Comment by leef
12 years ago
No it's not. The court system, even if it is rumber stamp-y, provides way more visibility and accountibility than secret and total access to Google's data via tapping data links.
12 years ago
No it's not. The court system, even if it is rumber stamp-y, provides way more visibility and accountibility than secret and total access to Google's data via tapping data links.
The FISC is not visible or accountable to the public. NSLs must be kept secret by law. In other words, all courts do is provide the NSA with a minor speed bump when it wants to wiretap everyone.
It's mostly a moot point since it's overseas, but I doubt the secret court would be willing to pass through over 6 million FISC requests a day (181,280,466 requests every 30 days the NSA reportedly gets through this wire tapping). At the very least the FISC courts provide a bottleneck at whatever government 'efficiency' throughput they can provide.