Slashdot Mirror
More FISA Orders Were Denied During President Trump's First Year in Office Than in the Court's 40-Year History (zdnet.com)
In its first year, the Trump administration kept one little-known courtroom in the capital busy. From a report: A secretive Washington DC-based court that oversees the US government's foreign spy programs denied more surveillance orders during President Donald Trump's first year than in the court's 40-year history, according to newly released figures. Annual data published Wednesday by the US Courts shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court last year denied 26 applications in full, and 50 applications in part. That's compared to 21 orders between when the court was first formed in 1978 and President Barack Obama's final year in office in 2016.
there.
I don't know if this is good or bad and if it's good who is it good for (The People?) If it's bad, then why is it bad?
In its first year, the Trump administration kept one little-known courtroom in the capital busy.
There's nothing in the story about whether the gov't made more or fewer FISA requests in 2016.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... prosecutors polluted the list with requests they knew would be rejected or which they didn't care if they were rejected, just so the court wouldn't look like a rubber-stamp court.
This will take political pressure off of the court so the prosecutors can get the requests they really want approved rubber-stamped.
That's the cynic in me.
The responsible person in me is pleading ignorance on the real reason for the recent rejections.
So the law doesn't respect his every whim / punk ass retard request, news at 11. #Leavenworth, under it.
Or were they denied because the standards have changed due to some recently publicized abuses, meaning how many would have been denied if submitted about two years ago?
All we have are some numbers, and now people will claim conclusions that fit their desired viewpoint.
For those of you not up on any of this, the data is extremely odd as the blockage started at the start of the Trump administration. Trump is under investigation for collusion with a foreign power, bribery by a foreign power, being compromised by a foreign power. Russia, specifically Putin.
The ongoing investigation is pretty much a slam dunk. Trump has been acting extremely oddly towards Putin; giving public warning of an attack, giving special attention to relieving him of sanctions both active and in legislation, being active in removing the oil-drilling block of Exxon-Mobil that's worth a trillion bucks through Tillerson, the CEO turned Secretary of State.
If it turns out the FISA application denials are primarily about Russia, we have a serious national security issue. We need to find out how, or if, the President or his people put their hand in this process and why and who the FISA warrants were about. If he's covering for the Russians again, as seems totally in keeping with his behavior, it's one more impeachable offense, if not criminal.
Bullshit alarm is going off due to being aligned w/ mainstream media, and there's important missing information. If they say Obama refused 21, and Trump has said fsck off to 26, that doesn't tell us anything. We need to at minimum know the percentages. My suspicion is that number of FISA orders has been increased substantially. To have only half a dozen more "um, no" responses with tons more orders would make Trump look good. Therefore, it would make sense biased media sources would conveniently leave that context out.
This doesnt nevcesarily mean that Trumps fisa requests were any more egregious than Obamaâ(TM)s but given how politicized things have become it may well be that they just not agree on the targets
How much you want to bet that over half of the denied requests are to spy on the Trump White House and staff?
OK, let's do a little research and look at the actual data. We can get all the reports since transparency was mandated in 2015:
USCourts Report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts' Activities
According to FISA's data, in 2016:
"The FISC disclosed that it received 1,752 applications in 2016. After consideration by the court, 1,378
orders were granted, 339 orders were modified, 26 orders were denied in part, and 9 applications were
denied in full."
Meanwhile, in the latest report, from 2017, during the first year of the Trump administration:
"The FISC disclosed that it received 1,614 applications in 2017. After consideration by the court, 1,147
orders were granted, 391 orders were modified, 50 orders were denied in part, and 26 applications
were denied in full."
So what does this tell us? Applications for survellience were actually a bit lower, but denials went from .5% of Obama's FBI to 1.5% of Trump's FBI's requests. Does that mean the requests were of lower quality in 2017? The FISA court was feeling a little chastened by all of the publicity of its usual rubber-stamp policy? Or the FISA court is a bunch of liberal cheeto-haters? Hard to say?
