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21 Apr, 4 tweets, 3 min read
Senators @RonWyden and @RandPaul, and in House @RepJerryNadler and @RepZoeLofgren, plus many cosponsors, introduce anticipated bill that would ban the US government from buying app data from brokers on things like people's locations without a warrant. /1 wyden.senate.gov/download/the-f…
Here's a story from January about the Defense Intelligence Agency buying commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps & searching them for Americans’ past movements without a warrant. /2 nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/…
This bill seems destined to become a proposed amendment to the larger bill on FISA reform and reviving Section 215 of the Patriot Act, if and when Congress gets around to picking that issue up again after it collapsed amid Trumpy chaos last year. /end nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/…
P.S. The bill would probably also block the CIA from buying calling metadata from phone companies, as I reported it was doing in 2013 amid the spike in chatter about surveillance related things due to the fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks. nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/…

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More from @charlie_savage

Charlie Savage Profile picture
21 Apr
Good explanation by @TomRtweets on CIA-NSA dispute over how much the lack of sigint in the pool of available evidence should discount confidence in the CIA's assessment that Russia offered bounties in Afghanistan. Dovetails w/ NYT reporting since 2020. washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/inside…
The facts - CIA analysts reached this assessment based on other types of evidence we have detailed, the Trump WH handled it strangely and then lied about whether he was briefed, and the NSA had lower confidence its based on concerns about sigint gap - are unchanged since 2020. /2
That the CIA (& NCTC) has moderate confidence in its assessment, meaning they think it is credibly sourced and plausible, and NSA (& DIA) has low confidence, w/ greater concerns over lack of sigint, is not new. It is the intelligence community status quo reported last summer. /3
Read 5 tweets
Charlie Savage Profile picture
4 Apr
Guantanamo's crumbling, super-secret Camp 7 is kaput, Southcom announces. (The high-value ex-CIA detainees it housed, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, have been transferred to Camp 5.)/1 southcom.mil/News/PressRele…
This article in December, a joint effort by @carolrosenberg, @EricSchmittNYT and myself, first put forward the chatter that closing Camp 7 and consolidating the detainee population in the 5/6 space was in the works. /2 nytimes.com/2020/12/15/us/…
In honor of Camp 7's departure from current-events relevance, let me one last time post this link to what satellite imagery and rare fragments of discussion in declassified documents etc revealed about its nature. /end charliesavage.com/what-google-ea…
Read 8 tweets
Charlie Savage Profile picture
19 Mar
In an already gratuitous tangent calling for overturning a key 1st Amendment precedent that protects the free press, 85-year-old Laurence Silberman seems to have lost the filter that counsels most judges against displaying a nakedly partisan demeanor. cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opini…
Silberman was Nixon and Ford admin official. He was a friend of Dick Cheney, who as WH chief of staff in 1975 wanted to make him the top WH domestic policy official, while Kissinger thought he should lead the CIA. (See Takeover p 49.) In 1985, Reagan made him into a judge. /2
In 1988, Silberman tried to give victory to the Reaganites' novel theories of executive power maximalism by writing an opinion striking down the independent counsel law and proclaiming the Unitary Executive Theory to be true. The Supreme Court disagreed, overruling him 7-1. /3
Read 5 tweets
Charlie Savage Profile picture
28 Feb
Thanks to @apcbapcb for the shoutout, in his review of @nicholsonbaker8's Baseless in @nybooks, to a point I made in my review in @thenation. But I would like to clarify something about this, for the sake of others out there who are frustrated by unsuccessful FOIA requests. /1
Baker's years of requests to liberate more information about Korean War-era bioweapons from the National Archives were largely unsuccessful. His original plan to prove what happened morphed into a book that is partly about FOIA's shortcomings. /2
In the section of my review in which I focused on his critique of the Freedom of Information Act, I pointed out a puzzling failure of imagination: Baker never filed a FOIA lawsuit. That's very often necessary to make FOIA work./3
Read 7 tweets
Charlie Savage Profile picture
16 Feb
I missed that DOJ has posted the individual certificates listing what offenses Trump pardoned for each person listed in his January 19 master clemency warrant, which had names but didn't spell out the covered crimes. justice.gov/pardon/page/fi…
Here's Steve Bannon's, for example.
Here's Elliot Broidy, a Trump fund-raiser who admitted to a role in a covert campaign to influence the administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.

nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/…
Here's Ken Kurson, a former Giuliani speechwriter and former editor of a newspaper Jared Kushner owned, who had been charged with cyberstalking
nytimes.com/2020/10/23/nyr…
Read 10 tweets
Charlie Savage Profile picture
5 Feb
I took a deeper look at the Biden WH not restoring the ABA's traditional role of pre-nomination vetting and de facto vetoing of potential judges, which the WP scooped the other day in a story about the Biden team getting geared up to make nominations. nytimes.com/2021/02/05/us/…
The ABA's pre-nomination vetting dated back to the Eisenhower administration. Its peer review system had long been a serious constraint on which lawyers politicians could transform into life-tenured judges. /2
But both parties, when in power, have chafed at that constraint. When Republicans' preferred nominees got dinged as not qualified based on temperament/ethics/competence, the GOP insisted it was instead because the ABA harbored ideological bias against conservatives./3
Read 12 tweets

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