Yeah, and it was a fucking embarrassment to the NSA. Their security procedures were pretty lax, especially for a three-letter agency, but that seems par for the

Yeah, and it was a fucking embarrassment to the NSA. Their security procedures were pretty lax, especially for a three-letter agency, but that seems par for the course given the budget climate in Washington. But the difference was that in this case, the default policy is collection. If you collect everyone's data, then no special effort has to be taken to snoop on an individual's data (besides accessing it). There might be access logs; there might not be. If there is a process that has to be followed to initiate data collection on a target, there will certainly be records of that process because they will be required to execute the process. It's at least better than having everyone's data sit in a datacenter somewhere ready to be searched by anyone with the proper security clearance.