Tag: [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Commentary: Speaker Mike Johnson’s ‘Personal Conservatism’ Betrays the Conservative Movement

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Speaker Mike Johnson

The election of Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana to Speaker of the House has thrown into stark relief the difference between what one might call “personal conservatives” and those of us who consider ourselves to be part of the conservative movement, or movement conservatives.

There’s no doubt that Speaker Johnson lives his life according to a set of conservative principles: He’s a church-going man known for his personal rectitude; he married his wife in a “covenant marriage;” as a lawyer he advocated a constitutional “textualist” approach to his cases; he spent many years actively involved in advancing the Right-to-Life; he opposes same sex marriages, and in 2015 he took one of his daughters to a purity ball.

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Reporter Tom Pappert: U.S. Rep. David Kustoff Is ‘Ripe for a Challenge’ in Tennessee’s 8th Congressional District Following FISA Vote

Kaitlin Housler
David Kustoff

Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said he believes Tennessee U.S. Representative David Kustoff’s (R-TN-08) vote on Friday against an amendment that would have ended the warrantless spying on United States citizens allowed under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) makes the congressman “ripe for a challenge” this election cycle.

Kustoff and Democrat Congressman Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) were the sole members of Tennessee’s congressional delegation to vote against the amendment on Friday, Pappert previously reported.

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Amendment in GOP-House’s FISA Renewal Bill for Warrant Requirement Fails in Tie Vote, 212-212

Just the News

A bipartisan warrant requirement amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act section 702 renewal bill failed to pass in a tie vote of 212-212 on the House floor on Friday. The amendment would have prohibited “warrantless searches of U.S. person communications in the FISA 702 database, with exceptions for imminent threats to life or bodily harm, consent searches, or known cybersecurity threat signatures.”

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Rep. Burchett: ‘FISA Needs to Die’

Peter D'Abrosca
Tim Burchett

A U.S. Congressman from Tennessee had some strong words after he joined 19 of his Republican counterparts in voting against the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on Wednesday.

“FISA, of course, is what they use to spy, literally, on America citizens,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN-02) in a video posted to his X account. “So what happens, very literally, say you have somebody working on your house, on your roof, what have you, [who is] not an American citizen, and then they contact you on their cell phone and basically because of that [the U.S. government] can follow you or investigate you or what have you, without a search warrant. And when I was told by the State Department that in fact it was problematic to have search warrants on these cases, they obviously have a problem with our Constitution. So, tough day for democracy today folks. And FISA needs to die.”

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FISA Renewal Deadline Fast Approaching amid Bipartisan Call for Ending Warrantless Surveillance

Just the News
Mike Lee and Dick Durban in front of FISA court (composite image)

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) renewal deadline is fast approaching as conservative lawmakers and some Democrats continue their push for ending warrantless surveillance.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including conservative and progressive legislators, have called for reforming section 702 of FISA ahead of the April 19 deadline.

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Congress Votes to Extend FBI Warrantless Surveillance Tool Without Reforming It

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Congress voted Thursday to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with no reforms as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA.

Section 702 of FISA is a tool that intelligence officials have allegedly abused as it enables them to surveil Americans without obtaining a warrant. After the Senate passed FISA through the NDAA on Wednesday and failed to get sufficient support to eliminate the four-month extension, the House of Representatives finalized it in a vote on Thursday.

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Top Biden Intel Nominee Calls Warrantless Surveillance Tool Used to Spy on Americans ‘Irreplaceable’

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President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead top intelligence agencies described a tool used to surveil Americans without a warrant as vital at his confirmation hearing Wednesday.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh characterized Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a tool that has been abused to spy on Americans, as “extensively used” and “irreplaceable” in his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Biden nominated Haugh to head both Cyber Command and the National Security Agency (NSA) in May, according to Politico.

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Bipartisan Effort to Reform FISA, End Abuses Could be Iced by GOP Outrage of Durham Report Findings

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Congressional Democrats have joined in bipartisan effort to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amid abuses but GOP outrage over the findings in the Durham Report, including recent calls to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland over such matters, has likely hurt such efforts.

Congressional reauthorization of FISA is due in December, with particular focus on Section 702 of the law, which permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance on foreign people outside the U.S., with the assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.

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DOJ Inspector General Has No Answer to How Many in Government Can Spy on Americans Through ‘Backdoor’ Searches

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Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz could not answer how many people in the federal government can use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on Americans through backdoor searches when Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz asked him at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Thursday.

FISA Section 702 enables intelligence agencies to carry out targeted surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S., but they have improperly used it on Americans. There were 3.4 million backdoor searches in 2021, according to an Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2022 Transparency report.

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Commentary: Is the Justice Department Blackmailing President Joe Biden?

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by Robert Romano   In 2016, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, had an FBI investigation because she was storing classified information on her private server for the convenience of reading her classified emails on a smartphone. Details of the investigation came out throughout the campaign, resulting in former FBI Director James Comey’s July 2016 determination not to pursue charges and then an Oct. 2016 surprise that he was reopening the matter. Determined to ensure that her opponent, then candidate Donald Trump, would not be without an investigation of his own, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee sought to frame him as a Russian agent who had helped Moscow hack the DNC and put the emails onto Wikileaks. It resulted in a top secret FBI investigation and FISA warrants that all carried over after the 2016 election when Trump won and into his administration, ultimately resulting in Special Counsel Robert Mueller being appointed to investigate—severely hampering the Trump presidency. Mueller found there was no Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia to hack the DNC and give the emails to Wikileaks. According to Mueller’s final report to the Attorney General, “the evidence was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump Campaign…

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Andy Biggs Reintroduces Bill to Uphold the Fourth Amendment by Prohibiting Warrantless Surveillance of American Citizens

Neil Jones

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) reintroduced the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act Wednesday, which seeks to prohibit warrantless surveillance of American citizens.

