right, because the FIS judges who say no get fired. this is survivor bias in action.
Congress and law enforcement are behaving as if the core problem facing the legal system is a new one, 'how do you catch criminals on tor'. Pro-privacy activists are saying it's 'how do you engineer the social contract to prevent rebellion' (i.e. the same problem legal systems have always faced).
In general, privacy rights and property rights are linked. It's not a coincidence that the brandeis paper which introduced privacy to american jurisprudence was phrased in the vocabulary of real estate & tresspass. It's no coincidence that large institutions that pay for things (home loan banks & health insurers) have an automatic right of tresspass in many cases.
It will be interesting to see if erosion of information privacy leads to erosion of property rights. You can argue that increasing police seizures is already a symptom of this. Let's cross our fingers that at the point where property rights are at risk, courts (the non-secret ones) will start doing their job again and reverse the balance.
Page 8 of the PDF is worth a read. The head judge of the FISC is claiming that non-government entities have the opportunity to be heard by the court because they can (1) refuse a court order which (2) triggers a contempt hearing if (3) the DOJ permits it.
> One can assume DOJ is smart enough to avoid the judge who says no.
I can imagine that that happens to some extent, but it's quite a bit weaker than what you originally suggested (and maybe there are other factors that prevent or deter the applicants from exercising complete control over who reviews their applications).
Hmm, maybe. Given the court's secrecy and the general tendency of judges to defer to law enforcement on what constitutes an emergency, I assume there are cases where the gov't acts first and gets permission afterwards. If that's the case (and I recognize it's an if), and if every request is approved by the weak-willed judges (history suggests yes), then they have complete freedom to choose their judge.
There is a secret court with secret interpretations of the law and it literally never has any problem with our governments request to spy, even on its own citizens.
Not the sky, but the forth amendment is falling, the fifth too for that matter.
Personally, I think that the FISA court is a travesty, and rejecting zero surveillance requests is just rubber stamping.
But how would I refute the "Federal judges warrant rejection rates are very low because the law enforcement doesn't want to present questionable warrants in the first place" argument?
It seems to me that a place to start is to ask where the FISA warrants get reviewed - in regular (non-terrorist) cases there's all kinds of warrant review and challenge and argument before a trial, but I'm not sure that kind of review happens with FISA warrants.
> But how would I refute the "Federal judges warrant rejection rates are very low because the law enforcement doesn't want to present questionable warrants in the first place" argument?
Even if every LEO is trying their best to avoid filing questionable warrants, they will end up being mistaken far more than 0 out of 48,642 times. What's the point of having this oversight apparatus if they provide no apparent oversight whatsoever?
"Reuters writes that the 1,457 requests made last year by the NSA and FBI were all approved"
1,457 < 48,642.
> "Even if every LEO..."
NSA != LEO. Do you believe their requests were not being made by lawyers with the relevant act open on their other monitor?
> "no apparent oversight..."
The court's previous rejection rate was .03%. .03% of 1457 is less than 1. IOW, this is the expected outcome even if no greater care was taken to write bullet-proof requests. Also, this:
"The memo did reportedly show an marked increase in requests that were modified by the court before approval: 80 applications were changed, as opposed to 19 in 2014"
>But how would I refute the "Federal judges warrant rejection rates are very low because the law enforcement doesn't want to present questionable warrants in the first place" argument?
Assuming that is the case, one would think it would be in NSA's self interest to be less stringent with their FISA requests so as to achieve a higher rate of rejections, thus creating an image of propriety for the court.
If memory serves, NSA seems to pride themselves on the low rejection rate. Not that there's anything wrong with that—if in fact it's due to stringent preparation—it just looks bad from the outside.
We changed the HN title to be that of the article.
The submitted title ("US surveillance court rejected ZERO spying requests in 2015") broke the HN guidelines twice: first by rewriting the title to make it more misleading and linkbaity—the site rule calls strictly for making titles less so—and second by using all caps for emphasis. Please don't do that.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadCongress and law enforcement are behaving as if the core problem facing the legal system is a new one, 'how do you catch criminals on tor'. Pro-privacy activists are saying it's 'how do you engineer the social contract to prevent rebellion' (i.e. the same problem legal systems have always faced).
In general, privacy rights and property rights are linked. It's not a coincidence that the brandeis paper which introduced privacy to american jurisprudence was phrased in the vocabulary of real estate & tresspass. It's no coincidence that large institutions that pay for things (home loan banks & health insurers) have an automatic right of tresspass in many cases.
It will be interesting to see if erosion of information privacy leads to erosion of property rights. You can argue that increasing police seizures is already a symptom of this. Let's cross our fingers that at the point where property rights are at risk, courts (the non-secret ones) will start doing their job again and reverse the balance.
Any indication that judges have ever been "fired" from the FISA Court?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Page 8 of the PDF is worth a read. The head judge of the FISC is claiming that non-government entities have the opportunity to be heard by the court because they can (1) refuse a court order which (2) triggers a contempt hearing if (3) the DOJ permits it.
I can imagine that that happens to some extent, but it's quite a bit weaker than what you originally suggested (and maybe there are other factors that prevent or deter the applicants from exercising complete control over who reviews their applications).
Not the sky, but the forth amendment is falling, the fifth too for that matter.
But how would I refute the "Federal judges warrant rejection rates are very low because the law enforcement doesn't want to present questionable warrants in the first place" argument?
It seems to me that a place to start is to ask where the FISA warrants get reviewed - in regular (non-terrorist) cases there's all kinds of warrant review and challenge and argument before a trial, but I'm not sure that kind of review happens with FISA warrants.
Even if every LEO is trying their best to avoid filing questionable warrants, they will end up being mistaken far more than 0 out of 48,642 times. What's the point of having this oversight apparatus if they provide no apparent oversight whatsoever?
"Reuters writes that the 1,457 requests made last year by the NSA and FBI were all approved"
1,457 < 48,642.
> "Even if every LEO..."
NSA != LEO. Do you believe their requests were not being made by lawyers with the relevant act open on their other monitor?
> "no apparent oversight..."
The court's previous rejection rate was .03%. .03% of 1457 is less than 1. IOW, this is the expected outcome even if no greater care was taken to write bullet-proof requests. Also, this:
"The memo did reportedly show an marked increase in requests that were modified by the court before approval: 80 applications were changed, as opposed to 19 in 2014"
http://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-bad.html
Regardless of domain, perfect agreement can indicate a problem.
Assuming that is the case, one would think it would be in NSA's self interest to be less stringent with their FISA requests so as to achieve a higher rate of rejections, thus creating an image of propriety for the court.
If memory serves, NSA seems to pride themselves on the low rejection rate. Not that there's anything wrong with that—if in fact it's due to stringent preparation—it just looks bad from the outside.
Americans police state.
anyone want to argue otherwise?
American police state.
People need to first accept the obvious truth. America is a corrupt nation of corrupt laws rules by a corrupt elite enforced by corrupt officers.
The submitted title ("US surveillance court rejected ZERO spying requests in 2015") broke the HN guidelines twice: first by rewriting the title to make it more misleading and linkbaity—the site rule calls strictly for making titles less so—and second by using all caps for emphasis. Please don't do that.
American is a police state. Censor the truth.
You must love to be subservient dog to the State.