> The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court doesn’t (and courts in general don’t) issue subpoenas.
This sounds like a matter of technicality, no? Whatever you call it, what they issue has the effect of a subpoena that you can neither appeal nor speak about.
My point is not that this is what's going on here, but that the right to appeal is not generally a given.
> Whatever you call it, what they issue has the effect of a subpoena that you can neither appeal nor speak about.
No, it doesn’t. FISC doesn’t generally issue orders that are subpoena-like that would be presented to people outside of government. It provides surveillance orders to the FBI under which they conduct surveillance and, should someone later question if maybe that surveillance was a criminal violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—which would also be the FBI—the FBI can show the FBI the paper from the FISC that says its okay and then the FBI will not arrest the FBI for criminal violations of FISA.
Or if someone somehow finds out they were surveilled and files civil charges, the paper serves a similar function.
Where they do (and this only, IIRC, occured under law that has now expired) issue orders that apply to external parties, those can be challenged directly in the FISC, appealed from the FISC to The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, and, from there, to the US Supreme Court. There is at least one such appeal to FISC-R by Yahoo! that has been published in redacted form.
In no case does FISC issue orders that would go to an outside party who would then have no means or forum to challenge them.
This sounds like a matter of technicality, no? Whatever you call it, what they issue has the effect of a subpoena that you can neither appeal nor speak about.
My point is not that this is what's going on here, but that the right to appeal is not generally a given.