Since one person alone, Chief Justice, Roberts, hand picks the FISA judges (who, by the way, are virtually all Right Wing Republicans) is it any wonder they have denied eavesdropping requests fewer times than you have fingers on one hand?

Cursory reports on 215 activity are sent to Congress every year. The last one was eight sentences.

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.

The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as "incidental collection" in surveillance parlance.

But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals' communications.

In 2012, the database was queried 300 times by an NSA analyst.

Whatever numbers survive after the NSA analyst's search are passed to the FBI for further investigation. The NSA gave the FBI 500 numbers in 2012.

The FBI investigates these numbers further within the guidelines of the law. To access private records...

If the FBI wanted to go further, such as obtaining a person's bank or credit card records, it would require a court order, warrant or subpoena and then an assessment or investigation probably would occur.