warrantless wiretapping

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 [...]

Jesselyn Radack at Daily Kos slams The Washington Post for its editorial yesterday praising the Senate Judiciary Committee for its highly compromised Patriot Act reform bill. “The Post turns a blind eye to the vast amount of civil liberties protections Senate Democrats and the Obama administration gave up at last week’s Patriot Act markup, instead [...]

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 [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and committee members Christopher Dodd (D-Ct.), Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) are expected to introduced in the Senate today a bill that would repeal the immunity granted to telecommunications companies under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) passed last year. The immunity provisions ensured the dismissal of [...]

Last week I wrote about the serious limitations on President Obama’s new policy on the administration’s use of the “state secrets privilege” to dismiss cases charging the government with torture, warrantless wiretapping and other egregious abuses of executive power. Although the government has said it promises to invoke the privilege more sparingly, it’s still notably [...]

Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.

After seeking to dismiss at least a half-dozen lawsuits alleging torture, illegal wiretapping and other abuses by Bush administration officials, each time on the grounds that the lawsuits would endanger national security by unearthing “state secrets,” the Obama administration today is expected to finally change its tune.
Carrie Johnson at The Washington Post reports that the [...]

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.”

After my post yesterday updating the status of the Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to conceal evidence that British resident and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed was tortured, Ed Brayton, a fellow with the Center for Independent Media and author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, asked me whatever happened to that promise [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post, I must point out the absurdity of the opening of John Yoo’s op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal.
It was instantly clear after Sept. 11, 2001, that our security agencies knew little about al Qaeda’s inner workings, could not detect its operatives’ entry into the country, nor predict where it might [...]