Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Analysis

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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) was signed into law October 25, 1978 by President Carter. This federal law was created in response to the use of federal resources by President Nixon to spy on certain groups. This activity violated those groups Fourth Amendment rights. With the signing of FISA into federal law, FISA provides judicial oversight and congressional oversight of the government's covert surveillance activities, while maintaining the secrecy required for national security, in order to ensure the convert activities by the government do not violate the Fourth Amendment rights or the civil liberties of U.S. persons and entities. Since 1978 and especially after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, …show more content…
persons’ Fourth Amendment rights are protected. In addition, Section 702 establishes the procedures to be followed when targeting these foreign individuals located outside the U.S. and its territories. Furthermore, Section 702 forbids the direct and indirect targeting of not only U.S. persons but also that of persons known to be located within the U.S. Besides of these directives, Section 702 expands the oversight compared with the previous FISA when collecting on foreign individuals located outside the U.S. and its territories. This oversight is expanded in order to prevent the misuse of the Section 702 authority in collections. This oversight is conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), Congress, and Executive Branch Inspectors General (Mann, …show more content…
One of which is the unintentional collection or targeting of U.S. persons. “While Section 702 explicitly prohibits both the direct and indirect intentional targeting of U.S. persons or of any person known to be in the U.S., the communications of some U.S. persons are occasionally collected in the course of legitimate surveillance operations” (Mann, 2014). Unfortunately, this example of collection on U.S. persons is known as an incident compliance issue. Incident compliance issues are generally the result of human operator error, a software error, or a computer error that unintentionally collects on U.S. persons. In a twelve month time frame, there were 2,776 incidents including the unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications most of which were unintended. The incidents were found mainly to be caused by failures involving due diligence or not following the standard operating procedures that are in place to prevent such occurrences (Gellman, 2013). This number seems very large but the rate is actually less than a half percent (Mann, 2014). It is these occurrences that contribute to the concern that those surveillance authorities authorized by Section 702 will allow for the potential warrantless surveillance of U.S. persons and entities which violates Fourth Amendment
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