I’ve got a longish piece over at The American Prospect that looks at how the Obama administration worked to kill the National Security Letter reforms that Obama once campaigned on—and even borrowed a page from Bush by retroactively reinterpreting the law to excuse systematic illegal surveillance.

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For those who didn’t want to sit through the full panel, here’s an eight minute excerpt:

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Anyone in the DC area who’s interested enough in privacy and surveillance to put up with this blog really ought to come down to the Cato Institute at 4 this afternoon for our PATRIOT Act reauthorization debate, where I’ll join forces with CDT’s Greg Nojeim against Deceptacons Jena Baker McNeil of Heritage and Richard Samp […]

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xI’ve been debating the Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill on the USA PATRIOT Act over at the LA Times all week: You can check out round one and round two, with the final bout scheduled for this afternoon. It’s frankly been a bit frustrating so far—I think it’s telling that PATRIOT defenders are so reluctant […]

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I’ve got one of a bunch of letters in the Sunday Washington Post objecting to their facile editorial on PATRIOT Act renewal, which weirdly asserted that a “reasonable balance” is struck by a bill that reauthorizes surveillance powers almost unaltered. My original letter, incidentally, had somewhat more pointedly said that the Post “duly transcribed” the […]

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I have a probably excessive analysis over at Cato.

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It’s not getting a lot of pickup, but this Thursday’s markup in the Senate Judiciary Committee really could be the single most significant privacy and surveillance event of the Obama administration. There has to be a vote on the renewal of expiring PATRIOT Act provisions.  Thursday will determine whether the renewal legislation is in the […]

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And not even resting that much, but as I noted earlier, expect to see a good deal more of my blogging over at Cato@Liberty these days. Here’s a long one on the recent call for more regulation of behavioral ads—which, believe it or not, I only mostly disagree with.

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