Word: fisa
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...power to spy within the U.S. Then came the intelligence-gathering abuses of the Nixon years, when the NSA as well as the FBI were used by the White House to spy on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists. In 1978 Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which required the NSA to obtain a warrant any time it sought to monitor communications within the U.S. (Outside the U.S., it still enjoys a free hand.) The new law created the FISA court, an 11-member secret panel whose job it is to hear the NSA requests and issue...
...Administration maintains that advances in technology since FISA was passed make the court's procedures too slow to contend with the immense flood of electronic chatter that now passes in and out of the U.S. and which the agency has much improved means of capturing and analyzing. Justice Department officials say a FISA surveillance request can take up to a week to prepare, even for some seasoned department lawyers. One of them describes the requests as being "like mortgage applications" in their complexity. "When you get a terrorist's cell phone and there are 20 numbers in it," a former...
...that's so, the program's critics ask, then why not just apply to the FISA court first for a warrant, especially when the court has rarely stood in the way of any warrant request? According to the Justice Department, from 1979 to 2004 the court approved 18,724 wiretaps and denied only three, all in 2003. (Despite the 2002 presidential order allowing the NSA to work without a warrant when it chooses to, the agency has continued in many cases to apply for them. Last year it sought 1,754.) But the court has been subjecting the applications...
...also has the technology to perform data mining, combing by computer through billions of phone calls and Internet messages and looking for patterns that may point to terrorist activity. That requires sifting through a mountain of individual communications to find the one that might lead to something. Under FISA, the NSA would have to obtain a warrant for each suspect phone number. Authorities argue that the FISA process is too slow to cover a situation in which a known terrorist calls a number in the U.S. not already covered by a FISA warrant...
...Carter said that the FBI does not have the resources or the desire to go on “fishing expeditions.” In order to obtain records of the books an individual has checked out, Carter said, the FBI needs approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, whose proceedings are not open to the public. The FBI can request other records, including those of internet usage or e-mail addresses, by issuing a National Security Letter (NSL), which a senior FBI official can authorize, Carter said. “The level of review that...