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The main issue in this country is that judges can be bought just like any other elected official. Judges having the final say over bad laws and statutes should be held to even higher standards of electoral rules than either senators or presidents.

Total ignorance of how the US federal system works.

Federal judges are appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate and serve for life.

Bribery as the geek's all-purpose explanation for any legal or political decision he disagrees with. In our entire history only four federal judges have been impeached and convicted on bribery-related charges. Impeachments of Federal Judges

The geek can still wonder why no one ever takes him seriously as force in politics. Donald Trump without the hair or the ability to incite the masses.

I tend to limit my comments to things I know a lot about. But this is the first time I've ever been called a troll. Makes me feel like a true member of the Slashdot community. };->

I would consider you a member in good standing - you have a highly moderated post and don't seem to know much about the FISA court.

What is the FISA court?
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

You'll know you've stepped up your game when you regularly get modded down for posting factual, relevant material about the topic being discussed.

"Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperilled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face." http://www.fjc.gov/history/hom...

Federal judge isn't an elected position. You've got that all wrong.

http://www.fjc.gov/federal/courts.nsf/autoframe?OpenForm&nav=menu3c&page=/federal/courts.nsf/page/A783011AF949B6BF85256B35004AD214?opendocument Woosh, yeah, appointed by the chief executive nazi, I arrest my case there...

That word and "sheeple" are usually argument "winners" all by themselves.

You might be confused with wolves...

No, "Infowars" hysteria aside.

Military force is military force no matter the subject, the damages for such can present themselves differently but the effect is the same, take a hard look at the direction the economy is going, and consider then environmental change rooted by actions of the NSA. These are grounds for the consent to be governed, be revoked, well beyond violation of the 4th.

The members of the FISA court are public record, they are judges from other courts that rotate through the FISA court. The function of the FISA court is documented. You seem disinterested in the facts of the matter.

THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE COURT - 2012 Membership

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

What about you? Can you point out any of the United State's secret courts? Can you name judges, or supply the addresses at which these judges hold court? Can you name the officers of the courts?

The FISA court is staffed by regular judges from other courts that rotate through it.

Here are 9 of the 11 judges.

Every few months, the FISA judges set aside their regular, public cases, travel to Washington, and take the bench inside a secure, windowless courtroom at 333 Constitution Avenue. Prosecutors and federal agents appear to answer questions about warrants before individual judges, rather than a panel.

Generally, the judges rotate on a week-long schedule. Three judges live in the Washington area and are available for emergencies. FISA judges do not receive extra pay.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

Your error is relying on Wikipedia as an authoritative source.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

The act of 1978 also established a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, presided over by three district or appeals court judges designated by the Chief Justice, to review, at the government’s request, the decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

You are misinformed.

Citation: "The power of judicial review makes the Supreme Court's role in our government vital. Judicial review is the power of any court, when deciding a case, to declare that a law passed by a legislature or an action of an executive branch officer or employee is invalid because it is inconsistent with the Constitution. Although district courts, courts of appeals, and state courts can exercise the power of judicial review, their decisions about federal law are always subject to review by the Supreme Court on appeal."

Why is it a sealed criminal complaint? I thought that only those with something to hide needed privacy?

There is almost certainly classified information to protect in the case.

Sealing Court Records and Proceedings: A Pocket Guide

Specific Record and Proceeding Issues

Some sealing issues have arisen frequently enough for case law about them to be developed. Some types of information are understood to be properly protected by sealing, such as national security secrets. Some proceedings are understood to be properly held in secret, such as grand jury proceedings. The identities of some parties, such as juveniles, are properly protected by sealing or redaction. The following are summaries of the case law pertaining to several such issues.

National Security

On rare occasions, adjudication of a case requires presenting to the court classified information, which is information an intelligence agency has determined could result in damage to national security if it were disclosed to the wrong person.20 The Executive Branch decides access and storage limits for classified information.21 The public is given access to cases involving classified information by redacting the classified information from the public record.22

The FISA court doesn't try people. Its primary purpose is to issue warrants for national security surveillance operations. You can find some background on it at the link:

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

Any actual trials would be held in other courts.

The US and the West are still free, but the people need to be politically active to maintain that freedom. Legislatures and executives must engage in oversight of their intelligence agencies.

There is still a pretty substantial difference between the Western nations and the Soviet Union. Even Russia is far from being the Soviet Union even if it is on somewhat shaky ground from time to time. (Old habits can die hard.)

