In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
I'm sure I'm going to take a karma hit, but please tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong, since it doesn't seem to mesh with a lot of the Snowden reporting: Snowden grabs a significant amount of the NSA's actual reporting and collection, hands it to the Washington Post and they find that:<p>- The NSA is actively scrubbing the collection and removing the identities of Americans<p>- The most egregious privacy violation that WaPo could find was a set of love letters between an Australian government employee and her boyfriend who went off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban<p>- In the process of doing this, the NSA is pulling out information on "a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks"<p>- The WaPo estimates that around 900k people's communications are caught up in the NSA's "incidental" collection<p>I could see an argument made for future abuse, but this really seems to fly in the face of grand conspiracy theories that we've been seeing for the last year.