What I believe is that if the NSA are already monitoring someone for whatever reason and see evidence of law-breaking that they would call up an appropriately cleared contact in the relevant agency and say, hey you should look into this person. The agency is free to run with it from there, using whatever tools with minimal oversight are available to them and no need to even mention the NSA after that point.
In fact, I believe that the number of actual terrorists is so small that such (ab)uses of the system are inevitable. In the same way that all the federal money for SWAT training of police departments has resulted in SWAT teams being deployed for all manner of low-risk situations, there just ain't enough real work for them to do so the mission creeps.
What I believe is that if the NSA are already monitoring someone for whatever reason and see evidence of law-breaking that they would call up an appropriately cleared contact in the relevant agency and say, hey you should look into this person. The agency is free to run with it from there, using whatever tools with minimal oversight are available to them and no need to even mention the NSA after that point.
In fact, I believe that the number of actual terrorists is so small that such (ab)uses of the system are inevitable. In the same way that all the federal money for SWAT training of police departments has resulted in SWAT teams being deployed for all manner of low-risk situations, there just ain't enough real work for them to do so the mission creeps.