Author: Charlie Savage

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 […]

I wrote a half-reported, half-analysis article in the New York Times today that brings to public light a novel interpretation of the 2001 Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the 9/11 perpetrators. The Obama administration believes it authorized the massive American airstrike in Somalia that killed 150 alleged low-level Shabab fighters — even though the […]

Today the NYT published a news analysis article I co-wrote with my colleague Scott Shane, our first team-up since he went on book leave for Objective Troy and then I went on book leave for Power Wars. It makes the case that much of the political rhetoric about Obama’s Guantanamo prison closure plan is garbage. Most of the article is devoted to explaining how numerous claims […]

Last fall, I attempted to get Donald Trump to answer some questions about his understanding of executive power. Like most candidates this cycle, he declined to answer my questions. That was particularly notable given his vow to bring back torture: DONALD J. TRUMP has declared that as president, he would bring back waterboarding “and more” […]

Last week, The Weekly Standard published a lengthy review of Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency by Gabriel Schoenfeld. I was grateful for the engagement with the book, though of course as with any review, I agreed with and liked some parts of it more than others. He and I had a private exchange about one […]