Secret Laws, Secret Government

The FISA court in operation

Secret laws, secret government

8 July 2013

wsws.org

The secret court that hears applications for wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, has issued secret rulings that vastly expand the spy powers of the National Security Agency, according to a report Sunday in the New York Times .

The Times report gives a glimpse of the police-state infrastructure that underlies the threadbare trappings of democracy in the United States. The article begins:

“In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been mainly known as a rubber stamp for requests from the executive branch for spying authorization. Of the 33,949 requests filed by the government since the FISA court was established in 1978, only 11 have been denied.

The Times reports that in its secret rulings, however, “the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny…” The FISA court has “quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.”

This report confirms that under the Obama administration the tendencies towards police-state rule that emerged in the Bush administration—with its post-9/11 plans for a secret government that would rule the United States from Richard Cheney’s notorious “undisclosed secure location”—are not only continuing, but accelerating.

The Times article comes a month after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the British newspaper the Guardian a classified order from the FISA court authorizing the collection of all telephone metadata from customers of Verizon Business Services. It was widely reported at the time that similar orders were in effect for all customers of all US-based telecommunications firms.

Additional revelations have followed from Snowden, and more are promised. It is likely that the report in the Times is the result of an authorized “leak” from US military-intelligence sources, aimed at preempting an even more devastating exposure of US government spying on the American people and the population of the world.

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