FISA bill

FISA: House pulls bill after Trump veto threat

"FISC" redirects here. For other uses, see .

United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court(F.I.S.C.)Location()Appeals toEstablishedOctober 25, 1978AuthorityCreated by –Composition method appointmentJudges11Judge term length7 yearsThe United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) is a established and authorized under the of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance against foreign inside the by and . Such requests are made most often by the (NSA) and the (FBI). Congress created FISA and its court as a result of the recommendations by the 's .

From its opening in 1978 until 2009, the court was housed on the sixth floor of the . Since 2009, the court has been relocated to the in

In 2013, a order issued by the court, which was later leaked to the media from documents culled by , required a subsidiary of to provide a daily, on-going feed of all —including those for domestic calls—to the NSA.

Contents FISA warrants Each application for one of these surveillance warrants (called a FISA warrant) is made before an individual judge of the court. The court may allow third parties to submit briefs as . When the determines that an emergency exists, the Attorney General may authorize the emergency employment of electronic surveillance before obtaining the necessary authorization from the FISC, if the Attorney General or their designee notifies a judge of the court at the time of authorization and applies for a warrant as soon as practicable but not more than seven days after authorization of such surveillance, as required by .

If an application is denied by one judge of the court, the federal government is not allowed to make the same application to a different judge of the court, but may appeal to the . Such appeals are rare: the first appeal from the FISC to the Court of Review was made in 2002 (), 24 years after the founding of the court.

Also rare is for FISA warrant requests to be turned down. 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. The four rejected requests were all from 2003, and all four were partially granted after being submitted for reconsideration by the government. Of the requests that had to be modified, few were before the year 2000. During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, and another seven being rejected. Over the entire 33-year period, the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants, with only 12 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests. This does not include the number of warrants that were modified by the FISA court.

FISA warrant requests for electronic surveillanceYear# Requests submitted# Requests approved# Requests modified# Requests denied1979199207001980319322101981431433001982473475001983549549001984635635001985587587001986573573001987512512001988534534001989 54654600199059559500199159359300199248448400199350950900199457657600199569769700199683983900199774974800199879679600199988688000 20001,0051,0121020019329344020021,2281,2282 0 020031,7271,724794 20041,7581,75494020052,0742,07261020062,1812,17673120072,3712,370 86420082,0822,0832120091,3291,32014220101,5111,50614020111,6761,67430020121,7891,78840020131,5881,58834020141,3791,37919020151,457 1,45680520161,4851,4513103420171,37294831034Totals41,22240,6681,25285Notes:

On May 17, 2002, the court rebuffed Attorney General , releasing an opinion that alleged that the FBI and officials had "supplied erroneous information to the court" in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by FBI Director . Whether this rejection was related to the court starting to require modification of significantly more requests in 2003 is unknown.

On December 16, 2005, reported that the administration had been conducting surveillance against U.S. citizens without specific approval from the FISA court for each case since 2002. On December 20, 2005, Judge resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance, and later, in the wake of the 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 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. The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year. But a warrant for each target would thus no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or "foreign powers". The FISC also extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Both measures were done without public debate or any specific authority from Congress.

Secrecy Because of the sensitive nature of its business, the court is a "secret court" – its hearings are closed to the public. While records of the proceedings are kept, they also are unavailable to the public, although copies of some records with have been made public. Due to the classified nature of its proceedings, usually only attorneys licensed to practice in front of the US government are permitted to appear before the court. 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 of an order issued with respect to NSA's had been published for the edification of other potential appellants. The identity of the appellant was declassified in June 2013.

