@ "Every Agency employee goes through orientation, in which we are taught about the federal laws that govern NSA/US Cyber Command: Title 10 and Title 50. We all

@ "Every Agency employee goes through orientation, in which we are taught about the federal laws that govern NSA/US Cyber Command: Title 10 and Title 50. We all know that it's illegal to look at a US citizen's data without a court order. I use the term "look" deliberately: the Agency makes the distinction that looking at data is surveillance, while gathering it from locations outside the US is not. We gathered everything, and only looked at a tiny percentage of it. I am okay with this distinction both because I don't mind if my emails are copied to an Agency database and likely never read and because from a technical standpoint it would seriously impair our ability to spy if we couldn't gather everything." lorendsr has far too much confidence that what he was taught about the governing law is correct. The governing law is far broader than the two titles of the U.S. Code he cites. The 4th Amendment, for example, protects against not only warrantless searches but also warrantless seizures. That line is first crossed at the gathering point, not at the point that the data is viewed. Put another way, the Amendment prohibits warrantless gathering of the haystack that includes private communications, not just the warrantless search of that haystack for a given needle. http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment And that is only one example of his legal naivete. Paul E. Merrell, J.D.