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.
1,846 Articles
In 2007, One Judge Said No to the NSA
Last week, the government quietly released a new cache of court filings and orders from late 2006 and early 2007 that together reveal a watershed moment in the government’s effort…
The Cato Institute Surveillance Conference
Now that I’ve more or less recovered from planning and running it, I wanted to make sure Just Security readers were aware of the inaugural Cato Institute Surveillance Conference…
Guest Post: Intelligence Legalism and the Torture Report
As I was reading the SSCI’s torture report last week, my mind went back to two Just Security posts last month (here and here), in which I argued that the U.S. Intelligence Community…
Guest Post: Drone Courts–A Response to Professor Vladeck
Editors’ note: In this post, Professors Brand, Guiora, and Barela reply to Steve Vladeck’s December 2 post, “Drone Courts: The Wrong Solution to the Wrong Problem,”…
Why Do We Talk About Torture The Way We Do?
Editors’ Note: The following post is the latest installment of our “Monday Reflections” feature, in which a different Just Security editor examines the big stories from…
The Torture Report is Only the First Step
Ed Note. This piece also appears in Foreign Policy. Great nations admit and learn from their mistakes. The United States took a major step forward this week with the long-delayed…
The Cost-Benefit Analysis: The Preventive Value of the Senate Torture Report
Amidst the full-throated defense of the CIA’s interrogation tactics (see, e.g., Cheney – “I’d do it again”), the President’s refusal to state whether or not abusive…
Cyber Attribution Problems—Not Just Who, but What
Yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that hackers, likely from Russia, caused a 2008 explosion on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in Turkey. According to Bloomberg, the…
Five Torturous Steps to Hell
In a short and early section of the SSCI’s redacted summary of its torture report, we can read about the step-by-step descent from humanity to inhumanity, from the 20th century…
The Torture Report and the “Glomar Fig Leaf”
The Glomar Explorer, the CIA ship after which the much-abused legal doctrine is named Buried in the SSCI’s report is an arresting passage that suggests that the CIA was quietly…
Guest Post: They Knew It Was Illegal
The Senate Intelligence Committee report released December 9 confirms many already-reported facts about the CIA torture program, including the agency’s use of brutal stress positions,…
Torture: Unreliable and Inestimably Costly
A few years ago, I served as a member of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment – an 11-member, bi-partisan group of former, high-ranking officials in…