Students and faculty filled the Moot Courtroom to hear the lecture “Inside the NSA: Liberty and Security in a Changing World” given by University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone on Wednesday ?afternoon.
Obama chose Stone in August 2013 to serve on a five-member group reviewing different intelligence and communication technologies, according to the University.
Stone’s lecture addressed post-9/11 security and how this affected the presidential review group’s decisions about future intelligence security.
Stone quoted former Secretary of State James Baker’s analogy comparing national security to being a soccer goalie. The challenge, though, is the opposing team and the ball are invisible and can score at any angle.
“What we ordinarily rely on to keep ourselves safe is deterrence,” Stone said. “People know if they do something bad to us, we will do something bad to them. That usually deters them from doing something bad to us in the first place. After 9/11 it became clear that there is no deterrence.”
The review group worked for five days a week for four months before finally submitting its document to Obama.
The more than 300-page document included 46 recommendations decided unanimously by the group, Stone said.
These recommendations were made in hindsight, adhering to the nation’s better-safe-than-sorry approach to national security, Stone said.
“Whenever we as a nation have faced a crisis that has threatened our people, we have, human nature being what it is, overreacted,” Stone said. “Our job was to go back and, knowing that the dangers are real and the threats are serious and potentially grave, that we went too far.”
Stone discussed some recommendations the president supported, such as the protection of the NSA’s metadata program in which the NSA has an enormous database of phone call ?records.
To prevent future abuse of this information, the review group suggested the metadata be held by a private or third-party entity, Stone said.
Furthermore, Stone said if the NSA wanted access to the metadata they would have to get the equivalent of a warrant from a judge to get it.
“One thing that shocked me was that I found the NSA to be an institution with a high degree of integrity,” Stone said.
Stone also mentioned recommendations the president did not take, such as putting restrictions on the FBI’s national security letter usage.
This would mean the FBI would have to get a court order before obtaining personal records for people of interest. As it stands, the FBI has the authority to do this on its own, Stone said.
After his talk, Stone answered questions from students about online security, what branch of government the recommendations were specified for and if there was any hope of citizens gaining back privacy rights.
“It’s a very seductive world of national security,” Stone said. “It’s very easy to start looking at the question of ‘Are we following the authorities correctly?’ rather than ‘Have we given the right orders?’”
