National Security Agency

Marc Ambinder has a seriously detailed curtain-raiser on a turf war that’s roiled the intelligence community for months. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, have clashed over who controls the top U.S. intelligence officer in various foreign countries. But Ambinder goes way deeper to provide a [...]

Although the government has said that warrantless wiretapping under the Terrorist Surveillance Program has stopped, the Obama administration has not said that warrantless wiretapping isn’t ongoing under some other program.

As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both pointed out over the weekend, Eric Holder on Friday once again declared that a case charging government lawbreaking must be dismissed because to let it continue would reveal important “state secrets.” That’s despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder not long ago announced that he’d be asserting [...]

That’s one of the questions coming up in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit being argued today by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 23 lawyers who believe they may have been wiretapped without a warrant by the National Security Agency during the Bush administration. But the government won’t answer the question.
The NSA [...]

Pressed by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) on his view of whether the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal, Attorney General Eric Holder said the program was “inconsistent” with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, but repeatedly refused to say it was “illegal,” or that President Bush broke the law — despite previous statements [...]

Responding to the controversial assertion by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair on June 8 that warrantless wiretapping “wasn’t illegal,” Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) today sent a letter to President Obama asking him to make clear that he is not claiming that extraordinary executive authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
“As a [...]

You’re a maddening figure, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). You seem like a nice enough gentleman. And then you say things like this — via Josh Orton at MyDD –  during last year’s debate over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (video after the jump):

Just out from Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), one of the leading civil libertarian voices in Congress opposing the 2007 FISA Amendments Act that lowered the standards for National Security Agency surveillance on U.S. citizens and residents:
“Since 2001, I have spent a lot of time in the Intelligence Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and on the floor [...]

Just released from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reacting to the National Security Agency’s surveillance “overcollection”:
“These are serious allegations, and we will make sure we get the facts,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The Committee is looking into this, and we will [...]

Dear Tea Partiers,
I’d like to address you in good faith for a moment. I noticed today you had some strong feelings about what you consider to be President Obama taking away your freedom. You had some problems, I saw, with a recent Department of Homeland Security report assessing that your outrage is coterminous with prospective [...]