Well, if we get really pedantic and nit-picky, the alarming news that the president was responding to was actually that a tremendous percentage of phone calls a

Well, if we get really pedantic and nit-picky, the alarming news that the president was responding to was actually that a tremendous percentage of phone calls are being recorded, IIRC. Strictly speaking, it's actually impossible for NSA employees/contractors to "listen to" more than a tiny fraction of them, there simply aren't enough human-hours to do that. Nobody seriously thought that the NSA actually had a human being snooping on every phone call. So the people say "You're recording our calls!" And the official answer is "Well we're not actually listening to them. We analyze the crap out of the metadata, though." I'm still OK with calling that "discounting."