Author: Charlie Savage

Several months ago, as The New York Review of Books was preparing to publish its review of Power Wars, I received a letter from its editor, Robert Silvers, asking whether I would like to write a review essay about Playing to the Edge by Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and the CIA. […]

Here’s a 4 p.m. before Memorial Day Weekend news dump item. The background is here. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for any similar from Senator Ayotte though!) Statement by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. on Gender-Neutral Staffing of Guard Forces at JTF-GTMO Military […]

The newly unveiled Senate Armed Services Committee version of the National Defense Authorization Act has a provision that would wildly expand the number of countries to which the U.S. government may not transfer low-level Guantanamo detainees. Specifically, it would ban transfers to any nation for which the State Department has issued a travel warning. Senator Ted Cruz, […]

One of the undemocratic – or at least, untransparent – things about how Congress shapes American national security law is that the armed services and intelligence oversight committees craft their annual authorization bills behind closed doors, sending them to the floor as a fait accompli. (Another is that these bills contain extensive classified annexes, as Dakota […]

Someone named Michael Brenner has been circulating a lengthy critique of Power Wars, including distributing a version to his listserv [to which he unilaterally adds the e-mail addresses of people] on Thursday, uploading a version to Consortium News on Saturday, and uploading another version as a Huffington Post blog yesterday. It opens with a flattering thought […]

Edit: Bottom line up front: Several widely cited numbers about the FISA Amendments Act warrantless surveillance program — that circa 2011 the NSA was collecting >250 million communications annually, of which 9 percent came from upstream and 91 percent came from Prism — may be inaccurate. _________ On Medium, Beatrice Hanssen, a writer whom I have […]

At Just Security, Jake Laperruque writes about the recently declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion re-upping the FISA Amendments Act warrantless surveillance program for another year. That is the ruling in which Judge Hogan, after hearing constitutional concerns about backdoor searches by FBI agents working on ordinary criminal cases, reaffirmed that such searches are constitutional. Jake is digging into other parts […]

After the Snowden leaks, government surveillance defenders’ best and most often-cited example about the value of post-9/11 electronic spying programs was the discovery of Najibullah Zazi in 2009, just days before an intended bombing of the New York City subway.  Zazi, who had trained with Al Qaeda in Pakistan, had made the mistake of sending an […]

I end the second chapter on the once-hidden history of surveillance 1978-2015 in Power Wars with a behind-the-scenes reconstruction of the fight to enact the USA Freedom Act and then a forward-looking focus on the “backdoor search” loophole, whereby government agents search private communications by Americans that the NSA gathered “incidentally” and without a warrant: [T]he Freedom Act […]

Yesterday, Brian Egan, the Obama administration’s recently confirmed State Department legal adviser (and former National Security Council legal adviser), gave a speech at the annual American Society of International Law conference about “International Law, Legal Diplomacy, and the Counter-ISIL Campaign.” Egan’s speech was an excellent distillation of the Obama administration’s argument for why it thinks […]