( CNN) On Sunday night, I came across a terrifically informative Twitter thread from April Doss regarding this weekend's release of a previously categorized foreign surveillance warrant application on one-time Trump campaign official Carter Page. The warrant, approved in 2016, let the FBI to conduct surveillance on Page.

I reached out to Doss to walk me through the FISA process and shed some light on who is right when it comes to the Page warrant in particular. She knows of what she speaks: She spent May 2016 to May 2017 as the senior minority advise for the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation and is now the chair of cyber& privacy at the law firm Saul Ewing. She has also previously served as the head of intelligence law at the National Security Agency.

Our conversation, conducted via email and gently edited for flow, is below.

After a series of public hearings in Congress — known as the Church and Pike Committees — a number of reforms were put in place that would restrict the government's ability to spy on people in the US, and created stricter oversight mechanisms across all three branches of government to ensure that, if the intelligence or law enforcement agencies( CIA, FBI and the like) believed they needed to collect information on specific Americans for intelligence or counterintelligence intents, relevant agencies would have to meet very clear standards explaining why they suspected that person was a counterintelligence threat, what information they sought to collect about the person, and how the information would be protected.

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