The Senate has voted to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted the government with electronic surveillance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Here’s the roll call of votes.
The immunity amendment is part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bill to modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The three senators running for president split over [...]

The Republican National Committee has a new ad warning that Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are playing into terrorists’ hands by trying to block permanent changes to surveillance law. Not that Republicans haven’t been playing tough over this issue. They’ve also tried to assert that if the Protect America Act is allowed to [...]

Saying he wanted “to be very clear in addressing the Iranian nuclear capability,” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee today that Iran continues down a path that could lead to construction of a nuclear weapon. Reiterating what appears to be a coordinated line of thinking, McConnell said that Iran is still [...]

The list is growing. Israel has now come out against the United States’ National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, declaring that the country is three years away from obtaining offensive nuclear capabilities. Mossad chief Meir Dagan presented that assessment to a Knesset committee Monday, and added that the NIE “pulls the rug out from under” attempts [...]

Several noted computer security experts have an interesting paper in the current issue of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine. Rather than critique the civil liberties implications of the Protect America Act, the “fix” to intelligence wiretapping and surveillance law being debated in Congress, the experts examine potential security weaknesses in the surveillance system run by [...]

So now, in addition to the Director of National Intelligence, and the President of the United States, add the French government to the dissent column on the explosive National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Herve Morin, the French defense minister, was in Washington yesterday, and he said that “coordinated information from a number [...]

President Bush offered fresh evidence in his State of the Union address last night that not all decision-makers share the intelligence community’s view on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Although he was remarkably restrained in his rhetoric–particularly in comparison to years past–Bush homed in on Iran’s uranium enrichment and ballistic missile programs to remind us that the [...]

President Bush has signed a directive that formally kicks off what intelligence reporters have been chronicling for months: The National Security Agency, the nation’s electronic eavesdropping agency, will take a new, presumably aggressive role in responding to Internet-based attacks against government agencies.
The Washington Post broke news of Bush’s directive on Friday, and the Baltimore Sun [...]

The Protect America Act, a six-month modification to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that directly affects the National Security Agency’s terrorist surveillance program, expires on Feb. 1. It’s looking more and more like the Congress will punt on this one, passing another temporary extension–perhaps as short as one month–while lawmakers try and sort out a [...]

Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker has a new (very long) piece on DNI Mike McConnell, the culmination of an apparently extraordinary level of access and series of intimate interviews. (Wright and McConnell ate together and flew once on the DNI’s private plane.)
While I hate to say the piece didn’t do much to illuminate McConnell’s [...]