Much less info, if that's supposed to be accomplishing the same thing. In particular, this implicit acknowledgement that they're Hoovering up a lot of telephone connection metadata:

"By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. Only specially cleared counterterrorism personnel specifically trained in the Court-approved procedures may even access the records."

Given that they aren't disposing this data, that their searches today are, at least officially, narrow, is of little reassurance.

You can't query this much data with clustering it, indexing it, analyzing it first somehow.

Nah, check out data warehouses. This data is really limited in details (anything more than from and to telephone numbers, and start and stop times?), and can be shoved into a data warehouse without any analysis as that word is generally understood.

Of course it gets indexed, but that's automatic and mindless.

I see your point but I am so tempted to assume that they are not just storing it in some flat dump but trying to extract some sort of higher order representation of the data as they are processing it into the warehouse. You could argue that surfacing trends is technically not "querying".

Not the same document.

You are absolutely right my bad - was haste of me. Still another interesting document. Wonder why the first is gone.