What is FISA?

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was signed into law in 1978 and was intended to create a procedural firewall that law enforcement had to broach before it could conduct eavesdropping and electronic surveillance on domestic, civilian targets. Under FISA, agents have to show probable cause that the person they want to eavesdrop on was an agent of a foreign group or a terrorist before they could be monitored. The act does not prevent “emergency” monitoring, requiring the government to provide it's justification within 72 hours.

Accompanying the new law, was the creation of a new overseer: the FISA Court, a secret spy court created to “hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance anywhere within the United States.” The court is composed of a rotating panel of eleven federal district judges selected (in secret) by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In the first twenty years of it's existence the court approved over ten thousand applications for surveillance. When it grants an application, that means the government has ninety days to monitor, at will - by all electronic means. Since Sept.11, the court has granted over one thousand applications per year.

The court meets in a windowless, soundproof, cipherlocked room on the sixth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington,DC. It's writs and rulings are permanently sealed from review. The public cannot ever access these records, knows very little of the court, and Congress doesn't know much more as there is next to no oversight of the FISA Court. The court has to submit the number of surveillance orders approved every year along with a brief report. In 1997, the report was two paragraphs long.

Excerpted from: Chatter; Patrick Radden Keefe, Random House, 2005
Posted on The Human Stain