That’s an interesting point. Are the CRS reports you mention available online?

Even if you’re right that an application requires hundreds of hours of a lawyer’s time to review, I’m not sure that strikes me as an intolerable burden. If it takes, say, 500 lawyer-hours per FISA application, and there were about 2000 applications in 2006, that suggests that the federal government needed to have 500 lawyers on hand to comply with FISA in 2006. If we figure they each lawyer costs the government a million dollars, that means that FISA cost taxpayers a half-billion dollars in 2006. Which is a drop in the bucket in federal budgeting terms and certainly a small price to pay to ensure our civil liberties are protected, no?

First, DOJ’s OIPR works very closely w/ the FISC, to maintain that working relationship, must be above the board on all applications. OIPR holds up applications until they’ve been documented extensively and gone through exhaustive reviews. An average application requires hundreds of hours of lawyers’ time to review. A regular warrant, meanwhile, may require an hour or less to draft and put before a magistrate. Maybe a bit longer under Title III.

Second, FISC review can be a back-and-forth process, with the court indeed micromanaging the details of the application, the evidence presented to it, and the means of surveillance and minimization. This is clear in the statute itself (50 U.S.C. § 1804 (d), I think).

In short, it’s a good rhetorical point, but nothing more than that. An understanding of the statute itself and how the FISC operates (two recent CRS reports are particularly good on this) are crucial to knowing what the acceptance/rejection totals really mean.