Today's Headlines and Commentary

Closing arguments were made in the Bradley Manning trial on Thursday.  Here's a sampling of media coverage: NPR, New York Times, and the Washington Post. Regarding Afghanistan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey is "upbeat" about what he's seen thus far in his latest trip there. Of course, that doesn't mean the U.S. and Afghan governments see eye-to-eye on the future of the country, as former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad says in this Washington Post op-ed. It also doesn't mean the American people really relish a continued American send our military presence there---as the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll results suggest. Meanwhile, the Afghan Taliban continue efforts to yank control of the country away from Afghan security forces.  The former group literally seized an entire Local Police unit in a small southern Afghanistan hamlet, as Matthew Rosenberg and Taimoor Shah report in the Times. The Pakistani Taliban, meanwhile, attacked a regional office of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence , killing at least 8 people. Salman Masood reports on the attack in the Times. Back to our regularly-scheduled surveillance programming: The Times's Scott Shane reminds us of what lead to the passage of FISA in the first place.  (Zach and I wrote a piece a few months back about the compromise in Congress that created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC.). Shane's colleague Charlie Savage takes a closer look at the members of the FISC.  Each was appointed by the current Chief Justice:

Ten of the court’s 11 judges — all assigned by Chief Justice Roberts — were appointed to the bench by Republican presidents; six once worked for the federal government. Since the chief justice began making assignments in 2005, 86 percent of his choices have been Republican appointees, and 50 percent have been former executive branch officials.

AEI Scholar Gary Schmitt makes the case for abolishing the FISC and replacing it with a mechanism similar to that used in the covert action context. You can find Schmitt's idea over at the Weekly Standard. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger authored a USA Today op-ed defending telephony metadata collection by the NSA. He argues that the collection is quite limited:

In reality, what we are talking about is collection of "metadata," not content. No names, no addresses and absolutely no conversations. Just phone numbers.

Interesting tidbit from Wednesday night's failed attempt to pass the Rep. Justin Amash's Defund-the-NSA amendment: House Speaker John Boehner, who does not usually participate in roll call votes (typical practice for the Speaker of the House) cast his vote against the amendment. Carlo Munoz and Jeremy Herb share Boehner's explanation and describe some unusual alliances during the roll call---Pelosi and Bachmann voted together, what?---at The Hill. Yesterday was DoD General Counsel nominee Stephen Preston's nomination hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee. Carlo Munoz discusses the goings-on at The Hill in two pieces, one regarding Preston's remarks on counterterrorism and the other regarding waterboarding. Big, big news in the world of prosecuting hackers: the U.S. has charged give Eastern European computer programmers with hacking into more than a dozen networks, stealing over 160 million credit card numbers, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. The Department of Justice says this represents the largest such scheme ever prosecuted. Perhaps less earth-shattering, but important nonetheless: the Department of State's Inspector General released a report highly critical of State's cyber security team. Here are a story in the Fiscal Times and the report itself. Josh Gerstein has this recap of Wednesday's Senate hearing on closing Guantanamo at Politico. Meredith Clark of MSNBC discusses the partisan divisions over closing the detention facility. For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Syracuse’s Institute for National Security & Counterterrorism’s newsroll and blog, and Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief and Cyber Brief. Email Raffaela Wakeman and Ritika Singh noteworthy articles to include, visit the Lawfare Events Calendar for upcoming national security events, and check out relevant job openings at the Lawfare Job Board.