Skiwillgee you have taken a real situation, a current event and placed it outside of its context and manifested a totally fictional construct and said…this is the way I wish it was. No, I’ll not cry foul for I too wish it wasn’t happening but that of course would be wishful thinking. It seems to me the letting sleeping dogs lie is exactly what got us into this situation to begin with. For if congress, the sleeping dog, had been doing its job of being watchful of its citizenry’s constitutional rights maybe we would still have them.

Funny that you mention the Forefathers for every time I broach this subject of the NSA I’m instantly reminded of two of Ben Franklyn’s famous quotes;

“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

And;

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Whereas there was a time the subject would have normally meant and may have stood for a sense of national security now terms such as Orwellian, Big brother, secret court, Surveillance State, privacy, intrusion, authoritarian, paranoia, fascism, Stasi, shadow court just to mention a few come to mind. Being a survivor of 9/11 having personally witnessed and having lost family and colleagues in that tragedy we should have been more vigilant not only of the enemy without but also the powers that control our nation. It’s not like we didn’t know they were doing all these secretive things especially with the introduction of the Patriot Act which was proposed, enacted and signed 45 days after the tragedy which naively made it seem like they would be collecting information only from those suspected of terrorism. I was one that supported it as long as there was sufficient oversight I kept saying. Well oversight be damned we’ve let the fox guard the chicken coup and now some of the chickens are gone. But as of 2008 it turns out we are all suspects in the eyes of the government instituted by the people and for the people. And not only are Americans suspect but also our friends and allies around the world as well.

The Patriot Act has come back to bite us on the ars. Instead of providing oversight congress all of sudden seems to be shocked and surprised by the revelations of the Edward Snowden leaks and they’re all scurrying around climbing on their little ponies to make hast corralling the monster that has gotten too big and out of hand. It has come to the point where one of the original authors of the Patriot Act Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) has come out against administration claims that the Patriot Act gives them the right to sift through the details of the private lives of its citizens saying “I do not believe the released FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act,” Sensenbrenner wrote. “How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?”…“The USA Patriot Act section the NSA and FBI cite to justify mass phone surveillance is meant to allow seizures of information directly related to national security probes, not the routine collection of phone records of millions of Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing,” he said referring to Patriot Act section 215 he authored back in 2001 saying further; “And unless national-security officials rein in the scope of their surveillance of Americans' phone records, "There are not the votes in the House of Representatives" to renew the section when it expires, he said in a heated confrontation during the hearing. “No Section 215, no surveillance authority,”

Section 215 - the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act that allows the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to authorize broad warrants for most any type of records, including those held by banks, doctors and phone companies. Lawmakers have repeatedly voted to prevent the act from expiring. The government only needs to show that the information is “relevant” to an authorized investigation. No connection to a terrorist or spy is required.

Well mister Sensenbrenner it happened while you and the rest of congress were asleep at the helm back in 2008 whether deliberate or otherwise when the FAA signed off on mass communication gathering to the NSA via FISA. If I may quote Glenn Greenwald who puts it more concisely than I can;

“…the original Fisa law was enacted in 1978, its primary purpose was to ensure that the US government would be barred from ever monitoring the electronic communications of Americans without first obtaining an individualized warrant from the Fisa court, which required evidence showing "probable cause" that the person to be surveilled was an agent of a foreign power or terrorist organization.

That was the law which George Bush, in late 2001, violated, when he secretly authorized eavesdropping on the international calls of Americans without any warrants from that court. Rather than act to punish Bush for those actions, the Congress, on a bipartisan basis in 2008, enacted a new, highly diluted Fisa law – the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) – that legalized much of the Bush warrantless NSA program.

Under the FAA, which was just renewed last December for another five years, no warrants are needed for the NSA to eavesdrop on a wide array of calls, emails and online chats involving US citizens. Individualized warrants are required only when the target of the surveillance is a US person or the call is entirely domestic. But even under the law, no individualized warrant is needed to listen in on the calls or read the emails of Americans when they communicate with a foreign national whom the NSA has targeted for surveillance.

As a result, under the FAA, the NSA frequently eavesdrops on Americans' calls and reads their emails without any individualized warrants – exactly that which NSA defenders, including Obama, are trying to make Americans believe does not take place.”

Now this is in sharp contrast to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper statement “no, sir, Not wittingly” when asked by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

And what or who exactly is this secretive Supreme Court parallel shadow court called FISA that the Wall Street Journal says redefined “Relevant” to empower the NSA to mass data-gather? FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) is comprised of 11 judges nominated by the incumbent President who serve staggered seven year terms taking turns traveling to Washington for a week to handle business and are assigned by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Today that would be Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. a republican and there seems to be some bias since 10 of the judges assigned are also republican. Which in and by itself shouldn’t be a problem insomuch as they are not biased when it comes to applying the law…ah, yeah right. But their responsibility has somewhat expanded from simply approving warrants to interpreting  surveillance laws which are coming more into play in our lives as our communications technologies expand and are making administrative policy all behind closed doors and in secret. Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times; “In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”

This fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”In 2012 FISA heard nearly 1,800 applications from the U.S. government and not one was denied. In fact in its 33 year history FISA has only rejected 11 of 34,000 requests. Unlike the Supreme Court FISA only listens to one side, the government’s side and therefore does not have adversarial recourse and no checks and balances and did I mention it’s all secret away from public scrutiny.

Consider this case; the ACLU is seeking an injunction to stop Verizon Business Network Services, of which the ACLU is a customer, from handing over its phone records. Such collection of records allowed the government to learn sensitive and privileged information about the ACLU's work. Not that I’m a big fan of the ACLU but they do have their moments. This also includes ournalists looking to protect a source or people seeking online help for personal health matters and many others who have a need for privacy.

Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel at the ACLU Washington legislative office said “This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress," Richardson said. "Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability.”

"The Patriot Act’s incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it,". The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement. "The Patriot Act provision requires the FBI to notify Congress about the number of such warrants, but this single order covering millions of people is a deceptive end-run around that disclosure requirement."

I think it’s time to kick that sleeping dog awake.