Tampabay: Court offers oversight of intelligence-gathering

WASHINGTON -- There are no gavels, bailiffs or benches in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Its classified work takes place in a vault-like secure room at the Department of Justice.

It has even been known to meet in a judge's living room. In the middle of the night.

Obscure and mysterious, this rotating panel of judges approves the government's top-secret requests to eavesdrop on suspected spies or terrorists in the United States. It played a major but unseen role in the Sami Al-Arian investigation. In accusing the University of South Florida professor of leading the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group in America, a 121-page federal indictment released Thursday relied heavily on intelligence information collected over a decade by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Dozens of intercepted phone calls and faxes allegedly show Al-Arian managing the group's finances, discussing strategies and monitoring the outcome of suicide bombings in Israel.

Electronic surveillance of Al-Arian and seven others indicted last week was approved by the court, which began operating in 1979 but was overhauled and expanded by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth in Washington oversaw the court from May 1995 to May 2002 when the court was approving government wiretaps for the Al-Arian investigation. He was unavailable for comment Friday.

But in a June interview, Lamberth described the court's inner workings.

"There's no question that every judge who has ever served on this court has thought it was the most significant thing they've ever done as a judge," Lamberth told The Third Branch, a newsletter by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Lamberth recalled holding an emergency hearing at 3 a.m. in his living room after the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa. "Some of the (wire)taps I did that night turned out to be very significant and were used in the New York trials of the people indicted for the bombings," he told the newsletter.

The court's origins lie in the intelligence community scandals involving the CIA and the FBI that surfaced in the 1970s. In response, Congress passed the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide judicial oversight of domestic intelligence-gathering.

The chief justice of the United States appoints the 11-member panel, which includes judges from around the country. U.S. District Judge William H. Stafford of Tallahassee is a member.

Only one judge is needed to approve requests, which come from the FBI and the National Security Agency. (The CIA is not permitted to do domestic surveillance.)

Criminal indictments rarely result from the surveillance, but the court's workload is increasing. In 1979, the court reviewed 199 applications. In 2000, it considered 886.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress passed the antiterrorism Patriot Act, which directed domestic intelligence information be shared with criminal investigators to prosecute terrorists.

Later, Ashcroft moved to implement those changes with new Justice Department rules.

But in May 2002, the court rejected proposed intelligence-sharing procedures as inadequate for protecting civil liberties.

But in November, an appeals court disagreed, allowing the rules to go forward.

Three months later, the rules helped produce an indictment against Al-Arian.