Archive

How to Fix the Internet #1: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Our topic today is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is also called the FISC or the FISA Court. The judges who sit on this court are hand-picked by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court; that’s currently Justice Roberts. The FISA Court meets in secret, and has a limited public docket. And until recently it had almost no public records of its decisions.

Cindy Cohn at Aaron Swartz Day 2015

We’ve got an inflection point opportunity here and we ought to be talking about this European Court of Justice opinion and what it means, because what the European Court of Justice said is the NSA surveillance is not appropriate.