A couple of weeks ago, Wikimedia’s lawsuit against the NSA got thrown out. Wikimedia (and the ACLU, NACDL, Amnesty International, and many more) claimed the NSA was violating everyone’s rights with its “upstream” surveillance of internet communications. The court dismissed the case because nobody could prove that they had “standing”...
It should be clear by now that I’m no apologist for governmental overreach or law enforcement abuses. But after the news broke this morning about the DEA’s Special Operations Division, and everyone has been freaking out about yet another erosion of the Fourth Amendment, I feel like I ought to...
So after catching one of the guys thought to have committed the Boston Marathon bombing (and a string of violent acts thereafter), the government said they weren’t going to read him his rights. Not just yet. Invoking the “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule, they said they wanted a...
The other day, we said the short answer is that the killing of Osama bin Laden was lawful. Some have asked for a bit more detail in the answer. We can’t give the full answer, of course, but we can give a slightly longer one than we did. A full...
It’s only been a few days since Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. military assault on his compound in Pakistan. And in those few days, the internet has been buzzing with discussions, debates and hand-wringing over whether the U.S. acted lawfully. We’ve been reading thoughts of people on...
So on Thursday the WSJ reported that the Obama administration has changed the rules of investigating terror suspects, to permit interrogation without Miranda warnings in certain circumstances: A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that...
Last week, the House passed a bill that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts (by cutting off the funds to do so). The Senate is now considering it as part of the 1,900-page omnibus spending bill. This is largely seen as a reaction to...
Now that Julian Assange has been arrested in the U.K., his fight for the moment is to prevent extradition to Sweden, which wants to arrest him for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct. But given the comparative laxity of any punitive measures Sweden might impose even in the worst case...
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