You have a Congress conducting oversight which routinely usurps powers not enumerated to it by the Constitution during the course of its day to day business - and we are counting on them to determine if a line of Constitutionality has been crossed by the demands of the executive for petabytes of private-source data on American citizens?
You have a rubber-stamp FISA court which does not reject any government requests.
And you have an administration which is demanding information on Americans under the guise of fighting terrorism when they claim the war against Islamic terrorism is on the wane whilst there is a rising thread of Tea Party terrorism?
And the entire process is cloaked in secrecy, which means the public only finds out from whistleblowers that are made examples of to discourage others from coming forward.
There is the illusion of Constitutional oversight here. But in reality it means nothing. And that is the core problem here. And not only in this matter, but across the entire federal government.
I don’t disagree with what you wrote. However, we (America) are responsible because we elected our representatives who approved of this.
This has always been my biggest heartburn with the War on Terror. This was my biggest heartburn with Bush. “Homeland Security” and the Patriot Act upset me from the beginning and many of us (yourself included obviously) saw the potential for the inevitable pendulum to swing too far in violation of the constitution.
The legality issue has been covered by a complicit congress and FISA court that is willing to sacrifice our constitutional rights for the illusion of security.
It was a problem then. It is a problem now. It will continue to be a problem. However, you won’t see anyone outside of potentially the leaker who is prosecuted for it because they most likely followed the law.
Doom on our nation for not recognizing this in 2001/2002/2003 when this structure was put in place. Doom on our nation for not passing stronger privacy laws for electronic media.
Interestingly, the courts have been pretty solid on protecting our rights against unreasonable search and seizure outside of the FISA court and the WOT. This will be an interesting debate moving forward and I have to go to work. FRegards.