The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review apply the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended; the USA PATRIOT Act is, AFAIK, largely irrelevant to them.

Their decisions, including the legal reasoning and analysis, are largely themselves classified, and are (like most warrant application procedures) non-assertive, which presents a significant problem of transparency. (Regular warrant application processes, insofar as they support what eventually turns into criminal prosecutions, at least are aimed at feeding into adversarial proceedings which can reject their results, which mitigates the problems stemming from non-adversarial proceedings.)

And the process of creating said legislation out of public view in the first place, and the courts which oversaw challenges to the constitutionality of the US surveillance state who deemed it acceptable. Much like the doctors, lawyers, and others who oversaw approval of US torture programs, they're all reprehensible.

From 1979 to 2013, the FISA courts have denied 12 warrants [1]. That a FISA court actually denied the initial surveillance on Trump Tower, and Obama's DOJ then pushed it through, should be an enormous red flag to people.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

My confusion is regarding the "entire US population" claim because I have never heard anything like this. I could have missed it and would like to know if that is the case. The closest thing I remember is the metadata issue specifically with identifiers related to Verizon account holders. My understanding is that the rules were tightened with regards to US citizen metadata as a result of this disclosure from Snowden, which is probably the best possible outcome (Short of it not happening in the first place).

Again, if I am off base and there was additional approval for any sort of surveillance on the data of the entire USA, I am very interested in learning more.