America's most controversial courtroom has no need for a gavel and no place for a gallery. In fact, situated on the third floor of the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., it isn't so much a courtroom as an office with thick walls designed to defeat electronic surveillance.

Inside, judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court pore through -- and almost always approve -- government applications to eavesdrop on people suspected of acting as agents of foreign governments. Typically this means allowing the government to snoop on suspected terrorists or spies on U.S. soil and those who might phone, text, email or communicate with them from abroad.

Critics have long accused the court of being a rubber stamp that violates the constitutional rights of surveillance targets. The panel provoked national outrage in June, when The Guardian newspaper of London published a document -- leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden -- showing the court ordered Verizon to turn over millions of Americans' phone records to the NSA.

Though the court sits three time zones away, it's intimately linked to the residents of Oregon, whose U.S. senators have sponsored or signed onto at least eight pieces of legislation to revamp the panel since the NSA revelations. Those senators -- Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley -- want to change the law that created the court: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, better known as FISA.

They say amendments to the law since 9/11 -- along with rapid advances in surveillance technology -- have created a court with the power to secretly trample the privacy of ordinary citizens. They want a court with more transparency in its rulings and an advocate inside the panel to represent the privacy and civil rights of those targeted by government eavesdropping.

Oregon possesses a multitude of powerful ties to the court, its decisions and its future.

Wyden is a senior member of the

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the panel has authorized surveillance in Oregon of at least 16 people and a nonprofit business suspected of illegal ties to foreign powers, according to court papers.

Michael W. Mosman

Edward Leavy, a senior federal appeals court judge in Portland, previously sat on a little-known panel that reviews the surveillance court's rare denials.

Two top-rail attorneys with ties to Oregon --

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden is a senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, giving him a rare portal into the doings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Wyden receives classified briefings as a member of the intelligence committee. He says portions of FISA work well but that amendments -- particularly under the USA Patriot Act -- have made it anachronistic, a vestige of a well-intentioned law run amok in the name of national security.

He's fond of quoting Benjamin Franklin on the subject: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Yet it was liberty that motivated Congress to enact the law in the first place.

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During the Cold War years of the 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon secretly approved orders for domestic electronic surveillance of America's enemies.

Bipartisan lawmakers drafted FISA to take decisions about such snooping out of the Oval Office and put them into the hands of the three branches of government. The American Civil Liberties Union blessed the legislation, while some constitutional scholars and civil libertarians argued that Congress was creating a star chamber.

The law enacted 35 years ago permits the executive branch -- by way of the Justice Department -- to snoop on suspects electronically or physically. The judicial branch staffs the court with U.S. district judges. The legislative branch, through congressional committees, oversees its decisions.

Congressional leaders at the time assured Americans that the Justice Department wouldn't misuse FISA by going after suspected criminals. They expected only a small number of operations to be approved.

But the court has approved more than 33,000 surveillance orders, the bulk of them since 9/11, according to its unclassified annual reports. From 1979 to 2012, the court turned down 11 requests.

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Critics of the court call it a panel of rubber-stampers.

Turley, the law school professor, doesn't question the integrity of the court's judges. He takes aim at the wording of the law, which in his opinion allows the government -- including the FBI, NSA, and CIA -- to target people for surveillance without the basic probable cause standards afforded by the Constitution.

"The statute does not give the judge the authority to turn down applications when the criteria (for eavesdropping) are met," Turley says. "And those criteria are so low that they are always met."

He recalls working as an intern at the NSA during the Reagan administration, when he had occasion to go inside the court.

"I was horrified by what I saw," he says. "It was abundantly clear this was a Potemkin Village. ... One can only call this a court if you abandon every substantive meaning of that term. This court has less authority than a standard municipal traffic court. There is no serious review, because there's no substantive authority to question or reject these applications."

Those intimately familiar with the court's operations, including national security lawyers past and present, say rejections of FISA applications are rare because they are so exhaustively vetted before ever reaching a judge.

For example, FBI agents and their division counsels pore through and edit applications before passing them to lawyers in both the bureau's headquarters and a panel of Justice Department lawyers. By law, topmost officials in the bureau and Justice Department must sign certifications attesting to the evidence and the need to eavesdrop.

The court's judges also rigorously review applications. A recently declassified document shows the panel requires revisions to nearly one in four applications before approval.

