How to Deal with the Expiration of FISA Surveillance Authority

To repeat what I’ve opined many times over the past 20-plus years, one of the reasons I object to our post-1978 surveillance framework, built around the constitutionally dubious and practically difficult Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is that it thrusts the courts — the judicial branch that is supposed to be insulated from politics — into intelligence collection, a national defense function to be carried out by the political branches that answer to the people.

But the courts are in that position, regardless of whether they should be. And now, with the government’s statutory authorization to collect foreign intelligence — FISA Section 702 — about to lapse at midnight, the Trump Justice Department needs help from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to make certain that intelligence collection continues. National security depends on it.