I am not sure if they need a secret FISA court approval for these requests, but apparently no request to the court has been denied. It is very bad. What is worse, the constitutionality of these actions haven't been successfully considered in a real court, because in order to bring a case against the government, an individual needs to be able to prove that harm has been done to them. Due to the secretive nature of these programs, this barrier hasn't been successfully overcome in a case to get to court. I am almost certain that if this gets to the Supreme court, this behavior will be severely restricted, but I am not certain that it will get there. We were talking last night about implementing something like this, but I suspect that it will be worthless. They are not going to just throw up their hands and give up if you try to be clever.