Jameel Jaffer
@JameelJaffer
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Director, @knightcolumbia . Editor, @just_security . Formerly @ACLU . This is my personal account. Also: @jameeljaffer .bsky.social & @jameeljaffer @mastodon .social.
Joined December 2011
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Another way to look at this is that forcing publishers to publish the government's speech is what happens in China.
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A judge just found that the Justice Department tried to send a man to prison in retaliation for his plan to publish a book critical of the president. What country is this, again?
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From the FBI agent who led the investigation into the massacre of civilians by Blackwater mercenaries.
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A few years ago it was very common for older liberals to complain that young people don't understand or appreciate free speech.
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This is worth reading. From one of the country’s leading experts on the laws of war: Trump’s pardon of war criminals might itself be a war crime.
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I didn’t respond to
@paulkrugman
's original tweet because I assumed it was just a bad tweet and that he’d figure that out on his own. But now I'm realizing that a lot of the events that defined the past 19 years for people like me didn’t even register with him. THREAD
I’m going to do a delayed update on a tweet from 9/11 that sparked a lot of outrage. Before I start, however, let me give you some data from the FBI’s hate crimes database, showing victims of hate crimes by motivation in selected years. 1/
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This is not the “never again” tweet one would have hoped for this morning.
.....THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!
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You imprisoned eight hundred men at Guantanamo based on hearsay evidence. (Which is one of about twenty reasons your tweet is bad.)
In America you can’t even get a parking ticket based on hearsay testimony.
But you can impeach a president?
I certainly hope not.
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Think what you want about Snowden and Russia. He did an immense public service by exposing mass surveillance programs that multiple courts later found to be unconstitutional. The newspapers that happily collected prizes for their reporting on the abuses should say this clearly.
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From a note that Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger just sent to the
@Columbia
community.
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Someone at Guantanamo has finally been charged, tried, and convicted.
BREAKING: A federal judge in Jacksonville, Florida, just sentenced the former Guantanamo Bay commander to two years in prison for obstruction of justice and other federal charges.
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Rumsfeld gave the orders that resulted in the abuse and torture of hundreds of prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. This should be at the top of every obituary.
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Disney blocks John Oliver episode to avoid inconveniencing Modi, whose henchmen are inciting anti-Muslim riots in India. Utterly craven.
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Romney will have no friends in politics. The people applauding him today will forget him tomorrow. The people condemning him today will hold a grudge. But he is doing something courageous and principled and his grandkids will remember him for it.
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A betrayal of the First Amendment and a great gift to authoritarians around the world, who will soon be citing this profoundly misguided bill to justify new restrictions on their own citizens' access to ideas, information, and media from abroad.
U.S. House PASSES bill forcing on requiring TikTok to divest from China or face U.S. ban, 352-65.
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Wait, what
A 57-year-old man drove a car into a crowd of protesters on Tuesday at a picket organized by CUAD outside a Barnard trustee’s home, an NYPD spokesperson said. The driver hit and injured one protester, and both were arrested alongside another protester.
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For example, hundreds of Muslim men were rounded up in New York and New Jersey in the weeks after 9/11. They were imprisoned without charge and often subject to abuse in custody because of their religion. None of this would register in any hate crimes database.
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@realDonaldTrump
The Justice Department is arguing in court that this is your personal account. Why does this tweet say "STATEMENT FROM THE WHITE HOUSE" at the top?
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The problem with the argument he makes here is that it doesn’t recognize that most of the "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" was *officially sanctioned*. Focusing narrowly on hate crimes stats has the effect of moving all of that out of the picture.
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If you’re participating in a protest today and see officers without badges/insignia, please post photos here (with time stamps and location) or send them to info
@knightcolumbia
.org.
We sent this demand letter to the AG late yesterday. More officers on the street last night and this morning with no insignia and no ID numbers/names.
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It’s true that he authorized torture, but on the other hand he did give Michelle Obama that mint.
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Jewish faculty at Columbia denounce the weaponization of anti-Semitism and call for the defense of the university as a "site of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production." Really good letter, worth reading in its entirety.
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Should have put a finer point on this. Trump's nominee for CIA Director is *quite literally* a war criminal. This is the import of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which SCOTUS held that "war on terror" prisoners are entitled to basic Geneva Conventions protections.
Trump’s nominee for CIA director oversaw torture of prisoners in CIA black sites.
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I could go on. The US has been in a paroxysm of "anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" for going on twenty years. That this doesn't seem to have registered with Krugman is really amazing to me, and pretty disturbing.
