Goodness! My calls were probably relevant to the War on Terror
It appears that new and improved Relevant is a broad category that also encompasses that sphere formally know as irrelevant. I doubt that the calling histories of "the majority of Americans" were really relevant to specific terorism investigations, but if you don't know which calls are relevant than any call might be relevant, right?
A new "meh... might be useful" category of evidence would certain make life easier for the good guys. For instance, I can flat-out guarantee to a judge that if we look in every window in America right this second we will find a crime being committed. That much is known.
But we don't know which window to look in. If we knew then we could get a normal warrant, but since it could be any window we need a super warrant that holds all windows to be relevant because, hey... they might be. 
Why take chances?
So let the universal piss-testing begin! I am 100% certain that somebody, somewhere, is using drugs and your urine is relevant because... well, because maybe you're on drugs.
The National Security Agency's ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: "relevant."
This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that "relevant" could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, current and former administration and congressional officials are shedding new light on the history of the NSA program and the secret legal theory underpinning it. The court's interpretation of the word enabled the government, under the Patriot Act, to collect the phone records of the majority of Americans, including phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from, as part of a continuing investigation into international terrorism.
"Relevant" has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, "everything," is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department's primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law. ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578571893758853344.html
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