Suppose there were two rogue judges on this court. Judges who would reject every wiretap. Every time a 3-judge panel was formed, those judges would vote to at least modify the request. Furthermore, suppose that approximately half of the 5645 requests since 2001 were in the 2003-4 era. So, suppose there were 3000 requests in the high-rejection era (early part of 2001 would be slow).
If we chose a panel at random, the probability that you would get one of these rogue judges is 0.0545.
Multiply this by 3000 and you get 164 -- very close to the number of rejections in this era.
I am conjecturing that nearly all the modifications and rejections resulted from the same two judges being on the panel
God I love this place.