Whilst reading this artcle about Yahoo and their attempts to demonstrate how little they had cooperated with the NSA regarding the Prism spying programme, I found a reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

I find the existence and purpose of the FISC to be both worrying and bizarre. As you can read here, the court was established by the US Congress in 1978 to "oversee requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States by federal law enforcement agencies" (mostly requests by the NSA and the FBI).

Normally, the requirement for law enforcement and surveillance agencies to obtain a court approved warrant would give us all a nice feeling of safety; the feeling that our rights were being upheld. It seems that is not justified in this case. The FISC is outside of the normal judicial system: judges are appointed solely by the Supreme Court Chief Justice, without confirmation or oversight by the U.S. Congress. There is no effective judicial oversight, and the whole process is highly secretive. Requests are almost never refused (during the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while just four were rejected). There are strong suspicions of pro-government bias in the court.

One thing which I find odd is that the Prism programme was (apparently) approved by the court at all. US government statements have assured us that Prism does not spy on US citizens or US residents, but the court has the remit to "oversee requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States". If this is so, their only interest in Prism would be cases of spying on foreign nationals who are not resident in the US, whilst the are temporarily in the US (only a subset of the activities of Prism). There actually seems to be no judicial system for approval of spying on foreign intelligence agents when they are outside of the US. Where is the system to ensure that espionage is conducted in accordance with the laws of those other countries having legal jurisdiction over the surveillance targets, and to guarantee the constitutional rights of those foreign nationals? The answer, of course, is that the USA does not care about the laws in other countries (including their allies), but the USA are not alone is this.

Is this really the kind of world that you want to live in?