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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but they had secret courts issuing secret warrants. Or something. So they’re fine.

No, this isn't the FISA stuff (which, while still unconstitutional, claims authority from the FISA Amendments Act, and, yes, the secret rubber stamp FISA court), this is worse: this is the CIA doing something completely unrelated via an executive order interpretation.

This doesn't even go to the FISA court, and they didn't tell the congressional oversight committees about it (all of whom have clearance to know/hear).

It always bothers me that people claim it's terrible because it's a "rubber stamp court". But I've dealt with government procurement, and if you're undergoing a massive project applications process, then you do the due diligence to make sure your application is likely to pass. Time spent making applications that aren't going to pass is time wasted.

"Likely" in your sentence seems like something orders of magnitude below the 0.03% fisa court stamp rate though. A fail rate that low means the exact opposite of what you're saying, which is that it would be a waste of time to be so careful because making a mistake and having to redo it 1% of the time would be overall faster (and that's still assuming the government only targeted entirely "correct" cases)

In my experience 0.03% is below rate of form-filling / typographical errors that don't get caught even with several proofreaders.

Not only do they have clearance,

they're also the only meaningful oversight.

Yeah, there’s a secret law saying that it’s all good.

Trust Us.

I trust you.

If you can't trust shadowy organizations with a track record of lying or misleading congress, who can you trust?

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