Criticism There has been growing criticism of the court since the . This is partly because the court sits – in other words, in the absence of anyone but the judge and the government present at the hearings. This, combined with the minimal number of requests that are rejected by the court has led experts to characterize it as a (former analyst called it a " with a rubber stamp"). The accusation of being a "rubber stamp" was rejected by FISA Court president who wrote in a letter to Senator Patrick J. Leahy: "The annual statistics provided to Congress by the Attorney General ... – frequently cited to in press reports as a suggestion that the Court's approval rate of application is over 99% – reflect only the number of final applications submitted to and acted on by the Court. These statistics do not reflect the fact that many applications are altered to prior or final submission or even withheld from final submission entirely, often after an indication that a judge would not approve them." He added: "There is a rigorous review process of applications submitted by the executive branch, spearheaded initially by five judicial branch lawyers who are national security experts and then by the judges, to ensure that the court's authorizations comport with what the applicable statutes authorize." In a following letter Walton stated that the government had revamped 24.4% of its requests in the face of court questions and demands in time from July 1, 2013 to September 30, 2013. 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. Some requests are modified by the court but ultimately granted, while the percentage of denied requests is statistically negligible (11 denied requests out of around 34,000 granted in 35 years – equivalent to 0.03%). The accusation that the FISC is a "rubber stamp" court was also rejected by (General Counsel of Office of the ): "When [the Government] prepares an application for [a section 215 order, it] first submit[s] to the [FISC] what's called a "read copy", which the court staff will review and comment on. [A]nd they will almost invariably come back with questions, concerns, problems that they see. And there is an iterative process back and forth between the Government and the [FISC] to take care of those concerns so that at the end of the day, we're confident that we're presenting something that the [FISC] will approve. That is hardly a rubber stamp. It's rather extensive and serious judicial oversight of this process."

A 2003 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":

> The secrecy of individual FISA cases is certainly necessary, but this secrecy has been extended to the most basic legal and procedural aspects of the FISA, which should not be secret. This unnecessary secrecy contributed to the deficiencies that have hamstrung the implementation of the FISA. Much more information, including all unclassified opinions and operating rules of the FISA Court and Court of Review, should be made public and/or provided to the Congress.

Allegations of bias In a July 2013 interview, Senator and privacy advocate described the FISC warrant process as "the most one-sided legal process in the United States". "I don't know of any other legal system or court that really doesn't highlight anything except one point of view", he said. Later in the interview he said Congress should seek to "diversify some of the thinking on the court".

Elizabeth Gotein, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program of the at the , has criticized the court as being too compromised to be an impartial tribunal that oversees the work of the NSA and other U.S. intelligence activities. Since the court meets in secret, hears only the arguments of the government prior to deciding a case, and its rulings cannot be appealed or even reviewed by the public, she has argued that: "Like any other group that meets in secret behind closed doors with only one constituency appearing before them, they're subject to capture and bias."

A related bias of the court results from what critics such as , a scholar at the , have described as the near certainty of the polarization or of the judges of the court. Since all of the judges are appointed by the same person (the ), hear no opposing testimony and feel no pressure from colleagues or the public to moderate their rulings, Sanchez claims that "group polarization is almost a certainty", adding that "there's the real possibility that these judges become more extreme over time, even when they had only a mild bias to begin with".

Appointment process The court's judges are appointed solely by the without confirmation or oversight by the U.S. Congress. This gives the chief justice the ability to appoint like-minded judges and create a court without diversity. "The judges are hand-picked by someone who, through his votes on the Supreme Court, we have come to learn has a particular view on civil liberties and law enforcement", Theodore Ruger, a professor at the , said with respect to Chief Justice . "The way the FISA is set up, it gives him unchecked authority to put judges on the court who feel the same way he does." And , a law professor at the , added, "Since FISA was enacted in 1978, we've had three chief justices, and they have all been conservative Republicans, so I think one can worry that there is insufficient diversity." Since May 2014, however, four of the five judges appointed by Chief Justice Roberts to the FISA Court were appointed to their prior federal court positions by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

There are some reform proposals. Senator from Connecticut proposed that each of the chief judges of the 12 major appeals courts select a district judge for the surveillance court; the chief justice would still pick the review panel that hears rare appeals of the court's decisions, but six other Supreme Court justices would have to sign off. Another proposal authored by Representative of California would give the president the power to nominate judges for the court, subject to Senate approval, while Representative proposed that Congressional leaders pick eight of the court's members.

Judicial and public oversight Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the , has argued that, without having to seek the approval of the court (which he has said merely reviews certifications to ensure that they – and not the surveillance itself – comply with the various statutory requirements), the U.S. Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence can engage in sweeping programmatic surveillance for one year at a time. There are procedures used by the NSA to target non-U.S. persons and procedures used by the NSA to minimize data collection from U.S. persons. These court-approved policies allow the NSA to do the following:

Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said in light of revelations that the government secured telephone records from Verizon and Internet data from some of the largest providers that safeguards that are supposed to be protecting individual privacy are not working. Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that when courts make mistakes, the losing party has the right to appeal and the erroneous decision is reversed. "That process cannot happen when a secret court considers a case with only one party before it."

