Geoffrey R. Stone, John O. Brennan, and Ellen Nakashima - "National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On"
Geoffrey R. Stone, John O. Brennan, and Ellen Nakashima will discuss National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press: The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On.
Presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival
Virtual event
REGISTER HERE
About the book: One of the most vexing and perennial questions facing any democracy is how to balance the government's legitimate need to conduct its operations-especially those related to protecting the national security-in secret, with the public's right and responsibility to know what its government is doing. There is no easy answer to this issue, and different nations embrace different solutions. In the United States, at the constitutional level, the answer begins exactly half a century ago with the Supreme Court's landmark 1971 decision in the Pentagon Papers case. The final decision, though, left many important questions unresolved. Moreover, the issue of leaks and secrecy has cropped up repeatedly since, most recently in the Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning cases. In National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press , two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars-including John Brennan, Eric Holder, Cass R. Sunstein, and Michael Morell, among many others-to delve into important dimensions of the current system, to explain how we should think about them, and to offer as many solutions as possible.
About Geoffrey R. Stone: Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago where he has served as Dean of the Law School (1987-1994) and as Provost of the University (1994-2002). Stone is the author or co-author of many books on constitutional law, including Leaks, National Security and Freedom of the Press (2021), Democracy and Equality (2020), The Free Speech Century (2019), Sex and the Constitution (2017), The NSA Report (2014), Top Secret (2007), War and Liberty (2007), and Perilous Times (2004). In 2013, President Obama appointed Stone to the five-member NSA Review Group, which produced an influential report following up on the Edward Snowden disclosures, he then served as a Senior Advisor to the Director of National Intelligence.
About John O. Brennan: John O. Brennan was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 until January 2017 and Deputy National Security Advisor as well as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism from January 2009 until March 2013. During his earlier CIA career (1980 to 2005), he was President Clinton’s daily intelligence briefer, Station Chief in the Middle East, Deputy Executive Director, and founding Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Brennan has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Fordham University and a master’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin. He currently is a Distinguished Fellow at Fordham Law School and a Distinguished Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin.
About Ellen Nakashima: Ellen Nakashima reports on national security for The Washington Post. She covers issues related to intelligence, foreign malign influence, technology and great power competition. In 2018, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In 2014, she and her colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for exploring the scope and policy implications of U.S. surveillance programs. She earlier reported from Southeast Asia on militant networks, the Indian Ocean tsunami and SARS. She got her start on The Post’s Virginia staff in 1995.