Secret Law

Beginning a national security reform process is not just necessary, but urgently demanded to break inertia and launch a new dynamic.

Ensuring that any secret law-making in the executive branch gets disinfecting sunlight is uniquely important because of its potential to give legal cover for overbroad, unaccountable,…

Analysis of DOJ Office of Legal Counsel's May 19, 2023 release of a new index of unclassified OLC opinions written between 1998 and 2019.

Congress should take steps to end America’s war-based approach to counterterrorism policy.

Of the many abuses that sprung from the Patriot Act’s toxic soil, the most pernicious and enduring is the growth of secret laws. The insistence that the government must not only…

For decades, a special court—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or “FISC”—has issued secret legal opinions authorizing the U.S. government to conduct sweeping…

In theory, it’s the province of the judiciary to say what the law is, but in practice this task often falls to the Office of Legal Counsel.  This is because many important questions…

On Wednesday, I summarized the findings of my recent study of alleged secret law in the three branches of the US government and my conclusion that secret law is a limited but important…

Secret law. The words are chilling. They evoke Kafka, unaccountable government, liberty subordinated to state security – and to some ears, perhaps simply the paranoid rantings…

Now that the cell phones in San Bernardino and Brooklyn have been unlocked (no thanks to Apple), FBI warnings about “going dark” in the face of advancing digital encryption…

The Justice Department recently released another of the now-notorious Office of Legal Counsel memos written by John Yoo — memos that authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping,…

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…