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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 ...

[Updated (11:34 a.m.): Ben rightly points out to me that his reply does not use the phrases "clearly legal" or "settled," and so my use of quotation marks around those terms may convey the wrong impressi...

I have no doubt that Ben meant to provoke--and, at least in my case, he did (enough, at least, to make a Coming to America reference in the title of this post).