Director Of National Intelligence Tries To Downplay PRISM Paranoia

How might you unintentionally target someone for surveillance? Their careful wording -- "we don't intentionally target US citizens" -- necessarily means they believe it's possible to "accidentally" catch a US citizen in their surveillance dragnet.

Taking them completely at their word, that this is a good faith operation, under what circumstances might an unintentional targeting occur? What would it look like? What does it say about the data they've collected and the analysis they're performing against it? What would the reconciliation process look like for a US citizen who was unintentionally surveilled without a warrant? Would the government still bring charges? Or are the secret courts allowed to issue ex post facto authorizations? If they're not allowed to issue such authorizations, how would we know if they did so illegally?

I don't normally buy into these big hype stories but there is just so much here that is very wrong. The phrase "secret court" just sounds totalitarian.

Note that he doesn't deny that they did in fact collect literally every piece of phone metadata generated by Verizon (and presumably every other phone company).

Every single phone call you have made for quite some time exists as a record in an NSA database.

We should all trust James Clapper after this, you guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRhjgynfhag