Do we care so much about whether and how the government accesses our data perhaps because the line between ourselves and the machines that generate the data is getting fuzzier? Perhaps the NSA disclosures have struck such a chord with so many people because on a visceral level we know what our law has not yet begun to recognize: that we are already juvenile cyborgs, and fast becoming adolescent cyborgs; we fear that as adult cyborgs, we will get from the state nothing more than the rights of the machine with respect to those areas of our lives that are bound up with the capabilities of the machine.
Archive | 2014
Databuse and a Trusteeship Model of Consumer Protection in the Big Data Era
Coauthored with Wells C. Bennett How much does the relationship between individuals and the companies in which they entrust their data depend on the concept of “privacy?” And how much does the idea of privacy really tell us about what the government does, or ought to do, in seeking to shield consumers from Big Data […]
Reforming the NSA: How to Spy After Snowden
Coauthored with Daniel Byman, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2014 The long-running debate over the tradeoffs the United States should make between national security and civil liberties flared up spectacularly last summer, when Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, handed journalists a huge trove of heavily classified documents that exposed, in excruciating detail, electronic surveillance programs […]
Is Al Qaeda Winning: Grading the Administration’s Counterterrorism Policies
Testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream Thank you, Chairman Poe, Ranking Member Sherman, and members of the subcommittee for inviting me to present my views on the future of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and intelligence collection under Section 702 […]
Benjamin Wittes 