I wanted to look at the the three documents that the government is withdrawing in whole or in part in the Thomas Drake case. Ellen Nakashima implies that three of the documents are three of the five charged documents. According to people following the case, the government may have to drop two Espionage Act counts [...]

Apparently, the government is scrambling in the Thomas Drake case. According to Ellen Nakashima, they offered him two plea bargains yesterday, both involving no jail time. He rejected both. Drake has repeatedly told friends that he will never “plea bargain with the truth.” Drake turned down a deal to plead guilty to unauthorized retention of [...]

There’s something else that has been going on as the case against Thomas Drake has gotten narrowed because the government withdrew some of its exhibits. Drake’s lawyers have been arguing that some of this information–and, I believe, some of the information that subsequently got withdrawn–has already been discussed by government officials. I noted this filing [...]

As I noted the other day (and Josh Gerstein first reported), the government has chosen to withdraw two exhibits and redact discussion of a certain technology from another in the Thomas Drake case. Ellen Nakashima appears to reveal that those three documents were three of the five charged documents. According to people following the case, [...]

The reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act focused a lot of attention on the fact that the Administration is interpreting the phrase “relevant to an authorized [intelligence] investigation” in Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act very broadly. As Ron Wyden and Mark Udall made clear, the government claims that phrase gives it the authority to collect [...]

Canada has just discovered how much corporations own our legal system, how our legal system criminalizes whistleblowers, and our utter and total disdain for the rule of law. At issue is the apparent conspiracy between Cisco and the US government to respond to an anti-trust lawsuit launched by Peter Alfred Adekeye, a former Cisco employee. [...]

As Josh Gerstein just reported, the government has decided to withdraw some evidence against Thomas Drake rather than come up with CIPA substitutions that would give Drake the ability to defend himself. At issue is “NSA’s targeting of a particular telecommunications technology,” which the government wants to hide. To avoid mentioning it, they are now [...]

This document, Judge Richard Bennett’s rulings on the admissibility of a number of documents presented in CIPA hearings, is interesting for several reasons, some of which I may return to. But I wanted to highlight that the government is trying to introduce evidence under a silent witness rule, something I hadn’t seen mentioned before. [Update: [...]

Even though he admits yet again that torture didn’t get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Furaj al-Libi to reveal the name of Osama bin Laden’s courier, Michael Hayden has launched yet another round of sophism to defend the case that torture led to Osama bin Laden–and if it didn’t it produced a whole lot of [...]

Earlier today, we learned that (thanks to Antonin Scalia) the word “suspicion” no longer means what it used to mean. Now we learn that “protected” doesn’t mean what it used to mean. As Josh Gerstein reports, the judge in the Thomas Drake case has agreed to let the government protect unclassified information using the Classified [...]