On February 12, 2009, the government submitted a 28-page brief and 93 pages of supporting documentation to the FISC in response to the court’s January 28, 2009 order. The brief opens with two clear conce...

The story starts in May 2006, when the FISA Court granted the FBI’s application for telecommunications companies to turn over certain “tangible things” to the NSA under Section 215. The “tangible things,...

The latest cache of NSA documents---a group released yesterday related to errors in collection under Section 215---follows the same basic narrative pattern as the agency’s earlier release concerning impl...

The most puzzling line in the President’s strange speech last night was this: [E]ven though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or immin...

Congratulations to John Carlin, who has been serving as the acting head of NSD since this past March.  From the White House comes the formal announcement of his nomination: THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the ...

[Updated (11:34 a.m.): Ben rightly points out to me that his reply does not use the phrases "clearly legal" or "settled," and so my use of quotation marks around those terms may convey the wrong impressi...

I have no doubt that Ben meant to provoke--and, at least in my case, he did (enough, at least, to make a Coming to America reference in the title of this post).

The NSA has been somewhat less in the news the past few weeks, thanks largely to Syria. That's going to change in the coming days, when the latest tranche of declassified materials becomes public.

Julian Ku is right to poke fun at the administration for conveying its vague and conclusory legal rationale for intervening in Syria through the reporting of the NYT’s Charlie Savage.  But vague and conc...

Sam Tanenhaus had an essay over the weekend in the NYT that I think is at bottom a “little c” conservative critique of President Obama’s Syria push.  But the essay makes little sense, at least to me. Ta...

Senators Manchin and Heitcamp are working on an alternative Syria Resolution that tentatively provides: The failure by the government of Bashar al-Assad to sign and comply with the [Chemical Weapons] Con...