Civil Liberties
1,361 Articles
Manager’s Amendment Puts Back Door Searches Back In USA Freedom Act
Yesterday, the stagnant USA Freedom Act started to move through the U.S. House of Representatives, starting with a Manager’s Amendment to the bill. According to its drafters,…
Terrorist Watchlists and the Myth of Individual Suspicion
Jen Daskal commented last week on the revelation of a secret exception to the “reasonable suspicion” standard for adding people to the terrorist watchlist. I want to raise…
White House Makes Reassuring Noises On 0-Day Policy
Yesterday afternoon, the White House put out a statement describing its view of vulnerability disclosure: the contentious issue of whether and when government agencies should disclose…
Petition denied in Hedges
The Supreme Court this morning unsurprisingly, and without comment, denied the petition for certiorari in Hedges v. Obama, No. 13-758. The plaintiffs in Hedges challenged the…
Let the Sun Shine In: WaPo Story on the Magistrates’ Revolt
Yesterday’s Washington Post has an interesting story about the increasingly aggressive role some federal magistrate judges are playing in policing criminal investigations involving…
Secrets Revealed: The Government’s No Fly List Arguments Aren’t Flying
Last week Judge William Alsup (N.D. Cal.) released the unredacted version of his ruling in the first-ever challenge to the no-fly list to be decided on the merits – a case that…
Statelessness knocked on the head: House of Lords’ defeat for the UK Government’s citizenship-stripping proposal
As Steve Vladeck observed in one of his first posts at Just Security, citizenship-stripping proposals are a recurring feature in American politics and public discourse, especially…
New Editors’ Picks Reading List: IHRL on Privacy and Surveillance
As regular readers will likely recall, in recent weeks there has been much discussion here on the pages of Just Security (and elsewhere) on important questions regarding the extraterritorial…
Fourth Circuit Upholds Contempt Against Lavabit, Doesn’t Decide Gov’t Access to Encryption Keys
Today the Fourth Circuit refrained from deciding the first legal challenge to government seizure of the master encryption keys that secure our communications with web sites and…
United States v. Glenn Greenwald?
Apparently, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras–two of the journalists most directly involved in the dissemination of Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding various NSA…
UK Surveillance Watchdog Releases Report Endorsing UK Surveillance Programs
As we covered in yesterday’s Early Edition, Sir Anthony May, the UK’s Interception of Communications Commissioner (the UK’s surveillance watchdog), has concluded…
European Court says Data Retention Directive is Invalid
Yesterday, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) gave a compelling judgment in two joined cases: Case C-293/12 Digital Rights Ireland; Case C-594/12…