Civil Liberties
1,474 Articles
More Executive-Minded than the Executive
The English judiciary continues to show its habit of subservience to the government on security matters. In August 2013, David Miranda, who was carrying a hard disk with files…
Information Cascades and Intelligence Oversight
Sen. Blumenthal opened a recent surveillance oversight hearing by hammering an important point from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s thorough report on the…
Update: Changes to Export Control Arrangement Intended to Apply to Surveillance Technology, not Exploits, but Confusion and Ambiguity Remain
Last month, we wrote a post raising the potential that recent changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement could apply to “zero-days” and other computer exploits. As we noted in our…
Members of the PCLOB Testifying Before the Senate Judiciary Committee
This morning at 10:00am, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on “The Report of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on Reforms to the Section…
The True Significance of Judge Tatel’s Opinion in the Force-Feeding Appeal
As Wells already flagged over at Lawfare, the D.C. Circuit decided Aamer v. Obama this morning — the effort by some of the Guantánamo detainees to challenge the force-feeding…
Eight Questions PCLOB Should Ask About Section 702
Tomorrow, all five members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about their recent report concluding that…
Office of the DNI Releases List of Permissible Uses of Data Collected in Bulk
If you’ll recall last month, in conjunction with his January 17th speech on U.S. signals intelligence reform, President Obama issued Presidential Policy Directive/PPD-28…
A Terrorist Watchlist Error Revealed
Last month, a federal district court for the very first time ordered the government to disclose an individual’s status on the terrorist watchlist. Jennifer Daskal described…
Two Developments re Section 215: (i) Changes to the Section 215 Program and (ii) Program’s Scope is Currently More Limited than Originally Thought
In his speech last month on the U.S. signals intelligence programs, President Obama “directed the Attorney General to work with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court…
Letter to the Editor: Schrödinger’s Metadata
Earlier this week, Charles A. Blanchard floated a provocative idea: “As strange as it may seem, quantum mechanics might help us illuminate the best approach to restrictions on…
“The NSA Doesn’t Spy On Americans”
Over at Lawfare, Ben Wittes is making excuses for the intelligence officials who’ve been saying the NSA doesn’t spy on Americans. Ben acknowledges the statement is false—“not…
Alberto Gonzales and Me on Oversight for Targeted Killing
Whatever folks think about the continuing utility (vel non) of student-edited law reviews, sometimes, they can produce some pretty interesting exchanges. Thus, today, the George…