Lawfare News

"Power Wars" in 100 Tweets

Timothy Edgar
Monday, December 7, 2015, 11:56 AM

Like many Lawfare readers, I confess to being a little obsessed with Charlie Savage's new book, Power Wars. It is a remarkable account of how national security law is forged, step by step, through the decisions of unsung government officials at times of intense stress. Its subtitle is "Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency," but it could just as easily bear the subtitle of this blog -- "Hard National Security Choices."

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Like many Lawfare readers, I confess to being a little obsessed with Charlie Savage's new book, Power Wars. It is a remarkable account of how national security law is forged, step by step, through the decisions of unsung government officials at times of intense stress. Its subtitle is "Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency," but it could just as easily bear the subtitle of this blog -- "Hard National Security Choices."

In an era in which we are supposed to express ourselves through social media in 140 characters, it's a pleasure to read a really meaty book. Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, has written that Power Wars is a "master class in how to think seriously about the subject." He urged politicians to read it rather than rush to opine on what we should be doing about terrorist attacks.

I couldn't agree more. But if your attention span has been wrecked by the Internet, I've reduced Charlie's book to 100 tweets. Here they are.


Topics:
Timothy H. Edgar defended privacy as an ACLU lawyer before going inside America’s growing surveillance state as an intelligence official in both the Bush and Obama administrations – a story he tells in Beyond Snowden: Privacy, Mass Surveillance and the Struggle to Reform the NSA. In 2013, Edgar left government to become a Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute and helped put together Brown’s Executive Master in Cybersecurity. Edgar also serves on the advisory board of Virtru, an encryption software company. Edgar’s work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Wired. Edgar is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Dartmouth College.

Subscribe to Lawfare