No, you're not a cynic. The EFF takes exquisite pains to hide from you the fact that these programs spied on foreigners, which is the job of the NSA. Thus, they are necessary and proper, and perfectly legal.
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.
Don't give us this "perfectly legal" crap. To remind you: the NSA killed off ThinThread (that explicitly took care to avoid wiretapping US citizens' data) in favour of Trailblazer, which grabs ALL data, ALL the time, including ALL US citizens' data.
Their explicit intent was to break the law. They broke the law. Then Congress retroactively let them get away with it. They're still breaking the law today.
> The "change in priority" consisted of the decision made by the director of NSA General Michael V. Hayden to go with a concept called Trailblazer, despite the fact that ThinThread was a working prototype that claimed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. ThinThread was dismissed and replaced by the Trailblazer Project, which lacked the privacy protections
Let’s not confuse the fact that they are only legally allowed to spy on foreigners, with what they actually do.
I have no idea how you effectively filter mass wiretaps in fibre raw data and exclude americans. It’s impossible to not catch some/lots of domestic data as well..
So what you're saying is that the NSA wiretapping is OK because they're not doing it to you? That's really dumb.
Currently, the US is in a number of intelligence sharing arrangements in which countries ask other countries to spy on their own citizens for them. e.g. if the NSA can't spy on someone because they know they're American, they ask GCHQ to do it for them. And vice versa. This is why human rights need to be as universal as possible, because otherwise you just ask your buddy to do what you can't legally do yourself.
"We only spy on foreigners" is a water sandwich.
Furthermore, it is NSA policy to treat all encrypted traffic as foreign, and to archive it forever until it can be decrypted and searched to determine if it was legal to decrypt and search it. In other words, "we only spy on foreigners" is a guilty until proven innocent policy.
"Necessary and proper" is decided by a security apparatus with a conflict of interest. Nobody voted for this, the executive branch just decided to do it. As for legality, well, I'll give you that Congress retroactively made the spying legal. On the other hand, the US Constitution has a pretty clear restriction on the use of state power in order to search and seize. Being a foreigner is not in and of itself necessary suspicion to justify searching through all their shit, because being from another country is not a crime.
The EFF is a propaganda platform. You shouldn't take its claims at face value.