National Security Agency (NSA)
295 Articles

Revelations From the Newly Declassified FISC Opinion on Section 702
Last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified several Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions from 2015. One opinion from November…

The FBI’s Warrantless Surveillance Back Door Just Opened a Little Wider
On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a redacted version of an opinion by Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance…

ODNI Response on Increased Intelligence Sharing Still Leaves Questions and Concerns
In late February, The New York Times reported that the administration was preparing to expand sharing of the mass signals intelligence collected by NSA pursuant to Executive Order…

The New Intelligence Sharing Procedures Are Not About Law Enforcement
[Editor’s Note: The author composed this analytic essay while serving as General Counsel for the Director of National Intelligence.] There has been a lot of speculation about…

We Need to Know More About When the FBI Can Access One of the NSA’s Biggest Databases
Americans have learned quite a bit about electronic surveillance since Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of classified documents almost three years ago. And while we still…

Surveillance Oversight Should Be President-Proof, But We’re Still a Long Way Off
Last week, at an event co-hosted by Just Security and NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the NSA’s Civil Liberties and Privacy Director Rebecca Richards dropped the ball. When…

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…

Reminder: You Should Care About Mass Surveillance, Even if You’ve Done Nothing Wrong
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…

When the NSA Merges Its Offense and Defense, Encryption Loses
How do you create strong encryption standards when the organization tasked to build them finds itself absorbed into an organization that dedicates huge quantities of resources…

Moving Beyond the “Going Dark” Frame
For more than a year now, this site has posted dozens of articles critiquing the US government’s claims that it needs a method of accessing encrypted digital communications…

USA Freedom: The Rubber Meets the Road
The National Security Agency has released its Transparency Report on the implementation of the USA Freedom Act — as well as the minimization procedures to be used for the new…

Cruz & Rubio’s Confusing USA Freedom Exchange
A few reporters have asked me about a slightly odd exchange between GOP presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at last night’s primary debate, so I thought it might…