Shane Harris and Benjamin Wittes with Serious Jokes on Surveillance
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2015
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A few weeks ago, Shane Harris and Benjamin Wittes spoke at Washington and Lee School of Law’s symposium on Cyber-surveillance in the Post-Snowden Age. Shane and Ben are familiar names to frequent Lawfare readers, no doubt. Ben is the editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Shane is senior correspondent at the Daily Beast and author of @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. Their speech, under the title "Point/Counter-point," is a lighthearted, but thorough, overview of the prevailing debates around NSA surveillance including the role of congressional oversight, our evolving perception of privacy, and how the law can respond to rapid technological change.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | So not to be outdone in the outrage department here that went back and forth between Congress and the CIA, |
| 0:37.0 | when my name Jake Garn, a Republican from Utah in the very staunch defender of the agency, |
| 0:42.0 | he left to Bill Casey's defense and declared, on the floor of the House, |
| 0:46.0 | in one of my favorite quotes from an American legislature, |
| 0:48.0 | quote, |
| 0:49.0 | you're all assholes. |
| 0:51.0 | The whole Congress is full of assholes. |
| 0:59.0 | All 535 members are assholes. |
| 1:06.0 | So let me just start by saying, Shane, you ignorant slut. |
| 1:12.0 | I want to suggest that there are a few things that are really overrated. |
| 1:17.0 | And they are roughly everything we talked about today. |
| 1:21.0 | That is to say, national security, the Fourth Amendment, and law. |
| 1:29.0 | And there's one huge thing that is grossly underrated. |
| 1:35.0 | And that's culture. |
| 1:37.0 | I'm Cody Poplin, and this is a LawFair podcast, February 14, 2015. |
| 1:43.0 | That was Shane Harris and Benjamin Wittis that you just heard. |
... |
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