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> the FISA court is that it's not about surveillance for the purpose of normal criminal prosecutions

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Yes, that is a very important loophole to bring up here.

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.

Parallel construction doesn't have nefarious uses it is inherently nefarious. It is an end run around the law they are supposed to be upholding.

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.

Parallel construction is a euphemism for perjury committed by law enforcement.

This should be prosecuted as such instead of concealed.

Data Laundering

You can't get a FISA warrant for a purely domestic criminal case, though you can use data discovered in a domestic criminal case. There used to better protections, requiring the gathering foreign intelligence must be the primary purpose of the warrant, but it was changed in 2008 to, "(v) a significant purpose of the acquisition is to obtain foreign intelligence information;". I know people are going to call fallacy, but FISA was a classic slippery slope.

I'm going off the wiki page for thee commerce clause [1] here. The Supreme court interpreted "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." as including "apply[ing] national quotas to wheat grown on one's own land, for one's own consumption".

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...

I can say what I'm saying because that's explicitly what the law says, and it has been litigated and adjudicated. Maybe I should have been more precise and have said you can't legally get a FISA warrant for a purely domestic criminal case. The only way it comes into play for a purely domestic case is if the FBI/DOJ lies to the judge, or the judge is corrupt. And I'm sure that's happened, and it is in part a consequence of the secrecy that shrouds the court.

> that's explicitly what the law says

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.

I 100% agree that secrecy is a problem and invites corruption. The intent of the law is clear though. It has come up in cases before, and hopefully will again if it is being abused.

”One development in the Paul Manafort case is that he admitted to pushing disinformation to American media to support his Ukrainian clients.”

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 about people acting as agents of foreign governments. If it was just an American trying to influence American media on behalf of an American organization, it wouldn't be a big deal unless it involves classified information or other illegalities.

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.

What reasons exactly?

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.

FARA is about disclosing the underlying relationship with the lobbyist and the foreign country, it's not necessarily to prevent foreign lobbying but to prevent US citizens to lobby but conceal that they are being paid by foreign governments to do so.

> 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?

It does include some of our erstwhile allies but enforcement is obviously going to be focused on our adversaries.

Is the success rate of this method able to justify using it? Because any system that generates too many false positives/negatives needs to be redesigned or reformed.

Would be very difficult to ascertain because a lot of the information gleaned from a FISA warrant may feed into counter-espionage efforts, which by their very nature are rarely going to become public.

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).

I don't expect this to become public. Or at least not on an immediate basis. The issue can be resolved by the body providing oversight. They can check whether any abuse has been made.

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.

FISA warrants come up for periodic review so if it was granted erroneously and no relevant intel is uncovered, it doesn't get renewed. So in the case of a witch hunt there is a mechanism by which it gets stopped.

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.

That's a reasonable explanation but not quite what I was curious about. Not renewing a warrant if further evidence is missing is a good step but I'm wondering if the proportion of warrants that turn up nothing after all is not a better measure for whether the system is used for abuse. If overall the system has a low "false positive" ratio, especially among journalists, then it's hard to argue that it's abused. But if it turns out most of the warrants (or something that stands out) issued on journalists end up bringing irrelevant info then it could raise suspicions.