The President's Civil Liberties Oversight Board's report on section 702 of FISA

The board agrees it should be renewed but splits three ways on proposals for reform

I summarize the President's Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) report on section 702 of FISA in this Lawfare article.  Quick summary:

"The PCLOB report is a gold mine of authoritative information about Section 702, and evaluating the recommendations is a good way to refine one's view of what reforms are needed. Whether the report will have much impact on the debate over renewal, however, is less clear. The unanimous support for renewal may be influential in the sense that it confirms a sentiment that already seems widespread in Congress, despite the FBI's travails. The report's inability to agree on more than that will dissipate its influence, particularly because understanding the dueling proposals for 702 reform requires working through hundreds of dense pages."

Comments

[apedad]

(Some background)

"Section 702 allows for the warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals outside the United States, even as they communicate with U.S. citizens on domestic soil. It’s a feature that many fear allows intelligence agencies to keep tabs on U.S. citizens without securing a warrant.

The FBI spied on more than 246,000 foreign nationals using the tool, a jump from roughly 232,000 the year before, about a 6 percent increase.

The number of Americans impacted by those searches plummeted, from 2.9 million last year to 119,000 this year.

The FBI attributes the decline to a shift in its practices, including requiring agents to 'opt in' to searching the 702 database and requiring attorney approval when running a batch of more than 100 queries."

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3978746-fisa-702-searches-foreign-nationals-rise-citizen-queries-drop/

[apedad]

Copy of the report: https://documents.pclob.gov/prod/Documents/OversightReport/e9e72454-4156-49b9-961a-855706216063/2023%20PCLOB%20702%20Report%20(002).pdf

[Dr. Ed 2]

It may well be too little, too late -- even if this were to eliminate the abuses, and it very well might, the FBI no longer has the credulity and good will to be believed anymore (and it will be a *long time*, if ever, before it does).

A lot of things have been said about how Truman rapidly dismantled the OSS with Eisenhower then building the CIA from its wreckage, what's not often mentioned is the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated the OSS. (They were allies at the time) -- and the OSS made a strategic decision that the CCP were more likely to defeat the Japanese than the Nationalists, but I digress...

At this point, I don't see any true reform without abolishing the FBI and creating something completely different.

[Brett Bellmore]

"even as they communicate with U.S. citizens on domestic soil."

The real problem isn't the actual communications with foreign nationals. It's the contact chaining, where they start playing 6 degrees...

And I don't know that I'd particularly trust the FBI to honestly report how many searches they were doing, at this point.

[Jazzizhep]

“Well shit judge. I honestly didn’t realize I had inadvertently set my query to return a maximum of 100 results per page. I don’t know how search result number 648 came to be on page one.”

[Michael Ejercito]

At least a lawyer who lied to a FISA court to obtain a warrant would be disbarred, right?

[iowatwo]

The last audit conducted by the FISA judges, found 1.4 million illegal searches.

Yet not a soul in management was fired.

Creating more rules when the existing ones are ignored without penalty calls for the shuttering of the program .

The FBI is why we can't have nice things anymore.