As a supercomputer software engineer, I was well aware of what the NSA could use the data for. I studied graph problems. However, that is not the point of the article. I wanted to focus on the constitutional infractions that deserve attention. I did not want to speculate about what I believe they're doing with the information. Public, informed guesses could harm the acceptable parts of the program.

My point about the Tsarnaevs was that the NSA publicly claimed their domestic-only intercepts were being used successfully to catch terrorists. The point of these whistleblower revelations was that the separation wall between domestic and foreign intelligence created by Senator Frank Church's committee had come down in some cases.