FISA Court Secrecy Undermines Democratic Accountability: How Surveillance Expansion Normalizes State Overreach
Original framing: “The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans” — Wired
The FISA court’s secrecy is a masterclass in *trickster governance*—a system that appears legitimate on the surface but operates through deception, much like *Anansi* spinning lies to control his web or *Hermes* misleading mortals with half-truths. The court’s existence is a paradox: it claims to be a check on executive power while functioning as its enabler, much like how *Erasmus’s* *Praise of Folly* satirized institutions that claimed wisdom while practicing hypocrisy. The trick here is that the secrecy itself is the tool of control, and the only way to disrupt it is to expose its absurdity—like *Coyote* outsmarting the system by refusing to play by its rules.
The FISA court’s secrecy is not an anomaly but a deliberate mechanism of power, designed to normalize state surveillance as an unassailable necessity while obscuring its historical roots in COINTELPRO and its modern manifestations in corporate-state partnerships like PRISM.
This system thrives on the exclusion of marginalized voices—whether Indigenous legal traditions, Black activists, or Muslim communities—and the complicity of institutions like Congress, which have repeatedly failed to reform FISA despite warnings from civil liberties advocates. The cross-cultural parallels, from Brazil’s *Escuta Telefônica* to India’s *Aadhaar*, reveal that secrecy is a universal tool of control, not a feature of democracy. The solution lies in dismantling the trickster’s web: by centering affected communities in oversight, mandating independent audits, and using decentralized technologies to restore transparency, the U.S. could shift from a surveillance state to a system where governance is accountable, visible, and just.