The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008, under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act (Section 1881a et seq in FISA).
federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Senate's Church Committee. From its opening in 1978 until 2009, the court was housed on the sixth floor of the Robert F.
02-001 NSA call database NSA warrantless surveillance (2001–07) Operation CHAOS ==References== === Citations === === General references=== 1978 establishments in Washington, D.C. Courts and tribunals established in 1978
During the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while only four were rejected.
Most of these defenses involve the 1979 Supreme Court decision Smith v.
The Supreme Court in 1991 said things are "relevant" if there is a "reasonable possibility" that they will produce information related to the subject of the investigation.
Of the requests that had to be modified, few were before the year 2000.
The identity of the appellant was declassified in June 2013. ==Criticism== There has been growing criticism of the court since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act expanded the court from seven to eleven judges, and required that at least three of the Court's judges live within of the District of Columbia.
Such appeals are rare: the first appeal from the FISC to the Court of Review was made in 2002 (In re Sealed Case No.
This does not include the number of warrants that were modified by the FISA court. Notes: On May 17, 2002, the court rebuffed Attorney General John Ashcroft, releasing an opinion that alleged that the FBI and Justice Department officials had "supplied erroneous information to the court" in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by FBI Director Louis J.
citizens without specific approval from the FISA court for each case since 2002.
Rumsfeld case, and also served on the FISC for three years between 2002 and 2005said he was "frankly stunned" by the newspaper's report that court rulings had created a new body of law broadening the ability of the NSA to use its surveillance programs to target not only terrorists but suspects in cases involving espionage, cyberattacks and weapons of mass destruction.
Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004.
The four rejected requests were all from 2003, and all four were partially granted after being submitted for reconsideration by the government.
Whether this rejection was related to the court starting to require modification of significantly more requests in 2003 is unknown. On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration had been conducting surveillance against U.S.
It's rather extensive and serious judicial oversight of this process." A 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee Interim Report on FBI Oversight in the 107th Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee: FISA Implementation Failures cited the "unnecessary secrecy" of the court among its "most important conclusions": ===Allegations of bias=== In a July 2013 interview, Senator and privacy advocate Ron Wyden described the FISC warrant process as "the most one-sided legal process in the United States".
During the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while only four were rejected.
Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004.
During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, and another seven being rejected.
District Court for the District of Columbia, who, in 2004, ruled against the Bush administration in the Hamdan v.
Whether this rejection was related to the court starting to require modification of significantly more requests in 2003 is unknown. On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration had been conducting surveillance against U.S.
On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance, and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.
Rumsfeld case, and also served on the FISC for three years between 2002 and 2005said he was "frankly stunned" by the newspaper's report that court rulings had created a new body of law broadening the ability of the NSA to use its surveillance programs to target not only terrorists but suspects in cases involving espionage, cyberattacks and weapons of mass destruction.
The Washington Post then reported that it knew of other orders, and that the court had been issuing such orders, to all telecommunication companies, every three months since May 24, 2006. Since the telephone metadata program was revealed, the intelligence community, some members of Congress, and the Obama administration have defended its legality and use.
The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008, under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act (Section 1881a et seq in FISA).
Because of the nature of the matters heard before it, court hearings may need to take place at any time of day or night, weekdays or weekends; thus, at least one judge must be "on call" at all times to hear evidence and decide whether or not to issue a warrant. A heavily redacted version of a 2008 appeal by Yahoo! of an order issued with respect to NSA's PRISM program had been published for the edification of other potential appellants.
Congress in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, even the collection of metadata must be considered "relevant" to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities.
Senate's Church Committee. From its opening in 1978 until 2009, the court was housed on the sixth floor of the Robert F.
Since 2009, the court has been relocated to the E.
The government's apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests. In 2011, the Obama administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases.
During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, and another seven being rejected.
