Setec Astronomy

[JasonL]

Yes the government is required to disclose relevant information to the judge and they are required to vet the authenticity of claims they present. These are laid out in the "Woods Procedures" which were, no lying, just set on fire for the Page warrant. There were all these pieces back in 2017 explaining what a big deal it was for the warrant to have been granted, that FISA is definitely not a rubber stamp because see all applications are subject to a body of verification entailed in the Woods procedures. All the pieces about how serious we should take the court granting this monitoring were predicated on the idea that Woods procedures were followed. They absolutely were not. To a remarkable extent.

https://reason.com/2019/12/10/the-fbi-w ... -warrants/

[Jadagul]

Julian Sanchez at least says that the Woods procedures violations were relatively minor; the bigger fuckups were things that rigorous Woods compliance wouldn't actually have helped with.

[JasonL]

I can’t get over the idea that he’s literally collecting checks to talk to Russians and that isn’t disclose to the judge and that’s no big deal.

[Mo]

Because Steele and Page weren’t the reason it started. It was Papadopolis blabbing to the Aussie ambassador about Russia/Wikileaks before that info was public.

[Pham Nuwen]

I mean it sounds an awful lot like they were trying to protect a source/sources. Just saying. I'm totally making that up. I understand that. It's just how it sounds to me.

[JasonL]

So you didn’t need anything, literally nothing to get monitoring up on whoever you wanted in the campaign once Papadopoulos opened his mouth? I mean the text of the application relies very heavily on Steele and paints Page talking to Russians as suspect suspicious.

[JasonL]

Let’s be clear, if a warrant were granted for this long on this pretext with these “errors” but the subject was rando Arab American would everyone be quite this cool?

[Pham Nuwen]

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

[thoreau]

Because Steele and Page weren’t the reason it started. It was Papadopolis blabbing to the Aussie ambassador about Russia/Wikileaks before that info was public.

This.

[Jadagul]

I can’t get over the idea that he’s literally collecting checks to talk to Russians and that isn’t disclose to the judge and that’s no big deal.

No big deal for what?

The FISA warrant process is almost definitely fucked up. We've always suspected that it's fucked, and this is good evidence that it's fucked up. Hopefully the IG does a broader audit of the FISA warrants application process.

This doesn't say much about Trump one way or the other. There's no evidence that this specific warrant is fucked up more than usual and the IG specifically concluded that the process wasn't affected by anti-Trump political bias. And as others have pointed out, the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign was only tangentially related to the Carter Page FISA warrant, and was primarily predicated on the Papadopoulos stuff. (And remember that this IG is a Trump appointee; he's probably not going out of his way to make the Mueller investigation look good.)

So I'm totally with you on getting the pitchforks and trying to reform or shut down FISA. The surveillance of Carter Page looks bad. But it was not politically motivated dirt-digging, and it wasn't targeted at Trump. And you should stop claiming it was. Get upset about the thing that actually happened.

[lunchstealer]

I can’t get over the idea that he’s literally collecting checks to talk to Russians and that isn’t disclose to the judge and that’s no big deal.

Reading this chronologically after Jadagul's tweet, I first read this to be a suggestion that Julian Sanchez is on the Putin payroll.

Я не собираюсь тебя трахать.

[Mo]

Also for all the noise about the Strzok and Page texts, there’s been very little noise about the anti-Clinton texts from FBI agents that the IG uncovered.

[JasonL]

I’ll stop after saying - it’s a dose of credulity I simply do not possess to accept that it was an accident or oversight that a guy working for the government was presented to a judge as though he were not working for the government to secure domestic surveillance on said guy. If I don’t accept that as a mistake Comey should probably go to jail. This belongs at a minimum in the real enemy is the cop.

[Andrew]

I wonder what the media reaction would've been if it had been discovered that the FBI had used a FISA warrant based on half-truths and the claims of government informants to spy on Obama and his campaign in 2008.

[thoreau]

Also for all the noise about the Strzok and Page texts, there’s been very little noise about the anti-Clinton texts from FBI agents that the IG uncovered.

IOKIYAAR

[Warren]

Let’s be clear, if a warrant were granted for this long on this pretext with these “errors” but the subject was rando Arab American would everyone be quite this cool?

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

I don't accept this. That is why we have judges checking their work. When law enforcement breaks the law, the consequences should not be lenient.

[Hugh Akston]

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

I don't accept this. That is why we have judges checking their work. When law enforcement breaks the law, the consequences should not be lenient.

Judges do check their work, and as you would expect, American law enforcement scores a solid 99.97%.

Judges at all levels take warrants very seriously, which is why we have SWAT teams kicking in the wrong doors and tossing flashbangs into cribs.

[Warren]

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

I don't accept this. That is why we have judges checking their work. When law enforcement breaks the law, the consequences should not be lenient.

Judges do check their work, and as you would expect, American law enforcement scores a solid 99.97%.

