Remember this oldie but goodie from 2006?
Bush Defends Legality of Domestic Spy Program
Despite a prohibition on eavesdropping on phone calls or e-mail messages that are regarded as purely domestic, The Times has reported that the N.S.A. has accidentally intercepted what are thought to be a small number of communications in which both ends were on American soil, due to technical confusion over what constitutes an "international" call.
Officials also say that the N.S.A., beyond actual eavesdropping on up to 500 phone numbers and e-mail addresses at any one time,
has conducted much larger data-mining operations on vast volumes of communication within the United States to identify possible terror suspects.
To accomplish this, the agency has reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the country's biggest "switches," carrying phone and e-mail traffic into and out of the country.
This access hasn't stopped, in error or not, despite warrants, and whether or not the telcos know about it, as reported three days ago:
Officials: NSA mistakenly intercepted emails, phone calls of innocent Americans
The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009,
analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.
Another former senior official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed Blair’s recollection and said the incident created serious problems for the Justice Department, which represents the NSA before the federal judges on the secret court.
Now I don't know about anyone else, but it's crystal clear to me from all this that 1) the NSA can access Americans' phone and email content whenever they choose, and 2) have in fact done so, in "error", at least twice.
Whatever the truth about Snowden, you have to have buried your head in the sand to suggest his allegations don't stand up.
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