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.

The official report that has shaped the international debate about NSA surveillance "We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking. Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials."—The NSA Report This is the official report that is helping shape the international debate about the unprecedented surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Commissioned by President Obama following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, and written by a preeminent group of intelligence and legal experts, the report examines the extent of NSA programs and calls for dozens of urgent and practical reforms. The result is a blueprint showing how the government can reaffirm its commitment to privacy and civil liberties—without compromising national security.

Reproduction of the original: The Right to Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis

"A result of an activity called for in Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28), issued by President Obama in January 2014, to evaluate U.S. signals intelligence practices. The directive instructed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to produce a report within one year 'assessing the feasibility of creating software that would allow the intelligence community more easily to conduct targeted information acquisition rather than bulk collection.' ODNI asked the National Research Council (NRC) - the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering - to conduct a study, which began in June 2014, to assist in preparing a response to the President."--Publisher's description.

National Security Law and Counterterrorism Law, 2023-2024 Supplement

This edited collection explores the topic of constitutionalism across borders in the struggle against terrorism, analyzing how constitutional rules and principles relevant in the field of counter-terrorism move across borders. Various chapters underline how constitution-like norms consolidate at the level of international and supranational organizations as a limit to the exercise of public power in the field of counter-terrorism policy, especially counter-terrorism financing. Other chapters examine the extraterritorial application of constitutional rights and the migration of constitutional norms – or anti-constitutional practices – from one state to another. Still others consider how transnational cooperation between states in areas such as intelligence gathering and data sharing may call for updating domestic constitutional law rules or for new international law compacts entrenching rights across borders. What emerges is a picture of the complex interplay of constitutional law, international law, criminal law and the law of war, creating webs of norms and regulations that apply in the struggle against terrorism conducted across increasingly porous borders. The book will be of particular interest to academics and graduate or postgraduate students working in the fields of constitutional law, international law, human rights, comparative law and national security law. It may also be of interest to practitioners concerned with national security, counter-terrorism, and related questions of individual rights.