is what the NSA could possibly think they're going to find. No terrorist smart enough to pull off a successful attack is going to be dumb enough to announce it in an email or telephone call.

If you were a terrorist, would you write. "We're going to blow up the Capitol building at noon on July 4. Notify your operatives."? Or might you phrase it something like, "Abu and Fatima finally set their wedding date. It's New Year's Day at 3pm at that lovely mosque in Washington you and Faisel visited earlier this year. Please tell all your American cousins."?

And, of course the message would be in Arabic to further confound anyone listening in. So kind of needle in such a haystack could the NSA possibly be expecting to find?

Based on content, I suspect this Fray post has a greater chance of appearing on the NSA radar than any actual terrorism clues

That's not what they are looking for (I think). They are combing traditional "traffic analysis" (who messaged whom how often in what sequence - doesn't require that you can read the message) with things like supermarket affinity card records, gasoline purchases, general credit card records, etc to look for patterns that they think indicate suspicious activity. Try going to a different city and not buying your favorite foods - as carefully guarded as you are on the phone you will sooner or later slip up and buy European tooth powder rather than US-style toothpaste. Combine that with traffic analysis, gasoline and airline purchases, and boom! You have a lot of false positives (but they don't care about that).

sPh

but that's going to require one hell of an algorithm. It reminds me of a company I once worked for that spent millions on a project to enable it to customize its website according to the specific attributes of every individual visitor as divined by the way each toured the site. Needless to say, they were never able to pull it off.