You make a good point. There are a few different aspects worth separating here: - First, oddly, we don't know what the law allows. The Obama administration's s

You make a good point. There are a few different aspects worth separating here: - First, oddly, we don't know what the law allows. The Obama administration's secret interpretation of FAA 702 and secret rulings they obtained from the FISC have not been made public. This is a continuation of the Bush-era penchant for secrecy that included a secret interpretation of the law to allow warrantless eavesdropping and torture. See the last page of: http://epic.org/FISC-NSA-domestic-surveillance.pdf/ http://epic.org/FISC-NSA-domestic-surveillance.pdf/ - Second, Congress would almost certainly not have approved the FAA (2008) if they had known that a single analyst has access to Americans' confidential email, phone records, etc. Same with the Patriot Act (2001) that is used obtain a general warrant to vacuum up Americans' phone records on an ongoing daily basis. And Snowden said today it's not just NSA, but FBI, DNI, CIA, etc. analysts. Read 702 and see if you think you can predict how it would have been secretly interpreted: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.06304 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.06304: - Third, U.S. intelligence officials have argued in the past that the president has the constitutional authority, no matter what the law says, to authorize domestic spying without warrants. So the wording of the law may no longer matter! See: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/washington/02intel.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/washington/02intel.html