The good folks at the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition captured video of my speech at the Fourth of July “Restore the Fourth Amendment” rally in DC’s McPherson Square: Here’s the text I scribbled in a notebook before I got up. The gist is the same, but this is a somewhat more polished version: At […]

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A brief, slightly confusing exchange between Rep. Jerrold Nadler and FBI director Robert Mueller at a hearing this week is stirring up a lot of fuss, as C-NET reports (and The Hill repeats) that it reveals an NSA admission that analysts sifting through metadata can, without further court authorization, listen to calls or read e-mails: […]

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A little ditty I wrote for frustrated journalists, activists, and academics to sing while tangling with our beloved, Byzantine Freedom of Information Act process—to the tune of “That’s Amore,” of course: When your FOIA reply Can’t confirm or deny That’s a Glomar! (That’s a Glomar!) When you need x-ray spex To read your Vaughn Index […]

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So what the hell happened with the FISA Amendments Act over the holidays?  I made a short video for Cato explaining it.

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The FISA Amendments Act has been extended, without amendment, for another five years—and The Wall Street Journal is delighted: Well, not everything President Obama and the 112th Congress managed to achieve is so terrible. With scarcely any notice, much less controversy, they did at least preserve one of the country’s most important post-9/11 antiterror tools. […]

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As a general rule, going on television reminds me why I’ve chosen a career in print, but between the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act and the David Petraeus scandal, I’ve nevertheless ended up making a handful of small-screen appearances in the past couple months. For those of you who are into that sort of […]

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I’ve just had a chance to play around with C-SPAN’s clip-and-share functionality from its video archives, which seems like a pretty great tool for wonks like me who actually pay attention to stuff like last week’s marathon Senate debate over the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act, which President Obama signed on Sunday evening. With […]

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Over the weekend, I had a piece at Ars Technica urging Google to roll out end-to-end encryption for Gmail, allowing hundreds of millions of ordinary users to enjoy the level of privacy now largely reserved for paranoid ubergeeks. I tried to address some of the obvious economic reasons Google might be hesitant to do this, […]

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Most students learn in history class that our Fourth Amendment emerged from the hostility of the American colonists to “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” authorizing intrusive, discretionary searches of private homes.  What they’re seldom taught is how strongly that hostility was bound up with undisguised class-based contempt for the officers who conducted those searches—so […]

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I’m doing a deep dive into the pre-history of the Fourth Amendment, and am continuously amazed at how perfectly the condemnations of the “general warrants” that incensed the Framers apply to the programmatic authority granted the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act. The legal challenge to that statute is currently hung up on questions of […]

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