More Mish Mosh from the National Security Agency

Officials at the National Security Agency (NSA) have gone all out to assure the American public that their surveillance program is absolutely needed for public protection against terrorist acts, and that it does not unnecessarily invade individual privacy.
The Washington Times has a considerable write-up on the NASA revelations.
Some of the information is revelation, but it is mostly a mish mosh of anecdotes.
Let us remember that the question is not whether we need a surveillance program to unearth projected terrorist activities. The question is what sort of program should be used and still stay within the privacy rights of innocent individuals, as required by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Washington Times reveals that NASA has had two surveillance programs, rather than one. Deputy NSA Director Christopher Inglis said that one program exposed by Mr. Snowden, code-named Prism, collects email, text, video messages and other online communications from nine Internet companies, but it is used only to target foreigners believed to be outside the United States. The obvious use of this program is to look at the email, text, video messages, and other online communications, all of which are the personal records of individuals, most of whom are innocent and who's records have been illegally seized according to the limitations of the Fourth Amendment.
The other program, authorized under the USA Patriot Act, involves the collection of “metadata” from about every telephone call made or received in the United States, Mr. Inglis said. “The controls on the use of this data at NSA are specific, rigorous and designed to ensure focus on counter terrorism,” Mr. Inglis said. “To that end, the metadata acquired and stored under this program may be queried only [under] a reasonable articulable suspicion” of a link to terrorism. Here again, the seizing of the personal records of presumed innocent individuals is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Mr.Inglis also said, "The agency is not recording “the content of any communications, what you’re saying during the course of the conversation, the identities of the people that are talking or any cell phone locational information,” he added. Instead, the NSA collects only the numbers called and calling, so that when the agency discovers the telephone number of a terrorist overseas, it can be discovered whether that person had been in touch with anyone in the United States". Here again, the mere collection of the meta-data, which involves the personal records of individuals, is a violation of the fourth amendment. It has also been said that private companies similarly collect this kind of information from the Internet for marketing purposes. That does not make it right, and it should be stopped by both private companies and the federal government.
Additionally, NASA said that last year it checked fewer than 300 telephone numbers against its database containing details about every phone call made in America. I am unimpressed, because NSA should not even have had the database on which to check the 300 telephone numbers. Telephone service suppliers have this information as a database, because they need it for billing, and this is done with the acquiescence of the customers. In the case of NASA having a similar database, there is no logical commercial reason, and it is certainly not being done with the acquiescence of "customers". Since the phone companies are justified in maintaining the database, while NSA is not, NSA could have obtained a court order requiring the phone company to turn over the records of those specific customers under suspicion of various activities.
As an anecdotal presentation, NASA said Najibullah Zazi, who schemed to bomb the New York subway, and David Headley, who helped plan the 2008 Mumbai massacre, were caught because of their telephone or online communications with al Qaeda suspects abroad. That's good, I'm glad they were caught. The question is whether my Fourth Amendment rights were also violated in the operation, and whether a more specific program not involving seizing of records of innocent people could have produced the same results.
FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce revealed two more plots that he said had been disrupted with the help of intelligence from the two programs.
In one, a “known extremist in Yemen” was being monitored using Prism. The extremist was in contact with a man in Kansas City named Khaled Ouazzani.
“We went up on electronic surveillance and identified his co-conspirators” in plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, said Mr. Joyce. “We were able to disrupt the plot, we were able to lure some individuals to the United States, and we were able to effect their arrest. And they were convicted for this terrorist activity.” Hooray! Good job! However, it doesn't seem to me that the private records of presumably innocent individuals were necessary.
In the second instance, the FBI in October 2007 reopened a cold case from 2001, after "NSA provided us a telephone number only in San Diego that had indirect contact with an extremist outside the United States.” The FBI doesn't say how NASA knew about the foreign extremist. It is highly unlikely that this could have been picked up from a database. More logically, the information was obtained from other intelligence sources. Any subsequent tracking could been done through phone company databases, after obtaining a court order involving this suspicious person.