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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.
there.
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
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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'
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.
Better. The judge's are supposed to be skeptical as there is no routine review of these warrants as the cases progress. They were clearly rubber stamping, now they are embarrassed at having approved warrants on presidential candidates staff based on fiction.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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?
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.
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/
They're clearly still rubber stamping. The numbers should be put into perspective. .5% denial rate to 1.5% denial rate.... The one I like the most- it doesn't mean dick, period. Everyone's trying to put a political spin on a slightly bigger raindrop falling into Lake Michigan.
They denied 26 orders... out of 1600, as opposed to the previous years 9 out of 1700.
I don't think they're embarrassed in the slightest. There are many explanations for increase from
This is the FISA court refusing government surveillance orders. The implication is that the current regime is asking for things they shouldn't get.
Obama refused 21
21 orders between when the court was first formed in 1978 and President Barack Obama's final year in office in 2016.
That quote is from TFA, you should read it.
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.
That is also from TFA, first sentence.
Let's not pretend that secret courts are a good idea however.
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.
...
In 2017 (Trump): 26 Denied (1.6%), 50 Denied in Part (3.1%), 1147 Granted (71.1%)
In 2016 (Obama): 9 Denied (0.5%), 26 Denied in Part (1.5%), 1378 Granted (78.7%)
http://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/ao_foreign_int_surveillance_court_annual_report_2016_final.pdf
http://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/ao_foreign_int_surveillance_court_annual_report_2017.pdf
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.
It's not great, but it's better.
The ideal time to fix this is after the next election. After the Ds have had a candidate's campaign spied on. But the danger is they will lose and the spying will remain hidden, as it would have if Hillary had won.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> 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?
Those morons surveilled themselves.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Slapping Zoo" is the name of my heavy metal band.
The problem is, it's statistics that don't mean jack squat.
It COULD mean the administration is doing their job. Or it COULD mean the administration is producing very poor requests that judges are denying because they're stupid.
And the latter is certainly possible if a certain commander in chief wanted to spy on all his "enemies" and got rejected more times.
The problem is, we don't know. We can never know because the nature of the courts won't let use determine if the rejections are because the courts are applying more scrutiny, or because the requests are of poorer quality and thus rejected because there is no basis for approving them?
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.
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.
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.
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Not stated in the numbers presented is the total number of FISA warrants requested and issued. There are typically something like 1500 such warrants every year, so rejecting 26 in one year (instead of rejecting a mere handful) means we've shifted from "we approve virtually every warrant" to "we approve almost every warrant".
(Or, in round numbers, "we reject the most egregious 2% now, where before we rejected close to 0%")
Lots of jobs at the State Dept have gone unfilled, because Trump hasn't nominated anyone to fill them (and Tillerson was in no hurry to, either). The CIA and FBI have both suffered a lot of shakeout since Trump basically declared war on them.
Maybe some of those jobs involved vetting these requests and making sure the paperwork was in order, and now nobody's doing that, or at least the one guy who really knows how to do it has left and there's no-one with the same knowledge to replace him.
Just an idea.
Lots of jobs at the State Dept have gone unfilled, because Trump hasn't nominated anyone to fill them (and Tillerson was in no hurry to, either). The CIA and FBI have both suffered a lot of shakeout since Trump basically declared war on them.
Did you see the Comey exchange with Anderson Cooper on CNN? Cooper - super liberal Cooper - busted Comey's chops for being the FBI leaker. It was hilarious to see him try to explain himself. Hell, even the left hated Comey's guts before the election. Now with Comey and McCabe both exposed, not to mention the Strzok/page Trump hate fest, it sure looks like Trump was right on the money.
I don't know about the CIA specifically, but when DNI James Clapper lied to Congress, it didn't give me the warm fuzzy feelings about any of the secret societies.
Before you complain about anyone declaring war, maybe consider it was a self defense action.
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.
Secret laws, secret courts, tyranny.
You tell 'em, Comrade Wang!
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.
Please,if you would be so kind. Draw us a map of some kind that explains the path from "apparently", through "obviously", to arrive comfy and cozy at "obviously".
For hire.
Oh wait! Start at "allegedly".
For hire.
That is so cool. How exactly did Trump get the Freedom Act passed in 2015? Please do tell because I would love to hear more about Trump's time travelling skills!
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
Exactly what would those warrants be? Warrants can be issued on the basis of unreliable information. It isn't a problem as long as the information is noted as from an unreliable or partisan source, which is something Nunes obviously wanted to deny (in the case of the Steele report) but couldn't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
'The FISA courts issued a warrant for a Trump associate during the election, based largely on an unconfirmed report paid for by the Clinton campaign.'
That's just a fact on the record. The only thing they can claim is 'they had other allegations' on the record. Duh, everybody commits 3 felonies per day, that's old news.
We also have incomplete chat logs between corrupt feds conspiring on a setup, obviously angling for Justice Department Appointments in the inevitable Clinton admin.
Take off you partisan hat and consider how you would react if the roles were reversed. Because expect it, next presidential election cycle. D candidate better invest in real crypto, hire ex NSA and Mossad to run IT and campaign comms. Constantly 'test fish' the necessary idiots, have real consequences. Reimage devices 4 times daily.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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
Or it says that the quality of the requests is significantly lower, or that the rate of requests is significantly higher, or both.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Information that came from the opposition candidate isn't 'credible'. It's beyond unreliable.
Enjoy it when the next D candidate is FISA surveilled and incomplete, unverified, uncredible information is leaked during the campaign.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You know, I was really starting to think I should just block ACs, but this comment brightened up my day.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.