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Journal of Constitutional Law symposium examines fight for privacy in age of mass surveillance

January 26, 2015

Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, gave the keynote at the annual symposium of Penn Law's Jour...
Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, gave the keynote at the annual symposium of Penn Law’s Journal of Constitutional Law.

Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, gave the keynote at the annual symposium of Penn Law’s Journal of Constitutional Law.

By Kathy Zhang C’17

On January 23, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Journal of Constitutional Law hosted its annual symposium in Fitts Auditorium. The program, titled “What Privacy? Exploring a constitutional right to information privacy,” consisted of four panels and a lunchtime keynote address.

The keynote speaker was Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. His address focused on the development of government surveillance in the last century and where our concerns fit into the fight for privacy.

Wizner began his address by relating the story of the Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI, an activist group from the 1970s who famously broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole all the files, and distributed them to several news outlets.

According to Wizner, the documents confirmed the suspicions of many activists at the time: that the FBI “was engaged in widespread domestic surveillance.” The targets of surveillance, as revealed by the stolen documents, consisted of “antiwar groups, black student organizations, and other perceived dissidents from J. Edgar Hoover’s vision of America.”

Wizner moved on to evaluate today’s state of mass surveillance, where “almost everything we do leaves a digital trail of crumbs.” He spoke of Edward Snowden and Keith Alexander, focusing on the future of the NSA’s mass surveillance “time machine.”

“History tells us that the lock box that safeguards all this private information will one day be unlocked, or at least that the keys be more widely distributed,” he said. “I think it is reasonable to assume that the surveillance time machine that the NSA is now assembling will over time be increasingly available to the FBI, the DEA, and ultimately to more and more local law enforcement.”

Ultimately, according to Wizner, the solution to these privacy issues is not going to come easy. “There is no simple fix to the set of challenges we face,” he noted. “It’s going to require reforms on the legal side and also on the engineering and technical side. We’re going to need Congress to play a role. We’re going to need the technical community to raise the costs of bulk collection, to promote more widespread adoption of encryption.”

When asked whether he was aware of any winning strategies or goals for the ACLU in this fight for information privacy, Wizner said, “I think more about our role than our goal. Inevitably there’s going to be more aggregation of state power as technology makes surveillance more prevalent and cheaper. I think about how we can be a counterweight to these impulses. Not how are we going to win. These issues aren’t winnable. This is always going to be a struggle of interests.”

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