> there were technical and procedural safeguards that were intended to filter out US citizens' data, and analysts were not supposed to access US citizen data without a search warrant from a judge.
Nope
> The NSA has built a surveillance network that has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic.
> An internal NSA audit from May 2012 identified 2776 incidents i.e. violations of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans and foreign targets in the U.S. in the period from April 2011 through March 2012, while U.S. officials stressed that any mistakes are not intentional.
> The FISA Court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the U.S. government's vast spying programs has limited ability to do so and it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans.
> A legal opinion declassified on August 21, 2013, revealed that the NSA intercepted for three years as many as 56,000 electronic communications a year of Americans not suspected of having links to terrorism, before FISA court that oversees surveillance found the operation unconstitutional in 2011.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di...
The kicker to me:
> it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans
The courts told them to watch themselves and to self incriminate if they do crimez. An honor system. Which naturally, they did not snitch on themselves to the courts, because why would they.
Also let's not forget that they can make all the illegal surveillance legal in an instant just by labeling any person a "terrorist"