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by temp9251 4730 days ago
You seem to be conflating PRISM with NSA's entire SIGINT operation, I see a lot of people doing that. PRISM is one out of 504 programs that collectively obtain vast amounts of information (approximately 350 billion telephone and internet records globally in the month of March 2013). That is 4 trillion records per year, after filtering the data.

PRISM is an inconsequential piece of the puzzle, and truthfully one of the most innocuous. Nobody is really disputing that it collects information on only a small number of people. However, other NSA programs very clearly do not - they collect everything on everyone, then look at the interesting parts.

As of right now, the NSA has a blank check to collect any data they want and can retroactively obtain warrants for accessing that data. You can argue about the merits of what they are doing, but I see very little basis in arguing that they aren't actually collecting vast amounts of communications.

Personally, I think there is absolutely no way to stuff this genie back in the bottle.