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According to Google "NSA powers" in their case are restricted to FISA orders, so I'm not sure how a random worker at a government contractor can produce these. Snowden was a sysadmin for a contractor and that is how he got his hands on their internal documents.

Is no one else paying attention to anything beyond the "slides" in this story?!

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Aren't the NSA claiming they only need a FISA warrant if both ends of the correspondence are (reasonably believed to be) US citizens on US territory? For those of us in "the rest of the world" or any Americans corresponding with us I believe the restrictions on the NSA are "Yeah, do whatever the hell you want!"

FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, only creates warrants for surveilling foreign persons. It also requires that the surveillance actively minimize data collected on US persons in the process.

It that it covers foreign persons who are believed to be outside of the US

The NSA is claiming that FISA warrants are required if either end is a foreigner, and that if the connection is US-US that they're not allowed to examine that conversation at all.

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