Right, there's a huge amount of intelligence sharing. That's one of the critical points. Domestic law can be skirted by International Law and International Law can be skirted by Domestic Law.
Need an American's data? We can't take it off the wire, store it, process it, and inspect it (in all cases). But Canada can, or Israel can, or Australia can, or New Zealand can (etc).
Need a foreigner's data that blocked by espionage laws? The country may itself be able to. Or a partner that doesn't have an agreement may be able to.
> PRISM: Initial reporting said that the NSA had direct access... NSA did not have access to any of their servers
Right, but this is one of those word games. First, the direct access the NSA DID have was not under the PRISM program. Reading "PRISM program did not give NSA direct access to servers" reads the same as "NSA has no direct access to servers" but it's not.
The 'targetted' collection of data itself turned out not to be very 'targetted' at all. Many requests were for large swaths of data and in many cases the NSA was given direct control of the servers that stored the metadata (as with phone records) but would need to request the companies for the content itself. Metadata = surveillance.
To extend the skirting laws above, the federal government is able to bypass laws on search and seizure by forcing private enterprises to do it and then requesting it as they see fit later on.
Why are these companies allowed to surveil and have access to my information? I don't trust employees at Google or Apple any more than a stranger on the street or any random government employee. Actually, as there are few to nil restrictions on what corporations can do with databases of my and other communications, in some sense it's worse. Aren't we guaranteed security in our persons and our affects? If a federal government forces a private company to censor you, or to surveil you, isn't that still censorship or surveillance - regardless of whether as feds they act on, collect, mine or process that information/data at all?
> XKeyscore ... no proof shown by Greenwald or indicated in his slides he published that it had been used to collect American's communications
But it did show that there were mammoth amounts of American metadata present in the database (however it was collected). Doesn't seem to matter whether XKeyScore was the collector or just a repository.
> The Stewart Baker article... porn
There is a lot that the NSA and CIA can do to influence people, their credibility and the credibility of an idea in groups (MINERVA, etc) - look at what the USAID Cuban Twitter program nearly succeeded in doing, and what similar efforts may have had a role playing in Hong Kong (and dare I say Scotland).
There is no doubt about the use of using Porn to discredit 'radicalizers' (a term used to refer to foreign and domestic targets). AFAIK there have been 0 revealed domestic cases of this, and IIRC only 7 or so foreign targets are known about (and 1 being a Westerner?)
The JTRIG stuff is creepy, real and looks like something right out of a Stasi handbook.
"Used to... discredit a target"
"Write a blog purporting to be one of their victims"
"Email/text their neighbors, colleagues, friends, etc"
"Get someone to go somewhere on the internet or in the real world"
"Can take 'paranoia' to a whole new level"
"Stop someone from communicating [by] bombarding their phone [...], delet[ing] their online presence, block up their fax machine"
"Stop someone's computer from working"
"Why do an Effects Operation?"
Answer 1: "Disruption v Traditional Law Enforcement" (presumably - it's effective and we can do it without the same paperwork/groundwork/courts/etc)
Answer 3: "...could save time and money"