Jodie C. Liu formerly researched national security issues at the Brookings Institution as a Ford Foundation Law School Fellow and has worked at the Open Society Foundations in Budapest, Hungary. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2015 and summa cum laude from Columbia College in 2012, with honors in economics.
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Now that the Senate has passed—and the President has signed—the USA FREEDOM Act, we thought it might be a good idea to recap what exactly the new law does and does not do.
Here’s something a little outside the normal Lawfare fare but which Lawfare readers might find interesting: A new paper we have written about all the privacy benefits we receive from technologies we typically think of as privacy eroding.
The House has now passed the USA Freedom Act. If you feel the need to hear Mel Gibson shouting “Freeeedom!” in response, well, don’t thank us. We live to serve:
With opening statements made, prosecutors in the capital case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev commenced their presentation of evidence. An overview of the day’s testimony---which spanned some of the morning and all of the afternoon---follows below.
Morning Session
Taking the witness stand first was Thomas Grilk, Executive Director of the Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the Boston Marathon each year. Prosecutor William Weinreb started his examination slowly, gradually teasing out the mechanics and magnitude of the Boston Marathon.
After weeks of protracted and highly contested jury selection, opening statements in the capital case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got underway yesterday, more than one month later than originally planned. I attended this part of the Boston bomber’s trial---which I summarize below.
The defendant appeared at ease when he entered the courtroom, even cracking a smile or two with one of his attorneys, Miriam Conrad. Judge O’Toole began by ruling on some last minute motions, including the prosecution’s motion to exclude mitigating evidence.
As reported last month, the NSA in late December declassified more than ten years of NSA quarterly reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB). In them, the NSA lists, with varying degrees of detail and redaction, suspected violations of policies intended to ensure that the NSA’s intelligence gathering activities are in conformity with its collection authorities.
On December 23, the NSA released a set of redacted reports detailing “intelligence activities . . . that [it has] reason to believe may be unlawful or contrary to Executive order or Presidential directive,” reports which had been submitted to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) pursuant to Executive Order 12333.