Would be to fortify the protections, the Privacy Protections for americans in the law but the law has evolved and exactly the opposite direction and indeed since 9 11 there has been a sea change in the law. If you back up a few decades following the church committees revelations in 1970s there was a series of laws and policies put in place that establish a kind of golden rule. Intelligence agencies could not collect information on americans from within the United States without some individualized factbased suspicion of wrongdoing. Now the purpose and the effect of this rule was to constrain the abuses that had come before it. In the past 14 years a cardinal principle has been utterly jettisoned from the law. So lets talk about the three legal authorities that we know of under which mass surveillance is currently occurring. The first is section 215 of the patriot act. This is the provision that allows the government to get a fisa court order Compelling Companies to turn over Business R