Coauthored with Ritika Singh, Published in What So Proudly We Hailed: Essays on the Contemporary Meaning of the War of 1812, October 31, 2012. In November of 1814, the White House lay in ashes, burned to the ground by British troops. President James Madison was living in temporary quarters at the so-called Octagon House, having […]
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Against a Crude Balance: Platform Security and the Hostile Symbiosis Between Liberty and Security
The Brookings and Harvard Law School Project on Law and Security, September 21, 2011 “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” —Benjamin Franklin They are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship between liberty and security. They have become iconic. A […]
The Emerging Law of Detention 2.0: The Guantánamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking
Coauthored with Robert M. Chesney, Larkin Reynolds and The Harvard Law School National Security Research Committee. Brookings Institution, May 12, 2011. In January 2010, the Governance Studies department at Brookings released a paper entitled “The Emerging Law of Detention: The Guantánamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking.” In that paper, two of the present authors sought to describe […]
Databuse: Digital Privacy and the Mosaic
Brookings Institution, April 1, 2011, “The question of privacy lies at, or just beneath, the surface of a huge range of contemporary policy disputes. It binds together the American debates over such disparate issues as counter-terrorism and surveillance, online pornography, abortion, and targeted advertising. It captures something deep that a free society necessarily values in […]
Rationalizing Government Collection Authorities: A Proposal for Radical Simplification
Coauthored with Rabea Benhalim and Wells C. Bennett. Brookings Institution, January 7, 2011 The life of every person in an advanced industrialized country is a mosaic of digital information stored on public and private computer servers around the world. Most of the tiles of your own personal mosaic do not reside in your hands. They […]
Innovation’s Darker Future: Biosecurity, Technologies of Mass Empowerment, and the Constitution
Brookings Institution, December 8, 2010 “Using gene-splicing equipment available online and other common laboratory equipment and materials, a molecular biology graduate student undertakes a secret project to recreate the smallpox virus. Not content merely to bring back an extinct virus to which the general population is now largely naïve, he uses public source material to […]
Designing Detention: A Model Law for Terrorist Incapacitation
Coauthored with Colleen A. Peppard, Brookings Institution, June 26, 2009 A consensus is beginning to emerge in the public and political spheres concerning the non-criminal detention of terrorist suspects. Over the past several years, non-criminal detention of Al Qaeda and Taliban captives at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba has sharply divided the American polity. Since the change […]
The Emerging Law of Detention: The Guantánamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking
Brookings Institution, January 22, 2010 President Obama’s decision not to seek additional legislative authority for detentions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—combined with Congress’s lack of interest in the task—means that, for good or for ill, judges must write the rules governing military detention of terrorist suspects. As the United States reaches the president’s self-imposed January 22, […]
Looking Forward, Not Backward: Refining American Interrogation Law
Coauthored with Stuart S. Taylor, Jr. Part of the Series on Counterterrorism and American Statutory Law, a joint project of the Brookings Institution, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Hoover Institution, May 10, 2009 The worldwide scandal spurred by the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Afghanistan and secret CIA prisons during the […]
The Current Detainee Population of Guantánamo: An Empirical Study
Coauthored with Zaahira Wyne. Brookings Institution, December 16, 2008 The following report represents an effort both to document and to describe in as much detail as the public record will permit the current detainee population in American military custody at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba. Since the military brought the first detainees to […]
A Legal Framework for Detaining Terrorists: Enact a Law to End the Clash over Rights
Coauthored with Mark Gitenstein, Brookings Institution, November 15, 2007 Six years after the September 11 attacks, the United States still lacks a stable, legislatively established policy for detaining suspected foreign fighters captured in the war on terrorism. American detention policy has eroded this country’s international prestige and public image, embroiled its military in continuous litigation, […]
Benjamin Wittes 