Too often, national security and personal liberties are portrayed as inversely related. This is simplistic, and also clearly wrong. After all, in the absence of security, it would be impossible to enjoy our freedoms at all. Nevertheless, some of the hardest national security choices are inevitably those that involve tradeoffs with civil liberties. The need to gather information on our enemies rubs up against expectations of privacy. The eroding line between war and law enforcement endangers principles of due process. And the need to keep secrets increasingly leads to tension with a robust free press.
Latest in Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights
The German Constitutional Court ruled that German espionage activity must conform to the country’s constitution, even if conducted overseas on non-German citizens. What’s in the ruling?
What should courts do when people challenge pandemic containment measures imposed by state governments and the federal government?
A national commission just recommended mandatory draft registration for women. While proponents agree that this is good for the military, few have examined how it might also be good for women.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications under Section 702 does not violate the Fourth Amendment, but raised constitutional questions related to querying databases containing these communications.
Jed Rubenfeld is incorrect; the Good Samaritan provision of Section 230 does not turn internet platforms into First Amendment state actors.
The pivotal question, doctrinally, turns out to be what kind of First Amendment forums Google and Facebook operate.
On Sept. 4, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a decision in Elhady v. Kable—a case that challenges how the federal government manages the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), colloquially known as the “watchlist.” Judge Anthony Trenga’s opinion granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and found that U.S.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the federal government's Terrorist Screening Database program, commonly referred to as the terrorist "watchlist," does not provide "constitutionally adequate" process for Americans included in the database. The Court instructed both sides to submit briefs about what they each view as the appropriate relief. The ruling can be found here.
Conventional wisdom and many lower court cases hold that foreign states are not entitled to constitutionally based personal jurisdiction protections in federal courts because they are not “persons” protected by the Fifth Amendment. That reasoning is incorrect as a matter of constitutional text and history, and it leads to poor results as a matter of policy for reasons explored at length in a forthcoming article and summarized here.
It’s recently been announced that Alex Joel, who has served as the civil liberties protection officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for 14 years, is leaving the ODNI. I had the privilege of working closely with Alex, and learning from him, during some turbulent times for the intelligence community. At a time when the intelligence community is under attack, it is appropriate to honor Alex as an exemplar of the dedicated public servants who work in U.S. intelligence agencies.