The Soviet Story (2008)
A Portrait of Stalin: Secret Police

FISA is a court that deals in matters that are secret, not a secret court. The court itself is well known. The judges that preside are judges from other courts that rotate through it. The decisions can be cited, but they are often classified, so you would need a security clearance and a need to know to see them.

It is a court, not a tribunal. The one thing it doesn't do is conduct trials. Its purpose is to approve warrants and provide oversight.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

The FISA court is staffed by judges that rotate through from other courts. If the FISA court isn't a court, than which one is? Should we just abandon courts then?

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

The information the court handles is secret, not the court itself. Judges from other courts rotate through it. If that court can't be trusted for its limited function of approving warrants, not trials, what court can be?

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

The Congress, the courts, and the executive branch all perform various sorts of oversight over NSA.

I'm curious - will you next complain that the targets of surveillance aren't notified that they are under investigation?

There isn't much parallelism there. The Star Chamber was formed to conduct trials of suspects from the start. The FISA court doesn't try suspects at all. Abuses of the FISA court are unlikely to persist or go undiscovered since the judges from other courts serve there on a rotating basis.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

I remember when Evelle J. Younger was running against Brown in the late 70s. It was the first election I could vote in, anyway he had a funny commercial of Jerry Brown caricature and an old washing machine. The ad had the repeating lines of "Indecisive, Wishy-Washy" about how Brown had flip flopped on issues and was basically a hypocrite. Of course all politicians are hypocrites but it still was one of the funniest political ads I can remember.

I think the Malathion he drank has affected his brain because NFW would I allow a cop to rummage through my phone. Hopefully the marketplace will answer with some intrusion/wipe detection apps.

We do have a right to privacy and must defend it always. I understand the need to protect the public from criminal activity but there should be a barrier to prohibit privacy barriers from being circumvented as well. I guess this falls into the category of going through the glove box in your car when you get pulled over or going through your trunk so I presume there has to be probable cause established for this but undoubtedly the courts will have to decide this. In 1928, In Olmstead v. United States Justice Brandeis in dissent

"Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the Government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the Government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. "

This was about the first case brought before the court about wire tapping and after this case, it set off a rash of other rulings that brought the idea that technology could be used to intrude on privacy. Although the evidence in the case were transcripts, the information in the transcripts were used to arrest other people who were importing and distributing liquor. Eventually laws were put into place that meant that wiretaps had to be authorized by a judge and evidence of probable cause produced.

We always have to protect our privacy just like we protect anything else we value otherwise there will be someone in our government trying to take it away.

Abraham Lincoln appointed two of those judges.

A Republican in 1886 was not the same thing as a Republican in 2010. One of the most famous Democrats of the time was Jefferson Davis, the secessionist who had became President of the Confederate States of America in an effort to keep the South's economic tradition of slavery alive.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was heard in 1886. The governor of California at the time the case was raised was George Stoneman, a Democrat, and it was pushed to the California Supreme Court because their articles of Constitution specifically went out of their way to tax the railroads. The reason it got to the US Supreme Court was due to the Jurisdiction and Removal Act of 1875, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant (a Republican and a military officer who served in the American Civil War on the side of the Northern Abolitionists). This law was specifically created to protect former slaves from state-level judicial persecution. http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/landmark_11.html, and the railroad more or less abused it to get a favorable ruling... but it was California that forced the issue.

-- Terry

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.

. A few countries establish their own rights to hear international claims, known as universal jurisdiction - thats claimed by the UK, France, Canada, and Australia for instance. I'm sure there's some nuance in the difference between Universal Jurisdiction and that created under the Alien Tort Statute that I don't know, but at it's essentially the same thing. The cases heard tend to relate to human rights issues. The Supreme Court in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain reiterated their commitment to a test that considers international norms that are "specific, universal, and obligatory" but that's lead to it's own bundle of questions.

Short answer, yup they can.

Not that I believe this particular conspiracy theory, but if this was an elected judge rather than an appointed one, it may be possible.

