From Washington Post article: "A month after the FISA court learned of the program in 2011 and ruled it unconstitutional, the NSA revised its collection procedures to segregate the transactions most likely to contain the communications of Americans. In 2012, the agency also purged the domestic communications that it had collected." (Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-ga...)

That said, I really don't see how there could be an argument of an effective oversight, if what you are overseeing is so secret that you have no independent information on the subject matter. The secret organization (NSA in this case) is strongly incentivized to not disclose the entire truth or withhold key limitations in order to achieve its' objectives. If there is no way to independently verify that what is being said/committed to is actually functioning, court pretty much has to trust NSA to self-police. Everything here is being done on the NSA's terms and not the Courts or Congress's.

Even the Courts are saying the can't oversee this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/court-ability-to-poli...

this needs to be stopped!

It is also my understanding that the ruling was sealed as top secret by executive order, please someone confirm this. By doing so they proved/showed a ridiculous loophole in the system, that the court is a total puppet. It can declare verdicts, but the verdicts can be silenced by executive order, disappearing them.

Executive orders of secrecy can and will make everyone guilty of espionage at some point. 2 + 2 == 4 is now declared "TOP SECRET" to reveal it is an act against the US.

Antonin Scalia, dissenting in part stated:

"The document's failure to adequately specify binary operator precedence and associativity was a deliberate choice on the part of the author(s) and the court should hold the value of "2" [2 + (2==4)]as TOP SECRET as well. The failure to do so sets a dangerous precedent of strict adherence to ANSI C operator precedence regardless of context"

The court found a particular surveillance program with a particular set of minimization procedures unconstitutional (see discussion starting on page 49). It did not find "NSA surveillance unconstitutional."

The court's concern centers around purely domestic communications and the failure of the NSA's minimization procedures to exclude it from the collections.

i was wondering the same thing.