Giving in to the Surveillance State
My op-ed in today’s New York Times looks at a decade of secret government surveillance and why we’re still powerless against it.
My op-ed in today’s New York Times looks at a decade of secret government surveillance and why we’re still powerless against it.
A just-published paper offers new insights and intriguing details about the New York Times’ 2005 blockbuster on government spying. More here.
Read the rest of this entry »I was a guest on this week’s “On the Media,” talking about the renewal of the Patriot Act, and whether the Obama administration is secretly interpreting the law in a way that allows the government to collect more information.
Read the rest of this entry »I’ve long known that, on many important national security decisions, former president George W. Bush wasn’t in the driver’s seat. But I was shocked to discover that at one of the most critical points of his presidency, Bush wasn’t even in the car. Here’s my review of Bush’s shocking admission, in his new memoir, about [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The Russian spies arrested last month and traded back to Moscow have mostly been introduced to the American public as a hot girl and a bunch of bumbling Borises and Natashas. But people who crossed paths with one of the recently deported spies, a Bostonian calling himself Donald Heathfield, suggest that he, at least, may [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Somewhere on the fifth floor of an immense federal office building in downtown Washington is a filing cabinet, or perhaps a computer hard drive, that holds a set of documents that the next president and his lawyers will want to read very, very carefully. Read the story here in National Journal.
Read the rest of this story »In the old days, everyone was linked to a lug nut, and Jim Kallstrom liked it that way. It was 1985, a simpler time for a cop like Kallstrom, who was in charge of setting telephone wiretaps on suspected drug dealers and mobsters for the FBI’s New York City field office. In New York, Kallstrom’s [...]
Read the rest of this story »The debate in Congress about whether to allow Americans to sue companies that participated in the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance activities has little to do with punishing Big Telecom for its role in domestic spying. Rather, keeping alive an estimated 38 pending civil suits against AT&T, Verizon, and other companies has become congressional Democrats’ [...]
Read the rest of this story »As Democrats and Republicans debate legislation that would alter 30-year-old limits on intrusive electronic and physical searches by the government, the secretive 11-member court that oversees surveillance of foreign-intelligence targets in the United States finds itself in the middle of a very public power struggle.Regardless of where law and policy makers fall on the question, [...]
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