Most people would agree that having some military intelligence analyst in a room somewhere possibly read some of your personal emails is a small price to pay compared to the possible loss of life that could occur in a genuine terrorist attack. After all, if you have nothing to hide it will end at that.

For now the invasion of privacy is the only real threat to our civil liberties, at least for most people. You are still free to say whatever you want, you are still free to bear arms, and own property that is rightfully yours.

Warrantless foreign intelligence collection has been an established practice of the Executive Branch for decades. The Supreme Court has noted that warrantless electronic surveillance "has been sanctioned more or less continuously by various Presidents and Attorneys General since July 1946. Warrantless electronic surveillance has been used by the Executive to collect intelligence information since at least the mid-1800s" .

In the December 2000 criminal prosecution of Osama Bin Laden for the first World Trade Center attack, the Court found that the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement did not apply to searches conducted on foreign nationals overseas - indeed, there was no mechanism for a judge in Manhattan to order a search or interception in Nairobi. But that is overseas. So if the wiretaps were done by the U.S. government against foreign targets overseas, everything would have been ok. But the revelations were that the government was targeting U.S. persons for intercepts based upon some "connection" to some overseas person.