F.I.S.A. (pronounced f-eye-zah) stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is "an act passed by Congress in 1978 to establish procedures for requesting judicial authorization for foreign intelligence surveillance and to create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; intended to increase United States counterintelligence; separate from ordinary law enforcement surveillance " (source: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn ). The procedure described is like a fast-track judicial system to allow the NSA to quickly acquire autorization for spying on an American in the United States, when national security is at stake. Why have a judicial overview at all? Basically to preserve the checks-and-balance system that the founding fathers created when our government was first born (not wanting one branch of government to have absolute power). According to the Seattle Post (Saturday, December 24, 2005, "Secret court modified wiretap requests"), "Since 2001, the [FISA] judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration." So, only 3% of requests to wiretap Americans have not had an automatic "yes" response. The FISA courts are agreeable to almost all requests.
FISA suddenly came into the mainstream news media in 2005 after President George W. Bush admitted he authorized wiretaps on Americans many times since 9/11, but without getting FISA court permission first. He claims the wiretaps make Americans safer from terrorism, but why did he feel the need to bypass FISA then? One possibility is that he felt that having his requests modfied 3% of the time was unacceptable, another possibility is that he wanted to wiretap Americans he knew would be rejected by the FISA courts, thus causing him to avoid the process all together.
Many people agree the government makes mistakes. Some believe the government makes mistakes frequently, which is one of many...