... so far as we know. I can't say that I trust the NSA to follow court orders. At worst, I would expect them to just spool up another, similar project with higher levels of secrecy.

Is this paranoid/conspiracy-theory-esque? Maybe a little, but I honestly think it's reasonable to consider this in-character for the NSA.

> ... so far as we know.

This is easy to verify by asking the phone companies.

> Is this paranoid/conspiracy-theory-esque?

Yes. It's absolutely conspiracy theory nonsense.

To be fair, you’re saying exactly what was claimed before Snowden proved that it wasn’t nonsense, but day to day reality. Good luck trying to unspill that milk.

No, the phone metadata program was known about long before Snowden. The Bush administration never denied it, only saying that their lawyers considered what they were doing legal and that the appropriate oversight committees had been read in. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-n...

Except it's not - known bad actors should be treated as such. It isn't called being paranoid it is called not being dangerously naive - would you invest in a convicted scammer?

> This is easy to verify by asking the phone companies.

Yeah, because nobody at the NSA would know about NDAs.

Those are now required to be reported in transparency reports and have been for the past few years.