The report is a bit more clever than that, and *parts* of it are actually good. It's certainly more info than I ever knew before, and than they would have ever released before.
The way these "Devils in Details" landmined reports work is that 95% of it is legit, and builds a legit case towards ... what you think it should. Then at the very capstone when it comes time to produce the conclusion, they flip a key paragraph as the landmine. In a perfect world, let's say we ever magically elect a both incredibly powerful party majority and an incredibly honest one, they can take this report, reverse the landmine paragraphs, and end up with the correct result.
Try looking near pages 98-99.
This is the paragraph that echoes this entire thread:
"On the other side of the coin, the acquisition of private communications intrudes on Fourth Amendment interests. Even though U.S. persons and persons located in the United States are subject to having their telephone conversations collected only when they communicate with a targeted foreigner located abroad, the program nevertheless gains access to numerous personal conversations of U.S. persons that were carried on under an expectation of privacy. Email communications to and from U.S. persons, which the FISA court has said are akin to âoepapersâ protected under the Fourth Amendment,426 are also subject to collection in a variety of circumstances."
At this point everyone is clamoring for the followup to be "Unconstitutional so get rid of it." As they say, "always put one concession to your opponent's position in an argument", so here I say, "it is not possible under any form of intelligence work to have *zero* US-US information showing up, such as because any email to that sketchy girlfriend with a CC to your US buddy on it, drags him along along for the ride." Of course that's a minimal data point, but this thread has been about the issue of Non-Zero data collection.
*However*, then they threw their landmine in.
Over on page 99:
"The government has acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. persons are affected when their communications are acquired under Section 702 incidentally or otherwise, and it has echoed the FISA courtâ(TM)s observation that the implementation of adequate minimization procedures is part of what makes the collection reasonable. (See footnote 433)"
So before everyone jumps on the word "reasonable", *that's* their landmine. You get Schrodinger's Cat scenarios with that email because as soon as they even see whose names are on it, one to Osama Bin Laden's hot neice's Iranian cousin staying in the Netherlands, and one to your radical US buddy, they *already have* metadata! So they decide to open it, whereupon it contains some nice NSFW Rule34/Rule35 pictures, and a PS memo on the bottom of it with a piece of info that actually qualifies as intelligence. Great. Now you have an email that pisses off at least four countries. What do you do with that?! (After you finish grinning lewdly and more to the pictures!)
So the *actual* word to mess with is "Adequate". After you finish laughing at my scenario, is that an *adequate* acquisition of US citizen data? I don't know. So saying "Aha! A right was violated, abolish the entire agency!!" is not the answer. The only one I can think of is a percentage one of some kind, such as "less than X% of US communications were collected, as verified by an auditor that you actually believe." Then we can all start over deciding what that percentage is.