For those who don't know, one of obamas last endeavors in office was to allow NSA information to be shared w 16 other government agencies in the name of "National Security. " basically, agents from other agencies can peruse the NSA information as they please. Not only that, but "if analysts 'stumble' across information that an American has committed a crime it can be sent to the Justice department" (new york times, my parentheticals). Now any information obtained by these means CAN BE USED AGAINST YOU without a warrant or preceding charges...
I'm hoping some people on here can tell us intelligently if we are at increased risk now when discussing past and/or present drug use as well as dnm use. I imagine most of us don't use tor when casually redditing, so most of these usernames can likely be traced to an IP and our identities.. Do these new allowances put us at risk and what can be done to mitigate that risk? I'm legitimately strongly considering just torching this account and never writing again without using Tor.
Real talk, I used to be an intelligence analyst for the NSA while I served in the air force. I was military but worked side by side with NSA employees. I also did some work with the CIA and had their caveot clearance (HCS, I only got it for working a special mission project jointly operated by the Air Force, CIA, and NSA)
I did drugs and even sold pounds of herb before I joined, but lied about it other than smoking weed twice and never had to do a lifestyle polygraph. Now that I'm an honorable discharged veteran, and have been for several years I've been using DNMs since SR 1.
I can tell you from an insider perspective that these agencies HATE sharing information with each other. I worked on separate project where the creator of our software told us in a briefing that if the CIA calls asking about it tell them you don't know anything and give them his number. This is because it's somewhat of a personal achievement. They don't wanna share data because they worked hard for it and use it for our purposes not theirs!
With these new laws agencies might have reciprocity, but I can assure you there is no database the DEA can just log into. The NSA has their own intranet called NSANET. The collaboration isn't gonna start cause he signed a piece of paper. There will have to be radical changes to how information is compartmentalized. Read up on how clearances work and you'll see there isn't as much sharing as you think.
Edit: as u/drewlaflare said, it's almost 100% focusing on counter terror. But even then the sharing will be minimal. At the end of the day some sap that's doing the job I used to makes those calls. And I considered myself to be one of the top analysts they had. But a lot of them are there because they have to be. They aren't tech savvy, they barely passed their certification, they just wanna get off work and go get drunk.
Edit 2: I did SIGINT against other countries. I never did any collection of American stuff. Although it does happen my job was not associated with that. Most of what the NSA does (I'd estimate 90%) is focusing on other "threat" countries. Threat countries aren't as much if threats of what the average person thinks either. Some of my adversaries were more ally than foe.