Latest in FISA
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.
Benjamin Wittes flags that much of the Yahoo story is unclear, including legal arguments and the objective of the search, and further reporting from Motherboard and the Intercept further confuses the possible mechanism of the search, describing it not as a spam filter but like a "rootkit" and opening up a significant vulnerability.
In 2009, the discovery of a major complaince incident shook NSA to its core. This is the story of how it came to pass and what happened next.