"but the tradeoff there is that when government agencies make a good-faith effort to stay within those restrictions (as even the Snowden leaks have indicated with regard to NSA) that you wouldn't expect heads to roll even if a court later disagrees."

We must live in parallel universes, only bridged by a single message thread. Since in my universe your account of the NSA is a bizarro-world inversion of what we have here, I am pretty jealous of you getting to live there.