Power Wars: Surveillance, Drones, and Obama's Post - 9/11 Presidency

POWER WARS: SURVEILLANCE, DRONES,

AND OBAMA’S POST-9/11 PRESIDENCY

Charlie Savage, Pulitzer Prize winning, New York Times journalist,

and author, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency, charliesavage.com

Friday, December 4, 2015, 4 - 5.30 pm

MIT, Stata Center Room 32-155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of change from George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.”  Yet from drone strikes and indefinite detention to surveillance and military tribunals, Obama ended up continuing -- and in some cases expanding -- many policies he inherited.  What happened?

Based on confidential interviews with more than 150 current and former officials and access to previously unreported documents, Charlie Savage tells the inside story of how the Obama administration charted its path through ceaseless dilemmas -- including its decisions to keep the then-secret National Security Agency program that collected records of every American's phone calls, raid Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, and bomb Libya.  Savage also pieces together the first comprehensive history of how American surveillance secretly developed over the past 35 years, synthesizing recent revelations and filling in gaps with new reporting.  charliesavage.com

Moderator:  Deborah Hurley, Fellow, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, scholar.harvard.edu/deborah_hurley

Discussants:  Kade Crockford, Director, Technology for Liberty Program, ACLU of Massachusetts, aclum.org/about/staff-advocates/kade-crockford; Timothy Edgar, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies and Public Affairs, Brown University, watson.brown.edu/people/fellow/edgar; and Susan Landau, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy, Worcester Polytechnic  Institute, privacyink.org

Sponsor:  MIT Cryptography and Information Security Group, toc.csail.mit.edu/cis

Co-hosts:  Data Privacy Lab, Harvard University, dataprivacylab.org; Internet Policy Research Initiative, MIT, internetpolicy.mit.edu; and Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, watson.brown.edu

Contact:  Debbie Lehto, dlehto@csail.mit.edu

http://toc.csail.mit.edu/node/428

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC