FISA is Not Simple

There has been a great deal of discussion about FISA Warrants, without very much of it saying what they are.  The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal offers a good story about that today. The article points to an often omitted element of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - that it is a process, a complicated one that takes time, and discipline to get through.  From my own experience, it seems to take forever.

There is a discipline to this process because it will order surveillance - very broad surveillance - of an individual who may not be accused of a crime, but is involved in terrorism or intelligence collection against the U.S.  We have good reason to want to know what these kinds of people are up to.

Once in awhile, even more so today with the numbers of former terrorists being exported from battlefields in the Middle East and other conflict zones,  we come into contact with U.S. citizens who talk to our terrorists or intel collectors.  I could live next door to one of these people and not know it, talk to them every day, even call them now and again.  The process is usually simple for someone who has occasional contact and no known association - dump the data about the U.S. person and move on.  That happens very quickly.

The difference here, that some are suggesting, is that people in the U,S. Government  went beyond that by using unverified material paid for by the opposition political party, to obtain and perpetuate those warrants.  They not only did not dump the data, but unmasked those U.S. citizens who were hidden by required redactions made by the agencies that collect this sort of data.  That would be a corruption of the FISA warrant process and directly threatens every protection offered in the Act to a U.S. person.  If people are emotional on both sides of this, it is because most of them recognize that they cannot be seen to be part of a conspiracy that undermines the protections given to U.S. citizens.  When “The Memo” is published later this month, we may see one side of this story, an undoubtedly ugly one.