At 09:14 AM 1/19/2014, coderman wrote:
(2) threats to the United States and its interests from terrorism; Terrorism was the previous justification for the bulk collection and for the 3-degrees-of-separation "rule", so no change.
(3) threats to the United States and its interests from the development, possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass destruction; When Dubya Bush was trying to justify invading Iraq, he talked about WMDs as "nuculur bombs" and chemical and biological weapons. But when some angry young zealot tried to car-bomb Times Square using "explosives" he'd gotten from an FBI informant, they also charged him with making "weapons of mass destruction", the Boston Marathon bombers got charged with that, and I think even pipe bombs have been called WMDs recently.
So WMDs might be any random young resident calling his brother or cousin, and the NSA still gets to Tap All The Phones.
(4) cybersecurity threats; [ED: WTF???] Hey, the guy might be using Skype to call his cousin instead of minutes. And people are constantly trying to hack the computers at military facilities, banks, and civilian government agencies, either with deliberate targeting or just because it's easier not to program your botnet to use whitelists, and maybe that defense contractor's supercomputer can mine Litecoins fast.
So no, I don't see the situation improving soon, and certainly not before they repeal Moore's Law.