[honway]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1576/1028069.html

Link

The special court that reviews FISA requests -- a federal panel that since 1999 has included U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota -- has approved more than 12,000 Justice Department applications for covert search warrants and wiretaps and rejected only one since the act was passed in 1978, according to government reports.

[Republican_Strategist]

"FBI officials also made fateful decisions. After Moussaoui's arrest, bureau lawyers in Washington repeatedly declined requests from Minneapolis agents to seek a special warrantWell you don’t seem to understand that the FBI doesn’t seize a person’s computer without a warrant. They did eventually crack it. You also failed to read the source of your information, which said s-e-e-k, declined to seek a “special warrant.” under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizing a search of Moussaoui's laptop computer. That decision is being questioned by some FISA experts, who say it's possible a warrant would have been granted.

The special court that reviews FISA requests -- a federal panel that since 1999 has included U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota -- has approved more than 12,000 Justice Department applications for covert search warrants and wiretaps and rejected only one since the act was passed in 1978, according to government reports.

Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general who handled FISA cases as a Justice Department attorney in the 1980s, said FBI officials in Washington may have had a regional bias in the Moussaoui case: "They probably assumed there's nothing going on in Minnesota."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, when authorities did search Moussaoui's computer, they found evidence that would have heightened suspicions that he was a terrorist."