FISA court secrecy must end | Last year alone not a single request was denied.
On any given day in Washington, 11 judges — all designated by Chief Justice John Roberts, without congressional advice or consent — convene to hear surveillance applications from the United States government. Behind closed doors and without checks or scrutiny, they balance the threats of espionage and terrorism with Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures. But the odds are stacked strongly in favor of the federal government. Last year alone, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, heard nearly 1,800 such applications from the U.S. government; not a single request was denied. In its entire 33-year history, the FISA court has rejected just 11 of 34,000 requests.
Until recently, few Americans had heard of the FISA court. Yet this federal body, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and expanded under the PATRIOT Act, wields tremendous power. FISA requires the government to obtain a judicial warrant prior to commencing particular kinds of intelligence operations within the United States, and the FISA court is empowered to provide these warrants. FISA court judges decide whether the government can tap phone calls, access business records and sweep up a wide array of data that can be used to map the contours of our daily lives. After the court rules, its findings are almost never made public. Americans whose privacy may be compromised by FISA court rulings cannot read those rulings, much less contest or appeal them.
Created in the wake of Watergate-era revelations about executive-branch spying on domestic dissidents, the FISA court today operates in the shadows without public oversight. Members of most federal courts are selected by the president and confirmed by the Senate with public hearings and an extended opportunity for the public to comment. Members of the FISA court are selected by the chief justice alone, and the American people rarely learn their names or anything about their judicial philosophies until a scandal thrusts them into the public eye.
This secretive process has given us a FISA court in which, at the very least, the appearance of effective, nonpolitical justice is gone, as 10 of 11 members were nominated by Republican presidents, and the executive branch almost never loses.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/fisa-court-process-must-be-unveiled-94127.html#ixzz2Z9mSKpL8
