Also late last week, the National Security Agency — the federal government's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying agency — announced that it would voluntarily hold back on its more aggressive uses of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That section permits the NSA to capture communications between foreigners and Americans without a warrant from any court, even though the NSA has its own secret court that has granted well over 99 percent of applications for spying brought to it.

Yet the NSA has convinced the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that when it captures the communications of a foreigner and an American and those communications refer to a third person who is an American, Section 702 extends the authority for warrantless spying to that third person, as well.