book that i in a watcher having spent 35 years in the cia i was more of a watcher and a watchee. having left by meles watchee, i am one of the watched. but having been a watcher, i came to understand shane's purpose in writing this was to show that people with a very noblest of motives have created a state which people i don't think are fully aware of. it is a little bit like the cyber threat. it's their. it's hard to see. it's hard to touch and yet it is there and it is growing and it is something that is partially generational that is we have a generation that is much more used to social media and sharing but for my generation i think it comes as a bit of a shock to sort of sort of the totality of

what shane is driving at in this book. we talk about an intelligence community now the number 200,000 people and a budget of some $80 billion was a very, very large and formidable group of people who are contributing to this effort. ..

and many other media publications that you are familiar with. before he was with the journal, he was a government executive which is probably the premier publication here in town on particularly the sis, senior executive service, the intelligent side is the senior intelligence service. he has also written fiction, done some screenplays, which i believe were entered into sundance and did quite well and were finalists. so he has a very wide range. i'm delighted you turned your international security affairs and i think it's a real contribution. so it's my pleasure to welcome you here today and to introduce you. caught [applause] >> thank you for that terrific introduction. it's a thrill to be here. as peter said, this is the publication date, a sort of a lunch into the world with a

two-year process of sitting with it. so it's fitting that it would be in a place that's devoted sordid to the allure and the life of people i've been hanging out with for many years to come up with the stories that are in this boat. spies are interesting people. you know, there started a very lot sometimes and one thing i've learned in hanging out with people in the intelligence community, they don't necessarily always like to be called spies. he often prefer the term professional. i'm just an immediate professional. but there's a character in the book, mike mcconnell, was the director of national intelligence from 2007 until 2009 in sort of was the chief intelligence professional if you like for president bush. and he is asked at one point someone asked him, how do you define a spy? what does this by do or intelligence professionals rely? he says well, let me put this to you this way. a diplomat is someone who can make you do you go to how we can

look for did the trick. it's by someone who can tell you to go to hell and has been mean to delivery day. [laughter] i suppose i probably shouldn't cast down. i reminded people in my business and mentors are your comments comment that has been journalists are right for the newspaper but don't tell my mother. she thinks i play piano in a brothel. [laughter] the last years have been putting this together in shaping the narrative that comes out in the story of the watchers. people always ask me, what is the book about? give us the nutshell of it. and i say well, first and foremost this book is a story. the watchers are five men who have spent much of their career in intelligence agency working for the government and they are united a common idea. and this idea is that the right access to information and the right information, we can define the sense of future crises and terrorist attacks before they

have been. the watchers have spent 25 years building technological systems capable of ingesting huge amounts of information and filtering through it looking for the signals and the warning signs of disaster. they are guardians and spies. their technicians and officials. they watch us at the same time that they watch over us and collectively these five people have been responsible for building, running and in some cases even tearing down a formidable system of global surveillance capability that allows the government to effectively monitor whoever wants, whenever it wants, wherever it wants. and people would say, while that sounds very interesting. and invariably one of the three would always say this is fiction you're writing about? and i would stop and say no, i don't know a tv that impression. this is a fiction. this is nonfiction, journalism. he must've changed the names of the people who were involved in this kind of thing and no, this is people using the book are real people. they exist in most of them are alive today and the things they did didn't set in the book are precisely what they did.

and i sort of thought about what is the about this that make some people react to this as is if this were some sort of fanciful story. one is perhaps the sketch i just debut is perhaps so fantastic that it sounds like it must be an episode of 24 or some sort of a jerry bruckheimer movie in which case you should skip the book and on to hollywood with the idea. and the second website was ipod maybe it's just that i've sketched out this idea of a system that is so sophisticated and so coordinated in its reach that no reasonable person could possibly believe the united states government was responsible for it. maybe a little bit of culinary, column b., skepticism. what this reminded me of talking as this was taking shape is people often have a great deal of skepticism certainly about what they read of the intelligence community and what's really going on in this world are at and as a journalist and a story about writing the intelligence domain, this is one of the toughest targets areas. when you're talking about an area in which people are

actively trying to keep information from you. this museum is there much devoted to a tradecraft that is built on keeping secret and on deceiving people in many cases. so someone who is looking for truth and facts nectarine can be quite challenging. to put this in some sort of perspective, imagine you are a theater critic. you're a theater critic in your editor has his annual to cover the opening of a new play. and you walk into the theater and take your seat and the lights go out in the play began, but the curtain never goes up. you hear footsteps behind the curtain, people moving around from you catch that says of muffled dialogue, you see a light movie and drink the curtain, occasionally somebody bumps the curtain and you get a little peek or sometimes a mini comes out from behind the curtain and leaps over on the apron and says i'm not supposed to take what's going on behind the curtain, but listen, and somebody comes out usually in a suit and five just told you what

they thought what was going on, that's not what was going on at all. and this is kind of the world we live in in which we are as reporters constantly grabbing these fragments of a story where we can and then going back and taking a step back and trying to fashion them into a mosaic in a narrative. the funny story that kind of illustrates this is in 2005 in early 2006 as doing a lot of reporting on the national security agency program for phone calls and e-mails which takes up a big chunk of the book and we'll talk about that a little bit as well. and i've been getting information from sources of mine, the telecom industry and people out of government have been hearing things than a few people and agencies use information and kind of weaving it together. and actually to some sources on the intelligence committee on the hill announce them for comment about this. assertively up the story as i understand it and say, what can you tell me about this? what is your reaction about? at 1.1 of the staffers stopped

me and said you should stop asking me questions right now he just clearly you know more about this story than we do. which i suppose there's something about the intelligence oversight process that's not encouraging. this happens that is the chroniclers, journalists who are going around picking up these pieces. we often see the totality of the narrative that even the people to play behind the curtain don't always see. so that's one way of doing this. second way of telling a story and building up a narrative is to form relationships with people. it often is deep personal relationships built on trust and mutual understanding of reporter and source. and while i think that "the watchers" really was born out of both of these kinds of methods of writing and reporting, it's the latter, the personal relationships that are like the heart and soul of what this book is all about it as it is ultimately a story about people, people who built the systems and why they did it and what they hoped to achieve and what that means for all of us.

and for me personally and for this book, the relationships really began with one individual in particular. in november of 2002, i was working as a technology reporter for a government executive magazine which is peters out is sort of a premier publication covering the senior executive. in fact, businessweek and ford is about business government. and writing about technology in november 2000 to about a year after the 9/11 attacks there was one sort of magazine that everyone was covering, connect to the dots. the narrative that i developed after 9/11 was that the government had failed to connect the dots about al qaeda and the events preceding the attacks in new york and washington. the fbi had information on some of the terrorists, the cia was collect and intelligence. the nsa had a sure bet, but nobody accused the separate streams from these thoughts together and formed a cohesive picture. and at that point on the technology is and was in answer to that question, a remedy,

always going to the databases and systems that collect his thoughts and making some sense and connecting them. i don't think the we went i can't even the year after 9/11 that i wasn't pitched by a company, a government agency or it would be entrepreneur who was some sort of great idea for how they were going to fix this problem. we've built a computer system, software program, the algorithm that can take care of it. and they really took on almost a ghoulish aspect of people willing to do publicity campaigns that we can stop the next 9/11 if you only let us. and of course this was post.com collapse, goes to lots of companies are looking to come to washington and cashin. so in the midst of all of this, these incessant pitches, i get a call from the public affairs officer at the defense advanced research projects agency for darpa. for those of you who aren't familiar with darpa, is basically the pentagon's futurists brain trust. darpa is the place where government and academic scientists invented things like stealth technology.

it's a good place for several decades ago people with computer engineers connected their machines are the primitive network which they call the arpanet, which you and i now know as the internet. darpa was the place where people in government and research went to solve big, hard technological problems. and in november 2002, what was the big technological problem? connecting the dots. somoza priced articles up because we're working on something in this area and would like to tell you about. we started a new office called the information awareness office and it is something we called total information awareness, which i have to say in terms of the catchiness factor was pretty good. i mean this is a pretty ambitious title of the total information awareness. this information out there were going to be totally aware of it and solve the problem. so they have this aspect to it as well were you kind of think they're selling something. they said would like you to come in into a briefing. fine, be happy to. the public affairs officer says there's one more thing is interesting to.

retired admiral john poindexter. i'm 26 years old at the timecomes to my familiarity with john poindexter suffice to say it's probably not as deep as many of my colleagues, but a quick graphical sketch on this rather interesting character who occupies a centerpiece in my book here at john poindexter graduated from the u.s. naval academy in 1958 of the top of his class, had a meteoric rise to the surface, was staffed by bob not merit is one of the illustrious whiz kids of the pentagon brought into the systems thinking on hard problems like how do we fight wars in the new century? of unexpected you would rise to the top of the service, probably become the top of naval operations maybe the chairman of the joint chiefs or dennis ruiz are easily sidetracked in 1981 to become familiar and at the white house national security council. he was specifically brought in by the then national security adviser to revamp the situation room, which despite the image we have of the situation now is this kind of nerve center

