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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.
It says 'they' are embarrassed by the unreasonable approval rates that were revealed after the election. The judges are _now_ doing their jobs, not rubber stamping.
Which is good, I guess. Another example of routine corruption that got exposed and derailed by Trump's election.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Silly Rabbit, The NSA and FISA are tools of the beltway insiders, no way they will let an outsider get his grubby orange hands on them.
If they say Obama refused 21, and Trump has said fsck off to 26
You've got the situation reversed. When you're a law enforcement officer dealing with national security and want to request a warrant, you can't go to a normal court to ask for a warrant since it's a sensitive matter, so you instead go to a FISA court to ask for a warrant. The Presidential administration isn't refusing anything: they're the ones making the requests, and it's the FISA court refusing the requests of the intelligence/law enforcement agencies serving under the President.
Anyway, depending on how you interpret the information, this difference could mean a few different things:
1) If you assume that the FISA court has up to now been failing at its duty to provide oversight (which is a frequent complaint among many people here), then one interpretation is that the FISA court has finally started performing its duty instead of rubber-stamping everything that crosses their desks.
2) If you assume that the rejection rate for requests being made under Trump is the same as prior rejection rates, that would mean that agencies under Trump are making SIGNIFICANTLY more requests than agencies serving under previous administrations.
3) If you assume that the FISA court is behaving impartially and otherwise the same as before, then this difference is evidence that Trump's administration is abusing the system by asking for unwarranted warrants on a regular basis.
4) If you assume that the FISA court is acting partially, this difference could be evidence that the judges serving on the FISA court are rejecting requests on account of who's the boss of the people making the requests.
Or it could be some combination of the above or other factors that I've failed to account for here. The fact is, a single data point doesn't really tell us much about what's going on. I'm hoping the FISA court is finally waking up to their duties, but I figure that it's likely a combination of #1, #3, and #4.
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.
I'm on the conservative/libertarian end across from you. I did not vote for Trump. I think he's an egotistical asshole with no fixed ideological principles of his own to speak of, has no filters between his emotions and his mouth, and doesn't know when it's best to keep said mouth shut.
I'm almost as stunned as you.
I admire your honesty, we need more of that.
If I may, allow me to suggest reading a fantastic book by Jonah Goldberg called "The Suicide Of The West". Absolutely brilliant, no matter where you stand ideologically or politically.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
if they are already doing this, then the hearing that authorized the Trump campaign surveillance needs to be made available to the appropriate committees.
Do you actually live in the U.S.? If so, what rock are you living under to have escaped the news of the failed Nunes stunt and not know that that's essentially what happened... or that it is kinda the nature of the FISA court that the presented information would often compromise our or our allies' intelligence assets.
Someone had to do it.
Or is it warrants against people connected to Trump, in relation to the Russian collusion case that are getting rejected?
You might want to temper that "well done" with a little bit of reality. The statement that more FISA orders were denied in 2017 than in the court's 40 year history is almost certainly false. We don't have any regular data on this for years prior to 2016; the court was not required to release this information, so for most of those years we only know about failed orders where information was released due to some other circumstance (for example, as part of a report about the efficacy of the USA FREEDOM Act, which is why we know about five of the FISA orders that were denied in late 2015). The idea that more FISA orders were denied in 2017 than in the 40 years before that is based on treating the value for any year that we have no data for as 0, which is obviously very dishonest.
We have no idea if the rate of FISA order denials has changed meaningfully. What we do know is that the government's reporting method changed partway through 2016, leading to us actually having data on the number of denied applications. 2017 is just the first year for which we have the full data.