Today's Headlines and Commentary

I'm sick of talking about the government shutdown---and it's nowhere near over yet. So let's skip ahead to other national security goings-on while we wait for our elected officials to grow up. At yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, NSA director Keith Alexander acknowledged that the agency had collected bulk data about Americans' cellphone locations in 2010 and 2011---although he maintained that the information was only part of a pilot program and had not been used for intelligence analysis. The Hill reports, as does the Washington Post. General Alexander quoted both Ben's Lawfare post and Ben's testimony last week in his own testimony. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein sparred over the existence of the program, with the former fighting to shutter it, and the latter advocating to keep it in place. Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner and John Conyers are co-sponsoring a bill to end the program, which Senator Leahy will also sign on to. Politico has what you need to know. Former NSA director Michael Hayden defended the NSA's role in targeted killings and joked about adding Edward Snowden to a kill list. The Hill has more. According to the Post, the DOJ has asked the FISC to deny requests from major tech firms for permission to release more information about the number and nature of data requests they have received from the government. The Justice Department’s Inspector General has released a report that found that employees are not properly declassifying national security information. Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times writes about the oral arguments in Bahlul v. United States. Check out Wells and Raff's recap, as well as Peter Margulies' thoughts, and, of course, our Al Bahlul Case Page. Much Ado about Iran: After President Obama spoke to Iran's president Hassan Rouhani last week, Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Tokyo that the United States would only negotiate with the country if it proved that it was willing to renounce its nuclear program, report the Times and CNN's Security Clearance blog. Vali Nasr of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies argues in an op-ed in the Times that America should not be naive about Iran's "charm offensive." On Iran's end, President Rouhani tweeted that he would endeavor to reduce online censorship, says the Guardian, and CNN interviewed Iranian vice president Mohammad-Ali Najafi about a new era of U.S.-Iran diplomacy. The Telegraph tells us that the head of Iran's cyber war program was assassinated, as Paul noted as well. Remember Syria? The Post informs us that the CIA is expanding a covert program to train rebel fighters. Jack discusses the story here. The Long War Journal reports that Al Nusrah Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, both Al Qaeda affiliates, appear to be putting aside their differences in their common goal of toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. We learn that an official U.S.-Afghan agreement over long-term security has still not materialized. The Post says: "The primary unresolved issues involve the Afghans’ insistence that the U.S. military do more to stem the flow of terrorists from Pakistan and their resistance to unilateral U.S. military operations." The Hill and Reuters have more. The AP discusses the sad business of roadside bombs in Afghanistan. Speaking of sad business, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has conducted an audit of the Afghan National Police Fuel Program, which has found "limited oversight of fuel purchases and a high risk of loss, theft, or misuse of U.S. funds and purchased fuel." Pakistani Taliban militants launched an assault on the compound of a rival Taliban commander in North Waziristan, announces the Associated Press, in which at least fifteen people were killed; the BBC also has the details. And a commander of the Pakistani Taliban claimed credit for assassinating a Pakistani army general last month, says the Long War Journal. Richard Clarke, former NSC Special Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism, has been arguing that the CIA deliberately did not tell the White House and the rest of the intelligence community that it knew two Al Qaeda operatives were in the United States more than a year before 9/11---because it was trying to recruit them. Watch this interview with Clarke below, in which he makes his stunning accusation (h/t Bruce Riedel). Dawinder S. Sidhu, who has written for us about hate crimes and terrorism after the shooting at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin last year, has three brief essays on his experiences as a legal observer at Guantanamo Bay. Check them out, on the Oxford Human Rights Hub blog, or here, here, and here. Make sure to check out Bryant Walker Smith's guest posts at the Volokh Conspiracy this week about the future of self-driving vehicles. And, it turns out the FAA has a lot of work to do. The Atlantic Wire reports that a drone fell out of the sky in midtown Manhattan yesterday, nearly landing on a man's head---it's Today's Moment of Zen. For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Syracuse’s Institute for National Security & Counterterrorism’s newsroll and blog, and Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief and Cyber Brief. Email the Roundup Team noteworthy articles to include, visit the Lawfare Events Calendar for upcoming national security events, and check out relevant job openings at the Lawfare Job Board.