So for example, RT America was recently forced to get FARA registration, as was some Chinese media outlets.
One development in the Paul Manafort case is that he admitted to pushing disinformation to American media to support his Ukrainian clients. If there were other avenues of hostile foreign influence operations attempting to subvert US media, a FISA warrant would be one way it might be done.
One thing to remember about the FISA court is that it's not about surveillance for the purpose of normal criminal prosecutions, it's about supporting national security, which often doesn't necessarily lead to criminal charges. It may mean just monitoring what adversaries are up to. This is also why the bar for FISA warrants is different than it is for normal criminal investigations.
At any rate, the FISA court's powers can certainly be abused and meaningful oversight is needed. Especially in this time with increasing politicization of federal law enforcement. Spying on journalists gets into dangerous territory, so yes, people should pay close attention here.
As I said, sometimes what the FBI does is just monitor the actions of spies and their assets for a long time, without taking action. Then, they may abruptly roll up a bunch of spies at once after watching them for year. We saw that a few years ago with Operation Ghost Stories where a bunch of deep cover Russian intelligence officers got deported (there was a lot of media coverage of a particular attractive agent: Anna Chapman).
The problem isn't how many times the warrants were used but rather how many times did they turn out to be a witch hunt. Assuming there is some oversight (although one has to wonder...) analyzing this shouldn't be an issue.
There is a good deal of oversight in the system already, the FBI spends a lot of time vetting their FISA warrant applications before they submit them. But as another commenter pointed out, there's the issue of parallel construction and how to prevent abuse of that.
Doesn’t the administration at any given time do the same thing? It’s been pretty blatant since Viet Nam and I’m sure it went much earlier than that. The only difference is that they don’t call them clients.
FARA is aimed at preventing clandestine efforts by foreign governments to subvert/compromise our government. Enforcement has been lax to non-existent for a long time, but that has changed in big way in the last few years or so, for reasons that are obvious.
Will the governments being dissuaded from influencing ours include allies such as Saudi Arabia, Israel and the UK? Or will it just be Russia, Iran, and China?
I would personally be in favor of stopping our allies from influencing our government as they do it constantly and blatantly. If you influence it enough, perhaps that's how you become an ally in the first place and how you remain as one.
It does include some of our erstwhile allies but enforcement is obviously going to be focused on our adversaries.
It is used for domestic criminal purposes, as long as the court only sees a parallel construction[1] that conceals that the evidence is the fruit of the poisonous tree.
On one hand, parallel construction can be used in order to not compromise sensitive sources and methods. If you found out about a spy ring because you compromised a spy's phone, you might not want that revealed, so a different path to the evidence is constructed to conceal that method.
But it of course can be used in a nefarious manner to launder evidence gained on someone illegally. So maybe in the course of a nat'l security investigation the feds stumble conversations of a drug trafficker, then use parallel construction to create a paper trail that would make it seem like the knowledge about the drug trafficker was obtained through normal channels.
That is absolutely an area that requires more rigorous controls and oversight, although I don't know how often FISA warrants have been exploited in that matter. Could be mostly federal law enforcement eavesdropping with stingrays.
In actual practice you shouldn't perform broad illegal surveillance of your populace and if you do you shouldn't be able to use it in court without revealing your sources.
This fundamentally violates the rights of the accused.
This isn't a new observation unique to todays conversation (I'm sure it has been bought up from the establishment of a secret court) but you can't claim what you are claiming unless you happen to be a FISA court judge. We don't know what this court is doing. We don't decide what these words mean. The dictionary doesn't decide what these words mean. The judge decides what the words mean.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause#Dormant_Commer...
The very large number of lawyers and justices are employed to argue extensively about the meaning and interpretation of the law.
You are interpreting the law here. You cannot know if your interpretation aligns with FISC, because the proceedings are not public.
By the way, while looking up names for this comment I came up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla... . So it looks like the FISC court is doing exactly this by getting creative with what a "special-need" is.
This is one of the most infuriating things about people's political decisions. When a party or individual they support is in power they're happy to extend the limits of his power as much as they possibly can. And then they act surprised when those very same powers are later on exploited by a an individual they do not support.
The only way this can ever end is by starting to reign in power even when the people that would use that power are those that we currently like and trust to use it responsibly.