technology with an absolute technological backwater. were talking about a few phone spirit when attacking a sophisticated computer systems. poindexter comes in and gives them the job of modernizing this place. via teleconferencing systems, computers going in and announce any built a whole new crisis management center come this multimillion computer complex across the street from the white house at the old executive office building. so is a techno- wizard. he is a genius for this kind of thing. introduces e-mail to the white house. they never had this before. in 1982 mind you. you telecommute from home, when the first people to do this probably in official washington history. and of course this rise, this technological sort of greatness is completely derailed in 1986 with the exposure of his role in the iran-contra affair. poindexter authorized his members of the nsc and the intelligence community to secretly sell arms to elements in iran. with the implicit promise that they would intervene to try to get hostages, american hostages

freed from lebanon and then he authorized the covert of money from those arms sales to support anti-communist rebels which congress has specifically said don't do. so the iran-contra affair becomes the greatest political scandal in america since watergate. it threatens to derail the reagan presidency and john poindexter is at the center of it in his career is effectively over. so this is a guy they wanted to come and attack too, which is kind of exciting. so i say i will come into darpa and talk about total information awareness and i'm actually disappointed to see that poindexter is not giving the briefing, actually as deputy which is fine, but he says nevertheless this is the system that poindexter has envisioned the money laid out for you. so the idea behind total information awareness was this coming a sinister region connect the dots about terrorism before 9/11, yet the government had information it to debate the matter than useful. however, those of the really useful stuff that help hold clues, electronic breadcrumbs be left by the terrorists out there

or be held in databases protected mode credit card transactions, airline reservations, car rental records, other controversies. private transactions and listen and going okay, private information comes that they don't have access to now. well, they proposed building a system that would in fact get access to this and would get that private information of a pack and put it together with the government intelligence and see if they couldn't design patterns of activity that fit templates that they plan to devise of the kinds of secrets is an event that terrorists have to go through before an attack against. so for instance, three people with the muslim sounding name fly into new york prevailed at the same hotel room. they leave the city the next day on one-way tickets to different cities. they come back to the same city two weeks later. maybe that means there's something suspicious going on. you literally become the patterns they were talking about. people of particular names in certain countries coming into this country coming to invent them i look suspicious.

can we vote them into database and make some sense of it? the second part of this besides from that arguably somewhat scary and threatening proposition was a technological component that no one at this point had ever heard in all the stages i've been given had ever proposed which was this: could we actually built in a system of encryption such that an analyst who was sitting at a total information awareness great with access to all of this universe of information could not see a single name for a single identifying feature underneath all of it? of a wiki was an encrypted series of dots and patterns of activity and they would never know who is underneath them. and only if the government could convince a judge that there was probable cause to believe that the people attached to those dots were actually bad actors are we needed to look at them more closely. only been in what they want to unlock cryptographic shall pull the names out and see who the people were. okay, a check and and a balance. this is a fairly sophisticated bold audacious plan which i have

to say at the time sounded utterly fanciful and i thought would never actually materialized. it was a research program. it was built-in controversy. john poindexter was in charge of it. and i left that office at that time figuring while this is all very interest in, but probably not much is going to come of this and will stay fairly low level in two years now no one will ever remember what this lesson be put on the shelf someplace. well, i was wrong. about two weeks after that meeting, l. safire, the lake ray columnist for "the new york times" devoted his entire column for the week to the total information awareness program at the john poindexter in particular. use your dance on the obvious aspect; total information awareness a superstate stream and set said everything that you've written every phone call you made, every description you've ever felt, but contact contacted overhead will go into a grin centralized government database. and who also is in charge of this effort?

none other than quote the ring knocking matcher of deceit himself who safire said was back at the plate more devious than iran-contra. tia had gone from the level of technology trade reporters into a national firestorm and poindexter was directly at the center of it. so i of course wanted to keep writing about this. that's exactly what you do when something like this happens. all of my interview requests were denied. i was never told why, but they get trained to go and get those fragments. i went to old darpa records. i interview people used to work for darpa and data mining. i tried to find speeches that poindexter had given. all towards this aim of knowing what something like this work? what was this about? could you actually separate the good guys from the bad guys? what you need to change the laws? what that look like? they also kept hearing ti did network that poindexter had set up for a real intelligence agencies were connecting their systems in a private internet

