Reminder: Way back when the AT&T 'secret rooms' that enabled the NSA to tap all traffic were revealed, we learned that the NSA relies heavily upon an extremely questionable legal opinion written by their own lawyers which says that communications do not count as 'collected' or 'intercepted' until a HUMAN operator reads the plaintext. That means no amount of automated processing, machine learning, statistical analysis, filtering, profiling, etc run on your communications or its metadata amounts to your communications being 'intercepted' as far as they are concerned. They know this legal opinion is dicey, and they will do absolutely anything, including dropping cases entirely, to avoid having it tested in court.
