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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

This already exists with rubber stamp FISA courts (a rejection rate of 0.03 percent) for citizens and non-citizens. It is just a difference of degree and scale (the APIization of everything).

There are also other workarounds to FISA courts including the “willful“ volunteering of information and tools (or else), using the NSA and their tools, and other foreign “friendly” collaborators like the Five Eyes, or German intelligence etc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

https://www.dw.com/en/report-us-germany-spied-on-countries-f...

https://www.rt.com/usa/qwest-ceo-nsa-jail-604/

Here is some details on historical spying (a much smaller scale because of the smaller digital footprint)for the curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

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>a rejection rate of 0.03 percent

I agree that this is too low and is a sign of rubber stamp-iness, but what would be the right rejection rate to make you feel more comfortable about the FISA process?

Agencies come to the court with what they think is a rock solid case, so it's not entirely outrageous that the court would have a very high approval rate. See other similar stats like the conviction rate by federal prosecutors (93%+), where they only drag a defendant into court with very good reason.

The conviction rate is a great example. “Very good reason” like Aaron Swartz trying to share scientific literature with the public?

The word choice "very good reason" in the parent comment isn't in regards to anyone's view of the ethics of a particular case. A different way of phrasing the parent comment would be prosecutors only pursue cases that they think are winnable, given the evidence available.

>The word choice "very good reason" in the parent comment isn't in regards to anyone's view of the ethics of a particular case.

Thanks.

I almost don't even bother commenting anymore because people come out of the woodwork with some lame gotcha like "but what about this one thing???"

> Agencies come to the court with what they think is a rock solid case

I think the rubber stamp reputation of the FISA courts undermines this assumption. Are 99.7% of cases ~really~ ironclad? Building a rock solid case takes a lot of work and if the FISA courts aren't actually going to scrutinize the evidence, I expect that the people bringing these cases will take advantage of that.

It is not 99.7 percent. It is in fact 99.97 percent.

12 denials from 33942 requests. 1 out of roughly 2828 requests instead of 282 requests.

Having worked with people who bring cases to FISA, they spend a ton of time ensuring they are ironclad before they bother bringing them to FISA.

Previously I had assumed it was a lot of rubber-stamping, however the folks I worked with frequently bemoaned about how incredibly difficult and time consuming it was to get a FISA warrant.

Read the Horowitz report. They fed you lies.

I will assume good faith in your comment. I don't think you were "fed lies" or that there's some soros deep state conspiracy going on.

That being said, the approval rate for the court is pretty shocking. If this isn't a rubber stamp court, I don't know what is. Their approval rate on 41,000+ warrants in 40+ years is 99.97%.

I don't think the notion that each of those 41,000+ warrants were air tight, or wouldn't be rejected by other normal (read: public, transparent, democratic) courts, passes the smell test.

I would be curious to know what the approval rate for regular search/arrest warrants is too.

>Are 99.7% of cases ~really~ ironclad?

>> I agree that this is too low and is a sign of rubber stamp-iness, but what would be the right rejection rate to make you feel more comfortable about the FISA process?

Probably a secondary random evaluation, and removal of unethical/lazy judges.

Defendants in US federal courts plead guilty in about 90% of cases: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...

Whether that is due to “very good reasons” or the possibility that prosecutors have many options of how many charges to bring and what degree of charge is debatable.

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