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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’ […]

Beginning in February 2001, almost seven months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government’s top electronic eavesdropping organization, the National Security Agency, asked a major U.S. telecommunications carrier for information about its customers and the flow of electronic traffic across its network, according to sources familiar with the request. The carrier, Qwest Communications, refused, believing […]

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, […]

Just when you thought it was safe to go on vacation… Congress and the administration have been busy bees the past week, haggling over modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The new law effectively legalizes much of what the National Security Agency has been doing since 9/11 under the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. Intelligence […]

No big surprise here, but an important admission from Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence. In a letter to Arlen Specter (Penn.), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, McConnell acknowledges that the president authorized the National Security Agency to undertake “various intelligence activities,” after the 9/11, aimed at preventing another terrorist attack. […]

With all the recent attention on the National Security Agency’s surveillance program–particularly that it was the so-called “data mining” aspects that drew Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card to John Ashcroft’s hospital room back in 2004–I thought it was a good time to recall a story I wrote last summer. This story goes into considerable detail […]