Hello, I'm Michael Winship. This is a Moyers & Company, Podcast Extra.

I'm talking with Ben Wisner, who is the director of the ACLU's speech, privacy and technology

project and a legal advisor to Edward Snowden. Since 9-11, he's been litigating a number of cases

involving abuses of civil liberties, including airport security, government watch lists, extraordinary

rendition, torture. He's a graduate of Harvard and New York University Law School,

and we are very pleased to have him with us.

Tell us about the Speech Privacy and Technology Project.

What's its agenda?

We're trying to plant our flag at the point where science and technology

and civil liberties intersect.

The rapid developments in science and surveillance technologies really do have an impact on

a whole range of rights, not just privacy.

And we want to have the expertise, the institutional expertise, to be able to identify what

those issues are and shape

sophisticated responses. So the project has lawyers, but not only lawyers. We have two full-time

computer scientists on our staff who are technologists, who are experts in encryption,

secure communications, surveillance technologies. They've been able not only to help us respond with more intelligence, I would say, to the intelligence surveillance scandals, but also to help identify issues that we might not have intuitively understood to be civil liberties issues.

We want to be looking at issues

that are not ready to be litigated, but might be important issues in five years or eight or ten.

One of the things I like to do is go into a room of scientists, maybe neuroscientists, and say,

what do you think the ACLU should know and be worried about? And just see what kind of conversation

comes out of that.

...