According to The Guardian, "The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants". , who published details of the , explained:

> that this entire process is a fig leaf, "oversight" in name only. It offers no real safeguards. That's because no court monitors what the NSA is actually doing when it claims to comply with the court-approved procedures. Once the Fisa court puts its approval stamp on the NSA's procedures, there is no external judicial check on which targets end up being selected by the NSA analysts for eavesdropping. The only time individualized warrants are required is when the NSA is specifically targeting a US citizen or the communications are purely domestic. When it is time for the NSA to obtain Fisa court approval, the agency does not tell the court whose calls and emails it intends to intercept. It instead merely provides the general guidelines which it claims are used by its analysts to determine which individuals they can target, and the Fisa court judge then issues a simple order approving those guidelines. The court endorses a one-paragraph form order stating that the NSA's process "'contains all the required elements' and that the revised NSA, FBI and CIA minimization procedures submitted with the amendment 'are consistent with the requirements of [50 U.S.C. § 1881a(e)] and with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States'". As but one typical example, The Guardian has obtained an August 19, 2010, Fisa court approval from Judge which does nothing more than recite the statutory language in approving the NSA's guidelines. Once the NSA has this court approval, it can then target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even order telecoms and internet companies to turn over to them the emails, chats and calls of those they target. The Fisa court plays no role whatsoever in reviewing whether the procedures it approved are actually complied with when the NSA starts eavesdropping on calls and reading people's emails. The guidelines submitted by the NSA to the Fisa court demonstrate how much discretion the agency has in choosing who will be targeted. ... The only oversight for monitoring whether there is abuse comes from the executive branch itself: from the DOJ and Director of National Intelligence, which conduct "periodic reviews ... to evaluate the implementation of the procedure". At a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday afternoon, deputy attorney general testified that every 30 days, the Fisa court is merely given an "aggregate number" of database searches on US domestic phone records. ... The decisions about who has their emails and telephone calls intercepted by the NSA is made by the NSA itself, not by the Fisa court, except where the NSA itself concludes the person is a US citizen and/or the communication is exclusively domestic. But even in such cases, the NSA often ends up intercepting those communications of Americans without individualized warrants, and all of this is left to the discretion of the NSA analysts with no real judicial oversight.

Deputy Attorney General and NSA Deputy Director 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. Representative , challenged Cole's defense of the program's constitutionality, and he said the secrecy in which the court functioned negated the validity of its review. "The fact that a secret court unaccountable to public knowledge of what it's doing ... may join you in misusing or abusing the statutes is of no comfort whatsoever", Nadler said. Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, said the secrecy that comes along with national security makes it difficult to evaluate how the administration carries out the wide authority Congress has given it. "FISA court judges hear all of this and they think it's legal," Kerr said. "What we really don't know, though, are what the FISA court's opinions say."

Secret law In July 2013, 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 . It reported that anyone suspected of being involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage or cyber-attacks, according to the court, may be considered a legitimate target for warrantless surveillance. Acting like a parallel , the court greatly broadened the to do so.

The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans". It also wrote, with respect to the court:

> In one of the court's most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the 'special needs' doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures ... The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government's need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.'s collection and examination of Americans' communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said. That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law – used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints – and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects.

The "special-needs" doctrine is an exemption to the Fourth Amendment's Warrants Clause which commands that "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be and seized". The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized an exemption to the Warrants Clause "outside the foreign intelligence context, in so-called 'special-needs' cases. In those cases, the Court excused compliance with the Warrant Clause when the purpose behind the governmental action went beyond routine law enforcement and insisting upon a warrant would materially interfere with the accomplishment of that purpose. See, , 515 U.S. 646, 653 (1995) (upholding drug testing of highschool athletes and explaining that the exception to the warrant requirement applied "when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement[s] impracticable (quoting , 483 U.S. 868, 873 (1987))); , 489 U.S. 602, 620 (1989) (upholding regulations instituting drug and alcohol testing of railroad workers for safety reasons); cf. , 392 U.S. 1, 23-24 (1968) (upholding pat-frisk for weapons to protect officer safety during investigatory stop)". The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review concluded on August 22, 2008, in the case In re Directives [redacted text] Pursuant to Section 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that the "special-needs" doctrine applied by analogy to justify a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement for surveillance undertaken for national security purposes and directed at a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

– a former judge for the , who, in 2004, ruled against the Bush administration in the case, and also served on the FISC for three years between 2002 and 2005 – said 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. Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of constitutional law at the , said he was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system. He said, "That whole notion is missing in this process".

