> The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I assume the system enforces this. As such, US citizens have nothing to worry about.

I think it's fair to say most rank and file NSA employees are honest and actually do believe in their mission. The far scarier thought is how things may work at an extremely senior level (contractors included), where there's literally nobody there to watch the watchers, or at least challenge them without being fired and blackballed.

That said, "US selectors" shouldn't return the results that they do in the first place. Obviously there's incidental collection, which is unavoidable. But the notion of incidental collection, as with metadata collection, was hijacked and used in public relations messaging as a cover for actual domestic collection programs that intentionally capture the full contents of nearly all domestic communications within the United States.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec1...

Despite exceptions such as the article above, this messaging has largely been successful. Even The Guardian and The Washington Post---organizations who publish stories directly sourced from documents leaked by Snowden---routinely fail to underscore the critical difference between actual collection, and "collection" in the sense of mere authorized access to data that's already intercepted and stored. The two have been intentionally conflated as part of a semantics game, and it's working beautifully to mislead the American public about what's actually happening.