The process is so exacting that FBI lawyers denied requests by Minnesota agents in 2001 to obtain a FISA order that would allow them to search the laptop of Zacarias Moussaoui. The al-Qaida figure is now serving life in prison for his role in the 9/11 conspiracy.

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The FBI has investigated six criminal cases in Oregon since 9/11 with evidence obtained under FISA.

Perhaps the most sensational arrest occurred Nov. 26, 2010, when a Somali American teen, Mohamed Mohamud, attempted to detonate what he thought was a massive fertilizer bomb at Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square.

The bomb, which Mohamud armed to go off during the city's holiday tree lighting ceremony, was a harmless fake secretly built by the FBI and introduced to Mohamud by undercover FBI agents posing as al-Qaida terrorists.

Prosecutors filed a notice after Mohamud's arrest to let the defense know agents used FISA to collect evidence. (Much later, on Nov. 19, 2013, prosecutors filed another notice acknowledging the investigation collected electronic intercepts from overseas.)

The sting operation shocked city leaders. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force gave no previous notice about the case to then-Mayor Sam Adams, who served as police commissioner, because the city wasn't a member of the multi-agency counterterrorism team. Portland had dropped out of the task force in 2005, the first city in America to sever such ties.

Prosecutors filed notice after the arrest of Mohamed Mohamud to let the defense know agents had used FISA to collect evidence.

Hinnen, a native Portlander, flew to the city on Valentine's Day 2011 to urge the City Council to rejoin the JTTF. He was then serving as a senior lawyer in the Justice Department's National Security Division.

Today, Hinnen works for the Perkins Coie law firm in Seattle, where his chores include representing people wrapped up in national security probes. While he now works on the other side of FISA, he strongly supports the work of the court and the law that created it.

"There are a number of safeguards in place already," he says. "But there are additional safeguards that could be put into place."

One potential change advanced by members of Congress, he says, is turning the court's operations into an adversarial proceeding. As it stands, government lawyers submit applications to the court, where they are reviewed by legal staffers and passed to judges such as Mosman, who served from 2001 to 2003 as the U.S. attorney for Oregon. But the court does not hear from anyone representing the privacy or civil liberty interests of potential targets.

Creating a panel of legal advocates with security clearances could change that, Hinnen says. These lawyers could offer input about privacy and constitutional matters as judges decide whether to grant or turn down a surveillance order.

Wyden and Merkley co-sponsored a bill by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., that would create an executive-branch position -- Office of the Special Advocate -- to protect the rights of targeted individuals. Wyden introduced a bill that would create an advocate within the judicial branch.

The senators hope such an advocate would provide the court with a balanced view of issues, especially when its judges are making significant legal interpretations. Wyden says he doesn't expect such an advocate to get involved in routine applications.

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Until Snowden's leaks began to reveal the extent of NSA data collection, the public knew little about the court's decisions. Now that terms like "telephony metadata" have become part of the national lexicon, Wyden finds himself fielding questions from constituents. Most are critical of the court Wyden calls the "most bizarre" in the land.

"People have asked me about the FISA court in the barber shop," he says.

The senior senator from Oregon says the Patriot Act sent the court's decisions off the tracks. The 2001 law changed a key tenet of FISA. Before its passage, the government had to show that the purpose of its FISA surveillance was to gather foreign-intelligence information. After its passage, the government had only to show that a "significant purpose" was to collect foreign intelligence.

Wyden says the law is supposed to allow the government to collect records on U.S. residents when they are relevant to terrorism or other national security matters. But it has "morphed,"he says, into bulk phone data collection.

Technology is partly to blame, he says, because it once had limitations.

"Now," he says, "the technology seems to be able to do just about everything -- unbridled. So protections for the liberties of our people become even more important."

Lewis & Clark Law School professor Tung Yin says the NSA's technological reach may have outstripped the current law's ability to protect privacy. But he questions whether the government's use of FISA to collect vast stores of emails and phone-call data harms innocent residents. Under the law, the agency must get the court's permission to search for specific data.

"If no human is looking at it, is there a real privacy harm?" he asks. "I think one answer to that is, how much do you trust the government?"

Oregon's federal public defender, Steven T. Wax, has an answer.

