The 4th Amendment of The U.S. Constitution

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

that's what it says.

the original 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
never fit within the confines of the Fourth Amendment.
after J.Edgar Hoover, and Watergate;
after the Church Commission, and
Seymour Hersh's New York Times' articles such as
HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U. S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES,
OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS,
we noticed we'd had NO oversight of any of our intelligence surveillance activities nor any of our clandestine agencies.

FISA was going to make it all better.

How Star Chamber can you get:
a secret court for warrants from the feds?
this was one of the larger winks at the Constitution.
well, post-Nixon/pre-cheneyBu$hco, anyway.
FISA has always been Constitutional Fiction.
The PATRIOT Act made an already unacceptable state of affairs
much worse.

Then cheneyBu$hco got caught in violation of even the
constitutional laxity of own rewritten update to FISA.
(as amazing as that still seems to be)

What in the hell have they been up to that they failed to find enough fellow travelers to let them continue to get away with it?

we have seen that some Republicans still cling to the Rule of Law
and eschew violating the Constitution: Judge Reggie Walton; James Comey; Bruce Fein; Patrick Fitzgerald; even John Ashcroft, soort; among others untold.
And, at least one of the FISA court judges.

we may not unreasonably believe that what we call "data mining" is what the hell they have been up to.

ben franklin said "A republic, if you can keep it!"