It's not a 'just your opinion, man' sort of thing - more or less nobody seems to have thought PRISM was unlawful. Rand Paul, I think, made some noises about suing at the time and eventually did file some sort of suit that ended up not being about PRISM.
But it is... You're conflating two different things: the legal position accepted by the government and the reality. I don't think PRISM was legal, in my opinion, you can have an opposing view. People write opinions on lawfulness of all kinds of topics prior to making legal arguments regarding. And many do think it is unconstitutional / illegal [0] [1].
It wasn't legal because it completely violates the 4th amendment in the mind of any reasonable person. The government said that was okay, but really it wasn't okay, and we all know that it was unConstitutional under even the most liberal interpretation of the 4th amendment.
No, I'm sorry, what's happened here is that you (and "el Reg") don't know what PRISM is, but only innuendo about it, and so you've mistaken it for other USG programs that do offer instances of the government enabling "unlawful intercept". PRISM is a paperwork handling service for FISA 702 directives, not the backdoor into Google that Glenn Greenwald initially thought it was. But a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still grinding its way through the top of your "Read It Later" list.
You could have made the argument you were trying to make colorably and defensibly. All you had to do was not try to sound like you'd been "read in" to NSA's SIGINT programs. But, like I said above: you managed to cite one of the few NSA program examples that is in fact totally banal and, ironically, an almost perfect example of lawful intercept.
So... 702 and PRISM aren't still being litigated? It's fun to watch you twist reality with this type of non-informational response. I get with the above you'd like people to assume that, instead, you've been "read in" on the subject matter. <golf clap> But not all of what you've outlined here is the _whole truth_.
These are words, I acknowledge that they are, but they're assembled in an order that make it hard for me to understand what they mean.
As I said above: it's not hard to come up with cases where NSA is doing things that appear to contravene US law, but you managed to cite the one instance where all they're managing is paperwork.
