Like the Church Committee "review" of Government "shadowy" overreach, way back in the 70's.
It was the Congress' push-back after the "exceptional" fallout of Watergate.
The Church Committee Hearings & the FISA Court
A closer look at the famous post-Watergate investigation into domestic spying abuses and how it led to a secret court to authorize surveillance requests.
by Katelyn Epsley-Jones and Christina Frenzel, Frontline, pbs.org -- May 15, 2007
The 1975-76 Church Committee congressional hearings probed widespread intelligence abuses by the FBI, CIA, IRS and NSA. Headed by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the committee exposed how under the guise of national security agencies spied on American citizens for political purposes during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations.
While the hearings focused on the FBI and CIA, they also catapulted the National Security Agency (NSA) from the shadows of the intelligence underworld to the national stage. The hearings revealed how the NSA set up secret projects code-named "Shamrock" and "Minaret" to collect international and domestic communications. In Project Shamrock, the major communication companies of the day -- Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications -- provided the NSA access to their international message traffic, from which the NSA extracted telegrams containing the names provided to them by the FBI, CIA and other sources. Church said the three-decade long program "certainly appears to violate section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934 as well as the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution."
[...]
The committee also discovered abuses in Project Minaret, a sister program to Project Shamrock. In Project Minaret, the NSA added Vietnam War protestors to its watch list at the request of the U.S. Army, which was concerned about the heavily attended 1967 "March on the Pentagon" protest. The list scooped up notable protesters including actress Jane Fonda, singer Joan Baez and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Then-NSA Deputy Director Benson Buffham stated, "It appeared to us that we were going to be requested to do far more than we had done before."
[...]
Congress responded to the committee's findings by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which created the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to issue warrants for domestic eavesdropping. In recognition of national security imperatives, Congress allowed the proceedings of the FISA court to be kept secret. Seven judges, from different regions of the country, are appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court for seven-year terms.
[...]
Hmmmm, I wonder how those 'corrective & secretive measures' have been working out lately?
Frontline goes on to discuss the problems with FISA. And its Secret Court. That can be easily by-passed ... ask G.W.
You know what they say:
"Those who don't learn from History ..."
The Sheep Stop Here: Another Church Committee or Full Review of Privacy Laws Needed?
by Jody Westby, Contributor, Forbes.com -- Sep 20, 2012
During the early 1970s, the infamous Church Committee investigated abuses of power by the CIA and FBI, including their spying on U.S. citizens for political purposes and intercepting, opening, and photographing more than 215,000 pieces of mail. Mark Benjamin, in a 2007 Salon article reported that, “CIA agents moved mail to a private room to do the dirty work or in some cases opened envelopes at night after stuffing them in briefcases or even coat pockets to deceive postal officials.”
After 9/11, some blamed the U.S.’s lack of human intelligence capabilities to counter terrorist activities on the reforms enacted following the Church Committee’s reports. Perhaps, but over-correction is often the outcome in Washington. Congress may have gone too far in reining in intelligence activities, but the abuses of power detailed in the fourteen Church Committee reports were chilling. The reports gave the American public its first in-depth look at U.S. intelligence gathering activities through more than 50,000 unclassified pages. It offered the lesson that power exercised in secrecy is bound to be abused.
Now, nearly 40 years later, it may be time for another Congressional Committee’s review of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence activities against the limits of the rule of law. At a bare minimum, when the 113th Congress convenes in January, 2013, it needs to conduct a full review of privacy laws and protections for civil liberties against the government collection of and access to communications data.
[...]
"Those who don't learn from History ... are destined to repeat it."
Except for when it comes to thorough Investigations to check the abuses of unaccountable officials, it seems.
They just don't make Investigations like that anymore, do we?
-- Church Committee Reports
-- Rockefeller Commission Report (the immediate predecessor to the Church Report)
It must be for the lack of those exquisite 70's font-types. What else can it be?
Or maybe it's because no one reads these dang reports, anyways. Do They?
"What's the use?" Our Congress must continually ask itself ...