I think that's the key insight. It may not be legal for NSA to look at records of US citizens, but build a search engine and there are other departments for whom it is legal to do that. NSA just becomes the facilitator or router of the data.
Is that even what's being described? I don't see any reason why it would be bad to let the DEA search an NSA database of intelligence about foreign suspects.
The problem is (as it's always been) that they aren't just criminal suspects and they aren't all foreign. But that was the problem whether or not the NSA built a "Google."
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I think that's the key insight. It may not be legal for NSA to look at records of US citizens, but build a search engine and there are other departments for whom it is legal to do that. NSA just becomes the facilitator or router of the data.
Is that even what's being described? I don't see any reason why it would be bad to let the DEA search an NSA database of intelligence about foreign suspects.
The problem is (as it's always been) that they aren't just criminal suspects and they aren't all foreign. But that was the problem whether or not the NSA built a "Google."