FISA court never turned down govt warrants to wiretap--until 2003

There's something about those Bush admin requests that just doesn't sit right with the court, according to Josh Marshall:



http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_12_11.php#007275

Here are some more details on the record of the FISA Court (the Court established in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

According to this table compiled from DOJ statistics at the EPIC website, the FISA Court did not reject a single warrant application from its beginning in 1979 through 2002. In 2003 it rejected four applications. In 2004, the number was again zero.

So, in a quarter century, the FISA Court has rejected four government applications for warrants.


...


Two applications were "approved as modified," and the United States appealed these applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, as applications having been denied in part. On November 18, 2002, the Court of Review issued a judgment that "ordered and adjudged that the motions for review be granted, the challenged portions of the orders on review be reversed, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's Rule 11 be vacated, and the cases be remanded with instructions to grant the United States' applications as submitted..."

In 2004, the number of approved warrants with "substantive modifications" was 94 out of a total of 1758.

Before the year 2000 modifications were seldom if ever made. In 2000, there was one; in 2001, two; and in 2002, there were two applications modified but those modifications were later reversed..

2003 is where the change comes.

-- Josh Marshall

...Bush started overreaching...and then as his requests were returned with modifications, he said, "Oh, well screw them then, we'll just circumvent them. No one tells me no."

He wanted to spy on people. I would guess political opponents and the like. Someone brought that up on the Thom Hartmann show.

If any of the people on the list are political opponents of the Bush regime, then that is the best reason for not going to the FISA court.

Ockams Razor -- the simplest explanation is usually the truest.

Bush can send over the list to the Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees if all the spied upon are "legitimate" persons of interest.

Do you think that will happen?

were for, huh? Too bad. I think it would be very telling to find out what changes were demanded under THIS admin, when there were NONE in the previous 20+ years!

through the freedom of information act??

If it was authorized in the 70's and used ever since, that tells me that what they do or are asked to do are secret too. I'd bet there's no way you'd be able to get infor about their activities through FOI.

If, as it's been reported, Bush started using warrantless wiretaps soon after 9/11/2001, what sort of FISA requests was the government submitting in 2003? Obviously they didn't simply give up on the FISA court. This means that they were doing both simultaneously - using FISA, and using the unwarranted wiretaps. This seems to indicate that the reason they needed the unwarranted wiretaps were for situations where the FISA court wouldn't be practical. You can take this to mean whatever you want, but it seems to indicate that Bush continued using FISA (and abusing it to the point of having his applications modified or rejected) whilst simultaneously also using unwarranted wiretaps.

Why?

:wtf:

A few more points and questions:

1) Not all FISA requests are WoT-related
2) We have no way of determining whether the rejected FISA warrant requests were related to the WoT. It may be that the administration simply stopped using FISA requests for all vaguely-WoT-related requests and continued using it for everything else. We have no way of knowing at the current time.
3) Do we know if the NSA was aware that the wiretap requests didn't have FISA warrants? I assume there's got to be some kind of mechanism in place to prevent this, but maybe not.

they had to have known something was fucked up. That's not their jurisdiction, ordinarily.

...with automatically assuming that this was being used to spy on political adversaries. I'm not willing to grant that the NSA is a tool of the Republican party until I see some evidence pointing in that direction.

who refused to go along or voiced dissent? Are there really no patriots left in this country who work for the gov that can shed some light on this? * is doing this illegally, totally against the grain. Certainly there are some higher ups who can obtain and release information that would shed light on this.
Come on you NSA folks, support your constitution, give a breath of life back to this country, show the emperor for the naked being he really is.
Hopefully there will be further releases which will help us understand the depths of *'s irresponsibility.

As an aside all this makes one wonder just what else there is that isn't being told, or being held by the enabling and compliant press.

Man, you gotta hate the NY Times for holding this until after the election. That really stinks of subterfuge.

it would be because there are certain people he wanted to wiretap such as the Democratic headquarters, certain antiwar activists (I'm pretty sure Cindy Sheehan would do well to have her phones checked) that would never have passed fisa.

I thought that the FBI was turned down on that one - it was notorious for being the exception, IIRC.

