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← The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) is a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Such requests are made most often by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Congress created FISA and its court as a result of the recommendations by the U.S. Senate's Church Committee. Its powers have evolved and expanded to the point that it has been called "almost a parallel Supreme Court." Since 2009, the court has been relocated to the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C.〔 "For about 30 years, the court was located on the sixth floor of the Justice Department's headquarters, down the hall from the officials who would argue in front of it. (The court moved to the District's federal courthouse in 2009.)"〕 For roughly thirty years of its history (prior to 2009), it was housed on the sixth floor of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building.〔〔 In 2013 a top-secret order issued by the court, later leaked to the media via journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill from documents culled by Edward Snowden, required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed of all call detail records including those for domestic calls to the NSA. ==FISA warrants== Each application for one of these surveillance warrants (called a FISA warrant) is made before an individual judge of the court. The court may allow third parties to submit briefs as ''amici curiae''. When the U.S. Attorney General determines that an emergency exists, he may authorize the emergency employment of electronic surveillance before obtaining the necessary authorization from the FISC, if the Attorney General or his designee notifies a judge of the court at the time of authorization and applies for a warrant as soon as practicable but not more than 7 days after authorization of such surveillance, as required by . If an application is denied by one judge of the court, the federal government is not allowed to make the same application to a different judge of the court, but may appeal to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. Such appeals are rare: the first appeal from the FISC to the Court of Review was made in 2002 (''In re Sealed Case No. 02-001''), 24 years after the founding of the court. Also rare is for FISA warrant requests to be turned down. During the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while only 4 were rejected. Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004. The four rejected requests were all from 2003, and all four were partially granted after being submitted for reconsideration by the government. Of the requests that had to be modified, few were before the year 2000. During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, and another 7 being rejected. Over the entire 33-year period, the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants, with only 11 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests.〔 〕 This does not include the number of warrants that were modified by the FISA court. This can cause a phenomenon called "confirmation bias" which, due to such a high approval rate of warrants, can lead to over rationalization of information by the government on targeted individuals. For example, certain characteristics like ethnicity and religion combined with probable can cause the FBI to dig into the background of an individual until anything remotely suspicious comes up, even if there's clear-cut evidence that the person is innocent.〔Harwood, Matthew. "The Terrifying Surveillance Case of Brandon Mayfield | Al Jazeera America." The Terrifying Surveillance Case of Brandon Mayfield | Al Jazeera America. N.p., 8 Feb. 2014. Web. 02 Dec. 2014. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-terrifying-surveillancecaseofbrandonmayfield.html 〕 ;Notes: On May 17, 2002, the court rebuffed Attorney General John Ashcroft, releasing an opinion that alleged that the FBI and Justice Department officials had "supplied erroneous information to the court" in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh." Whether this rejection was related to the court starting to require modification of significantly more requests in 2003 is unknown. On December 16, 2005, ''The New York Times'' reported that the Bush administration had been conducting surveillance against U.S. citizens without the knowledge of the court since 2002.〔Risen, James; Lichtblau, Eric (December 16, 2005). ("Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts" ). ''The New York Times''. Retrieved July 11, 2013.〕 On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance,〔Leonnig, Carol D.; Linzer, Dafna (December 21, 2005). ("Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Panel" ). ''The Washington Post'' (via Information Clearing House). Retrieved July 11, 2013.〕 and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law. The government's apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests. In 2011, the Obama Administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases. The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year. But a warrant for each target would thus no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or “foreign powers.” The FISC also extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Both measures were done without public debate or any specific authority from Congress. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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