If your grandmother worked somewhere with access to critical infrastructure or had access to IP that would be in our best interest to protect and she was for some reason in contact with terrorists or suspected foreign agents then it's useful information.
Keep in mind that they need court ordered approval to access the data so without that existing context it's off limits.
You should be more concerned with what your service providers and companies like Google or Facebook are doing with that data because they aren't limited by FISA courts.
> 534 million records of phone calls and text messages
But we don't know how that breaks down to "phones" as you say. I don't even like to use my phone but I bet if you count my texts and calls in a year it would be in the 1000s of records.
No I don't believe that there are "500 million phones going to suspected terrorists in the US" but there may be 500 messages from individuals who have suspected connections to terrorists and foreign agents. And you would never know for sure unless you can look at their metadata to analyze those suspected connections.
You're right that the FISA approval rate is incredible. But it's still a record of requests made (which helps prevent abuse). and as I understand it that number of requests is only in the ~2000 range.
Again, it's a much better situation than the level of scrutiny you're holding to companies like Google/Facebook/Microsoft or ISPs. And those companies aren't even offering national security as a service.
They really aren't. 500 million sounds like a lot, but it is very unlikely any call by anyone in your family is caught in this net. As someone pointed out, with 250 million people owning phones in this country, as well as vast networks of systematic and/or automated calling, the portion of calls actually being tracked here is pretty tiny.
It's also a situation where having useless data costs next to nothing (economically at least, philosophically is a different debate), but missing even a small detail could be critical.
We knew five years ago that the NSA was receiving "billions of [call detail] records ... per day", just indiscriminately collecting every CDR they could -- from everyone (including my grandma and yours), not just criminals or "terrorists" or whomever the latest bogeyman is.
I have no reason to believe that that has changed, that they have stopped collecting all of this data that is so easily available to them.
With that in mind, I do not believe that "it is very unlikely any call" by anyone in my family was included in the catch. I believe it very likely that many calls by many people in my family was -- and continues to be -- included in their "net".