The court concluded that mass collection of telephone (including the time of phone calls and numbers dialed) does not violate the Fourth Amendment as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American's communications. This concept is rooted partly in the special needs doctrine. "The basic idea is that it's O.K. to create this huge pond of data", an unnamed U.S. official said, "but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing". Under the new procedures passed by the U.S. Congress in the , even the collection of metadata must be considered "relevant" to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities. The court has indicated that while individual pieces of data may not appear "relevant" to a terrorism investigation, the total picture that the bits of data create may in fact be relevant, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the decisions.

A secret ruling made by the court that redefined the single word "relevant" enabled the NSA to gather phone data on millions of Americans. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that "relevant" could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed. Under the Patriot Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation can require businesses to hand over "tangible things", including "records", as long as the FBI shows it is reasonable to believe the things are "relevant to an authorized investigation" into international terrorism or foreign intelligence activities. The history of the word "relevant" is key to understanding that passage. 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. In criminal cases, courts previously have found that very large sets of information did not meet the relevance standard because significant portions – innocent people's information – would not be pertinent. But the court has developed separate precedents, centered on the idea that investigations to prevent national-security threats are different from ordinary criminal cases. The court's rulings on such matters are classified and almost impossible to challenge because of the secret nature of the proceedings. According to the court, the special nature of national-security and terrorism-prevention cases means "relevant" can have a broader meaning for those investigations, say people familiar with the rulings.

People familiar with the system that uses phone records in investigations have said that the court's novel legal theories allow the system to include bulk phone records, as long as there are privacy safeguards to limit searches. NSA analysts may query the database only "when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization", according to . The NSA database includes data about people's phone calls – numbers dialed, how long a call lasted – but not the actual conversations. 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. "I think it's a stretch" of previous federal legal interpretations, said Eckenwiler. If a federal attorney "served a grand-jury subpoena for such a broad class of records in a criminal investigation, he or she would be laughed out of court". Given the traditional legal definition of relevant, Timothy Edgar, a former top privacy lawyer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations, noted it is "a fair point" to say that someone reading the law might believe it refers to "individualized requests" or "requests in small batches, rather than in bulk database form". From that standpoint, Edgar said, the reinterpretation of relevant amounts to "secret law".

Controversies 2013 NSA controversy Main article: In June 2013, a copy of a warrant, issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to London's newspaper by NSA contractor . That warrant orders to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony " – comprehensive , including – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls". 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 "" and sparked a public outcry of criticism and complaints that the court exceeded its authority and violated the by issuing . 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. Most of these defenses involve the 1979 Supreme Court decision which established that people do not have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy for electronic metadata held by third parties like a cellphone provider. 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. The U.S. government was relying on a part of American case law known as the "third-party doctrine". This notion said that when a person has voluntarily disclosed information to a third party — in this case, the telephony metadata — the customer no longer has a reasonable expectation of privacy over the numbers dialed nor their duration. Therefore, this doctrine argued, such metadata can be accessed by law enforcement with essentially no problem. The content of communications are, however, subject to the . The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held in October 2011, citing multiple Supreme Court precedents, that the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to the contents of all communications, whatever the means, because "a person's private communications are akin to personal papers".

Former FISC judge , who provided the legal foundation for the NSA amassing a database of all Americans' phone records, told associates in the summer of 2013 that she wanted her legal argument out. Rulings for the plaintiff in cases brought by the on September 10 and 12, 2013, prompted 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 , 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. The ACLU argued that the program violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of privacy and information as well as exceeding the scope of its authorizing legislation, Section 215 of the . The U.S. government countered that the program is constitutional and that Congress was fully informed when it authorized and reauthorized Section 215. 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 Main article: In November 2016, reported on the news website 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. persons' in Donald Trump's campaign with ties to Russia". On 12 January 2017, BBC journalist 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 , the , the , the , the and the . 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". According to Wood, this application was rejected, as was a more narrowly focused request in July, and the order was finally granted by a different FISA judge on 15 October, three weeks before the presidential election. On January 19, reported that one of its sources had claimed "intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House".

