Law school course draws lessons from Snowden disclosure

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Law professor Michael Greenberger’s new class started last week, but he can’t tell you what he’ll be teaching in a month.

The course, “National Security, Electronic Surveillance and Bulk Data Collection: The Withering of the Fourth Amendment,” will focus on the leaks about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs and what the news means in relation to the Fourth Amendment.

“I’ve told the class I could not give them a syllabus because this thing is changing from week to week,” said Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

He has planned only a few lessons so far. There is no casebook, and most of the readings will come from news articles and court documents.

“As far as I am concerned, this is the most important Fourth Amendment issue of our lifetimes,” he said.

The course grew out of one on homeland security and counterterrorism Greenberger has taught since 2002 through the university’s Center for Health & Homeland Security, which he founded in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

His lesson plan was hijacked last fall, though, when he brought up the June leak of classified documents by an NSA contractor’s former employee — Edward Snowden.

After spending 15 hours of a 39-hour course talking about the legal implications of the breaking news topic, Greenberger realized he needed an entire semester to devote to the issue.

“The law was just evolving before our very eyes,” Greenberger said. “I realized I could not teach this as part of a class anymore. I needed to develop a full 39-hour course at that point.”

Although Greenberger usually teaches about 25 students per class, the new one has about 50, ranging from relatively new first-years to soon-to-graduate third-years.

While the lesson plan may be set in sand, there are a few givens, Greenberger said. He’ll begin by discussing the history of the Fourth Amendment and what the nation’s Founding Fathers intended it to mean. The course also will look at the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, what was happening leading up to Snowden’s leaks and what has happened since.

The class will especially take note of court cases concerning the NSA’s monitoring of personal data, Greenberger said.

For instance, one federal judge held last month that government collection of telephone metadata was likely a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Later that month, however, a different federal judge dismissed a constitutional challenge to the program, saying it is a tool to stop terrorist attacks.

Greenberger kicked off the course Friday with Fourth Amendment background and discussed President Barack Obama’s speech that morning on plans to change the country’s surveillance practices.

“[Obama’s] speech, this course, would not have taken place but for the fact that Snowden has taken these documents,” Greenberger told the class.

He called the developments a “living example” of the law.

“As we go on,” Greenberger said, “stuff will be coming out and we will have to talk about that.”

Trudy C. Henson, a senior law and policy analyst with the Center for Health & Homeland Security, took Greenberger’s original homeland security class as a first-year law student. The course piqued her interest in the topic and led her to get a job with the center in 2008.

The security classes teach law school students essential skills, she said.

“It is very helpful,” Henson said. “… It’s really a lot of critical problem-solving.”

Second-year student Casandra Mejias, 28, decided to take the new course because she did intelligence work while serving in the Army.

“I thought the class itself would be an interesting conversation and would be both relevant and current,” Mejias said.

Another second-year, Lindsay Bramble, 24, said she is taking the class to gain a better grasp on the implications of the security leaks.

“It is just an interesting subject I don’t know much about,” Bramble said. “It’s so relevant to current news right now.”

Greenberger said he hoped students would leave the class with the “legal intelligence equipment” to understand this issue as the country continues to grapple with it.

“This is the unfolding of a major constitutional issue for which there is no settled law,” he said.

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