FISA Was Modifying Warrant Requests

San Francisco Gate:

Government records show that the Bush administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to begin secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an authority on the security agency that intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications.

Let's look at the numbers. FISA has approved at least 18,740 applications for electronic surveillance since 1979 (records are available only up until 2004). 13,102 were approved over the first 22 years, and only two warrant applications were ever modified.

13,102 divided by 22 is an average of 596 a year.

"Since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5645 requests...by the Bush Administration."

5645 divided by 4 is 1411 a year. That's quite a spike in requests.

And according to the article, 173 of those were in 2003 and 2004. Only six were modified before.

And six requests were also rejected or deferred during those two years - "the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history".

When did the avoidance of FISA begin? Right after September 11, 2001. However, the reticience of the FISA court to approve warrants without modification began much later, as the numbers show. These number cannot be used to exonerate Bush. The difficulties with the court begin after his bypass. They can't be the cause of the bypass.

By the way, the modification rate from 2001 to 2004 is 3% of submitted and approved requests. Wow, that's such a burden on law enforcement.

But you can begin to see why the Bushies felt that the application process was "too cumbersome". They were submitting two and a third more requests than previous administrations. But rather than going to Congress to deal with the situation, they decided to flank the system and screw anyone who second-guessed them or complained about civil liberties.