Currently, the intelligence agencies and the Obama administration say that Americans' privacy is protected because the NSA needs "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of a link to terrorism or foreign espionage before it sifts through its phone records database.
Federal officials will be required to request records using "a specific selection term" on the basis of "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the call information is linked to international terrorism.
The government enshrouds the details of its surveillance programs in a technical vocabulary ("reasonable articulable suspicion," "seeds," "queries," "identifiers") that renders them too dull and opaque for substantive discussion by civilians.
An R.A.S. is a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that someone might have something to do with terrorism; a seed is a search term, perhaps a telephone number, that the N.S.A. plugs into a database of hundreds of millions of phone records it has collected indiscriminately.
You may want to ask more questions of those people so it gives you more ammunition to make an articulable reason as to why you are striking them, not for race".
Despite the apparent lack of a connection to terrorism, all the D.E.A. needed to search the database was a "reasonable articulable suspicion," a lower standard of evidence than probable cause that is most often associated with counterterrorism and counterintelligence programs.
(Senator Dianne Feinstein has stated that the N.S.A. does not require a court order to search its database of call logs; it needs only "reasonable, articulable cause to believe that that individual is connected to a terrorist group").
One of the first bills that Obama co-sponsored, the Security and Freedom Enhancement Act, would have required that the government present "specific and articulable facts" if it wanted a court order for records, a much higher standard than the existing one.
The N.S.A. was supposed to search its archive of metadata only after it had determined that there was a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" — RAS — to believe that the phone number or other search term was related to terrorism.
Under rules imposed by the court, the agency may search for phone calls only if there is "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the underlying phone number is linked to terrorism.
It said the government may access the records only when there are "facts giving rise to a reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the number to be searched is associated with terrorism.
