I agree with you in that a key difference would be if people were held accountable for illegal acts.
If you think the law makes it a police state, then argue about the law, but RyanZAG was suggesting that some evidence of a police state is that laws meant to restrain the government are not being enforced.
The people who argue this is constitutional have really only addressed the "on it's face"/prima facie sort of constitutionality.
Whereas, "as applied" is both harder to defend and attack because we know so little.
You can now break the law without even knowing it.
For starters, the law creating FISA isn't something that one can "break", necessarily. The only ones who can run afoul of it are agencies like the NSA, not the populace at large.
More importantly though, the public law carves out a niche that they allow the NSA to operate under, with the proviso that the NSA get the activities pre-approved and overseen by the FISA Court, and with reports routinely made to Congress. The FISA Court verifies that the NSA's proposed activities fall within the scope of the FISA (as amendmended) and with normal case law.
For the approved programs (even the secret ones) they are approved because of the fact that they fall within the area laid out by public law (in the opinion of the FISA Court of course, but that issue underlies all of law).
Even in unclassified jurisprudence there are lots of examples of closed-door court sessions, gag orders, etc.
Now I agree that there are problems with the way the FISA Court is staffed and composed, but those problems don't derive from the closed-door nature as much as from the fact that a single person is able to stack that Court as he/she wishes.
What amazes me is that Clapper can baldly lie to Congress and not even have to resign, let alone be prosecuted. Lying to Congress is a federal crime! Yet the government spends $40 million prosecuting Roger Clemens for lying to Congress about steroids, and they couldn't even get a conviction.
Also, Clapper has been wrong about many things, including Libya and Egypt. I believe the US government wants total spying because their intelligence agencies are so incompetent at identifying threats. 9/11 proves this as the CIA had identified two of the hijackers as Al Qaeda members, determined they had US visas and then did not tell the FBI or State Department. The NSA had phone transcriptions of terrorists and refused to share them with the FBI. The FBI actually started building listening stations in Africa and the east at great expense due to NSA intransigence.
Before 9/11, they were very vigilant about respecting laws on intelligence gathering. After 9/11 it all went out the window, laws were broadened and oversight has been strangled.
And a violation on such scale...
That's not to say each and every instance of these programs has always been scrupulously constitutional, but we never expect our government to get it right 100% of the time. That's why the FISA court exists. You may wish its oversight were stronger or its opinions always public, but again, nothing about how it operates is obviously unconstitutional. Certainly not as self-evidently as some people around here seem to assume.
Instead, their intentions clearly were in the other direction.