Henry Farrell: belief

Transcript context

…If you were a kangaroo court for NSA surveillance, right? Snowden has pointed out, basically, that they’ll approve whatever request comes in. That has changed to some degree. If you look at FISA now, FISA is a very, very different beast than it was in the past. More or less, the problem with FISA, as I understand it, was effective as a court in which only one side was able to present its evidence, and now you have effective public advocates. You have a number of people who act as advocates of the general public interest and who are read into the secrecy surrounding it but are not representative of the interests of the security community. My understanding is that FISA is still perhaps problematic from a civil liberties perspective, but it is far, far less problematic than it used to be. So I think that it is possible to do this kind of stuff. It takes careful institutional design, and in general, I think that it is okay to have some legal access to heavily encrypted information. The problems, of course, are going to be (a) as you say, this is likely to be something which is going to be swept up into the security state, and (b) let’s really implement this properly — we’re going to have to see the creation of some kind of a system, probably among advanced industrial democracies in Western Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea, and a small number of other countries where there is some set of shared standards and shared agreements around this. We’re beginning to see the battles starting over that with agreements between the United States and the United Kingdom over access to electronic evidence. I worry that this discussion is going to be dominated by the security side of the House, but to the extent that privacy advocates, privacy officials are able to get into this debate as well, I think that one could plausibly come up with something which is going to be reasonably respectful of civil liberties. Why does Twitter seem to be relatively left-wing politically? I don’t mean the company. I mean the service.…

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