Following up on our stories earlier this week about the legal vacancy at the National Security Agency, Mark Hosenball at Newsweek finds that the Justice Department is sending some relief to Fort Meade.
Declassified has learned that the Obama administration has now asked a career Justice Department
Marc Ambinder reads the text of a bill Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) intends to release today to clarify an organizational structure within the Department of Homeland Security for safeguarding civilian cyber-infrastructure. He focuses on this provision:
The President must notify Congress in advance about the threat and the emergency measures
Some more details following yesterday’s story about the National Security Agency looking for a new top lawyer. As it turns out, the super-secret surveillance agency has been without a top-level legal adviser for about nine months.
According to an “NSA spokesperson” who insisted on anonymity — you would think More…
Looking for a change of career? Excited by the world of communications intercepts, network protection, cryptography, cryptanalysis and surveillance? Got legal training? The super-secret National Security Agency is hiring.
If you scour MSN CareerBuilder — in employee searches as in other endeavors, the agency casts a wide net — More…
The Pentagon just announced that late Friday, the Senate confirmed now-full-Gen. Keith Alexander to be the first commander of the U.S. military’s new effort at safeguarding its digital and information security infrastructure, known as U.S. Cyber Command or CYBERCOM. If that sounds like a vague mandate, it is, as More…
A surreal moment in Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander’s confirmation hearing to become the first U.S. Cyber Command chief: Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) noted that almost “all” substantive answers Alexander provided the Senate Armed Services Committee for how Cyber Command will operate and how it will work with the National More…
As first reported by Firedoglake’s Marcy Wheeler, a federal judge has ruled that the Bush administration illegally wiretapped the defunct Islamic charity al-Haramain, a major legal step in a years’-long battle to determine whether Bush’s constellation of warrantless surveillance programs begun after the 9/11 attacks broke the law. More…
Noah Shachtman has a great post about Google’s decision to ask the National Security Agency help the company defend itself against cyberattacks.
But there’s a problem. The NSA and its predecessors also have a long history of spying on huge numbers of people, both at home and abroad. During the
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 More…
On October 30, the Justice Department for the first time applied its new “state secrets” policy to a case charging the government with breaking the law. Open government advocates hoping for a significant change in the government’s stance toward secrecy in national security cases were sorely disappointed. Attorney General Eric More…
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