Lessons on studying security
On Tuesday, Cass Sunstein, a member of a five-person advisory panel created by President Obama to make a sweeping review of U.S. surveillance activities, discussed the group’s efforts and the 46 recommendations it released last month, including major reforms to the way the intelligence community does business. “We did have a shared, unanimous belief,” Sunstein told a crowd at Harvard Law School, “that reforms are highly desirable.” Sunstein, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, examined some of the committee’s key recommendations, top among them the suggestion that compiling telephone metadata — information about whom a person called and when — be taken out of the hands of government and placed with either phone companies or a new, private entity. “Our recommendation is not that the phone companies should all of a sudden start storing the metadata. … They already have it. They store it.” The committee took the...