the use of the state secrets claim that the justice department invoked last month and throughout the aclu suit on behalf of rendition victims. this is not changed. this is definitely more the same. yet now, mr. chairman i have got to tell you i am thankful that mr. obama has had some epiphanies lately. i hope that he accelerates those epiphanies because i think that the national security of the country and economic future, the constitutional foundations of the nations are at stake. but with that said i want to give mr. grossman and opportunity, the aclu said this isn't changed, this is more the same and i want to give you a chance to disagree or agree with the aclu director. ..

>> what is important here, i think, is for all of us to realize that truth and time travel on the same road and that truth always has the last word and that somehow perhaps in this institution and in our campaigns we should try to figure out what's right instead of who's right all the time, and with that i yield back. thank you. >> i thank the gentleman. i think the purpose of this hearing is regardless of the purpose of any administration to figure out what's right, not who is right, and i agree with the gentleman in that. i thank the witnesses. without objection, all members will have five days to subject

written questions to the witnesses which we will forward and ask the witnesses to answer as quickly as you can. without objection, five legislative days to submit materials for inclusion in the record. without objection, i thank the witnesses and the members, and with that this hearing is adjourned. >> pleasure to serve with you. >> yeah, good to see you. >> in about a half hour at 1 p.m. we'll have live coverage of today's white house briefing with spokesman robert gibbs. and on c-span right now we've got more on the situation in iran with a discussion on the recent elections there and iran's nuclear program and ambitions. hosted by the woodrow wilson international center for scholars, that's live now on our companion network, c-span.

>> how is c-span funded? >> publicly funded. >> donations maybe? i have no idea. >> government? >> c-span gets its funding through the taxes. >> federal funding? >> sort of a public funding thing. >> maybe. i don't know. >> how is c-span funded? thirty years ago america's cable companies created c-span as a public service, a private business initiative. no government mandate, no government must be. money. >> in a speech at the imperial college in london, british conservative party leader david cameron accused prime minister gordon brown of creating a control state.

mr. cameron said if he became the next prime minister, he would increase access to government data in several areas. he also talked about the recent members' expense scandal in the house of commons. following his speech, he took questions from the audience. this event is about a half hour. [applause] >> thank you very much for that introduction and for your kind words about the need for honesty, openness, and transparency about public spending, something the prime minister and i discussed in a slightly less calm atmosphere yesterday, but nonetheless extremely important. [laughter] i want to thank imperial college for inviting me to speak here today. you do have a remarkable history. in just a little over a century, you've got the discovery of penicillin, the development of fiberoptics, the foundations of the internet and, of course, 14 nobel laureates to your name. these innovations have put real power into people's hands and have changed the world, and

that's what i want to talk about today, people power and the change we need in this country. after the political crisis this year, the consensus for change is overwhelming, but the reality so far has been, let's be frank, underwhelming. blacked-out expenses claims, the announcement of a behind-the-doors iraq inquiry, and a prime minister who's talked about restoring the authority of parliament but is still making announcements on the radio. now, if you're serious about change, you need a consistency of argument and a clarity of purpose, and that is what i believe the conservatives are now offering. we have a coherent program to fix the broken politics and to drag our democracy into what we call the post-bureaucratic age. it involves a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power from the political elite to the man and the woman in the street. but before we deal with long-term plans, we do first have to deal with this expenses

issue. now, i set up a scrutiny panel to examine the claims of every conservative mp and to examine whether they were reasonable and whether in retrospect some money should be paid back. conservative mps have responded overwhelmingly in a positive way and showed a real desire to take a lead on what has been a damaging issue. it is an effort both collectively as a party and individually as conservative mps to address the public's anger about what has happened, and today we're publishing a very full update from that scrutiny panel. already conservatives have paid back over 125,000 pounds, and this exercise will add another 125,000 pounds to that money paid back. that this is not about mps that broke the rules. we all know the rules weren't good enough. it's about understanding the level of public anger, about a system that was broken and, yes, the part that we played in it. it's not good enough just to

sort out the rules for the future. we need to recognize and in some way try and atone for the mistakes of the past. and these payments are, i believe, an important part of that. this is just one step of many that needs to be taken to restore some trust and some faith in the british political system. now, a month ago the open university i set out some of our plans to decentralize power in britain. today i want to take the next step and show how we will control the power of the state and make it more accountable to people. now, the british state has developed over centuries into a powerful entity charged with delivering some very important goals. protecting our citizens, redistributing wealth, insuring public services. and these things have undoubtedly made our country a place which is safer, fairer, and where opportunity is more equal. but the more the state does the greater risk there is that it gradually becomes the master

