Courtesy of The New York Times: “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law .” An internal review has determined that since the passage of the FISA Amendments Act last year, there has been systematic “overcollection” of the strictly domestic communications of U.S. persons, for which intelligence agencies are still supposed to seek traditional FISA warrants. For […]

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From Powerline: For example, [Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn] Johnsen has objected to warrantless surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. The special appellate court created by Congress to review executive branch surveillance programs upheld the foreign wiretap activities of the Bush administration that Johnsen had denounced as based […]

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Finally reading the infamous Yoo memos after all these years was a sort of vertiginous experience, like catching sight of a unicorn, or meeting Santa Claus, or having brunch with Stalin.  I realized that there was a part of me that was actually hoping to discover some ingenious argument in defense of warrantless surveillance, some […]

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Ok, no, I actually got teary watching this too. Pass it around. “Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo. Ok, Ok, when I say “got teary” I mean “bawled like John Turturro in Miller’s Crossing.” Seriously, this is some incredibly powerful stuff.  If they’d had this running during the campaign, I think there’s a […]

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I haven’t paid  any more attention to the Blagojevich bruhaha than was totally unavoidable—which still turns out to be quite a bit in DC—but I was nevertheless a little surprised to see the blogosphere’s Google-trained legal scholars reach such rapid consensus on Majority Leader Harry Reid’s threat to refuse to seat Blago appointee Roland Burris. […]

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Ezra Klein and Rachel Maddow absolutely nail this: A four, five, or six hour line at the polling station is just a poll tax exacted in time rather than dollars.  That’s not to say we should holler “disenfranchisement” every time there’s a bit of a queue at the booth, or even that it’s obvious which […]

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Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe the arguments ACLU and EFF are advancing against the legitimacy of the FISA Amendments Act’s retroactive immunity provisions—and I do think at least a couple of them are pretty strong. But I’m not yet super-sanguine about the chances of the court agreeing; Walker Vaughn might give them a […]

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…at Ars.  Basically a quick rundown over why civil libertarians shouldn’t get their hopes up about this being a legal game changer in the surveillance fight.  I’m still holding out hopes that it may be significant as a matter of public perception.

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I figure my blog readers, even the ones not normally super enamored of the techy stuff, might be interested in this story at Ars about a fascinating case that doesn’t seem to have gotten a whole lot of coverage.  It involves Echostar, the parent company of DISH Network, suing a firm that manufactures “free to […]

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I know there’s a measure of FISA-exhaustion out there, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the looming constitutional fight over the FISA Amendments Act—or, as I prefer to call it, in homage to the epic rivalry between James Tiberius Kirk and Khan Noonien Singh: “FISAAA!”  I’ve got a writeup at Ars with a summary […]

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