You can whine all night about “what might be”, but the discussion is about the content of the law.
Actually this thread is about something entirely outside 'content of law'. It began about the DoJ 'hiring' some university to conduct "studies" of social media under the guise of collecting trends, opinions and feelings of the 'populace' about vague 'right wing' or 'conservative' thoughts that might be considered as potentially dangerous.
Why did they, DoJ, choose it this way? Perhaps because they don't want to more violations of the law regarding privacy and government surveillance under their belt. Instead, they issue a vague RFQ and this university wins the contract to do their dirty work for them. Do you think we'll even see their final report and appended data? If you're as smart as you think you are, research bank on stuff like this and the female professor operative under grant who researched and located all these recalcitrants.
Lastly, I've been around a long time. I remember IBM hard drives that were a whopping 10MB and the PCs were 7 grand. I am also keenly aware of the astronomical advances in data rates and storage. Further, I also understand very well about metadata that wraps content and what throughput and simplicity is when it comes to having unlimited storage.
They've admitted they sift emails. They've had to admit they 'only' collect metadata after having been caught in a lie. They photograph every addressee and return address on every envelope, they scan and collect it all.
To think that they have everything in each phone call digitally and every bit of RF data on this planet given the massive storage capacity they've developed along with compression algorithms and don't have access to it when they deign to ask for a rubberstamp FISA approval is absurd. "Build it and they will come".....they cannot help but be tempted with they delude themselves it is 'good' for the nation.