of anything but merely adopts an outraged tone and provides links that don't seem to support the claims -- a habit that eventually produces loss of credibility and exhausts the public, who inevitably then lose interest

The opening sentence of the FDL piece references "that whole not spying on Americans thing" but so far as I can discern, the article is ultimately (though very loosely) based on various FISC documents declassified by DNI Clapper last week

OK. So I downloaded and skimmed the first four documents in that collection: none seem to reference spying on Americans; all four reference FBI authority to request certain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States citizen, which (in this case) seems to be telephony metadata

So there seems to be no big smoking gun there. Pieces like this from FDL are simply counter-productive. In reality, actually winning this particular fight would require rather more careful boring grunt work, and rather less hyperventilation, than we have seen to date