Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
253 Articles

Espionage Porn and Democratic Platitudes: A Response to Rahul Sagar
I don’t have much to say in reply to Rahul Sagar’s thoughtful response to my January 23 post, “Does Espionage Porn Make Us Stronger?” Much of that is because,…

Eight Questions PCLOB Should Ask About Section 702
Tomorrow, all five members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about their recent report concluding that…

Office of the DNI Releases List of Permissible Uses of Data Collected in Bulk
If you’ll recall last month, in conjunction with his January 17th speech on U.S. signals intelligence reform, President Obama issued Presidential Policy Directive/PPD-28…

The Muhtorov Constitutional Challenge to Section 702
Jamshid Muhtorov is a lawful permanent U.S. resident and a criminal defendant in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, charged with providing material support to…

Reforming 702: Does NSA Minimize Cloud Files?
Yesterday, I wrote generally about the problems with section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). Today I want to focus on categories of information—including content—that…

Reforming The Section 702 Dragnet (Part 1)
The consensus is clear that spying on innocent Americans section 215 of the Patriot Act is flatly illegal. The Center for Democracy and Technology said it, Christopher Sprigman…

Lost in the Bulk Collection Debate — Fifth Circuit Affirms Life Sentence of Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari
With most (if not all) the focus these days on bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, Section 702 of FISA, or E.O. 12333, it is easy to forget that foreign intelligence…

Which Congressional NSA Reform Proposals Will the Obama Administration Now Support?
A lot of my reactions to yesterday’s surveillance reform speech by President Obama have already been captured by others, including David Cole in his thoughtful take over…

Overview of Proposals to Reform Signals Intelligence Programs in Today’s Speech by the President
In today’s speech on Signals Intelligence Programs, President Obama outlined a number of “concrete and substantial reforms that [the] Administration intends to adopt…

New Report Questions Value of Section 702 Warrantless Surveillance
Today over at the New America Foundation, researchers have published a paper examining the role of dragnet programs in the United States’ counterterrorism operations. The paper…

10 Questions for the Review Group Members to Publicly Address at the Senate Hearings
The members of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies will appear on Tuesday, January 14th for hearings before the Senate Judiciary…

Could the NSA’s Telephony Metadata Program Have Prevented 9/11? Judge William Pauley v. Lawrence Wright
In an earlier post, I proposed some analytic tools for evaluating the effectiveness of the NSA’s telephony metadata program – in light of recommendations by the President’s…