I have a modest proposal.

All FISA court decisions are published, with identifiers (names, IP addresses, country names, etc) redacted, after 10 years. After 30 years, unredacted copies are published.

This lets us know the scope of the spying. This allows for public feedback to let the FISA court know what people do. This lets everyone - including our intelligence services - understand that there are real consequences to spying on allies, and we shouldn't do it when they don't want it.

For those who complain that this limits what we can do because revealing our programs will upset allies, I would point out that history shows that programs tend to get revealed anyways. Therefore we should assume that people will eventually find out what we are doing, and not do things that are objectionable. Having an explicit timetable keeps our secret agencies from continuing to repeat this elementary mistake.

I like the idea (though I might limit disclosures of spying on a country $FOO to countries with a bilateral agreement not to spy back or to be similarly transparent).

I don't think it addresses the concern of capturing haystacks before we know which needles to look for but it would certainly help with transparency. Even more importantly, it ingrains in the mind of the analysts actually using these systems within the intelligence agencies, and the FISC itself, that there is that concern for eventual public disclosure. Therefore, they should be inherently suspicious of anyone trying to avoid adding a given FISA warrant to the public disclosure list, or otherwise trying to interfere with public disclosure (such as by going around FISA).

And as I've mentioned before it would be even better if this kind of thing were built-in to the systems themselves so that an analyst or their supervisor couldn't choose to 'forget' to do it.

I agree that this discussion needs to remain at the forefront of our collective thoughts and discussions.

We have an awful tendency to forget these things, and as the old saying goes:

He who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.

Is their issue with spying only about how much oversight there is, and not with the US government having full and complete access to the underwater Internet cables like some kind of totalitarian government?

As long as they can still do that, you still can't trust anything they say or any of their "policies". Also what will happen with the Utah data center now? Will it be turned into a dairy? Or will the NSA be free to use it just as originally intended?

I believe governments need to go back to what they were always supposed to do - investigate specific targets, without having access to everyone's data in order to do that.

Also there should be no ties between the NSA and FBI. None whatsoever. If there's an urgent national threat, the NSA should report to the president, and then the president can contact the FBI about it, allow them to collaborate in some way. But that's it. The policy/law should be very clear about the circumstances in which they are allowed to do that.

Otherwise, I fear in many cases the info NSA is getting is later used by the FBI as "probable cause", to later get (constitutionally legal) warrants to investigate someone - when it was just a fishing expedition all along.

Agreed. Considering the NSA stores the contents of all our electronic communications (including phone calls), they have a massive pool to fish in. What will they fish for next?

Edit: You know who's in that pool, alongside us? Senators. Congressmen. Police. Other spy agencies.

Exactly. Most people forget this. It's not the risk present for you or I that worries me. It's that the powers that be can use this information to subvert justice and/or the political process without anyone(other than those affected) ever knowing about it. It's already happened in the past(recent tea party tax scandals, watergate, etc...)

And journalists and political activists.

And millions of us foreigners with absolutely no vote on anything.