Matthew Olsen

An op-ed by Matt Olsen. A core national security law allowing the government to collect intelligence information—Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—is set to expire at the end of the year. With the deadline looming, the debate in Congress over reauthorizing Section 702 now centers on a crucial issue: the FBI’s ability to search for clues in its databases. The focus on this issue is important. There is a national security imperative for the FBI to review quickly and efficiently data that the government has lawfully collected when the Bureau opens an investigation or identifies a new suspect, especially someone who may have links to terrorism or espionage.

The conflict between President-elect Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community could have profound repercussions. We spoke recently about the issue to Matthew Olsen, who spent two decades working in senior posts in intelligence and national security for Democrat and Republican administrations. Olsen, 54, served most recently (from 2011 to 2014) as director of the intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center. Before that, he was the general counsel of the National Security Agency. In 2009, he was executive director of the Guantanamo Review Task Force for the Justice Department...Today, he’s an executive at IronNet Cybersecurity, a firm he co-founded, and a lecturer at Harvard Law School.