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Julian Sanchez joins us for a discussion on privacy, the NSA, and domestic surveillance.
If the government’s been spying on us for decades, what’s new now? Why is bulk data collection so particularly nefarious? What is metadata anyway, and what does the government do with it? Does the government actually catch terrorists through mass surveillance? Why do people treat terrorism differently from other violent crimes? The defenders of surveillance say that “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of,” but does this justification hold water?
Research fellow Julian Sanchez focuses primarily on issues at the busy intersection of technology, privacy, civil liberties, and new media — but also writes more broadly about political philosophy and social psychology. Before joining Cato, Sanchez served as the Washington Editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, where he covered surveillance, intellectual property, and telecom policy. Prior to that, he was an assistant editor for Reason magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. Sanchez’s writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Reason, The Guardian, Techdirt, The American Spectator, and Hispanic, among others, and he blogs regularly forThe Economist’s Democracy in America. Sanchez studied philosophy and political science at New York University.
Matthew Feeney is head of technology and innovation at the Centre for Policy Studies. He was previously the director of Cato’s Project on Emerging Technologies, where he worked on issues concerning the intersection of new technologies and civil liberties, and before that, he was assistant editor of Reason.com. Matthew is a dual British/American citizen and received both his BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Reading in England.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.