“They already know who it is.” That’s how one former U.S. official responded the Justice Department’s years-long investigation of a suspected leaker of classified intelligence. So, why are prosecutors trying to force a well-known journalist to identify this suspect before a federal grand jury? And what does it mean for the future of a free […]

The relationship between a national security reporter and a confidential source is one of the most guarded and prized in Washington. Now, an audacious Web site is upending the way sensitive leaks find their way to daylight, and with it, the media’s influence over information. Is the Obama administration taking notice? Read my new piece […]

Harold Koh made big news last night, laying out for the first time the administration’s position that drone strikes against terrorists and militants are legal. Here’s my first take for the Atlantic on the news and what it means for the administration.

Here’s a departure from all the talk of surveillance and book tours. I was at a breakfast yesterday morning with Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, and had a chance to ask him where he stands on the use of unmmanned drones to kill suspected terrorists. I wrote a lenghty piece about this issue […]

This week, I’ll have an online discussion at Slate with my friend and fellow intelligence author, Patrick Radden Keefe. We’ll be talking about The Watchers, my relationship with John Poindexter, the limits of surveillance, and the future of privacy.

The United States is fighting a new kind of war, but the first shots were fired a generation ago. Check out my feature story in Washingtonian about the rise of cyber security in the U.S. government, told through the tales of two key actors.

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.