1st Amendment
195 Articles
The FBI Wants Schools to Spy on Their Students’ Thoughts
Imagine you’re a high school principal. An FBI document lands on your desk. It’s called “Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools,” and it’s alarming. According to the…
We Need to Know More About How the Government Censors Its Employees
In December, in a series of editorials published in The Washington Post and Just Security, Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway made the case for reforming the government’s broken…
Justice Scalia, Privacy, and Where We Go From Here
When you work in privacy and civil liberties, you get accustomed to having strange bedfellows. Senator Bernie Sanders, Democratic socialist presidential candidate from Vermont,…
National Security Letters and Leak Investigations
Journalists were reminded again last week of how little legal protection actually exists when the federal government decides to investigate national security leaks. In an ongoing…
Fixing Pre-Publication Review: What Should Be Done?
Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway called attention in several recent columns to the pre-publication review process (here, here, here, and here) that many current and former national…
Settlement of NYPD Muslim Surveillance Lawsuits: A Platform for Better Oversight
Last week, the City of New York agreed to settle two federal lawsuits challenging the NYPD’s surveillance of American Muslims, promising to reform the rules that govern how the…
Social Media Companies Should Decline the Government’s Invitation to Join the National Security State
The pressure on social media companies to limit or take down content in the name of national security has never been greater. Resolving any ambiguity about the how much the Obama…
The Scope of the Prepublication Review Problem, and What to Do About It
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. The problems in the prepublication review process that we identified in our Washington Post op-ed and in a subsequent post…
Path Dependence and the Prepublication Review Process
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. Over the weekend, we wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the lifetime prepublication review process required of nearly…
More Problems With Prepublication Review
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. Over the weekend, we published an op-ed in the Washington Post about the government’s broken prepublication review process.…
The Over-Complicated Prepublication Review Process
I wanted to quickly flag for readers a great op-ed written by our own Oona Hathaway and Lawfare’s Jack Goldsmith in the Washington Post that dives into how out of control the…
Remember Why We Have the Fourth Amendment
The Paris attacks have fueled a debate over surveillance on both sides of the Atlantic that, while not new, has reached a level of hysteria that I have not witnessed since the…