on public accountability and judicial oversight. Importantly, a majority of the surveillance changes were already part of a long wish list from law enforcement that had previously been rejected by Congress. The Patriot Act ushered in what intelligence agencies called “the golden age of surveillance,” as the surveillance state secretly expanded, often without oversight from lawmakers or the courts . in September 2019 he’d be running for Senate against Senator Ed Markey instead. “Torture is wrong, indefinite detention is wrong, assassination is wrong,” states Greenberg. “And yet nobody has been held accountable. We ask ourselves how we got to where we are today and it’s like, ‘Hello!’” Not a single high-ranking official from the Bush or Obama administration, the DOJ, the DOD, or the CIAhas been held responsible “This sends a troubling message to the American public — not to mention the world,” said Wertheim. “On the one hand, we’re in an open-ended war across a wide arch of the world; and on the other hand, we don’t have enough control of ourselves to keep track of what we’re doing and provide oversight and legal authorization for those actions.”