As Members of Congress we can now engage with our constituents via online innovations like the Huffington Post, while a small business in rural Oregon can use the Internet to find customers around the world.

For those who believe executive branch officials will voluntarily interpret their surveillance authorities with restraint, I believe it is more likely that I will achieve my life-long dream of playing in the NBA.

Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.

When the Veterans Affairs Department implemented a program to provide home-based health care to veterans with multiple chronic conditions - many of the systems most expensive patients to treat - they received astounding results.

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

I think we have to ask this administration, and the President specifically, about using their political capital now to stand up for the American consumer who is getting clobbered by these gasoline and oil prices.

Until relatively recently, law enforcement's ability to determine an individual's location and track their movements was largely limited to natural human powers of observation.