>> this week on "the communicators," a look at how members of congress use technology andocial media to inform their constituents about congressional issues. this week we talk with steve israel of new york. >> host: what's your favorite way of communicating with your

constituents? >> guest: you know, in this environment you can't have one favorite way. it's got to be integrated, it's got to be comprehensive because not everybody follows one venue. so in a district as diverse as mine in new york there are some people that i communicate with throug twitter. there are others that i communicate through my e-newsletter. others still want a piece of paper, so we send mail. i've always believed the success of communication in this day and age relies on having an amply-stocked tool box and using all of those too in an integrated way. >> host: well, you seem to be a pretty active twitterer. can you give us an example of some of the ways you twitter and to whom? >> guest: you know, i use several approaches. there are my correspondents who use twitter as a hand grenade and will toss it to me. i enjoy engaging them. now, there are some who it

doesn't make sense to engage becausenything i say will not have any resonance with them. then there are others, critics. i've got one named zach who i have some pretty strong debates with. i also like to do behind-the-scenes things. i'm on the house appropriations committee, and we were on a marathon mark up one day, and i took pictures. i tweeted them saying this is what it looks like to be on the appropriations committee. i think that's just another way to draw people in and make them feel like they're part of the process. >> host: do you get in trouble foraking pictures in the markup with your fellow congressmen? >>uest: these are my fellow members of congress. they have no problem having their pictures taken. [laughter] >> host: how, how common is it for members of congress now to tweet? are you one of the first?

>> guest: ihink i'm probably one of the early users of twitter. i believe that i'm probably one of the most frequent and sustained users of twitter. the problem is that the technology's changed so quickly. for 200 years most members of congress communicated with their constituents in newspapers, in frank mail, and then in the past eight or nine years that has changed dramatically at an incredible pace. i remember coming to congress in 2001 having freshman orientation, and i was told you got to have a frank mail plan, you've got to get earned media in the newspapers and local televisions stations, and you've got tt town hall meetings -- to do town hall meetings. about two years later i was told the frank mail wasn't working anymore, you have to do e-newsletter. it changes so quickly that by the time i figured it out, it's passe.

so the challengeere for my colleagues is keeping up and also diversifying, making sure you're not using one medium or another, but you're using them all. >> ht: are the rules of the housekeeping up with the different technology? >> guest: there's always a challenge. the rules of the house sometimes can be antiquated and make certain assumptions based on technologies that have already kind of gone out of biness. so one of the challenges is to make sure that you're keeping up not only with the technologies, but that the rules of the house are keeping up with those technologies. >> host: congressman steve israel, you have 150 followers on twitter, 400, 500,000 people in your district, how many people on your eewsletter? >> guest: you know, i don't know off the top of my head how many people are subscribers to our e-newsletter, but we work very hard to make sure that's avlable to them. every communication i have with

my constituents whether it's responding to a piece of mail with another piece of mail or doing something on my internet site we always ask people to subscribe to my e-newsletter, and the response has come in pretty well. we leverage it towards other technologies. two weeksgo i decided to have a telephone town hall meeting, and we used our subscriber list to identify people who might be interested in participating in that telephone town hall meeting. we did robo-calls, and the end result was that he had over 5,000 people calming into this tele-town hall meeting. i represent a district that is very busy, very fast-paced, people don't want to always hear from their congressman. to get 5,000 on my constituents on the phone at one time was a very big deal. >> ht: begin with your iphone. what do you use that for?

>> guest: my iphe has become -- you know, this little thing in my hand has become my most effective tool in communicing with my constituents. i mean, just this morning i did, i tweeted, and i do it routine during the day. and so this morning i shared one of the concerns that i have had with some of my colleagues who were engaging in rhetorical excess on the health reform bill. one of them said that the health care bill will put seniors in the position of being put to death by their government. i tweeted that. i want people to understand what's being said. i'm not making a judent on it, i don't defend it, i just want people to hear what's being said. and i've already received some responses. this is instant feedback for me. inassistant feedback. -- instant feedback. i don't have to wait to check the phone logs or the mail logs, i can just see how my people have responded to my tweets, and

it's taking a little while here. that's right. you can have the most cutting -- >> host: so you can be anywhere, and you can send a tweet. >> guest: absolutely absolutely. and then other members are tweeting, so congressman tim ryan from ohio, myths v. facts on health care. last sunday i gave a speech to the fighting 69th, and i wanted people not to read my speech, but i wanted them to join me in kind of honoring the members of the fighting 69th. and so i -- let's see. i posted a photograph of the troops from the stage and so people can see, you know, they can access what i'm doing, and i can can hear from them at frequent points during the day. >> host: congressman, is this

