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" Can we take just a short break from the good fun we&amp;#039;re all having trying to guess where Edward Snowden will land, and about how much of self-promoting show pony he may be, and return, however briefly, to the very serious argument within our democracy that his revelations have set off? In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation&amp;#039;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 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. Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court&amp;#039;s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve seen a growing body of law from the court,&amp;quot; a former intelligence official said. &amp;quot;What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.&amp;quot;  There should be no reason to belabor this in a democracy, but you really cannot have secret courts developing a new &amp;quot;common law.&amp;quot; In this country, at any rate, the common law is exactly what it says it is -- a law created in common, by the representatives elected by the people, under which we all agree openly to live. What secret courts &amp;quot;develop&amp;quot; is not a &amp;quot;common law&amp;quot; but, rather, an entire infrastructure of loopholes, exceptions, and trapdoors that allow the government to evade what we all believe is the &amp;quot;common law.&amp;quot; Increasingly, and sadly, the courts that are not secret have been helping them along. In one of the court&amp;#039;s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the &amp;quot;special needs&amp;quot; doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment&amp;#039;s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government&amp;#039;s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.&amp;#039;s collection and examination of Americans&amp;#039; communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said. That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law - used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints - and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. &amp;quot;It seems like a legal stretch,&amp;quot; William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.&amp;quot; If you&amp;#039;re not driving drunk, why do you care about roadblocks? If you&amp;#039;re not doing drugs, what do you care if they test you? See how it starts? Now we&amp;#039;re all the way to, if you&amp;#039;re not contacting terrorists, what do you care if the NSA collects your data? And this last part of the slide was undertaken in secret, by a secret court. And this is the Snowden Effect in action. Without the revelations, the president would not have made the preposterous public claim that the rubber-stamp FISA court qualified as &amp;quot;oversight&amp;quot; by any but the most laughable definition. There then would not have been the pushback against that silliness, and then there would not have been the FISA court itself responding that it was not a rubber stamp which, I am sure, is part of what intrigued the Times enought to produce this story which brings us all the way back around to how preposterous the president&amp;#039;s original claim was. Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case - the government - and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court&amp;#039;s history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court. Created by Congress in 1978 as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government, the court meets in a secure, nondescript room in the federal courthouse in Washington. All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and 10 of them were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Most hail from districts outside the capital and come in rotating shifts to hear surveillance applications; a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court. Whether he likes it or not, this is the &amp;quot;national conversation&amp;quot; that the president said he wanted. Edward Snowden, world traveler, international man of luggage, made it impossible to avoid. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18960/today-in-snowdenland/>