…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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Normally, I’d be all over a new wiretap abuse story like piranha on a cow, but I’ve been wiped out sick for a couple days now, so I’m really only just getting to pay any attention to the reports from NSA whistleblowers who describe their practices of recording and transcribing, en masse, the conversations of […]

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I’ve got a long double review up at Ars of two of privacy scholar Dan Solove’s recent books, one a more abstract and theoretical examination of the concept of privacy in American law, the second more of a case study of how the Internet and social media are making it harder to control our identities […]

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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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What I thought would be a quick writeup of a press conference announcing a new wiretap suit ballooned into a rather lengthy analysis of the surprisingly tricky quesition of when a communication is “intercepted” or “acquired” by a government device. Check it out at Ars. The rest of the writing I’ve been doing there this […]

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So it turns out that I’m going to be on a panel of journalists assigned to pepper Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr with questions at a National Press Club event tomorrow, which will focus on privacy and civil liberties issues. Festivities kick of at noon; come check it out.

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Speaking of The Dark Knight, I’ve already had a couple requests for a “FISA analyisis” of the movie (believe it or not), and since Ezra’s already brought it up, I suppose I’m due to throw in my two cents.  Rest of the post below the fold in in the unlikely event that someone reading this […]

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I can’t believe it’s still possible for me to find this depressing, but ThinkProgress has an interview with a former U.S. attorney who’s claiming that John Ashcroft was pushed out of the administration because he refused to override the acting AG from his hospital bed in order to authorize warrantless wiretaps. No good deed goes […]

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One aspect of the newly-passed FISA law that deserves a bit of extra scrutiny is the amount of pressure it puts on “minimization procedures,” one of the few points of contact between the surveillance program and the FISA court. This is arguably part of a drift we’ve already seen a fair amount of in foreig […]

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