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the G-man said:
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Matter-eater Man said:
Why avoid a judge? Could it be that he's wiretapping folks that a judge wouldn't OK?



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wannabuyamonkey said:
...could it be because they wanted to minimise the chance that the opperation would get leaked?



Byron York, NR's White House correspondent reports that especially before, and even after, passage of the Patriot Act, the FISA bureaucracy and the agencies that dealt with it were too unwieldy to handle some fast-moving intelligence cases:

    In 2002, when the president made his decision, there was widespread, bipartisan frustration with the slowness and inefficiency of the bureaucracy involved in seeking warrants from the special intelligence court, known as the FISA court.

    Even later, after the provisions of the Patriot Act had had time to take effect, there were still problems with the FISA court — problems examined by members of the September 11 Commission — and questions about whether the court can deal effectively with the fastest-changing cases in the war on terror.

    People familiar with the process say the problem is not so much with the court itself as with the process required to bring a case before the court.

    "It takes days, sometimes weeks, to get the application for FISA together," says one source. "It's not so much that the court doesn't grant them quickly, it's that it takes a long time to get to the court. Even after the Patriot Act, it's still a very cumbersome process. It is not built for speed, it is not built to be efficient. It is built with an eye to keeping [investigators] in check."

    And even though the attorney general has the authority in some cases to undertake surveillance immediately, and then seek an emergency warrant, that process is just as cumbersome as the normal way of doing things.

    Lawmakers of both parties recognized the problem in the months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. They pointed to the case of Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who ran up against a number roadblocks in her effort to secure a FISA warrant in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative who had taken flight training in preparation for the hijackings. Investigators wanted to study the contents of Moussaoui's laptop computer, but the FBI bureaucracy involved in applying for a FISA warrant was stifling, and there were real questions about whether investigators could meet the FISA court's probable-cause standard for granting a warrant. FBI agents became so frustrated that they considered flying Moussaoui to France, where his computer could be examined.

    But then the attacks came, and it was too late.

    It was in the context of such bureaucratic bottlenecks that the president first authorized, and then renewed, the program to bypass the FISA court in cases of international communications of people with known al Qaeda links.




If this is the case, then perhaps a better solution is to somehow streamline the bureaucratic process so that a judge can still approve the wire-tap or whatever else needs to be done in a timely manner instead of bypassing a judge completely. If it can be done properly, everybody wins except the terrorists.

Yes, going through courts and obtaining permits is time consuming, but it is the law, if I understand correctly. And considering a law to be inconvenient is a lousy excuse to violate it.

Last edited by Darknight613; 2005-12-20 2:00 AM.
"Well when I talk to people I don't have to worry about spelling." - wannabuyamonkey "If Schumacher’s last effort was the final nail in the coffin then Year One would’ve been the crazy guy who stormed the graveyard, dug up the coffin and put a bullet through the franchise’s corpse just to make sure." -- From a review of Darren Aronofsky & Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" script