In August 2013, I was sitting in my office working on a book, minding my own business, when I got a phone call from the White House. I was told that, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, President Obama was appointing a review group to study national security and information privacy issues and asked if I would be willing to serve.

My first thought was, “Oh, shit.” This would be a time-consuming process that would distract me from my writing and, like so many previous committees, the group would end up producing a report that would inevitably disappear into somebody’s desk, never to be heard from again.

When the president asks, though, you can’t say no, especially when you were the one who, as dean, first appointed him to the Law School faculty. So I kept my first thought to myself and said, “Sure, happy to do it,” confident that I had an ace in the hole that would prevent me from serving. 

I knew I would need top-secret clearance, and I figured there was more than enough in my background to preclude that. But, somewhat to my dismay, I expeditiously received a top-secret security clearance and was hustled off to Washington for a meeting in the White House situation room with President Obama, national security advisor Susan Rice, and several other people, including my former student, assistant attorney general Lisa Monaco, JD’97.

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