And who approves surveillance orders?
If the FISA court is willing to approve surveillance this broad, it's hard to see why the administration ever wanted to circumvent it.
Anderson is scathing, however, about the existing legal framework for surveillance, describing it as intolerable and undemocratic, and he has proposed that the authority to approve surveillance warrants be transferred from the foreign and home secretaries to the judiciary.
According to some legal commentators, such an argument, no matter how it is styled, would almost certainly fail; the FISA court so frequently approves surveillance orders that it is often criticized as a rubber stamp.
The attorney general's comments come at a time when judges are increasingly being drafted in to chair sensitive public inquiries – such as the Goddard inquiry into institutional sexual abuse – and approve surveillance warrants.
The Home Secretary won praise from political rivals for abandoning elements of the "snooper's charter", which was blocked during the Coalition Government, and for giving judges a key role in approving surveillance exercises.
Nominally, the answer is all three branches of government: a secret court that approves surveillance warrants, Congressional oversight committees and the intelligence agencies themselves are supposed to be policing the spy-catchers to guard against abuses.
A number of lawmakers have demanded disclosure of the legal claims behind the National Security Agency's data-mining program, as well as more openness from the court that approves surveillance requests.
On the other hand, if the court is willing to approve surveillance this broad, and the NSA doesn't have to disclose the fact of that surveillance, it's hard to see what the point of subjecting such surveillance to a court is.
It will also, as David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has noted, make the UK the only state in the Five Eyes alliance (which includes the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) that does not vest the power to approve surveillance activities in the judiciary.
He proposed making changes to the Patriot Act, under which the NSA programme is authorised, and reforming the secret court that approves surveillance requests.
