“If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware

“If we’re validly targeting foreigners and we happen to collect communications of Americans, we don’t have to close our eyes to that,” Litt said. “I’m not aware of other situations where once we have lawfully collected information, we have to go back and get a warrant to look at the information we’ve already collected.” Although I'm receptive to that argument in general, part of the whole idea that generic collection is authorized at all, is that pre-emptively mirroring the data without looking at it (assuming that such mirroring is required at all) is still at least not doing a search on that data. While I understand the Administration has tried to go away from that argument after it was first presented I see no other justification for capturing traffic that isn't clearly crossing national boundaries (which is admittedly a hard problem). So the only way I could see for that argument to apply is if the data in question comes up on a legal search of foreign traffic, but not a new selector search into the entire pool of set aside traffic. If you couldn't have legally run a search on the data as it came across the wire due to lack of a warrant then it wouldn't become OK unless another legal search window into that data opened it. It certainly doesn't become OK just because you happen to have custody of the data, just like we don't let the government open and read our mail without a warrant.