Comment by mpyne

> It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time.

Well, the article makes the point exceptionally well; it's unclear why MUSCULAR is needed when PRISM already exists.

However as long as the interception was exclusively between overseas Google and Yahoo data centers I'm not actually sure it's even clearly criminal.

Instead I think it shows a rather stunning 'loophole' in current U.S. law and case law when you intersect a globalized Internet with laws meant to deal with national-level communications.

Frankly, this is the same feeling I experienced when it became clear how global companies are able to "nation shop" for maximum tax advantage. I didn't like seeing it then, and I don't like it here.

But although the behavior might be technically legal (thanks to the platoon of lawyers) it's certainly not in keeping with the spirit. It seems to me that oversight much become much, much more intrusive than it used to be.

Instead of writing the law and then letting NSA squirm for years until it finds loopholes that work for it, it's time to force effective oversight deep into every level.

Because what's most striking to me is that I'm not sure that even the law as it stood before 2001 would have made this behavior technically illegal. MUSCULAR couldn't have happened then, of course, but now that American data is being farmed automatically to data centers around the world....