David Banisar is a privacy advocate and legal researcher who worked for many years at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (epic) and subsequently at Article 19, an international freedom of expression organization. He co-authored the-electronic-privacy-papers (1997) with Schneier — a documentary compilation of government documents, wiretapping legislation, and surveillance records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, providing primary-source evidence of the surveillance infrastructure that the crypto wars were contesting.
The Electronic Privacy Papers
the-electronic-privacy-papers was a different kind of Schneier book from the cryptographic texts: less analysis, more archive. The compilation brought together government documents that revealed the institutional and legal architecture of electronic surveillance — FISA records, FBI intercept requests, NSA program descriptions, legislative histories — alongside technical specifications for surveillance systems and wiretapping standards. The book's value was evidentiary: it documented that the surveillance capabilities the cypherpunks feared were not hypothetical but operational, and that the government's public statements about those capabilities were incomplete at best.
Banisar's contribution was the legal and FOIA expertise: knowing what to request, how to read what came back, and how to place it in the framework of privacy law and civil liberties advocacy. The collaboration joined Schneier's technical ability to read and explain cryptographic and surveillance specifications with Banisar's legal and advocacy capacity to obtain and contextualize the relevant government documents. The result was a resource that armed privacy advocates, journalists, and legislators with primary sources rather than speculation.
Connection to the Crypto Wars Ecosystem
Banisar's institutional home at epic placed him at the center of the privacy advocacy network that surrounded the crypto-wars-export-controls and clipper-chip-announcement battles. EPIC under Marc Rotenberg was one of the primary organizational voices arguing that government surveillance required legal constraint and public accountability — arguments that complemented the technical arguments Schneier was making in applied-cryptography and in public commentary on the Clipper proposal.
The Banisar collaboration represents the documentary and legal dimension of Schneier's engagement with surveillance policy: not just explaining what surveillance systems could do, but establishing through primary sources what they were actually doing. This evidentiary approach prefigures the work that the snowden-revelations would make dramatically more consequential two decades later.