Judges at all levels take warrants very seriously, which is why we have SWAT teams kicking in the wrong doors and tossing flashbangs into cribs.

I think we could do something about that too if we wanted.

[Hugh Akston]

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

I don't accept this. That is why we have judges checking their work. When law enforcement breaks the law, the consequences should not be lenient.

Judges do check their work, and as you would expect, American law enforcement scores a solid 99.97%.

Judges at all levels take warrants very seriously, which is why we have SWAT teams kicking in the wrong doors and tossing flashbangs into cribs.

I think we could do something about that too if we wanted.

Sure we could, but even if we could afford the propellant, the asteroid belt lacks even basic life support infrastructure.

[JasonL]

If it’s a rubber stamp you didn’t need to fabricate this much crap and misrepresent it to the judge.

[Warren]

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

I don't accept this. That is why we have judges checking their work. When law enforcement breaks the law, the consequences should not be lenient.

Judges do check their work, and as you would expect, American law enforcement scores a solid 99.97%.

Judges at all levels take warrants very seriously, which is why we have SWAT teams kicking in the wrong doors and tossing flashbangs into cribs.

I think we could do something about that too if we wanted.

Sure we could, but even if we could afford the propellant, the asteroid belt lacks even basic life support infrastructure.

That's not a problem if we put the telephone sanitizers, account executives, etc. on the ship.

[Jadagul]

I’ll stop after saying - it’s a dose of credulity I simply do not possess to accept that it was an accident or oversight that a guy working for the government was presented to a judge as though he were not working for the government to secure domestic surveillance on said guy. If I don’t accept that as a mistake Comey should probably go to jail. This belongs at a minimum in the real enemy is the cop.

I agree with that, and was never arguing with that.

I wonder what the media reaction would've been if it had been discovered that the FBI had used a FISA warrant based on half-truths and the claims of government informants to spy on Obama and his campaign in 2008.

If Obama appointed someone to look into it, and the person looked into it, and announced that the warrant wasn't politically motivated?

If someone in the FBI wants to put a warrant on you they will. I'm again making that up. But I strongly suspect it's true. *shrug*

You understand they aren't going to have a come to jesus moment on warrants, right?

I don't accept this. That is why we have judges checking their work. When law enforcement breaks the law, the consequences should not be lenient.

Judges do check their work, and as you would expect, American law enforcement scores a solid 99.97%.

Judges at all levels take warrants very seriously, which is why we have SWAT teams kicking in the wrong doors and tossing flashbangs into cribs.

The 99.97% is overstated because it represents _final_ applications; apparently they submit a preliminary application, and sometimes the judges say "this isn't good enough, fix it before you submit a final". And sometimes they never even resubmit.

That said, the recent events show that the current standard is not good enough.

[D.A. Ridgely]

There isn't ever going to be a FISA standard that withstands public scrutiny because it isn't intended to withstand public scrutiny, it's intended to give the patina of due process for a post 9/11 police state in which due process is little more than whispering "Terrorists!" into the ear of someone with a robe and a law degree but, far more importantly, a code word level security clearance and a lifetime of dedication to the ever-growing security theater of U.S. intelligence operations. I'm not saying nothing ever gets kicked back for lack of due diligence or that no one is going, hey, maybe we should actually read this and ask a few questions because U.S. citizens with European surnames are involved, but don't kid yourself into believing this was ever supposed to be much more than window dressing and plausible deniability.

I was watching some reruns of The West Wing recently because sometimes I prefer Aaron Sorkin's fantasy presidency to Donald Trump's fantasy presidency and there's an episode in which Bartlett's successor Santos is pissed off because it turns out the NSA has monitored his call to Chinese officials and the entirely plausible and satisfactory answer comes back that *of course* they've been monitoring *all* Chinese and Russian officials' phone calls and gawd knows what else because that's what they do for a living. This, folks, is what they do for a living, warrant or no warrant.

[lunchstealer]

There isn't ever going to be a FISA standard that withstands public scrutiny because it isn't intended to withstand public scrutiny, it's intended to give the patina of due process for a post 9/11 police state in which due process is little more than whispering "Terrorists!" into the ear of someone with a robe and a law degree...

This is my thinking. I'm not of the 'this was acceptable behavior' so much as 'this was accepted behavior'. I'd be astonished if a rigorous review of FISA warrants didn't turn up worse obfuscation from pretty much everyone who's written a FISA application in the past 18 years.

[Warren]

There isn't ever going to be a FISA standard that withstands public scrutiny because it isn't intended to withstand public scrutiny, it's intended to give the patina of due process for a post 9/11 police state in which due process is little more than whispering "Terrorists!" into the ear of someone with a robe and a law degree...

This is my thinking. I'm not of the 'this was acceptable behavior' so much as 'this was accepted behavior'. I'd be astonished if a rigorous review of FISA warrants didn't turn up worse obfuscation from pretty much everyone who's written a FISA application in the past 18 years.

But Jason makes a good point. If that's the case, why go through all the trouble of manufacturing evidence?