The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law. It makes no sense for the requirements to get a wiretap to be so stringent but the requirements to monitor someone's internet traffic to be nonexistent, just because it's laundered through "intelligence gathering" and you argue it's therefore not "law enforcement."
> The point is that mass domestic surveillance of American nationals violates common understanding of the law.
It also violates the courts' understanding of the law. That's probably why one such program was shut down prior to the Snowden leaks and definitely why the other was shut down after.
The point of bulk data collection is to be able to, in effect, take a wiretap in the past before you knew what you'd need to be wiretapping in the present, by querying the bulk datasets for communications between specific endpoints within specific points in time.
As time travel doesn't exist, this is the next best technology available.
Sadly, governments end up becoming corrupt. In one formerly free nation (or at least it was one that obnoxiously bragged about being one), data about women's periods became weaponized in a witchhunt against abortions.
You don't agree with monitoring the communications of adversaries at all, or you don't agree with doing the equivalent for communications made in the recent past?
When the country's own citizens are the "adversaries", that's a highly fucked up government and government agency. If the people are the enemy the country is dead.
