It's possible to lie without directly lying here:

- "Verizon intercepts the calls, we only collect them"

- "Verison only gives us call meta data (who called whom? when? how long?)."

- "We don't intercept the emails, Google just gives us all of the emails sitting on their servers."

... etc

"we don't - our contractors do"

"we don't - our interception devices do"

:(

"It seems pretty clear that the NSA engages in bulk collection of databases which _might_ someday contain something interesting, and only considers it "interception" when they query their own DBs."

Interesting. Along those lines then if you were to make a clone of someone's hard drive but you actually didn't boot or access any of the information on the hard drive I wonder what law that may or may not break? You seem to be guilty of cloning a hard drive which may not be the same as stealing anything in particular that is covered by the way a law is written.

Isn't the specific terminology used very important to help differentiate exactly what type of surveillance is being done?

Language matters.