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Would you believe that any process where 18,742 requests were granted and 4 are denied is because of "the quality of each request"? What would you think about

Would you believe that any process where 18,742 requests were granted and 4 are denied is because of "the quality of each request"? What would you think about a class where 18,742 students passed it and 4 failed it, or a company where 18,742 employees have acceptable performance and 4 are fired?

ethanbond 3y ago
Exams and performance reviews are designed to rank the things being examined... why would that possibly apply to a warrant evaluation process? You think a good process is one where definitionally 50% of the warrants get rejected? In that case: just file 2x garbage warrant requests so the ones you care about are "correctly" guaranteed to be at the top.
- function_seven 3y ago
  50% would be a lot. I don't know what the optimum number is, but 0.02% (0.0002 rate) is just not plausible. One way to resolve this is to not have secret courts. Then we can judge the merits of these warrant applications in the light of day. If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed. But in practice, you or I or anyone else should be able to pull up all the warrants issued in 2016, or 1994, or 2021. We should be able to assess the quality of the supporting PC, we should be able to track the success rate of these searches (How many ultimately went nowhere? What was the FBI focused on in a particular year? Etc.) All of this is a bare minimum requirement for a free and open society. Instead we get secret courts and a single statistic (99.98% acceptance rate). That's basically the same as a North Korean approval rating, or the electoral performance of a dictator. It's just too perfect to pass muster.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    > If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed. Didn't you just describe a secret court? I don't think these records don't exist or are permanently classified.

ethanbond 3y ago

Exams and performance reviews are designed to rank the things being examined... why would that possibly apply to a warrant evaluation process? You think a good process is one where definitionally 50% of the warrants get rejected? In that case: just file 2x garbage warrant requests so the ones you care about are "correctly" guaranteed to be at the top.

function_seven 3y ago
50% would be a lot. I don't know what the optimum number is, but 0.02% (0.0002 rate) is just not plausible. One way to resolve this is to not have secret courts. Then we can judge the merits of these warrant applications in the light of day. If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed. But in practice, you or I or anyone else should be able to pull up all the warrants issued in 2016, or 1994, or 2021. We should be able to assess the quality of the supporting PC, we should be able to track the success rate of these searches (How many ultimately went nowhere? What was the FBI focused on in a particular year? Etc.) All of this is a bare minimum requirement for a free and open society. Instead we get secret courts and a single statistic (99.98% acceptance rate). That's basically the same as a North Korean approval rating, or the electoral performance of a dictator. It's just too perfect to pass muster.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  > If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed. Didn't you just describe a secret court? I don't think these records don't exist or are permanently classified.