As Ben noted, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has redacted and made available another memorandum and primary order dealing with Section 215 telephone metadata collection. Two things s...

Get yer copies of the memorandum and primary order here. (Other less interesting documents here and here.) I'll write up my thoughts as soon as I have any.

Over at TNR's Security States, Matt and I have a new piece about international calls to ban autonomous weapon systems.  It begins like this: What if armed drones were not just piloted remotely by humans ...

Let’s clear away the underbrush: The buried lede in Judge Walton’s letter of July 29---which is the one that matters---is the comparison of FISA scrutiny to that of district courts assessing Title III wa...

Although Joel's post from last night cites the wrong letter from Judge Walton to Senators Leahy and Grassley, this week's letter, which definitely does not bury the lede, does provide significant data on...

Now we know:  the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court bounces a quarter of the government’s applications for surveillance orders.  This according to statistics released this week by the court’s chief...

. . .The Senate took action on a host of pending executive branch nominations on Wednesday evening after it passed legislation ending the shutdown. Two dozen civilian executive branch nominations, to be ...

Here's the news, from The Daily Beast's Dan Klaidman: The White House has settled on a former high-ranking Pentagon official to replace Janet Napolitano as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Secu...

You can find the interim report---the final won't be submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council until 2014, apparently---here. There's a good bit to pore over in the paper authored by Emmerson, with who...

Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m., D.C. Circuit Judges David S. Tatel and Thomas B. Griffith, and Senior Judge Stephen F. Williams will hear oral arguments in Aamer v.

Via the New Republic's Security States blog, I have a new essay up on last week's Ninth Circuit decision in Hamad, and how it's part of the larger pattern of judicial hostility to damages suits in counte...

Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia who was convicted of war crimes in 2012 by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, arrived in Britain yesterday to begin a 50-year prison term in a British jai...

What does the government's demand for Lavabit's encryption keys have to do with its justification for its bulk data collection under FISA Section 215? Basic logic.

If a body other than the Congress of the United States were actively contemplating a step that would, by the accounts of virtually all economists, tank the U.S. economy, cause interest rates to shoot up,...

Although the Federal Aviation Administration has been tasked by Congress to come up with regulations for the use of drones  in domestic airspace, it is running late on that mandate.  Even small, light mo...