All I can do is quote:
All of the information gained by the NSA through spying is then shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes. The agencies are instructed to intentionally “launder” the information gained through spying, i.e. to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way … and to hide that from defense attorneys and judges.
More below the fold...
Keep in mind Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information. DiFi may think it is perfectly OK since she has "nothing to hide":
“My phone numbers, I assume, are collected like everybody else’s,” Feinstein said. “But so what? It does not bother me. By the Supreme Court decision in 1979, the data is not personal data. There’s a Google Map that allows somebody to burgle my house, it’s so clear and defined, and I can’t do anything about it.”
But here's what Justice Breyer has to
say about that:
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
As Binney tells the Washington Blog:
This is a total corruption of the justice system not only in our country but around the world. The source of the info is at the bottom of each slide. This is a totalitarian process – means we are now in a police state.
UPDATE: Some of the skepticism in the comments might be addressed by quoting further from the Washington Blog:
Binney told us today:
The main use of the collection from these [NSA spying] programs [is] for law enforcement. [See the 2 slides below].
These slides give the policy of the DOJ/FBI/DEA etc. on how to use the NSA data. In fact, they instruct that none of the NSA data is referred to in courts – cause it has been acquired without a warrant.