Rubber stumped: spying oversight.

• Author: Shackford, Scott
• Position: Citings - Brief article

THE FOREIGN Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court is frequently accused of rubberstamping government requests to collect data. Newly released FISA court documents reveal a worse problem: The court is making decisions based on inaccurate or misleading information provided by the very officials they're supposed to oversee.

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These new revelations, which emerged from a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, show FISA judges frustrated to find that the National Security Agency (NSA) misled them about certain surveillance techniques. In 2009 the court was told that of the 17,000 "suspicious" phone numbers being used to query metadata information, only about 2,000 had passed any sort of test for the "reasonable, articulable suspicion" the court required.

And in 2011, the FISA court...