I attended some of last week’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, and had the following thought after an excellent panel discussing the necessity of reforming the atavistic Electronic Communications Privacy Act. As privacy buffs well know, the law sets a fairly high bar for acquiring or intercepting the “contents” of a user’s communication—the audio of […]

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While I expect it’s cold comfort to Publius, I suppose Ed Whelan should get some modicum of credit for realizing—however belatedly—that his “outing” of his pseudonymous interlocutor was wrong. I might have gone with something stronger than “uncharitable”—”crass” and “petty” spring to mind—but let’s face it, a second-thought and an apology are so rare in […]

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On the whole, I find William Saletan a sharp analyst and an engaging writer.  This column, however, is really profoundly revolting. Your first clue that something might be awry comes with the kicker headline: “Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?” Sane people do not regard that as an open question—or, for that matter, a […]

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You’d think after seven years in DC, I’d have developed an immunity to surprise at political mendacity, but every now and then, a truly heroic example of shamelessness can still astonish me.  My morning feeds bring a doozy in the form of a putative “news” item titled “Patriot Act Likely Helped Thwart NYC Terror Plot, […]

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Marc Ambinder notes that the federal government’s annual wiretap report—that’s Title III criminal wiretaps, not the foreign intel surveillance covered by FISA— is out, and the headline figure is that there was a 16 percent decline in wiretap orders over the previous year. Then he offers some speculation on why this might be that makes […]

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Courtesy of The New York Times: “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law .” An internal review has determined that since the passage of the FISA Amendments Act last year, there has been systematic “overcollection” of the strictly domestic communications of U.S. persons, for which intelligence agencies are still supposed to seek traditional FISA warrants. For […]

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From Powerline: For example, [Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn] Johnsen has objected to warrantless surveillance of suspected al-Qaeda communications into and out of the United States. The special appellate court created by Congress to review executive branch surveillance programs upheld the foreign wiretap activities of the Bush administration that Johnsen had denounced as based […]

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Finally reading the infamous Yoo memos after all these years was a sort of vertiginous experience, like catching sight of a unicorn, or meeting Santa Claus, or having brunch with Stalin.  I realized that there was a part of me that was actually hoping to discover some ingenious argument in defense of warrantless surveillance, some […]

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So, as readers have noticed, I don’t blog here nearly as often as I once did; daily journalism is time consuming. But I got my start as a writer blogging, and in a lot of ways that’s probably still my comparative advantage. So I’m happy to announce that, starting today, I’ll be blogging about the […]

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Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe the arguments ACLU and EFF are advancing against the legitimacy of the FISA Amendments Act’s retroactive immunity provisions—and I do think at least a couple of them are pretty strong. But I’m not yet super-sanguine about the chances of the court agreeing; Walker Vaughn might give them a […]

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