It's a distinction without a difference. If they can spy on any foreign person, and anyone who had contact with them, and anyone who had contact with those people, then they are spying on everyone.
So the way the NSA works is they are a service provider and other agencies are the clients. The NSA collects everything. They supposedly do not provide it to the others without a warrant or FISA request or whatever and without redacting the names of US citizens. In any case, my point is, I thought that the fact that they collect everything and filter it later was well known.
There was an article some years back in Wired about how they built a datacenter in the desert full of hard drives, then tapped the lines at major internet interconnects and the claim was they were recording EVERYTHING that passed over the Internet. I'm not sure what the feasibility of recording every packet is, but if you deduplicate it seems much more feasible to record only unique data.
(post is archived)