Ten reports have gone missing. Under a federal law passed in 2008, President Barack Obama is required to nominate members of a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent office in the executive branch of the U.S. Government. Fusion Center administrators and information sharing specialists are required by law to take civil liberties [...]

On March 7, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be traveling to Colchester, Vermont for a special hearing entitled “Strategies to Protect and Promote Vermont Brands.” How does this state-level business marketing question fall under the jurisdiction of the national-level Judiciary Committee? Will judges be tasked with the milking of cows or the tapping of maple [...]

On the morning of January 20 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy reacted to the Inspector General’s confirmation that the FBI had illegally obtained Americans’ phone records under false pretenses by telling stories about threats of terrorist attack that did not exist. His words: Senator Patrick Leahy: This morning, the Inspector General released a report a few [...]

The following is a transcript of remarks made by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy upon this morning’s release of the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s illegal seizing of thousands of phone records of Americans (including those of American newspaper reporters) by: lying to phone companies, lying to FISA court [...]

Overnight, news emerged that for years, the FBI grabbed Americans’ private telephone records without any search warrants, and justifying the seizures of these records by claiming that there were emergency terrorist threats that in fact never existed. Thousands of times, the FBI completely invented stories of terrorist plots to attack the United States so that [...]

Senator Patrick Leahy insisted, even though the meeting had been previously designated as an appropriate time to deal with FISA Amendments Act reforms, that the matter would not be dealt with. So, the amendment had to be withdrawn.

Where Patrick Leahy, the committee Republicans and the collaborating Democrats could make make a meaningless pose of expanded protections for libraries, they did. Where they could have made an actual contribution to protections for libraries from the Patriot Act’s National Security Letters, they did nothing.

Senator Russ Feingold is right. A society in which a Senate Prosecutor Committee replaces the Senate Judiciary Committee is one where citizens cannot trust their own government, where law enforcement becomes a feared tool of the powerful against the powerless, rather than an instrument of true justice.

Senator Dianne Feinstein just got done saying that concerns about Americans’ constitutional rights must not be allowed to interfere with the powers of government spy agencies. Feinstein asserted that we should all understand how important it is that our constitutional rights be compromised, because she had been, yesterday, given a secret classified briefing yesterday that [...]

The first generation of US citizens had plenty of experience with the way that unscrupulous leaders could exploit fears about security to impose tyrannical abuses against the people. Those sorts of abuses, given the power of today’s surveillance technologies, are more important to protect against, absolutely, than ever before.