Jack Balkin has some insightful analysis of the Senator Specter’s NSA Bill over at Balkinization:
Jack Balkin on the NSA Bill
Category: Surveillance
Posts about Surveillance by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
The NSA Bill in the Mainstream Media vs. the Blogosphere
In reading the mainstream media accounts, one would get the impression that Senator Specter’s NSA surveillance bill is a compromise with the Administration, a way to limit Executive power, and that the Administration is reluctantly capitulating to judicial oversight.
Massive Government Data Mining of Financial Records
Apparently, warrantless wiretapping and gathering of phone call records just aren’t enough to quench the Bush Administration’s thirst for data. Now we learn that the government has gathered massive quantities of financial records. The New York Times reports:
The Technicalities and Complexities of Electronic Surveillance Law
Currently, there’s a debate raging about whether the phone companies violated the law when they supplied phone call records to the NSA. Orin Kerr opines:
Electronic Surveillance Statistics for 2005
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has released its annual report on the number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders, Wiretap Act orders, and National Security Letters issued in 2005. For FISA surveillance orders, 2072 applications were made to the FISA court; none were denied. Over the past few years, the number of orders has been steadily increasing:
The FBI and Illegal Cell Phone Records For Sale
A while ago, I blogged about companies that were selling records of the numbers people call on their cell phones on the Internet. Congress is currently conducting an investigation into these companies. Today, Bob Sullivan at MSNBC reports:
William Stuntz’s Misguided Theory of Privacy and Transparency
William Stuntz (law, Harvard) has long been advancing thoughtful provocative ideas about criminal procedure. I’ve always found Stuntz to be insightful even when I disagree (and I have disagreed with him a lot). Stuntz’s recent essay in The New Republic entitled Against Privacy and Transparency has me not just disagreeing, but doing so rather sharply.
NSA Surveillance: No Limit
When it comes to surveillance for the Bush information, it appears that only the sky’s the limit. From the Washington Post [link no longer available]:
Total Information Awareness Strikes Back
Government surveillance and data mining programs, it seems, never die. They just get renamed. So it has been with the much maligned airline screening program, which was originally called “CAPPS II.” It was canned, and a new program was started called “Secure Flight.” Recently I blogged about Secure Flight being canned, and I predicted that it […]
Gonzales’s Tortured Logic on NSA Surveillance
Attorney General Gozales brought out some new arguments in defense of the warrantless NSA surveillance program. He should have kept these arguments in the bag, as they are flatly wrong. For example, according to the AP: