The Dangers of Secret Law

Last week, the Department of Justice released 18 new FISC opinions related to Section 702 as part of an EFF FOIA lawsuit. Of course, they don't mention EFF or the lawsuit. They make it sound as if it was their idea. There's probably a lot in these opinions. In one Kafkaesque ruling, a defendant w...

NSA Abandons "About" Searches

Earlier this month, the NSA said that it would no longer conduct "about" searches of bulk communications data. This was the practice of collecting the communications of Americans based on keywords and phrases in the contents of the messages, not based on who they were from or to. The NSA's own...

Yahoo Releases Second Wave Unsealed FISA Documents

Yahoo officially released part two of its once-secret government documents that were part of its 2007 court battle with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court FISC that forced it to reveal sensitive customer data requested by the National Security Agency. This second wave of documents brings...

FISC Approves 90-Day Extension of Section 215 Surveillance Authority

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has authorized a 90-day extension to the Section 215 bulk telephone collection program used by the National Security Agency, giving the agency through the end of February to run the program in the absence of legislation establishing a new...

Documents in Long-Running Yahoo FISC Challenge Case Published

During a long-running secret dispute between Yahoo and government officials over the constitutionality of orders from the federal government to turn over data belonging to Yahoo users, the company was facing fines of $250,000 for refusing to comply with the order. The revelation is contained in a...

White House Releases Plan to End Section 215 Bulk Collection

The White House today unveiled a five-point plan to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone call metadata, preserving what it says is a balance between the intelligence community’s national security needs and the public’s desire to maintain its privacy. The proposal ends the...

New Bill Would End Mass Surveillance

UPDATE: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner R-Wisc. is introducing a bill that would counteract many of the elements of the U.S. PATRIOT Act that enables the mass collection of data belonging to U.S. citizens. Sensenbrenner’s bill is called the USA FREEDOM Act, a quasi-acronym for Uniting and Strengthening...

FISC Court renews the Permission to collect Telephony Metadata again

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has once again has renewed the permission to the U.S. government for a controversial program to collect the telephony metadata from American phone companies. The News that the NSA collects bulk phone call metadata including phone numbers, call times and...

Dropbox Requests National Security Letter Transparency

Dropbox, as LinkedIn did a week ago, filed an amicus brief yesterday with the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court FISC requesting permission to publish the number of National Security Letter requests the cloud storage company receives. Dropbox followed LinkedIn’s lead, arguing i...

FISC: No Phone Company Ever Challenged Metadata Collection Orders

A newly declassified opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from this summer shows the court’s interpretation of the controversial Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act that’s used to justify the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collections, and reveals that none ...

DNI Releases FISC Docs, But Legislators Say Much More Remains Hidden

The federal government has released hundreds of pages of documents, including orders and opinions from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, related to the NSA’s surveillance programs, but legislators who have been involved in the process say that there still are significant...

Google, Facebook, Yahoo File NSL Transparency Motions

Google, Yahoo and Facebook filed amended requests today with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court FISC reiterating their desire to publish numbers on requests for user data related to national security. Google, meanwhile, went a step further asking for an open, public hearing with the...

Government to Release Hundreds of Documents Related to NSA Surveillance

In response to a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Department of Justice is preparing to release a trove of documents related to the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. The declassified documents will include previously secret opinions of the...

Declassified 2011 FISC Opinion Shows Court Found Some NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional

Newly declassified documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the EFF show that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 declared that the National Security Agency’s techniques for collecting upstream Internet communications was unconstitutional an...

New Bill Would Declassify FISC Opinions

A group of eight senators from both parties have introduced a new bill that would require the attorney general to declassify as many of the rulings of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as possible as a way of bringing into the sunlight much of the law and opinion that guides the...