“We cannot continue to provide our government with clandestine spying powers that violate the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans,” Biggs said in a press release. “It’s imperative to have a surveillance apparatus to address national security concerns, but it also must protect Americans’ constitutional rights.”

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Commentary: The 2023 Congress’ Opportunity to Stop the FBI’s Spying on Americans

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The 18-member U.S. intelligence community (IC) has released the Annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Intelligence Community’s Use of National Security Surveillance Authorities. One of the few to pay attention was historian Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an affiliated scholar at the University of California’s Hastings School of Law.

This government document, the ninth such report to be made public, “provides statistics and contextual information concerning how the Intelligence Community uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and certain other national security authorities to accomplish its mission.”

The law authorizes the U.S. government to engage in mass surveillance of foreign targets. As Guariglia discovered, FISA is “still being abused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans without a warrant.” This abuse takes place under Section 702, an amendment to FISA.

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NSA Inspector General ‘Concerned’ About Surveillance of Americans’ Communication Devices

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On Monday, the office of the Inspector General at the National Security Agency (NSA) released a report showing that the agency failed to follow basic internal guidelines and court-ordered procedures in its surveillance of American citizens’ communications.

According to CNN, the report showed that the agency abused a loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). While Section 702 allows the government to collect such communications of foreign citizens on foreign soil without a warrant, it prohibits the government from doing so with American citizens. The loophole allows the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use this section to collect American communications without a warrant if they believe “a query is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.”

The inspector general’s report “revealed a number of concerns involving [U.S. person] identifiers used as query terms against FISA Section 702 data.” Furthermore, some of these NSA queries “did not always follow NSA procedural and policy requirements.” Among other discrepancies, information gathered on “selectors,” or particular search terms in an investigation, were not properly documented; in addition, the NSA’s internal query tools designed to automatically prevent the processing of queries involving any Americans associated with the selectors ultimately failed to do so, thus allowing Americans to be investigated and monitored.

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Thousands Attended Medical Freedom Rally Featuring Del Bigtree

Hayley Feland

Thousands gathered at the Minnesota capitol building on Sunday afternoon for what some are saying was the biggest Minnesota medical freedom rally yet. The rally featured Del Bigtree, the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). Bigtree said he was encouraged by the level of turnout, saying that it is important for Minnesotans to show up and speak out against mandates.

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Peter Strzok Defends FBI Against FISA Abuse Allegations, Says Agents Were ‘Overworked’

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Former FBI official Peter Strzok defended the bureau’s surveillance of former Trump aide Carter Page in an interview aired Sunday, attributing failures found in a government watchdog report to agents being “overworked.”

“I don’t think at all that it’s anything improper. You get people who are overworked, who make mistakes — and don’t get me wrong, inexcusable mistakes,” Strzok said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

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FBI Agents Pushed for a FISA to Investigate Foreign Government Targeting Hillary Clinton

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by Chuck Ross   FBI agents in 2015 sought authorization to surveil foreign government operatives who sought to influence Hillary Clinton, but ultimately settled for a defensive briefing given to lawyers for the Democratic presidential candidate, according to documents released on Sunday. One FBI agent involved in the investigation asked then-FBI Director James Comey in an April 2015 email for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, according to the documents, published by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham. A FISA order was not granted in the investigation. Instead, an FBI special agent provided a defensive briefing to Clinton’s personal lawyers in October 2015. Graham, a Republican, said that the documents are evidence of a double standard in how the FBI conducted investigations of foreign meddling regarding the Clinton and Trump campaigns. The FBI obtained FISA orders against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page in October 2016 as part of its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election. The FISA Court has been highly critical of the FBI over its surveillance of Page, citing numerous errors and omissions found in applications for the spy warrants. The FBI provided defensive briefings to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton regarding general foreign threats in August 2016.…

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Commentary: The Russia Collusion Hoax Lays Bare the Urgent Need for FISA Reform

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by Robert Romano   By far the biggest takeaway from the failure of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to establish that there was any coordination or conspiracy with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election by President Donald Trump, his campaign or any American is that we need immediate and swift reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court system that was weaponized against a political campaign to investigate a crime that was never committed. The FISA warrants taken out against the Trump campaign that began in Oct. 2016 relied upon the dossier full of phony allegations by former British spy Christopher Steele that was paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign. It gave the government access to campaign emails, phone calls, text messages and other communications. This was the same dossier that was briefed to then-President-elect Donald Trump in Jan. 2017 by former FBI Director James Comey, who later told Congress that it was “salacious and unverified” and then was used again when the warrants were renewed. The dossier alleged that President Trump was a bought and paid for Russian agent, that former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page while on a trip to Moscow where he delivered a commencement address at the…

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President Of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton Trashes DOJ And FBI For Abusing ‘Awesome Powers’ Without Accountability

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Tom Fitton

by Nick Givas   Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton trashed the FBI and Department of Justice for abuse of power on “Fox & Friends First” Tuesday and said they are not being held accountable for their actions. Fitton’s group sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain surveillance warrant documents related to President Donald Trump’s former adviser Carter Page, but the information was heavily redacted. “[Trump has] to intervene,” Fitton said. “Rod Rosenstein signed that [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)] renewal. So he’s being asked to release information that may reflect poorly on him. He’d have to take himself out of the decision-making as to whether that material’s released. The president should step in like he did last time, that resulted in the release of this partial disclosure. And there’s more information to be gotten.” Fitton said Judicial Watch plans to file a motion Tuesday to get access to transcripts of the FISA hearings from the Page case and demanded better transparency from the federal government. “We plan to file a motion today with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get access to any hearing transcripts of any hearings that took place about the Carter Page warrant applications,” he continued. “We ask the Justice…

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