I'm shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.

[RevDisk]

As most of us know at this point, the NSA spies on Americans and has a rubber stamp to make it legal. The FISC is a secret court that rubber stamps NSA and other intelligence requests about 99.97% of the time. Not sarcasm, they've rejected a couple dozen requests out of tens of thousands of requests.

But sometimes... A rubber stamp just isn't good enough to defend our freedom. And the NSA has to get creative.

https://tcf.org/content/report/surveillance-without-borders-the-traffic-shaping-loophole-and-why-it-matters/

We've all heard the perjury from NSA officials, which they have admitted, testifying before Congress that they only spy on US communication if one party is a foreign entity. This is a polite lie. But sometimes they want to pay lip service to polite lies. If you want one 'entity' to be foreign, just route the traffic outside the US! Nothing bad could come out of that!

This is akin to knowing you can't get a warrant, so you kidnap someone, throw them across the border and then search them because they crossed the border.

[Hawkmoon]

A number of years ago the feds busted the then-Mayor of Waterbury, CT, on a juvenile sex offense using that technique. They were actually secretly investigating him for alleged corruption when, in the course of the investigation, they intercepted a series of cell phone calls (or text messages, or both) pertaining to his efforts to get a mother to make her two very young daughters available to hizzoner for ... ah, well ... for certain "services."

The feds, to their credit, chose to blow up their corruption investigation and bust the creep for the attempts to engage in juvenile sex. IIRC, they were able to assert jurisdiction because some of the cell phone calls were made or received from the western part of Connecticut, and bounced off towers in New York state. Ergo, "interstate communication."