Fixing FISA, House Judiciary GOP 

Fry: Professor Turley, I’d like to go back to something you mentioned earlier as well. And that is the concept of making the FISC court process. More adversarial adding an adversarial component of that or having an amicus involved in that process. Would you elaborate for us on how you think that type of reform could be implemented and how that might look?

Schaerr: Thank you very much for that question. Congress years ago implemented this amicus process by which the court can reach out by what the Congress described as novel questions to get the assistance of essentially a third party view separate from the government that has been relatively underutilized. And as far as I know, there’s no indication it’s ever been used in an individual case where the FIS court says, can you look at this application? And what we know is that when we actually put those applications under a spotlight, which is relatively rare?

As the, as the chair mentioned out of, I think 29 cases reviewed 25 of them were in error. So there’s obviously a need for some additional viewpoint. I don’t think that’s going to be achieved with, with any amicus cure eye. I think that what you really need is this sort of concept of a special advocate, a very formal office that has the ability among other things to bring a case to the appellate FISA court to, to say that there’s a problem here that you should reveal or review.I think that would be very useful to have an actual privacy advocate with security advocacy. If you’re going to have a secret court, let’s make sure both are represented. Thank you, Professor Charley and Mr Chairman, I yield back.