The United States Foreign Intelligence Supervisory Tribunal ( FISC , also called FISA Court ) is a US federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Oversight Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee the request for surveillance of foreign spies in the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Such requests are most often made by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Congress created the FISA and its trials as a result of recommendations by the US Senate Church Committee. In 2013, The New York Times said "Quietly became almost parallel to the Supreme Court."
Since it opened in 1978 to 2009, the court was placed on the sixth floor of the Robert F. Kennedy Building of the Department of Justice. Since 2009, the court has been transferred to E. Barrett Prettyman, United States Court in Washington, D.C.
In 2013, a secret order issued by the court, which later leaked to the media of documents taken by Edward Snowden, required Verizon's subsidiary to provide daily feeds, all call detail records - including for domestic calls - to the NSA.
Video United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
FISA guarantee
Every application for one of these surveillance warrants (called a FISA warrant) is made before each court judge. The court may allow third parties to submit reports as amici curiae . When the US Attorney General decides that an emergency exists, the Attorney General may authorize the emergency work of electronic surveillance before obtaining the necessary authorization from the FISC, if the Attorney General or the assignee notifies the court judge at the time of authorization and applies to the warrant as soon as possible but not more than seven days after the authorization of such supervision, as required by 50 USC Ã,§ 1805.
If a request is rejected by a court judge, the federal government is not allowed to apply the same to different court judges, but may appeal to the United States' Foreign Intelligence Oversight Tribunal. Such applications are rare: the first appeal from the FISC to the Court of Appeal was made in 2002 ( In Sealed Case No. 02-001 ), 24 years after the founding of the court.
Also rarely for FISA request warrants being denied. For 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while only four were rejected. Less than 200 requests had to be modified before they were received, almost all in 2003 and 2004. Four rejected requests all came from 2003, and four were partially awarded after being filed for reconsideration by the government. Of the requests to be modified, only slightly before 2000. Over the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were more than 15,100 additional warrants granted, and seven others were rejected. Over a 33-year period, the FISA court awarded 33,942 warrants, with only 12 rejections - a 0.03 percent rejection rate of total demand. This does not include the amount of warrants amended by the FISA court.
Note:
On 17 May 2002, the court rejected Attorney General John Ashcroft, issuing an opinion alleging that the FBI and Justice Department officials had "given wrong information to court" in over 75 applications for search warrants and eavesdropping, including those signed by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh. Whether this rejection related to the court began requiring significantly more modification of demand in 2003 is unknown.
On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration has been under surveillance of US citizens without the court's knowledge since 2002. On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson withdrew from his post. with the courts, apparently in protest of secret control, and later, in the wake of the Snowden leak of 2013, criticizing the extent approved by the courts from the scope of government oversight and allowed to create a private legal entity. Clear government offenses against the court began before the modification increase ordered the court to guarantee the request.
In 2011, the Obama administration quietly won the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Supervisory Tribunal to reverse the restrictions on the use of National National Agency phone calls and e-mails that were intercepted, allowing agents to search deliberately for American communications in massive databases. The search was conducted under the official Congress oversight program in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Oversight Act. Under the law, targets should be "reasonable" foreigners outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedure in a good order for one year. But a warrant for each target will no longer be needed. That means that communication with Americans can be picked up without trial in advance determining that there is a possible cause that the people they are talking to are terrorists, spies or "foreign powers". The FISC also extended the length of time the NSA was allowed to withhold US communications from five to six years with extensions allowing foreign intelligence or counter-intelligence purposes. Both actions are carried out without any public debate or particular authority from Congress.
Maps United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
Confidential
Because of the sensitive nature of the business, the court is a "secret tribunal" - the trial is closed to the public. While court records are kept, they are also not available to the public, although copies of some of the records with confidential edited information have been published. Due to the secret nature of the process, usually only licensed lawyers to practice in front of the US government are allowed to appear before the court. Due to the nature of the problems heard before, trials may be necessary at any time of day or night, weekday or weekend; thus, at least one judge must be "on call" at all times to hear evidence and decide whether to issue a warrant or not.
A highly edited version of Yahoo's 2008 appeal of an order issued in connection with the NSA's PRISM program has been issued for the confirmation of other potential applicants. The applicant's identity was declassified in June 2013.
