This week, Senators Mike Lee, Dick Durbin and others proposed the SAFE Act, which the Senate Committee on the Judiciary describes as “Bipartisan legislation [that] would protect Americans from foreign threats and from warrantless government surveillance.” Whether the continuation of programs pursuant to Section 702 of FISA in any form would provide Americans significant protection from foreign threats is open to debate. What is not open to debate is that, at least as currently authorized, Section 702 of FISA is a blatant violation of Americans’ rights under the Fourth Amendment. In ..read more

In December, Congress rushed through a National Defense Authorization Act which included a short-term reauthorization of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 702 permits warrantless interception, collection, storage, and searching of communications related to “foreign intelligence information.” At the time, Senator Mike Lee warned that the reauthorization, although set to expire next month, would permit the program to continue until April 2025. It seems he was right. Last month, when the House was considering a new package for reforming Section 702, heat ..read more

In today’s digital age, headlines scream about “disinformation” as a pervasive menace imperiling the very foundations of our constitutional republic. It’s a term that’s often used to justify restrictions on speech, sometimes sincerely (but mistakenly) for the noble cause of safeguarding truth, but more often for the venal purpose of consolidating power.  During our tenure at Parler we witnessed firsthand the consequences of wielding this term too broadly: we believe Parler was unjustly scapegoated and deplatformed precisely because we refused to “fact-check” content in accordance with the ..read more

Later today The Federalist Society is premiering a short film/documentary on the “third-party doctrine,” something many of you have heard me talk about before. It’s the doctrine which gives a veneer of legality to all the bulk surveillance programs that were revealed by Edward Snowden over 10 years ago. Here’s the cute promotional poster they made for the occasion: Soon after Snowden’s revelations, I published an article proposing a solution, based in the common law of contract, for this decades-old problem. I am so pleased and honored to have been included in this project, especially because ..read more

I woke up on Monday to a love letter from YouTube, which reads in relevant part: What was the content? A somewhat geeky episode in which Benjamin and I explored the epistemological implications of an analogy between a specific aspect of the Dominion v. Fox News defamation case, and an accusation commonly leveled at COVID-19 mRNA “vaccine skeptics.” Apparently, during the course of this long-form discussion on the contextual nature of the onus of proof, Benjamin or I shared Super Dangerous Medical Misinformation. Watch it if you dare on Rumble: Given the delay between th ..read more

Watch it…if you dare! I woke up this morning to a love letter from YouTube, which reads in relevant part: I have appealed, and have asked, should they decide not to reinstate my content, to let me know what, exactly, violated their policy against “medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.” I’ll let you know what I learn. Regardless, the fact that their explicitly stated policy is to use government proclamations as a standard for what content is permitted on their platform, shows that they are ..read more

how will he handle it? Buried in this story about Elon Musk announcing his plans to convene a “Council” to make the tough, politically fraught content moderation calls (Ayn Rand’s “Anthem,” anyone?), was this gem: “ ‘In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,’ said the European commissioner for the internal market Breton.” He may as well have said, “The bird will fly according to our whim,” because their rules are non-objective. Perhaps he should have cut to the chase and said, “In Europe, you will think what we allow you to think.” Hard to believe this is being said by a human ..read more

Thanks to host Doug McKelway for having me on again ..read more

“Squirrel!”  The famous invocation from Up—a movie whose sense of life I’m not sure any informed human being will be able to experience again—is essentially what the FCC’s Brendan Carr has said to Apple, Google—and now the rest of us—in an official letter to the two tech giants’ CEOs. In the letter, published on Twitter earlier this week, Carr warns the two leaders of the danger posed by TikTok, and urges them to remove the app from their app stores.  The concerns seem legitimate enough. If a recently released report from Buzzfeed News is accurate, Beijing ..read more

Thanks to host Doug McKelway for having me on again ..read more