The Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society parts the smokescreen of legalistic justifications employed by sign-off lawyers to ratify surveillance decisions that play havoc with morality:
To understand surveillance, you must also free your mind from traditional definitions of other words, including "target," "relevant," "incidental." As cryptographer Matt Blaze once said, crafting a question to get meaningful answers from the NSA is a lot like crafting a wish to get a genie to give you what you actually want. The agency is warping language in order to make rules mean something very different from what ordinary people would take them to mean.
