A judicial ruling on drug tests for athletes blossoms into a huge Fourth Amendment case. Read the full story in National Journal.

The Washington Post has a front-page story this morning on the Obama administration’s new plan to create a crack group of interrogators to glean intelligence from so-called “high value detainees.” The idea had been reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. But a new piece of information, the significance of which was overlooked by the [...]

Calls are coming in for President-elect Obama to take quick and decisive action on interrogation and detention of terrorist suspects.

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.

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 [...]

In my interview with John Brennan, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign, Brennan stated that he favors granting immunity to those companies that were asked to participate in covert surveillance activities after 9/11. This position differs from Obama’s. He voted to strip an immunity provision [...]

“All of our legal architecture is founded on the notion that telecommunications intercepts involved putting bugs in walls or hooking interception devices to pairs of copper wires.” Sound like a familiar complaint? It should, if you’ve been following the debate to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But this quote comes from one of our [...]

Defying expectations, the House adjourned for recess Thursday and will let the Protect America Act expire tomorrow. Unwilling to try and iron out differences between their bill and a version passed this week by the Senate, lawmakers will take up the thorny issues of telecom liability and oversight of intelligence surveillance at a later date. [...]

Comments by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer suggest that Democrats might be preparing to let the Protect America Act expire this week. They would then use the next few weeks to pass a longer-term law. Voice of America has a roundup of member positions this morning, and quotes Hoyer. Hoyer asserted to reporters that even [...]

The House voted down a Democratic measure that would have extended the Protect America Act for another 21 days. Joining the unanimous Republican vote were 34 Democrats (list below). In breaking ranks, they have positioned the House to take up a Senate bill that makes major changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and which [...]