Adam Klein, who most recently served as the Chairman of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has joined the Strauss Center at the University of Texas as Director of our new Program on Technology, Security, and Global Affairs, and also as the Center’s Deputy Director. His research will focus on how governments around the world use emerging technologies to pursue their security goals, and how those choices affect U.S. interests and alliances. Adam also will be a lecturer at the School of Law, where his teaching will focus on counterterrorism, national security, and balancing surveillance with civil liberties and privacy.  

“This is an extraordinary development for the Strauss Center,” said Bobby Chesney, the Director of the Strauss Center and the James Baker Chair at the University of Texas. “Adam Klein is a widely-respected, deeply-accomplished expert working at the intersection of security, technology, rights, and international affairs. The new program he will lead on that topic is timely and essential, and he is uniquely situated to advance it.”

“The Strauss Center is already one of the nation’s leading academic centers on international security and law,” he said.  “I look forward to working with the Strauss Center’s exceptional team to inform policymakers and inspire students about the opportunities and risks facing our country.  With emerging technologies increasingly a decisive factor in national security debates, the Strauss Center and the University of Texas at Austin are exceptionally well positioned to lead in solving the security challenges of the coming decades.”

In 2018, Adam was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to lead the independent, bipartisan U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the federal agency responsible for overseeing counterterrorism programs conducted by the NSA, FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security.  Before entering government, Adam served as the Robert M. Gates Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan national-security research institution in Washington, DC.

Previously, Adam practiced law at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, LLP and served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  He has also worked on national-security policy at the RAND Corporation, the 9/11 Public Discourse Project (the nonprofit successor to the 9/11 Commission), and in the U.S. Congress.  Adam received his BA from Northwestern University and his JD from Columbia Law School. He is a former Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow and Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Berlin, and speaks German and French.