Lawrence Lessig on Using Coders to Protect Our Privacy

Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and founder of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, tells Bill Moyers how our government — given all the ways it can spy on us — should just as determinedly use modern technology to protect our liberties.

“We’ve got to think about the technology as a protector of liberty too. So code is a kind of law…There’s a way to build the technology to give us this liberty back, this privacy back. But it’s not a priority to think about using code to protect,” Lessig tells Bill.

“We have two kinds of specialized knowledge here, lawyers and coders — those people have to be in the same room as they listen to the government and the government says, ‘This is what we need to do to keep America safe.’ Let’s force the government to prove that to both of these lawmakers, the lawyers and the coders.”

Watch the full conversation between Bill Moyers and Lawrence Lessig