"Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger on Tuesday announced Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU as founding director of the First Amendment Institute, which was created to work to preserve and expand freedoms in the digital age.... “We’re at a moment in our history when freedom of expression, access to information and high quality journalism have never been more important, yet are facing unprecedented challenges,” Bollinger said in a statement. “No one understands that better than Jameel Jaffer. Throughout his accomplished career, Jameel has proven himself to be among the First Amendment’s most effective defenders and we could hardly have a more ideal founding director of the Knight Institute at Columbia.” Jaffer, who joined ACLU nearly 15 years ago, has litigated a number of notable cases involving national security and civil liberties, including constitutional challenges to gag orders under the USA Patriot Act and National Security Agency surveillance."

“I do think that the decision is important and surprising, a very significant victory for Julian Assange. I think the press freedom implications are more complicated. The judge — while ultimately holding that Assange can’t be extradited to the United States on the basis of his mental health and the conditions under which he would be held if he were extradited here, the judge largely endorses the U.S. prosecution theory. And that theory is based on an indictment that sweeps very, very broadly, that basically the indictment is an effort to hold Assange criminally responsible for acts that journalists engage in all the time. And it doesn’t matter whether Assange himself is properly characterized as a journalist. That may be an important debate, but legally it’s completely irrelevant.”

“Democracies may be more fragile than we care to admit, existing perhaps one election from tyranny. At a time in history when those words blink red in the mind, this investigation shows the dangers of investing government with the power to kill suspected enemies in secret. Jaffer and his team perform a lasting public service by exposing the ‘targeted killing’ policies, and Jaffer’s introductory essay is a much-needed corrective to the linguistic manipulation and official obfuscation that have made these policies possible.”

“Justice Alito’s opinion for the court seems to be based on the theory that the secret court may one day, in some as-yet unimagined case, subject the law to constitutional review, but that day may never come. In many national security cases, the government has prevailed at the outset by citing lack of standing, the state secrets doctrine or officials’ immunity from suit.... More than a decade after 9/11, we still have no judicial ruling on the lawfulness of torture, of extraordinary rendition, of targeted killings or of the warrantless wiretapping program. These programs were all contested in the public sphere, but they have not been contested in the courts.”

“This is a compelling exposé of the sophisticated and concerted efforts by Obama Administration officials to thoroughly subvert the international rule of law in the pursuit of minor short-term military gains and at the expense of American credibility.”

“Armed drones have given the United States the power to kill individuals anywhere, even far from conventional battlefields, but the United States has failed to articulate clear limits on their use—let alone subscribe to the limits imposed by international law. As Jaffer’s book makes clear, that failure has grave implications as the technology of killer drones inevitably spreads to other countries.”

“The important fact is that Assange has been indicted on the grounds that he engaged in activities like cultivating confidential sources, maintaining their confidentiality or maintaining the confidentiality of their identities, and publishing classified secrets. And, of course, those things, all of those things, are integral to national security journalism.”