No, that's not how it works. NSA's different systems record everything (within technological capabilities). If you wait on a key word to be spoken before you start recording, you've missed it. And it's not as though the bad guys are going to say anything obvious.
"List of certain keywords or phrases" is an extremely elementary way of describing what are extremely detailed and intricate queries against all that collected data. And understand, all the pertinent data isn't necessarily the words spoken. Other criteria would include, for instance, network routing, times of day, lengths of calls, voice analysis, et cetera. It might be a certain word or name that has been spoken in certain contexts in earlier communications (another reason to record everything)...that's how keywords are developed.
That data might be combined or compared with concurrent information, such as other communications, changes in total communications of a certain type, or even non-communication data like aircraft or vehicle movements (such as the famous "above average number of pizza deliveries during graveyard shift at the Pentagon"). There are hundreds of criteria beyond keywords.
When I was involved, even back in the ancient 80s and 90s, I took what amounted to a college course in writing the "seed" queries. A seed query might be several single-spaced pages of typing. Even back then, we were experimenting with simple AI systems that would take our seed queries and extend them to areas we hadn't considered and bring back surprising results. For instance, we might write a query to locate certain terrorist activity in a suspected area, and the AI would come back with results for that same terrorist group operating in a totally different area we didn't even suspect. We'd look at the AI's rewrite our manual query and see that it had tripled in size.
There's just too much data for aimless browsing. There are billions of texts and calls every day. It's got to be weeded through by automated systems. When an analyst comes on shift, the system will have its results for the day waiting. There are certainly, however, high-priority queries that will immediately alert analysts when the pre-determined conditions were met. When some event happens, such as the Hamas attack, you (or rather, the automated system) takes that "ground truth" and goes back through all the previous recordings to make comparisons and create new "keywords" that might help track down who was who involved in the attack. Someone who was merely a low-level clerk in this attack may rise to be a leader in the next attack...that kind of thing can be tracked if you already know that clerk's name.
When Osama bin Laden was killed, I considered it a big mistake to make that immediate public announcement. That was for the political optics. The better action for intelligence purposes would have been to say nothing and see how the communications changed...who talked about it, who suddenly stopped talking, who got frantic, and who seemed to be oblivious to it.
I was also alarmed at the emails that had been leaked by Hillary Clinton's stupid private server stunt. Even if an email was itself unclassified, or if the information in that email was perishable and would be useless later, the "CC" lists of the emails revealed the identities of relatively junior members of the permanent bureaucracy and confirmed their positions in government. Years from, when those names crop up again in other communications gathered by our enemies, those names will prove the bona fides of those future communications. That's how we tracked down Osa bin Laden. This is intelligence analysis 101.
No. As I said, a query that will result in personal identification of "US persons" must be warranted by a federal judge before that query can be run. They can run queries that narrow down to just that point without a warrant. Remember, though, that tracking US persons is not the mission of the NSA. Believe it or not, there are real foreign enemies of the US out there, lots of them, that NSA is striving to track down.
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