and sharing intelligence and using this total information awareness pattern analysis tools to try and design a telling cues from the data they were looking at. so something is happening here behind this curtain and we couldn't get access to it. i didn't get the chance to find out what that was then and in the summer of 2000 for the political controversy completely engulfed poindexter. congress told the public funding for tia, the information awareness office was shut down. he resigned and i think as far as most people knew he was going to go crawl back under whatever rock he came out of and go back to its existence as a washington pariah. it was six months passed and i got a letter from the maxwell school of public affairs at syracuse university. they were hosting a daylong symposium on homeland security and they wanted me to come up with that on a panel to talk about the media's role in explaining homeland security topics to the public. and as tempting as the author to come to syracuse in winter actually was, i knew that i would not say no when i look on

the list of other attendees and thought it would be speaking later in the afternoon and it was none other than john poindexter. and that's like a fairly small crowd. there wasn't going to be any other press in attendance. so of course i went. i was on the plane is in effect you get there. now mind you, i didn't know what john poindexter the site. in fact, i had never seen a a picture of the man taken after 1986 at the iran-contra hearing. he's at the j.d. salinger of the spy world, right this recluse soundbites. so annoyed with the sky looks like as far as i know he does not know what i look like, but i get into a room about the size and in putting down my back and the other attendees are coming in and i hear this voice behind me say, shane harris and a turnaround in a sea of face and a name tag and i kind of jumped and laugh and say hello, john poindexter, how nice to meet you. so thank if accurate if accurate is, in face to face the evil genius himself and i'm expecting the bald head and the monocle on the monochrome suit and all

this. and i sort of him immediately taken back because standing before me is this sort of placid almost endearing very kindly old man who opens up the conversation by apologizing to me here because i really want to apologize to you. i'm really sorry that i was unable not able to take or interview requests several months ago. you see, don rumsfeld, an old friend of his at the pentagon have forbidden me from talking to the press after the controversy came out in the times and given everything that happened with the business that it. iran-contra was always the iran-contra business, not the affair, the skin of the business. they say i'm really sorry i couldn't argue. he said a lot of people wrote very terrible and didn't get a better way we were trying to do. i immediately think your accounts, he's going to my attention in the middle of the stream until mail the horrible things i wrote about him. this is why can't you see her cues, not to talk about tia, which of course is ridiculous.

i don't include you in that. i read everything he wrote. i don't agree with all of it, but i was so that you are trying to give this a fair shake in that you are actually interested in what we were trying to do. so i can't take issue with anything he wrote on the facts. i said well, you know, now that you're not been gagged by don rumsfeld to you. to be free to speak your mind, would you be interested in sitting with me for interview sometimes to build towards a profile in the magazine of. and he said, while all seriously consider that. about a week or so goes by and he calls me up as i thought about your offer and i'll punch you on one condition. you have to agree to come out to multiple interviews of two hours each and we have to take everything. now, it's been said about john poindexter about one of the problems in the iran-contra is he didn't understand the media and a journalist thing. and i know this was true because anybody who understands what it's like to be a reporter in the kinds of things we live for

understands that it is not an onerous request when one of the great political figures of the past 20th century and a student of scandal says, please come out to my house, follow me around, ask whatever questions you want and we have to record it all. these kinds of things just don't happen very often. select okay fine, i guess i'll come out here to do when, we'll do it. [laughter] so this begins this sort of really years long series of regular meetings of a kind of flaky quake in my head too like it's my tuesdays with morrie's moment with john poindexter. he's 26 years old and she was in his early 70's at the time. i remember hardly anything about his past but i was deeply interested in is present in what his future might be. and we talked. we would go for two hours and have coffee. there was every subject was on the table. i could ask whatever he wanted.

they have some other of other questions or try to get answered about total information awareness enhancing and answered in the could have never revealed if he had classified information. i should make that very clear. we talked about iran-contra. i guess in the big burning question which we need to remember was dead president reagan authorize you to divert the funds from the ibm sales to the contrary. did he know about it? poindexter said he didn't know which was a preposterous notion, how could the president not know something about this? he would say that and i would ask them again in the third trimester and he picked up his pipe from his trademark by 30 always has fascinates as you keep asking a question like sometime you're going to get a different answer. and i was there. we never talked about it again. everything was on the table. this is a series of these amazing moments with this person. i read a profile of government executive magazine, which really portrayed poindexter as the sort of human lightning rod.

