I watched the 1.5 hour long Town Hall meeting on Ted Koppel's The Price of Security and I must say that it gave me more hope than anything I've seen or read in a long time. Because if these people:
Zoë Baird, President, Markle Foundation
Bradford Berenson, former Associate White House Counsel
Lanny Davis, Member, Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
Jim Dempsey, Policy Director, Center for Democracy & Technology
Viet Dinh, former Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy
Clark Kent Ervin, former Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security
Alamdar Hamdani, Civil rights attorney
David Holtzman, author, Privacy Lost
Paul McNulty, Deputy U.S. Attorney General
Alberto Mora, former General Counsel of the Department of the Navy
Nuala O’Connor Kelly, former Chief Privacy Officer, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Ted Olson, former Solicitor General and member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board
Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Adjunct Professor, Columbia University Law School
Tom Ridge, former Secretary of Homeland Security
Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center
Rep. Chris Shays, Chairman House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threat and International Relations
George Soros, Founder and Chairman, Open Society Institute and Soros Foundation
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), former Chief of Staff, Secretary of State Colin Powell
Gen. Tony Zinni (ret.), former Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)
Dr. James J. Zogby, founder and president, Arab American Institute
can ALL agree that there must be oversight of the executive branches surveillance powers, that partisan bickering is doing more harm than good, and that the war against terror requires a new approach both strategically and legally then things may not be as bad as I have been fearing.
One additional thing that everyone agreed on is that if we don't have the civil liberty vs national security debate before the next successful terrorist attack we never will.
(I'm planning on getting a copy of the transcript.)
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