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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
A long-awaited filing Thursday in the al-Haramain v. Bush terrorism case before a San Francisco federal judge presents a dare to the Obama administration: embrace the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance claims, invoke a secrecy doctrine that Attorney General Eric Holder has pledged to overhaul, or allow a case challenging the More…
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 More…
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 More…
Muslim groups are rethinking their previous commitments to work with the FBI in light of growing concerns that mosques and other Islamic centers are under surveillance or being infilatrated — without any evidence they’ve participated in a crime, The Associated Press reports.
That decision should come as little surprise More…
Julian Sanchez reads through the annual federal criminal wiretapping report so I don’t have to. On the surface it appears that federal wiretapping has declined while state-level wiretapping is, well …
This profound “decline” at the state level was from the highest number of authorizations in a decade to
Via ThinkProgress, this hot new New York Review of Books piece by Specter couldn’t possibly go over well with the GOP caucus:
First, I intend to introduce legislation that will mandate Supreme Court review of lower court decisions in suits brought by the ACLU and others that challenge
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), under fire for seemingly promising to intervene in a Justice Department probe and caught on a wiretap — Harman denies all wrongdoing — is demanding the department investigate improper wiretapping of her Congressional colleagues. (And also to release the transcripts of her own tapped calls.) More…
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