someone who is trying to change the world that can't escape his past. and let them know is interested in writing a book and i wasn't sure what the shiver that would be, but i wanted to know if he was on board with it. so one afternoon he invited me over he keeps a silver ford. he invited me to lunch with was a very sailors favorite of spam and beer and he could you expand? i said i think it's great. great, we'll have spam. it is cutting it up and put in the crackers on the plate and i'll never forget this. at one point he stops and turns to me and says, i read the article you wrote. okay, good good he says, you do how to put into words what i have in my head but that i can't make myself say because they don't know how. and it was truly this very human moment. i mean, this is what happens as a reporter sometimes when you go very deep into build this

understanding of trust. someone lets you into their life and personally i think the best thing that can happen is now that they say they like what she wrote, but that shoot accurately capture them on the page. that is what i think, that is what i meant. and so we have the sort of breakthrough. i think you was at that point that there was no question that he would be willing to sit for the lengthy and in numerous interviews were taped to do a book like this. and these deeper interviews with aching to see what set poindexter really was a character worth following and positioning very highly of the bug and that he was actually the starting point of a much longer narrative the posterior parallels to 9/11. in 1983, poindexter was the director of the national security adviser to reagan and was on call the morning that a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives into the marine barracks in lebanon, killing 241 marines and a suicide attack. the marines were there as part of an international peacekeeping

effort among this lebanese civil war. 241 men died most of them in their sleep. lots of memories plus the many people the many people would think iwo jima. this introduced america to the concept of fanatical religious suicide terrorism. poindexter got the call that morning and fell two and to start putting together the pieces and make a response to this. what he found, would others found was that just like 9/11 coming years later there were clues, there were doubts it existed that nobody had fused together that warranted that something bad might be happening. from march 1983 to october 1983, the intelligence agencies fielded more than 100 none of them were refused, they were sure, nobody gave most of them. there were about of bombings going on in lebanon at the time. in the spring of 1983 u.s. embassy was attacked by car bomber and more than 60 people were killed and more than most of the cia in lebanon. the fbi investigated the bomb that was used and found that it was a sophisticated combination

of explosives and easily available commercial materials to magnify the intensity of the blast and their conclusion was that a very sophisticated terrorist organization was operating in beirut targeting americans. the report was never shared with military commanders at the base of that they can shore up defenses of the marines at the airport. and finally come the national security agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency intercepted medication and iran to terrorist forces that eventually became what we known as hezbollah in lebanon, instructing them to take a spectacular attack against the marines in beirut. there was only one place for the marines in beirut were, the airport. of these pieces of the puzzle that nobody fused and poindexter realized this and i think correctly said we can't keep doing this. we have to do better. this can't be. so he along with a number of senior officials of the intelligence community wants to never to lash together these different agencies, military agencies, the intelligence agencies and to make sense of

what they knew about these threats to connect these dots. and he has some great success in the early mid 80's in and much of that effort ultimately was bonaparte in the iran-contra scandal and was never recovered particularly after they love. it's one of the curiosities of bureaucracy that would ultimately sometimes really innovated are dependent on the people that lead them and when they leave that energy just dissipates. so poindexter had clearly been there from the beginning of this long narrative about connecting the dots. seeing though i would say this is actually a story that was much bigger than i thought and that he had played a role in it and i've never anticipated. in december of 2005, at this point i am working at a journalist covering homeland security and i was having a very interesting set of conversations with sources of mine who worked at the telecommunications companies, the big ones that you've all heard of good

remember that my early experiences as a tech beat reporter at government executive and a lot of contacts to sell technology adjudication services to the government through the federal government in the case of no companies like at&t for instance is their single largest customer of these companies for the visions that are devoted solely to servicing the federal government and within the subdivisions that work just on national security projects. and so i'm talking with my sources at this time in december of 05 about a really amazing story that just appeared a few weeks earlier and "the new york times." it reveals that in october 2001, president bush secretly authorized national security agency to monitor and intercept phone calls, e-mails and other telecommunications of americans that if they were connected to terrorist groups and do that without a word. this was groundbreaking these of journalism. it was really a shocking story because ordinarily if intelligence can be as going to monitor americans can indication and certainly they're going to do it in this country, which is what happened coming out of a

war appeared a judge has to look at this and determined that the primary purpose of the interception is to gather information on foreign intelligence. well if the nsa is off doing this in the presidential order the court doesn't know about it, and the community summit held the hill to know is going on, clearly see what is happening which is essentially a widescale being run by the secrecy. some talking to the sources about this and people telecom industry are saying yes we understand this is happening but there's something else that is going on the people don't know about. and i said what is this? they said well, in the weeks and month or so after 9/11 we got visits and calls from the government who wanted access to the cd-r's. now, the tech beat reporter when they said cd-r, a cd-r is the call detail record. it's an industry term, but you and i mostly know what a is what shows up as your phone bill create a cd-r is a record of on a network, who called whom, when, how long the call lasted.

