> What exactly is the point you're trying to make here? That this is all legal? They have at least violated the SPIRIT of the law.

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.

I think his point is that ultimately what matters is whether these abilities are being abused, particularly for something like political ends - so far we've seen only a few isolated cases towards personal ends(and the nsa did not protect those people). Given the size of the organization I think it's safe to say that that is within the bounds of statistical probability.