The law is bendy when the actions are all secret and you don't have anyone challenging you. it's enough to make up a semi plausible legal argument/loophole to cover your ass. See eg the treatment of legal coverage in the James Banford books - there's usually a i house lawyer who is paid to have opinions favourable to the agency.

Particularly where lack of standing, mooting by the government dropping its case, or most problematical of all, state secrets privilege, born of U.S. v. Reynolds.

See: "State Secrets Privilege"

Essentially, by invoking the state secrets privilege in this way, the government argues that even if all of the allegations of serious law-breaking and Constitutional violations are true, surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans is exempt from judicial review.

In response to the government’s assertion, and as it has since the first wiretapping cases started in 2006, EFF argues that in creating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congress preempted the state secrets privilege, creating a separate but still very secure way for the case to be decided. The FISA law not only prevents the immediate dismissal of the case, it affirmatively instructs courts to determine whether electronic surveillance is legal....

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/state-secrets-privilege

Snowden since then released a cache of documents showing that the NSA wasn't doing what the EFF suspected. Continuing to claim otherwise is conspiracy theory raving.

Care to link?

This or any of your numerous other conspicuously unsourced claims?

Are any of your claims sourced? You linked to documents that either had nothing to do with your claims or directly refuted them. I, on the other hand, posted a CNET article that directly supported my PRISM claim.

I'll let you look this one up yourself. It might take you some time to find it, but by doing it yourself, you'll learn some things that will fix a few other conspiracy theories you might have that you haven't brought up yet. Look for "minimization" and "Section 702." Both will be good starting points.

> The four other members of the Five Eyes are under no such restrictions.

None of your links provide any evidence that they do so, which makes sense because the agreement that the Five Eyes programs derive from was a no-spy agreement between the members. If the US government asked other countries to spy on its citizens to skirt its own laws, there would have been evidence in Snowden's document haul, and that would have been the biggest story in them. Instead, bupkis.

To reiterate the initial point, I don't know why you have those links given that they say absolutely nothing that supports your claim.

Addressing surveillance of UK nationals by the NSA:

The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America's National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...

Reuters reports the agreement as reciprocal:

Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has tapped fibre-optic cables that carry international phone and internet traffic and is sharing vast quantities of personal information with the U.S. National Security Agency, the Guardian newspaper said on Friday.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-security-britain/briti...

Lawfare on the Five Eyes agreement itself which specifically does permit information sharing:

Born from spying arrangements forged during World War II, the Five Eyes alliance facilitates the sharing of signals intelligence among the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The Five Eyes countries agree to exchange by default all signals intelligence they gather, as well as methods and techniques related to signals intelligence operations.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/newly-disclosed-documents-five-e...

Your first link supports my point that it emerged from a no-spy agreement between the parties: "Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others." It has nothing that supports your point because nowhere in it does it say the UK uses that data to skirt its own laws, and it is obvious that the US collecting data on Britons does not break its own laws.

Your second link simply states that the UK has access to intercepts that it shares with the US. It doesn't say that the US asks the UK for data on people it is prohibited by law from spying on.

Your third link likewise does not say anything about any of the member countries illegally spying on their own citizens using other countries' data.

This all makes sense because what you are claiming is illegal, and there would have been lawsuits against the US government about it if there were any evidence (even the slightest hint of any evidence) it was happening because it would be by far the most egregious overreach in the leaks. The government cannot pay a third party to illegally search a US citizen any more than it can pay a third party to illegally detain one. Instead, the only illegal US program in Snowden's leaks was the phone metadata collection, which has since been shut down.

> It doesn't say that the US asks the UK for data on people it is prohibited by law from spying on.

From the quote of the third link:

> The Five Eyes countries agree to exchange by default all signals intelligence they gather, as well as methods and techniques related to signals intelligence operations.

This seems like a pretty clear implication that a Five Eyes country gets information about its own citizens via automatic sharing of information gathered by the other countries. Whether they technically "asked" for the information or not is not relevant.

> This seems like a pretty clear implication that a Five Eyes country gets information about its own citizens via automatic sharing of information gathered by the other countries.

No, it does not. If it did, Snowden's documents would have contained evidence showing that the NSA either has a copy of the GCHQ wiretap data or that the NSA has direct query access to it, either of which would have been a blockbuster story. There was no such evidence.

Instead, what your quote means is that the parties to the agreement can ask the other parties for any information about their collection they like, and the default response (if there are no overriding rules) will be to return that information. The US cannot ask another country for data about its own citizens without a warrant because, as I've stated multiple times, that is illegal.

You are creating some all-seeing bogeyman by misreading some words. This is better than dredmorbius's comments in that you misread some words instead of not reading them and pretending they said something, but do you understand that misreading words is how conspiracy theories are created?