1st Amendment
187 Articles
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…
Breaking news from the Supreme Court!
No, not that news (although it is rather shocking). The Court also denied certiorari this morning in two other cases that had received some attention in national security circles:…
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…
Lane v. Franks and the First Amendment Rights of National Security Leakers
At various points in the past, I’ve suggested that, read broadly, the Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos could sound the death knell for First…
A more equivocal take on the constitutionality of the DNI’s Directive 119
In a post yesterday, Steve concluded that the DNI’s new Directive 119 — which, broadly speaking, prohibits employees of the Intelligence Community from unauthorized…
Intelligence Community Directive 119 and the First Amendment
As the inestimable Steve Aftergood noted last week over at Secrecy News, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has issued a new “Intelligence Community Directive”…
United States v. Glenn Greenwald?
Apparently, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras–two of the journalists most directly involved in the dissemination of Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding various NSA…
ACLU Takes Phone-Records Challenge to Appeals Court
The ACLU has just filed its opening brief in the Second Circuit in its challenge to the NSA’s phone-records program. The brief—the first appellate brief to be filed in any…
Does “Espionage Porn” Make Us Stronger?
Although they have somewhat different focuses, one can find much in common in recent posts about the continuing byproducts of the Snowden disclosures (including last Friday’s…
NSA SEXINT is the Abuse You’ve All Been Waiting For
In the latest news report based on documents revealed by Edward Snowden, we’ve learned that the NSA creates profiles of porn viewing, online sexual activity and more from its…
Equating Terrorism and Bubonic Plague: Bad for Counterterrorism, Bad for the Constitution
If I were Al Qaeda’s director of propaganda and managed to infiltrate an agent into the American judiciary, I’d want him to exaggerate the terrorist threat and then leverage…
Avoidance of the First Amendment Questions in the Mehanna Case
In contrast with several other wartime eras in our Nation’s history, it is striking that the government’s counterterrorism efforts during the past twelve years have…