This is a favorite statistic for advocacy reporters, but it has many different interpretations:<p>1. Perhaps FISA really does rubber-stamp all requests.<p>2. Perhaps NSA really is surveilling almost solely targets of real security interest.<p>3. Perhaps the FISA process and the documentation it generates forces NSA to be overly conservative about surveilling targets, to the detriment of security.<p>4. Perhaps NSA only uses the FISA process for targets of real security interest, and uses some other process for other targets.<p>In fact, a 50&#x2F;50 success rate at FISC would be disturbing for other reasons: it would imply that the USG was aggressively targeting people of no security interest, and only the FISC process was preventing that from happening.