Court Rules That FISA Cannot Sidestep Crucial Constitutional Right
Anyone still upset by Crossfire Hurricane, will see this as welcome news

Now that we’ve seen how often and easily FISA powers have been abused to gain unauthorized access to the lives of other Americans… this ruling is BIG.
After 4 years of the Biden administration routinely stepping over nearly every safeguard the Framers devised to protect citizens from the power of a government gone rogue, it’s nice to see some limits being enforced again.
If you want to access information scooped up by FISA on a US citizen, you’re gonna need a proper warrant to do it.
Federal authorities used FISA Section 702 evidence to secure Hasbajrami’s conviction, but only after Hasbajrami had been in jail did the Justice Department disclose to the court—for the first time—that “some of the evidence it had previously disclosed from FISA surveillance was itself the fruit of earlier information obtained without a warrant pursuant to Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, 50 U.S.C. § 188 1a et seq. (‘Section 702’).”
In this case, the 702 information in question on Hasbajrami was obtained by FBI agents querying the vast FISA Section 702 database, which Democratic and Republican administrations have argued does not require a warrant.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied Hasbarjami’s blanket evidence suppression motion for the exclusion of all FISA Section 702 collection in his case but did not weigh in on whether the warrantless Section 702 database queries were constitutional, instead remanding the case back to Judge Hall for a review of that question. Hall subsequently agreed with Hasbarjami’s argument that “inadvertent acquisition of Defendant’s communications does not automatically permit the government to search among the acquired communications without a warrant.”
[…]
Hasbarjami will thus remain behind bars. But his success in this case in getting Judge Hall to rule that FISA Section 702 warrantless “back door” searches violate the Fourth Amendment has reopened the issue. — CATO
Said differently, even information currently in the possession of the government requires a warrant before any information connected to an American citizen can be accessed.
Having seen the impunity with which these resources have been weaponized in the past, this is a good step in the right direction.