I Feel Safer Already

Taken verbatim from Amitai Etzioni's blog:

In an effort to better combat terrorism, the Patriot Act removed some of the obstacles that previously hindered the Justice Department’s ability to get permission for secret warrants from a “special intelligence court.” The new latitude resulted in the submission of a flood of applications to the Department for such warrants. But, according to recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the mounting number of applications has taxed the Department of Justice’s ability to process them in anything resembling a timely manner: “…testimony indicated that it was taking an average of 46 days for a warrant request to be processed and submitted.” Part of the problem is that the Justice Department simply doesn’t have enough lawyers on hand to deal with all of the applications. Indeed, an internal departmental memo from last fall desperately sought volunteer attorneys for “the secret unit that does the processing.” It read as follows: “No special qualifications are required other than basic typing and word-processing skills…Moreover, applicants need not have previously attained any security clearance.”