So if they really did pick an "impressive" list, I'm curious what their incentive was for doing so? What is that selection process and who does it? Anyone know?
"In the court’s history, warrants (and related orders) are approved more than 99 percent of the time."
Quite the appearance for judges who are not rubber stamping.
1. Perhaps FISA really does rubber-stamp all requests.
2. Perhaps NSA really is surveilling almost solely targets of real security interest.
3. Perhaps the FISA process and the documentation it generates forces NSA to be overly conservative about surveilling targets, to the detriment of security.
4. Perhaps NSA only uses the FISA process for targets of real security interest, and uses some other process for other targets.
In fact, a 50/50 success rate at FISC would be disturbing for other reasons: it would imply that the USG was aggressively targeting people of no security interest, and only the FISC process was preventing that from happening.
"Perhaps" is no longer enough to sway me. Apart from the reason already given, we the west are still suffering terrorist attacks, making the NSA (and GCHQ et. al.) wasted money.
The "period of time" needs to be short - in the 12-to-24 month range, rather than the 50-100 year range.
Maybe a model statute that required the USG to (a) declare its surveillance objectives publicly (it's no secret that we're after AQ and ISIS, nor should the USG get to be secretive about its broad objectives) and (b) limit use of the FISC process to targets operationally relevant to those objectives.
But while I would be happier with that kind of transparency, I think people actually involved with surveillance would say it's just window dressing, because the totality of the FISC process and the 2001 and 2003 AUMFs has the same effect.
Why indeed can't everything be open and transparent with the People's government?
What do we really need to fear if our government's actions are ALL in the open?
As an aside, I'd imagine that in previous days without these public advocates, the government would have bent over backwards in choosing submissions judiciously, to guard against the obvious perception that the court was being abused. But now perceptions are different, and they can (from a PR standpoint) afford a very small amount of fighting with the public advocates. So maybe now they'll push the envelope a very slight bit, see where the boundaries are.
Not sure I believe that story, and even if it's true it's not a great idea to rely on the innate moral fiber of the judges, but that stat is not necessarily a smoking gun.
The problem with the FISA court is that it lacks oversight provided by publicly-readable appeals. This, legal scholars have no way to debate if warrants are valid or invalid.