Wax is one of more than a dozen lawyers to have argued FISA's constitutionality in Portland's U.S. District Court since 9/11. He says the law and its younger brother -- the Classified Information Procedures Act of 1980 -- have made judges and government lawyers privy to secret files to the exclusion of defendants and their lawyers.

FISA targets have no right under the law to know they were subjected to surveillance unless they learn, as Wax's client Mohamud did, that they were charged with crimes. The law prevented Wax from learning from the government or the court what evidence the Justice Department provided to the surveillance court to spy on Mohamud.

At a hearing in the case, Wax told U.S. District Judge Garr M. King that prosecutors keep filing classified documents with him, essentially telling the defense, "trust us" to which Wax says, "no, thank you."

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Turley, the law professor, says he thinks the court was borne of a political compromise that sacrifices Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. FISA, he says, permits the thinnest evidence as probable cause that an American is acting on behalf of a foreign power.

Wyden doesn't lay sole blame for this overreaching on the court but says the panel is a key part of a system in need of reform.

For example, he says, the government obtained at least one FISA order that the court later determined was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. A redacted copy of that 2011 opinion, turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, indicates the order involved the NSA's overseas Internet interceptions.

Although Wyden believes some portions of FISA work well, Turley thinks the court it created should be abolished.

"We have a system that has been dealing with classified information for a very long time, and there's no reason why we can't use standard federal judges -- and constitutional procedures -- to deal with these things," Turley says. "We don't have to have a special court operating under special rules."

Leavy, who sits on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse, thinks dividing the work of 11 judges (with one staff) into the hands of 600 federal judges (and their staffs) would probably undermine national security.

"Expose enough secrets to enough people," he says, "and you run untold risks."

Leavy, who has been a judge for 56 years, was appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Appeals in 2001, a year after he successfully mediated the controversial criminal case against Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was guilty of mishandling classified data.

A year later, the surveillance court's review panel heard the government's first appeal of a FISA-application denial. Leavy and his colleagues sided with the government.

Leavy says he has no quarrel with the current composition -- or the secrecy -- of the court. Police work -- especially surveillance operations -- demand secrecy. The 84-year-old judge recalls signing off on more than his share of search warrants as a magistrate. And, he says with a chuckle, there was one constant: "You didn't tell the guy you were coming."

But Leavy acknowledges one significant difference between a standard wiretap warrant and an order by the surveillance court. When the FBI arrests someone after a non-FISA wiretap, all the records -- from agents' affidavits to judges' signed warrants -- are disclosed as evidence to the defense.

The surveillance court turns over no such evidence.

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The Bush administration in 2006 sought an interpretation of the legal standards the court applies to its FISA applications.

"Out of that came a court opinion saying these standards allow you to do everything -- just collect all the data you want," Merkley says.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley has co-sponsored a bill by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., that would create an executive-branch position -- Office of the Special Advocate -- to protect the rights of targeted individuals.

The senator wants a glimpse at the court's decision-making. He submitted a bill this summer that would require periodic declassification of the court's legal findings. The bill has not come up for a vote.

"It will seek the declassification of the opinions of the court," Merkley says. "But if there are national security concerns for that, then it would ask for a declassified statement -- or summary -- of the findings of law."

Defense lawyers for decades have attacked the constitutionality of evidence obtained under FISA.

Turley in 1997 filed a memorable constitutional challenge to quash FBI evidence obtained under FISA. He was defending Oregon native Harold James "Jim" Nicholson, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever charged with espionage.

Turley's motion accused the court of violating Nicholson's due process under the Fifth Amendment and his right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. It was the first legal challenge of a 1995 amendment to FISA that permitted physical searches of a target's car, home or other property.

"I knew the Nicholson case was the best vehicle for challenging the FISA court that I had seen," Turley recalls.

Nicholson's lawyers also asked U.S. District Judges James C. Cacheris to recuse himself from trying their client because Cacheris not only sat on the surveillance court but had signed the orders that let the FBI snoop on the accused spy. Turley described this as a tremendous appearance of conflict.

Cacheris did not recuse himself, and he denied Turley's motion. A few weeks later, Nicholson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage.

No U.S. judge has ever suppressed evidence derived by order of the surveillance court.

"It has become a bonanza for the Department of Justice," Turley says. "Why should they comply with the Constitution if they can just do this type of surveillance at a sub-constitutional level?"

-- Bryan Denson