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Rubber Stamp Court Gave NSA, FBI Permission for all Electronic Surveillance
- afarrell 11y agoIn regular warrant proceedings, warrant requests are granted at a very high rate. Is this because the judge is a rubber stamp? No. It is because the prosecutor doesn't want to get a reputation for wasting judge's time with requests that are likely to be rejected.[1] I suspect the same thing is not operating on the FISA court. Why? Normal warrants are used to collect evidence. That evidence is then used in criminal prosecutions. Less than 10%[2] go to trial but before trial, there are pretrial hearings. Here, the defense can challenge the validity of evidence and have it excluded because, the warrant under which it was collected is invalid. Furthermore, after the initial trial, the defense can to to the appellate court to have a decision in a pretrial hearing reversed. If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, they can appeal to them. All of the argument and reasoning here is openly available. At the cost of dealing with a truly awful user experience, you can read the details of a warrant and the decisions around it for free[3]. Law schools can debate both the validity of the warrants and their execution. Judges errors can be corrected. This appeals process does not occur with FISA warrants because they are not used for criminal prosecutions. Therefore, they are not challenged and debated. [1] Nathan Burney, http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1664 http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1664 [2] http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/types-cases/criminal-cases http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/types-cases/cri... [3] yes, this is PACER. Under a certain number of documents, PACER is free. The interface and payment system are both awful and state-of-the-art.