A Very Brief Reply to Steve Vladeck
Let’s clear away the underbrush: The buried lede in Judge Walton’s letter of July 29---which is the one that matters---is the comparison of FISA scrutiny to that of district courts assessing Title III warrants, and not simply the raw percentage of modified applications.
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Let’s clear away the underbrush: The buried lede in Judge Walton’s letter of July 29---which is the one that matters---is the comparison of FISA scrutiny to that of district courts assessing Title III warrants, and not simply the raw percentage of modified applications. The media missed that.
The broader questions Steve implicitly raises are, first, what should the approval process for FISA warrants should look like? And second, how should the scope of the surveillance authority be delimited? These are the right questions, but we won’t find the answer to either one by demanding more data about the current process, as Steve seems to suggest.
Joel Brenner is a senior research fellow and lecturer in MIT’s Security Studies Program. He was the head of U.S. counterintelligence policy under the first three directors of national intelligence and is a former inspector general and senior counsel of the National Security Agency.
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