[nyolfen]

well, it's a secret interpretation of a particular executive order (EO 12333 signed by reagan, if you're curious), in the sense that it's not obvious on its face from reading the order that one should come to the same interpretation as they have, and that they don't officially divulge that interpretation.

prior to snowden, almost everybody (you and your clever colleagues excluded, obviously) would think it was paranoid to believe this was the case. at least, there's no way i could make the leap from:

'EULA's state that recording activity on a company's servers by that company [i assume this is what you mean?] doesn't require a warrant but the government reading it does'

to:

'the government records incomprehensible amounts of domestic traffic but it doesn't count as warrantless surveillance because they don't read most of it'

[lern_too_spel]

EO 12333 doesn't redefine collection. Data collected abroad under 12333 is still "acquired" according to the definition in the NSA's documents leaked by Snowden. Do you have any documents that you can point to that say otherwise?

[nyolfen]

i should have been less ambiguous, sorry -- USSID 18 is derived from EO 12333, and USSID 18 nominally provides protections to US citizens from being spied upon; USSID 18 also is what has a secret interpretation by NSA lawyers that most people would probably feel is not in the spirit of the EO. here's a very nice writeup:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/primer-executive-order...

section 4 outlines collection policy, beginning on page 6 of the pdf:

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDFinal%20USSI...

[lern_too_spel]

Section 9 of that document defines "collection" to mean what you would expect it to mean.

[nyolfen]

the issue is that there is a secret interpretation of it, as i explained in each of the above posts

edit: if the term' collection' is your major gripe, i apologize -- i rewatched the video i cited and the term is actually 'intercept', not 'collect'

[lern_too_spel]

Why don't any of Snowden's documents confirm that they're using this interpretation and instead show that they are interpreting it as everyone else does?