Liza Goitein
Director, Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice
Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein codirects the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program. Ms. Goitein is the author of the Brennan Center report The New Era of Secret Law and coauthor of the reports Overseas Surveillance in an Interconnected World, What Went Wrong with the FISA Court, and Reducing Overclassification Through Accountability. She is also the author of the chapter “Overclassification: Its Causes and Consequences” in the book An Enduring Tension: Balancing National Security and Our Access to Information and coauthor of the chapter “Lessons From the History of National Security Surveillance” in the 2017 Cambridge Handbook of Surveillance Law.
Her writing has been featured in major newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Los Angeles Times, and she has appeared on national television and radio shows including the Rachel Maddow Show, All In with Chris Hayes, PBS NewsHour, and NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. She has testified before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.
Before coming to the Brennan Center, Ms. Goitein served as counsel to Senator Russ Feingold, chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. Ms. Goitein graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for the Honorable Michael Daly Hawkins on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.