Executive Orders
176 Articles

Trump’s Muslim Ban & the Propaganda Value of Violence Against Women
There has been much well-deserved criticism of President Trump’s Executive Order imposing a Muslim Ban on entry into the United States and the chaotic and non-deliberative process…

The CIA’s New Guidelines for Handling Americans’ Information
In acknowledgment of the mass scale of modern electronic intelligence collection, the Central Intelligence Agency today released newly updated guidelines governing how it treats…
The government’s treatment of civilian casualties in counterterrorism operations [updated]
The government has just released two important documents. One is an assessment by the Director of National Intelligence of the cumulative civilian casualties from U.S. counterterrorism…
Obama Shouldn’t Wait for Congress to Ensure He Leaves Behind a Clearly Defined War
Against the backdrop of a collapsing ceasefire in Syria, President Obama announced last week that he approved the deployment of an additional 250 special operations troops to Syria,…
ODNI Response on Increased Intelligence Sharing Still Leaves Questions and Concerns
In late February, The New York Times reported that the administration was preparing to expand sharing of the mass signals intelligence collected by NSA pursuant to Executive Order…

The New Intelligence Sharing Procedures Are Not About Law Enforcement
[Editor’s Note: The author composed this analytic essay while serving as General Counsel for the Director of National Intelligence.] There has been a lot of speculation about…
We Need to Know More About When the FBI Can Access One of the NSA’s Biggest Databases
Americans have learned quite a bit about electronic surveillance since Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of classified documents almost three years ago. And while we still…
Deterrence by Indictment?
In an indictment released this morning, the Justice Department charged seven Iranians with carrying out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on US financial institutions…
Overseas Surveillance in an Interconnected World
Outside the pages of Just Security and a handful of other places, it’s hard to find much debate over the NSA’s overseas surveillance activities. The same lawmakers and pundits…
Closing Guantánamo: Before You Accuse Congress, Take a Look at Your Administration
Five years ago today, President Obama issued Executive Order 13567, which established the Periodic Review Board (PRB) process to review every “forever” detainee in Guantánamo…
Bulk Collection Under Section 215 Has Ended… What’s Next?
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 Remarkable (and Remarkably Unnoticed) Guantánamo PRB Scorecard
One of the best-kept secrets concerning the ongoing detentions of non-citizens at Guantánamo is the Periodic Review Board (PRB) process being conducted pursuant to Executive…