Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
253 Articles

Talking About Section 215: A Readers’ Guide
Media coverage of John Oliver’s critique about the lack of discussion surrounding government surveillance programs seems to prove his point. Much, if not most, of the attention…

How a Case of Stolen Corn Seeds Shows the Problem with the FISA Court
As collateral challenges to the mass surveillance programs disclosed by Edward Snowden like US v. Moalin, US v. Muhtorov, and US v. Mohamud are winding their way through the courts,…

Wikimedia v. NSA: Standing and the Fight for Free Speech and Privacy
On March 10, 2015, represented by the ACLU, the Wikimedia Foundation and eight co-plaintiffs filed suit against the NSA, the Justice Department, and others, over the mass search…

Reforming the FISA Court
There has been much discussion, on the pages of this blog and elsewhere (here, here, and here to name just a few), about the procedural shortcomings of the FISA Court — the lack…

Why Wikipedia is Suing the NSA
This week, the Wikimedia Foundation, sued the NSA over surveillance efforts taking place on US soil, specifically the “upstream” collection of Internet data in an effort to…

Wikimedia Sues the NSA
This morning, the organization behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, sued the NSA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, and their…

US Government Makes Slight Concession in Twitter’s Warrant-Canary Suit
The US government last week conceded for the first time that some companies have the right to publish so called “warrant canaries” in a new filing supporting its partial motion…

Guest Post: US Intelligence Reforms Still Allow Plenty of Suspicionless Spying on Americans
Last week, the Obama Administration released a report and documents cataloging progress toward signals intelligence (SIGINT) reform goals set a year ago by the President in a document…

The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans’ Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar
Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question…

US Government Seeks to Deny Twitter’s “Warrant Canary” Challenge
On Friday, the Justice Department asked a federal district court to brush away a lawsuit filed in October by Twitter seeking greater freedom to publicly report on the numbers and…

In 2007, One Judge Said No to the NSA
Last week, the government quietly released a new cache of court filings and orders from late 2006 and early 2007 that together reveal a watershed moment in the government’s effort…

The Problem With Legalism in the Surveillance State
Editor’s note: this post is a preview of ideas raised in an upcoming article by the author, Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap,…