Common sense says that they would not look at that data. If the response is "well they're power hungry, they'll look at whatever they want" then the discussion about the number of hops used is irrelevant since a power-hungry and abusive organization would find no value in limits on this sort of thing in the first place.
Case in point: all the license plate surveillance stories that came out today. (Not sure why today, this has been well understood for a couple years now.)
Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.
If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.
And the point of this "hops" story isn't whether they're looking at everyone now, it's whether your data is being automatically gathered and stored today to construct who knows what perspectives about you in the future. And at 3 hops of potentially useful data, odds are yes.
>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.
I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).
But, in reality, they are doing exactly what they represent, except without limitations. So, there is direct bearing.
And, the concern is that by fudging the limits, it's gone from a limited program that gives at least a nod to 4tb Amendment protections to one that is virtually unlimited.
The discussion about the number of hops is the result of their attempts to thwart oversight. They are misrepresenting what they are doing, so as to avoid constraints.
In other words, they are power-hungry and abusive.