I started noticing this last week, but the level of bald-faced mendacity indulged in by defenders of the recent FISA amendment is sort of gobsmacking, which is saying quite a bit given how little I expect of GOP dead-enders at this point. Consider this, from the Weekly Standard‘s blog: One of the last things Congress […]

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According to The Wall Street Journal, a three-month-old decision by DNI Michael McConnell has dramatically expanded intelligence agencies’ access to domestic surveillance images from spy satellites. There are a couple of interesting legal questions here, as the WSJ article notes. The first is whether routine domestic intelligence use of satellites developed by the military runs […]

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Via Tech Liberation Front, privacy expert Susan Landau has an important Washington Post op-ed on how an expanded wiretapping infrastructure might make it easier for hackers to eavesdrop on us. As Landau points out, this is not hypothetical: We know that even the most top-secret government networks have been breached in the recent past. The […]

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The more I think about it, the more curious I become about the contents of the secret FISA court ruling first reported by the LA Times, which supposedly sparked the sudden need for reform. The article suggests that the ruling had forced intelligence agencies to treat communications between two parties, both overseas, as domestic surveillance […]

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I’ve got an article up at Reason today about the weekend’s FISA amendment. If you just can’t get enough, see also Tim Lee’s take at Ars Techica, Patrick Keefe at Slate, and Ryan Singel at Threat Level.

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Ryan Singel reports that the Society for Professional Journalists is using distributed journalism to uncover the identity of the senator who’s placed a secret hold on a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act.

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The Washington Post has published an op-ed of truly magnificent stupidity (and, incidentally, gratingly twee prose) today, decrying the platform the Internet provides for anonymous speech: In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. […]

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London’s Evening Standard looks at the proliferation of closed circuit cameras in the city by focusing on the former home of George Orwell, where there are now some 32 cameras within 200 yards of the apartment where the author once lived. Citywide, there’s a camera for every fourteen people.

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Via 27B Stroke 6, The Washington Post reports on documents uncovered in a civil suit brought by some anti-war protesters that confirm their claims, which police and the FBI had denied, that the protesters had been detained for wearing black (anarchists wear black!) and interrogated about their political views by FBI agents. (The official rationale […]

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It should have come as no surprise that National Security Letters, which bypass the judicial oversight that would normally be required for a search warrant, have been subject to widespread abuse. But an anonymous Washington Post contributor reminds us of an additional factor: NSLs typically come coupled with gag orders, preventing those who’ve been served […]

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