West LegalEdcenter Webcast: “The NSA Disclosures: What Do We Really Know Now?”---Now Available On Demand

For those readers who missed our experiment with live webcast programming through the West LegalEdcenter, here's your second chance. It has been archived and is now available on demand. The West LegalEdcenter is a subscription service, though one can also participate in its programming on an a la carte basis. Here is the description of the program:

Recent disclosures about NSA surveillance—both leaks and official releases—have made public a huge amount of information about programmatic intelligence collection by the National Security Agency. The volume of information has been so vast that it’s hard to keep track of, much less to understand how these activities fit under U.S. constitutional and statutory law. This webcast will make sense of what has become public and will look at the interaction of the intelligence community, the law, the judiciary, and the Congress.

The webcast's participants included me, Steven Bradbury—who talked about this paper—and Shane Harris, who has been covering the NSA controversies for Foreign Policy magazine. It ran for 90 minutes and was a terrific discussion. Shane gave an overview of the unauthorized disclosures, the ongoing Edward Snowden story, and the journalism around it. Steve gave an overview of the relevant law governing both Section 215 and Section 702. I then gave a talk about the authorized disclosures and what they reveal about the relationship between the executive branch and the FISA court. I then interviewed my two copanelists towards the end. If you have need of CLE credits or if you are just interested in an overview of the current controversies, it's well worth the time.