But, he's not wrong. Collect all the things is exactly their mandate. This information is then mined to produce actionable intelligence. It's absolutely what we do in business today, but turned toward diplomatic aims.

I don't see why this is a conspiracy kind of thing. We have a spy agency, that are hired to do SIGINT spying.

> Collect all the things is exactly their mandate.

Where is this written down?

Facts matter. Especially in debates like this.

Their "Mission" page indicates their SIGINT mission:

""" The Signals Intelligence mission collects, processes, and disseminates intelligence information from foreign signals for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and to support military operations. """

Collecting All the Things is not in the mandate, but it's a very effective way to meet it. I'm not even sure how they'd go about collecting only mission-specific information without being able to peek at the metadata they collect on us all.

I don't like it, but I don't see an alternative way to do what they are mandated to do.

0: https://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml

> foreign

That's the keyword there.

> for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and to support military operations

This is meaningless without oversight.

> > foreign

> That's the keyword there.

Ah, but they don't know if it's a foreigner until they look at it. So might as well collect it all and figure out which ones are the foreign ones later. After all, the data's not actually "collected" until an analyst looks at it. It's a sort of Heisenberg-data - only exists when you look at it. While it's sitting in the NSA data centre, it's entirely harmless!

I imagine OP is referencing the Alexander quote: "Collect it all, tag it, store it....And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it....."

More info: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/07/15/crux-nsa-story-...

That makes me sad, but in a world where the one and only person punished for our torture program was the whistleblower, it's hard to believe the NSA even has to pretend to follow the law. And if / when they get caught, all they have to do is yell terrorists, terrorists to get a get out of jail free card.

While I agree strongly with your sentiment, why even bother bringing up the "conspiracy nut" label? It's only ever used in an ad hominem attack, and has nothing to do with the truth. All arguments should be judged on sources and reason, regardless of how farfetched or paranoid they seem from your perspective.

Snowden showed us that a lot of things that sounded exactly like paranoid conspiracy theories were 100% true. At this point I wouldn't blame someone for thinking we should maybe take another look at UFO sightings or mind control satellites or something.

Regarding UFO's, I enjoyed the documentary Mirage Men: https://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/70305797

Quoting the top review: "This is a documentary not about UFOs but rather intelligence operations perpetrated against Americans by their government in order to cover up top secret projects and engage in social control experiments using a particular American subculture."

it's not a conspiracy theory, in fact, it's probably already true.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/05/why_the_curre...

Chris Soghoian 5/180 or 3% of FISA orders are about this bulk phone metadata program. the rest: "other programs".

Conspiracy theories and true events are not disjoint sets. Humans do sometimes conspire.

Careful now, there is a BIG difference between conspiracy types and cynics.

"All new truths begin as heresy."

Maybe it's time to reconsider the term "conspiracy nut", then?