An interview with free speech champion Ben Wizner
NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE IN LATE JUNE 2025, AT THE HEIGHT OF THE NATIONAL GUARD AND MARINES DEPLOYMENT IN LOS ANGELES.
Founded 105 years ago to oppose America’s first Red Scare, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has fought to protect our constitutional rights every step of the way since. In 1920, ACLU challenged the Palmer Raids, during which thousands of people were arrested and detained without warrants. These courtroom gladiators then fought for the First Amendment at 1925’s Scopes “Monkey” Trial, when Tennessee banned teaching evolution and, in 1942, opposed the forced internment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, in prison camps. They were on the frontlines of 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education struggle to desegregate schools and, during the Vietnam War, protected antiwar students’ rights to free speech. They played an outsize role in 1973’s Roe v. Wade victory for reproductive rights, and their list of battles and accomplishments goes on and on.
The result is that today the ACLU is uniquely prepared to challenge the Trump Administration’s dictatorial policies. Key to this fight is free speech champion Ben Wizner, who has served as the director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project since 2011 and is one of the organization’s point persons in the crusade to protect our constitutional rights.
This intrepid attorney has impressive legal credentials. During the so-called “War on Terror,” Wizner’s high-profile clients included Khalid El-Masri, the German citizen who the Central Intelligence Agency flew to a black site in Afghanistan in 2003, where he was tortured for months, before the CIA admitted El-Masri was mistakenly arrested and released him. Wizner has boldly made repeat trips to Gitmo, the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, to defend terrorist suspects. And since 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who exposed top-secret warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens.
In this wide-ranging, candid conversation, Ben Wizner discusses Trump’s war on free expression, from academia to dissident foreign-born students to news media to law firms; the deportation campaign; Trump’s deployment of the military; Kilmar Abrego Garcia; Project 2025; his most celebrated client, Edward Snowden; and so much more.
