FISC also doesn't issue opinions on "the meaning of the 4th Amendment". The most important way the courts have shaped 4th Amendment jurisprudence in the last century is through application of the exclusionary rule in criminal cases. FISC doesn't hear criminal cases, and if evidence from NSA/FISA was brought up in a domestic criminal case, it would be evaluated by a normal domestic court judge and, very likely, excluded.
>FISC also doesn't issue opinions on "the meaning of the 4th Amendment"
The FISC most certainly does use the Fourth Amendment as a major part of the justification of it's rulings. The "secret ruling" that the EFF and ACLU are trying to view was a FISC ruling that held that on at least one occasion the government had conducted surveillance that was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment (http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/05/29/ron_wyden...).
> "The most important way the courts have shaped 4th Amendment jurisprudence in the last century is through application of the exclusionary rule in criminal cases."
I think this ignores a large body of civil case law built up around wrongful arrests and vehicular searches. Both of these are examples of active jurisprudence over the last century that directly pertain to Fourth Amendment violations.
A violation of the Fourth Amendment is not acceptable simply because they don't use what they obtained in a criminal proceeding. There are a massive number of ways that the government can harm you with the information they collect without ever filing a criminal case.
But in fact it does issue opinions on the meaning of the 4th Amendment. It applies judgment on whether given searches are legal and constitutional, which the government apparently regards as being normal judicial precedent.
The fact that those warrants then never lead to ordinary criminal cases is precisely the point.
