Snowden basically admits the "direct access" claim was bullshit.

[limpyhobbler]

182. I completely disagree with everything you just said in your post.

"Each person can form their own opinion on this issue." That's kind of the point. Snowden decided what is Constitutional for us.

Nope. The government decided to create a secret law, a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, and then kept the data collection a secret so nobody would have standing to challenge it in court. The Government (Obama) decided what would be Constitutional for all of us by abusing secrecy authority to deny Americans the right to challenge the secret law in court. Now that Snowden has released the information, and the government was forced to admit they were doing this, we have proof of the secret data collection, and groups will challenge the law. The government used a secret law to circumvent people's Constitutional protection of the right to challenge laws in court.

I really think the majority of people don't care in the slightest

That's completely irrelevant. Legal rights exist to protect minority populations.

if encrypted numbers and date/timestamps -with no identifying info-

Wrong again. You expect anybody to believe that the NSA cannot figure out a name if they have the phone number?

is stored somewhere and cannot be looked at without a 2nd warrant.

Nope. The metadata, that means all phone call numbers, times, GPS locations, cell towers, email records, sender and receiver, IP addresses, websites, browser fingerprints, can all be looked at as part of the data library without a second warrant.

Further, the contents of emails can be read without a warrant.

New documents from the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ offices paint a troubling picture of the government’s email surveillance practices. Not only does the FBI claim it can read emails and other electronic communications without a warrant—even after a federal appeals court ruled that doing so violates the Fourth Amendment—but the documents strongly suggest that different U.S. Attorneys’ offices around the country are applying conflicting standards to access communications content (you can see the documents here).

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/fbi-documents-suggest-feds-read-emails-without-warrant

I don't know how the telecom companies are getting the data to the NSA. The PowerPoint slide was about access to Internet providers. They all say the NSA does not have 'direct access' to their users' info, only access to secure computers where they place data retrieved according to a warrant.

This is a fake distinction. If the warrants cover millions of people and millions of people's private communications are moved to the "secure computers", this is still a gross abuse of government authority. The fact that they were keeping it a secret makes it double plus evil. By keeping it a secret they circumvented the Constitution and denied us the protection of courts.

And if Snowden had anything near the access he claimed, why has he not shown us anything other than a PowerPoint slide?

Maybe he doesn't have anything else. So what. That's completely irrelevant to anything.

Why wouldn't Snowden provide us with some diagrams or the President's email since he claims he could do all that and more?

Maybe he couldn't really do that, or he didn't want to. Don't know and don't care. That argument is just an attempt to shift the focus to Snowden personally, to distract away from the massive government abuse of surveillance powers and secrecy authority.

If the NSA is doing more than what is allowed, why hasn't Snowden shown us evidence of that?

The NSA was operating under a secret law (secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act). Nobody could challenge it because it was a secret. Snowden revealed a small piece of the abuse. It's just the tip of the ice berg.