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

Top Law and Intelligence Experts’ Views on Mueller Hearings
To help make sense of the day’s hearings, we turned to Just Security’s editors and contributors for their thoughts.

Revamped Security Clearance Process Could Provide Leverage Over Those Who Punish Whistleblowers
The security clearance backlog is finally shrinking. This offers a special opportunity to protect embattled national security whistleblowers.

Iraq ‘Dirty Tricks’ Tale Gets Star Treatment, But Big Questions Remain
The dramatic but little-told story of a British intelligence whistleblower who tried to raise the alarm over a questionable spying campaign to bolster the cause for the Iraq War…

Why the Ghost Keys ‘Solution’ to Encryption is No Solution
The use of applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger for communications secured by end-to-end encryption has exploded over the past few years. Two…

The Supreme Court Just Made It Easier to Conceal Abuse of Migrant Detainees
The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed a half-century of precedent on citizens’ rights to know what their government is doing, by making it more difficult for the public to probe…

U.S. Offensive Cyber Operations against Economic Cyber Intrusions: An International Law Analysis – Part II
Part I demonstrated that the United States is likely to struggle to make a convincing argument that economic cyber intrusions carried out against it breach international law. Consequently,…

Outside the Beltway: An Experiment on Human Rights & Potential CLOUD Act Agreements
What questions remain in assessing the human rights concerns of potential CLOUD Act agreements? How would executive branch lawyers approach these questions?

Five Takeaways from Talking Feds’ Mueller Preview Panel
As we prepare for the upcoming congressional testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, we thought it would be helpful to tune into the Talking Feds podcast, which taped a series…

U.S. Offensive Cyber Operations against Economic Cyber Intrusions: An International Law Analysis – Part I
On June 11, 2019, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton announced that U.S. offensive cyber operations would be expanded beyond countering election interference to…

Policing, U.S. Style: With Little Idea of What Really Works
Until we better analyze police strategies, policies, and technologies, and learn, in a quantifiable way, what works and what doesn’t, we are not truly advancing public safety.…

Cyberattack Attribution and the Virtues of Decentralization
In the midst of rising tensions between the United States and Iran over tanker attacks and Iran’s downing of a U.S. drone, reports emerged that U.S. Cyber Command had launched…

Assange’s Indictment: A Threat to Everyone
Had the precedent of the Justice Department’s prosecution of Julian Assange existed in the past, there are numerous cases that could have resulted in a prosecution under the…