I have a very vague memory of the FISA courts being an issue in 2002--having something to do with the Bush administration working to do away with some of its safeguards. It may have been during the work on Patriot Act II. I seem to recall that the court somehow dodged that Bushist bullet. That's the extent of my memories of the FISA court being in the news. I don't recall any mention of Moussaoui during that tussle.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&startpos=600#a082801fail

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a082801fail

August 28, 2001: Minnesota FBI's Moussaoui Warrant Request Is Edited, Then Dropped by FBI Deputy General Counsel

A previously mentioned unnamed RFU (Radical Fundamentalism Unit) agent edits the Minnesota FBI's request (see August 23-27, 2001) for a FISA search warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's possessions. Minnesota is trying to prove that Moussaoui is connected to al-Qaeda through a rebel group in Chechnya, but the RFU agent removes information connecting the Chechnya rebels to al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, the FBI Deputy General Counsel who receives the edited request decides on this day that the connection to al-Qaeda is insufficient to allow an application for a search warrant through FISA, so FISA is never even sought. <9/11 Congressional Inquiry, 10/17/02> According to a later memo written by Minneapolis FBI legal officer Coleen Rowley, FBI headquarters is to blame for not getting the FISA warrant because of this rewrite of the request. She states: “I feel that certain facts ... have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mischaracterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons.” She asks, “Why would an FBI agent deliberately sabotage a case?” The superiors acted so strangely that some agents in the Minneapolis office openly joked that these higher-ups “had to be spies or moles ... working for Osama bin Laden.” FBI headquarters also refuses to contact the Justice Department to try to get a search warrant through ordinary means. Rowley and others are unable to search Moussaoui's computer until after the 9/11 attacks. Rowley later notes that the headquarters agents who blocked the Minnesota FBI were promoted after 9/11.

of the FBI's hands to even be rejected by the FISA court. Josh Marshall's point is that of all requests for wiretaps from the government since the court was established in 1979, it was only when the Bushist's started making requests that they were turned down or even modified.

it was only when the Bushist's started making requests that they were turned down or even modified.

Assuming that the Bushists started making FISA requests in 2000, they had a good two to three year run of never having a warrant questioned. So the supposed start date of the warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11 predates the first refusal of a FISA warrant for the administration by quite a big chunk of time.

It seems that the Ashcroft DoJ, the Pentagon, Cheney, Hadley, Rice and Gonzalez were all on the same page about how much contempt to show the other branches of government. As underpants suggested in Will Pitt's thread on Karen Kwiatkowski, the page seems to have been written by the Federalist Society years ago. This was an admin that seems to have been looking to make a power grab for the executive branch all along. 9/11 was just an excuse to follow through.

...has been on the Republicans' agenda for a long time. Actually, to some extent its been on both parties' agendas since the end of WWII. No doubt they'd use any excuse to increase their own power. The main difference with this crew is that previous administrations did it legally. I can't find any paralleling what this admin has done in recent history.

making requests. My suspicion is that the secret wiretaps have been going on all along with some requests being sent to the court to preserve a sense of business as usual.

...granted? One would expect to see a *large* jump in the number of requests immediately after 9/11.


Edit: Aha! Yes we do!

http://www.epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html

Year Reqs Approve Reject
1990 886 880 0
2000 1005 1012 0
2001 932 934 0
2002 1228 1228 0
2003 1727 1724 4
2004 1758 1754 0

So what we actually see is a massive increase in the number of FISA warrants requested and issued starting in 2002. However, the average number of FISA requests has gone up over time. Obviously they were still using the FISA process for something other than ornamental purposes after 9/11.

I don't know how much information is made public.

The info was linked from the original TPM post.

If it was a legitimate tactical requirement against an operation in progress, they might have an argument. If it was for political espionage against US citizens,then they have a BIG problem.

according to one seemingly clueful DUer:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5637650

It's a dragnet. Anyone who utters a key word is tagged.

Welcome to Big Brother.

I think it was James Bamford, but not sure, however he said that he suspects that regardless of whether this is an Impeachable Offense, considering the CURRENT Supreme Court and adding that Alito will probably be on it, that THEY will most probably look the other way.

In other words, this F--K of our country is probably going to SLLIIIIDDDEEE, AGAIN!!

Hello to ALL you Americans who didn't BOTHER to vote! Look what they've done to YOUR country, MA!!!

The supreme court has nothing whatsoever to do with bringing articles of impeachment or determining whether or not to convict.

might end up at the Supreme Court. But I don't think that's the way I heard it. But, I could be wrong. It just came up in the conversation and THAT statement was made.

But who here REALLY thinks it would EVER get so far as Impeachment?? These crooks have so much on their plate now and NOTHING has happened yet!!

Don't hold your breath!!!

Let O'Connor have one last chance to redeem her soul, assuming this is possible.

I was under the impression that the makeup of the supreme court was irrelevant in impeachment.

The only role it would play is in sending Roberts to preside over the trial in the Senate.

... the President to turn over items that would be useful in his impeachment. The Supreme Court did this with the Nixon tapes, as I recall, and he resigned shortly thereafter.