Judge John Bates on FISA in the News
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2019
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas, Benjamin Wittes sat down in front of a live audience with Judge John Bates, a senior district judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Bates has served on the court since 2001, and from 2009 to 2013, he served as the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court. Wittes and Judge Bates talked about the role of the FISA Court, its procedures and caseload, its recent prominene in the news, and how the court might respond to cases that have an overtly political context.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.8 | I'm Benjamin Widis and this is the LawFair podcast. |
| 0:42.0 | We are at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas and I have here with me a real live |
| 0:49.4 | FISA judge or rather to be precise, a real live former FISA judge. |
| 0:56.4 | John Bates is a senior judge on the DC District Court in Washington, DC where he has served |
| 1:05.4 | since 2001. |
| 1:07.2 | That is correct. |
| 1:09.2 | And in that time he was appointed to be the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence |
| 1:15.1 | Surveillance Court, which as is now commonly known is the superduper secret court that |
| 1:21.2 | approves wire tap warrants in national security cases and does some other really interesting |
| 1:27.3 | stuff. |
| 1:28.3 | We're going to talk about it all. |
| 1:30.0 | So let's jump into it. |
| 1:32.3 | But I'll call it the FISC instead of that long series of words that Ben just used. |
| 1:37.8 | Yeah, so let's start with that. |
| 1:40.5 | Anybody in the world except the people who actually have intimate experience with the FISA |
| 1:47.1 | Court, call it the FISA Court, the people who have served on it or practiced before it, |
| 1:53.0 | call it the FISC, explain the Nomenclature differential. |
... |
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