Wired‘s Jennifer Granick has more on recently uncovered FBI misuse of National Security Letters.

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It certainly sounds like good news that the administration has finally deigned to let FISA courts play their legally mandated oversight role, putting an end to the extralegal enterprise euphemistically (and question-beggingly) dubbed the Terrorist Surveillance Program. But as Orin Kerr notes there’s a big honking ambiguity in this new oversight: Justice department officials won’t […]

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The wording is ambiguous, but a presidential signing statement tacked on to a recent postal reform law asserts a vague executive power to read mail without a warrant in “exigent circumstances.” There’s a longstanding Fourth Amendment exception for certain sorts of cases like this—a package believed to contain a bomb that could go off any […]

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This article hits a note that’s been ringing in my head over the holiday weekend as, being gripped by suburban nostalgia, I’ve found myself flipping through the MySpace pages of old friends and relatives. Maybe it’s because I’m unusually privacy conscious, or maybe it’s just because (as a onetime BBS sysop and Internet early adopter) […]

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The Post reports that citizens’ concern for privacy is yawning and blinking after a long hibernation: Two-thirds think intelligence agencies are “intruding on some Americans’ privacy rights” in terrorism investigations, and the number who say this is justified has fallen from 63 percent to 51 percent over three years. Better still, a majority want to […]

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Intelligence officials offered up a rather weird argument in defense of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program in congressional testimony today: But the administration officials called FISA impractical and ineffective for tracking al Qaeda, saying the law would require separate warrants for each U.S.-bound phone call placed by an overseas suspect. “It would cause a tremendous […]

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday won permission to lawsuit against AT&T, which has been aiding the NSA by siphoning off information about communications passing through its networks for pattern analysis. You can read the full decision, listen to a conference call with EFF attorney Cindy Cohn, or check out Orin Kerr’s analysis of the ruling. […]

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“White House Agrees to Review of Surveillance Program,” says The New York Times, while The Washington Post‘s headline reads “Bush Compromises On Spying Program.” Something there strikes me as a bit surreal—as though a president’s deigning to permit constitutional review of a massive NSA program of warrantless eavesdropping were an act of noblesse oblige—but according […]

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