Wyden calls Fisa court 'anachronistic' as pressure builds on Senate to act
Pressure is building within the US Senate for an overhaul of the secret court that is supposed to act as a check on the National Security Agency's executive power, with one prominent senator describing the judicial panel as "anachronistic" and outdated.
Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator for Oregon, said discussions were under way about how to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, the body entrusted with providing oversight on the NSA and its metadata-collecting activities. He told C-Span's Newsmaker programme on Sunday that the court, which was set up in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), was ill-equipped to deal with the massive digital dragnet of millions of Americans' phone records developed by the NSA in recent years.
"In many particulars, the Fisa court is anachronistic – they are using processes that simply don't fit the times," Wyden said.
There clearly seems to be a movement afoot for some accountability. The biggest problem with evaluating the effectiveness and legality of the FISA court, or the FISC as it is officially named, is the secrecy in which all of its dealings are cloaked. Most government institutions are supposed to be open to public scrutiny. If they are found to be engaging in hidden transactions, that is viewed as a defective practice.
The court was originally setup in 1979 in the wake of the findings of the Church committee. It seems likely that from then until 9/11 its operations were limited in purpose and scope. It was the clearly illegal over reach of the Bush administration that set off what looks like mission glut. The 2008 amendments that were passed just as Bush was on the way out the door were intended to legalize the activities that his administration had been conducting. We really don't have a clear picture of how things have operated under the Obama administration.
On Sunday, the prominent Democratic senator for Illinois, Dick Durbin, added his voice to the mounting criticism of the Fisa court, telling ABC's This Week: "There should be a real court proceeding. In this case, it's fixed in a way, it's loaded. There's only one case coming before the Fisa, the government's case. Let's have an advocate for someone standing up for civil liberties to speak up about the privacy of Americans."
Last week's vote on the Amash-Conyers amendment seems to be turning up the heat under the boiling pot.