Cybersecurity Originalism, or What Ben Franklin and John Jay Would Have Thought about Signal

Our contemporary debates about cybersecurity, surveillance and the law are steeped in 21st century technology, but the problem of interception is not new.  Surveillance and information warfare played an essential role in the American revolution and in the negotiations that led to independence.  Ben Franklin, John Jay and other founders participated in these dark arts, with varying degrees of success.  This talk will explore this history and consider what it means for us today.

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Speakers

Timothy H. Edgar

Timothy H. Edgar is a former national security and intelligence official, cybersecurity expert, privacy lawyer and civil liberties activist. He teaches at Brown University and Harvard Law School.

Edgar launched his professional career at the American Civil Liberties Union shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He left the ACLU to become the intelligence community’s first deputy for civil liberties in 2006. Edgar tells the story of trying to make a difference inside America’s growing surveillance state in Beyond Snowden: Privacy, Mass Surveillance and the Struggle to Reform the NSA, winner of the 2018 Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

In 2009, after President Barack Obama announced the creation of a new National Security Council position “specifically dedicated to safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Edgar moved to the White House, where he advised Obama on privacy issues in cybersecurity policy.

In 2013, Edgar left government for Brown University to help launch its professional cybersecurity degree program. At Brown, he is a Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.  Edgar is a contributing editor to Lawfare and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Wired.

Christopher Bavitz

Christopher T. Bavitz is the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Experiential and Clinical Education at Harvard Law School. He is also Managing Director of HLS’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. And, he is a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center. Chris has taught courses including the Counseling and Legal Strategy in the Digital Age and Music & Digital Media seminars, and he concentrates his practice activities on intellectual property and media law (particularly in the areas of music, entertainment, and technology).

Chris oversees many of the Cyberlaw Clinic’s projects relating to copyright, speech, advising of startups, and the use of technology to support access to justice, and he serves as the HLS Dean’s Designate to Harvard’s Innovation Lab. Chris’s research and related work at the Berkman Klein Center addresses intermediary liability and online content takedown regimes as well as regulatory, ethical, and governance issues associated with technologies that incorporate algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.