https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200511/17164144480/even-as-gop-whines-about-illegal-deep-state-surveillance-preparing-to-give-more-surveillance-powers-to-fbi.shtml > We've been pretty critical of federal surveillance powers going back, well, as long as we can remember. And while Trump's biggest supporters like to insist that FISA warrant abuses were some sort of new thing that were just used against his campaign in a politically motivated manner, the reality is that it's just been standard operating procedures for the FBI to abuse the same "backdoor warrants" that were first revealed in 2013, but go back years before that. While, yes, the problems with the Carter Page surveillance were concerning, they were no more concerning than tons of other crap the FBI has done in making use of so-called backdoor warrants to surveil tons of Americans without cause. > Indeed, just this morning we were writing about how the FBI couldn't even bother to meet the most basic procedural requirements regarding the use of these backdoor searches, and violated the Constitution over and over and over again in sniffing through this huge corpus of data.