Civil Liberties
1,460 Articles
Strong Intelligence Oversight Can Happen Within the Executive Branch
That the American public is divided on the current showdown between Silicon Valley and the national security state is to be expected. What is more striking, at least at first blush,…
Overseas Surveillance in an Interconnected World
Outside the pages of Just Security and a handful of other places, it’s hard to find much debate over the NSA’s overseas surveillance activities. The same lawmakers and pundits…
The Growing Divide Between European Governments and Regional Courts on Surveillance
Last week, as he delivered his first report to the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy made headlines with his sharp criticism of the United…
FOIA Litigation Has Its Own Rules, But We Deserve Better
When will federal judges start acting more like State Department flacks? It’s a question worth thinking about during Sunshine Week. For those of us who regularly litigate national…
More Transparent Than Thou
At the dawn of his second term, President Obama declared, “This is the most transparent administration in history, and I can document how that is the case.” But three years…
The FBI Wants Schools to Spy on Their Students’ Thoughts
Imagine you’re a high school principal. An FBI document lands on your desk. It’s called “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools,” and it’s alarming. According to the…
We Need to Know More About How the Government Censors Its Employees
In December, in a series of editorials published in The Washington Post and Just Security, Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway made the case for reforming the government’s broken…
DOJ’s appeal to district court judge from Magistrate Orenstein’s rejection of Apple All Writs Act order
is here; I have not yet read it. It will be considered by Judge Margo Brodie.
Reminder: You Should Care About Mass Surveillance, Even if You’ve Done Nothing Wrong
This post is the latest installment of our “Monday Reflections” feature, in which a different Just Security editor examines the big stories from the previous week or looks…
UK Government Introduces Revised Investigatory Powers Bill in Parliament
Yesterday, the UK government introduced a revised version of its Investigatory Powers Bill (aka the “snooper’s charter”) to Parliament. The bill seeks to consolidate, for…
A Readers’ Guide to the Apple All Writs Act Cases
The last few weeks and months have been awash in media coverage of two cases before magistrate judges involving the federal government seeking to use the All Writs Act to compel…
[UPDATED] Magistrate Judge Orenstein’s order in the EDNY, denying DOJ’s All Writs Act request . . .
. . . is here. The order that the government requested the judge to issue would have required Apple to bypass the passcode security on an iPhone 5s (which used Apple’s iOS…