In Florida politics, self-funded candidates are faring well in the polls, with the multi-millionaire political neophytes Jeff Greene, running as a Democrat for U.S. Senate, and Rick Scott, running as a Republican for Florida governor, now even with or ahead of their more established primary opponents, Rep. Kendrick Meek More…
I just spoke to Kevin Bankston, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior attorney specializing in free speech and privacy law, about his reaction to today’s Senate Judiciary Committee markup session on the Patriot Act, which resulted in passage of the Leahy-Feinstein bill, with a few More…
The Leahy-Feinstein substitute bill I discussed in my piece this morning about the USA PATRIOT Act was just approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee 13-8, with only minor word changes.
Amendments proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) that would have required that the target of a National Security More…
Most of the senators on the Judiciary Committee today seem to be bending over backwards to give the FBI and Justice Department every benefit of the doubt when it comes to the tools they say they need to fight terrorism. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) just warned of all the people More…
An amendment to the Patriot Act provision authorizing National Security Letters that would have required the letters to target only people with some connection to a foreign power or the activities of a foreign power, so as to ensure that the NSL is actually issued to investigate terrorism rather than, More…
Republicans and Democrats have been sniping about the USA Patriot Act ever since Congress passed the law in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to try to forestall another such disaster. But now, it’s the Democrats who are sniping among themselves about it. While some lawmakers, like Sens. More…
Though the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week included lots of expressed concern that the USA Patriot Act compromises civil liberties, the version of the bill being debated in that committee today fails to adequately address the problems, argues Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and the American Civil Liberties More…
Even as House lawmakers are celebrating their remarkably swift move to infuse the popular cash for clunkers program with additional funds, some lawmakers and environmentalists are warning that extending the program is premature without knowing what it even does.
Of the $1 billion More…
I hate to say it, but, I told you so…
Just the other day, when I was writing about the case of Jewel v. NSA (and responding to the Columbia Journalism Review’s criticism that no one was covering this important case about warrantless wiretapping), I remarked that while More…
As TWI’s lightning-fast national security reporter Spencer Ackerman just wrote, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence just formally announced what we’ve known and been reporting on for weeks now: it will review the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush years.
That’s welcome news for all of More…
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