Big Brother

It astounds me that there are people out there that don't really care about this. I mean what could go wrong....wake up.......
For over a year, EFF has been fighting the government in federal court to force the public release of an 86-page opinion of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Issued in October 2011, the secret court's opinion found that surveillance conducted by the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act was unconstitutional and violated "the spirit of" federal law.
.....What does make it past the redaction details repeated wrongdoing that even the FISA Court, long perceived to be the NSA's rubber stamp, found egregious.....A footnote on page 16 points out that the agency had "substantially misrepresented" the extent of its "major collection program" (including the harvesting of "internet transactions") for the third time in less than three years. The same set of footnotes attacks the so-called "big business records" collection, accusing the agency of using a "flawed depiction" of how it used the data to basically fleece the FISA court since the program's inception in 2006.

Then there's this pair of concluding sentences, which severely undercut anyone's arguments that the FISA Court is a reliable form of oversight.
Contrary to the government's repeated assurances, NSA has been repeatedly running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been "so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall… regime has never functioned effectively."
..... This opinion appears to detail the NSA setting up its own complicit court system, intentionally misleading it in order to continue its surveillance programs unabated......The leaks keep coming and keep pointing to the same conclusion: the NSA has acted as a law unto itself.