Also, they used to call “conspiracy theorists” detectives. There’s this illogical notion that simply because some people jump to off-the-wall theories (Alien reptiods from Andromeda run the NSA!!!) that anyone positing a theory that two or more people are working in secret toward a common goal, is not sane.

The fact is that conspiracy theories occur CONSTANTLY. Every time a guy cheats on his wife with her friend or sister, the two are conspiring toward a common goal. If I tell you this is going on, it’s simply irrational to dismiss it out of hand because of the fact that I have a theory that your husband is boning your sister.

To dismiss such theories is to accept what you are told at face value and be gullible as though you were born yesterday.

If a detective sees a red stain on Bob’s shirt, and the Bob says it’s ketchup, and he sees hair under Bob’s finger nails, and Bob says it’s from petting his dog, and then says his wife is lying on the ground because she fell on a knife and died, and the detective suspects foul play, we do not call him a conspiracy theorist.

We say he’s seeking the truth. That is all it is, and such professions do not have a monopoly on seeking it. I encourage you to seek it out and question everything.

For example, some leaked docs have claimed that FISA requests are always specific, while others have cited FISA requests that are basically a rubber stamp for any future collection. Likewise, PRISM has sometimes been used to designate only voluntary provision via a participating ISP of a specific user’s metadata. But in other places, it’s much more general. To @ix’s point, we already know that xkeyscore sits atop much more than metadata, and there are presumably systems we still don’t know about. We see this all the time in large IT systems — people just use the term that they think will get across the basic point to their audience.

To your point about conspiracy, it was a conspiracy from the start, by definition. The government needed cooperation and silence from many parties, and used many forms of persuasion to ensure silence. Of course, they claim it is all totally constitutional, but the point is that all of the parties continue conceal the truth while striving to provide the “least untruthful” answer possible within the constraints of concealing the truth.

Since it necessarily must filter broadly (because deep filters take too much processing time) it ends up catching a lot of data, which might add up to the 200 million something. Or if you count every time an agent looks something up in this system, suppose he wants everything from one IP for the last 3 days. This would be hundreds or thousands of http connections, tens of e-mails sent, etc. Might well add up easily to 200 million.