Timothy Edgar

A must read! My students have been reading for years.

Cybersecurity and privacy technology offer better solutions. Courts and lawmakers should do better!

Tl/dr: more control and less freedom online, as the justices decide to prioritize potential harms in uphold a ban on TikTok and age verification for accessing pornography.

Evaluating the Supreme Court: Harvard Law faculty weigh in on 2024-2025 SCOTUS term  - Harvard Law School Harvard Law faculty offer their thoughts on some of the most important Supreme Court decisions of this term — and how they could impact the law and society.

My take on what the Supreme Court's term means for the internet, in Harvard Law Today (scroll down to Timothy Edgar, Lecturer on Law). hls.harvard.edu/today/evalua...

Digital Identity Leaders and Privacy Experts Sound the Alarm on Invasive ID Systems | American Civil Liberties Union Signatories, including the ACLU, warn officials of “Phone Home” feature of digital IDs that allows the government to track people’s daily lives

Identity/credential services should not be snooping on us. #nophonehome

Brown to confer honorary degrees on seven distinguished leaders at Commencement 2025 The University will bestow honorary degrees on a diverse group of community leaders, artists, writers, performers and scholars during its Commencement exercises on Sunday, May 25.

It’s a special honor to be among those receiving honorary degrees from Brown. It’s a place that welcomed me and shaped me and challenged me and liberated me, and made possible everything that came after. I’m looking forward to celebrating this weekend with friends.
www.brown.edu/news/2025-05...

Signal Gate: The Criminal Law Precedents That Are Most Relevant A range of federal laws, including the Espionage Act and laws against the destruction of government records, could apply in Signal Gate.

With renewed relevance, this explainer I wrote last month:

Signal Gate: The Criminal Law Precedents That Are Most Relevant

The key legal issues are:

--> 18 U.S.C. 793(f)(1) of the Espionage Act - gross negligence
--> Destruction of government records

CISA reverses course, extends MITRE CVE contract While the last-minute extension averts an immediate lapse in support, rival organizations are being stood up to supplant the global vulnerability system.

In a last-minute switch, the #CISA said it will continue funding a contract for #MITRE to manage the CVE program and other vulnerability databases. via @derekbjohnson.bsky.social cyberscoop.com/cisa-reverse...

YouTube video by Forbes Breaking News Facebook Whistleblower Makes Shock Claim About Mark Zuckerberg During Senate Testimony

Facebook whistleblower testimony on Mark Zuckerberg's cooperation with CCP shows why Congress was wrong to focus exclusively on TikTok when US and other Big Tech companies play footsie with China in service of the bottom line. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zzx...

YouTube video by Forbes Breaking News Facebook Whistleblower Makes Shock Claim About Mark Zuckerberg During Senate Testimony

Some riveting testimony from a whistleblower on Facebook's detailed cooperation with CCP censorship even as Mark Zuckerberg was denying this before Congress. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zzx...

Terrific for Maine!

Principals Committee. It's the highest level in the National Security Council below the President.

I'm a former intelligence official. The Signal fiasco was as risky as leaving the nuclear codes in a Starbucks. Timothy H. Edgar worked inside the intelligence community during the Bush and Obama administrations. He called the Signal debacle "remarkably reckless."

Everything in the "Houthi PC small group" chat, including the name, should only have been discussed in classified channels. www.businessinsider.com/trump-admini...

Historical tidbit: the reason it was called D-Day is so the Germans wouldn't know what DAY the attack was coming, which was sensitive even though they didn't know where the attack was coming.

I'm a former intelligence official. The Signal fiasco was as risky as leaving the nuclear codes in a Starbucks. Timothy H. Edgar worked inside the intelligence community during the Bush and Obama administrations. He called the Signal debacle "remarkably reckless."

Leaving the nuclear codes in a Starbucks would be reckless even if a journalist noticed and politely gave them back to you without publishing them.

Remember when Trump tore up documents and flushed them down the WH toilet in his first term? Here's a good analysis in @lawfare.bsky.social of the laws that were broken then. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trum...

