Latest in FISA
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its annual transparency report regarding use of national security authorities for calendar year 2016, available here and below. Lawfare will publish a summary shortly.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts today released its statutorily mandated annual report on activities of the FISA courts. The unclassified version of the report contains summary statistics on the number of applications made under various statutory authorities and the number of those applications granted, modified, or denied in part or in full. The reporting requirement was enacted in 2015, and this is the first report containing a full year of statistics.
The government has released the second annual Report of the Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts on Activities of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts as required by the USA FREEDOM Act.
The U.S. intelligence community is on the verge of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy it has not experienced since the 1970s.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will rehear en banc the ACLU's claim that it has standing to assert a First Amendment right to see FISC decisions upholding the government’s bulk data collection program.
While Flynn's registration as a “foreign agent” under FARA does not mean he was targetable as a "foreign agent" under FISA, it does raise a series of important questions.
Under minimization rules, no serious argument can be made that Flynn’s identity was not necessary to understand the intelligence significance of his call with the Russian ambassador. The call is foreign intelligence information mainly because it involves Mr. Flynn.
While John DeLong and Susan Hennessey establish that the NSA did not willfully violate RAS compliance, they do not fully address the disconnect that the RAS compliance problem revealed between the NSA’s institutional culture and Congress’s plan.