On 13 March, the demanded that the Trump administration provide evidence to support the President Trump's claim that former President had wiretapped . 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 on 14 March, commentator said, "Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. ... He used . What is that? It's the initials for the British intelligence spying agency. Simply by saying to them, 'The president needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump's conversations' he's able to get it and there's no American fingerprints on this." Two days later, on 16 March, White House press spokesperson, , read this claim to the press. A GCHQ spokesman responded: "Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct 'wiretapping' against the then president elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored." On 17 March, the U.S. issued a formal apology to the for the accusation.

On April 11, reported that the FBI had been granted a FISA warrant in the summer of 2016 to monitor then-Trump foreign policy adviser . According to the report, "The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page's communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials." The report also states that the warrant has been renewed multiple times since its first issue. These warrants were criticized in the controversial for allegedly being issued on the basis of evidence gathered by politically motivated sources.

Composition When the court was founded, it was composed of seven judges appointed by the , each serving a seven-year term, with one judge being appointed each year. In 2001, the expanded the court from seven to eleven judges, and required that at least three of the Court's judges live within twenty miles (32 km) of the . No judge may be appointed to this court more than once, and no judge may be appointed to both the Court of Review and the FISA court.

Chief Justice John Roberts has appointed all of the current judges.

Membership (as of 1 January 2020)

JudgeJudicial districtDate appointedTerm expiryReferenceMay 19, 2014May 18, 2021January 1, 2020 PresidingMarch 8, 2013March 7, 2020May 19, 2016May 18, 2023May 19, 2016May 18, 2023July 2, 2019May 18, 2026May 19, 2015May 18, 2022May 19, 2017May 18, 2024May 4, 2013May 3, 2020May 19, 2015May 18, 2022May 19, 2019May 18, 2026May 19, 2018May 18, 2025Former members JudgeJudicial districtDate appointedTerm expiryRefJune 8, 1989May 18, 1992May 19, 1998May 18, 2005February 22, 2006February 21, 2013May 19, 2009 PresidingApril 8, 2004April 7, 2011December 2, 1981May 18, 1984October 1, 2002May 18, 2009July 17, 1997May 18, 2004January 1, 1979 January 1, 1986September 10, 1993May 18, 2000May 19, 2002May 18, 2008February 2, 1993May 18, 1999May 19, 2011January 8, 2013May 19, 2002October 30, 2003May 19, 1987November 20, 1989May 19, 1981May 18, 1988May 19, 1999May 18, 2006July 2, 2012July 1, 2019 January 11, 1985November 10, 1992February 13, 2013May 18, 2019May 19, 2010May 18, 2017May 30, 1990May 18, 1994May 19, 2001May 18, 2008May 19, 1988May 18, 1995May 19, 1990 PresidingMay 19, 1979 PresidingMay 18, 1982May 19, 2000May 18, 2007May 19, 2009May 18, 2016May 19, 2014 PresidingMay 19, 2005January 8, 2012July 15, 2003May 18, 2010July 24, 1994May 18, 2001May 19, 2002 PresidingMay 18, 2009May 19, 1979May 18, 1985May 19, 1995 PresidingMay 18, 2002May 19, 1979May 18, 1980July 5, 1985April 8, 1989May 19, 1979May 18, 1983May 19, 2008May 18, 2015May 19, 1979 May 18, 1981September 21, 1989May 18, 1996May 19, 1986May 18, 1993May 19, 1983May 18, 1990May 19, 1988 PresidingMay 19, 1980May 18, 1987May 19, 1979January 1, 1981May 19, 2002December 19, 2008May 19, 2011May 18, 2018August 5, 1992May 18, 1999May 19, 2004January 8, 2011May 19, 1982 PresidingMay 18, 1988May 19, 1996May 18, 2003June 11, 1990May 18, 1997May 4, 2006May 3, 2013May 19, 2007May 18, 2014February 22, 2013 PresidingMay 19, 2009May 18, 2016May 19, 2008May 18, 2015See also References Notes

References

Current active judges of the [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1]Retrieved from "": Hidden categories: Pelosi pulls vote on FISA bill after Trump veto threat | TheHill ...

