The important and probably irresolvable debate about torture in the new movie has overlooked what it gets right: Namely, that the intelligence business is painstaking, frustrating, and slow. More…    

The government claims Mark Owen violated secrecy agreements in writing about the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Here’s how the ex-SEAL can avoid jail time.

A former Navy Seal who took part in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden has written a first-hand account. Despite the author’s public statements to the contrary, the book is political, and that’s too bad. More here.

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.

Could “total information awareness” have prevented the killings in Colorado? No. Here’s why.

A just-published paper offers new insights and intriguing details about the New York Times’ 2005 blockbuster on government spying. More here.

Have a bunch of Silicon Valley computer geeks figured out how to stop terrorists?

As aircraft and weapons have become more precise, human beings have become less essential to the conduct of war. The rise of unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly known as drones, promises to push human beings further out of the loop. This essay is part of the Hoover Institution’s Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and […]

No one asks, “Where were you on 9/10?” and most people don’t remember. It’s only in hindsight that the details of a thoroughly ordinary day seem so remarkable.

I joined NPR’s Scott Simon recently for a discussion about unmanned aircraft, and whether we’ll soon  be seeing tiny drones flying around American cities. The full audio is here.