Criticism
There has been increasing criticism of the courts since the September 11, 2001 attacks. This is partly because the court sits ex-parte - in other words, in the absence of anyone but the judge and the government present at the hearing. This, combined with the lack of requests that have been rejected by the court, has caused experts to characterize it as a rubber stamp (former National Security Agency analyst Russ Tice calls it a "rubber kangaroo court"). The accusation of being a "rubber stamp" was rejected by the FISA Court president Reggie B. Walton who wrote in a letter to Senator Patrick J. Leahy: "The annual statistics given to Congress by the Attorney General... - are often quoted in press reports as suggestions that the application level the Court's approval of more than 99% - only reflects the number of applications final submitted to and acted upon by the Court.This statistic does not reflect the fact that many applications are altered for prior or final submissions or even withheld from the final filing entirely, after an indication that the judge will not approve them. "He added:" There is a rigorous review process of the application submitted by the executive branch, pioneered initially by five lawyers of the judicial branch who are national security experts and subsequently by judges, to ensure that the authorities the courts comply with the prevailing laws. "In the letter following Walton stated that the government has changed 24.4% of its request in the face of questions and court demands within the period from 1 July 2013 to 30 September 2013. This figure becomes available after Walton decides in the summer of 2013 that the FISC will begin storing its own calculations on how the Department of Justice's request for electronic surveillance fared well - and will track for the first time when the government withdraws or resends the application with changes. Some requests were modified by the court but ultimately granted, while the percentage of declined requests was statistically negligible (11 denied requests from about 34,000 given in 35 years - equivalent to 0.03%). The accusation that the FISC is a "rubber stamp" court is also rejected by Robert S. Litt (General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence): "When [the Government] prepares an application for [section 215] command, first send [s] FISC] so-called "read copy", which will be reviewed and commented upon by court staff. [A] nd they will almost always come back with questions, concerns, problems they see and there is an iterative process between the Government and [FISC] to take care of the matter so that in the end, we are confident that we will present something that [FISC] will approve, almost no rubber stamp.This is a fairly extensive and serious judicial oversight of this process. "
The 2003 Senate Honorary Committee Interim Report on FBI Supervision at the 107th Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee: The FISA Application Failure cites the "unnecessary secrecy" of the court among its "most important conclusions":
The confidentiality of individual FISA cases is certainly necessary, but this confidentiality has been extended to the most basic legal and procedural aspects of FISA, which should not be kept secret. This unnecessary secrecy contributes to the shortcomings that have crippled the implementation of FISA. More information, including all unclassified views and operating rules of the FISA Court and the Court of Review, should be published and/or made available to Congress.
Allegations of bias
In a July 2013 interview, Senator and privacy advocate Ron Wyden described the FISC warrant process as "the most severe legal process in the United States". "I do not know of any legal system or other court that really does not highlight anything but a single point of view," he said. Later in the interview he said Congress should strive to "diversify some thoughts in court".
Elizabeth Gotein, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice National Liberty and Security Program at New York University Law School, has criticized the court for being too compromised to be an impartial tribunal overseeing the work of the NSA and other US intelligence activities. Since the court meets secretly, only hearing the arguments from the government before deciding on a case, and the verdict can not be appealed or even reviewed by the public, he argues that: "Like any other group meeting secretly behind closed doors with only one constituency in front of them, they can be arrested and biased. "
The relevant bias from the trial of what critics like Julian Sanchez, a scholar at the Cato Institute, has been described as a close certainty of polarization or the thinking of a group of judge courts. Since all judges are appointed by the same person (Chief Justice of the United States), in 2013 almost all judges currently serving come from the same political party (Republicans), do not hear opposing testimonies and feel no pressure from colleagues or communities to moderate their decision, group polarization is almost certain. "There is a real possibility that these judges are becoming more extreme over time, even when they have only a light bias to begin with," Sanchez said.
