surveillance

Are there really any “lone wolves” engaging in dangerous terrorist liaisons? That’s what some opponents of section 6001(b) of the USA PATRIOT Act are asking.
Lots of Democrats now concede that Congress overreacted a bit after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to give sweeping authority to the FBI to conduct various kinds of sneaky searching and snooping [...]

Eight years after it was passed, the USA Patriot Act remains among the most controversial pieces of counterterrorism legislation in the so-called “war on terror.”

Marc Ambinder follows up on my question to John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism aide, about what role Brennan played in domestic surveillance during the Bush administration. From 2003 to 2005, recall, Brennan ran two organizations — the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and then the National Counterterrorism Center — whose analysts prepared threat assessments that [...]

I’ll have a broader piece up soon about John Brennan’s speech about counterterrorism, which in many ways represented a stark departure from several key tenets of the Bush administration’s approach. But on one issue that I asked Brennan about, the president’s chief adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security seemed reluctant to clear up an issue [...]

Here’s some clarity on a post I wrote Friday. I wondered what Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) meant when he called on President Obama to withdraw certain Justice Department legal memoranda that remain operative. Which memoranda? Apparently some from President George W. Bush’s second term are still in place.
In a letter — sorry, I don’t have [...]

Sure, the associate attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department is supposed to be in charge of the office. But in 2001, then-OLC chief Jay Bybee “was never read into” the President’s Surveillance Program and instead, his deputy, John Yoo, was the only one in the office who would “draft [...]

What do I mean when I say that the inspectors general report on warrantless surveillance shows a larger role for CIA in the post-9/11 surveillance efforts than has been previously disclosed? According to the report, CIA would prepare a threat briefing for President Bush justifying the need for such surveillance. Then-CIA Director George Tenet’s chief [...]

Last year, the Democratic Congress enthusiastically acquiesced to President George W. Bush’s insistence on carving out individualized suspicion and other privacy protections from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Democrats did so to preempt the charge of being weak on national security from the presidential campaign — didn’t work — and then-Sen. Barack Obama, who [...]

A long-awaited filing Thursday in the al-Haramain case presents a dare to the Obama administration.

So much for the most-transparent-administration-ever stuff.  Remember the Democrats on the House intelligence committee’s effort to open briefings on covert intelligence programs to a broader pool of members of Congress than the so-called “Gang of Eight?” And that they pushed that change because those restricted briefings enabled the Bush administration to keep Congress in the [...]