As Wired's David Kravets explains, "The secret court, which came to life in the wake of the Watergate scandal under the President Richard M. Nixon administration, now gets the bulk of its authority under the FISA Amendments Act, which Congress reauthorized for another five years days before it would have expired last year. The act allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant."
The McCauley article references a report (pdf), which was released on May 2nd to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), which states that during 2012, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the “FISC”) approved every single one of the 1,856 applications made by the government for authority to conduct [domestic] electronic surveillance and/or physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.
"Though depicted as some kind of check on Executive Branch behavior," Glenn Greenwald writes, the entire process "is virtually designed to do the opposite: ensure the Government's surveillance desires are unimpeded."
The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory?
