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Would be very difficult to ascertain because a lot of the information gleaned from a FISA warrant may feed into counter-espionage efforts, which by their very n

Would be very difficult to ascertain because a lot of the information gleaned from a FISA warrant may feed into counter-espionage efforts, which by their very nature are rarely going to become public. As I said, sometimes what the FBI does is just monitor the actions of spies and their assets for a long time, without taking action. Then, they may abruptly roll up a bunch of spies at once after watching them for year. We saw that a few years ago with Operation Ghost Stories where a bunch of deep cover Russian intelligence officers got deported (there was a lot of media coverage of a particular attractive agent: Anna Chapman).

close04 8y ago
I don't expect this to become public. Or at least not on an immediate basis. The issue can be resolved by the body providing oversight. They can check whether any abuse has been made. The problem isn't how many times the warrants were used but rather how many times did they turn out to be a witch hunt. Assuming there is some oversight (although one has to wonder...) analyzing this shouldn't be an issue.
- GVIrish 8y ago
  FISA warrants come up for periodic review so if it was granted erroneously and no relevant intel is uncovered, it doesn't get renewed. So in the case of a witch hunt there is a mechanism by which it gets stopped. There is a good deal of oversight in the system already, the FBI spends a lot of time vetting their FISA warrant applications before they submit them. But as another commenter pointed out, there's the issue of parallel construction and how to prevent abuse of that.
  - close04 8y ago
    That's a reasonable explanation but not quite what I was curious about. Not renewing a warrant if further evidence is missing is a good step but I'm wondering if the proportion of warrants that turn up nothing after all is not a better measure for whether the system is used for abuse. If overall the system has a low "false positive" ratio, especially among journalists, then it's hard to argue that it's abused. But if it turns out most of the warrants (or something that stands out) issued on journalists end up bringing irrelevant info then it could raise suspicions.

close04 8y ago

I don't expect this to become public. Or at least not on an immediate basis. The issue can be resolved by the body providing oversight. They can check whether any abuse has been made. The problem isn't how many times the warrants were used but rather how many times did they turn out to be a witch hunt. Assuming there is some oversight (although one has to wonder...) analyzing this shouldn't be an issue.

GVIrish 8y ago
FISA warrants come up for periodic review so if it was granted erroneously and no relevant intel is uncovered, it doesn't get renewed. So in the case of a witch hunt there is a mechanism by which it gets stopped. There is a good deal of oversight in the system already, the FBI spends a lot of time vetting their FISA warrant applications before they submit them. But as another commenter pointed out, there's the issue of parallel construction and how to prevent abuse of that.
- close04 8y ago
  That's a reasonable explanation but not quite what I was curious about. Not renewing a warrant if further evidence is missing is a good step but I'm wondering if the proportion of warrants that turn up nothing after all is not a better measure for whether the system is used for abuse. If overall the system has a low "false positive" ratio, especially among journalists, then it's hard to argue that it's abused. But if it turns out most of the warrants (or something that stands out) issued on journalists end up bringing irrelevant info then it could raise suspicions.