Stewart Baker is a former US national security official and a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, where he practices in national security, cybersecurity, and export controls. He served as NSA General Counsel (1992-1994) and as DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy (2005-2009), and writes and comments on national security law and technology policy.
Government career
Baker served as NSA General Counsel from 1992 to 1994 under President Clinton, responsible for legal advice on NSA operations, surveillance law, and cryptography policy. In that role he oversaw the NSA's position against end-to-end encryption during the "Crypto Wars" of the early 1990s, including the Clipper chip debates.
From 2005 to 2009 he served as DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy under President George W. Bush, acting as the department's chief policy officer with responsibility for aviation security policy, information sharing, and post-9/11 counterterrorism legal frameworks.
Post-government work
Baker is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP, a Washington national security law firm, where his practice covers national security, cybersecurity, and export controls. He is the author of Skating on Stilts (2010), on the national security implications of privacy law, and co-hosts the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast on national security technology.
AI and export controls
In July 2025, Baker signed a letter to Commerce Secretary Lutnick (Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28)) urging the administration to reverse its decision to resume exports of Nvidia H20 chips to China and to "continue blocking the sale of advanced AI chips to China." The letter, co-signed with Matt Pottinger, David Feith and 17 others, argued that the H20 is "a potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities, not an outdated AI chip": designed to work around export-control thresholds, optimized for inference, and faster than the already-restricted H100 on inference tasks. Baker signed as a former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security and former General Counsel of the National Security Agency (Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28)). Baker's prior roles at the NSA and DHS place his signature among national security figures weighing in on the security-versus-openness tradeoffs in the export control debate.
Relationships
- signed: Letter to Sec. Lutnick on H20 Restrictions (2025-07-28) — co-signatory urging that H20 exports to China remain blocked
- related: Matt Pottinger — co-signatory on H20 letter
- related: David Feith — co-signatory on H20 letter
- related: Export Controls (AI) — H20 letter weighs in on this policy debate
- related: Chip Smuggling and Export-Control Evasion — export controls context