The FISA rulings and arguments never become public, most of the domestic surveillance warrants are justified merely by the fact the people will never find out they were surveilled and therefore won’t be “harmed” by such behaviour (this was the exact argument which Yahoo was given and lost trying to fight it in one of the only public FISA rulings available online).

Most importantly only the NSA government lawyers gets to argue the grounds for surveillance is justified. There is never a point in time where it is critical analyzed by outside parties so we put 100% of the trust in the FISA judge panel doing their due diligence and standing up for American citizens rights.

But as we saw with the recent Carter Page FBI investigations the feds can feed the FISA courts complete crap and they’ll sign off on it anyway. Multiple times.

I love when people act like this isn’t some rubber stamp court and is actually sufficient to protect Americans constitutional rights. It so obviously isn’t and you’d have to be a serious military authoritarian hawk not to see through that nonsense.

These secret courts live and die because the average person doesn’t understand how it works and the government is just telling everyone to ”shut up and trust us”... including decades of congressman on the House Intelligence Committee.