In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency
the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing
not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in
nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.
The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken
on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad
constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents,
with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former
officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.
The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA
court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping
orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago,
it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the
ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that
will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the
officials said.
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