This report analyzes four key aspects of US and Iranian strategic competition--sanctions, energy, arms control, and regime change. Its primary focus is on the ways in which the sanctions applied to Iran have changed US and Iranian competition since the fall of 2011. This escalation has been spurred by the creation of a series of far stronger US unilateral sanctions and the European Union’s imposition of equally strong sanctions, both of which affect Iran’s ability to export, its financial system, and its overall economy.

In The Breach of a Treaty: State Responses in International Law, Maria Xiouri examines the relationship between responses to the breach of a treaty, namely between the termination of the treaty or the suspension of its operation and countermeasures.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) is an independent bipartisan agency within the executive branch established by the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. The Board is comprised of four part-time members and a full-time chairman, all appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. On June 5, 2013, the British newspaper The Guardian published the first of a series of articles based on unauthorized disclosures of classified documents by Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency ("NSA"). The article described an NSA program to collect millions of telephone records, including records about purely domestic calls. Over the course of the next several days, there were additional articles regarding this program as well as another NSA program referred to in leaked documents as "PRISM." These disclosures caused a great deal of concern both over the extent to which they damaged national security and over the nature and scope of the surveillance programs they purported to reveal. In response to the congressional and presidential requests, the Board immediately initiated a study of the 215 and 702 programs and the operation of the FISA court. This Report contains the results of the Board's 215 program study as well as our analysis and recommendations regarding the FISC's operation.