Seriously, why do people conveniently ignore this little fact? Why would these filters exist, as revealed in CLASSIFIED documents, if the government were interested in spying on its own citizens?
If the government were interested in spying on you, they would just do it. They wouldn't need to build machines to protect your privacy rights.
That doesn't make sense. How can you tell who is talking on the phone anyway? And what if a US citizen was talking to a non-citizen?
Regardless, the point is that backdoors - even if used 99% of the time correctly - opens up your phone and all its nitty gritty details of your life to adversaries. IDK how the NSA phone logging worked so I can't really comment on how safe it is. None us can. That's sort of the problem.
But, right now, there exists filters to filter out US citizens comms from NSA spying, as revealed in CLASSIFIED documents.
This is something Snowden's friends love to conveniently ignore, because it doesn't fit into their artificially constructed world-vision of the US government as giant evil monsters.
I thought I recalled Obama saying that all meta data was stored. Regardless...
How did they detect when a US citizen was using a phone abroad, or a terrorist using a landline phone in the USA? Identities are not tied to phones.
Furthermore, how secure is the system they used? Can adversaries tap in to the NSA database? Is the filtering "hard wired" or is it something that is programmable and how susceptible is it to bugs, viruses, or hacking? How trustworthy are the people that control this data? Is it possible that anyone that works at the NSA is not trustworthy and might defect? Such as Edward Snowden?
These are important questions. Even with 'filtering' there is a lot of questions to be asked. And I doubt all them have great answers. The point is, there is a system in place to problematically spy on any phone conversation at any time among other things. Even if they use it "for good," that should be very concerning for anyone that knows that programming secure systems is mostly an effort in futility. Especially for the government who can't even code up a CRUD healthcare website without issue - and that the system is completely closed source not allowing others to review it.
Which brings us to another issue - why was this secret? Isn't this the kind of thing that should be approved by USA citizens? And publically verified for safety and security? This alone is so concerning.
I'm happy you think "filtering" makes all of these questions a non-issue though.
But, right now, the NSA does what is legal, which is to spy on foreign nationals.
We decide what matters when its time to write the laws.