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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

"Unconstitutionally used" ≠ "mass surveillance on Americans"

The issue that your article discusses is searches about Americans conducted on data collected from non-Americans outside the US (via Section 702). This is not mass surveillance on Americans.

The only program that collected Americans' data en masse in Snowden's documents was phone metadata collection, but it would be a huge stretch to label the way the documents described the data as being used as "mass surveillance." It certainly doesn't paint a picture of intelligence agencies run amok spying on everybody without regard to the law and without oversight.

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> The FISC found that the FBI created an “unduly lax” environment in which “maximal use” of these invasive searches was “a routine and encouraged practice.”

.. to the point of unconstituainality, using a database with records of most Americans in it.

That is definition "mass surveillance on Americans".

> using a database with records of most Americans in it.

How did you make up this "records of most Americans in it" claim? How would communications between targeted non-citizens outside the US with other non-citizens outside the US contain records of most Americans? To understand the article you posted, you have to understand the terms in it first.

Since I'm being rate-limited, some responses to the comment below (if you want me to reply normally, send a few upvotes to reset the rate limiter):

> The NSA believes it only has to be accurate "51%" of the time, with no court oversight that they're hitting that goal.

No, it doesn't. Where does that claim come from?

>The court above had found out that the FBI routinely didn't follow it

Follow what? You're confusing 702 collection, which requires showing that the target is a non-citizen outside the US communicating with the same, with querying of that non-American data for American identifiers, which merely requires sufficient documentation for oversight. You very clearly don't understand the article you posted.

The NSA believes it only has to be accurate "51%" of the time, with no court oversight that they're hitting that goal.

The court above had found out that the FBI routinely didn't follow it, to the point of an unconstitutional view of the program as a whole. They weren't following the rules you're laying out.

Now that I'm not rate limited:

> The NSA believes it only has to be accurate "51%" of the time, with no court oversight that they're hitting that goal.

No, it doesn't. Where does that claim come from?

>The court above had found out that the FBI routinely didn't follow it

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