A note on impeachment in the federal system:

Since 1797 the House of Representatives has impeached sixteen federal officials. These include two presidents, a cabinet member, a senator, a justice of the Supreme Court, and eleven federal judges. Of those, the Senate has convicted and removed seven, all of them judges. Not included in this list are the office holders who have resigned rather than face impeachment, most notably, President Richard M. Nixon. Of thirty-five attempts at impeachment, only nine have come to trial. Because it cripples Congress with a lengthy trial, impeachment is infrequent. Many officials, seeing the writing on the wall, resign rather than face the ignominy of a public trial. A Short History of Impeachment

Impeachments of Federal Judges

The first - and I think the only - federal judge to be convicted of bribery was District Judge Robert F. Collins in 1991. Federal judge is first ever convicted of taking bribe

Any ideas on what could be done by East Texans? Like I mentioned before this is a problem with the U.S. Federal court so we can't use our votes to fix this problem.

This isn't accurate. If Lamar Smith and John Cornyn were voted out of our delegation, and the new House member showed that they were willing to fulfill their oversight duties (up to impeachment of Ward and Davis), the local rules, which are so favorable for plaintiffs, could be changed by pressure.

And anyway, you should check out the IP legislation that our delegation supports. Scary stuff.

See my previous comment. Texans in the federal legislature would be taken very seriously if they were to move to reform E.D. Texas.

Additionally, "U.S. Federal Court" and "District Court" are not synonyms; all Cognac is brandy but not all brandy is Cognac. The district courts were established by acts of Congress, while the Supreme Court was established by the Constitution. Congress is expected to provide oversight for these courts, if anything even more so for District Court. The movement of cases through this level of the system and each court's subject-matter-jurisdiction is set forth by Congress (e.g. Evarts Act, PL 96-452, etc.). It is well with Congress's power to reform E.D. Texas, and changes to the court system occur relatively frequently.

• Legislative history of the Federal Judiciary.
• U.S. District Court
• Eastern District of Texas

Your vote does count.

Hopefully Google will print out the information, one record per page, single sided, on heavy card stock,

Given that the judge was born in 1927, I don't think he should find it unreasonable if they did that (okay, maybe not heavy card stock).

http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGetInfo?jid=2274

Hard to believe, but they were taken offline by court order in the United States. A corrupt Swiss Bank, Julius Baer, objected to wikileaks posting documents showing malfeasance on the part of the bank, so this crazy judge, Jeffrey White, who really doesn't understand the First Amendment (and was nominated to the Federal bench by Bush of course), ordered the site to be taken offline. Here's a BBC link describing what happened. And another one from Counterpunch.

This link explained alot for me. Too bad it's a secret court, but it's better than no court, and at least it's a court within the judicial branch of the federal government.

http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/fisc_bdy! OpenDocument&Click=


Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

Congress in 1978 established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a special court and authorized the Chief Justice of the United States to designate seven federal district court judges to review applications for warrants related to national security investigations. Judges serve for staggered, non-renewable terms of no more than seven years, and must be from different judicial circuits. The provisions for the court were part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (92 Stat. 1783), which required the government, before it commenced certain kinds of intelligence gathering operations within the United States, to obtain a judicial warrant similar to that required in criminal investigations. The legislation was a response to a report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the "Church Committee"), which detailed allegations of executive branch abuses of its authority to conduct domestic electronic surveillance in the interest of national security. Congress also was responding to the Supreme Court's suggestion in a 1972 case that under the Fourth Amendment some kind of judicial warrant might be required to conduct national security related investigations.
Warrant applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are drafted by attorneys in the General Counsel's Office at the National Security Agency at the request of an officer of one of the federal intelligence agencies. Each application must contain the Attorney General's certification that the target of the proposed surveillance is either a "foreign power" or "the agent of a foreign power" and, in the case of a U.S. citizen or resident alien, that the target may be involved in the commission of a crime.
The judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court travel to Washington, D.C., to hear warrant applications on a rotating basis. To ensure that the court can convene on short notice, at least one of the judges is required to be a member of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The act of 1978 also established a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, presided over by three district or appeals court judges designated by the Chief Justice, to review, at the government's request, the decisions the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Because of the almost perfect record of the Department of Justice in obtaining the surveillance warrants and other powers it requested from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the review court had no occasion to meet until 2002. The USA Patriot Act of 2001 (115 Stat. 272) expanded the time periods for which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can authorize surveillance and increased the number of judges serving the court from seven to eleven.

In practice, it allows manufacturers of printers to sue manufacturers of replacement cartridges.

The problem really is that there USED to be judicial oversight.

