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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 witc

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.