US must fix secret Fisa courts, says top judge who granted surveillance orders

[Igel]

25. He's embarrassed, an outsider, and doesn't agree.

He knows quite well that a warrant is not the same as adjudication in the sense of settling a dispute. There's the judge and the claimant, and nobody else. And if it's adjudication in the way that warrants and such are "adjudicated," then it's up to the judge to review the evidence. The bar is a bit lower because there's always a remedy if it's been found that the government overstepped its bounds or that the decision was flawed. The evidence is tossed--it's guilt and innocence that the courts deal with, and the FISA court doesn't deal with guilt or innocence. Period.

If he objects to that kind of thing, I'm surprised he accepted a FISA Court appt. That's all they do--look at applications and decide if the application was filled out and the evidence strong enough or argumentation valid enough to permit evidence collection.

Given that this judge hasn't reviewed the evidence and has been out of the loop for 3 years, he is making inferences based on incomplete, albeit expert, information. He can only really speak concerning what was done when he was there. Oddly, he's not.

So here's the question: When did "relevant" come to mean a wide range of metadata?

My inference so far has been "under Bush," although that's perhaps my main source of info on this is DU OPs and there'd be a natural inclination (on the part of most people) to avoid embarrassing Obama and Holder.

This guy retired in 2010 according to the article. Bush had been gone at least a year by then. So if the meaning did change under Bush, it changed during his tenure. I wonder if he used the expanded definition.

Or is he like O'Connor (Ginsburg?)--he lost an argument in camera and can now defend his own reputation in public by saying how much he disagreed with it, knowing that those still "in the game" are pretty much held to secrecy. It's easy to make a convincing argument when there's only one side arguing in the court of public opinion, and it's almost a slam dunk that his argument will be rubber-stamped. It's a process he obviously thinks is just fine.

Oh. Wait. That's his complaint about the flawed FISA court in the first place--that it only hears one side of the argument and rubberstamps it.