[BrandonMarc]

Exactly. The NSA's purpose for existence is to intercept communications of non USA citizens outside USA borders. Right or wrong, it's simply why they exist in the first place.

The current scandal is due to how much they do it to USA citizens within USA borders ... without getting into the right or wrong of it, the latter is against the Constitution, while the former is not.

[robin_reala]

That might be the focus of the scandal in the US, but it certainly isn’t in the EU.

[sneak]

Yeah. If Google/AWS/AWS-hosted companies/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook know what's good for them, they'll quickly do literally everything they can to force the US government to stop this foolish bullshit. They have far more non-US-citizen customers than they do US-citizen customers.

[dragonwriter]

> That might be the focus of the scandal in the US, but it certainly isn’t in the EU.

Its the focus of the leak which is at the heart of the scandal (and the leaker is not someone for whom the NSA spying on purely foreign traffic would be remotely problematic or noteworthy.)

But it would be a mistake to content the focus of the leak with the overall scope and focus of the NSA's intelligence gathering efforts.