This is HUGE!

(CNN)A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency's controversial collection of Americans' phone records, the subject of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, is not legal under the Patriot Act.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in the case, which was brought by the ACLU, that the telephone metadata collection program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized." The court did not rule on a larger Constitutional issue and sent the case back down to a lower court for further proceedings.
A three-judge panel held that the text of the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program."
"If Congress chooses to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, unambiguously," the court said. "Until such times as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well-established legal standards. "

A more full quote here.

The laws that the US government used to defend its vast surveillance program "have never been interpreted to authorize anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here," the opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stated...
From the opinion:

Search warrants and document subpoenas typically seek the records of a particular individual or corporation under investigation, and cover particular time periods when the events under investigation occurred. The orders at issue here contain no such limits ... The records demanded are not those of suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects, or of people or businesses that have contact with others who are in contact with the subjects — they extend to every record that exists, and indeed to records that do not yet exist ... The government can point to no grand jury subpoena that is remotely comparable to the real‐time data collection undertaken under this program.

So let's be clear:

1) the federal government has been breaking the law for at least a decade.
2) it's only a matter of time until this ruling is also applied to CIA and DEA spying programs.
3) Snowden is now officially a whistleblower by the legal definition of blowing the whistle on illegal activities.
4) this would never have happened if it hadn't been for Snowden.