it's essentially a schematic imprint of the way that patterns of communication smooth over networks. some of the companies were telling me and what my subsequent reporting showed was that nsa was taking this information, was often referred to as metadata and not necessarily the content of the phone call, but the records, the sort of transmitting information and mining that for suspicious patterns of terrorist activity. so here we have a government agency collecting huge amounts of information held mostly in private hands, mining it for patterns of suspicious that entities. i mean at this point i made expecting john poindexter to pop out from the curtain and say surprises me. it's all sounding terribly familiar. i'm thinking this is totally information awareness. this is a sadly what he was talking about, but it's real. this is in the research like tia was. at this point i did not know how or even if poindexter or ta fit into this but i could see the circles of activity kind of coming together in my mind.

now at this point, i recall back to some stories i've been hearing since 2,392,004 and it was always a store that after total information awareness was shut down that it would never actually ended, that something happened to it, something big happened to it or was kept alive somehow. there were these pictures of something has to live in a laboratory or something. and i went back and review the authorizing language of 2004, the defense authorization bill that pulled the funding on tia. there was this clever two sentences. in the spell that said essentially congress now employs the funding for total information awareness with the exception of funds that are still allowed for a series of technology and counterterrorism programs that are detailed and declassified and next to the budget. so the classified annex to the budget is the back edge. it is the budget for the intelligence programs are funded, where you have to have a security clearance to see it. this is a public information.

essentially does the click a trap door that allowed maybe tia to escape by the pentagon's public stream and into the black budget. a few months went by in what must be one of the most deep throat like moment in my journalistic career, an unmarked envelope showed up at my office in the mail. it was a manila envelope stamped canceled no return address. i open up a simple opener was full of documents about total information awareness and about the nsa. none of them classified. some of the internal human occasions things no one thought would end up in the hands of a journalist. but this source and i will emphasize it was not john poindexter, putting any figuration to fester. this source was reviewing these documents and what i confirmed in subsequent limitations of this person was that in fact tia had lived. total information awareness was broken down into about half a dozen components in those pieces

were picked up by a research organization paraded at the direction of none other than the national security agency, by an office literally located at the headquarters. tia had gone pending this whole imaginary proposition of candy mind patterns in great amounts of data and got over to an agency secretly doing it for years and no one knew. until then. so this was the revelation, these two worlds had sort of collated for me now. what i discovered as i dig deeper into this was that nsa had in fact been a part of the total information awareness experiment from the beginning. john poindexter and my kitten actually knew each other and had meetings at least one meeting where they talked about how they might be able to help each other. but my kid and the nsa director. system from the rivalries there and never quite a feeling of trust that there was always this awareness of each other. and if nsa exit participated in

the network that i mentioned earlier with the different agencies for connecting to the secret internet intranet and sharing information with each other and using the tia programs to mine information. in fact, what i found was that two years later they actually, this is two years later than the present, nsa was not only still on the that that were put at more terminals connected to it than any other agency in the intelligence community had effectively become the biggest user. i also found that in 2003 when the program was still alive, nsa had in fact taken some of these experimental data mining tools, pulled them off that network and use them on the phone call is being updated that was intercepted without warrants. all of this was without poindexter ever known it happened. suddenly it all became clear to me that john poindexter the% and the ideas that he expressed were not just a the starting point of a story. there were the center of the story, you are the animating idea of a narrative. what did nsa have what it overtook the total information

awareness program? well, as poindexter had proposed, could we build some sort of sophisticated system for pattern analysis, some sort of way of really digging into data and matching up what looked like events in the real world from a future of information doing it in a fine granular weight and secondly producing and encrypting the data. but nsa actually did when they took over this program. two things, when a privacy research was abandoned. all of the other data mining and pattern analysis and information collection ideas for stuff that really terrify people kept going without but officials determine the privacy connection was too costly, too cumbersome and frankly too controversial. abc becomes a sort of third rail. i think the attitude was that if somebody were to find out that you are interested in researching very high privacy question would be way too much in the first place? the people just really a bandit and said they away from it.

as far as the sophisticated kind of analysis, the sort of cutting-edge connecting the dots, nsa didn't seem so interested in that. in fact, that kind of analysis, that sophistication was trumped by an almost insatiable and compulsive need to collect information on as many people and those as great a volume as they possibly could. in fact, nsa got to the point where they were collecting so much information from the telecom networks and i write about this extensively in the book, but they couldn't look at it in real time. they had to stick it in databases and go back in my later. it was simply coming in too fast and in quantities that were too big even for their systems to manage in real-time. so by this emphasis on collecting information and not making sense and connecting there were a couple of reasons i think for this. one, the nsa could do it. they had technological means. they also have access to the data through the telecommunications companies which a no small feat to get.

