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In light of the United States' recently elevated attention to terrorism, the issue of national security has become of great importance to the American public in recent years. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) is one of the most significant courts in the judiciary to deal with such issues. Curiously, the business of the court is very different in comparison to other federal courts. The problem is attempting to balance important national security issues with ensuring that civil rights are not violated due to the secret nature of the court. The paper delves into analyzing known functions of the court, reasons for secrecy, structural issues, the quasi-executive nature, affects of the Patriot Act,wiretapping issues and purpose as stated in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. In doing so, we reveal problems that arise with lack of oversight, the non-adversarial process, the structure of the court, ex parte opinions, and the constitutional and civil liberties issues in general. We believe the court could be structured otherwise and still achieve national security objectives. Among the suggestions are using a panel of judges, a Special Amicus to represent the accused, and doing away with the current appeals process the court has. Our arguments are normative due to the secrecy of the court, and our suggestions will promote legitimacy and accountability within the FISA Court. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructivist theories of securitization are built on a foundation of communicative action tenets. While this represents an important and innovative advance in international relations theory, securitization ignores some of the components involved in a successful communicative act. Williams (2003) calls for securitization theory to incorporate the hitherto ignored effects of mass media and in this paper we answer this call. We first show that securitization's specification of leaders' speech acts and audiences' legitimative discourse presumes mass media actors are indifferent in how they convey leader representations and justifications of crises. We take this presumption as an empirical question and execute a study of whether the national presses of ally countries differently emphasized the frames Bush invoked in their news coverage of key September 11th speeches. We show from comparisons of chi-square distributions and regression analyses that, far from being passive conveyers of speech frames, the national presses of the US, Canada, France, Britain and Ireland (1) did not convey all of Bush's securitizing problem representations and response justifications proportionate to the extent Bush invoked them in his speeches, and (2) that for each national press factors based on professional norms and/or organizational routines increased the likelihood that a speech sentence would be conveyed in a news story. We discuss the implications of our findings for how securitization theory should conceptualize media actors when redressing this gap in its explanatory models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]