David Kris on the NSA Annex
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2021
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
The NSA this week released a long-awaited update to its signals intelligence policy, which had not been updated since 1988. David Kris, former assistant attorney general for the National Security Division, shortly thereafter produced an even longer paper analyzing the dense and technical policy document. David joined Benjamin Wittes to talk about the significance of this new policy document, what it does and how it is different from the document it replaces. They also talked about David's paper, how he came to write it, why it is so much longer than the policy document itself and what the implications of the new NSA policies are for signals intelligence collection and civil liberties.
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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 |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | I take that little sentence except where FISA applies and I try to explain where FISA |
| 0:39.1 | applies, which means I'm doing a lot of spade work that they don't have to do because if |
| 0:45.6 | you're an operator inside NSA you've got some guidelines from your lawyers and compliance |
| 0:51.1 | personnel and your civil liberties folks and so forth, I'm trying to actually explain |
| 0:57.6 | within the four corners of my document what is going on as well as I can, which means |
| 1:04.2 | I've got to do a certain amount of foundation laying in for some of the shorthand in the |
| 1:08.8 | document in the SIGANANIX itself. |
| 1:12.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast January 15th, 2021. |
| 1:19.3 | The NSA this week released a long awaited update to its signals intelligence policy, |
| 1:28.1 | which had not been updated since, wait for it, 1988. |
| 1:34.1 | It's a dense technical document and so naturally David Chris, former assistant attorney general |
| 1:40.9 | for the National Security Division sat down, read it super carefully and produced an even |
| 1:48.8 | longer paper analyzing it. |
| 1:52.2 | David joined me in the virtual jungle studio to talk about the significance of NSA's new |
| 1:58.4 | policy document, what it does and how it's different from the document it replaces. |
| 2:05.3 | We also talked about his paper, how he came to write it, why it is so much longer than |
| 2:12.1 | the policy document itself and what the implications of the new NSA policies are for signals intelligence |
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