your persolhone or is this a house-issued iphone? >> guest: this is my personal iphone. one of the frustrations, you mentioned the rules of the house, one of the frustraons i have is that the rules have not kept up with the technology, and so right now we have to figure out how the encryed data for house e-mails are secure on an iphone, and they're trying to work that out right now. >> host: so all your tweets go from your personal iphone. >> guest: they go from an unofficial iphone. and just looking this morning, my friend zach e-mailed, tweeted me: at least give us time to debate the issue before jamming it through. talking about health care. last night he said the government prevents competition in the health insurance market reducing quality. we need free markets, not a government monopoly. and y get, you know, just a wide view of opinions, but you get them instantaneously. >> host: have you ever chatted

with zach in person or just via tweets? >> guest: just via tweets. now, i'm not sure where zach lives. another frustration with this is that your not always -- you're not alway sure you're talking with constituents, and that's a big deal for many of my colleagues. there's no way of knowing unless you do some digging, and there are ways on the iphone to see what kind of background they ve, but it's not immediately understood or apparent that some of your fellow tweeters live in the district. but, you know, i still enjoy the engagement. >> host: congressman israel, you also have on your official web site, israel.house.governor a video blog. and how do you do that and where do you do that? >> guest: do you want to see it? >> host: sure. >> guest: okay. i don't want my internet site to be static. you know, the whole point of the internet is to be up-to-date, to

be timely, and so onefhe things that i like to do is speak directly to my constituents. >> host: and this is the official house web site. guest: this is the official house web site. >> [inaudible] i want to invite you to call a special dedicated phone line i've set up to leave your opinions on the health reform bill being debated in washington this week. it's very important that i hear your concerns and am aware of your opinions. so i'd like you to call 202-226-4229, and let me know what you think the congres and the president should do with respect to health care. one of the thing i'm focusing on is the cost of health care. premiums for most aricans have doubled. so this gives you a sense of trying to use those integrated strategies. i'm using the telephone which is a more conventional instrument

of communications with a web site. when people will call, it will give us a database of those who are concerned about health care. i'll be able to engage them in back and forth communication, so what we try and do is have a reinforced communication strategy. >> host: what kind of technology do you use to tape that? >> guest: well, i use this, another handy instrument that fits in the palm of one's hand, and, you know, this is actually a high definition flip phone, flip cam. one of the great experiments that i had with this is it helped generate tremendous support for legislation that i introduced. it's called why tuesday. and that legislation would move elections from tuesday to weekends. one out of four people who don't vote say that they don't vote because tuesday's just too inconvenient for them. they have jobs, they have kids, i'm trying to move this to

weekend voting. people kind of understand it, but what i did was i took this down to the capitol building one day when there were lots of tourists in town, and i did my own little documentary. i would say, do you know why we vote on tuesdays? and hardly anybody knew. hi, folks, i'm congressman steve israel from new york. >> i'm from mississippi. >> i'm going to do an interview with you. monte, that's your name? >> that's correct. >> why do you think we have election days on tuesdays in ameriaa? >> i suppose because once upon a time all the taverns were closed on tuesdays. >> because people would forget to vote. >> maybe if easter falls late on monday -- >> majority of the holidays are served on mondays, so we vote on tuesdays. >> gue: as a result of that, we had over 12,000 hits on the internet, and that generated a lot of curiousty and generating

co-sponsors for my bill. so we used that as another communications tool with legislative strategic intelligent. >> host: congressman, you were also recently in afghanistan and brought the flip cam with you. >> guest: i bring it almost everywhere i go. you know, in the old days you would visit troops in afghanistan or wherever they happened to be deployed and do a report to your district, but we now are in a clicker society, and so i need ways of communicating with my constituents that are resonant, that have immarket, and these are new yorkers. they want something fast and immediate. so i've done it with the visual. so when i visit troops in afghanistan and iraq, i don't simply write a report, i do a documentary. i went to vit new orleans and mississippi after katrina -- >> there was no life, there were no animals, there were no sounds. >> they watched most of them

have water over them. >> they've got pockets of recovery, and then you have something like this. this is the lower ninth. this is the levee tt failed. water came over this levee, swept down on this area and complete washed homes off their foundations. but there's all this green space here, but this wasn't green space. this was blocks and blocks of homes. now open space. i did my own documentary and took my flip cam around, interviewed people. it got a tremendous response. people can't really uerstand the devastation of katrina without seeing it, and i made sure they were able to see it thanks to this. >> host: is this house issued or, again, is this personal?

