Andrew P. Napolitano

In some respects, the recent admission by CIA Director John Brennan that his agents and his lawyers have been spying on the senators whose job it is to monitor the agency should come as no surprise. The agency’s job is to steal and keep secrets, and implicit in those tasks, Brennan would no doubt argue, … Continue reading “Spying, Lying, and Torture”

“Chilling” is the word lawyers use to describe governmental behavior that does not directly interfere with constitutionally protected freedoms, but rather tends to deter folks from exercising them. Classic examples of “chilling” occurred in the 1970s, when FBI agents and U.S. Army soldiers, in business suits with badges displayed or in full uniform, showed up … Continue reading “Frightening People into Silence”

In what appears to be one of Edward Snowden’s final revelations, the former CIA and NSA agent has demonstrated conclusively that the National Security Agency has collected and analyzed the contents of emails, text messages, and mobile and landline telephone calls from nine non-targeted U.S. residents for every one U.S. resident it has targeted. This … Continue reading “Spying on Innocents”

After a brief holiday last week, I returned to some heavy reading courtesy of the federal government. Some of the materials that I read were gratifying, and one was terrifying. In one week, the Supreme Court told the police that if they want to examine the contents of our cellphones, whether at traffic stops or … Continue reading “Independence Day, 2014”

With heart-pounding suspense, John le Carre-like intrigue and Jeffersonian fidelity to the principles of human freedom, Glenn Greenwald has just published No Place to Hide. The book, which reads like a thriller, is Greenwald’s story of his nonstop two weeks of work in May and June of 2013 in Hong Kong with former CIA agent … Continue reading “No Place To Hide”

When President Obama decided sometime during his first term that he wanted to be able to use unmanned aerial drones in foreign lands to kill people – including Americans – he instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to find a way to make it legal – despite the absolute prohibition on governmental extra-judicial killing in federal … Continue reading “A Legal Way To Kill?”

Last week, National Intelligence Director Gen. James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans’ emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of their telephone conversations … Continue reading “A Government Admission of Wrongdoing”

Except for the definition and mechanism of proving treason, no area of the Constitution addressing the rights of all persons when the government is pursuing them is more specific than the Fourth Amendment. The linchpin of that specificity is the requirement that the government demonstrate probable cause to a judge as a precondition to the … Continue reading “Probable Cause”

Initially, I was gratified to learn that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was unafraid to take on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over the issue of domestic spying. The CIA is limited by its charter to stealing secrets from foreigners outside the U.S. However, in a recent dust-up, Feinstein … Continue reading “Freedom for Me, but Not for Thee”

The government is caught up in another scandal in which federal agents have been accused of hacking into one another’s computers. When the CIA was established in 1947, Congress and President Truman were concerned that it might not confine itself to spying. Its sole statutory purpose was to steal secrets from foreign governments so that … Continue reading “A Rivalry of Government Hackers”