Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
user-inactivated · 3939 days ago · link · · parent · post: Obama to "Call for End" to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection
WSJ article is paywall'd, but up to 2004 they only rejected 4 request (and eventually partially granted all of those), and only required modifications 200 times. Eventually, the government always gets what it wants out of them, which is to be expected because American courts are adversarial and in the FISA court the government has no adversary. Civil law countries can work that way because they (in principal, at least) don't leave their laws open to much interpretation. We do, and we depend on both sides fighting it out to get a semi-reasonable one. Of course some constitutional jujitsu will get anything through FISA on the rare occasion they reject something; they win by default.