Author: Charlie Savage

When President Trump signed the fiscal year 2018 iteration of the annual National Defense Authorization Act this week, he appended a signing statement challenging several dozen of its provisions. Obviously he didn’t write the signing statement himself, but his legal team – spanning the Office of Legal Counsel, the Office of the White House Counsel, […]

The White House last night sent its semi-annual War Powers Resolution letter to Congress disclosing deployments of U.S. troops “equipped for combat” (a sometimes ambiguous category – guards at Guantanamo count, but not troops along the DMZ in the Korean Peninsula). I compared it to the June 2017 letter and identified the following deltas: The […]

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has provided some written answers to questions submitted by senators like Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, and Angus King during Senate Intel hearings over the summer about the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance program. Some of this is well covered territory, like Wyden’s fighting with the […]

The law that supports the NSA/FBI warrantless surveillance program, the FISA Amendments Act Section 702, is set to expire on December 31, 2017, if Congress does not act to extend it. There are a proliferating array of rival bills to do so, some with modest reforms, some with sweeping reforms, and some with scant or […]

This is the draft manager’s amendment to H.R. 3989, the “USA Liberty Act,” which would extend the expiring FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance law but impose some changes to it, and which is being pushed by bipartisan leadership in the House Judiciary Committee. It’s been circulating for several days. Among other things, it […]

Today the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is marking up, in secret, Chairman Burr’s bill to extend the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act. While the bill is not yet public, I published a copy here yesterday, alongside a revised draft of the Goodlatte-Conyers House Judiciary Committee bill, […]

Lots of legislative action on FISA Amendments Act Section 702 warrantless surveillance is happening with drafts that are not public even though they are not classifed. Here are some. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 24, 2017, will mark up – behind closed doors – a bill being pushed by its chairman, Senator […]

The National Security Agency has declassified a third (and final) tranche of previously unreleased documents from the docket of a then-secret 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court case over upstream Internet surveillance conducted under the FISA Amendments Act/702 program. Here are the first and second tranches. This third tranche is long a dense – nearly 350 pages – but […]

Among surveillance legal policy specialists, it is common to cite a set of statistics from an October 2011 opinion by Judge John Bates, then of the FISA Court, about the volume of internet communications the National Security Agency was collecting under the FISA Amendments Act (“Section 702”) warrantless surveillance program. In his opinion, declassified in […]

**UPDATE: Problem fixed, many thanks to John Musser of Digerati Designs.** Several readers have brought to my attention that the web page containing the index to the hardcover edition of Power Wars will not load; it appears to have become corrupted. Unfortunately it is so far proving to be beyond my WordPress skills to fix this […]