The Washington Post's lead article today describes the dismay of judges on the secret FISA court -- dismay at how their role is being questioned and criticized by the media and the public as overly secretive, authoritarian, and inappropriate in free country.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took the highly unusual step Friday of voicing open frustration at the account in the report and court’s inability to explain its decisions.
“In my view, that draft report contains major omissions, and some inaccuracies, regarding the actions I took as Presiding Judge of the FISC and my interactions with Executive Branch officials,” Kollar-Kotelly said in a statement to The Post. ...WaPo
This is hardly the first time Post reporters have looked at Kollar-Kotelly's rulings. In 2006, the Reagan-appointed Colleen Kollar-Kotelly also suffered from press queries about her job, warnings that Bush/Cheney spying was clearly illegal.
Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.
The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen... WaPo
Kollar-Kotelly and another FISA judge had indeed shown some concern about the Bush administration's spying but did nothing, effectively, about it.
The two judges' discomfort with the NSA spying program was previously known. But this new account reveals the depth of their doubts about its legality and their behind-the-scenes efforts to protect the court from what they considered potentially tainted evidence. The new accounts also show the degree to which Baker, a top intelligence expert at Justice, shared their reservations and aided the judges.
Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president's power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.
It was an odd position for the presiding judges of the FISA court ...WaPo
Here we are, seven years later, raising the same questions with the same judge. Is that fair?
In the comment section of today's report in the Post, the response from at least one reader is clear and unforgiving.
Even if this court turned down every request from NSA, the principle of a secret court which issues secret opinions is incompatible with even the broadest understanding of what democracy (or republic) means. ..."TMX"
Gradually Americans are learning what "national security" really means when applied by a bought-'n'-paid-for government whose components depend financially on a private sector that, in turn, has come to depend on huge profits from illicit data collection, manipulation of voters, and foreign wars.
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None of this is helps the US government in its relationship with the rest of the world.
The president of the European parliament has called for "full clarification" from the US over claims it bugged EU offices in America and accessed computer networks.
Martin Schulz said it would have a "severe impact" on relations between the EU and the US if revelations by German magazine Der Spiegel are true.
Der Spiegel reported that the US had bugged offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks, according to secret documents – the latest in a series of exposures of alleged US spy programmes.
It quoted from a "top secret" US National Security Agency (NSA) document from September 2010 that Der Spiegel said former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had taken with him, and which the magazine's journalists had seen in part.
Der Spiegel said the document outlines how the NSA bugged offices and spied on EU internal computer networks in Washington and at the United Nations, listening to conversations and phone calls and gaining access to documents and emails. It said the document explicitly called the EU a target. ...The Guardian
The punishment for Edward Snowden's grit is bound to be unpretty.
