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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: wonk who wrote (12803)	2/20/2006 2:13:05 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541465

It seems that even if the court is open 365 days a week 24 hours a day, it has a lot of work to do, especially after 9/11. During that time, the applications mushroomed. And, yes, the judges also sit elsewhere and carry normal docket loads on the district courts in which they sit. Their FISA work load has to be tremendous, a factor which militates against efficiency. But there is no way that I can see to determine from the available data how timely the disposition of a request might be or, even,for that matter, how much time the judges devote to each application. What we know as hard facts is simply not enough to say that the court is efficient or inefficient.

To: wonk who wrote (12803)	2/20/2006 3:15:33 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 541465

Even these inferred statistics (as you correctly noted) cannot indicate how long an application was pending before processed. However, given the processing rate, which is quite good, if there are delays the only way to eliminate the backlog is either simplify the process (which entails potential abuse) or to allocate more “just in time” resources - see Queuing Theory. Advocating the former is like eliminating airbags to save weight to get better gas mileage. Well said. Interesting data. As I've looked at a bit of this data, I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion, as I typed earlier, that the FISA court simply wasn't doing it's job. We were badly served.