The appointment process
Justice judges are appointed only by the United States Justice Chief without confirmation or supervision by the US Congress. This gives justice to the chairman to appoint like-minded judges and make courts without diversity. "The judges were elected directly by someone who, through his voice in the Supreme Court, we have come to learn to have a particular view of civil liberties and law enforcement", Theodore Ruger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said in connection with Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. "The way FISA is organized, it gives him unbridled authority to put a judge in court who feels the same as him." And since Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, added, "Since the FISA was enacted in 1978, we have three chief justices, and they have all become conservative Republicans, so I think one can worry that there is diversity In May 2014, however, four of the five judges appointed by Supreme Court Justice Roberts to the FISA Court were appointed to previous federal court positions by President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
There are several proposals for reform. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut proposed that each chief judge of the 12 main appeals courts elect a district judge for a supervisory trial; The Chief Judge will still choose a review panel that hears a rare appeal from a court decision, but the other six Supreme Court Justices must sign. Another proposal written by Representative Adam Schiff of California will give the president the power to nominate a judge for the court, subject to Senate approval, while Representative Steve Cohen proposes that Congressional leaders choose eight court members.
Judicial and public oversight
Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, believes that, without seeking approval from the courts (which he says only review certifications to ensure that they - and not the oversight themselves - comply with various statutory requirements), the Attorney General The US and the Director of National Intelligence may engage in programmed program supervision for one year at a time. There are procedures used by the NSA to target non-US people and procedures used by the NSA to minimize data collection from US people. This court approved policy allows the NSA to do the following:
- stores data that potentially contains details of US people for up to five years;
- defend and utilize "accidentally-acquired" domestic communication if it contains usable intelligence, information about criminal activity, threats to persons or property, encrypted or believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
- preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained in client-client communication; and
- access the communications content collected from "US based machine [s]" or phone number to determine whether the target is located in the US, for the purpose of stopping further surveillance.
Jameel Jaffer, the legal director of the ACLU representative, said in light of the revelation that the government secured phone records from Verizon and Internet data from some of the largest providers that the protection that should protect individual privacy is not working. Elizabeth Goitein, deputy director of the National Liberty and Security Program at Brennan Center for Justice in New York, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that when the court made a mistake, the losers had the right to appeal and wrongly reversed the decision. "The process can not happen when a secret tribunal considers one case only with one previous party."
According to the The Guardian , "The wide scope of the court order, and the nature of the procedures set out in the document, appears to be clashing with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA can not access calls or email information of people America without warrant ". Glenn Greenwald, who published the details of the PRISM surveillance program, explained:
that the whole process is a fig leaf, "oversight" in name only. It does not offer any real protection. That's because no court monitored what the NSA actually did when it claimed to comply with a court-approved procedure. After the Fisa trial put the stamp of approval on the NSA procedure, no external legal examination of which target was chosen by NSA analysts to eavesdrop. The only individual warrants required are when the NSA specifically targets US citizens or communications are purely domestic. When it was time for the NSA to get Fisa's court approval, the agency did not notify the court that the call and its email would be intercepted. It not only provides general guidelines which it claims to use by analysts to determine which individuals they can target, and Fisa court judges then issue simple orders that approve the guidelines. The Court endorses the composition of a one-paragraph form stating that the process of NSA " 'contains all the necessary elements' and that the NSA, FBI and CIA minimization procedures filed with amendments are' consistent with the requirements [50 USC Ã, 1881a (e)] and by the fourth amendment to the United States Constitution ' ". As a typical example, The Guardian has obtained the approval of the Fisa court on August 19, 2010 from Judge John D. Bates which does more than read the official language in approving the NSA guidelines.
Once the NSA gets this court approval, the NSA can target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even instruct telecommunications and internet companies to hand them email, chat and calls from those they target. The Fisa court did not play any role in reviewing whether the approved procedure was fully met when the NSA began eavesdropping on calls and reading people's emails. The guidelines submitted by the NSA to the Fisa court show how much of the policy the institution has in choosing who to target.... The sole oversight to monitor whether abuse exists from the executive branch itself: from the DOJ and the Director of National Intelligence, conducting a "periodic review... to evaluate the implementation of the procedure". At a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday afternoon, deputy attorney general James Cole testified that every 30 days, the Fisa court is only given an "aggregate amount" of database searches on US domestic phone records.... The decision about who has his email and phone calls blocked by the NSA is made by the NSA itself, not by the Fisa court, except where the NSA itself concludes that the person is a US citizen and/or communications only domestic. But even in such cases, the NSA often ends up intercepting communications of Americans without an individual warrant, and all of this is left to the wisdom of NSA analysts without real judicial supervision.
Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole and NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis cited court oversight in defending the constitutionality of the NSA's oversight activities before the hearing before the House of Justice Committee in July 2013. Nadler's Jerrold representative opposed Cole's defense of the constitutionality of the program, and he said the confidentiality in which the courts function eliminates the validity of their review. "The fact that a secret tribunal can not be held publicly accountable for what it does... may join you in abusing or abusing the law is not fun at all", says Nadler. 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 runs the broad powers Congress provides. "The FISA court judge heard all this and they thought it was legal," Kerr said. "What we really do not know, is the opinion of the FISA court."
Secret law
In July 2013, The New York Times publishes the disclosure of the secret government secret disclosures written by a court that holds a huge collection of data on all Americans (even those who are not connected in any way to foreign enemies) collecting by the NSA does not violate the requirements of the Fourth Amendment warrant against the US Constitution. It reports that anyone suspected of involvement in nuclear proliferation, espionage or cyber attacks, according to the court, may be considered a legitimate target for unsecured surveillance. Acting like the US Supreme Court are parallel, the court greatly extends the exception of "special needs" to do so.
The newspaper reported that in "more than a dozen secret rules, the state surveillance tribunal has created a covert legal body that gives the National Security Agency the power to collect huge data collections about Americans". He also wrote, in connection with the court:
In one of the most important decisions of the courts, the judges have extended their use in terrorism cases from a legal principle known as the doctrine of 'special needs' and carved an exception to the requirements of the Fourth Amendment of a warrant for search and seizure... The doctrine of special needs was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a decision enabling drug testing of railroad workers, found that minimal intrusions on privacy were justified by the government's need to combat large public hazards. Applying the concept more broadly, FISA judges have decided that the collection and inspection of American SSS data to track the possibility of terrorists does not collide with the Fourth Amendment, officials said. The interpretation of the law is significant, say some outside jurists, because it uses relatively narrow legal areas - used to justify checking at airports, for example, or checkpoints of drunk driving - and apply them more broadly, in secret, to wholesale communication collections in pursuit terrorism suspects.
The doctrine of "special needs" is an exception to the Fourth Amendment Guardian Clause ordering that "no Warrants shall be issued, but on a probable basis, endorsed by Oath or affirmation, and in particular explaining the place to be sought, and persons or objects -become to be and confiscated ". The Supreme Court has acknowledged the exclusion of the Clause Warrant "out of the context of foreign intelligence, in the so-called 'special needs' of the case.In those cases, the Court condoned compliance with the Warrant Clause when the purpose behind government action went beyond routine law enforcement and enforcing a warrant would materially disrupt the achievement of that goal.11 See, Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton , 515 US 646, 653 (1995) (enforcing high school athlete drug tests and explaining that exceptions to the requirements of a warrant applied "when special needs, beyond the normal requirement for law enforcement, make warrants and the probable causes of [s] improper (cite Griffin v. Wisconsin , 483 US 868, 873 (1987)) ); Skinner v. Ry. Execution of Labor. Ass'n , 489 U.S. 602, 620 (1989) (regulation enforcing drug and alcohol testing of railway workers for security reasons); cf. Terry v. Ohio , 392 US 1, 23-24 (1968) (uphold pat-frisk for weapons to protect officer safety during stopping sweeps). "The US Foreign Intelligence Supervisory Court concluded on August 22, 2008, in the case of In the Directive [edited text] Under Article 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act , that" special needs "doctrine is applied by analogy to justify the exclusion of foreign intelligence to the requirements of a warrant for supervision made for national security purposes and directed at foreign powers or agents of foreign powers believed to be outside the US.
James Robertson - a former judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia, who, in 2004, ruled against the Bush administration in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and also served at the FISC for three years between 2002 and 2005 - said he was "absolutely shocked" by the newspaper report that a court ruling has created a new legal entity that expands the NSA's ability to use its oversight program to targeting 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 University of Chicago, said he was troubled by the idea that courts are creating significant legal entities without hearing from anyone outside the government, to abandon the hostile system that is central to the American judicial system. He said, "The whole idea is lost in this process".
The Court concluded that mass telephone metadata collection (including phone call time and contact number) does not violate the Fourth Amendment as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security rules before taking the next step to thoroughly examine the content of an American communications. This concept is rooted in part in the doctrine of special needs. "The basic idea is that O.K. to create this huge data pool", an unnamed US official said, "but you have to set a reason to put your stick in the water and start fishing." Under the new procedure passed by the US Congress in the 2008 FISA Act Amendment, even the collection of metadata should be considered "relevant" to the investigation of terrorism or other intelligence activities. The court has indicated that while each piece of data may not appear "relevant" to terrorism investigations, the total picture that the data bits created may actually be relevant, according to US officials with knowledge of the decision.
