I see your point, but my argument does not actually hinge on the existence of other programs. It's multifaceted and draws from sources outside of the leaks as w

I see your point, but my argument does not actually hinge on the existence of other programs. It's multifaceted and draws from sources outside of the leaks as well, including the mission statement of the NSA. If you look into the nature of how the NSA uses the phone information you'll find that it is used for political and espionage purposes. None of the programs exist in isolation - they all hang together. An example of this is the NSA's program to discover company hierarchy structure from phone metadata - which is used among other things to find targets that give the NSA leverage into and/or access to the parts of a company they want to infiltrate. Finally, Merkle and other political leaders _were_ (are) part of the phone metadata program. http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada... If you want to know what the FBI does with guns, you can't just inspect what their guns are capable of. You have to look at their mission statement, their actions, their other technological investments, reviews and investigations of the FBI, etc. The NSA works with bureaus that handle domestic terrorism. They provide some small tools and data for that. Some selectors and social analysis of phone metadata are surely part of that. But if you look at what the NSA does, what their capabilities are, what their mission is and objectives are, and reports about their internal posture and attitudes you quickly learn that their programs are not broadly about counter-terrorism, although sometimes they partner for these purposes.