Intelligence & Surveillance
Just Security’s expert authors provide legal and policy analysis of intelligence and surveillance activities, focusing on their impact on national security and on civil liberties and privacy rights, and their oversight by Congress and the courts.
1,805 Articles
The Newest Reforms on SIGINT Collection Still Leave Loopholes
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning released a report detailing new rules aimed at reforming the way signals intelligence is collected and stored by certain…
Five Important Questions About DEA’s Vehicle Surveillance Program
With each week, we seem to learn about a new government location tracking program. This time, it’s the expanded use of license plate readers. According to the Wall Street Journal, relying…
Members Only: Al Qaeda’s Charter List Revealed After 13 Years in US Hands
A fascinating bit of evidence about al Qaeda’s early days emerged yesterday during the trial of alleged al Qaeda operative Khaled al-Fawwaz – what federal prosecutors call…
You Should Care About Mutual Legal Assistance More Than You Do
About a year ago, I wrote here that the mutual legal assistance (MLA) regime – the legal system that regulates government-to-government requests for evidence in criminal investigations,…
OHCHR Call for Comments on Encryption and Anonymity Online
David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on protection and promotion of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has issued a call for submission of information related to…
The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans’ Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar
Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question…
Charlie Hebdo, The Interview, and Censoring Torture Photos
In France and the United States, there seems to be near-universal agreement that to self-censor because of threats of violence is unwise and cowardly. The slogan “Je Suis Charlie,”…
The Torture Report, the CIA’s “Work of Fiction,” and a Friday-afternoon Letter From DOJ
In an earlier post, I called attention to the revelation in the Senate torture report that the CIA contemplated disclosing information about the torture program under cover of…
Decrypting John Boehner on the Capitol Bomb Plotter
An Ohio man was recently charged with plotting to blow up the U.S. Captiol, and House Speaker John Boehner appears to be claiming that the NSA’s controversial bulk telephony…
Cybersecurity and a New Era of Asymmetric Economic Warfare
In the last two decades, and in particular after the 9/11 attacks, the United States and its allies have had a near-monopoly on the use of coercive economic measures (sanctions,…
US Government Seeks to Deny Twitter’s “Warrant Canary” Challenge
On Friday, the Justice Department asked a federal district court to brush away a lawsuit filed in October by Twitter seeking greater freedom to publicly report on the numbers and…
No Impunity for Torturers [Updated]
[Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on December 15, 2014. Check out a substantial Update published on January 5, 2015 and appended below.] In a post called…