PRISM, FISA, & FISC
The government’s intrusion into people’s personal lives began long before Snowden released the infamous PowerPoint slides. The first step towards PRISM started, quite ironically, with the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. FISA was created in response to the FBI’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens during the Vietnam War; its intended purpose was to oversee American intelligence gathering agencies (Matz 70-71). To this end, FISA created the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC. As Chris Matz explains in his article, “Libraries and The USA Patriot Act: Values in Conflict,” FISC was created to decide which requests for warrants from American intelligence agencies were granted, but with the added benefit that information gathered through these warrants are never released (70-71). Adding to FISC’s already far-reaching powers was the USA PATRIOT Act, which greatly extended the freedom with which government agencies could investigate possible threats to national security. With FISC and the PATRIOT Act granting a legal route for search warrants without any threat of public disclosure, it is quite easy to see how something as immense and far-reaching as PRISM was able to survive unnoticed for so long. Still, it was the Protect America Act of 2007, an amendment to FISA, that removed the final restriction barring programs like PRISM from being created: government surveillance agencies were now allowed to investigate intelligence targets reasonably believed to be outside the United States.