A nation must think before it acts.
Secrecy, Privacy, and Freedom — From Bletchley Park to the NSA: How Technology Both Preserves and Threatens Free Societies
Free societies thrive when citizens feel secure in their privacy, feeling themselves free to think and act as they see fit within the limits of the law, and also protected from outside threats to their security. Yet those two impulses can work against each other: the very technologies that offer protection against hidden or future threats can also undermine the privacy citizens hold most dear. With every new technological advance, the possibilities for both protection and intrusion grow. From the codebreakers who helped defeat Nazi Germany by intercepting and deciphering secret messages to the NSA contractors who seek terrorist patterns in cell phone metadata, the balance between security and privacy has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Join Ron Granieri and Lawrence Husick as we discuss the technology of security and surveillance, and its impact on free societies in the past century.
An information technology consultant, chemist, computer system designer, and intellectual property rights lawyer, Lawrence Husick is Co-Chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Terrorism and co-director of the FPRI Wachman Center’s Program on Teaching Innovation. He is also a faculty member at the Whiting Graduate School of Engineering and the Zanvyl-Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Biotechnology Program of the Johns Hopkins University.