You only need probable cause for US citizens IIRC. Anyone else is fair game as far as the NSA is concerned.
The twist here is that the NSA gets to trawl through the data looking for interesting stuff (to them) on a pinky promise to a judge (in a court that has never said no) that they won't target US citizens. Given that the US government has stated that a 51% chance that the target is not a US citizen is sufficient to meet this requirement (!), it sounds to me as if the NSA gets to target whoever they like (because taking a huge pile of data and processing it with automated algorithms is not 'collecting' it according to the State doublespeak) and if they happen to wind up targeting some US citizens, well they can always claim in court (should it ever come to that, which it won't) that they thought there was a 51%+ chance that they were dealing with non-US individuals. How would you ever challenge that?
The other part of that is context. The NSA can't come into your house and read your mail for a week. On the other hand, people let google read all of their email to sell ads.
I think there's the idea of a spectrum of intrusion. Looking in windows of a car is a search, but that stuff is already in plain view. Is that unreasonable? We all know email is plain text and the sender does not control routing. It's more like a postcard than a letter to begin with.
That said, I'm a weeks worth of surveillance without a warrant is horrifying.
The twist here is that the NSA gets to trawl through the data looking for interesting stuff (to them) on a pinky promise to a judge (in a court that has never said no) that they won't target US citizens. Given that the US government has stated that a 51% chance that the target is not a US citizen is sufficient to meet this requirement (!), it sounds to me as if the NSA gets to target whoever they like (because taking a huge pile of data and processing it with automated algorithms is not 'collecting' it according to the State doublespeak) and if they happen to wind up targeting some US citizens, well they can always claim in court (should it ever come to that, which it won't) that they thought there was a 51%+ chance that they were dealing with non-US individuals. How would you ever challenge that?