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Mark Twain supposedly said "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." President Obama and Secretary John Kerry must hate the rhyme, as their frustrating experience confronting Assad and Syria echo...
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Next came a period of relative calm, and somewhat less wrist-slappy FISC-NSA dynamics. The respite nevertheless was short-lived, judging by the final three documents in this week’s trove of declassified...
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To really switch things up, let's begin with non-Syria news today.
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That is the gist of this unclassified FISC opinion, penned by U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, today. It resolves a motion, which was brought by the ACLU's national and Washington, D.C.
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Shane Harris has a long piece in FP about NSA Director Keith Alexander entitled The Cowboy of the NSA. Harris shows, with nice detail and color, how Alexander has engaged for years in an all-out drive t...
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This is speculation. I have no hard facts or evidence to support it. But I am convinced to a moral certainty that NSA is scaling back certain collection.
That is not something I say with pleasure or tri...
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The latest installment in the NSA declassification story comprises five documents. The first is an internal NSA compliance review; the second is a court filing regarding that review. The latter also re...
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While the Obama administration quickly backs away from a military strike on Syria, the CIA has been delivering weapons to Syrian rebels and the State Department is providing vehicles and gear, reports th...
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For those interested in arguments about international law and possible military intervention in Syria, I highly recommend great essays by two authors from the United Kingdom (as readers may recall, the U...
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The next key date in the metadata saga was February 26, 2009---that is, about a month after the government initially had apprised the court of a violation of the its procedures for querying collected met...
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Back in July, we published the second paper in the Lawfare Research Paper Series, an essay entitled "Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action" by Nathan Myhrvold.
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On February 12, 2009, the government submitted a 28-page brief and 93 pages of supporting documentation to the FISC in response to the court’s January 28, 2009 order. The brief opens with two clear conce...
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The story starts in May 2006, when the FISA Court granted the FBI’s application for telecommunications companies to turn over certain “tangible things” to the NSA under Section 215. The “tangible things,...
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The latest cache of NSA documents---a group released yesterday related to errors in collection under Section 215---follows the same basic narrative pattern as the agency’s earlier release concerning impl...
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On the twelfth anniversary of 9/11 and the first anniversary of the Benghazi attack, we pause for a few moments to remember the lives that were lost and to reflect upon the consequences of those two trag...
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The most puzzling line in the President’s strange speech last night was this:
[E]ven though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or immin...
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Prescience
In 1948, E.B. White penned a little essay that would become a little book. “The city,” he wrote, “is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds mu...
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Congratulations to John Carlin, who has been serving as the acting head of NSD since this past March. From the White House comes the formal announcement of his nomination:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the ...
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Like its predecessor, this latest cache apparently was released in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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On Monday morning---after a marathon argument in a well publicized net neutrality case---the D.C. Circuit turned to this question, in the case of Hentif v. Obama: whether the appellant timely noted his a...