It doesn't mean anything of the sort. They just need a tip-off at the border. They don't need access to everything or even need to know how or why.
They don't even need to know that it's a tip-off: a computer could just spit out "selected for random phone search" and maybe "suspected immigration fraud" when that person reaches border control. The border agent needn't know how or why the selection was made, nor have access to any top-secret data. Just follow instructions.
With automated screening using access to a database of everybody's communications, I'm sure you could easily predict more than 80% of the people who cross country borders within 24-hours. For flights, that would be close to 100% accurate. With satnav, you'd probably catch a good portion of the rest who drive across.
And who do you reckon is doing all of this expensive, technically demanding and legally hazardous work just to catch people getting married for green cards? The NSA does not give a crap about that.
If every government agency were dipping into the NSA's cookie jar of secrets so liberally, we'd most likely have known about all these not-so-secret programs years before Snowden ever worked there.
It's not impossible, but it's sufficiently implausible that you'd be crazy to bet on it.
They don't even need to know that it's a tip-off: a computer could just spit out "selected for random phone search" and maybe "suspected immigration fraud" when that person reaches border control. The border agent needn't know how or why the selection was made, nor have access to any top-secret data. Just follow instructions.
With automated screening using access to a database of everybody's communications, I'm sure you could easily predict more than 80% of the people who cross country borders within 24-hours. For flights, that would be close to 100% accurate. With satnav, you'd probably catch a good portion of the rest who drive across.