Friday, December 20, 2019

Where is the outrage?

The coverage of the FBI's abuse of FISA to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page is a sham and a shame. The Horowitz report "identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications and many errors in the Woods Procedures" and "at least 19 references to the status quo’s threat to 'constitutionally protected activity,' notably the 'First Amendment.'” 
The FISA court found the report so troubling that it issued a rare public order for the FBI to report soon what it is doing to prevent making mistakes in the future. The Horowitz report also notes that it failed to find "documentary or testimonial evidence” of anti-Trump bias. Both the finding so many mistakes and the lack of finding bias deserve more attention. Here are questions I would try to answer if I were a reporter.

  1. Is four mistakes per application typical? The 17 mistakes for Carter Page occurred over four applications.
  2. Can the public rely on the FISA court to preserve our liberties?
  3. Has the time come to eliminate FISA and stop the FBI and CIA from spying on US citizens without "normal" warrants?
  4.  How many of the mistakes in the applications for Carter Page favored getting the warrants and how many worked against getting it? I presume that the answer is 17 to 0 in the next question.
  5. What is the probability that all 17 mistakes favored getting the application if the probability of one mistake favoring the application is 50%. Answer = 1/131072 = 0.000007629394531 = 0.0007629394531%.
  6. Is such a low probability of making so many of the mistakes in favor of getting the warrants more consistent with systematic political bias or lack of anti-Trump bias?
The lack of attention in the news media to the  abuse of FISA by FBI is shocking. If we cannot rely on the FBI to play carefully and straight then FISA cannot protect our Constitutional rights. I fear that loss of those rights is too great a price to pay for whatever benefits we are getting.

I am surprised at the lack of attention to the preponderance of mistakes that favored getting the warrant. Any possibility that political bias leads the FBI to spy on a citizen, much less a politician, strikes at the very heart of a free and fair democracy.

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