There are also criminal penalties for intentionally making US government records disappear. 18 U.S.C. § 641 (“Whoever . . . disposes of any record . . . of the United States . . . [s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”)

The law specifically provides that using private messaging services without copying official accounts for records preservation subjects WH staff to disciplinary action. 44 U.S.C. § 2209.

Fun fact: Presidential Records Act provides that WH staff may not use a "non-official electronic messaging account" without copying an official account so records may be preserved. 44 U.S.C. § 2209.

Just so we're all clear on the law: it is a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison to allow "information relating to the national defense through gross negligence" to be delivered to people not allowed to received it. Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. § 793(f).

Beyond Snowden Winner of the 2018 Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize Safeguarding our privacy and our values in an age of mass surveillance America’s mass surveillance programs, once sec...

I wrote about about the Snowden leaks that criticizes excessive secrecy. The Signal chat is not a close call: these are the kind of secrets intelligence officials get medals for when they get them from other nations. www.brookings.edu/books/beyond...

I'm a former intelligence official. The Signal fiasco was as risky as leaving the nuclear codes in a Starbucks. Timothy H. Edgar worked inside the intelligence community during the Bush and Obama administrations. He called the Signal debacle "remarkably reckless."

A high-level conversation about whether to conduct military operations, and following them in real time, is literally what the Situation Room is for. Saying they were unclassified insults our intelligence. www.businessinsider.com/trump-admini...

I'm a former intelligence official. The Signal fiasco was as risky as leaving the nuclear codes in a Starbucks. Timothy H. Edgar worked inside the intelligence community during the Bush and Obama administrations. He called the Signal debacle "remarkably reckless."

Don't have classified conversations on commercial platforms - and yes, discussing military strikes before they happen is classified, I tell @businessinsider.com
www.businessinsider.com/trump-admini...

SignalGate Isn’t About Signal The Trump cabinet’s shocking leak of its plans to bomb Yemen raises myriad confidentiality and legal issues. The security of the encrypted messaging app Signal is not one of them.

SignalGate Isn’t About Signal
The Trump cabinet’s shocking leak of its plans to bomb Yemen raises myriad confidentiality and legal issues. The security of the encrypted messaging app Signal is not one of them.
www.wired.com/story/signal...

Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within Somewhere between the tendency to see everything through the lens of race and racial oppression and the tendency to dismiss those dynamics altogether lies the truth in any given setting, including cri...

I'll be speaking with @pgeddington.com and Michael Fox about my book, "Policing White Supremacy," on Wednesday, March 26 at 1pm at the Cato Institute in D.C. @cato.org Join us for a lively discussion! Register here: www.cato.org/events/polic...

Holy cow❗

People apparently _returned_ from El Salvador for mistaken identity etc. in Alien Enemies Act deportations.

This new development appears to show that the Trump administration's claim that they know all detainees sent to El Salvador prison were properly vetted may be dangerously false.⬇️

This will be a test of the new, close relationships tech has been building with Trump.

If tech calls Congress’ bluff and Trump so much as lifts a finger, lawmakers’ only play will be to roll over or to push the big red button that blows up the internet, even as they admit that’s not the goal.

What's New and What's Not New with Universal Injunctions Notes on Jack Goldsmith's "Problems with Universal Injunctions Against Trump’s Program?"

The authoritative Sam Bray weighs in with terrific points about the current universal injunction spats, in part in response to what I wrote this morning.

blog.dividedargument.com/p/whats-new-...

Machine Surveillance is Being Super-Charged by Large AI Models | ACLU Limits and guardrails are vital to protect our privacy and liberty — as well as our sanity — against omnipresent AI surveillance.

Large language model technology is super-charging video analytics. Unless we enact guardrails, we can expect that nearly every rule, regulation, law, and employer dictate that can be enforced through the visual monitoring of human beings will be subject to unblinking AI cameras ready to report us.

Perhaps the talk of offensive cyber is just that - talk - serving as a smokescreen for ignoring the far more important task of making public and private computer system secure.