According to Supreme Court rulings, a phone call's content is covered by the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which restricts unreasonable searches, but the other types of data are not. "Relevant" has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, "everything", is new, said Mark Eckenwiler, a lawyer who until December 2012 was the Justice Department's primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law.
Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C. In 2013, a top-secret order issued by the court, which was later leaked to the media from documents culled by Edward Snowden, required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed of all call detail records – including those for domestic calls – to the NSA. ==FISA warrants== Each application for one of these surveillance warrants (called a FISA warrant) is made before an individual judge of the court.
On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance, and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.
The identity of the appellant was declassified in June 2013. ==Criticism== There has been growing criticism of the court since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
This figure became available after Walton decided in the summer of 2013 that the FISC would begin keeping its own tally of how Justice Department warrant applications for electronic surveillance fared – and would track for the first time when the government withdrew or resubmitted those applications with changes.
It's rather extensive and serious judicial oversight of this process." A 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee Interim Report on FBI Oversight in the 107th Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee: FISA Implementation Failures cited the "unnecessary secrecy" of the court among its "most important conclusions": ===Allegations of bias=== In a July 2013 interview, Senator and privacy advocate Ron Wyden described the FISC warrant process as "the most one-sided legal process in the United States".
Inglis cited the court's oversight in defending the constitutionality of the NSA's surveillance activities before during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2013.
"What we really don't know, though, are what the FISA court's opinions say." ===Secret law=== In July 2013, The New York Times published disclosures from anonymous government whistleblowers of secret law written by the court holding that vast collections of data on all Americans (even those not connected in any way to foreign enemies) amassed by the NSA do not violate the warrant requirements of Fourth Amendment to the U.S.
From that standpoint, Edgar said, the reinterpretation of relevant amounts to "secret law". ==Controversies== ===2013 NSA controversy=== In June 2013, a copy of a top-secret warrant, issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to London's The Guardian newspaper by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The Obama administration published on July 31, 2013 a FISA Court ruling supporting an earlier order requiring a Verizon subsidiary to turn over all of its customers' phone logs for a three-month period, with rules that must be followed when accessing the data. The document leaked to The Guardian acted as a "smoking gun" and sparked a public outcry of criticism and complaints that the court exceeded its authority and violated the Fourth Amendment by issuing general warrants.
That data is not considered "content", theoretically giving law enforcement more flexibility in collecting it. On July 19, 2013, the court renewed the permission for the NSA to collect Verizon customer records en masse.
Rulings for the plaintiff in cases brought by the ACLU on September 10 and 12, 2013, prompted James Clapper to concede that the government had overreached in its covert surveillance under part 215 of FISA and that the Act would likely be amended to reflect Congressional concern. The American Civil Liberties Union, a customer of Verizon, asked on November 22, 2013 a federal district court in Lower Manhattan, New York to end the NSA phone call data collection program.
Moreover, a government lawyer said, the ACLU has no standing to bring the case because it cannot prove that its members have been harmed by the NSA's use of the data. ===2016 presidential election controversy=== In November 2016, Louise Mensch reported on the news website Heat Street that, after an initial June 2016 FBI request was denied, the FISA court had granted a more narrowly-focused October request from the FBI "to examine the activities of 'U.S.
On 12 January 2017, BBC journalist Paul Wood reported that, in response to an April 2016 tip from a foreign intelligence agency to the CIA about "money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign", a joint taskforce had been established including representatives of the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency.
In June 2016, lawyers from the Department of Justice applied to the FISA court for "permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks".
On 16 March, the Committee reported that they had seen no evidence to support Trump's accusation that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign. On Fox News on 14 March, commentator Andrew Napolitano said, "Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command.
issued a formal apology to the United Kingdom for the accusation. On April 11, The Washington Post reported that the FBI had been granted a FISA warrant in the summer of 2016 to monitor then-Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
On 12 January 2017, BBC journalist Paul Wood reported that, in response to an April 2016 tip from a foreign intelligence agency to the CIA about "money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign", a joint taskforce had been established including representatives of the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency.
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