"Illegal" in the same way that saying "No" to congress when the real answer was "Yes" is. Then later explaining that iw was "the least possible untruthful answer".
The NSA have twisted their use of language - to try and claim that "recording phone calls of US citizens" isn't an illegal act until a human being listens to one of those recordings.
I'm 99.999% sure that a "jury of peers" would not interpret the law that way. (Which might be why the need "special courts" without juries…)
The NSA doesn't have to record phone calls of US citizens. They just get one of the other Five Eyes countries to do it for them, in a quid pro quo arrangement that circumvents the inconvenient rule of law in several places at once.
You're carrying water for some seriously un-American people. The only reason you're not upset about it is that it doesn't seem to be affecting you, personally, at the moment.
That is a very good point, this might not have been explicitly said (or I just didn't read about it yet) but I just kind of assumed it works this way. We spy on your people we spy on our people and then we share if we find something interesting.
Other countries also might not have the same supposed privacy guarantees in their constitution so it doesn't even have to be symmetric (say Australians somehow spy both on us and their citizens).
The NSA have twisted their use of language - to try and claim that "recording phone calls of US citizens" isn't an illegal act until a human being listens to one of those recordings.
I'm 99.999% sure that a "jury of peers" would not interpret the law that way. (Which might be why the need "special courts" without juries…)