“decorum” seems an odd term to resort to in a supplication for failing to have done an objectively responsible thing (like fact-checking, including for relevant antecedents) before posting a reader comment that heads madly off in all directions, particularly when commenting on a blog hosted by someone describing herself on Twitter as “Legendary potty mouth”.

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I won’t repeat here the long admittedly pedantic anecdote on reporting obligations I posted in commenting to an Emptywheel piece on this subject some years ago. Plus I both approve of this subject being covered as closely as possible by someone as careful and responsible as our host, and look forward to the promised follow-up on ‘resorts elsewhere’.

But I do add 3 points:

1. An 80% rate associated with one year followed by a 70% associate with the next does not to me seem particularly flag-worthy, especially, as our host notes there are only 2 years in the entire database.

2. The provisions of the FIS Act 1978 haven’t merely been renewed, but have actually been materially altered, FOUR TIMES (and all between October 26, 2001 and June 3, 2015, both dates inclusive).

Some of the changes made in each instance imposed barriers – at least barriers; actually, I think something approaching practical opacity – in attempting meaningful comparison among the 5 regulatory regimes.

3. Even under the two regimes of which I have some little personal experience or at all reliable hearsay, I’m aware of variations on reporting policies.

Note, AOT, that although the FISA was signed into law by a POTUS of one party, within less than 3 years he would be displaced by POTUSi of the other party, who were in for the next TWELVE.

That is. whatever ambit Congress and the administration might have shared for reporting when the law was first promulgated, the policies interpreting that ambit really didn’t begin to kick in until after POTUSi of the party, many of whose members broadly opposed it, were in office.

Recall that the controlling opinion of the court in the so-called “Keith” case 1972 was that the administration’s power to authorize strictly foreign surveillance was completely unfettered – a state of affairs Republican administrations, at least, have generally favored over the entire period since WWII, and that it was the combination of the Keith case opinion, the Watergate affair, and the Church Commission, all happening over a fairly compressed time period, that brought about the push for what became the FISA.

It was the two Reagan and one GHW Bush administrations that ended up doing the ‘pioneering’ work on those policies (I think it’s also worth noting that GHWB had been CIA director for a time, it was widely understood – at least before Woodward set to trying to re-write the history of the CIA of that time – that as veep, GHWB was far more hands on than Reagan in the intersection of U.S. spying and foreign policy, and that Addington entered federal public service as assistant general counsel to the CIA in 1984 and Libby entered in 1981 carrying Wolfowitz’ bags at State.

If I seem to imply a snake clusterball, I do: those 3 Republican administrations featured first ‘advice’ from, and eventually actual participation of, one Dick Cheney (first in as an unusually well-connected-and-favored House rep, then as Secretary of Defense), as well as his eventually favored pretties Addington and Libby, in their common areas of interest: CIA, State, and Defense.

So – imagine now the metamorphosis, notable even from some distance, that occurred over 1981-1993, not just generally in the reporting policies of the federal government, but in the areas entrusted with its most confidential and sensitive information.

My point, again, is that it’s at best extremely difficult to draw meaningful information, let alone any carrying lessons, from FISA reporting statistics even within a given regime.

(Now I fear that even as I try to avoid pedantry in this area, it still creeps in.)