over the citizens that it's actually meant to be serving. that's why we've traditionally created checks to keep the right balance of power. checks to stop the state exerting too much power over us, in other words, protecting personal freedom and also checks to help us exert our power over the state, in other words, insuring political accountability. but i believe the last 12 years we've seen diminished personal freedom and diluted political accountability, and i want to try and address both of those today. today, i believe, we're in danger of living in a control state. almost a million innocent citizens are caught in the web of the biggest dna database anywhere in the world, larger than that of any dictatorship. hundreds of shadowy powers allow officials to force their way past your front door and soon we'll be forced to pate with our personal information to identity cards. every month over a thousand

surveillance operations are carried out by public bodies like councils. and the tent -- tentacles of the state can rifle through your dust bins for juicy pieces of information. have we got ourselves into a position where there's such a marked imbalance between the citizen and the state? now, i acknowledge that new labor began with the right intentions. the freedom of information act, data protection laws, scottish and welsh devolution, eastern the a-- even the attempt to invest humans with constitutional rights. but this liberal strand, i believe, has been crushed by overwhelming dominance of what i'd call the political authoritarians. now, this strand of the party, i think, has been guided by two thicks: partly political philosophy and partly a style of government. the philosophy has at its heart a leaf that the state is the

answer to most of our problems, so they've reached for more control over many areas of our lives herding everyone into the net of the control state. on the governing style, on the other hand, is all about presenting the government in the best possible light. they've seen it throughout as vital to demonstrate that ministerial action, an announcement from outside downing street leads directly to some beneficial result and not just any result, but a very fast and a very visible one. the authoritarians are not really interested in rail and sustainable change -- real and sustainable change in our country unless it can be linked directly to their own actions. this is what people call spin, endless relaunches, the downing street summits that we're so familiar with. so when, for instance, crime rises much better say the authoritarians to create a new criminal offense, and we've had over 3,000 new criminal offenses in the last decade, than it is actually to take the long-term

action that would, for instance, strengthen families and cut crime in the first place. it's a government, if you like, of the short term, by the short term and for the short term. so top-down philosophy together with a short-term governing style, this was an ideological and political recipe for creating a disastrous imbalance of power between the citizen and the state. the belief in the state led them to increase state power and thereby diminished personal freedom and their reliance on spin made them hostile to scrutiny which is why we've ended up with diluting political accountability. now, people may have seen that labor's intentions have been crushed and lost, but they ask of it, all right, how will you be different? now, i think conservatives start with an instinctive desire to give people more power and control over their lives, but we're not naive. we know the state can't just let go. the right power balance is something that has to be

constantly negotiated and adjusted through on going judgments. but we will always be aware that those judgments, however small and insignificant they may seem on their own, can together change the character of your country. so a conservative government would constantly ask two essential questions: does this action enhance personal freedom, and second, does it advance political accountability? and at the heart of our program for government would be an intention to change fundamentally the balance of power between the citizen and the state so that ultimately it's people in control of the government and not government in control of the people. now, we'll start by putting back in place the protections of personal freedom that labour have taken away. today in britain you can wake up in the morning in your own bed, in your own home to hear a knock on the door from an official with one of over a thousand powers that let the state go into your house.

you don't have to be a terrorist or a criminal fugitive. the authorities have the right to come into your home, for example, to inspect your potted plants for pests, to check the regulation of any hedge row. more than half of these new powers have been introduced in the past 12 years, but labour's control state can also snoop on you as you walk down the street. it's not just the sort of spies that you see in prime time dramas but these are new officials using the regulation of investigatory powers act sometimes known as the grim reaper. this was supposedly introduced to help fight terrorism, but for instance, the council in the southwest used it to spy for nearly three weeks on a young family who had applied to a local primary school, and they wanted to check and see if they lived in the right area. councils use the grim reaper to snoop on dog foulers.

this is not an appropriate use of the grim reaper. then there's the misuse of the terrorist legislation. section 44 of the terrorism act gives the police the power to stop and search any person on the street. now, last year it was used over 120,000 times, a threefold increase on the year before. that's one person stopped every 4 minutes, yet only 1 percent of these searches led to an arrest, let alone charges or convictions. and instead not terrorist offenses, we see a woman in her 30s held for walking on a cycle path, parents and their 12-year-old disabled son detained for two hours by ten officers on suspicion of people trafficking. [laughter] i'm not making this up, by the way. let's say you were charged. i would argue there are now serious questions about the quality of justice in britain. since 2003 we've seen repeated attempts to remove the role of juries in fraud trials and

