Oh, I don’t need to go beyond commercial motives to find a reason for Pharm. But more to the point, Pharm is domestic.

The hallmark of a signals intelligence espionage program would be intrusion into foreign computers, ideally non-allied computers or targeted computers, which is within the balliwick of most of these organizations.

Indeed, there might be a desire to simply scan lots of hard drives in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. And North Korea (the few that are on the internet) and other places, staying away from spying on computers belonging to allies and domestic parties. They could write code to examine machines and determine if they are domestic, or owned by domestic companies. Or even code to say, “Does this computer look like it might be owned by a jihadi?” — and then start spying on just those computers.

The recent trend in intelligence has been to look for ways to do blanket basic surveillance and then isolate the few actual targets they want to put human beings on. Of course, in the domestic case, such as AT&T, the law says they can’t do this. But they want to do it, and in fact we allege in our lawsuit that they did do this — put in a splitter to divert all data into NSA systems. If they are doing that in the domestic arena, seems likely they are doing it overseas where there is less control.