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Notes -
This depends on which version you think is an accurate description of what Snowden revealed. For example, the version @2rafa gives:
...just isn't the sort of thing that Snowden's documents revealed. Most of the discussion was around two different programs: 702 and 215.
702 was never about trawling trillions of FB messages/emails. It was that if they found a specific term that was uniquely associated with a foreign intelligence target (e.g., they rolled up Terrorist A, got into his computer, found the email address for Terrorist B), they could go to various companies and said, "Give us anything that crosses your wire that has this email address for Terrorist B." This is eminently doable; not really even that hard, even.
215 was an attempt at bulk collection of metadata (who talked to who, for how long), which didn't include the content of those comms. This would be, on its face, useless for trawling for specific messages that raised red flags. Instead, it was just things like, "Well, Terrorists A, B, and C all talk to this other number, so prooooooobably we should check that number out," or, "Terrorist A's number, which had been talking to Person B and Person C on a regular basis, suddenly disappeared, and at the same time, this other new number started talking to Person B and Person C with approximately the same regularly. Mayyyyyyybe, that's Terrorist A's new number." This is much more "needle-in-the-haystack" type of a problem, and they pretty publicly admitted that it was much less effective at doing much (was able to do some things, but much more inefficient).
So, a possible refined version of this conspiracy theory would have to be something like, "We'll use Snowden to target some 'vulnerable' journalists (who are 'vulnerable' to wildly exaggerating), and hopefully, to paraphrase the old saying, the wild exaggerations will travel the world before our consistent media push to describe it more circumspectly can get its shoes on." In this case, you'd sort of have to posit that the entire push to rein back in the perception was, itself, a sort of second-order psyop, because if they just wanted Snowden to make all the people who are most likely to pay close attention to sources and methods freak out and change their behavior, they'd want to just be silent and let Snowden make everyone believe that they're omniscient.
While strictly speaking they didn't admit to searching all comms, they did show that they could do so. If I'm a terrorist or a foreign hostile operative, I'm very much going to treat "NSA can search my comms" with "NSA will search my comms." Because I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life in Cuba.
I mean, it depends on what you mean by "could". Like, they're trying to be in a position so that they 'could' search Vladimir Putin's comms... and if they're ever in that position, then they probably 'could' search some rando terrorist's comms.
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