Category: Uncategorized

Zazi got a super-belated warrantless surveillance notice while no one was looking

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 […]

USA Freedom Act coalition vets fire warning shot, demand more information about Americans’ e-mails swept in by warrantless surveillance program

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 […]

[Updated with video, verbatim Q&A] Brian Egan’s ASIL speech and questions about rules for drone strikes in tribal Pakistan and for assessing collateral damage

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 […]

Power Wars: Two Important Backstories for Understanding the Shabab and AUMF Controversies

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 […]

Reality-checking Obama’s “values” argument for closing Gitmo

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 […]

Trump says he would only use “lawful” powers to fight terrorism – but there is a catch

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” […]

Is my Obama book, Power Wars, less “prosecutorial” than my Bush book, Takeover? Yes, some – and here’s why.

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 […]

Power Wars excerpt: A Fight in the Situation Room Over the FBI’s “Going Dark” Push

The end of this post has an excerpt from Power Wars about a behind-the-scenes conflict in the Obama administration over “Going Dark” — the FBI’s push to legally mandate that technology companies build interception or decryption capabilities into their products so it could execute wiretap or search warrants. The Going Dark debate is getting a […]

Four things Antonin Scalia did on executive power, secrecy & surveillance in the Ford administration

There have been a lot of retrospectives about Justice Antonin Scalia’s record on the Supreme Court since his death on Saturday, but here are four things about his earlier career as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel  in the Ford administration that you might not know about. They are drawn from my […]