Roberts’s Picks Reshaping Secret Surveillance Court
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/us/politics/robertss-picks-reshaping-secret-surveillance-court.html?_r=1&
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At a public meeting this month, Judge James Robertson, an appointee of President Bill Clinton who was assigned to the surveillance court in 2002 by Chief Justice Rehnquist and resigned from it in December 2005, offered an insiders critique of how rapidly and recently the courts role has changed. He said, for example, that during his time it was not engaged in developing a body of secret precedents interpreting what the law means.
In my experience, there werent any opinions, he said. You approved a warrant application or you didnt period.
The court began expanding its role when George W. Bush was president and its members were still assigned by Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died in 2005. Midway through the Bush administration, the executive branch sought and obtained the courts legal blessing to continue secret surveillance programs that had originally circumvented the FISA process.
The courts power has also recently expanded in another way. In 2008, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act to allow the National Security Agency to keep conducting a form of the Bush administrations program of surveillance without warrants on domestic soil so long as only foreigners abroad were targeted. It gave the court the power to create rules for the program, like how the government may use Americans communications after they are picked up.
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