their presidential authorization and in this film with the commander-in-chief's executive powers are largely unquestioned. if you got those three things, cooperation, technology and the president sign up for putting go. it was the familiarity of life in washington is that information is power. for more information that you wouldn't agency have, the more clout you have the more leverage and control you have. so i think from nsa's perspective, collection was the source of authority. it was the source of their power and they pursued vigorously. the nsa surveillance program overtime was known by various means, stellar wind it was called terrorist surveillance program. it's been called the president surveillance program. but inside the administration was regarded as the crown jewels of the war on terror. this was the way officials at the tsa said i think the white house was convinced of this that the united states is going to catch terrorists and keep up with them in the global information grid. this was the way we were going to do hot pursuit of the next

attack a train to swallow all the information out there and hoarded and collected and cover all the bases. now not everyone who is involved in hunting terrorists were so convinced this was the right strategy. in fact, nsa had the program that they were very fond of using too trying to spoil the connections connections among these millions of dollars for connecting on a regular basis. he poured the information into a graphic tool that would display connections among thousands of people places and events of the series of lines connecting them. here's a picture of the bug of an unclassified version of these were displayed on screens and would literally take up an entire wall in the mouths of lions and connections overlapping were so dense to eye you can't make any sense of it. nsa was very fond of this. the skeptics people were out there to taunt harris terrorists harris had the name of the spirit they called it the bag for the big ask graph. so nsa's fruition was the bag. get data, put it in the back, connections everywhere.

you can see the universe. and people looked at this and said this is a mess. analysts actually had another nickname for this overlapping tiny massive connections. they call them hairballs. period actually talk to one person at the cia who was responsible for the drone program at one point in this person's career and actually needed msa to come get him information on where he suspected terrorist and taliban figures were in afghanistan and pakistan so that they could go find them. and this person from nsa shows up and shows the cia guy one of these hairballs and laying out the whole social network and the cid official stops and says you know what, i don't need this. but i need you to do is tell me who's asked to put a hellfire missile on. this is really the two different worlds colliding the people who need heart information coming connected information and people who are assessed with collecting as much as they can't integrate

some power from that. and i'm left with this conclusion after doing all this research that this is what it's come to know. so for the billions of dollars we spend, the political capital was expended on the credibility of oscar maceda government lost as a result of this brush to build the system have we just created a regime of official surveillance, that's very good at collecting dots and the deterrable job of collecting them. what would be the consequences if this were true? well one a consequence of over collecting information is that you collect information on innocent people. i think we think that's pretty obvious. but the failure to connect that information, to make sense of what you're giving us real risk. the risk of course that intelligence agencies once again missed the warning signal of the catastrophe and that is precisely what it happened. last christmas, as you well know, a young nigerian man named omar farouk abdul makela ported a northwest flight and attempted

to set up a device in his pants. luckily the bond did not go off and he was tackled by the fellow passengers in its own custody. what the government know about abdulmutallab before they got in the plane back in november 2009, his father had gone into the u.s. embassy in nigeria and 710 i'm afraid my son is gone to join the radicals. they mentioned again in nigeria and wed been employed for a new plot. three, after the embassy visit, abdulmutallab name was mastered into a database by the national counterterrorism center where it sat waiting for analysts to review to decide whether he should be put on a no-fly list and kept up the airplane. so there's also the fact that abdulmutallab have an art issued a visa to gain entry to the united states. streams of intelligence, dots

never connected, collected and never connected. and why? the place while this is supposed to happen, the national counterterrorism center is drowning in data on a daily basis. officials were attacked to estimate they receive every day between 4,008,000 new names of suspected terrorists, which is absurd. they're about many viable terrorists in the world that they're getting 4,008,000 names every day that are expected to follow up on. the master database into which abdulmutallab's name alone has half a million names in it right now, many of which are aliases. on top of this, analysts have about half a dozen computer terminals on their desk just to connect to the more than two dozen different information networks and within that 80 streams of raw intelligence produced by the community country committees. there's new google for any of this information. the boat were collected and they

don't have the tools to connect what they have. this is why, as i write in the book, i think we're witnessing the rise of an american surveillance state. we are out of time for technology, culture and policy are colliding and it's becoming default position of our government to collect as much information as they can and the do connection an afterthought. i have proposed here in the book that we change our focus radically, that we perhaps accept the idea that in the 21st century, information is free and available and someone is going to get it. and that we should change our laws away from regulating how the government collects this to what they actually do with it when they have it. so were entered our privacy is protected and security is protected at the same time. i think neither is happening right now. we should be asking what's going on behind the curtain. i don't know if john poindexter have the right solution to this weird i can tell you what he spends most of his times these

