Rusted Sky

Over at Power Line: 72 Hours: Who Could Ask For More? they give an overview of the requirements and steps for approval of survelliance under FISA.

Now, I'm not much of sa stranger to governmental paperwork, having spent 13 years doing that work in the Reserves. THIS stuff, however, makes the military stuff I was doing look like a 2nd grade homework sheet. And that didn't make much sense to me, until I hit the following line.

"It takes days, sometimes weeks, to get the application for FISA together," says one source. "It's not so much that the court doesn't grant them quickly, it's that it takes a long time to get to the court. Even after the Patriot Act, it's still a very cumbersome process. It is not built for speed, it is not built to be efficient. It is built with an eye to keeping [investigators] in check."

During my time in doing paperwork, the emphaisis was on getting everything perfect. Punctuation, phrasing, paperwork, everything had to be just so. Why so? Well, let's be honest - in a peacetime military the problem is finding enough stuff to keep the troops occupied, no matter what their specialty is/was. Not much to do? Make the emphasis on doing it to perfection. And in administrative fields, that perfection means it's gonna take a long time. Two spaces after each bullet point sort of perfection, and if you miss, the form must be done over. The point is to keep the skill set fresh, but keep you busy.

But what do you do in times of conflict? You get the job done. You odn't worry that every I is crossed and every T is dotted, and that the form is filled out in 12 pt. Times New Roman at 1.5 line spacing. You concentrate on the important stuff, like funding cites and correct nomenclature and you don't worry about the small shit. It's supposed to be typed? If it's hand-written and legible, that's good enough.

Unfortunately, legal systems and procedures are massively dependent on the small shit. Thus you have an 11 step process with numerous substeps, all requiring a LOT of coordination. And if one step gets missed or delayed...

Poof. You've missed the deadline. Care to guess what happens?

At that point, there is a forfeiture: the surveillance is to be terminated immediately, and information gained from the surveillance during that key 72 hour period cannot be used for any purpose--not even communicated to federal anti-terror employees--without a certification that it "indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm to any person."

As a paperwork system, that doesn't cut it. Unless, of course, the idea is to NOT authorize surveillance - in which case it seems to be very well designed.

J.