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 al Nashiri, Judge Pohl orders disclosure of details of CIA’s “black sites” to the defense
To say it has been an eventful week for the military commissions in Guantanamo might be an understatement. As Ruchi has covered each morning this week in the Early Edition, the…
New Editors’ Picks Reading List: IHRL on Privacy and Surveillance
As regular readers will likely recall, in recent weeks there has been much discussion here on the pages of Just Security (and elsewhere) on important questions regarding the extraterritorial…
Fourth Circuit Upholds Contempt Against Lavabit, Doesn’t Decide Gov’t Access to Encryption Keys
Today the Fourth Circuit refrained from deciding the first legal challenge to government seizure of the master encryption keys that secure our communications with web sites and…
The reorganization of Title 50 (and a note about Congress having exempted “intelligence activities” from statutes implementing treaties)
Perhaps I was the last to know, but I just discovered that the House Office of Law Revision has recently reorganized, into four new chapters, what had long been known as chapter…
United States v. Glenn Greenwald?
Apparently, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras–two of the journalists most directly involved in the dissemination of Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding various NSA…
UK Surveillance Watchdog Releases Report Endorsing UK Surveillance Programs
As we covered in yesterday’s Early Edition, Sir Anthony May, the UK’s Interception of Communications Commissioner (the UK’s surveillance watchdog), has concluded…
State of play of the SSCI report on the CIA interrogation program: the relationship between declassification and disclosure
Last Thursday, Senator Diane Feinstein, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), issued a statement that the SSCI had voted that afternoon “to…
Hersh’s Syria Conspiracy Theory: The CIA and Intelligence Oversight Questions
In a previous post, I discussed the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the attack against U.S. facilities and personnel in Benghazi, Libya. That post contemplated bias by…
European Court says Data Retention Directive is Invalid
Yesterday, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) gave a compelling judgment in two joined cases: Case C-293/12 Digital Rights Ireland; Case C-594/12…
Why the CIA? Why no U.S. acknowledgement?
Just to follow up on Ryan’s post: Mark Mazzetti’s story for the Times, assuming it is accurate, confirms what I tried to explain in a post a few weeks ago —…
Yemen Banned Pentagon’s Drone Operations after US Struck Wedding Procession
In Sunday’s New York Times, a must-read story by Mark Mazzetti chronicles a wide range of issues involving the CIA and counterterrorism programs. A news development that might…
Searchable Database of NSA Documents
Some Just Security readers will be interested to know that the ACLU has just launched a text-searchable database of NSA documents released since June of 2013. The database is here.