They collect your data...
and then query it over and over and over and over.
To me each time they do this, it's an abuse. Even if at the end of a query it doesn't spit out a result with your name on it.
It is used to rule you out, which in itself means you were ruled in at some point.
This is just not something I think the USA spy agencies should be doing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
You conflated reading one field ("bumping it up against"
to check for relevancy to reading all of the contents of the entire record of data as well, which is the "spying" part that gets thrown around.
I.e., the better point to argue being that any record that is "U.S." should automatically be purged unless further investigation finds a link to "foreign" and that should have a warrant to view.
And this is why there is a dispute as to what a query is and does and what is actually being "seen" by a query. Applying pre-technological standards to modern technology, is complex and difficult.
I.e., what you are arguing is that if I'm driving down a street looking for a house with a specific address, then I am violating the privacy of all the occupants in all of the other residences that I pass by on the way to the residence I'm looking for, even though I haven't stepped on the zoned property, let alone gone inside those other residences. Merely driving by them and looking at the bare minimum of identifying info about them (their externally-displayed addresses) to see if a particular residence is the one I am looking for, is sufficient enough for the violation of privacy ("abuse" . Going around the block if I missed it the first time, is probably considered egregious "abuse".
This was one biggest issues about Google Street View cameras (and apparently other things like data sniffers) going up and down streets. However can actually "collecting data" (e.g., the Google "wifi" collection scandal) as one drives along the street be conflated into the same thing as merely "looking at" a specific, "publicly-displayed" address (and then moving on to the next one if it doesn't "match" what you are looking for)?
If you do agree that "looking at" minimal identifying info is just as bad as "collecting", then we might as well dump all of the maps in the U.S. I.e., the courts have been continually forced to define the point at which a line is crossed as technology advances.
Some do argue that this is "trespassing" - i.e., the mere presence of being "near" the residence (say driving down what is marked as a "private road" that runs by several houses towards a residence, with the road is not owned by the occupant of the house at the end of the lane), and that is something that the courts have been continually defining and redefining (e.g, "perimeter" vs something else).