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Obviously unconstitutional. If American journalists can report from Kandahar, they can report from Cleveland.
Message from Cleveland police tonight: “No media is allowed downtown unless they are inside their place of business. Period.”
@CLEpolice
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Netanyahu is killing journalists, doctors, and humanitarian workers indiscriminately (or maybe discriminately) and doing everything in his power to provoke a war with Iran, but Biden is just sending more fighter jets. Madness.
The Biden admin is close to approving the sale of as many as 50 F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three sources familiar w/ matter.
@NatashaBertrand
,
@KatieBoLillis
,
@kylieatwood
& I report --
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The NYPD spent years infiltrating American Muslim organizations, surveilling mosques, extorting vulnerable people to turn against their communities—a strategy that was based on prejudice and turned up no terrorists.
@adamgoldmanNYT
&
@mattapuzzo
wrote a book about it.
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I don’t think Americans understand the extent to which the “foreign-intelligence exception” has hollowed out the Fourth Amendment. Most reporting about the current legislative debate is technical and incremental, and misses the forest for the trees. 1/
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I argued five years ago that
@Snowden
should be pardoned. I believe this even more strongly today. The past few years have only underscored the vital role that whistleblowers play in safeguarding our democracy.
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Have been getting messages all night from human rights and press freedom advocates in other countries. They are in shock that these kinds of scenes could be unfolding here. I guess at some level they all still believed in this country’s exceptionalism.
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This
@washingtonpost
piece should have acknowledged somewhere--perhaps even at the top?--that some of the criticism of the Biden admin's Disinfo Governance Board came from civil liberties and human rights groups.
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The Assange indictment is a dagger at the throat of press freedom. The Biden admin should drop the prosecution, as press freedom groups (including
@knightcolumbia
) have repeatedly asked it to do.
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How is the admin going to defend the constitutionality of this executive order when the president has already said he's issuing it in retaliation for Twitter's factchecking of his tweets? The executive order is already unconstitutional and it hasn't even been signed yet.
NEWS: On the flight back to Washington, WH Press Sec Kayleigh McEnany came back just before landing to say that Pres Trump is signing an executive order today “pertaining to social media” but had no details on what it would do, per WH pool.
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I looked into it. Turns out there's a constitutional amendment on point. Also some Supreme Court cases, and some political theory.
President Trump: "It's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it."
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Border agents harassed, intimidated, and interrogated American Muslims returning from abroad, and foreign Muslims visiting the US, often asking them to justify their religious beliefs and practices. That’s not in the hate crimes databases either.
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Man, if you think that standing decision was bad, wait til you read Amnesty v. Clapper. It will totally blow your mind.
Trump: They say you don’t have standing. You mean as president of the United States, I don’t have standing. What kind of a court system is this?
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Turns out that many of the things some of us worried Trump would do in his second term he actually did in his first term—it’s just that we’re learning about it only now.
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Since not everyone seems to know what I'm talking about:
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Think about this video the next time someone tells you that some protest somewhere "turned violent."
The chyron literally says "Protests turn violent in Salt Lake City"
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Like Voltaire said, we may not agree with what you have to say, but we will defend to the death your right to say it, unless you are standing alone in the middle of a public square wearing a keffiyeh, in which case you will be arrested for participating in an illegal protest.
In France a woman is fined for wearing a keffiyeh, under the pretext it means she's participating to an "illegal protest" (even though she's alone in that "protest"...)
Like Iran's "morality police", but for a religion that sanctifies Israel's actions...
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Very sorry to do this but in the circumstances I don't feel like I have any choice.
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This is an entirely fair question. The Trump admin protected the guy who murdered a Washington Post journalist. Now the Biden admin is doing it. Only the tone has changed--and even that hasn't actually changed that much.
"Is the only difference between Trump bragging about saving MBS' ass, and Biden acting as if he has no choice but to save MBS' ass... the words surrounding the decision?"
-
@JakeTapper
on the US announcing no sanctions for the Saudi Crown Prince over Jamal Khashoggi's murder
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I'm grateful to
@RashidaTlaib
for her courage. Her voice is absolutely necessary right now, and the effort to censure her is morally grotesque. Don't pretend it's about anything other than silencing a powerful, principled voice for human rights.
I am the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, and my perspective is needed here now more than ever. I will not be silenced and I will not let anyone distort my words.
I’m from Detroit, where I learned to speak truth to power, even if my voice shakes.
