From The Guardian's live blog: Manning has been found not guilty of the most serious charge of "aiding the enemy". However the private has been found guilty on five counts of violating the espionage act....

Gary Schmitt has an interesting piece in the Weekly Standard that argues for eliminating FISC oversight of executive branch surveillance and instead ramping up congressional oversight.  He maintains that...

Cora Currier at Pro Publica has an important story on why DOD won’t publish the list of AUMF “associated forces” against whom we are at war.  DOD’s rationale: A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that re...

A recent cluster of stories – on al Qaeda’s growth, dispersion, and resilience, on the USG’s increased use of surveillance drones outside of “hot war zones,” on the USG possibly 

Today, the Brookings Institution released a lengthy paper my colleague Daniel Byman and I have been working on for some time, entitled "Tools and Tradeoffs: Confronting U.S. Citizen Terrorist Suspects Ab...

There are at least three noteworthy elements in the WP’s story this morning about intelligence committee “approval” of “CIA weapons shipments to opposition fighters in Syria.” First is the fact that the...

Last week, I posted these thoughts on the remaining mystery surrounding what the 2004 dispute that led to the famous hospital room showdown. I offered a couple of theories, based on Snowen-disclosed docu...

It's a big news day in national security law for all kinds of reasons---one being today's opinion from the Fourth Circuit in United States v. Sterling.   That, of course, is the prosecution against a fo...

Bob Litt, general counsel to the DNI, is speaking at the Brookings Institution at this hour on "Privacy, Technology and National Security: An Overview of Intelligence Collection." His prepared remarks ar...

When the Verizon telephony metadata issue first broke, I posed the following question about the government's legal position: Because we have only the order itself, not the application that underlies it, ...

One of the most illuminating documents Edward Snowden has disclosed is this draft 2009 report by the NSA inspector general, which the Guardian released late last month. The report, beyond the brief flur...

This morning both the WSJ (behind paywall) and NYT have stories on how law and lawyers have influenced the changing USG posture on intervening in Syria.  The gist of the WSJ story is that administration ...