emptywheel

I'm in Pasadena Courthouse for Keith Gartenlaub hearing today -- a really important FISA case. John Cline and ACLU's Ashley Gorski will be arguing w/@TorEkelandPC sitting around in his monkey suit. Here's the link: https://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/media/view_video.php?pk_vid=0000012639 …

The issues being argued are 1) whether data showing child porn that hasn't been accessed for ~3 iterations of hard drives can sustain a conviction and 2) the limits to FISA searches (in this case, an individual physical search of hard drives).

As I explain here, the Gartenlaub case is an explicit case where the govt is treating criminal behavior as a foreign intelligence. https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/09/29/how-keith-gartenlaub-turned-child-porn-into-foreign-intelligence/ … So as Congress preps to codify the use of 702 for porn, transnational crime, and other domestic crimes, key precedent.

There's a ton of circumstantial evidence that Gartenlaub is also a case where 702 was used -- almost certainly with reverse targeting -- to get to criminal warrants. https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/10/16/evidence-the-us-government-used-section-702-against-keith-gartenlaubs-parents-in-law/ … https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/11/15/how-fbi-could-use-reverse-targeting-to-use-section-702-against-keith-gartenlaub/ … But those issues aren't being reviewed today.

I also note how Gartenlaub's case seems to undermine some of the claims FBI Director Christopher Wray made recently in a 702 speech. https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/10/18/christopher-wray-and-the-myth-created-by-parallel-construction/ …

Finally, Gartenlaub is a classic case of how FBI uses FISA (both 702 and traditional) to obtain evidence the govt then uses to try to coerce someone to be an informant.