Re: [Sks-devel] IPv6 peering; keydumps annoyingly large

[Robert J. Hansen]

> categorized the U.S. as an endemic surveillance state.  And since
> that time it has continued to pursue private information and to do
> so often without a warrant--though the FISA court has yet to decline
> a single warrant request.

Although I don't mean to open a political can of worms here, why do people 
believe the low rejection rate by FISC (they've rejected five warrants, 
incidentally, not zero) is evidence of malfeasance?  For quite some time the 
gatekeeper to FISC was an FBI agent named Allan Kornblum, who knew that his 
career depended on FISC a lot more than it depended on the Executive Branch.  
He was sort of infamous for telling NSA "go away and come back with a better 
warrant, I'm not going to jeopardize my career bringing this to FISC, FISC will 
laugh at me if I bring them this and then I will never get the federal 
judgeship I'm looking for".

Stewart Baker, former General Counsel for NSA, former Undersecretary of 
Homeland Security, and one of the guys who tried to foist Clipper off on us in 
the early Nineties, has written a book called _Skating on Stilts_ in which he 
talks a good bit about the bureaucratic wrangling within the intelligence 
community post-9/11.  Kornblum is portrayed in a few different places as an 
obstructionist who was getting in the NSA's way.  Getting warrants past FISC 
was not the problem, according to Baker: getting warrants past Kornblum was the 
torment of the damned.  Baker tries to portray this as an example of how 
bureaucratic infighting post-9/11 got in the way of effective intelligence 
activities, but me, I thought it kind of said the system was working pretty 
well.

FISC, and everything that surrounds it, is not a single monolithic entity with 
one single hivemind.  It's a political bureaucracy, which means that it's full 
of strong egos in violent conflict with each other.

It's tempting to see government action as the result of a single set of 
policies carried out by people who are in agreement about how to do things, but 
really, this seems to be wildly the exception rather than the rule.  Usually 
these people can't even agree on whether they're wearing socks...