Benjamin Wittes - Constitution Day at the NSA
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
In mid-September, Benjamin Wittes, Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, delivered a keynote address on Constitution Day at the National Security Agency. We are pleased to now be able to provide that speech in full. That’s right - it took this long for an unclassified speech, from someone without a security clearance, to pass through the declassification process. To that point, Ben’s address touches on the difficulties of transparency in intelligence operations, outlines just why so many people now struggle to trust the intelligence community, and concludes with three challenges the community must address in order to maintain public confidence in the future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:27.2 | and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.0 | There are all kinds of things that we rely on for their legitimacy for you guys to do them, |
| 0:40.9 | principles that aren't really very neutral. |
| 0:44.0 | And I think this is, I'm not making any apologies for that by the way, but I think it is the |
| 0:51.7 | tectonic level of what gives rise to this very deep mistrust. |
| 0:59.0 | A friend of mine at CIA joke to me once that if it were legal under local law for us to |
| 1:06.6 | do it, if it were legal under local law to do it, you wouldn't need to have a CIA. |
| 1:12.3 | That's what the State Department is for. |
| 1:15.0 | And I think that's an interesting statement about why we have clandestine intelligence |
| 1:23.3 | services and it's a little bit hard conceptually to reconcile not impossible, but it's a little |
| 1:30.6 | bit tricky to reconcile with the idea of constitutions based on neutral principles. |
| 1:37.8 | I'm Cody Poplin and this is the LawFair podcast February 21, 2014. |
| 1:44.1 | How has Benjamin Wittis you just heard? |
| 1:45.8 | Editor-in-Chief of LawFair and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. |
| 1:49.8 | Back in mid-September, Ben delivered a keynote address on Constitution Day at the National |
| 1:54.5 | Security Agency, which we can now provide to you in full. |
| 1:58.2 | That's right, it took this long for an unclassified speech from someone without a security clearance |
| 2:03.4 | to pass through the declassification process. |
... |
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