Domestic Surveillance
291 Articles

A Republican Senate Takeover Won’t Doom Surveillance Reform
Late on the evening of May 29, 2014, California Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D) called a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers to her office in the Longworth Building on the Capitol Hill campus.…

2014 Congressional Midterms and Surveillance Reform: Races to Watch
This is the first of two posts discussing the future of surveillance reform after the 2014 midterms. The second post is available here. The high water mark for NSA reforms in the…

Apple, Boyd, and Going Dark
Apple’s recent announcement that it will encrypt its newest iPhones is again pushing to the fore the question of whether the law should be updated to require companies to have…

EU-Funded Study: Electronic Mass Surveillance Fails – Drastically
(This article presents the results of research by the SURVEILLE [Surveillance: Ethical Issues, Legal Limitations, and Efficiency] consortium, a European Union-funded multidisciplinary…

Shhh! Last Week Was All About Secrets
Editors’ Note: The following post is the sixth installment of a new feature, “Monday Reflections,” in which a different Just Security editor will take an in-depth look…

Twitter is Suing the US Government in an Effort to Reveal Surveillance Information
Twitter filed a case in the Northern District of California (docket number 14-cv-04480) on Oct. 7 seeking a court order that would allow the company to reveal more precise information…

It’s Time to Pass the USA Freedom Act—Warts and All
Thirteen years after 9/11, the United States Congress appeared poised to begin the long overdue process of reining-in the intelligence establishment’s runaway surveillance practices.…

The Need for Both Legal and Technical Privacy Protections
Last week, Apple and Google came under intense criticism from the law enforcement and national security communities for their decisions to encrypt user data when devices are locked.…

Justice Department Proposal Would Massively Expand FBI Extraterritorial Surveillance
A Department of Justice proposal to amend Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would make it easier for domestic law enforcement to hack into computers of people…

The Bells of September
This September 11th, I traveled with my little boy down the tree-lined beauty of Savannah to Reynolds Square where, amidst the draped Spanish Moss, historic Christ Church rang…

Renewed focus on statutory construction in the Section 215 litigation
C-SPAN videotaped Tuesday’s oral argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in ACLU v. Clapper, one of the primary challenges to the Section 215 telephony…

FISC OKs Section 215 Investigations of Americans, Despite First Amendment
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court declassified an opinion today which, although highly redacted, illuminates the way at least one Judge is interpreting his mandate to…