"Instead, there was an entirely one-sided system in which government attorneys presented the supposed interests of the intelligence community in the most expansive way possible, and the judges of a poorly resourced court tried unsuccessfully, and sometimes halfheartedly, to imagine what ordinary citizens might say in response. Over time, and perhaps without entirely meaning to, the court developed a wholly new body of law, a body of law animated not by democratic principles but by the values of the intelligence community – collect, analyze, conceal.
The intelligence committees that were meant to serve as a further check on unwarranted government surveillance failed just as profoundly. They allowed the intelligence community to launch dragnet programs when narrower programs would have been equally effective. They allowed it to mislead the public about the scope of its surveillance activities. They allowed it to pretend that the government's surveillance technology was directed at suspected terrorists abroad when in fact it was directed at ordinary citizens."
The intelligence committees that were meant to serve as a further check on unwarranted government surveillance failed just as profoundly. They allowed the intelligence community to launch dragnet programs when narrower programs would have been equally effective. They allowed it to mislead the public about the scope of its surveillance activities. They allowed it to pretend that the government's surveillance technology was directed at suspected terrorists abroad when in fact it was directed at ordinary citizens."
