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...
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...
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'...
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...
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...
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...
In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA's most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate. This...
Last week, a little noticed clash took place on Capitol Hill involving the fundamental values underlying the First Amendment. The issue was the lawfulness of publishing the secrets that were given to reporters by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward...
When President Obama chose a Friday before a three-day holiday weekend to address a matter as profound as the NSA spying scandal, I suspected he would raise issues that he hoped the media would ignore. That’s because the Reagan White House did a study in the early...
Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Administration (NSA), and asked plainly whether the NSA has been or is now spying on members of Congress or other public officials. The senator's letter was no...
