[jamesaguilar]

Only if you have no prior information. However, since the target has to be a specific person, and you have to have some reason to want to monitor them, you would have to have a good deal of prior information. At the very least, you know the networks on which they can be monitored, which already introduces a much more informative prior than "is-a human". The ratio of Americans to other people in your belief network would tend to be dominated by that other prior information.

[samd]

Yes, the more you know about your target the more confident you become about their nationality. Though I don't think the target needs to be a specific person, it could just be an email address couldn't it? Given just an email address you could be more than 51% certain it belonged to a foreign national and start collecting their data.

Sure, you might have to tortuously stretch the legal wording here to justify collection of any particular target, but if there's one thing this Administration has proven adept at it's tortuous stretching of the law.

[jamesaguilar]

You are right on the topic of an email address, but even for that there has to be some context that would cause you to want to collect its information. I guess if that is a single post that states violent intentions, then if you studiously avoid any further information, you could easily hit that 51% number. Then again, once you open the email, presumably you'll quickly derive the person's location and nationality, and you might then have to close it again.

I don't know if that "tortuous reading" thing is really specific to this administration. And anyway, I'm still having trouble figuring out how this whole PRISM thing was unexpected given the laws that congress passed. It seems like a rather straightforward reading of the law to me.