"WELNA: It could indeed. Hackers, by definition, are trying to break into other people's computer accounts and steal their information, so monitoring their activity means watching them poach on other people's Internet usage and private data. I talked with Jonathan Mayer, a computer security fellow at Stanford who's reviewed these latest Snowden documents. He says because of the way the surveillance law is written, the NSA can actually hang on to that hacked information.
JONATHAN MAYER: Even though Americans may in fact have been the victims of the online crime, their information nevertheless becomes eligible for the U.S. government to take advantage of it. It may seem like an odd legal result. The government's view is that that victim information is incidentally collected and therefore can be used for intelligence."