Secret interpretations of the statutes by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have granted the intelligence community much broader authority than they were originally intended to allow. In one of the first hearings this year on bulk telephone surveillance, following initial leaks, members of the House Judiciary Committee expressed outrage over the program. "I feel very uncomfortable about using aggregated metadata on hundreds of millions of Americans — everybody, including every member of Congress, and every citizen who has a phone in the US," Rep. John Conyers said. "This is unsustainable, it's outrageous, and must be stopped immediately."
The government argues that the bulk collection of sensitive data is managed responsibly through a "targeting and minimization" process intended to prevent or correct the inappropriate interception, analysis, or dissemination of data belonging to innocent US citizens. But, as declassified court opinions have revealed, the NSA's violations of the law are legion; the agency violated the rules thousands of times in 2011 and 2012 alone.To access collected data, NSA analysts have to input search terms called "selectors" into a system like PRISM, which then "tasks" data from other collection sites. Analysts are not permitted to specifically target someone who's "reasonably believed" to be a US person communicating within the United States, but according to The Washington Post an analyst only needs to have at least "51 percent" certainty that their target is foreign — just a little better than a coin flip.
Even then, the NSA's use of "contact chaining," which allows analysts to collect records up to "three hops" from a target, means that the NSA can collect records on not only a target's contacts, but their contacts' contacts as well. According to The Guardian, that means someone with roughly 400 friends on Facebook could potentially be linked to over 10 million contacts.While the NSA admits to some level of "incidental" collection of data belonging to US citizens and downplays it as insignificant, there have been flagrant ethical and legal violations of data collection and use.