Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court names five lawyers as public advocates

Jonathan G. Cedarbaum, John D. Cline, Laura Donahue, Amy Jeffress, and Marc Zwillinger will act as outsider public advocates at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

1. Cedarbaum is veteran of the Department of Justice, having served most recently as the Acting Assistant Attorney General as part of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Obama Administration.
2. Cline, by contrast, is a criminal defense attorney. According to his own bio, he served as co-counsel in many high-profile government cases, including United States v. Oliver L. North, United States v. Wen Ho Lee, and United States v. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
3. Laura Donahue is the only sitting academic in the group—she’s currently a professor at Georgetown Law. She has written extensively on national security law, privacy, Executive Order 12333, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
4. Jeffress is currently a criminal defense lawyer, but she was previously a Justice Department Attaché to the US Embassy in London. There, Jeffress coordinated cooperation between American and British authorities. She is also a former prosecutor with the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
5. Zwillinger is a longstanding privacy advocate. Way back in 2008, he represented Yahoo in its litigation fighting complying with directives under the Protect America Act, the precursor to the FISA Amendments Act. In that case, according to his bio, Zwillinger became the first private lawyer ever to appear before the FISC. More recently, he continues to represent Apple in a federal drug case in New York as the company attempts to resist government pressure to extract data from a seized iPhone.