This wasn't by design. Obama had options. He campaigned against mass surveillance but flip-flopped once in office, installing the very surveillance levers he criticized. “No more secrecy,” he said. “That is a commitment that I make to you.”[1] If his only option was to install these surveillance levers, then I guess American democracy is just a lost cause.
You're right. FISA courts are not sufficient oversight. Even Judge James Robertson resigned from the FISA Courts (FISC) in 2005 because:
>On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance,[11] and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.[12] The government's apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests. In 2011, the Obama administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases.
Let me get this straight: The FBI was monitoring a protestor’s bank account and spotted a Proton Mail purchase. They contacted the Swiss DOJ, requesting a subpoena based on the specific Order ID, date, and credit card digits of the bank account being monitored. The Swiss DOJ agreed, approached Proton Mail, and the company complied with the official legal request under Swiss law.
The real scandal here isn't Proton Mail's compliance. It is that the FBI is seemingly monitoring the financial transactions of millions of citizens' bank accounts.
This can happen with Mullvad too. If the FBI spots a Mullvad Purchase on anyone's bank account, they can go up to Mullvad with the Order ID, date, and credit card digits, and request Mullvad to redirect VPN traffic of that specific Order ID to the FBI's own monitoring servers.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov...