A group of prominent technologists submitted a letter today to the NSA Review Group, a body charged with conducting a review of NSA activities that does not currently have a technologist as a member. The letter urges the Review Group to seek assistance from independent technologists in order to conduct a thorough review, and that NSA oversight more broadly requires greater transparency with respect to the technical mechanisms used to conduct surveillance.
The letter also stressed that the National Security Agency's efforts to undermine encryption and secure communications technology have sabotaged the general security and privacy of users worldwide, and that much greater respect should be afforded to security and civil liberties considerations in order to prevent further damage to our country's values and to our economy.
The letter's delivery was coordinated by technologists from Center for Democracy and Technology and EFF as part of the NSA Review Group's request for public comments. The full list of 47 technologists who have signed the document is re-printed below. Affiliations are for identification purposes only.
Ben Adida
Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge
Dan Auerbach, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Brian Behlendorf, Board Member at EFF, Mozilla, and Benetech
Steven M. Bellovin, Columbia University
Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania
Scott Bradner, Harvard University
Eric Burger, Georgetown University
L. Jean Camp, Indiana University
Stephen Checkoway, Johns Hopkins University
Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University
Alissa Cooper, Center for Democracy & Technology
Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Nick Doty, University of California, Berkeley/World Wide Web Consortium
Jeremy Epstein, SRI International
David Evans, University of Virginia
David Farber, Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pennsylvania
Stephen Farrell, Trinity College Dublin
Joan Feigenbaum, Yale University
Edward W. Felten, Princeton University
Bryan Ford, Yale University
Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Matthew D. Green, Johns Hopkins University
J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Center for Democracy & Technology
James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Nadia Heninger, University of Pennsylvania
David Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Micah Lee, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Morgan Marquis-Boire, Citizen Lab, University of Toronto
Siobhan MacDermott, AVG Technologies
Jonathan Mayer, Stanford University
Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Institute, New America Foundation
Peter G. Neumann, SRI International
M. Chris Riley, Mozilla
Phillip Rogaway, University of California, Davis
Runa A. Sandvik, Independent Researcher
Jeffrey I. Schiller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bruce Schneier, BT
Seth Schoen, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Micah Sherr, Georgetown University
Christopher Soghoian, American Civil Liberties Union
Ashkan Soltani, Independent Researcher
Brad Templeton, Electronic Frontier Foundation/Singularity University
Dan S. Wallach, Rice University
Nicholas Weaver, International Computer Science Institute
Philip Zimmermann, Silent Circle LLC