>> guest: this is house issued. >> host: right on the front page of your web site is your video blog, but you've got twitter, youtube, and facebook. if youould click on the youtube site, i want to show where itays, it says you are now leaving the house of representatives, we hope your visit was informative and enjoyable. why does that message come up? >> guest: well, youtube is not an official site of the house of representatives, so there are a whole series of firewalls that are built into our messaging. so one of them is when, you know, this is my houseite is an official site of the united states congress, sanctioned and approved by the congress. but if you want to go to something that is not official whether it's twitter, youtube, or facebook, you literally have to leaf the house -- leave the house official site. >> host: so when you do then, you go to the youtube site -- >> guest: you can click on to youtube, and now i have --

this is my official youtube channel. and so there's a whole series of floor speeches and other youtube videos that i've been able to do. >> host: including some c-span video. >> guest: including -- well, and that's my favorite kind. but here's another example of what i t t do. i wanted to understand where my district was on economic issues. so instead of taking a poll what i did was i took my flip cam out and bent to a shopping center -- went to a shopping center and asked people what their priorities are. part of my new agenda, i'm traveling throughout my district to talk to people aut economic issues. gas prices, property taxes, heal care, getting a lot of input from people, and i'd like to share some of the things that i've learned. >> gas prices. >> gas prices.

>> [inaudible] >> guest: do you have any idea how much extra cost your gas prices have been recently? >> about $20 a week? >> guest: so if there's one thing you think congress should focus on more than any of the others, what would it be? >> gas prices. >> guest: gas prices. okay. what grade are you in? >> high school. >> host: congressman israel, how often do you do this? >> guest: it really depends on the impact of an issue. i intend to do this when'm back in my district this august on the health care reform bill. i did it last august when the economy was really on everybody's mind, but it still is. gas prices kind of reached a

crescendo last august, so i do it depending on the impact of an issue. and i have to tell you that if i just did a town hall and pontificated about gas prices, most new yorkers, their eyes would glaze over. but getting that instant feedback and sharing it with my district has much greater impact. >> host: is can you put anything you want on your youtube channel? >> guest: on my youtube channel, yes. on my official house web site, no. it's got to be official, it can't with partisan or political. >> host: right, but u can put the link on your web site. >> guest: correct. >> host: could you put campaign video? >> guest: no. now, most or many of my colleagues have their own separate and distinct facebook d youtube campaign pages, as do i. but i'm notllowed to show you that on this computer. >> host: if you would take us to your facebook page. official. >> guest: sure. once again we have to lea the

house of representatives. >> host: did that take quite a while to get that, to be able to link up? was that a rule change? >> guest: you know, it took about five seconds which is about four seconds too long. yeah, you know, this is my facebook page. and -- >> host: is this a personal facebook page or is this a government facebook page? >> guest: this is the official facebook page. and so, you know, again you get some good feedback. abby, i wt a public option, so i urge you to vote yes. >> host: congressman, in looking at your facebook page at your comments, i did note there were some criticisms on here, and it's kind of a conversation that you're having. >> guest: my district is the quintessential moderate district. so whenever i communicate with my district i'm going to get a diversity of opinion back.

you know, there are people in my district who are on the far left, there are people on the far right. most of my district is actually somewhere in between, and when you represent a district like that, you have to be prepared for that kind of diverse opinion, and i think i have a responsibility to kind of flesh it out. i don't want to hear from just one side or the other side, and that's why i feel so passionate about making sure we have all of the conduits to me whether it's a telephone town hall meeting or tweeting me or youtube. the best way i can hear that diverse range of opion is by creating a diverse communication option for my constituents. >>ost: you've been in congress since 2000. what were you doing prior? >> guest: i was an elected local official in huntington, new york, and i had a small business. [inaudible] >> guest: yes. i grewp in a house where my dad had a ham radio in the attic. you know, he was always the first out to get the next gadget, and that's part of my

dna. >> host: you have above your tv in your office another giz. what is that? >> guest: well, this is another very effective way of communicating with my district. it's a teleconferencing chnology. ando when we have groups of constituents in my office and i want to communicate with them and do it visually, they can come to the office. we have anothernit back in the do, so i can talk to them in realtime visually rather than just on a conference call. we also do i just for our own aff. we've gotwo separate staffs, but they're part of one team. and sometimes it makes more sense in terms of cohesion to have the staffs communicating with one another through this kind of technology. >> host: your use of technology, has it altered the way you look at legislation that might be coming up? net neutrality or other legislative initiatives that are related? >> guest: absolutely. in a major way and not simply

