That's the devil in the details. Sam altman's insult upon injury, treating the public as idiots on top of being a collaborator. The answer to your question is the government decides what is legal, as in the executive branch, in the pentagon the commander in chief decides. So essentially, they can do whatever they want so long as they call it legal.

As I said in a sibling comment, mass surveillance cannot be considered legal in the US under any context. not even war, emergency, terrorism, nuclear strike, national security reasons, imminent danger to the public,etc.. targeted surveillance can, scoped surveillance of a group of people can, but not mass surveillance. In other words Sam Altman is saying "This thing can never be legal short of a constitutional amendment, but so long as trump says it is, we'll look the other way".

What a two-faced <things i can't say on HN> this guy is!

I really hope Google poaches all his top engineers. If any of you are reading this, I ask you this, I get working for money, but will Google or Anthropic offer you all that much less? Consider the difference in pay when you put a price on your conscious.

Yes, I think that would be the idea. Again, not my view, but we give police officers license to use lethal force and often the victims of their abuse of that power have no recourse because they're already dead.