So now because people dont like Trump suddenly the entire US Govt has smashed on the brakes in every way possible.
If Hillary had won and did the same thing not a single FISA would be rejected.
...a good SJW Slapping Zoo! Gather 'em up and put 'em on display where normal people can visit, and CRACK!!, give 'em the pimp hand right up side the head! When you hear that loud CRACK!! ring out, like a tuning fork on steroids, in sympathy with the vibrations of the universe, you know that, just for that moment, all is well in the world, and everything is just as it should be! A great stress reliever and true example of Social Justice, in every sense of the word!
here's the history of FISA orders.
FISA info for 2017:
1614 orders were made
1147 orders were approved
391 orders were approved after being modified
21 orders were rejected
This is a non-story.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
is Trump's administration denying more requests a good thing because they're denying bad requests or a bad thing because they're making so many outlandish requests. No real telling since it's a secret court.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yep, the very same Andy McCabe whose wife got almost $1 million from Hillary.
Did McCabe issue ‘Stand-Down’ order on FBI Clinton Email Investigation?
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is now facing possible criminal charges for lying under oath about leaks he made to The Wall Street Journal in 2016, in an effort to salvage his reputation and give his account to journalists who were questioning whether he gave a “stand-down” order to FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation.
Multiple former FBI officials, along with a Congressional official, say that while there may have been internal squabbling over the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation at the time, there was allegedly another “stand-down” order by McCabe regarding the opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of her private email for official government business.
McCabe’s stand-down order regarding Clinton’s private email use happened after The New York Times first reported Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules in March 2015 and before the official investigation was requested by the Justice Department toward the end of July 2015.
After The New York Times publication, the FBI Washington Field Office began investigating Clinton’s use of private emails and whether she was using her personal email account to transmit classified information. According to sources, McCabe was overseas when he became aware of the investigation and sent electronic communications voicing his displeasure with the agents.
“McCabe tried to steer people off the private email investigation and that appears to be obstruction and should be investigated,” said one former FBI official with knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the investigation. ...
Who among James Comey, Loretta Lynch, and Barack Obama had to be aware of this?
Given that Obama also sent emails to Hillary's illegal email server, I'm betting it goes right to the top.
Obama used a pseudonym in emails with Clinton, FBI documents reveal
President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others, according to FBI records made public Friday.
The disclosure came as the FBI released its second batch of documents from its investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
...
.. and already the FISA court is doing its job better.
> almost $1 million from Hillary.
Not true. That money was from Terry McAuliffe the Virginia governor who got it from Hillary, and the part from Hillary was much less than a million dollars. According to Newsweek, and I save the article just to debunk these sort of claims, it was only $675,288. Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.
2010: 1511, 0 rejected
2011: 1676, 0 rejected
2012: 1789, 0 rejected
2013: 1588, 0 rejected
2014: 1379, 0 rejected
2015: 1457, 5 rejected
2016: 1485, 34 rejected
2017: 1614, 26 rejected
https://epic.org/privacy/surve...
Citing both numerators without citing both denominators doesn't mean anything.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
If they haven't already, EVERY FISA court proceeding should be video taped and have transcripts available. The we will know exactly what was presented, by whom, and with what kind of skepticism is was greeted.
if they are already doing this, then the hearing that authorized the Trump campaign surveillance needs to be made available to the appropriate committees.
It's complete bullshit that these kinds of proceedings are subject to he said they said. It is appalling that we can't see exactly what was shown in order to get the warrant.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's gotta be real right? /s
So, as a way-out-there social liberal who really dislikes Trump and has said bad things about him (and thought worse things), I feel like I owe it to somebody to say 'well done.'
The cognitive dissonance in my head right now is making it hard for me to follow the threads in the comments. I really did not see this one coming.
Just, wow.
