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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
Benjamin Wittes 