27B Stroke 6

27B Stroke 6: "One of the questions to emerge in press analysis of Wednesday's court hearing in the EFF's case against AT&T is whether the company might be legally immunized if the attorney general wrote a secret letter authorizing the alleged internet wiretaps.
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But the aforementioned Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) only allows temporary surveillance without a court order when the target is purely foreign communications, and where "there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." That clearly couldn't apply to wiretapping of AT&T's domestic internet service.

The law also requires the attorney general to "immediately transmit under seal to the court" a copy of the certification. We know that the FISA court learned about the NSA programs at the same time as the rest of us last year, so such a transmission never took place.
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