That whole surveillance system was created under the bush regime there bud
True, NSA vacuums up every phone call, text message, email, phone GPS locations, banking transactions for every person around the globe and those records can be searched at will for non-citizens of the USA.
When a US citizen (a 702, after Section 702 of the FISA which protects US citizens from wholesale data
exposure, not collection) is part of the communication, their identifiers (name, phone number, email addy, SSN, banking account numbers, GPS location info, etc) are anonymized. Only under certain conditions such as national security or an ongoing investigation, can their identity be unmasked.
The Obama FBI did not follow any of those rules; they unmasked millions of datapoints, placing names to the data or exposing data for a particular identifier, often banging the same identifier again and again and again for different dates. This was done for purely political purposes.
all the legal authority needed comes from teh patriot act
Yes, legal authority for legal use . . . That's not what these players did though and
that illegal access and illegal use and the cover-up is what ObamaGate is . . .