You can throw out visions of sleep-drived, skeevy NSA agents sitting in a basement staring at you through your webcam — the intelligence agency’s top lawyer told senators before a committee on Wednesday that the NSA is incapable of knowing how often data is captured inadvertently. The system is, apparently, heavily automated.

While Americans theoretically have protection from intrusive government searches under the Fourth Amendment, foreigners certainly do not. The NSA has recently come under added fire of it’s seemingly haphazard approach to surveillance without any centralized system in place. Data is seemingly being gathered from everywhere and being viewed by everyone, without any rhyme or reason. The Senatorial committee was particularly harsh on the lawyer for his vagueness.

“Isn’t it a bad thing that the NSA doesn’t even have a rough sense of how many Americans have had their information collected under a law … that specifically prohibits targeting Americans?”

via arstechnica