None of the facts you have cited contradict anything I said.

The data that is sent into the PRISM system is data that is sent by cloud providers, in response to a targeted warrant. The data is not collected whole-sale - it is targeted to a particular individual. That's the whole bloody point of warrants.

Once it's been sent by the cloud providers to the NSA, it ends up in a searchable database. I don't understand what is remotely controversial about that. The source of the data was not whole-sale collection - it was targeted warrants. That it becomes searchable afterwards is not relevant to anything. There is nothing illegal about police retaining data, and maybe even putting it in a searchable database, as long as that data was legally obtained - at least, in the United States.

> And yes, there is supposed to be a formal request where an analyst requests our secret court system approve a search before they carry it out. That process is unsurprisingly a rubber stamp - the court approves 99.97% of all requests. But more importantly this is something with no meaningful oversight.

I'm not sure you understand what the purpose of search warrants is.

Search warrants are overwhelmingly rubber-stamped by courts, regardless of whether it's a secret FISA court, or a local judge who works two days a week in Small Town, AK. The point of having to get a search warrant is not to obstruct the work of police. The courts don't interpret that to be their job.

The point of having to get a search warrant is to prevent fishing expeditions, and to make sure that police are conducting a narrow, targeted search. Most judges will rubber-stamp a search warrant for Bob Joe, based on incredibly flimsy testimony. Most judges will tell a police department to go pound sand if they wanted a search warrant for an entire town.

As long as those FISA courts were dealing with search warrants of the first kind (And all evidence points to this), rubber-stamping them would not have been any different from how regular courts rubber-stamp targeted search warrants.

> "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."

You are conflating two separate parts of PRISM, in a misleading manner.

The first part is how it requests data from cloud providers. It does so by targeted warrant. This is incredibly similar to how regular police operate. They get a targeted warrant, a judge rubber-stamps it, and they serve it. It is incredibly likely that this is not illegal.

The second part is that after it has retrieved the data, that data goes in a database, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry that works for a TLA can search for it (And go on fishing expeditions, in the already-retrieved set of data). This is also not illegal. If you think it is, please point me to legislature, or court precedent that implies that information obtained by the police in a warrant cannot be put into a searchable database.

You are conflating the two, by making it sound like every Tom, Dick, and Harry that works for a TLA can go on an untargeted, whole-sale, unwarranted fishing expedition on Hotmail.com. The simple fact is, they can't. Not via PRISM, at least. This is why the NSA was conducting criminal tapping of cross-datacenter links - because PRISM only let them serve targeted warrants, and they wanted raw, whole-sale, untargeted, backdoor access to your data. That, for some reason, most of the firms implicated in the leaked NSA files were not granting them, hmm...