How the FISA Court Undermines Trust
This is a succinct explanation of how the secrecy of the FISA court undermines trust.
Surveillance types make a distinction between secrecy of laws, secrecy of procedures and secrecy of operations. The expectation is that the laws that empower or limit the government’s surveillance powers are always public. The programs built atop those laws are often secret. And the individual operations are almost always secret. As long as the public knows about and agreed to the law, the thinking goes, it’s okay for the government to build a secret surveillance architecture atop it.
But the FISA court is, in effect, breaking the first link in that chain. The public no longer knows about the law itself, and most of Congress may not know, either. The courts have remade the law, but they’ve done so secretly, without public comment or review.
Reminds me of the two types of secrecy I wrote about last month.
Peter Andersson • July 23, 2013 1:31 PM
Once upon a time there was a president in the US who said:
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it…
I guess the times they are a changing, so to speak.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101206/01134912143/jfk-secrecy-censorship.shtml