coroners' inquests and other criminal trials. and justice hasn't just been eroded at home, we've seen a surrender to further attack from abroad. britain now allows extradition to a range of countries without that other country having to produce any proper evidence that the person in question has committed a crime. so in all these ways our personal freedom has been diminished, the balance of power in our country has shifted away from the individual just trying to live their life and towards the state and its agencies constantly probing, prying and picking on people. so we will make some important changes. the next conservative government will revoke the unjustified powers that let people into your home without your permission, we'll change the law that allows councils to snoop on people for trivial matters, we'll review section 44 and the stop and search powers contained within it, and we'll change the criminal justice act 2003 to strength p the right to trial by jury, and we will review the operation of the extradition act

and the u.s./u.k. extradition treaty to make sure it works both ways. but stops the state from exerting too much power over us demands another very big change. the government is running not just a control state, but what i would call a surveillance state. in 2007 privacy international ranked britain's privacy protections joint 43rd out of 47 countries surveyed with the worst record in europe only marginally better than russia and china. faced with any problem, any crisis, given any excuse we've seen a government grasp for more information pulling more and more people into the clutches of the state data capture. take contact point. it is a vast database that holds the details of everyone under the age of 18 in england, their name, their address, their gender, date of birth, school and health provider. and the government doesn't want to stop with the basic information, they want the most complex, important personal

information there is. there are nearly 5 million people on the dna database. now, the government says it's there to help fight crime, but almost a million of the people on it are completely innocent of any crime. tens of thousands of these innocent people are actually children. now, it's a situation that i think would cause concern under the most o pressive regime in the world, but it's happening right here, right now in britain. but labour want to go even further. they want every single person in the country to walk around with an identity card. with that card there'd be over 50 pieces of personal information being transferred from your private control to state control. not just your name and address, place of birth, but your image, signature, fingerprints, maybe even iris scans and facial measurement template. for those who don't get a card, there is talk of fines, enforced registrations and penalties in public service revision. getting things withdrawn from you if you're not on the database or if you don't have the card.

these are scare tactics to herd more disempowered citizens into the clutches of officialdom. if we want to stop the state controlling us, we've got to confront this surveillance state, so the next conservative government will scrap the database of children's details, we will scrap the id card scheme, and we will remove innocent people's records from the dna database. now, the action we take to rein in the control state and confront the surveillance state will help rebalance power in one direction by enhancing personal freedom and limiting the state's power over us, but a radical redistribution of power also means increasing our power over the state. now, that means advancing political accountability. again, information here is power because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. this has never been more true than today in what we call the

information age. the internet is spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. it turns lonely fights into mass campaigns, it excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. and constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful. i think we've seen this in the situation in iran. every time the iranian state has tried to choke the flow of information to dampen down the protests, people have turned to technology to share and access information. so when the state cut off the text messages and the mobile phones to stop people coordinating protests, the protesters switched instead to social media like twitter and facebook. for those of you who thought twitter was just about stephen frye telling us his latest move, we've now seen it. people on the street started uploading video clips onto youtube that men make their way into the -- then make their

way into the news reports around the world. that's why the u.s. administration, rightly, asked twitter to postpone its web site maintenance so iranians could go on using the site. this, if you like, the sort of foreign policy in the information age giving other people power so they can use that power to demand change. and we've seen the dramatic power, let's be frank about it, of information to shape events right here at home. last month the daily telegraph published receipts and expense claims that had previously been kept secret, information that the authorities -- to their shame -- have even now only released in a half hearted way thick with black ink. but what the telegraph did, the simple act of providing information to the public, has triggered the biggest shake-up in our political system for years. informs alone has been -- information alone has been much more power than years of traditional politics. now, of course, it has been a painful time for politics and for individual politicians, but let's be clear, this it is a poe

development for the country. it's information, not a new law, not a new regulation, not some announcement by a politician, just the provision of information that's enabled people to take on the political class, question them, demand answers, and get those answers. that's as it should be. that is actually what accountability is about. it's people power, and we need more of it, not less. now, we've already announced some of the ways in which we as a government would put information and thereby power into people's hands. we will publish every item of government spending over 25,000 pounds. it will be there for an army of, if you like, armchair auditors to go through line by line, pound by pound to hold wasteful governments to account. we will require the publication of crime data online in an open way so that every community can build up its own crime map, which crimes are being committed where, what time they're being committed at, and they can then hold their local police to

account if they're not doing something about it. a classic example of information giving you power, and we will require all local councils to publish information, all the local service data, in a standardized form. this is vital because it gives people the power to hold local government to account and to develop new public services. they would be able, for instance, to have services like local verses that have worked for you that tell teenagers when every sports center is open. they also allow you to compare councils to see which are providing value for money so residents can demand the same from their own local authority. but today we're enacting further steps towards true free come of information. -- freedom of information. there are over 100,000 public bodies producing a huge amount of public information. these range from school league tables to health outcomes in the health service to public sector job vacancies, but most of this information is kept sort of locked up by the state, and what

