Indeed, it increasingly seems 'content' is a consciously-chosen term, which is intentionally time-tense-ambiguous, to obscure the fact that calls and other comm

Indeed, it increasingly seems 'content' is a consciously-chosen term, which is intentionally time-tense-ambiguous, to obscure the fact that calls and other communications have slready been recorded to NSA systems. They're not tslking about a warrant to truly start 'collection' of future communications (in the normal senses of English). Getting a warrant just sets the read-access bit on already ingested 'content': "Oh, the secret court approved the warrant? OK, let me run `chmod a+r /calls/by-person-id/us-gz-74916949/*` - now you're in!" This might also explain the growing pursuit of mandatory-total-traffic-retention policies in other countries. Their security establishment has a hint of how nifty this has been for the NSA, but might not be able to pull off — legslly or financially — the same broad ingest feeds and giant datacenters as in the US... so they try to offload the obligation to regulated private entities, and still have the arbitrary lookback when they need it.