With the rise of modern technologies, the scope and scale of government surveillance has exploded. The use of digital communication has made communication more efficient, but also much more vulnerable. Governments, meanwhile, are increasing their capacity to exploit these vulnerabilities, and companies, their ability to thwart them. Both the PATRIOT act and the Snowden disclosures pushed the issue to the front of the national conversation. Today, the legal and policy debate—over what kind of surveillance tools are acceptable, against whom, and with with whose authorization—continues in full force.
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Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders filed an opening brief on behalf of Jamshid Muhtorov in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Mr.
The body of Jamal Khashoggi has yet to be found, and the case of his murder is littered with unanswered questions. There are a number of certainties about the gruesome crime, however, backed up by evidence, including that some of his most private communications were monitored by Saudi intelligence.
In recognition of the changing role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR); the difficulty finding and searching the more than 70 FISC/FISCR declassified opinions and 270 orders in the public domain; the increasing complexity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); the myriad statutory reporting requirements; and the rapidly expanding treatment of FISA in ordinary, Article III courts, I am delighted to announce the creation of the digital Foreign Intelligence Law Collection.
Last fall, Lawfare published a piece by Ian Levy and Crispin Robinson of GCHQ entitled Principles for a More Informed Exceptional Access Debate.
[Update: Several colleagues have pointed out that I did not make sufficiently clear that there is an alternate (and much less intriguing) explanation for the 1806(c) notices here.
The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice has released a report on the Drug Enforcement Agency's use of administrative subpoenas for bulk data collection and exploitation, without comprehensive legal review, in drug investigations involving Americans. The full report is available here and below.
Last week, reports surfaced from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that the NSA may be shutting down the Section 215 program accessing domestic call detail records (CDRs).
An apparent disclosure from a congressional staffer on the Lawfare Podcast has generated considerable buzz regarding the fate of a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that currently
This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.
In August 2018, the leading international academic conference on cryptography hosted a Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance. The workshop explored both legal and technical aspects of the ongoing debate over the impact of strong encryption and law enforcement surveillance capabilities. The workshop was co-chaired by Tim Edgar (Brown University), Joan Feigenbaum (Yale University), and me. As we described it at the time: