Snowden kills "metadata" argument during live hosted by The Guardian

An anonymous reader writes: In a live chat hosted by the The Guardian, Edward Snowden has clarified that the NSA does not simply have access to metadata, as has been the media rhetoric, and that large volumes of data relating to US citizens is frequently ingested.

Answering one question, he wrote:

If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time — and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

Answering another:

US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection — policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection — a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border.