Episode 15: Skirmishes in the Surveillance Wars

The National Security Law Podcast

Bobby Chesney and Steve Vladeck

Courses, Politics, News, Education, Government

4.8 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2017

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this surveillance-heavy episode, Professors Chesney and Vladeck dig into a raft of news about foreign-intelligence collection authorities. They open with an overview of how Section 702 collection authority works, and then unpack the recent news that NSA is dropping the "about" collection component of Upstream collection under 702. They explain it all, including the obvious and perhaps not-so-obvious reasons for this development. This leads them next to the ODNI's 2016 Transparency Report, which just dropped and provides a host of fascinating data points about not only 702 but an array of other surveillance/collection authorities. Stay tuned to here them try to convince you that 150 million is not actually a big number! As your reward, you'll then get a breakdown of an array of recent and looming Supreme Court developments (cell-site data, anyone?), and a wrap-up segment that only Val Kilmer could love.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello from Austin and welcome to episode 15 of the National Security Law podcast, brought to you by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas.
0:11.3	Today is Wednesday, May 3rd, and I'm Bobby Chesney.
0:14.8	I'm Steve Lodick.
0:15.7	Bobby, it's a little bit of a somber week here in Austin, and I think we wanted to say a word at the top of the show about why we might be a little less jovial than usual. It has nothing to do with sports,
0:26.2	has everything to do with an all-too-real tragedy that happened on this campus on Monday.
0:30.1	A freshman Harrison Brown was killed in a stabbing attack. The other students were wounded.
0:35.3	You know, we don't know Bobby anything more than what's been in the news,
0:37.7	but we do want to note that, you know, we live in a very real world with very real threats
0:42.5	from lots of different directions.
0:44.2	Yeah, it's a terrible tragedy, and our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends
0:48.6	of the victims.
0:49.9	Anyway, but so that's why we don't have anything especially fun to say at the top. Bobby, there's no easy segue into the substance for this week, but just to give our listeners a sense of what we're going to talk about, we'll try to find some humor down the road a little bit.
1:03.5	Jim Comey testified, obviously, before Congress today.
1:06.6	Not sure how funny that is, except that apparently he talked about being mildly nauseous, which is now a big trending term on Google.
1:13.0	No doubt about it.
1:14.0	He has a knack for a good turn of phrase.
1:16.7	Indeed.
1:17.3	We're going to actually really spend a lot of our time beginning our deep dive into Section 702 of the Ford Intelligence Surveillance Act,
1:23.7	thanks to Bobby some interesting and, at least to me, surprising news from last week.
1:28.6	We'll talk a bit about transparency under Section 702.
1:31.9	Then we're going to talk a bit about some interesting developments from the Supreme Court.
1:36.3	And then we're going to pivot out from there to maybe a brief discussion of some of the
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