Author Archive | Stewart Baker

I’ve been struck by an aspect of the Snowden affair that hasn’t been covered so far — the Guardian’s troubling decision to destroy its UK trove of Snowden documents rather than let the UK government see them.  Court filings in the UK tell the government’s side of that story, and they don’t make the Guardian look good. […]

I’ll be testifying tomorrow, September 11, about DHS’s progress in over a decade of existence.  A copy of the full testimony is here: Baker testimony to Senate Homeland Sep 2013. But I suspect that  the most interesting section concerns cybersecurity, which I’ve excerpted below. Sometimes it’s easier to persuade the team to give you the ball […]

Back from a fine hiking vacation, I have a short op-ed in USA Today: Many of us played Pick Up Sticks in our youth, slowly pulling first one then another stick from the jumble. You lost the game by pulling out the stick that collapsed the pile. It’s a great way to pass a rainy […]

Two updates for those following the XKeyScore debate: Joshua Foust has written an excellent post that clarifies a few things I didn’t cover in my earlier post. He notes that XKeyScore allows analysts to recover only material that NSA has collected and stored; that’s important because just being able to enter the President’s email address is not […]

Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare asks a good question: How is the NSA Director Alexander’s claim that “we can audit the actions of our people 100%” (thus providing an important check against abuse) consistent with (a) stories long after Snowden’s initial revelations that the White House does not “know with certainty” what information Snowden pilfered, (b) reported NSA uncertainty weeks after […]

The prosecutorial discretion built into the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is already controversial in the blogosphere, where leftie admirers of Aaron Swartz and libbie opponents of prosecutorial discretion have made common cause against the law.  And indeed it’s true; forfeiture laws aside, the CFAA is among the most flexible tools in a federal prosecutor’s […]

I ended up testifying again on FISA reform yesterday, this time to Senate Judiciary.  While mostly repeating my past testimony, I added a critique of two recent proposals for reforming FISA: One idea is to declassify FISA court opinions. Another is to appoint outside lawyers with security clearances who can argue against the government.  The […]

I’ll be testifying tomorrow to the full House Judiciary Committee about FISA, NSA, and the Snowden flap. (Excerpts below. My prepared testimony is here: Download Pdf of Baker testimony to House Judiciary Committee on FISA .) I used this opportunity to muse on the resemblance between today and the waning Clinton era: To be blunt, one of […]

If you don’t share my fascination with the journalistic ethics of the Snowden reporters, you can skip this long piece.  But both of the protagonists have now defended themselves, so I’m posting their messages, with commentary. I began the exchange when I questioned why Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian waited two weeks to release NSA’s […]

More than two weeks ago, when the first Guardian/Greenwald leaks about NSA were appearing, I suggested that Americans would be a lot less exercised about the “collection first” approach to phone data if they understood how NSA’s minimization procedures constrained the agency in dealing with US person data: I would not be surprised to discover […]

Foreign Policy has published my article on how attribution can be used to deter foreign governments’cyberespionage.  Excerpts below: The Obama-Xi summit in Sunnylands ended without any Chinese concessions on cyber-espionage. This came as no surprise; cyber spying has been an indispensable accelerant for China’s military and economic rise. And though Beijing may someday agree that […]

The Director of National Intelligence issued a statement late last night about the NSA collection flap.  It’s the smartest thing the government has released so far, and its justification for the program in question seems to confirm my speculation in Foreign Policy yesterday. First, large-scale collections give the government a way to screen for patterns […]

There may be a lot less to the NSA “scandal” than meets the eye.  In an article for Foreign Policy, I explain why I am quite confident that the program underlying the FISA court order is lawful: [T]his is not some warrantless or extra-statutory surveillance program.  The government had to persuade up to a dozen […]

Anger at Chinese hacking continues to build in American business and government circles.  As a result, establishment figures have begun to embrace the idea of letting private companies do more than passively defend their networks.  The latest evidence is the report of a commission headed by two Obama appointees, former US Ambassador to China (and […]

I’m testifying today on supply chain vulnerabilities and cybersecurity. The testimony is in a hearing held by the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. Here’s my quick diagnosis of the issue: Intrusions on our networks have reached new heights.  They have moved from penetration of government and military systems to wholesale compromises of companies, trade […]