Since 1979, out of 33,949 requests submitted, the FISA court has denied 12 of them, 4 of which were later partially granted after being resubmitted. You're correct in saying that it's good that this number is documented, but it also makes it extremely clear that the FISA court cannot be meaningfully said to constitute independent oversight.

Or it makes it clear that the NSA is in fact, following the law.

Which as far as I'm aware, none of what has been revealed by Snowden has been shown to be illegal. Correct me if I'm wrong of course.

Irrespective of whether or not you're wrong, when the law is practically a blank check, staying within its bounds isn't much of an accomplishment.

At a minimum, I'd like something enabling me to trust that FISA isn't just the rubber stamp it has every appearance of being. It has denied less than 0.035% of the requests ever submitted to it (and a third of those were subsequently at least partially granted, anyway), and "modified" (where "modification" appears to be a request for clarification, given the public remarks one former FISA judge made on the subject) less than 1.5% of them.

As "oversight" goes, that sounds rather a lot like, "That's nice, son. You run along and play, now..."

Almost all of the sitting members of the court are former law enforcement in some way, and many of them have evinced strongly statist and authoritarian views in the rulings they've made in the trial courts they also sit in.

So I'd also like to see some membership on the panel that doesn't seem hand-picked to yes-man (nearly) every request that comes along. I'm not suggesting this as a definitive proposal for changing the court, but what about including members from (or elected by) demonstrably pro-liberty organizations like the EFF or ACLU or whatever, with some kind of veto-like power?

I legitimately believe that there is value in being able to investigate suspected "bad" actors — and that sometimes those investigations must be surreptitious, or that actor will become aware of the suspicion and change his behavior. I don't buy the leap from that being the case to, "We can look into anyone at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, and then use whatever we find against you down the road, or hand it off to sibling agencies for 'parallel construction' type purposes." (And don't even try to suggest that doesn't happen. We know it does.)

So there's two thoughts off the top of my head.