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Editions Africa Australia Canada Canada (français) España France Global Perspectives Indonesia New Zealand United Kingdom United States Sections Search Services Information United Kingdom The E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse houses the FISA court. AP Photo/ Evan Vucci Author Disclosure statement Lacey Wallace does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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On Feb. 2, President Donald Trump allowed the release of the previously classified The memo, written by Republican congressional aides, criticized information used as the basis for a FISA court surveillance application related to the Mueller probe into Russia’s possible involvement in the 2016 election.

But what exactly is the FISA court? And how does it work?

1. When was the FISA court established? Congress passed FISA, or the in 1978. FISA was originally introduced by Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. The act was largely a response to to investigate U.S. citizens.

Its purpose was to provide oversight for foreign intelligence surveillance activities. These might include tracing telephone and email use, conducting physical searches or accessing business records. FISA lays out for these activities.

FISA applies only to “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers.” Basically, this means that FISA is used to gather information about people who work for the governments of other countries. Investigators are typically not allowed to target U.S. citizens under FISA. In fact, if information about a U.S. citizen is accidentally discovered, the law requires those records to be destroyed.

But there are some notable exceptions.

One is when the discovered information shows that there is a threat of death or serious harm to another person. Another is that officials can wiretap U.S. citizens while they are overseas. Importantly, FISA warrants can also be requested to monitor U.S. citizens believed to be acting on behalf of a foreign power.

As part of FISA, Congress established the , or FISA court.

The FISA court is a U.S. federal court whose purpose is to review and rule on search warrant requests made under FISA. Each year, the FISA court is required to provide a report to Congress of its activities. These include the number of requests made under FISA, but not the content of those requests. That content is not a matter of public record.

2. How is FISA court different from other courts? FISA court is not like a typical criminal court.

First, Department of Justice officials seeking a warrant or is about to happen. That sort of evidence, also known as probable cause, would be needed to obtain a typical search warrant in criminal court. Instead, officials only need to provide evidence that the target of surveillance is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.

Second, investigators can conduct surveillance for up to a year if authorized by the president. For this to occur, the U.S. Attorney General has to certify to the court that there is minimal risk that the investigation will turn up information about U.S. citizens. The U.S. Attorney General must also certify to the court that the target of the investigation is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power. These requirements parallel what Department of Justice officials would need to demonstrate in FISA court in order to obtain a FISA court warrant.

Third, the FISA court is closed to the public. Unlike a criminal court, there is no jury and the government is the only party present. In other words, FISA court proceedings do not involve prosecutors and defense attorneys arguing on behalf of clients. The FISA court is simply hearing the requests of officials seeking search warrants. This is very similar to what happens when local law enforcement officials seek a search warrant.

However, FISA court records are not open to the public. In rare cases, some records have been released with redacted information. The U.S. president also has the authority to information at his discretion. This is different from normal police investigations, where search warrants generally become unless sealed by a judge.

While many state criminal court judges are , are appointed by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, currently Justice John Roberts.

The 11 FISA judges are selected from across the U.S. federal circuits. These judges may serve for a maximum of seven years. Since not all judges are required at any one time, FISA court judges perform their duties on a . They don’t serve full time on the FISA court.

One similarity to a typical criminal court is that an is available. If a FISA court judge denies a search request, that judge must explain the reasons for the denial. Then, a panel of three federal judges appointed by the chief justice reviews the search request. This panel is called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. If the request is again denied, the U.S. Supreme Court has the authority to review the decision. There is no option for appeal by the person being investigated because he or she is unaware of the surveillance.

3. How many cases does the FISA court handle? In 2016, the FISA court reviewed for surveillance. While higher than the number of requests reviewed in 2014 (1,379) and 2015 (1,457), the number of requests has remained at 1,200 or higher since 2001.

It is rare for these requests to be denied. Of the requests made in 2016, only 34 were rejected. In most years, no requests were denied.

Since the proceedings of the court are secret, it is unclear why these denials occurred or why so few cases were denied.

It is also unclear how the current controversy over the Nunes memo will affect FISA operations in the future, if at all.

Events Trump to veto FISA bill if it passes House - TeleTrader.com

Trump to veto FISA bill if it passes House - TeleTrader.com

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