<i>He said it was &quot;patently absurd&quot; to pretend that they haven&#x27;t &quot;captured&quot; any data until someone searches for it.</i><p>Fishing trawlers don&#x27;t capture everything they catch: Most of it gets thrown back. This is all semantics, but without more context for the word &quot;capture&quot; (like, why it wouldn&#x27;t be legal to capture data you&#x27;ll never look at), I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s patently absurd to read the term in a way that makes reasonable intelligence work possible.<p>What if they only buffered the data for a few seconds while picking out the &quot;good stuff&quot;? A few hours? Where is the line?<p><i>I have no reason to think that they wouldn&#x27;t keep all of it, forever, period. Or at least retain a long enough window to render this statement pointless.</i><p>If you think the NSA has no effective oversight and is lying to the FISA court or the President about what it does and doesn&#x27;t do, you have bigger problems.<p><i>Old fashioned police work? Only gather data with a warrant?</i><p>The NSA isn&#x27;t a domestic law enforcement agency. You&#x27;re thinking of the FBI.