Judges who serve on the FISA court, approving the government’s collection of phone metadata, have bought Verizon stock in the last year. Although the justices have financial involvement in the company, it is not considered a conflict of interest.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the National Security Agency and other members of the country’s intelligence community must request approval from a top-secret court (the FISA court) to be able to legally place an individual under electronic surveillance. They must show that there is probable cause that the targets “are or may be” aligned with a terrorist organization with the purpose of carrying out acts of terrorism against the United States. The authorizations to conduct surveillance must be renewed by FISA every 90 days.

Many of those requests involve Americans who use Verizon.

In January, Verizon Communications became the first American company of its kind to publish information about the number of requests for user data it received last year from federal investigators and law enforcement agencies.

Verizon’s so-called transparency report revealed that local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies in the United States requested customer information no fewer than 320,000 times during the last calendar year.

RT