“For years the Bush administration had insisted there had been no abuses and that critics, like myself and the ACLU, were wrong. It mostly stopped doing that once the inspector general’s report on abuses related to national security letters came out [issued 3/19/2007]. Those abuses proved our point- the need for better checks on the executive branch discretion and particularly judicial oversight. We subsequently proposed significant changes to the NSL [National Security Letters] authority in the SAFE Act [New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013] and other bills that were never enacted despite the documented abuses. And as to the use of “sneak and peek” searches? The authority was used thousands of times post- Patriot Act. Were those abuses? It’s hard to know given the classified or confidential nature of so much of this activity.”
– Russ Feingold, While America Sleeps, Page 166