“Many people are asking why the administration chose to break the law in an arena where following it has been made very easy. The secret court administering government activities undertaken in compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is extraordinarily obliging: according to the annual FISA reports filed by the Justice Department, the court received 18,749 requests for authorization of physical searches, electronic surveillance or some combination of the two between January of 1979, when the law took effect, and December 31 of 2004, the end of the most recent reporting period (the 2005 report will be available in March or April of next year). Of those, the court has rejected a total of four requests, or roughly .o2%; in at least one instance, the court actually authorized activities the government hadn’t requested.

…One has to wonder what was in those four applications that were denied, and in several others that were withdrawn from consideration before the court could rule on them. Regardless, the four slaps in the Bush administration’s collective face amounted to about .07% of the more than 5,600 applications submitted between 2001-2004; not a bad success rate although not, apparently, good enough to satisfy this collection of steroidal scofflaws. But why?

Three possible explanations come to mind, singly or in combination. One is that the surveillance is on a scale that makes applying for court approval impractical… The second is that the administration are allergic to oversight of even the mildest sort… The third is that the administration is a collection of thugs who are using the NSA’s eavesdropping capacity for political purposes, spying on people no court in the universe would sanction as targets… ” (BTC News)