In a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the influential online forum Just Security, Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, delivered remarks at NYU Law on February 29. She then joined Dean Troy McKenzie ’00 for a public conversation that explored ways in which greater transparency by intelligence agencies can enhance US security, among other issues. Just Security and its home institution, the Reiss Center on Law and Security, convened the event.
Just Security was co-founded in 2013 by Ryan Goodman, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Reiss Center, as a platform for analysis of law, rights, and national security policy. Today Just Security is a widely read and multifaceted online publication that brings together analysis and commentary on security, law, foreign affairs, and democracy from a diverse range of experts. Tess Bridgeman ’10 serves as co-editor-in-chief of the forum as well as senior fellow and visiting scholar at the Reiss Center. Together she and Goodman welcomed Haines and celebrated the milestone event.
“I…want to take the opportunity to celebrate the impact that Just Security and the Reiss Center have had on just an extraordinary range of issues,” Haines said in her opening remarks. “You’ve built an intellectual community that believes it is possible through interdisciplinary discourse based on scholarship and experience to promote a more just society,” she added. "And you are a consistent resource for decision-makers, analysts, [and] practitioners who work on difficult national security issues, often raising the level of the public conversation and asking provocative questions that help ensure that we’re thinking things through.”
Watch the discussion between Avril Haines and Troy McKenzie on video:
Selected quotations from Avril Haines in her conversation with Dean McKenzie:
“Of course…it’s not as if we don’t share [intelligence] with these allies and partners on a regular basis, but as you intensify on a particular issue, you learn a lot from those discussions, right? They come back and they say, ‘Well, I’m not sure about this piece, but we’ve got a piece of intelligence that tells us this,’ and it helps you put the picture together in a way that gives you greater confidence about what’s happening.” (video 31:42)
“One of the things that we see sometimes with authoritarian intelligence services is they get used as a political tool. They’re not focused on what’s best for the country; they’re focused on what’s best for that political leader’s future or their capacity to do things. That is a drain of resources, in my view, on what is to do, but it also means that they’re not actually helping their leaders make better decisions for their country.” (video 40:02)
“China, it is a critical priority for us because it is so fundamentally important to our future…. It is a very long term, obviously, picture and goal, and one where part of the issue for us is ensuring that we keep our eye on the ball, which is to say it’s not as often the urgent threat the way the Middle East and counter-terrorism can be…. And so the capacity to maintain focus and understanding—building out expertise so that we’re able to give decision-makers a better understanding of the landscape and so on—is crucial…. That is where we need to invest.” (video 49:26)
“For Russia, you know, in so many ways, the invasion of Ukraine has really kind of accelerated a decline for Russia that I think makes them also increasingly dangerous in many ways. It is when you have less to lose, you’re willing to take more risk in effect to achieve your goals. And so as we watch that and try to help policymakers, again, understand what’s happening, it’s a dynamic evolving picture, where we’re looking to give them both the kind of indication and warning of various potential aggressive moves, but also opportunities to try to create greater stability in a situation that is very hard to maintain stability around.” (video 50:50)
Posted April 4, 2024