Very few are ever denied. In fact, if pressed they don't even have to go to court first and can just spy and get FISA approval later. Sometimes this retroactive request is denied, but you know. Emergencies. This happens to various presidents.
The running joke is that very few are denied, so this headline is idiotic.
A better headline might, sadly, be, "As with all other presidents, almost every single FISA request is approved."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Most of what you suggest would also be a good idea for regular criminal justice procedure. I'd love for Grand Juries to be contested procedures and I don't know why lying on a warrant application still isn't a crime.
It does kind of raise the question of whether you want to rule out so much evidence though. If you're investigating some international industrial espionage and stumble upon some terror cell getting ready to do something stupid, do you really want to throw out that evidence?
I don't think you have to complain about him not fixing everything to stop loving Obama. He had an American citizen overseas assassinated after determining that he was a terrorist. That's not how that's supposed to work.
This is from the guy that wants a security department that answers only to him. 17 aren't enough.
Your sig here!
> almost $1 million from Hillary.
Not true. That money was from Terry McAuliffe the Virginia governor who got it from Hillary, and the part from Hillary was much less than a million dollars. According to Newsweek, and I save the article just to debunk these sort of claims, it was only $675,288. Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.
Oh, well then, no harm, no foul if it was only a measly ~$700,000 from a DNC political apparatchik. Oh, and ~$300,000 from HRC. That's chump-change, not even worth mentioning! I mean, sure, you could probably hire a contract-killer for less, but human life is cheap! There's no way that tiny amount of pocket change could influence somebody being paid those luxurious government wages.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Skip to about 7 minute mark for FISA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY82yn2TDhA
Not all his info I think is accurate, but seems pretty close.
Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.
He didn't recuse himself for a conflict of interest. He lied multiple times under oath and got fired as per recommended by the OIG. There's the matter of intentionally misleading with "extremely careless" rather than "gross negligence".
The investigation was a sham, and that will become increasingly clear as information is dragged out of the justice dept. via FOIA lawsuits.
Without more context, it's hard to know what to make of this news article.
A. This could mean that all of a sudden career federal law enforcement and intelligence officers got really sloppy and have been asking for FISA warrants based on flimsy evidence and they're getting rejected by the FISC judges.
B. This could mean that the FISC judges all of a sudden decided to become MUCH more discriminating about what constitutes a valid warrant request.
C. This could mean that there's a massive uptick in Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents and the FBI/CIA/NSA is getting sloppy trying to keep up.
D. This could mean that there's a massive uptick in Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents and the FISC judges are more discriminating for fear of political repercussions.
E. This could mean "the deep state" has gotten emboldened and is spying on Trump/Russians on a larger scale because they're evil.
F. This could mean "the deep state" is spying on Trump/Russians on a larger scale because there is active, ongoing collusion taking place because Trump is being blackmailed and betraying America.
G. This could mean that the Trump Administration is desperately trying to spy on people and getting rejected by the courts.
Basically, without knowing the what the FISA warrant requests were for there's no way of knowing why they're getting rejected. Could be something, could be nothing. We may never know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reading the Trumpkins posts. Everything is either the greatest thing in the world or a conspiracy against the orange face fuhrer. It is entertaining to see real life buffoons who think they are the supreme beings on the planet. So cute.
Oh please. There's no evidence that money given to his wife bought influence.
It's supposed to be a secret warrant for spying on foreign people and we now know it was used an excuse for domestic political spying, I'm thinking this can only be a good thing.
Or was there no increase in denials? In other words, how does the percentage of denials compare between the two date ranges?
After the bastards were caught spying on then-candidate Trump's campaign, they have to turn down 1% of the requests to maintain plausible deniability. It will not work. They need to be prosecuted. They illegally rubber-stamp (almost) every warrant that comes before them.
Actually, the FISA court turned down continuous requests by Trump for takeout food.
