Civil Liberties
169 Articles

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…

Apple vs. FBI: “Just This Once”?
I wrote about the FBI’s attempt to force Apple to write an iPhone hacking tool for the bureau over at Time last week — and go read that if you’re getting caught up on the…

Building Civil Liberties Protections Into the EU’s Latest Border Discussions
European officials are renewing efforts to secure their borders in the wake of last November’s Paris attack. At the end of last month, EU Interior Ministers met to solidify cooperation…

FBI’s Push to “Fix a Typo” Would Really Expand Its Surveillance Authority
At last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Worldwide Threats, FBI Director James Comey reiterated his call for a major expansion of the FBI’s surveillance authorities,…

Surveillance Is Still About Power
Since the Snowden revelations in 2013, surveillance has gone from a somewhat arcane term of art used mainly by scholars, spies, and tinfoil hat types, to a household word that…

A New UK-US Data Sharing Agreement: A Tremendous Opportunity, If Done Right
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…

The High Standard of Proof in the Encryption Debate
Since the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris set off another around of debate about exceptional access, a lot of ink has been spilled on the subject of whether or not there…

IBM’s Terrorist-Hunting Software Raises Troubling Questions
Last week, Defense One published an article about a new use that IBM is pioneering for its data-crunching software: identifying potential terrorists in the stream of refugees entering…

Cryptopanic and James Comey’s Xanatos Gambit
For the past year or so I’ve been part of a cybersecurity working group at Harvard’s Berkman Center that on Monday released its first public report, Don’t Panic: Making Progress…

Democracy in Peril in Poland
The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe unleashed one of the most remarkable political transformations of modern times, paving the way for millions of Europeans…