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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
> 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