With regards to the first Snowden leak, there was no context behind it. We've had two independent reports (the Presidential Review Group's[1] and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's[2]) since then detailing exactly what is being done with phone records and what the NSA is allowed to do with them. I wouldn't call the 215 program monitoring at all, unless you're referring to the "seed selectors" that are approved by the FISC. Based on what we know now, the entire premise of the program, which was lacking in the initial reporting, is determining if any numbers on a list of foreign phones belonging to suspected terrorists have called or received calls from US numbers; if so, which numbers were they in contact with. You can call it massive over-collection to achieve those ends and you can say the potential for abuse is frightening, but none of the Snowden documents have actually shown any abuse, datamining or, dare I say, monitoring of regular people.

With your second article, it almost feels like your article and the source documents are talking about two separate things. You start off claiming that the documents are at odds with Obama's claim that the NSA can't listen to American's phone calls or target their e-mails, then go and cite a pair of documents that detail how to avoid collecting American's communications and what to do if they are inadvertently collected? You continue on by saying 'Analysts are expected to exercise "reasonable judgment" in determining which data to use, according to the documents, and "inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person may be retained no longer than five years."', but omit rest of the paragraph that it comes from:

Personnel will exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether information acquired must be minimized and will destroy inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person at the earliest practicable point in the processing cycle at which such communication can be identified either: as clearly not relevant to the authorized purpose of the acquisition (e.g., the communication does not contain foreign intelligence information); or, as not containing evidence of a crime which may be disseminated under these procedures. Such inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person may be retained no longer than five years in any event. The communications that may be retained include electronic communications acquired because of limitations on NSA's ability to filter communications.

Why is the beginning and end of that paragraph important but not the fact that NSA analysts are required to destroy any US person communications that couldn't be automatically filtered out and contain no intelligence value or evidence of a crime? It doesn't say anything about a requirement to destroy American's inadvertently collected communications anywhere in the article. You continue by saying 'The documents also refer to "content repositories" that contain records of devices' "previous Internet activity," and say the NSA keeps records of Americans' "electronic communications accounts/addresses/identifiers" in an apparent effort to avoid targeting them in future eavesdropping efforts.' What's the problem with noting that an e-mail address belongs to an American if the stated purpose is to mark it as unsuitable for collection?

You go to quote Jameel Jaffer at the ACLU as saying that "the NSA claims the authority to collect and disseminate attorney-client communications -- and even, in some circumstances, to turn them over to Justice Department prosecutors.", but the actual source document says this:

As soon as it becomes apparent that a communication is between a person who is known to be under criminal indictment in the United States and an attorney who represents that individual in the matter under indictment (or someone acting on behalf of the attorney), monitoring of that communication will cease and the communication will be identified as an attorney-client communication in a log maintained for that purpose. The relevant portion of the communication containing that conversation will be segregated and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice will be notified so that appropriate procedures may be established to protect such communications from review or use in any criminal prosecution, while preserving foreign intelligence information contained therein. Additionally, all proposed disseminations of information constituting United States person attorney-client privileged communications must be review by the NSA Office of General Counsel prior to dissemination.

I look at these things and I have to wonder why the article is written like this. It seems downright misleading to me. Is it an editorial decision, or is that how you actually interpret those documents?

EDIT: I'm re-reading this a few minutes later and I'm worried I'm coming off as offensive, which wasn't my intention. I'm honestly curious about this - I read those same source documents and interpret them completely different than how you wrote them up.