NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You
The headline is misleading - it's worse. The question isn't "did person X get spied on?", it's "how many people in the U.S. have been spied on?"<p>The answer to that question cannot possibly violate the privacy of any individual.<p>>> What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog...<p>So, either: 1) They are totally disorganized ("dang, it's not like we keep a database we could SELECT COUNT(*) from, you know...") or 2) there is no way to estimate because they're doing wholesale collection of all the phone calls, web traffic, etc that they can get their hands on.<p>Pretty sure it's #2.