The Week That Was: All of Lawfare in One Post

Laura Dean continued her online Cairo diary, chronicling the goings-on in Egypt. Read all her posts here. A lot of legal fireworks went off at Guantanamo this week: U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler issued a memorandum order finding that her court lacks jurisdiction to prevent forced feeding of GTMO detainees. The detainee bringing the original motion the asked the court to reconsider his argument, suggesting two alternative routes to asserting jurisdiction. Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the same court also found the detention center's counsel access procedures to be invalid. And Ben was tickled, as only a Lawfare blogger could be, after seeing signs that a detainee may make the argument that the NDAA's transfer prohibitions violate the Commander in Chief clause. In other GTMO news, the government has submitted its latest brief in Ali Hamza Al Bahlul's D.C. Circuit appeal of his military commission conviction. And Wells couldn't be more excited to check in on the Military Commission court calendar; it seems there will be a whole lot more live-blogging in the near future. (Paging the Military Commission Web Team: your RSS feed is no longer working, ever since the demise of Google Reader.) The Snowden saga continues: the first major public opinion poll on reaction to the Snowden leaks came out, courtesy of Quinnipiac University. As Snowden's exit options narrowed, Ben concluded that he probably shouldn't try to travel through Ireland, after seeing what an Irish court had to say about that country granting a U.S. extradition request. Over the holiday weekend, Ben noted a New York Times story about FISC opinions, while Paul wrote about a Washington Post report on "Team Telecom," the Global Crossing Security Agreement, and U.S. government access to fiber optic cable networks. Bobby shared the agenda for last Tuesday's public meeting of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on FISA. Meanwhile, we learned that the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court regarding the Verizon FISA order leaked by Edward Snowden. Steve got uber nerdy in this post arguing in favor of Supreme Court jurisdiction in that case. Paul considered one of Walter Pincus's Washington Post columns in which he argued that Snowden's antics (for lack of a better term) were more suggestive of a conspiracy than we might have thought; later Paul shared Glenn Greenwald's response. Steve responded to a proposal by GWU's Orin Kerr over at the Volokh Conspiracy to make the FISC more adversarial. Ben highlighted a paper by Anthony Dworkin that articulated a European opinion on drones and targeted killing strikes. And on the topic of drones, Paul highlighted an Atlantic article detailing DHS plans to deploy drones along the border that are equipped with non-lethal, but demobilizing weaponry. And the whole world is of the mind that a drone landing on an aircraft carrier is quite a big deal---Ben shared the video of the landing. Nathan Myhrvold sent in an addendum to his paper that we shared last week "Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action." There have been some significant shifts in personnel in the Obama administration this week: Tom Malinowski---who once made this hilarious video for Lawfare---has been nominated for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, as John noted. And one of the most prominent female official in the Obama administration, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, is resigning. Amidst the fireworks and hot dogs (and the brief spate of good weather we had in the DC area), we all had missed an important filing---but not John: the Obama administration filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse the 9th Circuit's assertion of personal jurisdiction in California in Bauman v. DaimlerChrysler I recorded the latest episode of the Lawfare podcast: an interview with Covington & Burling partner Mark Plotkin. We talked about CFIUS, pork products, and the intersection of national security and the private sector. My buddies up at MIT have quite the metadata exhibit for you---Immersion, which analyzes your Gmail account and maps your communications. Check out Ben's account visualization here. Seriously, I can't believe Wells, Ritika and I aren't portrayed by two enormous bubbles. And that was the week that was.