Between 1979 and 2012, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court received 33,900 surveillance requests and denied only 11 — a 99.97% approval rate. The court operates in total secrecy with no adversarial process. Declassified opinions revealed the FBI used Section 702 to surveil a sitting state court judge who had complained about civil rights violations by a police chief. The court has been called 'the most one-sided legal process in the United States.'
“The FISA Court is the most one-sided legal process in the United States. It makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was created in 1978, it was supposed to be a check on government power. A secretive tribunal, yes, but one with real teeth—judges who would scrutinize warrant requests and protect Americans from overreach. That was the idea. The reality, as decades of declassified documents would later reveal, looked more like a rubber stamp than a court.
Between 1979 and 2012, the FISA court received 33,900 surveillance requests. It denied 11. That's a 99.97% approval rate over three decades. For perspective, federal judges in ordinary criminal cases deny warrants at rates between 5% and 10%. The FISA court wasn't just lenient—it operated in a fundamentally different universe, one where there was no opposing lawyer, no advocate pushing back against the government's claims, and no public record of what was happening inside its chambers.
For years, civil liberties advocates raised alarms about this imbalance. Privacy groups and critics argued that a court operating in total secrecy, hearing only from one side, had become less a judicial check and more an institutional enabler. The government's response was predictable: trust us. These safeguards exist for national security reasons, officials said. The court takes its job seriously. The approval rate simply reflects the high quality of requests submitted by intelligence agencies. Nothing to see here.
Then the documents came out.
Declassified opinions revealed the actual mechanics of surveillance approval—and they confirmed what skeptics had long suspected. One particularly striking case involved the surveillance of a sitting state court judge. The judge had complained to about civil rights violations committed by a police chief. The FBI's response was to use authority to monitor the judge's communications. When the FISA court learned about this, it didn't shut down the surveillance immediately. The court had approved it.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
The case wasn't isolated. Declassified rulings showed a pattern: the court approved surveillance even when evidence was thin, even when the government's legal reasoning was questionable, even when the targets were people whose surveillance seemed to serve no legitimate national security purpose. The court's judges appeared to accept the government's framing without meaningful pushback. No adversarial process meant no one was there to challenge dubious claims.
The Brennan Center and other watchdog organizations documented the scale of the problem. What they found was a legal process so lopsided that legal scholar called it "the most one-sided legal process in the United States." NPR's investigation confirmed the basic numbers and the basic problem: a court system that had lost any meaningful ability to say no.
This matters because surveillance power without real oversight is surveillance power without real limits. The FISA court was designed to balance security and privacy. Instead, it became an instrument that tilted almost entirely toward security. Citizens had no idea they were being monitored. Their lawyers didn't know. The public definitely didn't know. A judge who raised concerns about civil rights violations ended up under surveillance himself.
The lesson wasn't subtle: courts that operate in secret, hearing only from one side, tend to approve whatever the powerful ask them to approve. Trust isn't a substitute for transparency. And a rubber stamp, no matter how many judges sit behind it, is still just a rubber stamp.
Beat the odds
This had a 0% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~50Network
Secret kept
0.5 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
