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...
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.
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.
Er, um, no. FISA warrants and courts are different than regular warrants and courts for a very good reason. Most of them are issued post de-facto and as mtgx and I have pointed out, are literally rubber stamped. ZERO were declined last year.
I'd love a citation for the last sentence of your post. I'll work on background info on FISA warrants. Like I said, wish I had my debate evidence I cut years ago. Rather ironically, it's actually remarkably hard to refind some of that evidence 10 years later. Google loves to emphasize more recent publications.
A FISA warrant is as much a warrant as an FBI agent wiping their ass on a piece of paper and calling it a National Security Letter makes it a "legal warrant". (Yes, field FBI agents can issue them, and they're issued in the tens of thousands every single year, AND a single letter can apply to a person, team, family, or entire workplace.)
You might call it "legal" in that a law passed by Congress with secret interpretations and special addenedums tells them they can... but yeah, I'm going to keep on calling FISA warrants and NSLs used on US Citizens what it is: unconstitutional and thus practically, illegal.
Literally hand picking any of these keywords pretty much leads to the same Wikipedia page discussing at least some of these things. I'm still reading it to see how complete it is. Again, where are you getting this information that the government has been more conservative or particular about these directives?
Ironically it actually has a fairly good record dating back to 2006 in several places when some of this stuff got stirred up that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...
The whole thing is insightful. (I edited this comment to be far less rude, my apologies, I should've slowed down)