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Anyone who thinks the torture of prisoners in US military custody (at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere) had nothing to do with religion doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Here’s an email an FBI agent wrote about what he saw at Guantanamo.
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Not sure whether this is the right call by
@twitter
, but it's crazy that the social media companies are making these decisions without the benefit--or constraint--of any regulatory framework. The integrity of our elections shouldn't turn on the grace of private corporations.
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This is a crucial point. For every student who's intimidated by "river to the sea," there's another student who's intimidated by the Israeli flag. If we start suppressing speech on this basis, there will be no end to the speech we need to suppress.
I know some Jewish kids feel threatened by "intifada," which references uprisings that have involved anti-Jewish violence. But if we ban the phrase, what do we say to Palestinian students who feel threatened by the Israeli flag, emblem of a state that is killing their relatives?
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You would think that the editor of a magazine dedicated to exploring Jewish history and identity would know the history of statements like this.
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Thanks to
@attackerman
, we have a lot of info about how the FBI was training its agents ten years after 9/11:
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Here’s something quite amazing. The OLC wrote a powerful memo explaining why the Attorney General's independence is vital to our constitutional system. It reads as if it had been drafted this morning, in response to today’s political landscape, but …. /1
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The idea that the government should ban citizens from accessing foreign media because of its (purported) viewpoint is totally inconsistent with the most basic democratic and free-speech principles. This is a practice that has long been associated with the most repressive regimes.
“Why has the PR been so awful?… typically the Israelis are good at PR—what’s happened here, how have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities and our POV?… some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok.”
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The TikTok bill is unconstitutional. The First Amendment means the government can’t restrict Americans’ access to ideas, information, or media from abroad without a very good reason for it—and no such reason exists here. (1/x)
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Ackman’s arguments against higher education have boomeranged spectacularly but it must be said that he makes a very powerful argument for a revival of the 140-character limit.
Editors these days are so highly paid, even billionaires can’t afford them
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RIP Joe Wilson, who blew the whistle on GWB's false claims about Iraq's nuclear program.
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It would be a mistake of historic proportions to go down this road (again) without thinking very carefully about whether new authority is needed and how that authority is likely to be used and abused. Let's not make the same mistakes we did after 9/11.
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Reminder: A federal appeals court held that this person is unconstitutionally stifling free speech on Twitter.
....Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!
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If you’re under the impression that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with prejudice, you’ve forgotten about stuff like this:
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This focus on Zuckerberg seems like a distraction to me. What we really need are transparency mandates, new privacy laws, interoperability requirements, antitrust enforcement. Facebook will change if the regulatory environment changes.
Facebook‘s whistleblower Frances Haugen urged Mark Zuckerberg to resign at the
#WebSummit
. “The company will not change if he is the CEO.”
#Zuckerberg
#Facebook
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A UK court will decide on Monday whether Julian Assange should be extradited to the US. It’s crucial to understand that the case isn’t just incidentally about press freedom. The whole point of the case is to criminalize national security journalism. /1
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Read the replies. The reaction to this very mild and entirely justified criticism of Biden is just incredible.
At this point in office, Trump had given five news conferences. Obama had given two, George W. Bush three and Clinton five. Biden so far has given zero.
@farhip
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This whole thing is mind-boggling. The over-the-top headline actually manages to capture only a small fraction of the lunacy reported here.
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Interrogators routinely exploited Muslim prisoners’ religious beliefs in order to pressure them to share information. Here’s one example:
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Apparently there is a pop-up-window exception to the Fourth Amendment now
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The Acting Solicitor General filed a brief with the Supreme Court less than a week ago characterizing this as "President Trump's personal social-media account."
I am pleased to inform the American Public that Acting Secretary Chad Wolf will be nominated to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. Chad has done an outstanding job and we greatly appreciate his service!
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This is exactly why the story is so disturbing. Why is DHS compiling and disseminating *intelligence reports* on *US persons* for activity that is *protected by the First Amendment*?
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Disappointed to see this.
@PeteButtigieg
appears not to understand the indispensable role that whistleblowers have played, and his faith in congressional oversight in this context is naive or uninformed. Hope this isn't where he'll land on these issues.
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Confusingly, there’s a guy called Jamil N. Jaffer who is my ideological doppelgänger. When I was litigating national security cases at the ACLU, he was working for the Bush admin. He’s a nice guy but we’re on opposite sides of basically everything. 1/
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Largely forgotten, but many people inside the US military rejected and resisted Rumsfeld's torture directive. Few of them have been recognized. The officials who authorized torture, by contrast, were honored and nominated to higher posts.
