Can someone clear it up for me. How likely is it that my google searches are being swept up and stored indefinitely, because I'm foreigner. I've disabled google search history, though I doubt it will help. Similar question - do they have a profile for every foreigner they can identify?
See https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect :
Normally, one would think that a communication that has been
intercepted and stored in a government database as “collected.”
But the government’s definition of what it means to “collect”
intelligence information is quite different from its plain
meaning.
Under Department of Defense regulations, information is
considered to be “collected” only after it has been “received
for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component,” and
“data acquired by electronic means is ‘collected’ only when it
has been processed into intelligible form.”
In other words, the NSA can intercept and store communications
in its data base and have an algorithm search them for key
words and analyze the meta data without ever considering the
communications “collected.”