FISA Pros And Cons

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FISA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was implemented in 1978. It outlines the procedures for physical and electronic surveillance of foreign intelligence. FISA had a large hand creating Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). This paper will be discussing subchapter I of FISA to be specifically which covers electronic surveillance since all the title would be too much information. Electronic surveillance serves as a vital tool in the collection and verification of intelligence. FISA outlines how this can be done legal on foreign powers and people of foreign interest. The intelligence community follows the laws that FISA put out in order to collect intelligence properly without any issues. FISA also allows local law enforcement…show more content…
Pros of the FISA act are that the government and law enforcement does not have to wait for political and legal loops to jump through to catch and stop terrorist activity against the United States. Another pro is that law enforcement can have someone else do the surveillance for them so nothing can come back on the government as far as a tactical sense. These are the two pros I want to talk about and give examples for even though there are many more. A perfect example of this would be, lets say hypothetically the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was tracking a home grown terrorist cell and three members were foreign national and three were U.S. persons the FBI would be legally able to conduct surveillance on the all the members and legal enter the location of the cell without have a legal search warrant before hand. These will ad the agencies and law enforcement in catching the terrorist and other bad guys more quickly. I believe this to be a pro for the fact that before it took too long in gathering all the correct legal documents to prevent and stop these people. The other pro was having outside parties conduct the surveillance. This is good so you can have someone else conduct the surveillance and if he gets compromised then the government or law enforcement do not lose their tactical stand point. What I mean by tactical standpoint is they can still conduct their surveillance with out themselves being compromised.

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