[9] Baker has often testified before Congress on behalf of Clinton and Bush administration intelligence policies, including defending The Patriot Act before the House Judiciary Committee.
[14][15] Baker served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, Inc. from June 2020 to December 2022, until being fired publicly by CEO Elon Musk.
[2][17][18] In 2004, according to The Washington Post, Baker was responsible for the discovery that "the government's failure to share information" regarding the NSA electronic surveillance program had "rendered useless a federal screening system" insisted upon by the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to prevent "tainted information"—in U.S. case law, "fruit of the poisonous tree"—from being used before the court.
Baker was reported to have informed presiding federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the FISC, whose complaints to the Justice Department led to the temporary suspension of the NSA program.
[20] In 2017, Circa reported that Baker was under a Department of Justice criminal investigation for allegedly leaking classified national security information concerning the Trump administration to the media.
[21] The probe, described as "a strange interagency dispute that ... attracted the attention of senior lawmakers", reportedly "ended with a decision not to charge anyone," per The Washington Post.
[4] On May 10, 2019, Baker was interviewed for a taped Lawfare podcast, a justice-focused blog, during which he discussed his role in the FBI investigation of events during the 2016 presidential election that would be taken over by Robert S. Mueller III.
Sussmann focuses on privacy and cybersecurity law and had approached Baker to discuss what then appeared to be suspicious communications between computer servers at the Russian Alfa-Bank and the Trump Organization.
[27] In a published essay and press interview, Baker announced his decision to "rethink [his] prior beliefs about encryption", and "embrace [the] reality" that Congress would not pass laws mandating backdoors in consumer devices.