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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 […]

Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge Christopher Cooper issued an unusual 14-page ruling in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by Protect Democracy and a preliminary injunction ordering the government to expedite its processing of the matter. The lawsuit is seeking documents laying out the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the United States’ April 6 […]

[Cross-posted to Lawfare] Today, Hachette is publishing the paperback edition of my history of Obama-era national-security legal policymaking, Power Wars, which is also replacing the text future e-book buyers will receive. I have systematically updated and revised the book since its hardcover publication in November 2015. A few months ago, over coffee in Cambridge, Jack […]

Here are some newly declassified documents from a FISA lawsuit that add to the historical record of the MCT issue that arose in 2011. They provide a little bit more information about the sequencing of the case before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the questions that Judge John Bates was asking. I don’t immediately […]

Several people have blogged things trying to make sense of the disclosure this week that the USA Freedom Act system (which replaced the Patriot Act Section 215 bulk calling records program) collected 151 million call detail records in 2016, even though the intelligence court had approved two-hop collection surrounding only 42 suspects. To be sure, […]

In response to one of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuits I am fighting with The New York Times’ lawyer David McCraw and our annual First Amendment Fellow, Ian MacDougal, the government has turned over a May 2005 memorandum by Patrick Rowan, who was then a top national-security prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. […]

Defense lawyers for Ali Hamza al-Bahlul have filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take his appeal of his conviction before a military commission of the non-war crime of “conspiracy.” It should be docketed tomorrow. Bahlul’s case has created one of the most complex appellate matters arising from the tribunals system. It went up and down […]

One of the Freedom of Information Act lawsuits I am fighting against the government with The New York Times is seeking the factual sections about 240 dossiers about the Guantanamo detainees who remained at the wartime prison when President Obama took office in 2009. Obama created a six-agency task force that went back over the […]

In the New York Review of Books, I have been engaged in a debate with Edward Jay Epstein about his book, “How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft,” which lays out the case that Snowden was an espionage source for the Russians or Chinese masquerading as a whistleblower. I wrote […]