The fallacy of FISA

Let's start with a belief statement, so you can decide if you want to read the rest of the post.

We believe that secret courts have no place in a democracy. And we think that the vanityfair author who says don't wail about FISA because a grand jury investigation is secret, too, should edit his piece for logic.

One clarification: this post does not purport to provide anything remotely useful on the areas of the world where terrorists exist in newsworthy numbers.  This is really about why there is such a huge effort to sift through Americans in the United States.

And a second clarification: smarter minds than me have written better discussions.

Our reason for calling FISA a fallacy in the context of protecting the US and the rest of the world, thank you, from terrorists is really based on one point.

Does anybody remember how the Western security folks scrambled to adapt their structure to the "new threat matrix"?

Our enemies are no longer primarily states with large, organized armies.

This is how every presentation by experts and military in the West has started for decades now.

Just like there is an App For That, we have a law for that. FISA was written at a time when you could say "foreign powers" and "agents of foreign powers", and people would understand.

Then the world changed, and we added terrorists to FISA. 

In other words, we added small bands of individuals to a law conceived, at the time, to fight the Soviets with their huge armed forces and spy capacities good enough to be dangerous.
Teaser: I am so depressed that I am willing to give you a couple of examples, but you'll need to be nice for that and not accuse me of hating America or worse, okay, we'll wait and see.

So, in a world where we had a big fat Soviet enemy with almost bottomless resources (or so they mistakenly thought), FISA secrecy makes sense to me. If we didn't go secret, they had a good chance to find out.

Then someone decided to apply FISA to terrorists.

Who have nowhere near the cash, the manpower, the support which our older enemies had.

Why are we hearing of successful FBI stings quite regularly?

Because a bunch of wannabe terrorists have to basically go around and beg for weapons and support.

One more thing:
It's about the totality of surveillance and secrecy, not the definition of "direct server access" or the preferred breakfast cereal of a whistleblower.
We have come so far that you can go to jail if someone sees you hit your child in public but, at the same time, we give a government pension to people who torture in our name.