Section 215, known as the "business records" portion of The PATRIOT Act allows "FBI agents to obtain any "tangible thing," including "books, records, papers, documents, and other items," a broad term that includes dumps from private-sector computer databases, with limited judicial oversight."[1]
That Section 215 exits is public record. However, the government has a "secret interpretation" of the law that allows itself many more powers than what is written in the publicly accessible version.
Only congressmen on the Senate Intelligence committee were briefed on the secret interpretation. With the exceptions of Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who tried warn the American public without revealing anything classified (in 2011), the rest of the congressmen on the committee did not have a problem with what the NSA was doing. Many of the congressmen on the SIC are ex-military or receive large campaign contributions from defense contractors and/or the intelligence community.