Domestic Surveillance
291 Articles

Responsibility and the Encryption Debate: A Response to DAG Rosenstein
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Last week, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave a speech about encryption at the U.S. Naval Academy, solidifying the Trump administration’s…

Surveillance “Reform”: The Fourth Amendment’s Long, Slow, Goodbye
Over 16 years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent repeated passage or renewal of draconian “temporary” but “emergency” domestic surveillance laws in response, it’s…

What the FISA Warrants Against Paul Manafort Tell Us About Mueller’s Investigation
The Trump-Russia saga has more characters than War and Peace and plot twists harder to follow than Game of Thrones. So making sense of the latest news – that the FBI had…

Opponents of Closing Sec. 702’s Backdoor Search Loophole are Distorting How the Fix Works
With less than five months to go until Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires, we still do not have a clear path forward to a reauthorization that…

We Are Already in a State of Emergency
As Trump reissues his “lock her up” talk against Hillary Clinton and assaults the Justice Department, FBI, and media, the Brennan Center recently had a prescient meeting about…

Recap of Recent Posts on Just Security (May 20-26)
I. Foreign Policy Michael Posner, Tillerson’s Degradation of Human Rights Mustn’t–and Can’t Yet–be Executive Branch Policy (Monday, May 22) Sydney Blumenthal, What…

Never Waste A Good Crisis, FBI Edition
President Trump’s decision to summarily dismiss now-former FBI Director James Comey has sparked grave concerns in many quarters. The move has been described as a profoundly…

How High Was the Bar for Getting a FISA Warrant to Monitor Carter Page?
During summer of the 2016 presidential campaign, the FBI obtained a warrant from a secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to monitor a Donald Trump…

Sally Yates, Russia Testimony & Executive Privilege in the Trump Era
This week has shed light on the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to executive privilege, but it has also cast doubt over President Donald Trump’s ability to assert…

Incidental Collection Is Extremely Troubling, Regardless of Legality
A lot of ink has been spilled over statements by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes that President Trump’s communications were incidentally collected pursuant to a surveillance…

Preventing an Aerial Panopticon Over American Cities
A Defense Department slide showing the development of aerial surveillance systems. The following is an abbreviated version of “Preventing an Air Panopticon: A Proposal for Reasonable…

Encryption Backdoors, Vault 7, and the Jurassic Park Rule of Internet Security
Surely without a hint of irony, just a day after WikiLeaks dumped a vault-load of documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of hacking tools and software exploits,…