Hoover Institution: Security by the Book

INTERVIEW WITH SPECIAL GUEST: Stephen Budiansky Benjamin Wittes interviews author Stephen Budiansky on his new book, Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union. The interview takes a look at the NSA's origins, its war against the Soviet Union and how the war relates to the Edward Snowden revelations.

INTERVIEW WITH SPECIAL GUEST: Orde Kittrie Jack Goldsmith interviews Orde Kittrie on his new book, Lawfare: Law as a Weapon of War, examining the deployment and impact of lawfare, the role played by the private sector, and real-world examples of its use by the United States, China, Iran, and Israel.

INTERVIEW WITH SPECIAL GUEST: Charlie Savage Jack Goldsmith interviews Charlie Savage on his new book, Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency, for a discussion of the Obama administration’s national security legacy. The conversation is full of insider accounts of just about all of the most important Obama administration legal and policy decisions. Savage discusses how Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing affected President Obama, and the two discuss exactly why a president who came into office critiquing Bush's national security policies ended up keeping so many of them. Savage and Goldsmith even touch on whether he will actually shutter Guantanamo Bay.

INTERVIEW WITH SPECIAL GUEST: William McCants and Joby Warrick Benjamin Wittes interviews William McCants and Joby Warrick on their new books, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State and Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS on the Islamic State including its history, the ideas behind it, and the people who made it happen and watched it happen.

The Hoover Institution hosted "Privacy & Power: A Transatlantic Dialogue in the Shadow of the NSA-Affair" on Tuesday, April 18, 2017 from 5:00pm - 7:00pm EST. The Hoover Institution's National Security, Technology and Law Working Group, along with Hoover's Washington, DC office discussed Privacy and Power: A Transatlantic Dialogue in the Shadow of the NSA-Affair. Benjamin Wittes (Hoover working group member and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution), Russell Miller (professor of law at Washington & Lee University School of Law) and Prof. Ralf Poscher (professor of law at University of Freiberg) discussed fundamental differences in the way that Americans and Europeans approach the issues of privacy and intelligence-gathering. Edward Snowden’s revelations of American intelligence-gathering and surveillance activities around the world stirred widespread resentment and dramatic law and policy responses in Europe. It is clear that there is almost nothing on which Americans and Europeans differ so dramatically as the questions of privacy and security. In dozens of contributions from leading commentators, scholars, and policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic, Privacy and Power definitively documents and critically engages with those differences. The book’s opening section acknowledges that Snowden’s revelations, and the startling glimpse they give us into the implications of our new big-data era, challenge us to reconsider our old notions of privacy. The book’s second section, featuring contributions from Benjamin Wittes (Brookings) and Anne Peters (Heidelberg Max Planck Institute), distills, embodies, and frames the transatlantic debate on these issues in these succinct terms: “Germany needs to grow up” and “American needs to obey the law”. The book’s third section consists in a collection of chapters from leading American and European privacy law experts that both substantiates the transatlantic divide and exposes the diversity of views within those spheres. A fourth section features commentary from experts on the supranational and international law implicated by these issues, thereby giving the European Union privacy and data-protection regimes the central role in the debate they are due. The book’s final section concludes with a collection of cultural commentary offering profound and challenging insights into the deeper causes of the American and European differences on these issues. (Playing time: 54:34)