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Here is our interview with Anthony Gregory.

<b>How did you first become interested in writing about the American surveillance state? What attracted you to the topic?</b>

<b>When did the American government start spying on both foreign nationals and its own citizens? What did they hope to achieve?</b>

We have a very different understanding of privacy today. Today it relates much more to the intimate life of the individual rather than private property. Up until the late nineteenth century, there was very little talk of “privacy” in this modern sense; the Fourth Amendment, which rarely inspired court decisions, concerned the integrity over physical bodies and belongings. There were statutory protections of privacy concerning the mail, but government warrantless wiretapping, as an example, was mostly legal because it did not involve physical trespass, but rather intangible signals. The Supreme Court didn’t apply modern conceptions of privacy through the Fourth Amendment until the late 1960s. Conservatives who rail against the modern conception of privacy as discovered by liberal jurists must therefore find another argument against such government wiretapping as conducted by the NSA.

<b>The 4th Amendment protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but it does not appear to be well suited to combating modern surveillance. Has the 4th Amendment served as a meaningful bulwark against expanding surveillance? Should Americans consider drafting a new constitutional amendment to codify American privacy protections that reflect the realities of the new surveillance state?</b>

Ultimately, the policy demands must change for surveillance to lessen. A robust national security infrastructure to police the world will necessarily tend toward energetic intelligence gathering abroad, and some at home. An ambitious domestic program, particularly in crime fighting but also in the policy areas undertaken by our administrative state, will also invariably compromise privacy. These policy priorities must change to make a difference in surveillance, and for them to change, American political culture must change. Legal reform is important but might be a lagging indicator of cultural change.

<b>The need for intelligence and the right to privacy are in opposition to each other. If you want to gather intelligence you will most likely have to violate personal privacy. Has the United States had difficulty balancing the desire to gather intelligence and the right personal privacy? Has this balance shifted over time?</b>

<b>Your last book, <i>The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror</i>, looked at the history of the legal principle of habeas corpus. Do you see any connection between the rights of habeas corpus and personal privacy?</b>

In terms of legal theory, protections against unlawful search, seizure, and detention are also complicated by the fact that they are both judicially constructed. Champions of such protections, particularly of the libertarian variety, want to see these legal rights as natural corollaries of some fundamental principles concerning person and property. On one level they can be—detention is a physical restriction on the body, and searches can target physical space and bodies—and yet the determination of whether a detention or search is “just” or “legal” quickly becomes a question of legal process, a process involving claims of legal authority, not just claims of right. It’s often unclear what the right answer is, because the law is written and interpreted by fallible people and is highly historically contingent. But even if we put all that aside, habeas corpus has often concerned disputes over civil rights beyond freedom from detention, and certainly the Fourth Amendment has come to protect rights that don’t correspond clearly to person or tangible property at all, but rather personal information.

<b>Remarkably, the current presidential race has included almost no discussion of issues related to either surveillance or personal privacy. After all of the hand wringing that occurred after the Eric Snowden leaks does this omission surprise you? What would it take for this issue to become more important?</b>

I want to reach anyone interested in the subjects of intelligence and privacy rights. More specifically, I hope to encourage the conversation between those who see these questions through the lens of surveillance and privacy, and those who think about them in terms of intelligence gathering and security. I also hope to encourage those in the policy debates over security intelligence and the Fourth Amendment to become more careful and clear about what they’re arguing, and to appreciate the nuance and complexity arising from the legal and historical problems of surveillance.