When a government makes a court secret, I tend to infer the worst interpretation of the activities they're hiding from us. We have no means of checking whether the FBI is putting any care into their warrant applications. We have no way of knowing if the judges even read the affidavits, or what level of scrutiny they apply to the requests, etc.

All we know is that they grant 99.98% of the warrants asked-for. That's a massively suspicious rate of approval that is more likely explained by the rubber stamp than careful consideration and evaluation.

Nothing in this world has that kind of success rate without some sort of shenanigans.

> We have no means of checking whether the FBI is putting any care into their warrant applications.

Congress does.

> Nothing in this world has that kind of success rate without some sort of shenanigans.

That's your assumption. I have a higher success rate of safely driving to work.

Sure and so far it was only Wyden that even was allowed to shed some light on what is happening behind the curtain and even then, when IC officials are dragged in front that body that is supposed to be the buck where it all stops, IC representative simply lied ( wiki Clapper for more info ). It is silly that all this is happening in plain sight and we still argue like it is some sort of assumption.

> How do we know it's automatic without knowing the quality of each request?

what purpose does the filter serve if it allows virtually all requests through? your response amounts to "trust the FBI, they don't need oversight".

> I think the FBI understands the process and doesn't send flimsy requests in the first place.

I would love to see your evidence for this.

> If it's a rubber stamp, why are any rejected?

because those requests were egregiously bad?

warrant approval is bad across the board, even when the requests are public[1]. what reason do we have to assume they're better when they're sealed? "the FBI is self-regulating" doesn't pass muster when we can see the warrant requests they put forward and get approved when the details are public.

[1]: https://www.popehat.com/2014/07/15/warrants-bulwark-of-liber...

Would you believe that any process where 18,742 requests were granted and 4 are denied is because of "the quality of each request"?

What would you think about a class where 18,742 students passed it and 4 failed it, or a company where 18,742 employees have acceptable performance and 4 are fired?

Exams and performance reviews are designed to rank the things being examined... why would that possibly apply to a warrant evaluation process?

You think a good process is one where definitionally 50% of the warrants get rejected?

In that case: just file 2x garbage warrant requests so the ones you care about are "correctly" guaranteed to be at the top.

50% would be a lot. I don't know what the optimum number is, but 0.02% (0.0002 rate) is just not plausible.

One way to resolve this is to not have secret courts. Then we can judge the merits of these warrant applications in the light of day. If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed.

But in practice, you or I or anyone else should be able to pull up all the warrants issued in 2016, or 1994, or 2021. We should be able to assess the quality of the supporting PC, we should be able to track the success rate of these searches (How many ultimately went nowhere? What was the FBI focused on in a particular year? Etc.)

All of this is a bare minimum requirement for a free and open society. Instead we get secret courts and a single statistic (99.98% acceptance rate). That's basically the same as a North Korean approval rating, or the electoral performance of a dictator. It's just too perfect to pass muster.

> If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed.

Didn't you just describe a secret court? I don't think these records don't exist or are permanently classified.

> How do we know it's automatic without knowing the quality of each request?

We don't need to. Based on what we already know, through years of news, abuse, etc., it is entirely inconceivable that every (or nearly every) single request is the perfect paragon of thoroughness and reasonableness.

> If it's a rubber stamp, why are any rejected?

Because no one actually uses "rubber stamp" to mean that literally every single thing goes by, unquestioned.

> Because no one actually uses "rubber stamp" to mean that literally every single thing goes by, unquestioned.

I do. That's what it means, after all.

metaphors, you see, are always literal

Probably some critical typo/paperwork issue (submitted to a suddenly dead judge or something). Once re-submitted, it was stamped.

Or it was a duplicate.

Are you really being so absolutist that 0.02% means that a definition is invalid?