I liked this, and it brings up an important point: details matter. I'd be careful, though. After TIA was destroyed a few years back, all of these ideas just go

I liked this, and it brings up an important point: details matter. I'd be careful, though. After TIA was destroyed a few years back, all of these ideas just got new codenames and continued on. My point being that NSA runs a huge bucket of programs that all get stuff from all over. Yes, for Google or FB, we can speculate that maybe there's a ticket system. Likely, even. But that's missing the point. As Snowden himself said, he could get anything he wanted to know about people simply by placing the right intercepts. Want to see what they type? Go for the telco records. Want to get all their personal details? Fetch that from the credit bureaus. Sometimes you might have to send a real, live person to attach a physical monitoring device. The pathways here are myriad. This isn't some single system that somehow is massively accessing every scrap of data. It looks like an asynchronous system that interacts with a platoon of other systems, already developed, to provide a total view of anybody you'd like. In some cases, auto-generated FISA requrests or NSLs are probably created. In some others, not. There's a danger here for we libertarians to go around like their head is on fire. That's the way it's always been. But I'd be careful with oversimplifying the actual nature of the discussion also. Secrecy really sucks, because all we end up doing is speculating about what might be created and what might be happening. Meh.