Foreign Surveillance
145 Articles

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…

Questions Congress Should Ask About Section 702
After passing a surveillance reform bill last year, Congress appears poised to turn to examine another controversial surveillance authority — Section 702 of FISA. Using Section…

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…

Safe Harbor and Reforming Section 702
Having only belatedly caught up on the European Court of Justice’s Safe Harbor decision, I wanted to weigh in on the excellent discussion between Tim Edgar and Peter Margulies…

The Declining Half-Life of Secrets
Image credit: US Government via Wikimedia Commons The following post is a preview of a new paper from New America’s Cybersecurity Initiative, where the author is a fellow.…

The OPM Hack and the New DOD Law of War Manual
Last Friday was a big day in cybersecurity news. OPM announced that, in addition to the compromise of the personnel information of federal employees revealed on June 4, Chinese…

USA Freedom and the Surveillance Reform That Almost Was
Committee markups can be a dry affair, an opportunity for political showboating, or both. Yesterday’s markup of the USA Freedom Act in the House Judiciary Committee was neither.…

Just Security’s Guide to the 2016 Presidential Candidates and National Security
The 2016 presidential election is more than 18 months away, but the races are already heating up with Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Hillary Clinton in the running so far.…

Appointing Democratic Judges to the FISA Court Won’t Solve Its Structural Flaws
Chief Justice Roberts recently named two new judges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — Judge James P. Jones from the Western District of Virginia and Judge…

The Patriot Act’s Sunset is the Perfect Chance to Make the FISA Court More Like a Real Court
In the coming weeks, Congress must decide whether to renew the Patriot Act, which the National Security Agency (NSA) uses to collect Americans’ telephone records in bulk, regardless…

The Investigation into 12333 Begins
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) voted 4–1 yesterday to conduct reviews of how Executive Order 12333 is used in counterterrorism investigations by the…

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…