Regular wiretaps must still be approved by the local federal district judge.

National security wiretaps must be approved by the The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. I don't see anywhere where one can get by without any judicial oversight, with the possible exception of short-term emergency taps. As far as I know, those still have to be reviewed by the judiciary.

McMahon, Colleen
Born 1951 in Columbus, OH
Federal Judicial Service:
U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
Nominated by William J. Clinton on May 21, 1998, to a seat vacated by John F. Keenan;

From http://air.fjc.gov/servlet/tGetInfo?jid=2799

Way to go Clinton ;)

*quickly ducks*

just to be the devil's advocate... Call me back when 'science' can be scientifically proven. it can't be. because the whole thing about science is trying to observe something and draw conclusions about it, while remaining open to other peoples conclusions about it. Science isn't about 'proving' anything. it's about observing the univers and saying "hey i think this is how things work, feel free to call me an idiot though if i'm wrong"
oh and i'm gonna cite what is considered 'scientific' evidence. it's just the expert testimony of someone who has 'witnessed, observed, and drawn conclustions based on that' So hey, i've got an angel guardian me, that means technically speaking i am 'scientific proof' of the existance of god, because i've observed God and in particular my guardian angel. The reason why i know i have an angel is because she gives me rainbows sometimes as gifts, and oh i've observed her save my life more times than i care to count. sure there are 'scientific explainations' for rainbows, but even the most experienced meterooligist will teel you that despite every observation made, weather is too complex to be predictable, that means you either need theory (which can't be proven any more than the existance of a god/angels) that states that after a certain level of complexity enters a system events will become mathematically impossible to precisely predict.. chaos theory they call it, and it's from the measured observation of 3 celelstial bodies in motion, that rather than ther motion be precisely predictable, there will be a predictable amount of randomness to there movements.

So there you go. Now it's true, that religious people tend to not want you messing with there religious beliefs. It's also true that ID's only 'scientific proof' is the testimony of people who have witnessed god.. and it's true that there are numerous possible explainations other than ID.

Should ID be taught in schools? hell yeah, should it be 'preached' as the only truth ala darwinism has been? i don't think so, kids would learn more from discourse over the merits of Id vs the merits of darwin/evolution/chaos theory than they would being taught that one is 'absolute truth.' so what if all the religious faithful have is 'eyesitness testimony' that's all Science is, to begin with. measured observation, "today when i walked across the street, a car swerved towards me, then was hit by cross traffic and i stood there unharmed, and in the rainbow of oil and transmission fuild i saw my angel smiling at me" is as much a 'measured observation' of god as noticing where around the sun the planet jupiter is. the problem is of course that you're out of hand discarding my observation with out even proving that i'm wrong. normally in science one would have to prove that i'm not making valid observations. and your lack of willingness to scientifically disprove ever single person who has ever 'been touched by an angel' proves your lack of commitment to disproving ID, and the existance of god.

http://www.fjc.gov/public/pdf.nsf/lookup/sciman00. pdf/$file/sciman00.pdf

Re-read the website you linked to, or better yet go up a level. Even better, I'll give you a direct link. The original "circuit courts" were abolished in 1912, and were replaced with the "circuit courts of appeals," which were established in 1891. These courts do not have original jurisdiction, only appellate jurisdiction. If I remember correctly from Rehnquist's book on the Supreme Court, the courts of appeals were established in order to limit the growing load on the Supreme Court (prior to the establishment of the appeals courts, the Supreme Court was the only court with appellate jurisdiction - appeals went straight from the district courts to the Supreme Court).

The District Courts (the present federal trial level) is comparatively new... dating back to, IIRC, the late 19th century.

In its plan for the federal judiciary, the Congress in 1789
divided the nation into thirteen judicial districts that served
as the basic organizational units of the federal courts. In
each district, a U.S. district court served as the federal
trial court for admiralty and maritime cases as well as for
some minor civil and criminal cases. Congress authorized the
district judge to appoint a clerk in each district to assist
in the administration of the district and circuit courts, and authorized the president to appoint in each district a
marshal and federal prosecutor, then called a "district
attorney." The court's jurisdiction was limited to cases
arising within the district, and the judges were required to
reside in their districts. The original districts outlined by Congress coincided with the borders of the eleven states
that had ratified the Constitution, with separate districts
for Maine and Kentucky, which were still a part of Massachusetts
and Virginia, respectively.