Stone: Congress Should Reform Surveillance Laws (and ex-NSA Chief Agrees)

Opinion: An ex-NSA chief and ACLU adviser can agree on surveillance reform. Why can't Congress?

The current debate over surveillance has been divisive and polarizing. But if a constitutional law professor and an American Civil Liberties Union advisory board member can find common ground with a former director of the National Security Agency and Army general, then Congress should be able to arrive at a compromise on surveillance reform as well.

As Americans, we share these bedrock principles: that freedom, privacy, and individual liberty are fundamental American values; that a core responsibility of our government is to keep our nation and our people safe; that the collection of intelligence is essential in the modern world to protect our nation’s security; and that, at present, the trust of the American people has been eroded and needs to be reestablished with new safeguards that ensure that the agencies charged with carrying out the collection of intelligence do so in a manner that is consistent with our deepest national values. 

That is not to say that the nation’s intelligence agencies have abused their authority. To the contrary, the NSA and other intelligence agencies have worked conscientiously to operate within the express authorities that Congress, the White House, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court have given them. Indeed, the men and women who work at NSA and other national security agencies deserve our admiration and support. Although intelligence agencies often operate out of necessity in secret, in our experience they adhere to the rule of law and comply with multiple layers of effective oversight. 

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