isn't taking "No" as an answer. There's no oversight. Frankly, we know little about the process. Read this article printed yesterday from 'Mother Jones'....Feinstein et. al. tried to get some info but the Fisa court mumbo jumboed her that it's intertwined with too much classified stuff. She was asking for general info...less the classified...of course.
Here's four paragraphs of it...go to link for more. See what you think.
"The FISA system is broken," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Journal. "At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of US citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review."
But according to Timothy Edgar, a top privacy lawyer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council under Bush and Obama, it's not quite as simple as the FISC rubber stamping nearly every application the government puts in front of it.
The reason so many orders are approved, he said, is that the Justice Department office that manages the process vets the applications rigorously... [S]o getting the order approved by the Justice Department lawyers is perhaps the biggest hurdle to approval. "The culture of that office is very reluctant to get a denial," he [told the Journal].
Still, the entire process is closed. The FISC court hears evidence for surveillance applications presented solely by the Department of Justice. The court does not have to release its opinions or any information regarding such hearings.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request
= new reply since forum marked as read