You make it sound like this casual thing. The only reason intelligence agencies can do all this crazy illegal stuff is because their mission is foreign intelligence, and foreigners aren't covered by US law. This is the legal basis for every intelligence agency in every democratic state, because it doesn't take a genius to realize that their activities are otherwise prima facie illegal under any human rights perspective.

So what happens when you stop making the distinction between intelligence agencies and general law enforcement agencies? You get the Gestapo [1], secret police.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo

But the paragraph from the EFF article that follows the one you allude to was this:

" However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote. So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security. "

That is not "spread further". Given the lack of a warrant and probable cause to initiate the search, prosecution using 'serendipitous evidence' flat out contradicts the 4th amendment.

That quote is from the NYT article though, not the declassified document. That quote was not good phrasing by NYT, as they did not stress the strong limitations in place.

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"so it doesn't increase that power, just spreads it further."

If a thing spreads it must also increase in at least some dimensions.

Fair point, I was going for magnitude.

Yea, time in this case, not power.