The Wall Street Journal published an extensive investigation on Tuesday night detailing how a large NSA spying operation targeting the Israeli government and its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, also swept up communications of sitting members of Congress.

It shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise that the NSA is spying on Israeli leaders, given Israel has attempted to sabotage US foreign policy objectives like the Iran nuclear deal, and the fact that the Israeli intelligence services are notoriously aggressive in their own spying on the US government (See Newsweek reporter Jeff Stein’s excellent series on the extreme lengths Israel will go to spy on United States officials). But this latest story demonstrates the startling powers the NSA holds to collect the communications of other branches of government without repercussion. And it’s a prime example of how innocent Americans often end up in the databases of the world’s most powerful spy agency.

Unfortunately, it’s only when members of Congress are caught up in the NSA’s dragnet that many of them start to pretend to care about the privacy of others. Former congressman Pete Hoekstra, who used to head the House intelligence committee and supported the NSA’s illegal spying program under George W Bush, tweeted that the NSA and Obama administration should be “prosecuted” if there were “any truth” to the Journal report.

We’ve seen this before: former Democratic ranking member of the House intel committee Jane Harmon was also a critical defender of Bush’s wiretapping program in the mid-2000s – that is, until she was caught on NSA wiretaps talking to an alleged Israeli agent. Then she quickly changed her tune. Likewise, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is notorious for defending the NSA no matter the scandal, so strongly condemned the NSA for spying on Germany’s Angela Merkel that a lot of people suspected she was so enraged because it was likely she was on some of Merkel’s recorded phone calls.

It’d be nice if members of Congress were not only outraged with the NSA spying on Americans when the Americans happen to be them.

Tracking Israel’s government may be a legitimate use for surveillance, but the Journal report still gets to the heart of why the NSA’s vast spying powers can be so worrying and their justifications so misleading. Congress wasn’t “targeted” for NSA spying, but because the NSA casts its net at so many different “targets” overseas – sometimes that can mean an entire country’s communications in bulk – undoubtedly there are countless innocent Americans who have their communications swept into NSA databases all the time, including members of Congress.

While the NSA has “minimization” procedures that supposedly protect Americans’ privacy – the Journal report describes how the NSA only says things like “US person” in their intelligence reports instead of the person’s name when it’s an American – there are plenty of ways that authorities can still get that information if they want it. As the Journal explains, all the executive branch has to do is ask for a name and they can get it (there’s no evidence the White House did in this case). And we know that the FBI goes back into the NSA databases without a warrant to look for US persons who communicated with people outside the country so much that they can’t even count how many times they’ve done it.

Congress had the chance to fix this so-called “backdoor” loophole when they passed the USA Freedom Act six months ago, but they failed to do so. Maybe now that it’s clear even they are vulnerable they will reconsider.

While all the defenses of NSA mass spying usually revolve around terrorism, the Journal investigation is yet another reminder that the NSA often uses its vast powers for surveillance of things that have little or nothing to do with terrorism directed at the United States. As former NSA director Michael Hayden candidly put it last year, the “NSA doesn’t just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who are communicating information.”

Senator and now-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders asked the NSA in 2014 about how and when it conducted surveillance of members of Congress. The response: “Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.” In other words, not much.