Defending Snowden
On Tuesday, as Ben Wizner ’93 was discussing his work as counsel to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor’s 2013 revelations about the scope of U.S. domestic and foreign surveillance programs continued to resonate. The day before, The New York Times had reported President Obama’s plan to overhaul the way the National Security Agency collects phone records through legislation that would stop the agency’s bulk collection of such data. The shift, confirmed by the Obama administration on the morning of Wizner’s visit to Harvard Law School, was a direct result of the massive leak of classified documents by Snowden, who was charged under the Espionage Act and has spent the last several months in Russia, where he sought asylum. “These documents have been our tickets to have our traditional oversight mechanisms actually function the way that they were intended to function,” Wizner said. Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and...