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Comment by creaghpatr | Hacker News Reader

Besides this particular case, I wonder which other FISA applications were manipulated with exaggerated or fabricated evidence? FISA court is known for rubber-stamping applications, they approve at like a 90% rate thousands of requests to spy on citizens.

Process changes are necessary but only criminal charges are gonna deter future abuse. How is the court supposed to know an email or a 302 was doctored? Process change can't fix that.

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It's actually closer to 99%. I think I heard they only rejected one warrant in the last calendar year.

Its surprising that it's taken something of this magnitude for people to realize this the whole idea of the FISC is a very bad idea. I know the original idea was to use against terrorist organizations and individuals who they knew were terrorists, but the extensive use of warrantless searches against US Citizens is a very, very dangerous thing.

> It's actually closer to 99%.

Folks often bring out this number, as if it is something to be outraged about. What do you think is the rate at which non-secret courts approve warrants?

In Utah, the approval rate is 98%. [1]

Warrants have always been a rubber-stamp process - the main purpose of which is to create a paper trail, and to prevent wide-reaching fishing expeditions.

[1] https://www.sltrib.com/news/2018/01/14/warrants-approved-in-...

A paper trail is less useful to the public when every document is classified. There is little reason to suspect that the FISA court has prevented "wide-reaching fishing expeditions".

All currently known evidence indicates that the FISA-stamped warrants that were sent out to tech companies were targeted, in that they identified particular individuals that should be surveilled.

So, yes, FISA did seem to accomplish one of the two purposes of warrants. I agree that a secret paper trail isn't particularly useful.

I consider an investigation to be "a fishing expedition" whenever there is no good reason at the beginning of the investigation to suspect that the target has committed a particular crime. Every time a FISA warrant has been publicized, it has fit that criterion. Following Cardinal Richelieu, any person subjected to enough surveillance may be convicted of something.

You may think that way, but judges don't.

If you are a gang leader, and you call someone twice a day, any judge will absolutely sign a wiretap warrant targeted at the person you are calling.

At a minimum we gotta get rid of the 2 or 3 hops permitted of the surveillance; theoretically, most of the campaign's communications could have been swept up in the collection process and examined by investigators.

More about the '2 or 3 hops':

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/fbi-s-secret-warrant-s...

NPR was asking a former FBI person exactly that allusion and their response was pretty much, “because few mistakes are made”. Yeah, I’m sure...

The only somewhat encouraging thing to me in the IG report was that the FBI's lawyers refused to submit the FISA application initially because there wasn't enough meat to the suspicions about Carter Page. They reversed their decision only when the investigators decided to credulously include the allegations from the Steele dossier. The optimistic take on this would be that maybe it's a big black eye to your career if you get rejected by the FISC, so they're careful about what they take there.

Of course, it was an FBI lawyer who later doctored an email from the CIA to say Carter Page was not working with the CIA when the email actually said he was, allowing them to renew his surveillance two more times. But hopefully that guy goes to jail.

I don't find this particular case all that illustrative. These folks were palling around with known foreign intelligence assets from a country whose government is definitely a hostile aggressor. I'd be more sympathetic to some low-level drug dealer scooped up through parallel-reconstruction. Still, even scum like Carter Page deserve their rights and protections.

> scum like Carter Page

All I know about Carter Page is he was falsely painted as a spy for Russia by the FBI and compliant media organizations for several years, even after the FBI knew he had been working with the CIA. Not sure what makes him the scum in that equation.

There is a frenzy of attorneys trying to attach themselves to Mr. Page's multimillion-dollar lawsuit for slander and libel. All of the big news firms will be paying for his vacation homes.

It's impossible to know how illustrative it is because FISA warrants are rarely declassified or confirmed to exist except to the intel committees and the agencies themselves.

Perhaps I was offering my opinion and not some sort of eternal truth.

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