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.