It's worth noting that a month ago the EFF was calling for people with technical and civil liberties expertise to help provide more oversight [1].
The NSA exists solely for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence - it's a spy agency. As a result, you'll never be able to get completely transparent public review of their activities without making them effectively useless. I see a few options on the table:
A) Go with the status quo, not change anything just trust the NSA to do its business under the existing oversight.
B) Strengthen the oversight to further ensure that the NSA is only conducting the work it's authorized to do against the targets it's authorized to spy on.
C) Assert that espionage just isn't worth it and just take the tools away from the NSA.
There are plenty of things that you can do under option B to address problems. Some of them are in this bill, and some of them can be made available to the public. Members of Congress have conflicting views on how much information they've been given by the NSA [2], which to me implies that some take their positions on the intelligence committees more seriously than others. If you look at the actual video of the hearing, Congressman Mike Rogers suggests that serving on the intelligence committee is a much bigger responsibility than serving on the other committees and they can't bring their staffers to assist [3]. If Congress isn't capable of providing the oversight they tasked themselves to do with the resources they have, then they need to either gather the resources they need or appoint another group to conduct oversight in a manner that can effectively ensure to the public that the NSA is gathering valid foreign intelligence and nothing else.
The NSA exists solely for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence - it's a spy agency. As a result, you'll never be able to get completely transparent public review of their activities without making them effectively useless. I see a few options on the table:
A) Go with the status quo, not change anything just trust the NSA to do its business under the existing oversight.
B) Strengthen the oversight to further ensure that the NSA is only conducting the work it's authorized to do against the targets it's authorized to spy on.
C) Assert that espionage just isn't worth it and just take the tools away from the NSA.
There are plenty of things that you can do under option B to address problems. Some of them are in this bill, and some of them can be made available to the public. Members of Congress have conflicting views on how much information they've been given by the NSA [2], which to me implies that some take their positions on the intelligence committees more seriously than others. If you look at the actual video of the hearing, Congressman Mike Rogers suggests that serving on the intelligence committee is a much bigger responsibility than serving on the other committees and they can't bring their staffers to assist [3]. If Congress isn't capable of providing the oversight they tasked themselves to do with the resources they have, then they need to either gather the resources they need or appoint another group to conduct oversight in a manner that can effectively ensure to the public that the NSA is gathering valid foreign intelligence and nothing else.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/47-prominent-technolog...
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/29/us-usa-security-ns...
[3] http://www.c-span.org/Events/Intel-Officials-Discuss-Propose... (jump to about 01:34:00)