The US Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978 as a check on executive authority. Recent disclosures about vast data-gathering by the government have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the court’s actions.
This secret court overseeing the government's surveillance program has given the National Security Agency authority to continue collecting metadata in bulk from telephone records, which has been in place for years, must be renewed every three months. According to the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which said authorization was renewed two weeks ago.
According to a recent survey by the industry organization Cloud Security Alliance, the exposure of NSA collecting metadata is having a real impact on the US cloud service providers in the form of lost overseas customers. Several Swedish municipalities use Microsoft and Google today but is reevaluating another services that comply with EU laws.
Also Al Gore said that the NSA's collection of US citizens' phone records was "not really the American way".
Interesting is that the NSA with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn't have the technology.
Anyway here is the list of Congressmen who voted for & against the amendment to stop NSA collecting metadata: