For those who don't know, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was set up in the seventies as a check on the FBI and later NSA. The idea is that FISC judges have all the relevant clearances, so if you need a warrant and can't tell an ordinary judge why, you go to the FISC so a warrant can be issued in accordance with all law and sanity. They also hold closed-door hearings (in their bunker of a courtroom) over abuses of power in the more secretive government agencies, in theory acting to prevent exactly the sort of scandal Snowden blew up open because they aren't doing their job.The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ducked an invitation to review the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's electronic eavesdropping practices.
The challenge was the first case to reach the court since documents leaked by Edward Snowden disclosed the broad outlines of the NSA's snooping programs.
The case was filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, but it was always considered a long shot because of the way it came to the court's doorstep. EPIC bypassed the lower courts and went directly to the Supreme Court, reasoning that only the justices could tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court what to do.
But such direct filings are rarely granted. Monday's rejection came without comment, as it the usual practice.
The challenge focused on the intelligence court's ruling that authorized government access to millions of Verizon phone-call records specifically.
The Obama administration argued in papers presented to the court that under existing law, only the government or Verizon itself could challenge a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The intelligence court's activities received widespread public attention in June when the British-based Guardian newspaper published the order that gave permission for the federal government to access data of telecoms giant Verizon.
Snowden, a former NSA contractor, later identified himself as the leaker and is currently in Russia on the run from the U.S. government. He faces a series of criminal charges for disclosing the full scope of domestic data-gathering activities.
The truth is, they've been a rubberstamp so long they're the only people still comically insisting they aren't.
So the first legal case to come out of Snowden's revelations won't be touched by the one court with the power to tell the FISC anything. Anyone care to bet on the follow-ups?
