Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which oversees intelligence surveillance within the United States, is a specialized body that meets in secret and hears only from the government. It was designed to grant individual warrants for foreign intelligence collection, and has always been especially accommodating to the NSA, approving well over 99 percent of the agency’s requests—a rate more suggestive of a ministerial rubber stamp than a deliberative judicial process. After 9/11, the court expanded its role from authorizing the surveillance of specific individuals to ruling on the legality and constitutionality of broad programmatic surveillance, without any adversarial scrutiny. A body that previously had been tasked with approving the surveillance of Foreign Terrorist #1 or Foreign Spy #2 was now being used to legitimize the whole combined infrastructure of PRISM and upstream collection. Judicial review of that infrastructure was reduced, in the words of the ACLU to a secret court upholding secret programs by secretly reinterpreting federal law.