Almost exactly a year ago, the NSA announced the hiring of Rebecca Richards to be its Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer, leading many to exclaim, wait, the NSA has that job? Indeed it does. Though we haven‘t heard much from Richards since that hiring, she did appear on the latest „Cyberlaw Podcast“ with Techdirt‘s number one fanboy, Stewart Baker.

During the podcast, Richards admits what many of us have been arguing for years (since even before the Snowden revelations), that the NSA is probably making a mistake in relying on „cute“ interpretations of the law to claim that it has legal justifications for its actions: