2 ms·
I don't give a shit if Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. sit on the FISC (FISC court is redundant). America doesn't do secret courts.
by pvnick 13y ago
I don't give a shit if Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. sit on the FISC (FISC court is redundant). America doesn't do secret courts.
- rhizome 13y agoWell...except that it does. :/
- tptacek 13y agoIt doesn't do secret Article III courts. That doesn't mean every review or adjudication process in the government is public. Most of the evidence I can find suggests that FISC isn't an Article III court. It happens to be composed of appointed federal court judges, but that's as close to "Article III-iness" as it gets. Real Article III courts have judges appointed by the executive branch who sit with lifetime tenure. Instead, the word "court" in FISC turns out to be a little misleading. FISC operates more in the manner of a review board. The Constitution doesn't set out limits to foreign intelligence operations, and FISA ostensibly concerns itself exclusively with foreign surveillance operations (and with the checks that prevent foreign surveillance from "mission creeping" into domestic surveillance, which is where things start to get fuzzy). The Constitution does not require NSA to obtain warrants to surveil foreign targets (no country really requires their spies to get warrants), and thus doesn't fundamentally require NSA to get court authorization to do what it does. Instead, FISC is a sort of half-measure intended to allow the Congress to have some ongoing check over what NSA does, by passing laws and providing a body to ensure that those laws are enforced.