The National Security Agency’s Prism program, which monitors...

that we have in place are protective enough of privacy,” he said during a Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee event Friday. But “if people don’t trust these services they are not going to use them,” said Davidson, now a visiting scholar at MIT’s technology and policy program. Davidson said “the low hanging fruit for Congress is more transparency about the number of the orders.” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Congress should amend Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which permits the government to get court orders to collect “tangible things” when the FBI certifies they're relevant to a government investigation. “We are of course very disappointed that these tools are being used for surveillance on everyday Americans,” she said. Judicial oversight of the programs is not adequate, said Richardson: “This is an area of law that has not been litigated in pubic courts. We really don’t know what they are doing.” This month the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the government that alleged the NSA program violates the First Amendment rights of free speech and association as well as the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment. The scale of the government’s surveillance of millions of Americans “makes any meaningful oversight more of a chimera,” said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute.