How should we use our intelligence?
How do we balance national security and privacy in an age when the government can access virtually all of our electronic communications? That question hit the public sphere with new force in June, when former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden disclosed, largely via the British newspaper The Guardian, new material about the extent of the surveillance operations undertaken by the National Security Agency (NSA). Six months later, a public forum held at MIT on Thursday showed that fault lines exist even among highly placed former government officials. Joel Brenner, a former general counsel for the NSA, largely defended an agency whose workers are, he said, “tasked with finding terrorists they don’t yet know about,” and thus in need of copious data. On the other hand, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman sounded a sharply critical note, decrying the “cancerous growth of the government surveillance apparatus,” which he described...