@thinkprogress
Former federal judge James Robertson, who used to grant surveillance orders, said he was shocked to hear of changes to allow broader authorization of NSA programs -- such as the monitoring of US phone records. He urged for a reform which would to allow counter-arguments to be heard.
"What FISA does is not adjudication, but approval," Robertson said, speaking as a witness during the first public hearings into the Snowden revelations. "This works just fine when it deals with individual applications for warrants, but the 2008 amendment has turned the FISA court into an administrative agency making rules for others to follow."
However, government officials have defended the surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, claiming they are necessary in order to guard the country against terrorist threats.
Following Snowden's revelations on NSA surveillance, President Barack Obama assured US citizens in June that "nobody is listening to [their] telephone calls."
He said the surveillance programs monitor phone numbers and the durations of calls, adding that if there are any suspicions and "if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they've got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."
President Obama added that America is "going to have to make some choices" between privacy and security, warning that the highly publicized programs will make it harder to target terrorists.
Meanwhile, deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce said that the "program is not intentionally used to target any US citizens" and is "key in our counter-terrorism efforts."
Testifying on Capitol Hill before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in June, NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander claimed that the NSA's storage of millions of phone records has thwarted more than 50 terror attacks in more than 20 countries since September 11, 2001. However, evidence of the prevented attacks has not been revealed.
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