They look at full email bodies. For many years, they treated email older than 180 days as "Abandonded". They could collect and read these full emails (not just metadata) because they weren't private data but "abandoned". Every sends emails and they stay in their Sent Items for 180+ days, so that means every email everyone sent.
This was true for many years, until recently that was disallowed.
There are a ton of exceptions where they can see your full data. They just use an exception, like the abandonded email exception.
I doubt they've changed that much from their days in Room 641A copying literally every bit that passed over AT&T's network. They could take the contents of everything that isn't encrypted going over the wire in real time then and I don't expect they've backed off since.
One can also gain credibility by admitting to a lesser crime, then one is viewed as compliant and honest, when the lesser charge masks large wrong doing. Classic Sun Tzu.
These are coming out now because the DOJ OIG was asked to look into FISA abuse back in late 2017 or early 2018. There's now a report circulating for comment in the FBI and other agencies.
How do you know this? My understanding is that the agencies will try not to submit anything to the FISA court that they know will be rejected as it would be a wasteful use of time and money.
If it was public I highly doubt there would be such efficiency.
If I was a judge on the panel and I knew there will be little to no public scrutiny, and even when there is scrutiny like the article it zero details are given and no punishments, I wouldn't try nearly as hard to protect people's rights above everything.
Especially if the only people arguing for it is the government, there's no one defending the people except the judges themselves. All day long they live in a security bubble listening the most paranoid people in the country.
It's just too convenient of an excuse to say that they are simply getting it right every time so nothing to see here.
> Over the entire 33-year period, the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants, with only 12 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests.
I really tend to doubt the agencies are that good at threading the needle.
(It's also a unique court, in that there's no opposing side. Just the government asking. I'd be much more comfortable with a setup where a group like the ACLU is permitted to object, while still being subject to security clearance and non-disclosure requirements.)
The rate is misleading since there's a back and forth with the judge before final submission.
eg the judge will look it over and says that there's no specific crime listed like the law requires, two weeks later there are money laundering allegations also listed, the judge approves it without asking where the new allegations came from.
> In June 2013, a copy of a top-secret warrant, issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to London's The Guardian newspaper by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata" – comprehensive call detail records, including location data – about all calls in its system, including those that occur "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
This answers your question because it's a request that should have been rejected by the explicit rules upon which the FISA court ostensibly operates. The FISA court approved it even though any fair minded person could tell that dragnet surveillance wholly within the United States is not within what the courts are only supposed to approve: specific communications between specific individuals of which at least one is outside of the United States.
This was true for many years, until recently that was disallowed.
There are a ton of exceptions where they can see your full data. They just use an exception, like the abandonded email exception.