warrantless wiretapping

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 [...]

The explosive inspectors general report released on Friday makes one thing increasingly clear: the Bush White House knew that it was probably breaking the law.
From the report itself, John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memo — and the lightning-fast reporting of Spencer Ackerman, Marc Ambinder and others on Friday — we now know that President [...]

Following up on my earlier post about how Attorney General Eric Holder dodged Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-Wis.) questions at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on warrantless wiretapping, Feingold just put out this statement:
I was disappointed by Attorney General Holder’s unwillingness to repeat what both he and President Obama had stated in the past – [...]

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 [...]

A federal district court judge in California yesterday dismissed a slew of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. government engage in warrantless wiretapping.
Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco dismissed the cases because Congress explicitly gave the telecom companies immunity from civil suits in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance [...]

While most of us were still reading or recovering from the latest batch of gruesome torture memos released by the Justice Department last week, bmaz at Emptywheel learned and reported that U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker issued his ruling in the al-Haramain warrantless wiretapping case.  In his order, Judge Walker rejects the government’s latest [...]

I hate to say it, but, I told you so…
Just the other day, when I was writing about the case of Jewel v. NSA (and responding to the Columbia Journalism Review’s criticism that no one was covering this important case about warrantless wiretapping), I remarked that while everyone’s been up in arms about the Obama [...]

Funny how,  as Greg Sargent at The Plum Line notes today, the Obama administration hasn’t yet taken a position on pending legislation that would curtail its ability to rely on the “state secrets privilege.”
As I’ve been reporting here, the Justice Department has been relying heavily on the privilege to try to dismiss cases that could [...]

In an interview with Katie Couric, Eric Holder dodged specifics on Justice Department plans.