A secret decision made by the court that redefined a single "relevant" word allowed the NSA to collect phone data on millions of Americans. In secret orders beginning in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that "relevant" could be extended to allow the entire database of records to millions of people, in contrast to more conservative interpretations applied in many criminal cases, where only a few records were likely will be allowed. Under the Patriot Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation may require the company to submit "tangible things", including "notes", as long as the FBI shows that it is reasonable to believe that these are "relevant to official investigations" of international terrorism. or foreign intelligence activities. The history of the word "relevant" is the key to understanding that passage. The Supreme Court in 1991 said things were "relevant" if there was a "reasonable possibility" that they would produce information related to the subject of the inquiry. In a criminal case, the court has previously found that a very large set of information does not meet the standards of relevance because a significant part - innocent people information - will not be relevant. But the court has developed a separate precedent, centering on the idea that investigations to prevent national security threats are different from ordinary criminal cases. Court rulings about such matters are classified and almost impossible to challenge due to the secret nature of the process. According to the court, the special nature of the national security case and the prevention of terrorism means "relevant" can have a broader meaning for the investigation, say people familiar with the verdict.
People familiar with the system using phone records in the investigation say that a new legal court theory allows the system to enter mass phone records, as long as there is privacy protection to restrict the search. NSA analysts may ask the database only "if there is any reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the specific basis for the request is related to a foreign terrorist organization," according to National Intelligence Director James Clapper. The NSA database includes data about people's phone calls - the number dialed, how long the call lasted - but not the actual conversation. According to the Supreme Court ruling, the content of a phone call is covered by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which limits the search which makes no sense, but other types of data do not.
"Relevant" has long been a broad standard, but the way the court interprets it, meaning, basically, "everything," is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a lawyer who until December 2012 is the primary authority of the Department of Justice on federal criminal law. "I think it's a stretch" from a previous interpretation of federal law, says Eckenwiler. If a federal lawyer "serves a grand jury call for such a broad class of records in a criminal investigation, he will be laughed off the court". Given the relevant traditional legal definition, Timothy Edgar, a former top privacy lawyer at the Office of the National Intelligence Director and National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations, noted it is a "fair point" to say that a person reading the law might believe it refers to "demand individual "or" requests in small batches, rather than in large database form ". From that point of view, Edgar says, reinterpretation of the amount relevant to the "secret law".
Controversy
NSA controversy 2013
In June 2013, a copy of a secret warrant issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to the London newspaper The Guardian by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. That command Verizon Business Network Services to provide daily feeds to the NSA containing "phone metadata" - comprehensive call details details, including location data - on all calls in the system, including what happened "entirely within the United States, including local phone calls". The Obama Administration publishes on July 31, 2013, the FISA Court supports the previous order that requires Verizon's subsidiary to submit all of its subscriber phone logs for a period of three months, with rules to be followed when accessing the data.
The document was leaked to The Guardian acting as a "smoking gun" and sparked public condemnation of criticism and complaints that the court exceeded its authority and violated the Fourth Amendment by issuing a public warrant. The Washington Post later reported that they knew of another order, and that the court had issued the order, to all telecommunication companies, every three months since May 24, 2006.
Because the phone metadata program is revealed, the intelligence community, some members of Congress, and the Obama administration have defended its legality and usage. Much of this defense involves the Supreme Court decision of 1979 Smith v. Maryland that stipulates that people do not have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy for electronic metadata held by third parties such as mobile providers. The data is not considered "content", theoretically giving law enforcement more flexibility in collecting it.
On July 19, 2013, the court renewed permission for the NSA to collect Verizon customer records in bulk. The US government relies on part of the American case law known as "third party doctrine". This idea says that when a person voluntarily discloses information to a third party - in this case, the telephone metadata - customers no longer have reasonable expectations about the privacy of the number being dialed or their duration. Therefore, this doctrine argues, such metadata can be accessed by law enforcement which is basically no problem. The content of the communication, however, is subject to the Fourth Amendment. The Foreign Intelligence Oversight Tribunal was held in October 2011, citing some of the precedents of the Supreme Court, that the Fourth Amendment Ban against unwarranted search and seizure applies to the content of all communications, regardless of how, for "personal personal communication is the same as a personal paper".
