How many times does the NSA have to be rebuked in court before judges start taking away some of the agency’s vast surveillance powers?

The controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court – derided in recent years as a rubber stamp for the NSA, and which normally operates in almost complete secrecy – just released an opinion from November 2015 in which federal judge Thomas Hogan sharply criticized the spy agency.

Hogan said he was “extremely concerned” about lax practices at the NSA and FBI regarding how they handle the vast quantities of data they collect. Worse, for four years, the agencies held on to personal information gathered by surveillance ruled unconstitutional in 2011, all while keeping it hidden from the court.

Yet after saying all this, the judge went on to reapprove all the surveillance the NSA asked for. It’s almost hard to keep track of how many times the courts have criticized spy agencies for breaking their own rules, the law or the fourth amendment, and then allowed them to proceed unimpeded.

In 2011, the Fisa court ruled some of the NSA’s internet surveillance unconstitutional, yet the NSA wasn’t required to shut down any of the spy programs that led to the ruling. In 2009, in a rather unbelievable opinion, a Fisa judge stated that court-ordered privacy protections – that were supposed to be in place for years – were “so frequently and systematically violated” by the NSA “that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall … [surveillance] regime has never functioned effectively.”

We only know about these past opinions because the government was forced to declassify them after the Snowden revelations in 2013. And we probably only know about this latest opinion because Congress passed the NSA reform bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, last summer. The law made it much harder for the government to keep these types of Fisa court opinions secret indefinitely.

The USA Freedom Act caused another interesting wrinkle in this latest case: it marks the first time that the public has seen a public advocate be allowed to make arguments on behalf of Americans’ privacy interests in the Fisa court. Before the act passed, virtually all Fisa court decisions were made after hearing only the government’s side, leading to an entire body of secret fourth amendment law that the American public was completely unaware existed.

Unfortunately, the judge disagreed with almost all of the public advocate’s arguments for privacy rights. However, the advocate, Amy Jeffress, said one thing in particular that really stood out: she made the case that the notorious Prism surveillance program, one of the first programs revealed by Snowden in 2011, is unconstitutional.

This is critical in understanding how the NSA operates: the spy agency engages in what’s known as “Section-702” surveillance – that’s the name of the same law used for the Prism program – where they collect information without a particular warrant on all sorts of people overseas that are suspected to be involved in terrorism, or whose communications contain “foreign intelligence” information.

However, potentially innocent Americans are caught up in this vast net when they talk to people overseas. Civil liberties groups have been complaining for years that the FBI can then search these enormous databases for those Americans, even when it has nothing to do with national security. Jeffress confirmed this in her brief, the judge readily agreed with her description of how the FBI can warrantlessly search Americans’ communications, and then he rejected the idea that such searches violate the fourth amendment.

As the Washington Post reported last month, the NSA is set to expand data access to all sorts of federal agencies, and potentially local law enforcement. All Americans should be deeply concerned, not just that more of their private information will be vulnerable to authorities, but that the oversight in place to keep this from happening instead let it continue unabated.