is published is mostly released in formats that means the information can't be searched or can't be used with with other applications like, for instance, an online map. now, this stands in the way of true accountability. let me give you some examples. today job add accelerates are placed in a few selected newspapers. but all of them in a variety of different publications meaning it's almost impossible to find out how many vacancies there are across the public sector, what sort of salaries are being offered, and how those vary from public sector body to public sector body. remember, this is your money being put forward to give someone a job, and yet you've got little way of finding out what the job is for and how much they're being paid. now, imagine in those were all published online in a standardized way. not only could you find out about every vacancy for yourself, but you could cross-reference what jobs are on offer. take patient outcomes in the

nhs. what we really want to know which is if i go to this hospital, what sort of chance am i going to have of survival? some of the most important information you'll need to know, how long will your dad survive if he gets cancer? all of this is really out of our hands. imagine if this information was in our hands. you'd be able to compare your local hospital with other hospitals, you'd be able to do something about it if it wasn't good enough, choose a different hospital, choose a different doctor, go to a patient group, make change happy. happen. all this data which would help hold the powerful to account. it's all locked up, and at the moment i think it's getting worse. next week the children's secretary will publish proposals for a new report card. sounds great, but it's actually replacing the league tables, and so it'll actually reduce the amount of information being published and reduce parent power to hold your school to account.

now, we want to set this data free. in the first year of a conservative government, we'll find the most useful information in 20 different areas ranging in schools to road traffic and publish it so people can use it. this information will be published proactively and regularly and in a standardized format so in the technical jargon, this can be meshed up and interacted with. because there's no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new right to data so that further sets can be requested by the public, and all requests will be successful unless it can be proved that it would lead to overwhelming cost or national security concerns. but as i said in my speech at the open university, to get real accountability we need to draw on the traditional means as well as the modern ones i've been speaking about. that means strengthening parliament to it holds the exty to account -- executive to

account, we will reduce the power of the party whips, and it means reining in and reversing the regulation of our lives by unaccountable judges who are changing britain's legal poland scape. that's -- landscape. that's why we'll introduce a british bill of rights over the creation of any new rights. and it also means strengthening the line of accountability that runs through our local politics. that's why we'll have more directly-elected mayors and also the right of what's called citizens' initiatives, giving people a new power to get a local referendum on any issue they feel strongly about. so here is the next stage in our radical redistribution of power. stopping the state from exerting too much power over us by enhancing personal freedom. so you will not be followed, have your home entered for no good reason, you can be tried by your peers, protected from unjust prosecution from abroad, and your identity will be freed

from all of those change of the state databases, and we'll help people exert more power over the state by advancing political accountability, opening up the information that help you to hold the powerful to account, strengthening the chain of accountability throughout politics. this, i believe, is what i call progressive conservatism in action, a traditional suspicion of state power combined with a clear grasp of the modern world, producing the right approach and the right plan of action to increase our personal freedom, to enhance our political accountability, to restore trust, and to help bring about the new politics that we so badly need right here in britain today. thank you for listening. [applause] now, thank you. we've got time for a couple of questions, so if anyone wants to kick off on that or, indeed, on anything else.

i've silenced you. [laughter] that's never happened to me. go on then, right. >> management of information, i do agree information is power and so forth, but certainly there could be arguments that certain levels of information do increase the security of the country, so it's quite a fine balance, isn't it, between what you hold as an individual and what you let the state have. and i would suspect, would you agree, that an open debate on this issue is required as opposed to a political party directing? >> i think that's right. i mean, i sat on the, the select committee that, the standing committee, rather, that looked at the government's id cards bill, and we had this fascinating debate about the holding of information. and one of the reasons i'm so against identity cards is what's called all the eggs in one basket problem. is the more you do to make the

id card potentially incredibly useful, the more information you pile onto it, the more danger it is that if that data security is broken, then someone has all your details and all your information. so i think that's a fascinating argument, but to me the real case against id cards is quite a pragmatic one. i think when you pursue the government's arguments about id cards, it's an ever-shifting answer. you know, you're told to start with what it's about, illegal immigration, but then you say why not have proper border control? well, it's not really about that, it's about combating crime. well, are the police going to be able to command you to produce it on site? no, they're not. well, then it's about fraud. it's a sort of solution seeking a problem, and it's also an extremely expensive one. so i think there are sort of pragmatic arguments against it which have been teased out through this debate, and then there are also the data security