There is another way in which the analogy is flawed. The analogy states that after the six months, when the forms have been reviewed or approved, the target dies.
If this is to be analogous to bulk surveillance, the assassination agency would have to discover that the target had actually died in an accident eight months ago, just before the forms were submitted, and they would simply retroactively dismiss any wrongful death or homicide cases that may be ongoing.
The panopticon operators are asking forgiveness rather than permission, and only for those specific instances where the surveillance needs to be laundered from illegally gathered to warrant-authorized.
As such, I have no faith that the spying has ever stopped, or slowed, or even decreased its rate of growth. The steep bureaucratic hurdle does nothing to prevent it. The most it does is limit the amount of information that can be moved from the shadows into the sunshine via that method, and strongly encourages less costly alternatives to actually honoring the law. One such workaround is "parallel construction", where the illegal spying is converted into an anonymous tip to another "innocent" agency of the state, who then gets reasonable suspicion on a pretext charge--like failure to signal a lane change, plus the invocation of the magical ritual phrase "I smell marijuana"--and then the road-patrol cop somehow finds 20 kilograms of cocaine in the trunk.
Fixing or eliminating the FISA court won't stop the behavior. Only actual accountability for the people actually doing the dirty deeds will help.
If this is to be analogous to bulk surveillance, the assassination agency would have to discover that the target had actually died in an accident eight months ago, just before the forms were submitted, and they would simply retroactively dismiss any wrongful death or homicide cases that may be ongoing.
The panopticon operators are asking forgiveness rather than permission, and only for those specific instances where the surveillance needs to be laundered from illegally gathered to warrant-authorized.
As such, I have no faith that the spying has ever stopped, or slowed, or even decreased its rate of growth. The steep bureaucratic hurdle does nothing to prevent it. The most it does is limit the amount of information that can be moved from the shadows into the sunshine via that method, and strongly encourages less costly alternatives to actually honoring the law. One such workaround is "parallel construction", where the illegal spying is converted into an anonymous tip to another "innocent" agency of the state, who then gets reasonable suspicion on a pretext charge--like failure to signal a lane change, plus the invocation of the magical ritual phrase "I smell marijuana"--and then the road-patrol cop somehow finds 20 kilograms of cocaine in the trunk.
Fixing or eliminating the FISA court won't stop the behavior. Only actual accountability for the people actually doing the dirty deeds will help.