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Absolutely incredible that Iranians and Americans are firing missiles at each other right now. What an indictment of the leadership of the two countries.
BREAKING: The U.S. has launched airstrikes in Iraq targeting the Iranian-backed Shia militia members believed responsible for a rocket attack Wednesday that killed and wounded American and British troops at a base north of Baghdad.
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Many of the deficiencies in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence can be traced to the feeling of powerful people that the government's surveillance powers are unlikely to be turned against them.
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I was worried that Trump would expand the drone campaign, but looks like Obama will do it for him.
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The large-scale deployment of armed officers to suppress peaceful protest on college campuses around the country is a shocking development. This response to peaceful protest is an assault on free speech–and it is also deeply reckless. (1/x)
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Good luck to my friend
@OmarJadwat
, super
@ACLU
lawyer who will argue tomorrow against Muslim Ban 2.0.
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Appalling. To state the obvious, a legislator genuinely interested in protecting free speech would not be asking a question like this.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn today asked if a Google engineer who has criticized her still has a job.
“He has had very unkind things to say about me and I was just wondering if you all had still kept him working there," she said
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Thanks to
@APDiploWriter
for his skepticism (entirely appropriate) and his persistence
Reporter: “It’s an action that you say they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. [...] This is like - crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now.”
Must-watch exchange between
@APDiploWriter
Matt Lee and
@StateDeptSpox
.
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Trump considering nominating Jose Rodriguez to run CIA--guy who oversaw torture, destroyed waterboarding tapes
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This mindset is dangerous. The free press is a bulwark of national security, not a threat to it.
AG Sessions: reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas. "We must balance the press's role with respecting national security."
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Immigration enforcement agents are being told what military & CIA interrogators were told in days before Abu Ghraib & black site abuses.
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The Biden admin is "heartbroken" about civilian deaths but not so heartbroken that it will stop supplying weapons, or limit the ways the weapons can be used, or demand investigations, or even ask questions. Which is to say, not very heartbroken.
State Department spox struggles to account for IDF shooting a man waving a white flag on video
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This is likely just the tip of an iceberg. An agency that is so cavalier about compiling intel reports about establishment figures like these is almost certainly compiling more comprehensive reports about others.
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This ruling was made possible by
@Snowden
's disclosures and by statutory reforms enacted in response. Be grateful that whistleblowers don't always confine themselves to official channels.
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We sent this demand letter to the AG late yesterday. More officers on the street last night and this morning with no insignia and no ID numbers/names.
Letter from
@knightcolumbia
to Attorney General Barr: "No-Badge" practices instill fear, chill protest rights, violate First Amendment.
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Americans aren’t going to understand the significance of the technical debate over the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act unless journalists who cover this stuff make clearer what’s really going on. 12/
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Free-speech week relocated to NFL football fields.
UC-Berkeley says 'Free Speech Week' is canceled. Milo Yiannopoulos says he's coming anyway.
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The Trump admin is relying on powers claimed by Obama, and on precedents set by him. This was entirely predictable. From my 2016 book, The Drone Memos:
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Something vaguely and disturbingly 1950s about this
@NYT
piece about
@wikileaks
and Russia.
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Even if this decision is politically savvy (is it?), it’s morally grotesque. Obviously 9/11 families deserve justice, but compensation should not come from funds that belong to starving Afghans.
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Maybe the most important privacy case in fifty years--and also a crucial test for the freedoms of speech, association, and the press.
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Such a disappointment that the Biden admin has decided to endorse and defend this digital dragnet. It’s the kind of surveillance one expects to encounter when one visits an authoritarian country. It’s an embarrassment that we’re subjecting millions of visitors to this.
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This is a powerful statement. Yes, I know. But it's a powerful statement and I'm glad he made it.
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Like I said to
@AJEnglish
, I really don't understand why the Biden administration would want this dangerous, short-sighted Espionage Act prosecution to be part of its legacy.
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I don’t know why this eloquent defense of the rule of law has been withheld from the public for four decades. Seems like it should be a reading assignment in every civics class. Here’s how it closes: /7
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Why are law enforcement and intelligence failures so often greeted with calls to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies more power rather than with outraged questions about why they didn't more aggressively or effectively use the power they already had?
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I know there are lessons to be learned from this sorry episode, but I feel confident that “the executive branch needs more surveillance authority” isn’t one of them.
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