Re: What difference does it make?
They don't need loopholes. There's no one to catch them spying, and no one to impose penalties if they were caught.
Intelligence agencies don't give up sources - legal or not, ethical or not - unless and until they decide their resources are better spent elsewhere. With the possible rare exceptions of the Henry Stimsons of the world, those nominally in charge of those agencies are perfectly happy with that; and even if they weren't, what would they do to stop their underlings? If Rand Paul, or you or I, were in charge of the NSA, he couldn't police everything every employee does.
COINTELPRO didn't need any S. 215. (Or the secret FISA court - which of course was ostensibly created to curb abusive domestic spying, not serve as a rubber-stamping Star Chamber. But then so was the actual Star Chamber. Huh!)
It's good to revoke abominations like the PATRIOT Act, so that the law is at least an image of a civil society we can aspire to, and gross affronts to civil liberties aren't enshrined in it. And legal obstacles to spying at least provide some impediment to wholesale, casual abuse. But "ending" it? Do what you will with the barn door, that horse ain't never coming back.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