The former FISC judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who provided the legal basis for the NSA to collect a database of all American phone records, told colleagues in the summer of 2013 that he wanted his legal arguments out. The decision for plaintiffs in the case brought by the ACLU on 10 and 12 September 2013, prompted James Clapper to recognize that the government has overstepped the secret control under section 215 of FISA and that the Act is likely to be amended to reflect Congress's attention.
The American Civil Liberties Union, a Verizon customer, requested on November 22, 2013 a federal district court in Lower Manhattan, New York to end the NSA call data collection program. The ACLU believes that the program violates the US Constitution's privacy and information guidance and goes beyond the scope of its authorization law, Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The US government denied that the program was constitutional and Congress was fully informed when it authorized and re-authorized Section 215. In addition, a government lawyer said the ACLU had no position to bring the case because it could not prove that its members had been harmed by the NSA's use of data.
Controversy 2016 presidential election
In November 2016, Louise Mensch reported on the Heat Street news website that, after the FBI request in June 2016 was rejected, the FISA court had granted a more focused October request from the FBI "to examine the activities of 'US people' in Donald Trump's campaign with relations with Russia ". On January 12, 2017, the BBC's Paul Wood reported that, in response to an April 2016 tip from a foreign intelligence agency to the CIA on "money from the Kremlin that will enter the US presidential campaign", a joint task force has been formed including representatives from the FBI, the Department Finance, Department of Justice, CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and National Security Agency. In June 2016, lawyers from the Ministry of Justice appealed to the FISA court for "permission to intercept electronic records of two Russian banks". According to Wood, the app was rejected, due to more focused demand in July, and the order was finally given by different FISA judges on October 15, three weeks before the presidential election. On January 19, the New York Times reported that one of its sources had claimed "intelligence reports based on some tapped communications have been given to the White House".
On March 13, the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded the Trump administration provide evidence to support President Trump's claim that former President Obama had tapped into Trump Tower. On March 16, the Committee reported that they saw no evidence to support Trump's allegations that the Obama administration was tapping his phone during the 2016 presidential campaign.
On Fox News on March 14, commentator Andrew Napolitano said, "Three intelligence sources have told Fox News that President Obama went out of the chain of command.... He uses GCHQ What is it? This is the initials for the British intelligence spy agency Simply by telling them, 'The President needs a conversation transcript involving the conversation of Trump's candidate' he can get it and no American fingerprints in this case. "Two days later, on March 16, White House press spokesman Sean Spicer read out a claim this to the press. A GCHQ spokesman replied: "The latest allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to do a 'wiretap' against the elected president is nonsense - they are absolutely ridiculous and should be ignored. On March 17, the United States issued an official apology to the UK on the allegations.
On April 11, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had been granted a FISA warrant in the summer of 2016 to monitor Trump's foreign policy advisor, Carter Page. According to the report, "The FBI and the Justice Department obtained a warrant targeting the Carter Page communication after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Supervisory Court judge that there is a reason to believe Page acted as a foreign power agent, in this case Russia, according to officials." The report also states that the warrant has been updated several times since the first edition. This warrant was criticized in controversial Nunes memo for allegedly being issued on the basis of evidence collected by politically motivated sources. However, this memo has been attacked by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, as well as law enforcement authorities and intelligence officials because it is supposedly written in a misleading and partisan way and ignores important details.
Composition
When the court was established, it consisted of seven federal district judges appointed by the United States Justice Chief, each serving a term of seven years, with one judge appointed each year. In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act extended the trial from seven to eleven judges, and required at least three Court judges to live within twenty miles (32 km) of the District of Columbia. No judge may be brought to this court more than once, and no judge may be appointed to the Court of Appeal and the FISA court.
By 2017, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has appointed all judges today, four of whom are nominated to their District Court judges by the Democratic President.
Membership
(starting May 19, 2017)
Former member
See also
- The national commission de contrÃÆ'Â'le des interceptions de sÃÆ' Â © curitÃÆ'Â ©
- In re: Sealed Case No. 02-001
- The NSA calls the database
- NSA warrantless surveillance (2001-07)
- CHAOS operation
References
Note
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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