here has never been effective oversight of the NSA‘s bulk collections programs, or indeed, intelligence agencies in general. There‘s been a lot of noise made about this vaunted oversight in defense of programs revealed by leaked documents, but this is nothing more than a talking point.

The NSA (along with the CIA) has no interest in real oversight or accountability, not even to the final arbiter of its domestic surveillance, the FISA court. Judge Walton threatened to end the Section 215 collection back in 2008 after uncovering widespread abuse of the collections and the NSA‘s constant misrepresentation of how it was handling the data it collected.