PRISM

[Lamplighter]

@Sexabon: Such an attempt distinguish between "gathering" and "accumulation"
is akin to something Humpty Dumpty might have said to Alice.
Your lead paragraph essentially uses the words interchangeably

The government makes a distinction between information
(raw data) and intelligence (data processed into a useful form).
Government does not consider the gathering and accumulation of information
to be a violation of the right to privacy because the data accumulation
is not yet in the useful form of an intelligence collection
that can be used to the detriment of citizens.<snip>

If you wish to duel about dictionary definitions, we can do that... I prefer not.

Your analogy of a "coin collection" is essentially misleading for PRISM,
because each individual coin is not "linked" to any other individual coin.
The properties of any one coin does not lead to the discovery of any other specific coin in the collection.

If we are to carry on a discussion of what we think we know of PRISM,
let us focus on "data" and "intelligence", because I think they come closer to your attempt
to distinguish between the constitutional and unconstitutional activity of our government.

But first my assumption: The government is obtaining raw data from
service providers and storing it in some logical format.
We (you and I) don't yet know if this format is file cabinets of paper,
databases of virtual data, or a Sheldon Cooper who simply remembers everything.

But I strongly doubt it is anything other than a database, and
I also doubt such database is just a non-sequential data dump
of phone numbers, dates and durations.
Instead, I suspect it is more likely to be a relational database,
organized by caller-ID, recipient-ID, which are in turn linked via date/time
with their durations and maybe even other kinds of data.

If my suspicions are correct, this meets your definition of "intelligence",
because it is the processing of raw data into a useful form.

The government makes a distinction between information
(raw data) and intelligence (data processed into a useful form)

Even if you are squeamish about this level of "processing",
just combining raw data from multiple providers across phone ID's
would constitute your definition of an unconstitutional collection.

And yes, this may be "legal" via the FISA court, but now we are back
to talking about altruistic leaks of classified information and whistle blowers.