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0 pointsmtgx12y ago0 comments

FISA warrant = "general warrant" = misnomer

According to the 4th amendment, "warrants" must be used in specific investigations and for specific individuals. There's nothing specific about a FISA warrant. They just get data en masse from a lot of people. And they use this paper that they are calling a "warrant" from the FISA court, that says they can get the data on everyone.

Also, FISA warrants completely ignores such things as "probable cause" and "reasonable searches", which are pretty important for a democracy, I'd say. You can't say you're getting all the data of 100 million people, and also have "probable cause" for them.

"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted as a response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, which is a type of general search warrant, in the American Revolution. Search and seizure (including arrest) should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court, usually by a law enforcement officer, who has sworn by it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United...

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twoodfin12y ago

FISA warrants are not the same thing as search warrants, in the same sense that an arrest warrant is not the same thing as a search warrant.

FISA "warrants" are really an oversight mechanism to the executive's generally accepted authority to conduct national security operations targeted at foreign powers. They're specifically to "warrant" that the Fourth Amendment is not being violated by a particular search, intercept, or program because the activity is appropriately targeted.

rayiner12y ago

You're both right. In the general case, FISA warrants are court orders sufficient to require a third party to disclose information in their possession. However, any given FISA warrant may not meet the requirements for a warrant that must pass muster under the 4th amendment. They are, however, sufficient for activity that does not require a warrant under the 4th amendment.

So the question is: what requires a warrant that meets the strictures of the 4th amendment? Not every kind of data gathering or information collecting activity requires a warrant.

A good hypothetical to think through is a Tesla car. Tesla has the capability to track you via GPS, though the functionality is apparently disabled on retail models. But say it was enabled, and Tesla collected and stored information about where you went to optimize your ownership experience. Do the police need a warrant to get that information?

On one hand, the police do require a warrant (meeting 4th amendment strictures) to put a GPS on your car (because it is a physical invasion of your private property). On the other hand, police don't need a warrant to ask your neighbors what they know about where you've been.

So: what do the police need to get your GPS information from Tesla? On one hand, you can say that the police shouldn't be able to do indirectly what they can't do directly, and say that they require a warrant meeting 4th amendment strictures to get that information from Tesla. On the other hand you can point to a crucial distinction: the police did not need to invade your physical property to put a GPS bug on you--you did that part yourself and voluntarily told Tesla exactly where you were going. If you had phoned Tesla, and told them exactly where you had went, and they wrote that down and stored it in a file, the police would not have required a 4th amendment warrant to get that data. Just a lesser court order in the event Tesla did not cooperate.