Civil Liberties
1,474 Articles
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…
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…