Supreme Court Justice John Roberts is the guy who appoints judges to the FISA court. He is said to be "quietly reshaping the court" into a cat's paw of pro-government, statist, Republican politics. His choices are getting some scrutiny.
In making assignments to the court, Chief Justice Roberts, more than his predecessors, has chosen judges with conservative and executive branch backgrounds that critics say make the court more likely to defer to government arguments that domestic spying programs are necessary.
Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts — were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials. ...NYT
In other words, Bush/Cheney/Reagan people, with Dick Cheney as the common denominator since the Nixon administration.
The Times notes that -- before Roberts -- the chief justices were also conservative, but they did what they were expected to do: they appointed both conservatives and liberals.
It comes down to this: FISA serves the Executive Branch and has done so since Bush/Cheney occupied the White House. A warrant with executive approval gets no scrutiny from the court. The White House wants a search? It gets a search.
Midway through the Bush administration, the executive branch sought and obtained the court’s legal blessing to continue secret surveillance programs that had originally circumvented the FISA process.
The court’s power has also recently expanded in another way. In 2008, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act to allow the National Security Agency to keep conducting a form of the Bush administration’s program of surveillance without warrants on domestic soil so long as only foreigners abroad were targeted. It gave the court the power to create rules for the program, like how the government may use Americans’ communications after they are picked up. ...NYT
FISA became an arm of executive policy making. See, for example, one of Edward Snowden's revelations.
Obama seems to be caught in the middle on this. Leaving aside a notably corrupt Republican leadership, one has to wonder who is more valuable to the American people at this point: Obama or Snowden? And which man represents the greater threat to our democracy, Roberts or Snowden?The first of the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden was a top-secret order to a Verizon subsidiary requiring it to turn over three months of calling records for all its customers. It was signed by Judge Roger Vinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan who had previously achieved prominence in 2011 when he tried to strike down the entirety of President Obama’s health care law.
Chief Justice Roberts assigned Judge Vinson to the surveillance court in 2006, one of 12 Republican appointees, compared with 2 Democratic ones. ...NYT
