> The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants. This isn’t correct AFAICT. This is the justification they give.

> The answer is that they are spying on other countries. That usually hasn’t required warrants. This isn’t correct AFAICT. This is the justification they give. This was one of the arguments put forward in 2017 after the Supreme Court ruling on the presidential surveillance program. A huge amount of international telecommunications traffic flows through the systems they’re trying to harvest data from and they have a hard time differentiating foreign communications from domestic communications. So they slurp it all up. But they also intentionally slurp up (or at least during the PSP did slurp up) “metadata” of U.S. citizens. And they don’t seem to have a problem querying these databases for U.S. citizen’s communications data from “the database” if they feel it’s relevant to crime. Something that they could just say is off limits and taints all downstream evidence. There are a lot of legal and mental gymnastics at play with these programs. But it does seem like the end goal is to get access to domestic communications content.