For those of you not up on any of this, the data is extremely odd as the blockage started at the start of the Trump administration. Trump is under investigation for collusion with a foreign power, bribery by a foreign power, being compromised by a foreign power. Russia, specifically Putin.
The ongoing investigation is pretty much a slam dunk. Trump has been acting extremely oddly towards Putin; giving public warning of an attack, giving special attention to relieving him of sanctions both active and in legislation, being active in removing the oil-drilling block of Exxon-Mobil that's worth a trillion bucks through Tillerson, the CEO turned Secretary of State.
If it turns out the FISA application denials are primarily about Russia, we have a serious national security issue. We need to find out how, or if, the President or his people put their hand in this process and why and who the FISA warrants were about. If he's covering for the Russians again, as seems totally in keeping with his behavior, it's one more impeachable offense, if not criminal.
And we'd have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling Democrats.
Now that you've solved this mystery gang, you can get back to working on solving the mystery of the WTC Building 7 and discrediting the single bullet theory.
Who among James Comey, Loretta Lynch, and Barack Obama had to be aware of this?
The FBI ethics office. That's right, McCabe voluntarily went to the FBI ethics office and got a ruling on how he should proceed.
Of course if you are a trumpanzee conspiracy fantasist that's just proof the entire FBI, packed to the gills with republicans, was in the bag for killary because conspiracy fantasies are unfalsifiable.
IMHO, the court started being more selective and started rejecting a few more "token cases" when knowledge of them became public. They figure they can reject a few more cases here and there and push the news to the media,"Look, we're improving." All the while, no real progress has been made.
Nothing to see here, move along please.
I think we can safely assume that we're seeing at least SOME liberal bias on the FISA courts for the following reason:
Normally, when a federal judge discovers he/she has been lied to, he/she summons the parties back into the court for a stern lecture and some penalty. In the case of the Obama admin lying repeatedly to the FISA court judges, ALL of whom just happend to be Obama-era appointees, there has been apparently NO blowback. There have been NO leaks about FISA court fireworks and outraged judges finding people like Comey and McCabe and Rosenstein in contempt and nobody seems to be getting prosecuted.
I tend to think the reason for the increase in denials is probably mixed, but I think it's mighty hard to deny SOME leftwing bias in the system.
a bad headline? Secret spying courts seem like a bad thing. Fewer approvals of secret spy ops on citizens seems like a good thing.
It's been fake news for a long time. I think you forgot how fake news started: It started by the large media providers (NY Times, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, etc) calling out the sites you mentioned as fake news. The only problem is that the spotlight accidentally shined upon them as well. All of a sudden it became obvious that something way more sinister was amiss than normal journalistic "bias".
So your position is that money received indirectly from politically motivated persons by relatives of government employees is a corrupting influence?
Gotcha. I now completely understand how the fact that Trump has delegated "management" of his businesses to his sons, the fact that prices for memberships or services in those businesses have drastically inreased, and the fact that politically motivated persons are flocking to them, means that there is no way that those tiny amounts of pocket change could influence him.
Oh, and he also just happens to have retained ownership of those businesses... but it's OK because he's rich and therefore above being influenced by money.
I've seen no good evidence of recently publicized abuses. I've seen people strongly implying that there were such abuses, but not actually supplying any support for such a claim.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And crooked Hillary.
#MAGA!
Did not cite rejection rate comparisons, number of applications per day, number of persons cited, claims before the court.
Best answer, no one is allowed to know
Most reasonable answer, tRump and co have demanded more FISA on spurious grounds than prior administrations
The only deep state that exists in the real world is the one that broke laws to help get Trump elected. But the beauty of a conspiracy theory is that anything which disproved the conspiracy theory is PART of the conspiracy.
Anyways, given the chaotic incompetence of the Trump White House and his history of promising to use government agencies to go after his enemies, Occam's Razor says FISA is just denying a whole lot of very poorly-filed requests because they're very poorly-filed.