Technology, Society and Public Policy Lecture Series presents: Your World Delivered to the NSA: Warrantless Domestic Wiretapping

One of the biggest questions facing the Obama Administration is what it should do with the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The U.S. Government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has been engaging in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans. EFF has been leading the fight against this domestic surveillance. In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF filed the first case against a telecom for violating its customers' privacy. In response to EFF's initial success in the case, and the filing of dozens of other cases across the country that attempted to hold law breaking telecoms accountable, the Bush Administration and the telecommunications carriers bullied Congress into passing a statute that allows the Attorney General to seek retroactive immunity for the telecommunications carriers. EFF is currently working to challenge this law. In addition, EFF is representing victims of the illegal surveillance program in Jewel v. NSA, a lawsuit filed in September 2008 against the government seeking to stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government officials behind the program accountable.

The warrantless wiretapping cases present profound questions about the use and misuse of government secrecy and the state secrets privilege, the extent of unilateral presidential authority and the role of intermediaries like telecommunications companies and internet service providers in protecting our privacy and assisting law enforcement. They also present questions about the balance between the constitutional and statutory rights of ordinary Americans to be free of general searches and the use of the tremendous datamining and semantic analysis capabilities of modern technologies in an effort to combat terrorism and criminal behavior.

Biography of Cindy Cohn:
Cindy Cohn is the Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as its General Counsel. She is responsible for overseeing the EFF's overall legal strategy and supervising EFF's 9 staff attorneys. Ms. Cohn first became involved with the EFF in 1995, when the EFF asked her to serve as the lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Outside the Courts, Ms. Cohn has testified before Congress, been featured in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere for her work on cyberspace issue. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online." In 2007 the Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America.
Speaker URL