Civil Liberties
1,368 Articles
The “Culture of Misinformation” and the Government’s Representations to the Supreme Court in Clapper
In yesterday’s New York Times, Charlie Savage had a new installment in his series about the government’s representations (and misrepresentations) in Clapper v. Amnesty, a…
Backgrounder: Preliminary Examination into Abuses by United Kingdom Personnel in Iraq
As we reported earlier, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor has reopened the preliminary examination into crimes committed by United Kingdom personnel in Iraq from 2003-2008 during…
Collect It All!: Newly Released NSA Documents Reveal Omnivorous Appetite for our Private Data
No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald’s inside account of the most significant leak of classified information in American history, is out today. I offer a mixed review of the book…
Video Clip of Former Director of NSA and CIA: “We Kill People Based on Metadata”
In a public debate with Just Security‘s David Cole at Johns Hopkins University, former Director of the NSA and CIA, General Michael Hayden made the provocative remark, “We…
Michael Hayden: “We Kill People Based on Metadata”
[Editor’s note: See the video clip from the debate where General Hayden said “We kill people based on metadata” here.] I have a New York Review of Books blog up today on…
Magistrate’s Compliance: Searching Electronic Data Overseas
Amidst all the talk about the so-called Magistrates’ Revolt (referring to a group of magistrates pushing back against the government’s broad electronic search requests), it’s…
Where is al-Bahlul??
I’d previously only been tweeting about this, but it seems worth a proper post to flag the remarkable fact that it’s now been well over seven months (!) since the…
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…