I definitely agree with Wyden's proposal -- that there be more transparency in this process, even if it's heavily redacted. Even he and his colleagues recognized and respected the need for keeping at least some amount of secrecy with cases like these, where they can't be brought to a regular (read: public) court. I found his suggestions to be sane and level-headed, and I think that if it hadn't been left to the last minute they'd have had a much better chance.

What I do not find sane is articles like this that declare that there aren't warrants involved, that there isn't probable cause. I think that that's misleading and sensationalist.

The similarity he's trying to invoke is between the probable cause requirement of a criminal warrant and the lack of any targeting whatsoever in a general warrant. It's obviously true that a FISA warrant is less targeted than a domestic criminal warrant. But FISA warrants also also much less intrusive than a criminal warrant, and, like airport searches (which are entirely warrantless and nonetheless constitutional under administrative search), serve a safety goal instead of a criminal evidence collection purpose.

FISA warrants also are targeted, unlike general warrants. The FISA court exists to verify that actual investigations are being served by the warrants. It's not hard to see why FISA warrants are rarely rejected: the government is not actually in the habit of randomly surveilling people outside of actual investigations.

Heading a series of unproductive responses off at the pass: seeing the logic of the "yea" votes in the Senate on this issue does not mean that I agree with them.

Now, this gets complicated if you have communication between two non US persons transiting a system in the US. Under the old FISA law there was no provision for handling this case, and there was a very credible legal argument that unrestricted collection of such communication was entirely fine under existing laws and presidential directives. So, after 9/11 the Bush administration decided to use that argument to compel various US telecom providers to grant access to these non US communications. (They did other stuff too, but that's the big one that the FISA law changed.)

People legitimately got freaked out at various things when the FISA situation went broadly public. And it really is a bad idea for the government to be able to press companies into providing foreign intelligence collection capability with no oversight. However, the intelligence community had actually been complaining about exactly this situation for decades earlier, because their conservative approach (prior to 9/11) had been to push everything through the FISA courts (which issued an order intended for targeting US persons). So, members of congress already had a bill mostly written to reform FISA for this case of non US person communications transiting US systems. That's the basis of the current FISA law.

So, that's where this whole warrant-less wiretapping thing comes from. The executive branch can now authorize collection for up to one year if various criteria and oversight are met, including a reasonable expectation that the collection will not contain any communications between US persons. And that authorization has the power of a warrant in that it can be used to compel service providers and telecoms to comply. As always, if all parties are non US persons and the systems used are outside the US then FISA doesn't apply at all, and the targets are simply fair game.