American Civil Liberties Union attorney Ben Wizner — legal advisor to Edward Snowden, the American computer professional who leaked classified documents from the National Security Agency to The Guardian — spoke at the Law School Wednesday advocating protection of individual privacy during a time in which government organizations and businesses desire to gather growing amounts of personal information. A question and answer session followed the talk.
Wizner spoke as part of the Law Public Service Program and was invited by Law Prof. Josh Bowers, whom he met during their time at New York University. Wizner discussed new surveillance technologies, describing inadequate legal protections in society’s current regime and why students should care.
“If we were going to try to distill the really extraordinary global debate that we’ve had around the world in the last year and a half, the sentence may be surveillance technologies have outpaced democratic controls,” Wizner said.
Bowers explained Wizner’s discussion, saying he analyzed the individual’s right to privacy from different societal parties.
“One context is with respect to a citizen’s privacy as against the state,” Bowers said. “The other context is questions of privacy in the digital age as against private actors — most often businesses — that may want to learn information about us in order to market products to us or learn things about us that help them develop their business more generally.”
Wizner also addressed fourth amendment protections against illegal search and seizure and the value or principle of privacy that the amendment provides. He also said individuals should defend their right to privacy, even for a citizen who thinks he or she has nothing to hide.
“We too readily conflate secrecy with privacy — secrecy is a desire to keep from the world things that perhaps embarrass us or things that we hope others don’t learn about us,” Bowers said. “Privacy is about defining the space around us and the relationships that we choose to have with others.”
Bowers said Wizner’s talk — which dealt with a terrific amount of contemporary debate over personal rights — was well received by student attendees.
“If you take anything away from this talk, I hope it is that when it comes to privacy, every one of us has some skin in the game,” Wizner said.
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