[advice4u]

>And how do most of these "personal details" actually have anything to do with his credibility?

The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable.

>rubber-stamping by the FISA courts

Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)

[gergles]

>Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin...

There have been nearly 34K requests to the FISA court. It has rejected 11.

[kvb]

How many should have been rejected, given proper scrutiny?

[mindcrime]

The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable.

How would that be any different, even if he had, say, a Ph.D. from Harvard? "Paper" credentials and knowledge/talent/wisdom hardly have a guaranteed correlation. Anybody can misinterpret or misunderstand things.

Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)

Well, I'd take it as suggestive that they only deny .03% of the requests they receive[1].

Also, there's a fair amount of additional information on FISA/FISC here:

http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spyin...