Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
(FISC)
Established:	1978
Judges assigned:	11
Chief Judge:	Rosemary Collyer
http://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) is a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Such requests are made most often by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Congress created FISA and its court as a result of the recommendations by the U.S. Senate's Church Committee. Its powers have evolved to the point that it has been called "almost a parallel Supreme Court."

Since 2009, the court has been relocated to the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C. For roughly thirty years of its history (prior to 2009), it was housed on the sixth floor of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building.

In 2013, a top-secret order issued by the court, which was later leaked to the media from documents culled by Edward Snowden, required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed of all call detail records – including those for domestic calls – to the NSA.

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