Patriot Act
74 Articles
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…
Connecting the Dots: Assessing the Effectiveness of Bulk Phone Records Collection
[Editor’s note: This morning we are enthusiastic to have the opportunity to publish on Just Security an extremely insightful and thoughtful paper on the effectiveness of…
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…
FISC Approves Application to Renew Telephony Metadata Program [UPDATED]
Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified and announced that the FISC has approved the government’s application to renew the telephony metadata…
Prediction: Fourth Amendment Evolves in 2014
When should courts follow legal precedent and when should the law change? This is a debate that underlies this month’s contrary decisions about the constitutionality of government…
How to Evaluate Whether the NSA’s Telephony Metadata Program Makes Us Safer (and What Proponents and Opponents Get Wrong)
[Editor’s Note: Just Security is holding a “mini forum” on the Report by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. Others in the…
Can §215 Be Used for Content Collection?
At this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the National Security Agency’s surveillance authorities, Sen. Patrick Leahy posed a crucial question to the government’s…
Center for National Security Studies’ Latest Filing for Amici Curiae in Section 215 Proceedings
On Friday, the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS) filed its latest pleading in its efforts to have the FISC enable third-party persons or organizations to submit amici…
La Plus Ça Change: A Look Back at Intelligence Gathering Reform
“To understand the past in order to better propose guidance for the future” -Church Commission (1976) Today’s report that the NSA has been tapping into Google and Yahoo data…
The Government’s Initial Supreme Court Filing on the Section 215 “Telephony Records Program”
On Friday the government filed its brief in opposition to the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s mandamus petition to the Supreme Court, No. 13-58, in which EPIC is challenging…
“Relevance” at the Royale Inn
The NSA’s controversial call records program is predicated on the extraordinary premise that the phone logs of nearly all Americans are “relevant” to an intelligence…
New NSA Reform Proposal from Sen. Leahy and Rep. Sensenbrenner
While the continued government shutdown has sidelined an estimated 800,000 federal employees and resulted in the cancellation of President Obama’s trip to Asia this weekend,…