Domestic Surveillance
291 Articles

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…

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…

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: NSA Reform — The Consequences of Failure
If you were expecting this to be a detailed post-mortem on the demise of the USA Freedom Act, you will be disappointed. As others have covered that ground, I want to focus on the…

Takeaways from the House Intelligence Committee Cybersecurity Hearing
On Thursday morning, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing on “Cybersecurity Threats: The Way Forward,” featuring testimony by Adm. Michael Rogers,…

There Will Be Surveillance Reform
How should we understand the Senate’s failure to pass the USA Freedom Act on Tuesday? I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it’s misguided to propose, as Steve Vladeck did…

The FBI Doesn’t Need More Access: We’re Already in the Golden Age of Surveillance
This post comes in advance of this afternoon’s debate between Just Security contributors Andrew Weissmann and Peter Swire about Law Enforcement vs. SmartPhone Encryption at…

The Surveillance State’s Legalism Isn’t About Morals, It’s About Manipulating the Rules
Margo Schlanger has written a great article forthcoming in the Harvard National Security Journal about intelligence legalism, an ethical framework she sees underlying NSA surveillance.…

The Problem With Legalism in the Surveillance State
Editor’s note: this post is a preview of ideas raised in an upcoming article by the author, Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap,…

Extending Privacy Protections to Foreigners Will Benefit Americans
I wanted to add a few thoughts to Ryan Goodman’s post outlining policy arguments for and against giving foreigners the same privacy protections enjoyed by Americans (at least…

A Cult of Rules: The Origins of Legalism in the Surveillance State
Editor’s note: this post is a preview of ideas raised in an upcoming article by the author, Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap,…

National Security Politics in the 114th Congress
Last September, I wrote a post exploring whether some of the congressional reactions to the Snowden disclosures might have been portents of a coming political realignment on national…