Since some of us were grappling with this story last night, here’s a decent article dumbing it down for us “normal” folks….
Did the NSA really help spy on U.S. lawyers?

Based on these facts, it seems to me that the story here isn’t ‘NSA helped spy on U.S. lawyers.’ Rather, the story here is more like ‘Australian government obtained legal guidance from NSA General Counsel’s Office on what to do when Australian monitoring of a foreign government includes attorney/client communications between the government and its U.S law firm.’ Of course, that’s not as shocking a story. And presumably it’s not something that lands on the front page of the Sunday Times. But it’s a more accurate reflection of the facts, at least based on the facts found in the story.
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This raises a broader problem with some of the reports based on the Snowden documents. With some reports, the documents largely speak for themselves. Opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can tell you a lot just from reading them. But in other cases, the documents leave a lot of open questions. That seems to be the case here. As I understand it, the Times story is based on a short entry in an NSA internal bulletin celebrating the liaison office’s accomplishment. It reports that the liaison helped clear up a legal issue, and that it all ended well, as the Australians ended up giving useful intel to the U.S. But because it’s just an internal bulletin, it doesn’t tell us what we want to know: What advice was provided, and whether the intel was related to the legal issue. Without that information, it’s hard to know if there’s a significant story here.