with respect to issues like net neutrality, but we are at a point where we can truly make government transparent. we can open government up tohe american people. we've got the technology, and now it's just a matter of summoning the political will. so one of the bills i'm working on right now would require that every freedom of information act request filed with the federal governnt be posted on the internet so that the american people can see exactly what kind of information is there, who's requested it and just open up government to a more transparent process. that's really been my focus as a direct result of these new technological breakthroughs that we have. >> host: congressman steve israel, a democrat of new york. we've been talking about technology and communications. >>on't forget that you can view this and other programs online at c-span.org. you can also go to the site to find out how to get this program as a c-span podcast.

>> next, treasury secretary timothy geithner on the troubled asset relief program otherwise known as t.a.r.p.. lasteek in congressional testimony he said the government is shifting to what he recalls a repairing and rebuilding phase following the markets' recent decline and that regulators should receive better tools to respond to situations. he spoke to members of the panel charged with overseeing t.a.r.p.

funds. this is about an hour and 45 minutes. >> hearing is called to order. thank you for being here today, mr. secretary. this hearing offers -- oh, i want to start by saying -- i was going to start with this -- thank you for being here, we welcome you. i also want to welcome paul adkins who is the newest member of the congressional oversight panel. thank you. i also want to say as we get started here the panel has agreed to keep their opening statements very short so that we can focus on the questions, and we appreciate that you've agreed to do the same, mr. secretary. so thank you f being here. this hearingffers an important opportunity to hear directly from you about the $700 billion investment tt taxpayers have de in the financial system. almost exctly a year ago secretary paulson told congress that the country was in a dire state. americans were alarmed.

to resto confidence, congress quickly passed the laws that created the troubled asset reliefrogram, t.a.r.p.. since that time, public fear has turned into anger. savings have evaporated and mortgage foreclosures are now measured in the millions of families and the billionsf dollars. taxpayers question what t.a.r.p. accomplished when on an individual level their financial circumstances seem more precarious than ever. they feel like they got stuck with the bill for this bailout, but they didn't get the benefits. in granting treasy such enormous discretion with t.a.r.p. money, congress expected an equal measure of transparency and accountability. taxpayers have a right to understand clearly what treasury'soing and why it is doing it. each month the congressional oversight panel has issued a detailed report. in june we evaluated the stress tests. in july we examined the repayment of t.a.r.p. funds, and

after we reported that the first 11 banks have repurchased their warrants from treasury at a price we believed was only 66 percent of their estimated valu the next round of banks repurchased their warrants at prices that were much closer to our estimated value. in august the panel examined the impact of the division to leave troubled assets on the books of the banks and how much risk that leaves in the banking system. yesterday the panel released a report examining the use of t.a.r.p. funds in the domestic auto industry and recommended that taxpayers, who now own substantial amounts of both chrysler and gm, might be better protected if treasury would put its shares in a trust so that someone not in government could actively manage them and make decisions about the best time to sell. of course, tax taxpayers are now stakeholders in hundreds of financial institutions as well. taxpayers still want to know how their money has been used and what difference their enormous

investment has made. have these companies been cleansed of toxic assets, the reason t.a.r.p. was passed? are these companies better run today than they were a year ago? do they treat consumers better now than they did last year? and the fear that no one wants to have to think abo, what are the chances these financial institutions will stumble again? or to put it more directly, are we going to change the rul that got us into this mess before it happens again? again, thank you for coming, mr. secretary. we look forward to hearing from you. congressman hensarling. >> thank you, madam chair. [inaudible] on occasion i suspect we will disagree in the future, but i do want to thank you for your public service at a time of great challenge in our nation's history. i would note that this is your second appearance before the congressional oversight panel

since the presidentas sworn in in january. it is now september. i believe you have agreed now to appear before this panel at least on a quarterly basis. i would ask you once again to potentially reconsider appearing on a monthly basis given that the president has made a commitment that his administration would be the most transparent and accountable administration ever. i would think that would comport with that goal a little better. we're clearly coming up on the one-year anniversary of the, of the issa legislation. t.a.r.p. has never really been as advertised, as we know, a toxic asset removal program became a capital infusion program. i'm not here at this pointo continue the debate on whether or not it was wise legislation. at the time i think there were smart people on both sides of that debate, and hisrians will one day record it.