Multiband phones are common. Verizon has them.
What if Omar is on the border between the US and Canada?
The point I'm trying to make is, there are complications introduced by modern communications that make deciding who is and who is not a "US person" simply by looking at metadata difficult. Someone anywhere in the world can use VPN or lots of other things to make it appear that they're somewhere else. AFAIK, anyone can get a virtual machine on Amazon's servers if they're willing to pay the price (or if not, there are certainly ways around whatever rules are in place). Are they a US person? How can you tell if you're just looking at metadata?
The government and the NSA says they have rules and procedures in place to try to address those complications. We can choose to believe them or not, just like we can choose to believe Snowden and Greenwald or not. We can argue that more transparency and more restrictions are needed, or not. But I don't think we can say that the task that the NSA has is easy or that it is trivial to exclude information from US persons. That doesn't pass the simplest of tests, IMHO.
I think I'm done for now.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
