Ever since the Patriot Act was enacted, Russ Feingold had been almost single-handedly (at least among members of Congress) trying to warn of the potential for abuse of NSLs. Finally, a couple of months prior to the time the Patriot Act was to be renewed in early 2006, Feingold got some help in his crusade, when The Washington Post's Barton Gellman published a superb investigative article which detailed the FBI's increasingly frequent and broad use of NSLs, and surveyed the obvious dangers from these unchecked surveillance instruments.

It seems there are a few brand new lessons that we can perhaps draw from these revelations ... Allowing government officials to engage in surveillance on American citizens with no warrant requirement ensures that surveillance will be used for improper ends, against innocent Americans.  

"I do think that in this day and age, if you think that cameras aren't watching you, you are very naïve," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in October during a tour of London's massive surveillance-camera system. "We are under surveillance all the time. We live in a dangerous world and people want to have security cameras." Bloomberg added that everyone he had met in London was "thrilled" about the security cameras around the city.

The government has a long and storied history of abusing surveillance powers. The more powerful surveillance technology grows, the more Bill Brown gets concerned. "When consumer convenience merges with law enforcement, merges with the military-industrial complex, this is what I worry about. Not today, not tomorrow, but the day after."

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty. Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which 'keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.