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Comment by yasp | Hacker News Reader

When a FISA request is granted, the government is granted the ability to spy on people within "two hops". E.g., spying on their contacts, and on their contacts' contacts. This is on the presumption that they all could be spies. If a journalist were one of these contacts, there would be the presumption that they could be a spy, given the above logic.

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If one counts hops arbitrarily casually one could count 100 casual contacts from one person and 10000 one step removed.

Then if one is especially suspicious one could put say 40k Americans on a list of suspicious people.

This is basically just saying none of us has any right to privacy which is the actual present case.

If that's the case, and any of us (HN readers) are within those 2 hops, I bet a lot of us would look very suspicious just by our nature. At least when viewing online habits are concerned. How many of us have multiple online personalities, or opposite with very little social presence? How many of us go out of our way to avoid online tracking? How many of us use tools like TOR or even VPN, use encrypted apps to chat, etc? After all, only the guilty try to hide things. You must be a spy worth further scrutiny.

I don't doubt that there are some US spies in the hacker community. Certainly not inconceivable that there wouldn't be foreign spies in it too.

What determines a "spy"? What prevents every other contact from being a "spy"? What prevents a foreign US agent approaching a target to have them tagged as a "spy"?

The whole thing is a farce designed from the beginning to be abused.

I don't disagree. There is good evidence that the FISA system was weaponized against the Trump campaign through Carter Page. That's what the present battle to get sections of the Page FISA warrant declassified is about.

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