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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.
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
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.
What a load of bullshit.
This is about the FISA warrant that was used to spy on Trump's campaign. He was supposed to lose and the facts were never supposed to come out.
Now that those facts are out, they are embarrassed and a few even realize that it could be turned against them and their pet candidates.
It's too late, unless someone from Hillary's campaign and the FBI goes to prison for this, every (non-incumbent/appointed successor) candidate's campaign will be spied on.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Shesh... Be carful there with what you accuse the Trump administration of..
I'd like to point out that MONTHS ago, around the time of Trump's "Wires tapped" Tweet that caused a week of "He's crazy!" reporting, it was alleged that the Obama administration did just this, went to the FISA court to get a political opponent under surveillance. Since then, more evidence has surfaced that indicates that this is actually true. (Remember the dueling "memos" from the house committee? That's what this was all about.)
So, I agree. Using the secrete FISA courts to get a secret warrant to spy on your political opposition is not good, neither would using such spying for personal or political gain. But I'm afraid that there is ample evidence that it has been going on and heads should roll for abusing the FISA system... Oh, and heads actually ARE rolling.... But you don't want me to discuss all that because the media isn't really covering it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Given the FISA court will give a warrant on a french bagel you have to wonder what exactly Trumps new "torture first" group of CIA/NSA spies are asking for warrants on.
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/
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.
...
Nice hyperbole. A member of Trumps campaign make active overtures to someone in Britain the US security complex believed was a Russian Spy.
It wouldn't have mattered if they were a vacuum cleaner salesman, I'm willing to bet anyone making such inquiries would immediately get all your conversations spied on with an immediate FISA application. This is how things work, you start taking to people the US government things is an agent of a hostile government those conversations are probably going to be recorded, transcribed and passed on for review.
Bringing it in like it was simply because Trump was connected is absurd. Want to test it? Start making overtures to Russian spies and see how long it takes them to start recording your conversations.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
Or is it warrants against people connected to Trump, in relation to the Russian collusion case that are getting rejected?
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!
Fake news is pretty old. What's new is the fake news websites. The difference between fake news and the New York Times is that the Times works for accuracy and retracts inaccuracies. Fake news works more like propaganda as described in Mein Kampf.
If a fact is reported in the NYT, it's very likely accurate. That doesn't apply to fake news, which will make up all sorts of things.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes