Hi everybody Cheryl Ackison here with another edition of the Cheryl Ackison

Podcast. The Secret of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, it's called FISA Court, has given the

FBI until January 10th to address abuses and lapses identified by the Department of Justice Inspector General in a recent report.

That report you may recall heavily criticized FBI practices in its long-term spy case that produced no evidence of any American improperly

conspiring with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Today I want to go over six ways that I think we were blind to screaming red flags about government

surveillance abuse. Number one let's talk about the FBI Woods procedures. I started writing about this a couple of years ago.

These were who helped design them, were supposed to appease the secret of FISA court that had

flagged abuses by FBI officials in their wiretap applications submitted to the court.

The court found that over and over again there were inaccuracies in these

submissions to the FISA court. This is a serious problem. The new procedures require strict

verification of all facts and sources in a wiretap application by FBI officials all the way up the chain.

Facts that cannot be properly verified such as the facts in that political opposition research dossier that was presented to the FBI in 2016,

facts that cannot be properly verified are to be removed from the wiretap application.

That's what the Woods procedures say.

The Woods procedures were designed, in other words, to prevent the very sorts of abuses that

FBI officials committed in 2016 and 2017.

How did that happen then?

Well, the problem is it's left up to the FBI to execute the safety check upon itself and apparently some officials there were not capable

of doing so faithfully.

Why were the Woods procedure set up if the FBI ultimately doesn't follow them and then nobody notices because there's no real oversight.

What makes any of us think any new proposed reforms that come now will have a different impact.

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