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Of Presidents, power and the press

May 23, 2013  •  New York Daily News

Dropboxes. Disposable cell phones. Encryption technology. Is this what American journalism has come to?

James Goodale, the former New York Times general counsel who ran the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, says that the Justice Department's secret seizure of reporters' phone and email records and its use of official press passes to track reporters' movements in government buildings make President Obama's record on press freedom worse than President Richard Nixon's.

But we live in a very different, far more dangerous time than the America of Watergate. Protecting the nation post-9/11, when the world's worst people seek to obtain the world's worst weapons, means taking aggressive measures.

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On the Outrageous AP Seizures

May 13, 2013  •  Tablet Magazine

In a move that First Amendment lawyers and advocates call a sweeping and unprecedented assault on press freedom, the Justice Department has secretly seized two months of telephone records belonging to reporters and editors for The Associated Press, apparently in an effort to discover who leaked classified information to reporters about a foiled Al Qaeda plot last year in Yemen.

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How to Stop Terrorists Before They Kill

April 24, 2013  •  The Wall Street Journal

The Boston Police Department responded with extraordinary skill to last week's marathon bombing, but some terrorism experts say that the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 200, may well have been prevented entirely had the perpetrators lived in New York City.

Part of the difference is a matter of numbers and resources. The New York Police Department has a vastly larger force—roughly 35,000 uniformed officers versus Boston's 2,000—and a far larger budget. The NYPD spent $330 million of its $4.6 billion annual budget in 2011 combating terrorism. Yet that is perhaps not New York's most telling advantage.

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Stray dogs, not lone wolves -- a new profile of jihadis

April 18, 2013  •  Fox News

Who bombed the Boston Marathon? While the FBI hunts for suspects and "persons of interest" in this case, an influential terrorism expert says that law enforcement has learned much about the kind of person, or persons for whom the 1,000 F.B.I. officials may now be searching.

No one yet knows whether the Boston attack is the work of a lone lunatic, a domestic extremist or right-wing hate group, a domestic or foreign jihadist cell or still anonymous others.

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Somber Linings

April 16, 2013  •  City Journal

What a difference a decade has made in the nation's fight against terrorism. It's impossible to find "silver linings" in an event that killed three, including an eight-year-old boy, and wounded over 175 people. But it's true nevertheless that the government's response so far to the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon yesterday has been nothing short of remarkable, and little of it could have happened before September 11. "We now have an array of capacities that we simply didn't have before," says R. P. Eddy, a former director of the White House National Security Council who has advised New York's police department. "Our response to this attack—individually, and at the local, state, and federal level—is totally different."

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