Panelists

Spencer Ackerman is a writer and journalist. Part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team reporting on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations, since 2002 he has covered the War on Terror for The New Republic, Talking Points Memo, Wired, The Guardian, and The Daily Beast—where he was senior national security correspondent from 2017 to 2021, and where he remains a contributing editor today. He is the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (2021), and founder of Substack newsletter “Forever Wars.”

Professor Linda Bilmes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, is an expert on budgeting and public finance. She is a full-time faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the US Department of Commerce. She has co-authored multiple books and book chapters, including the international bestseller The Three Trillion Dollar War and has written extensively on the cost of war, veterans’ issues, national parks, municipal budgeting and financial topics. She has been featured in several films, including Charles Ferguson’s award-winning documentary No End In Sight.  She serves on the US Department of Interior National Park Service Advisory Board and on the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration. Her research has been published in the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and other media. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and holds a BA and MBA from Harvard University and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Faiza Patel is a nationally recognized expert on counterterrorism and government surveillance. As co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, she has published research on NSA surveillance, social media monitoring, countering violent extremism, and targeting of Muslim communities. Patel has testified before the Senate and House on homeland security surveillance. Her writing has been featured in major publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. She is also a regular contributor to the legal blog Just Security, where she is a member of the Board of Editors. Previously, she worked as a senior policy officer at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague and served as a law clerk at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development and the Director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to the University of Maryland, he taught at several universities, including Cornell University, the Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science. He has also been active in the foreign policy arena. He has advised in one form or another every administration from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama. His best-selling book, The Stakes: America and the Middle East, was selected by Foreign Affairs as one of the top five books on the Middle East in 2003. His most recent book, The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East, was published in 2013. Telhami was selected by the Carnegie Corporation of New York along with the New York Times as one of the “Great Immigrants” for 2013. He is also a recipient of the University of Maryland’s Honors College 2014 Outstanding Faculty Award and in 2018 he received the University of Maryland’s Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award.