What does it mean that a military intelligence aircraft nabbed the terror suspect by sniffing out his cell phone?

With the arrest last night of Faisal Shahzad in the case of the failed Times Square SUV bombing attempt from Saturday evening, we see the continuation of a trend in which bombing attempts are botched, allowing law enforcement to move in, arrest the immediately involved suspect and then begin to investigate ties to larger groups.

Remember the OPR Report? No, not the OPR Report on John Yoo’s laughably bad torture memos. I’m talking about the OPR Report on John Yoo’s even worse memo(s) authorizing domestic surveillance. The Torture OPR Report notes that it was the domestic surveillance memo, and not the torture memos, that first clued Jack Goldsmith into how dangerous John Yoo was. So where is it?

So you decide. If you’re President Obama and Attorney General Holder, both of whom have already said that the illegal wiretap program was illegal, which are you going to choose? Accepting a ruling that says it was illegal, in exchange for keeping the details of that illegality secret? Or the invitation to take your chances with an appeal?

Lily Tomlin on The Merv Griffin Show portraying “an employee of one of America’s most beloved institutions — The Telephone Company.”

On Monday I did a post on what the DOJ IG Report on “Exigent Letters” revealed about the January 8, 2010 OLC opinion exploiting some kind of huge loophole in the Stored Communications Act. I’m now going to look at why–three and a half years after the abuse of exigent letters supposedly ended–Obama’s DOJ felt the need to get what DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine appears to believe is a very dangerous opinion from OLC.

Over the last nine years, the FBI changed its rationale several times for what it was doing with exigent letters. As with earlier excuses, the FBI was providing excuses they didn’t use contemporaneously, including claiming that telecoms turned over data voluntarily even though they had been given a letter promising a subpoena, meaning documentation exists to show it was mandatory. In both this IG Report and an earlier one, USDOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine takes them to task for claiming a justification retroactively, particularly where they claimed phone companies worked voluntarily.

During the early 1970s, my younger brother and I had an extraordinary opportunity: our dad worked at NATO in Brussels, and our whole family lived there. Europe was literally at our doorstep. We took lots of weekend car trips all over Northern Europe as a family, but my brother and I would hop trains throughout [...]

Last night I went to bed before I looked at the new SWIFT Agreement giving the US access to all of Europe’s finance data to track for terrorists. Here’s that agreement and here’s a Q&A document about what the agreement does. The agreement is instructive both for what it suggests about the negotiations between the US and EU, but also for what it suggests about the protections the US is willing to grant citizens of other countries that it is not extending to its own citizens.

Sprint’s geo-tracking feature has been used 8 million times in the last year.