The second issue of al-Risālah, the purported English-language magazine of Jabhat al-Nuṣrah, was released a few days ago, complete with soldier-of-fortune-esque cover showing a masked (stock?) photo horr...

This morning, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Clapper declined to issue a preliminary injunction halting NSA's bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act as authorized b...

In U.S. federal courts, questions about the existence and contours of customary international law (CIL) arise in a variety of cases, both civil and criminal. These have generated a number of interesting ...

Because of the unusual length of Sunday’s 9/11 military commission hearing, the write-up of the session

Just before the beginning of the Obama administration, in the Afterword to the 2009 paperback edition of the The Terror Presidency, I wrote:

Many of us on this side of the Atlantic have believed for a long time that citizens’ data is protected as well or better from government access in the United States than it is in Europe, notwithstanding...

As I explained in my last post, American constitutional law requires that plaintiffs show they have been the subject of surveillance in order to establish standing to challenge intelligence programs in c...

Following a public hearing on Thursday morning, the military commission tasked with trying five Guantanamo detainees for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks went dark for back-to-back, closed 505(h) ...

Both Jack Goldsmith and Harold Koh have recently written about the constitutionality of congressional restrictions on the transfer of prisoners. The President’s veto last week of the NDAA was based in pa...

Earlier today, the Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) by a vote of 74-21. Early reports are that most of the more significant privacy-related amendments were rejected, as was...

Editor’s Note: The drone program remains controversial, and critics regularly blast it for creating more terrorists than it kills. Prominent among these critics is Glenn Greenwald, a founding editor of T...

On Friday, we published a “what to watch for” guide to the then-imminent U.S. freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea. Yesterday, the USS Lassen, an Arleigh Burke-class guided miss...

Just this past hour, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Jim Clapper provided the keynote remarks at the public conference The Ethos and the Profession of Intelligence co-hosted by the CIA and the Ce...

Attorneys from Apple and the Department of Justice spoke yesterday before Judge James Orenstein of the District Court for the Eastern District of New York at a hearing on a high-profile case regarding en...

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal David Hoffman Doubleday (2015) 336 pages I didn’t pick up The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal ...