Worthy of note: Everything revealed by Snowden/Greenwald was postulated by James Bamford in 2009 based on publicly-available information. Not saying the NSA's actions aren't a terrible breach of trust and a clear indicator that they need greater oversight. Am saying that casual observers have been unsurprised, and that the scope of the NSA's behavior has not been difficult to discern.
Because "spy on everybody including foreign nationals" is a VERY different thing than "spy on foreign nationals." Here, watch: 1) Marijuana is legal (at the state level) in Washington, Oregon and Colorado. 2) Marijuana is illegal (at the federal level) in the United States. 3) The NSA is spying on Americans and giving their info to the DEA. 4) Joe, in Washington, promises his cousin Jane, in Colorado, to bring a quarter bag with him to visit via telephone. 5) The NSA, triggered by the keywords "quarter bag", record's Joe's conversation and passes it along to the DEA. 6) The DEA begins bulk surveillance on Joe in order to dragnet as many federal offenders (but law-abiding state citizens) as possible. 7) The DEA arranges a sting of Joe in Idaho, seizes his car and turns him informant over a quarter bag that he legally possesses but is illegally transporting across state lines. Tell me what part of that has fuckall to do with foreign intelligence?
Like I said, I understand that. This system seems to target overseas communications, not domestic. The link you provided for the DEA was referencing cell phone meta data, which is a different program from this one. I'm saying that this program has little to do with domestic privacy concerns. And either way, the DEA's parallel construction argument makes it very difficult to prove that the SOD in the link is doing anything that Reuters is alleging, so we can't really use it as an example. There is collateral information collected as in any broad net operation, but using it to further criminal prosecution is specifically prohibited by both the Posse Comitatus Act and USSID 18 (formerly SPOO 18).