As a fellow Arlingtonian and a reasonably tech-savvy person, I join Air Force General Counsel Charles Blanchard in taking issue with the categorization of Arlingtonians by our friends in the Bay Area as too technologically backwards to use an RSS feed. I use an RSS feed not only to keep track of Lawfare content, but also to be able to provide you with our news roundup every day. (How else do you think Ritika and I get all this material for you?) If you’re interested in becoming one of those Arlingtonians who flummox people in the Bay Area by being reasonably tech-savvy, you can follow Lawfare on an RSS reader by going here.

As is becoming a habit, let’s start with the cybersecurity debate in the Senate (more excellent coverage from The Hill on the play-by-play). Symantec has joined Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco in supporting the Lieberman-Collins bill, while Senators Rockefeller and Feinstein have joined the bill’s cosponsors in writing to the Chamber of Commerce regarding its opposition to the bill.  Republican senators are taking full advantage of the open amendment process, introducing amendments stemming from Senator John McCain’s rival Secure IT Act. And Democrats critical of the Lieberman-Collins approach aren’t shying away from introducing alterations of their own: Senator Patrick Leahy has introduced a number of amendments regarding privacy issues. And thanks to the dozens of amendments that have been introduced, Senate party leaders Reid and McConnell are negotiating as we speak concerning what will ultimately be considered on the floor and put to an up-or-down vote.

We missed this story in the New York Times by Michael Schmidt over the weekend on the Democrats’ decision to drop a mandatory reporting requirement in the bill that’s under consideration.

There are other bills that the Senate at least appears to be working on, in particular the defense appropriations bill for the upcoming fiscal year. Carlo Munoz and Jeremy Herb at The Hill report on activity there.

Phew! It’s official: NATO and Pakistan have finalized the agreement that will keep open the supply route between Pakistan and Afghanistan through 2015. Richard Leiby at the Washington Post has the story.

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports on the recent pledge by SecDef Panetta for counterterrorism support to Tunisia, as does Carlo Munoz at The Hill.

Greg Miller of the Washington Post provides some more details on that amendment that was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee to help stem leaks. He summarizes it as follows: “If the bill is passed into law, the provision would make it illegal for the CIA and other intelligence agencies to make analysts available to discuss unclassified national security issues unless the experts are identified publicly.” And the Washington Post editorial board is none too pleased with the implications of that proposal.

The FCC’s proposal to allow aircraft, including drones, to fill in telecommunications links when those links go down in a disaster (for example, the massive Verizon 911-outage earlier this summer in D.C.), is being rejected by AT&T, Sprint, and the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials-International.  Brooks Bolen at Politico reports.

Jennifer Turner of the ACLU marks the 10th year of Omar Khadr’s detention in Guantanamo with this Huffington Post piece.

For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief, and Fordham Law’s Cyber Brief. Email us noteworthy articles we may have missed at wakeman.lawfare@gmail.com and  singh.lawfare@gmail.com.

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