The History Behind America's Most Secretive Court

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This week The Guardian newspaper shared with its readers a document that few people ever get to see — an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court telling Verizon to share countless phone records with the National Security Agency. The White House would not confirm the existence of this surveillance effort, but it insisted Congress is fully briefed about such activities. Members of Congress confirmed that they knew.
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The court order does not let the NSA eavesdrop on the content of conversations, but it does allow the agency to collect data about the phone calls of millions of Americans without their knowledge, whether or not they are directly linked to anything illegal.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, insisted that the program protected privacy by operating under strict oversight from Congress and from a special surveillance court.

"And that's why this is carefully done, that's why it is a federal court of 11 judges who sit 24/7, who reviews these requests and then either approves them or denies them," Feinstein says.

The names of the judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are public. But good luck trying to read the thousands of wiretap orders the court has approved since it was created in 1978. They are all secret.

The court was designed to address abuses uncovered in the 1970s by congressional investigations. Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology says Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to bring law to a lawless area.
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Ordinary wiretaps are sometimes challenged by defendants once they are charged, but victims of FISA wiretaps almost never even find out they were bugged. In 2008, a group of activists and journalists challenged a law that expanded this court's authority. They argued that their communications put them at risk of being caught up in government wiretaps. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court said these people could not show they had in fact been monitored, so it threw their suit out.

David Fidler, a law professor at Indiana University School of Law, says the existence of this court order could provide new grounds for a challenge. "Makes it much more likely that a Verizon customer can say, 'Hey, I was in fact the subject of surveillance. Here's the scope of the order,' " Fidler says.

The secrecy of the entire FISA system makes it just as difficult for members of Congress to raise questions. Two senators said Thursday they had concerns about the surveillance order, but they could not speak up because the whole process is secret.

More: http://www.wmuk.org/post/history-behind-americas-most-secretive-court

[1-Old-Man]

1. The FICA Court is a very thin veil over a grotesquely invasive Government

[Canuckistanian]

2. The FISA court is a rubber stamp

Let's repeat that: "of 1,789 applications, the FISA court did not deny any applications in whole or in part." What fantastic oversight (1789 is, ironically, the year the Constitution was ratified). The court did "modify" 40 of those applications - less than 3% - but it approved every single one. The same was true of 2011, when the DOJ submitted 1,676 applications and the Fisa court, while modifying 30, "did not deny any applications in whole, or in part".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/03/fisa-court-rubber-stamp-drones

[1-Old-Man]

3. 11 Toads who call themselves Judges

[struggle4progress]

4. Those Senators, who say they have concerns but can't speak up because it's all secret,

need to reread their Constitution (Art I Sec 6 Par 1):

... for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place ...

In particular, Representatives and Senators enjoy complete immunity from prosecution for anything they say in the course of a speech or debate in Congress

[1-Old-Man]

5. Precisely, their bitching and moaning is just a replacement for meaningful action

But to be honest about it the problem is not those two, its the rest of the Committee, that does nothing at all. Diane Feinstien's defense of the program was reprehensible. Basically she said its legal because we do it and we've been doing it so long you have no right to complain. That is what I call a worthless Senator (much like my own state's Manchin), and I don't care which party she chooses to call her own.