These slides aren't an example of skirting domestic laws - they're examples of expanding collection on the NSA's target through partnering with other countries. Greenwald and company were trying to spin these slides as saying "look, the NSA collected 300 million German calls" and truth ended up being that the German intelligence service shared their own foreign collection with the US. None of the documents released has shown any indication that the NSA has ever asked a foreign country to provide them with collection on Americans. See [1], [2], [3] and [4].
> First, the direct access the NSA DID have was not under the PRISM program.
These are Greenwald's own words[5]:
The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.
The Washington Post backtracked on their reporting and took out the references to direct access. Greenwald has yet to issue any corrections to his report.
> The 'targetted' collection of data itself turned out not to be very 'targetted' at all.
Except that PRISM did end up being only for targeted communications. See the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on PRISM[8] (they describe targeting starting on page 7, but go into further detail in other sections). To date, the only domestic non-targeted collection has been the Section 215 telephony metadata collection (you can see the gory details here: [9]) and the Section 402 e-mail metadata collection which was discontinued in 2011 (details here: [10]). If Snowden just wanted to reveal either of those two programs, I wouldn't be so harsh on him. PRISM doesn't resemble those two programs in the least bit, though. Nor do many of the other disclosures, which focused purely on gathering foreign intelligence.
Note that contrary to what much of the reporting has suggested, the 215 program did not data-mine for indiscriminate call patterns, and there are restrictions on how they can search the database (see the PCLOB report[9] p.27-28, sections "Contact Chaining and the Query Process" and "Standards for Approving Queries"). I'm not going to argue and, in fact, would largely agree with anyone who says the standards don't go far enough, but most people I've discussed this with start off with a whole set of assumptions; it's only through looking at these documents and listening to congressional testimony that I've been able to figure most of this stuff out, and not many people bother putting that much effort into it.
> in many cases the NSA was given direct control of the servers that stored the metadata (as with phone records)
I haven't seen any reporting which said that, and the PCLOB report directly contradicts that statement (see the Section 215 PCLOB report[9] p.23-24, "Delivery of Calling Records from Telephone Companies to the NSA")
> But it did show that there were mammoth amounts of American metadata present in the database (however it was collected).
Here[6] is the report and here[7] are the slides that it was based on. Note the dramatic difference in the number of times Americans' communications are mentioned in the report (I counted 11) and the number of times in the slides (I count 0). It seems more like he just took assumptions from the Section 215 reporting and faulty PRISM reporting and applied those biases. I've noticed that's a common theme in most of the NSA reporting - there's a lot of fear-mongering about the fact that they could be doing using their tools to target Americans, but no actual evidence. You could make similar arguments about police and guns: they could use their guns to go door-to-door and indiscriminately kill ordinary, law-abiding citizens. But they don't. There's a big difference between having the technical capability to do something and having the legal authority to do it.
> look at what the USAID Cuban Twitter program nearly succeeded in doing
1) USAID isn't the NSA, and 2) the only thing it nearly succeeded in doing was giving ordinary Cubans a means of using the internet to communicate free of government censorship. I don't see what I'm supposed to be outraged at.
> The JTRIG stuff is creepy, real and looks like something right out of a Stasi handbook.
JTRIG is GCHQ, not NSA, and when I think of things straight out of the Stasi handbook, I think of things like making people disappear from their homes in the middle of the night never to be seen again, not discrediting them on the internet.
In any case, I guess my ultimate point is that this issue defies all journalistic norms and really needs to be approached with much more scrutiny than most issues. This isn't a situation where we have dozens of reporters from AP, Reuters, ITAR-TASS, etc. all on the ground objectively reporting independently verifiable facts as they see them. Instead, this is an issue where we have mountains of classified documents who were handed over to few carefully selected reporters by a leaker who is only available for softball interviews by carefully chosen interviewers. The documents are largely incomplete, and the reporters display their biases quite plainly (Greenwald himself is an advocate of 'adversarial journalism,' which embraces bias rather than seeking to minimize it). I've had plenty of people tell me not to trust what the government says, but you can't analyze the situation critically without also extending the same degree of skepticism to the Snowden and his small circle of journalists.
[1] http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/02/dutch-government-t...
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligenc...
[3] http://rt.com/news/norway-nsa-snowden-spying-us-965/
[4] http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_11_21/Denmark-admits-to-t...
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-...
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-...
[7] http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jul/31/nsa...
[8] http://www.pclob.gov/All%20Documents/Report%20on%20the%20Sec...
[9] http://www.pclob.gov/SiteAssets/Pages/default/PCLOB-Report-o...
[10] http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/198-pre...