TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Regardless of the specific form of the federal government’s spying, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s structure is worrying:

The surveillance court is a different world of secret case law, non-adversarial proceedings, and rulings written by individual judges who rarely meet as a panel.

Judges generally confer only with government lawyers, and out of public view. Yet the judges have the power to interpret the Constitution and set long-lasting and far-reaching precedent on matters involving Americans’ rights to privacy and due process under the Fourth Amendment. And this fast-growing body of law is almost entirely out of view of legal scholars and the public. Most Americans do not have access to the judiciary’s full interpretation of the Constitution on matters of surveillance, search and seizure when it comes to snooping for terrorist plots — and are limited in their ability to challenge it.

Their decisions impact U.S. citizens heavily, yet we have no way to know what their decisions are, nor to challenge the programs their rulings enable. And we have allowed it to happen.