One of the foundational questions in surveillance law is how to distinguish between the contents of communications and non-content metadata. Identifying the line between the two is critical. Earlier this...

Let me start by saying that I do not dissent from FBI Director James Comey's decision to give the remarkably fulsome account we saw this week of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, both in his lengt...

The first notable thing in FBI Director Jim Comey's statement on the Clinton email flap is that he issued it at all. Normally, the FBI does not issue reports on its investigative findings separate from J...

Editor’s note: This post also appears at Just Security.

Almost four years ago, I wrote the following in a post on lone shooters:

Greg Miller has an interesting and seemingly quite well-sourced article in the Washington Post today documenting (and offering explanations for) a significant decline in CIA drone strikes. To be clear, ...

PDF version Though I have been a journalist for most of my career, my experience with overclassification and the vagaries of declassification began in 1969 during an eighteenmonth stint running a subcom...

Three years ago today, The Guardian published the first story based on the huge archive of documents that that Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency while working as an NSA contractor. ...

I’ve read the Vice News report based on the FOIA-released documents three times now, and still do not see within it support for the headline, “Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Conc...

Yesterday, the ACLU filed a motion to join Microsoft’s ongoing challenge to the constitutionality of § 2705(b) of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which permits the government to obtain ...