I was sufficiently puzzled by Charlie Savage's story yesterday about NSA email monitoring that I waited a day to write anything about it. I'm still pretty puzzled by it, so I'm going to use this post to ...

Last Friday I asked how NSA Director Alexander’s claim that “we can audit the actions of our people 100%” was consistent with USG uncertainty about what Snowden stole and with its claims that it was “put...

The other day, Jack posted an excerpt from a Foreign Policy article by Professor Bruce Ackerman, advocating for Senator Wyden to take advantage of the Speech and Debate Clause and disclose classified inf...

In this post I want to offer some extended thoughts on the question of encryption and its intersection with surveillance on the web.  The jumping off point for this discussion is a recent article by Decl...

With the current controversies over the NSA's surveillance programs, I want to return to broader issues about how to think about the role of courts in the national-security area. In this area, governme...

For those who are interested in the details of the latest revelations about the NSA XKeyscore program, including some of the essential details that are elided in some of the public coverage, I was pointe...

1.

Tim Edgar has a unique perspective on national security surveillance.  He's an ACLU lawyer who went to work for the White House and did intelligence law from the inside.  Now he is out again (at Brown) a...

Here's the "Primary Collection Order" authorizing the collection of telephone metadata, signed by FISC Judge Roger Vinson (signed April 25 and expiring on July 19th, 2013), declassified. Also declassifi...