Perilous Times: The View from Inside the NSA

Description

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Technology and Democracy Project at CRASSH. It is part of the two-day conference on States of Exception in American History organised by Gary Gerstle and Joel Isaac of the History Faculty.

Geoffrey Stone

Edward H Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School

How did American intelligence agencies respond to the threats posed after 9/11? Professor Geoffrey R. Stone, who served on president Obama’s five-person Review Group that was charged with evaluating the nation’s foreign intelligence programs after the Snowden revelations, will offer a behind-the-scenes peek into the secret world of US national security surveillance. He will discuss both the merits and dangers of some of the nation’s most controversial foreign intelligence programs and he will outline some of the ways in which those programs can be reformed to strike a better balance between liberty and security in the future.

Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and the author or co-author of many books on US constitutional law, including Top Secret: When Our Government Keeps Us in the Dark (2007), War and Liberty: An American Dilemma (2007), and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004). Perilous Times received eight national book awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Book of the Year in History.  In the 2013, Mr. Stone served on the five-member Review Group appointed by President Obama to make recommendations concerning NSA surveillance and related issues. Mr. Stone currently serves as a Member of the Senior Advisory Group to the Director of National Intelligence.