When Congress enacted the Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA), it claimed the statute would guarantee the privacy of digital data that service providers were retaining in storage. The act prohibited the providers from sharing the stored data, and it prohibited...
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to deceive." ~ Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) The case of the Gitmo plea agreement keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. A few weeks ago, we learned that a plea agreement had been entered into by way of a signed...
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." ~ First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution When James Madison agreed to be the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787, he could not have known that just...
It is always dangerous to human freedom and due process when politics interferes with criminal prosecutions. Yet, present-day America is replete with tawdry examples of this. The recent exposures of the political machinations of the Chief Justice of the United States...
In 1966, two famous Russian literary dissidents, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, were tried and convicted on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet state. The two were authors and humorists who published satire abroad that mocked Soviet leaders for...
"America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy ... She might become the dictatress of the world, But she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit." ~ John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) In the middle of his term as Secretary of State, the future president...
Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the "wall" between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited...
In the months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating them on Osama bin Laden. Then, after it murdered bin Laden, the government decided that the true mastermind was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. By the time of bin Laden's death,...
Sometime before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have "near certainty" that the target of...
"I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude." ~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) It wasn't until 1969 that the Supreme Court's modern First Amendment jurisprudence made it clear that whenever there is a clash between the government and a person over the...
