Adam Klein
Lawfare
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Past articles by Adam:
What I Found in 19 FISA Applications
A set of 19 complete FISA applications offered a chance to form impressions about what these applications contain, and how the information is presented, across different FBI agents and government attorneys and over a span of five years. → Read More
The Long History of Coercive Health Responses in American Law
Americans are rediscovering the power of federal and state governments to enforce quarantine and isolation in the midst of the pandemic. → Read More
The "Section 702" Surveillance Program
Developing strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies. → Read More
The Cyclical Politics of Counterterrorism
Why didn’t the United States invade Afghanistan and destroy al Qaeda before September 11, 2001? This isn’t as farfetched as it might sound. → Read More
Today’s Big News About “Backdoor Searches”
According to today’s IC transparency report for calendar year 2016, only one FBI query in a non-national-security investigation returned 702-acquired data about a U.S. person in 2016. → Read More
Today’s Big News About “Backdoor Searches”
According to today’s IC transparency report for calendar year 2016, only one FBI query in a non-national-security investigation returned 702-acquired data about a U.S. person in 2016. → Read More
The End of “About” Collection under Section 702
As Bobby and others have already noted, the NSA announced Friday that it is ending “about” collection under Section 702’s upstream component. I want to inject into the discussion a few issues that I haven’t yet seen broached elsewhere. → Read More
The End of “About” Collection under Section 702
As Bobby and others have already noted, the NSA announced Friday that it is ending “about” collection under Section 702’s upstream component. I want to inject into the discussion a few issues that I haven’t yet seen broached elsewhere. → Read More
Don’t Dismiss Concerns about Transition-Period Unmasking (At Least Not Yet)
Even if Susan Rice and other officials did nothing unusual or illegal in unmasking transition officials, it is too soon to dismiss the allegations as a non-story. Patterns of conduct permitted by the rules might nonetheless raise legitimate concerns—particularly during the sensitive inter-party transition period. → Read More
Bipartisan Investigations: How the 9/11 Commission Did It
Amidst the turbulent investigations into the Russia Connection, it is useful to review what made the bipartisan investigation conducted by the 9/11 Commission successful. → Read More
Takeaways from House Intel Hearing on Russian “Active Measures”
Today’s just-concluded HPSCI hearing provided an informative, remarkably varied tour d’horizon of issues related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The biggest headline is likely to be FBI Director James Comey’s decision to publicly confirm that the FBI is conducting a counterintelligence investigation into Russian activities during the 2016 election, including “whether there was any… → Read More
Takeaways from House Intel Hearing on Russian “Active Measures”
Today’s just-concluded HPSCI hearing provided an informative, remarkably varied tour d’horizon of issues related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The biggest headline is likely to be FBI Director James Comey’s decision to publicly confirm that the FBI is conducting a counterintelligence investigation into Russian activities during the 2016 election, including “whether there was any… → Read More
Investigating Russian Hacking, Wiretapping Claims, and Surveillance Leaks
Developing strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies. → Read More
It’s Not About Mike Flynn
As Lawfare readers know, someone in government leaked the news that Michael Flynn did indeed discuss sanctions in his post-election phone calls with Russia’s Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. The leaker presumably knew this because the U.S. government surveils the Russian ambassador’s phone calls, a practice permitted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As others have… → Read More
Surveillance Policy in a Trump Administration
Last week, co-authors Michèle Flournoy, Richard Fontaine, and I released a Center for a New American Security report on the future of surveillance policy. The full report is available here; video of the launch event at Google DC is here. Peter Margulies analyzed the report last week on Lawfare here. Our report offers 61 policy recommendations, ranging from the legal standard for government… → Read More
Surveillance Policy
Developing strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies. → Read More
Thoughts on the Opinion in Spokeo v. Robins
The Court’s opinion in Spokeo v. Robins is here. I wrote about Spokeo when it was argued last November. My concern was that a ruling in Spokeo’s favor might limit Congress’s ability to provide private remedies for online harms that are intangible but nonetheless deeply injurious: > It’s easy to imagine many types of online conduct that a forward-thinking legislature might deem injurious—even… → Read More
Part III: Ending the AUMF War
Conventional wisdom holds that our ongoing war against jihadi groups is utterly unlike a war against a traditional state adversary. In my previous post, I argued that this is at least partially untrue: Jihadi groups combine “top-down” elements that resemble, to some degree, hierarchically organized state adversaries, and “bottom-up” elements that more closely resemble a decentralized mass… → Read More
Part II: Terrorist Groups and the Law of How Wars End
It is widely held that the inherent indefiniteness of the “war on terrorism” makes it utterly unlike previous American wars. Although there’s substantial truth in that truism, the reality is more nuanced, for two reasons. The first reason, which I discussed in my previous post, is that the exercise of war powers in past American wars has often bled messily into the postwar, requiring courts to… → Read More
When Does the War on Terror End?
Last week, Bob Loeb and Helen Klein examined the D.C. district court’s recent opinion in Al Razak v. Obama, which considered whether the war authorized by the AUMF has ended. I won’t recapitulate their excellent summary of the opinion and discussion of how the courts have handled this issue since Hamdi. But the case revives a pair of conceptual questions I’ve written on in the past: How do we… → Read More