> The NSA is a partner in the program
The NSA is aware of the program but has no say in implementing it and doesn't have access to its data. Only the UK has the data and gets to choose who to share what they've learned from it to. This is clearly not a violation of the 4th Amendment, which is why nobody has sued the US government for it. If you believe it is a violation, go ahead and try to find a lawyer to take your case.
> The reason why lawsuits so rarely get anywhere...
No lawsuit was brought at all against XKeyscore or Tempora. That is the reason they didn't get anywhere. Lawsuits were brought against the phone metadata program, which succeeded, and against PRISM, which was thrown out because it didn't collect the data of the person who brought the lawsuit, unlike what Snowden and Greenwald erroneously claimed.
> Just so you recall, FISA is a court that operates in secret, that grants virtually all requests, and that has demonstrably signed off on Unconstitutional bulk surveillance
Once again, no program the court has signed off on has been ruled unconstitutional. Just so you recall, FISA is not a court but a law. FISC is the court that rules on FISA requests.
> And by the way, the type of behavior we're discussing here, which we know for a fact the US government has engaged in, is exactly what people in this thread are alleging the Russian government might theoretically do to Kaspersky.
The behavior we're alleging the Russian government could do with Kaspersky is putting malware in its software. We know the US government has done this for hardware exported overseas, which is why we are right to expect Russia to do this. We also know that Russia engages in dragnet domestic surveillance, which is something you're alleging that the US does, but there is no evidence of.
> Yes, a "high school dropout" who was paid 200 grand a year and given access to the NSA's classified networks. What a dummy!
He was a Sharepoint admin earning $122k. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/06/.... His hilarious misinterpretation of PRISM and other programs proves what a dummy he is. The fact that he dropped out of high school just explains how he came to be so stupid, and it should have been a signal for you to read the documents he leaked instead of expecting him to interpret them correctly for you.
> Bulk collection of records of millions of Americans (this is just the warrant that we know of, and there were almost certainly similar warrants covering most Americans, because by design, the program was meant to do bulk analysis of all call records) is obviously unconstitutional, but also very difficult to legally challenge.
They just have to have reason to believe their data is being collected to challenge it, as they did in Klayman v. Obama I. The conclusion was that the bulk collection of everybody's call records wasn't justified by the law, with no ruling on the constitutionality, possibly because there was precedent in Smith v. Maryland that it is constitutional (the very opposite of "obviously unconstitutional"). After that, Congress passed a law that allowed collection of millions of call records, and that was not even challenged.