DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

SECRET FISA POWER REAUTHORIZATION

“For the past several years no corrective action taken by the intelligence community has improved the abuses outlined by the FISA court.  The sketchy programs, and abuse therein, needs more public attention.

However, there is now a confluence of events highlighting a likelihood congress and the intelligence apparatus writ large want to reauthorize the FISA surveillance and collection authorities without further sunlight and without public input. Here’s what’s going on…

It appears the DOJ is trying to get the FISA reauthorization passed before the FISC declassifies the corrective action outlined from the prior court order.  This response would also include information about the “sequestering” of evidence gathered as a result of the now admitted fraudulent and misrepresented information within the FISA applications.

With that in mind, it is NOT accidental the Wall Street Journal publishes an article today about AG Barr’s position on FISA reauthorization.   The White House wants structural reform; it appears the DOJ and FBI want considerably less than that.

…With the terminal deadline for FISA reauthorization rapidly approaching; and with serious abuses identified within the system of the FISA court, specifically as they pertain to the targeting of American citizens; there have been no public hearings or congressional discussions about the FISA process and the outlined fourth amendment violations.”

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/23/warning-house-schedules-backroom-fisa-reauthorization-hearing-without-sunlight-while-fisa-court-and-doj-delay/

>>8230224

“FISA orders are for foreign intelligence purposes, so the surveillance is rarely used in a prosecution and rarely challenged in a motion to suppress.  Moreover, even if the fruits of FISA surveillance are used in court, criminal defendants and other litigants are deprived of access to this information, so they have little way of knowing if evidence brought against them may have come from an improper FISA order. (FISA provides a mechanism for defendants to request this information, but no defendant has succeeded in doing so in FISA’s 40-year history.) This impedes a defendant’s ability to challenge their prosecution, and it prevents related, public knowledge of these challenges.

But the secrecy in FISA extends much further than FISC, adding further opaque layers between what intelligence agencies and the court do and what the public sees…

FISA’s inherent secrecy causes a chain reaction. Because the FISC’s surveillance orders are kept secret, it is hard to know if they are ever improper. Because criminal defendants are kept in the dark about what evidence was used to obtain a FISA order, they cannot meaningfully challenge if the order was wrongly issued.

In Congress, because lawmakers are widely excluded from knowing the FISC’s procedures, efforts to fix the process are scarce. And, as we’ve seen with the Nunes memo, because so few lawmakers can access FISA materials, if one lawmaker uses that access to make extraordinary claims, trying to prove or refute those claims is mostly futile.

Plainly, outsiders do not know who is telling the truth. Because the public cannot read the underlying FISA materials that the memo is based on, they can’t accurately separate fact from fiction. They cannot see the FISC’s written approval for the order. They cannot see the order itself. And they cannot see the materials that went into the surveillance application.

According to reports, the majority of Congress is in the exact same position. They have not been able to see the FISC’s written approval for the order; they cannot see the order itself. And they cannot see the materials that went into the surveillance application.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/problems-fisa-secrecy-and-automatically-classified-information