Charlie Savage

During a private meeting in February with former-FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump floated a proposal that, even by the standards of a leader who routinely advertises his disdain for the news media, brought editors and reporters up short. You should consider, President Trump told Comey, jailing journalists who publish classified information. Presidents are rarely afraid to wrangle and bully reporters, and Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, was pilloried by news organizations for aggressively prosecuting leakers. But Trump’s suggestion breached new territory for political reporters who already consider their profession under siege. “Suggesting that the government should prosecute journalists for the publication of classified information is very menacing, and I think that’s exactly what they intend,” said Martin Baron, The Washington Post’s executive editor. “It’s an act of intimidation.” While Trump’s proposal to Comey could be construed as a private fit of pique, journalists and press freedom groups said that they were alarmed by the possibility that he considered, even casually, enlisting the Justice Department to quash reporting he disliked.

The National Security Agency has halted one of the most disputed practices of its warrantless wiretapping program: collecting Americans’ emails and texts to and from people overseas that mention foreigners targeted for surveillance, according to officials familiar with the matter.

National security officials have argued that such surveillance is lawful and helpful in identifying people who might have links to terrorism, espionage or otherwise are targeted for intelligence-gathering. The fact that the sender of such a message would know an email address or phone number associated with a surveillance target is grounds for suspicion, these officials argued. The decision is a major development in American surveillance policy. It brings to an end a once-secret form of wiretapping that privacy advocates have argued overstepped the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches — even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court upheld it as lawful — because the government was intercepting communications based on what they say, rather than who sent or received them.

President Barack Obama largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration, and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous. The decision by President Obama rescued Manning, who twice tried to commit suicide in 2016, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the male military prison at Fort Leavenworth (KS). She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction. Now, under the terms of President Obama’s commutation announced by the White House, Manning is set to be freed on May 17 of 2017, rather than in 2045.

In recent days, the White House had signaled that President Obama was seriously considering granting Manning’s commutation application, in contrast to a pardon application submitted on behalf of the other large-scale leaker of the era, Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who disclosed archives of top secret surveillance files and is living as a fugitive in Russia. “Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” said White House spokesman Joshua Earnest. “Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary, and has sought refuge in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy.”

In its final days, the Obama Administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally-intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the NSA may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the NSA will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people. Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the move an erosion of rules intended to protect the privacy of Americans when their messages are caught by the NSA’s powerful global collection methods. He noted that domestic internet data was often routed or stored abroad, where it may get vacuumed up without court oversight.

The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) is a summary of high-level intelligence and analysis about global hot spots and national security threats written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the intelligence community produces many reports and assessments, the PDB is written specifically for the president and his top advisers.

Its origins trace back to a daily intelligence summary given to President Harry Truman starting in 1946, according to the C.I.A. Its current form began with CIA briefings for President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The intelligence community tailors the PDB to each president’s interests and style of absorbing information. At times, the briefing has included a “deep dive” into a specific question that a president may have asked or information that briefers believed he needed to know, such as the early August 2001 briefing President Bush received at his Texas ranch reporting that Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush received a supplement called the “threat matrix,” which listed more detailed intelligence about potential terrorist plans. Under President Obama, the brief has taken on some new topics and different forms, including a periodic update on cyberthreats against the United States. The P.D.B.’s form has also evolved. For example, President Bush preferred oral briefings to accompany the document, while President Obama has preferred to read the briefing on a secure tablet computer that lets him page through, underlining specific details.

Ten months after the Sept 11 attacks, the nation’s surveillance court delivered a ruling that intelligence officials consider a milestone in the secret history of American spying and privacy law.

Called the “Raw Take” order -- classified docket No. 02-431 -- it weakened restrictions on sharing private information about Americans, according to documents and interviews. The administration of President George W. Bush, intent on not overlooking clues about Al Qaeda, had sought the July 22, 2002 order. It is one of several still-classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court described in documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

The leaked documents that refer to the rulings, including one called the “Large Content FISA” order and several more recent expansions of powers on sharing information, add new details to the emerging public understanding of a secret body of law that the court has developed since 2001. The files help explain how the court evolved from its original task -- approving wiretap requests -- to engaging in complex analysis of the law to justify activities like the bulk collection of data about Americans’ emails and phone calls.

The Raw Take order significantly changed that system, documents show, allowing counterterrorism analysts at the NSA, the FBI and the CIA to share unfiltered personal information.