[krapp]

They can and they do. Look at the history - they routinely kidnap, torture, assassinate, spy on citizens, support all kinds of illegal activity and make unscrupulous deals with terrorists and tyrants. Every now and then they slip up and the government has to pretend to give a damn and they go through a show of righteous anger and then once the heat is off and constituents are satisfied the intelligence agencies go right back to doing what they were doing anyway.

The government doesn't want intelligence agencies reined in by anything but American interests. They want those agencies to be free do commit whatever evil is deemed necessary to further those interests, laws and Constitution be damned. The NSA is still spying on everyone. The CIA still runs torture camps around the world. Nothing changes. Snowden didn't change anything. Assange didn't change anything. Wyden isn't going to change anything.

The ability of the American people to hold their government to account in any meaningful way is a facade. Americans live under the oligarchy of corporations and the military industrial complex, not any kind of functional democracy. The American people, despite their guns and breathless evocations of the Founding Fathers, are not in control.