Scott Alexander

To learn more about the details, let's look at the law.

Mass domestic surveillance.

More than you wanted to know.

Mass and targeted surveillance of foreigners in their foreign countries is legal.

Broadly, the courts have declined to grant standing to allow court cases to test the executive branch's position that the president has inherent powers derived from his constitutional role to authorize foreign intelligence and counterintelligence surveillance, which de facto has allowed this position to become the standard executive branch argument for lawfulness.

Targeted surveillance of Americans domestically is legal for domestic law enforcement purposes and, in narrow and usually time-limited cases, or for intelligence and counterterrorism.

The surveilling agency must get the permission of a court first.

Normal courts for law enforcement, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, court for intelligence.

This latter category includes things like wiretapping Americans suspected of spying for Russia.

Mass domestic surveillance of Americans, American companies, and US permanent residents, or for that matter, generally their counterparts in other Five Eyes partners, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, is more complicated.

The current law is, roughly, that it's illegal to seek this kind of data, but legal to, quote, incidentally obtain it.

So, for example, if the US was looking for Al-Qaeda communications, it might tap a major undersea cable, and if tapping that cable happened to incidentally give it data on millions of Americans, it could keep that data.

But after incidentally obtaining, in quotes, the data, it may only query the resulting database in a targeted way.

So the government might take its trove of citizen data that it incidentally collected looking for Al-Qaeda and search for a specific citizen's history if it thinks, for example, that this citizen might be a spy.

The government reserves the term mass domestic surveillance for the thing they don't do, querying their databases en masse, preferring terms like gathering for what they do do, creating the databases en masse.

They also reserve the term collecting for the querying process, so that when asked, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, they

A director of national intelligence said no under oath, even though by the ordinary meaning of this question it absolutely does.

It's worth noting that the NSA is a Department of War agency.

Footnote, OpenAI's head of national security partnerships has made a few unclear tweets, perhaps implying that NSA might be excluded from their contract.

However, as of this writing, they have not clearly confirmed this, have made some other statements that all of DOW, which includes NSA, is in scope of their contract, and have not made any comment on other DOW intelligence agencies.