> And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary.
Congress did, in fact, pass the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 "to the contrary", expressly prohibiting (and criminalizing) many of the types of searches (both physical and electronic) for the stated purposes of "National Security" that had been done prior to the Act.
Of course, the executive was successful in getting Congress to remove many of the restrictions in FISA in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, including retroactive immunity for private firms that had cooperated in the executive's violations of FISA, but then, if the scope of the surveillance in violation of FISA was as broad as current surveillance appears to be, it may well have been the source of the leverage to get the change through Congress.
