They covered their asses to keep from going down for actual criminal activity, but I'm not willing to say that they seem to have placed any emphasis on the fundamental liberties or protections that the Constitution is supposed to afford.
Even their secret court has pointed out that they're crossing the line (likely, more than once).
I mean, it's at the point that they're having to lie to a secret, relatively unaccountable court because even that won't buy their bullshit.
As for the "intent of fundamental laws" the intent of the 4th amendment was to prevent customs officials from trespassing on private property. The founders never talked about the "right of privacy" as a coherent concept. The "right to privacy" was conjured from the "penumbras" of the Constitution (i.e. thin air) just a couple of decades before Smith v. Maryland was decided.
Also, you are ignoring all other reports that the NSA is storing CONTENT of every means of communication.
Just this week, it was revealed that they store hundreds of millions of text messages:
* http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-mi...
They also store every single phone call made in the US:
* http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec1...
* http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-spying-fla...
Oh, and thinking about using Skype? Also tapped:
* http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-ch...
The "spirit" of the law is to keep government agents from trespassing on your property looking for contraband. The "right of privacy" wasn't conjured out of thin air by the Supreme Court until the 1960's. Collecting information under the Third Party Doctrine violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the 4th amendment.
> Just this week, it was revealed that they store hundreds of millions of text messages:
Are they the text messages of Americans?
> They also store every single phone call made in the US:
If they store every phone call made in the U.S. that would definitely be illegal. But the evidence that they do this is much flimsier than for the other things we know they do.
E.g. they can collect every detail about a person's life in ways that are normally illegal, but it's ok because no person has looked at the data yet.
What's the legality of basically giving full system access to all NSA data to 'allies' such as Israel with only a footnote in the agreement about using the 'honour system' if they find data in the system that shouldn't be there (e.g. a Senator's data gets caught in the net)?
What about the legality of skirting 'no spying on Americans' laws by forming agreements with foreign bodies such that said foreign body readily shares all data it has from spying on Americans (and the NSA does the same thing in kind, sharing data that said foreign body isn't legally allowed to collect on its own).
"The government further disclosed that, apart from this shared database, NSA analysts made it a general practice to disseminate to other agencies NSA intelligence reports containing U.S. person information [..] without obtaining the required determination." (Page 18)
"The government has provided no comprehensive explanation of how so substantial an overcollection occurred, only the conclusion that, [..] there was a failure to translate the technical requirements [..]" (Page 21)
"The history of material misstatements in prior applications and non-compliance with prior orders gives the Court pause before approving such an expanded collection." (Page 72)
(SPOILER ALERT: Of course they rubber stamped it anyway!)
All from http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDPRTT%202.pdf
I don't live in the US, I'm currently in Australia. Australia has no law stopping them from gathering data on Americans, so what happens when the US says, 'hey, tell us about our citizens, we'll tell you about yours'.
You essentially have created the same mass surveillance, you've just outsourced it.
You can certainly draw assumptions from that: they aren't going to back away from these very reasonable interpretations unless the Supreme Court makes them untenable by, say, rejecting the Third Party Doctrine, but given the law that's on the books, it's accurate to say that what has been leaked is not consistent with the NSA actively seeking to ignore the law.