I find you can get a good idea of what's going on from reading between the lines of Wyden's statements. As a member of the intelligence committee he cannot directly disclose the operational details, but you can look at where he's concerned.
From the CNN article on this:
>> Another amendment at issue was from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Intelligence Committee. His amendment, which was co-sponsored by several of the most liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the chamber, would strike a new part of the program that he argued would lead every day Americans into helping the government spy if they have “access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.”
On the face of it, any cellphone or smartwatch seems to fit that definition. They could be converting everything into a listening device, recording all of it, and then making it available to intel officers only when they query for it and can argue one party is a foreign national.
So says Morgan Freeman's character Lucius Fox in 2008 in The Dark Knight[0].
The rest of the tech imagined in that scene is plausible today too, considering the density of WiFi/5G and research demonstrating the potential for its use as passive radar [1]. That paper metions a cooperative base station, but I am wondering if there is any value gained in knowing exactly what the traffic is (such as some of the intelligence community does) in modelling how the waves propagate and performing an even more passive observation.
From the CNN article on this:
>> Another amendment at issue was from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Intelligence Committee. His amendment, which was co-sponsored by several of the most liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the chamber, would strike a new part of the program that he argued would lead every day Americans into helping the government spy if they have “access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.”
On the face of it, any cellphone or smartwatch seems to fit that definition. They could be converting everything into a listening device, recording all of it, and then making it available to intel officers only when they query for it and can argue one party is a foreign national.