They don't even bother with that pesky Fourth Amendment. They just rake in all of it regardless of need. And then claim they have too much data to filter out actual terror suspects. They then ask for more money.
They did not bother to check for connections to their legally defined realm of international contacts but just scooped up all the information on everyone. I'm sure that made LOVEINT much easier. As well as shutting down The First Amendment protected Occupy Movement.
Make no mistake these are corporations with no bid contracts using our own tax dollars to act as corporate spies, use this information to target activists, and to perpetuate their behemoth money Hoovering machine. Protecting the public does not even register with them unless they are trying to justify their cut of our badly needed tax dollars under scrutiny. And even then they have impeded that mission by collecting way more information on everyone than they need instead of targeting this capability.
The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.
How about we completely defund them until they can show they understand the not only the Bill of Rights but terrorists are not lurking under every bed, or in every email.