Judge: Government Can Shield Its Conversations about Engaging in Torture
Josh Gerstein reports that a Federal Judge has rejected ACLU’s effort to get the government to remove more of the redactions in the OPR Report on the torture memos. Judge Rosemary Collyer basically...
View ArticleRummy Lawyers Up … To Defend Ordering Death Threats?
Josh Gerstein reports that the government has withdrawn from defending Donald Rumsfeld and others in the Jose Padilla suit Judge Richard Mark Gergel dismissed the other day. (h/t MD) The Justice...
View ArticleIs the Government Worried about Revealing Broader Targeted Killing Authority...
In addition to yesterday’s letter’s explanation that the government needed an extension in ACLU and NYT’s Anwar al-Awlaki drone FOIA because Obama and/or his closest aides–the highest level of the...
View ArticleTargeted Killing Timeline
A timeline! I’ve been working on this timeline for almost nine months, trying to pull together the known dates about strikes against Americans, the evidence supporting the strike against Anwar...
View ArticleDC Circuit Sends CIA’s Glomar Claims Back to the Drawing Board
The DC Circuit just remanded the ACLU’s drone targeted killing lawsuit (the one I talked about here) to the District Court. The decision is based on a theory Merrick Garland used in the hearing (which...
View ArticleJudge Collyer’s Factually Erroneous Freelance Rubber Stamp for Killing...
As I noted on Friday, Judge Rosemary Collyer threw out the Bivens challenge to the drone killings of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The decision was really odd: in an effort to...
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The Verizon Publicity Stunt, Mosaic Theory, and Collective Fourth Amendment...
On Friday, I Con the Record revealed that a telecom — Ellen Nakashima confirms it was Verizon — asked the FISA Court to make sure its January 3 order authorizing the phone dragnet had considered Judge...
View ArticleNo One Benefits from a One (Wo)Man FISC Court
Over at Just Security, Steve Vladeck takes issue with yet another proposal for a Drone Court. A new chapter by Professors Amos Guiora and Jeffrey Brand–“Establishment of a Drone Court: A Necessary...
View ArticleToday Obama Will Get His Fifth New Dragnet Order Since “Reform” Started
On December 12, 2013, almost one year ago, President Obama’s handpicked NSA Review Group made the following two recommendations. Recommendation 1: We recommend that section 215 should be amended to...
View ArticleWhen NSA Talks about Unintended Consequences, You Need to Ask a Follow-Up...
In yesterday’s hearing on Section 702 reauthorization, Dianne Feinstein asked all DOJ, FBI, and NSA whether they opposed a statutory prohibition on “about” searches. DOJ’s Stuart Evans falsely claimed...
View ArticleDid NSA Start Using Section 702 to Collect from VPNs in 2014?
I’ve finally finished reading the set of 702 documents I Con the Record dumped a few weeks back. I did two posts on the dump and a related document Charlie Savage liberated. Both pertain, generally, to...
View ArticleIf a Tech Amicus Falls in the Woods but Rosemary Collyer Ignores It, Would It...
Six senators (Ron Wyden, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Martin Heinrich, Richard Blumenthal, and Mike Lee) have just written presiding FISA Court judge Rosemary Collyer, urging her to add a tech amicus — or...
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The Domestic Communications NSA Won’t Reveal Are Almost Certainly Obscured...
The other day, I laid out the continuing fight between Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Senator Ron Wyden over the former’s unwillingness to explain why he can’t answer the question,...
View ArticleUSA Freedom Act Scofflaw Rosemary Collyer Claims She Can’t Find a Tech Expert
I say this a lot: for a privacy person, I’m actually pretty willing to defend the work of the so-called rubber stamp FISA Court. I’ve reported on some areas — such as location data — where FISC does or...
View ArticleA Better Example of Article III FISA Oversight: Reaz Qadir Khan
As debate over reauthorization of Section 702 heats up, both those in favor of reform and those asking for straight reauthorization are making their cases. As part of that, I wrote a summary of the...
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How Keith Gartenlaub Turned Child Porn into Foreign Intelligence
As I mentioned in this post on FISA and the space-time continuum, I’m going to be focusing closely on the FISA implications of Keith Gartenlaub’s child porn prosecution. Gartenlaub was a Boeing...
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702 Reauthorization Bill: The “About” Fix (What Is A Person?)
I’m going to do a series of posts on the draft 702 reauthorization bill, which is here. The bill makes a number of improvements to the status quo, but it’s not clear whether it fixes the biggest...
View ArticleBen Wittes and Susan Hennessey Endorse Judicial Lawbreaking
The surveillance boosters are having a tough time with this year’s Section 702 reauthorization. For the first time, enough details about the program are public such that we can have a debate about the...
View ArticleTechnical Fixes in HJC Bill Suggest SCOTUS May Have Reviewed a (2015 ?) FISA...
HJC has released a new version of the bill they’re cynically calling USA Liberty. The most significant change in the bill is that it makes the warrant requirement for criminal backdoor queries that...
View ArticleA Dragnet of emptywheel’s Most Important Posts on Surveillance, 2007 to 2017
Happy Birthday to me! To us! To the emptywheel community! On December 3, 2007, emptywheel first posted as a distinct website. That makes us, me, we, ten this week. To celebrate, the emptywheel team has...
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