Their moral compass may not be in line with the rest of the country. Some people when afforded the power to eavesdrop on anyone can and will focus on what they percieve to be existential threats. Existential is the key word. When Hoover focused on Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, he viewed them as existential threats to the United States. We today viewed that as extremely misguided, but at the time he and many others in power agreed that we should monitor and debase those "existential threads". The industrial food lobby considers animal rights activists existential threats. The administration views journalists as existential threats to their ability to defend against existential threats. Defense spending proponents think people that are anti-defense spending to be existential threats. The fact that the NSA is heavily Mormon, means that many people in the NSA may hold the same opinions about existential threats as the Mormon church. Many fundamentalist churchgoing folk consider gay marriage to be an existential threat. It is precisely because every individual has different views on what are and are not existential threats to the United States that we created a Bill of Rights that protect against the prosecution of existential threats that are merely the opinion of one individual and not the collectively opinion of the citizens of the United States.

The entire system of checks and balances was created because of this distrust of the "moral compass" of any single individual or signle in-group. When an individual or in-group can unilaterally monitor the communications of other individuals or in-groups with out due process, it all starts to fall apart.

There should be no secret court. There should be due process. There should be court appointed warrants not rubber stamps. This is all more important than what any one individual thinks is necessary for them to do what they think is their job. Their job isn't to catch terrorists. Their job is to catch terrorists without violating that principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. If they are doing the former at the cost of the latter they are failing at their job.