The caveat, which is an important one, is that after having done all of those things on day one, the administration invoked the state-secrets privilege over and over to prevent those who had been the victims of these policies from having their day in court. People who sought accountability for their torture in CIA custody or in military custody were kicked out of court because the administration argued that those cases were too sensitive to litigate.

Green: Another claim he made was that his administration worked to “reform our laws governing surveillance to protect privacy and civil liberties.” To what extent do you think that holds up?

Jaffer: There were some changes made by Congress in the summer of 2015, which the administration supported. The changes were modest, and came about only because Snowden disclosed what he disclosed. But for those disclosures, none of those reforms would have taken place.

The administration still characterizes Snowden as a criminal. There’s an irony in the Obama administration trying to take credit for these positive changes in the law while also trying to prosecute the person who is most responsible for bringing these changes about.

Green: The Obama administration’s aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers stands in contrast to some of the claims he made in his speech about protecting civil liberties. How does that policy connect to some of these issues?

Jaffer: This administration came in saying this would be the most transparent administration in the history of the United States. Over time, they became more closed and less forthcoming. They withheld many of the most crucial documents related to national-security policy, including the drone memos, until courts ordered them to release them, and information about government surveillance, until Snowden disclosed that information.

And they brought more prosecutions against government whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.

Green: How does the administration’s drone policy fit into Obama’s legacy on national security and transparency?

Jaffer: The phrase Obama used was putting “the fight against terrorism on a firm legal footing.” The other way to look at it is that this administration has normalized and entrenched many of the policies of the last administration. It would have been possible, eight years ago, to think of the Bush administration’s policies as aberrational—to see them as a reaction, and an overreaction, to the events of 9/11. It’s no longer possible to see these policies that way because the Obama administration has endorsed so many of them.

With respect to the drone campaign, that’s especially true: The Obama administration built a bureaucratic infrastructure to support this practice of targeted killing. It expanded the program dramatically. It now carries out, routinely, strikes in seven different countries; most of those countries are not conventional battlefields. I don’t think President Bush would have been able to expand the drone campaign in the way that Obama eventually did. Now we’ve invested all this power in the presidency, and all that power will be available to President Trump and whoever comes after President Trump.