“Though most Americans have little idea what it does, the FISA court is extremely influential. Thanks to a leak by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, we now know that it was the FISA court that decided, in a secret opinion, that the telephone records of millions of Americans could be acquired and stored by the government “on an ongoing daily basis.” It is also the FISA court that has decided, in recent years, whether the NSA’s scooping up of electronic communications abroad adequately protects the privacy of Americans whose communications are “incidentally” collected. Snowden revealed that such communications are monitored on a massive basis through a program known as PRISM.”