It has increasingly become clear that the Obama Administration treats the category of “terrorist” more flexibly than the Bush Administration did. With the introduction of the term “countering violent extremism,” for example, the Administration broadened the potential application of terrorist tools to those who were simply, according to them, “extremists.” Then there’s the odd treatment [...]

In Charlie Savage’s story from last year on the sidelining of Laurence Tribe as head of an “Access to Justice” program at DOJ, he reported that Tribe originally believed he would serve as counselor for “rule of law” issues in Obama’s Administration. There was also concern over how his presence might play out internally, several [...]

Today, David Cloud portrays the vignette of the cold, detached remote killing in the Afghanistan countryside. Tomorrow it will be open ground in the vicinity of Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana or Key West. Hammers like this, once set in motion and cravenly unrestrained by the men in American political leadership and White House, always find more nails. Stay tuned, drone life and remote enforcement is coming to a city and town near you.

Well, this weekend is round two in this year’s F1 Circus, the Malaysian Grand Prix. The field is set and Vettel is on pole.

DOJ and Willilam Welch have a problem in their case against ex CIA spook Jeffrey Feldman for his alleged leaks to Jim Risen of the New York Times.

I’m going to have more to say about the Libya memo the Administration released yesterday. But I just wanted to point out something about the structure of it. Here’s the first paragraph: This memorandum memorializes advice this Office provided to you, prior to the commencement of recent United States military operations in Libya, regarding the [...]

In all the government shutdown, nuclear meltdown and Libya war of choice news dominating the media landscape the last couple of weeks, a completely juicy little tidbit was pried out of the Obama Administration by a right wing news outfit – and almost nobody picked up on it. CNSNews, the cyber division of the Brent [...]

There is a report today that the Obama White House is ready to offer the FBI Director’s job to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly; if it does, it would be a profoundly negative comment on the Administration’s craven handling of the civilian trials in Article III courts issue.

I’m traveling to Boston today for the National Conference on Media Reform (if you’re in Boston, come see my panel on “Independent Journalism and International Crisis” on Saturday!). So blogging will be light today. But I wanted to point to one more aspect of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Intelligence Authorization–one also highlighted by Steven Aftergood. [...]

I did a long post yesterday describing how embarrassingly, pathetically bad DOD’s information security was and remains 3 years after a malware attack and a full year after the alleged WikiLeaks leak. Along with DOD’s gaping security problems, I noted that some entities in the intelligence community are still in the process of implementing user [...]