Schneier and Cohn: Twenty-Five Years of Post-9/11 Surveillance Is Enough

Security technologist Bruce Schneier and Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn have co-authored an op-ed in Lawfare arguing that the surveillance apparatus assembled in the weeks after September 11, 2001, should now be dismantled. The piece — sitting at nearly 460 points on Hacker News — marks twenty-five years since Congress passed the PATRIOT Act, dramatically expanding government authority over phone metadata, internet communications, and financial monitoring. The programs Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 traced their legal authority to that legislation. Schneier and Cohn's case rests on two claims: that the evidence of effectiveness is thin, and that the civil liberties costs have been substantial.

The Lawfare placement is deliberate. The publication is read by the national security law community, not primarily by technologists, and pairing Schneier's technical credibility with Cohn's legal standing is an attempt to reach a different audience than either author commands alone. The 141-comment Hacker News thread engaged seriously with the epistemological difficulty at the center of the argument: whether surveillance prevented attacks is, by its nature, hard to evaluate because the counterfactual is unobservable. Schneier's historical position is that the burden of proof falls on program proponents, and that burden has not been met.

A technical dimension reinforces the legal argument: the PATRIOT Act was written before smartphones existed and before end-to-end encryption became widespread. The surveillance infrastructure was designed for a communications landscape that has been fundamentally transformed; the legal framework has been stretched to cover situations its drafters could not have imagined rather than revised to reflect them. Schneier and Cohn's call for dismantlement is, in that sense, also a call to stop improvising with 2001-era tools against a 2026 threat environment.