The real outrage about the Justice Department's use of secret subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press journalists is that, based on the information that has surfaced to date, it was probably legal.

Under federal law the Justice Department needs only a subpoena -- a piece of paper that...

Public employee unions face a new, and mortal, threat. It's not the unfunded liability of union pension plans or municipal governments' resort to bankruptcy to void union contracts. It's not state initiatives to restrict collective bargaining rights or other outpourings of voter resentment. No, the new existential threat facing government...

U.S. aviation officials are warning of severe flight delays due to furloughs of air traffic controllers triggered by the sequester's across-the-board budget cuts. I have a better idea.

Instead of furloughing controllers across the country, the Federal Aviation Administration should just shut down all major airports for the nation's...

John Brennan, President Obama's nominee for Director of the CIA, has the bad luck of having to testify before Congress on Thursday, just days after publication of a Justice Department "white paper" containing the administration's legal justification for the targeted killing of high-level Al Qaeda members who are also...

Although the stock market yawned at Facebook's announcement of "Graph Search," its new search service, with investors wagering it would only hurt smaller, vertical search services like Yelp and Linkedin, the truth is that it is potentially much more significant than that.

For the last several...

Christmas 2013 came early for Google as the Federal Trade Commission, following a two-year investigation into allegations of anticompetitive practices, announced a settlement that spares Google a battle royale with the government over its core business: the selection and presentation of search results.

Although the FTC

Apple recently announced that it had reached a global settlement of its patent disputes with HTC, a producer of smartphones using Android, the Google-owned operating system for phones and tablets that compete head-on with Apple's phones and tablets.

Although this settlement, covering some 50 lawsuits, will have...

If you were looking for a way to sabotage America's freedom of information laws, you couldn't do much better than a legal strategy being pursued by government entities in two California towns.

The public school district of Willows, in Glenn County, and the town of Sebastopol, near Petaluma, have been...

In the world of secret information about powerful people, there are two sets of documents in especially high demand right now. First are Mitt Romney's undisclosed tax returns. You already know about those.

The other is a classified legal memorandum, prepared by the Justice Department, analyzing the government's legal authority...

Everybody has a theory about why Mitt Romney, in the face of mounting criticism even within his own party, refuses to make public more of his tax returns.

My two cents: His returns for the years 2000-2005, before Romney had settled on a decision to seek the presidency, will perhaps...

Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the upholding of President Obama's health reform plan not because he believed that that was the legally correct outcome, and not because he wanted to spare Obama the loss of his singular legislative achievement. No, Roberts' deft decision, substantially upholding the health law -- while...

The orgy of political spending that has been unleashed by super PACs in the current election cycle exceeds what a free democracy can bear. A president who is obligated to repay even a fraction of the political debts created by special interests' funding of super PACs is a president who...

In America today, conservatism's one clear fault line, cutting across cultural and socioeconomic schisms, aligns conservatives based on their views about the relationship between government and its citizens.

On one side are born-again libertarians, like supporters of perpetual presidential candidate Ron Paul. Believing that governmental power and personal freedom...

The US Justice Department announced this week that it will sue e-book publishers and Apple Computer for conspiring to raise e-book prices above the levels that Amazon, the dominant retailer for e-books, had been charging.

News reporters, responding critically to the government's charges, were quick to point out...

Nothing brings out the hypocrisy of America's political class like the high-profile blunder of one of its celebrity members. Consider, for example, Rush Limbaugh's recent Tourette's moment, in which he defamed a law school student and woman's activist as a "slut" and "prostitute" because she favors contraceptive coverage in health...

BY PETER SCHEER

Successful technology firms pride themselves on their capacity to disrupt the established order. The reference is usually to a technological advance that poses an existential threat to an entrenched industry or way of doing business. Think of Apple Computer's impact on the cellphone and music industries, Google...

Jobs died at age 56, a young man. But one of the things that stands out about him is the longevity of his superstardom. Jimmy Carter was president when Jobs first appeared on the scene as the bearded personification of high-tech cool. From the early Apple PCs to the launch...

The economic forces that pummeled every American newspaper from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle have barely disturbed Rupert Murdoch's media properties. The Wall Street Journal, for one, has not only weathered the storm that decimated competitors' newsrooms, but it has added editorial staff, news features and...

Ever since WikiLeaks became a household word, traditional news media have had every reason to try to replicate its technology for receiving leaked documents, via the Internet, on an anonymous and secure basis.

Traditional media may be at war with Julian Assange and disagree fundamentally with his methods in vetting...

An inebriated John Galliano, sitting in a Paris bar, unleashes an anti-semitic rant ("I love Hitler") that is captured on a cellphone camera and posted on the internet. Within days the Dior designer is not only fired from his job, but is given a trial date to face...