US must fix secret Fisa courts, says top judge who granted surveillance orders

[JDPriestly]

7. If the government or a private non-profit appoints someone to represent the adversaries

to warrants, the system remains subject to corruption.

The person who appoints the adversary can control the adversary role and water the system down until there is no real adversary but merely the appearance of an adversary.

We need openness. The papers concerning the issuance of warrants should be required to be published or made available to the public within, say, six months or 1 year of the issuance of the warrant.

The purpose of warrants is to facilitate an investigation. The investigating authorities should have maybe six months to a year in which they are to complete their FISA court investigations -- no longer.

We are not even supposed, under our Constitution, to have a standing army without congressional review of its budget every couple of years. Our military and our Congress have set that limitation aside by automatically passing military budgets every couple of years.

With warrants, the warrants should be reissued. Remember, the FISA court is supposed to give these special warrants for the purposes of insuring national security. Six months to a year is, in my opinion, long enough for a warrant to be secret. If the government wants to snoop on someone's records for over a year, the person on whom they are snooping should be able to go to court and ask for evidence of probable cause for the searches.

For all we know, organizations like the ACLU or Electronic Frontier may be under permanent surveillance just because they defend our rights.

We citizens have a right to know. It's OK to keep military secrets, but the 4th Amendment as well as the First and Fifth Amendments were written to make sure that military secrets are not the excuse for reducing individual privacy and rights to nothing. And right now, it appears that is happening.

We cannot exercise our right to petition the government about surveillance of us if we do not have proof that the surveillance is taking place or has taken place.

The FISA court secrecy should be limited with regard to time. And after that period, any person aggrieved by the surveillance should be able to take the authorities or private companies doing the surveillance or receiving the information from the surveillance to court to show the probable cause justifying the surveillance.

Otherwise, the Bill of Rights is just one big, cruel joke giving us a sense of false security.