days talking with people in positions of power trying to commit them he was right and what they should be doing. he and i certainly part ways on his proposals and i talk about them in the book as well. what i will give them credit for one thing. he courted this debate and challenge people to ask these very, ugly questions now while we still have the time to do it. now in the relative calm before another attack of the time to ask the hard questions. and we put a stop at our pair o. there is one point that everyone i've talked to for this book agrees, no matter what their political strike, no matter what their ideological persuasion, no matter how much familiarity they have at one point they all agree if there is another attack on the scale of 9/11 in this country, this question of the balance between security and liberty will become a purely academic matter. the government will decisively come down on the side of security here you will see the government collect on a scale that we have never seen before. they'll be driven by offensive urgency, by a sense of fear and

you will see impingement infringements on liberty that to this point we have really only imagined might happen. simply put, for don't ask hard questions now, the government will collect first and ask questions later. and what happens we shouldn't be surprised. that is after all of the government does best. thank you very much. [applause] >> on that happy note i be happy to take any of your questions if you have some. yes, sir, please. [inaudible] >> that was a great presentation you gave. what about americans who are engaged in nonviolent political action that the government doesn't like peace groups have

traditionally been impressed and human rights organizations even if president obama's meeting with the dalai lama today. most peace groups to not give such a welcome reception from the government. >> writes. that is a huge concern. in terms of the history of government surveillance and unwarranted, perhaps unjustified surveillance of americans, yes to peace groups have been, particularly in the 50's, 60's 70's have been the direct targets of this. you know it's worth remembering this is an intelligence community and mike mcconnell and the book went for a number of years talks about this in the book as well, that wiretaps martin luther king, that wiretaps to supremes to court justices that monitored war protesters and the black panthers that monitored all kind of social activists. and in the 70's when all this was exposed into committees on

congress held by the church and pike commission, this is a searing experience in the intelligence committee and you have a whole generation of officials who've been brought up the mantra we don't spy on americans, we don't find americans. and this is why after 9/11 when the nsa was shown to in fact be spying on some americans, so many people in the intelligence community actually push back against the characterization and said no, no, no this wasn't spying on americans. when you think spying, the connotation of spying on them were political purposes, spying on them to repress their first amendment rights. and the prohibition on that has been pretty well drilled in to the intelligence community. today we're spying on terrorists, bad actors and if you're into negation of the terrorists, then you are under suspicion too. okay, let's say that's fair enough of a point. my fear and i don't believe

people in the intelligence community have any desire of oppressing people's first amendment rights to that in the wake of another attack piece assembly, free speech, they become luxuries that perhaps the intelligence community fears that it can't afford. that's what i think you can very much the potentially a turn back to the battle days in the 50's and the 60's and i think that would be a terrible thing. anymore questions? i just impressed everyone here that much? yes, please. >> what you think is the root cause of terrorism and the possible potential that actually the root cause, the backend of terrorism quest >> unfortunately u.s. and the question which i'm totally incapable of answering. you know, they're people with written books about the subject that are far more expert than i am that very subject.

what i do know is that it seems to me that terrorism against the united states is not motivated by terrorist dislike of us are that they hate freedom. it seems to be motivated largely by our actions and our policy actions. i'm not justifying it by many means. the use of that kind of violence particularly as i'm calling an unjustified. i think of are going to look at the root causes of terrorism, and probably we have to start looking at some of our policies in the world and realizing that a lot of the reactions were getting for the past 25 years to those policies in the form of violence are for a reason. it's not because people woke up one morning and decided they hated america. they have policies they disagree with you i'm not going to attempt to try and give you a discourse on what those policies are because i'm just not expert enough on it. it seems to me but should probably, you know, look to her own actions about and question whether or not we are inviting

us to sponsor is enough to recall them. >> sir, yes. >> it seems to be one of the problems is that you have this corporate -- they don't communicate with each other. would it be a solution to just have a stronger unification of the intelligence community like other countries for instance, canada or germany? >> i think one idea that strikes me wouldn't even have to go that far is why not sort of put spies on a dated diet. why not say okay, out of these 17 different agencies that are collecting information on a scale like i said two dozen terrorism networks, 80 different streams of information say okay, guys, find the ten most valuable sources and whoever the players are, whichever agency controls those pieces of information, you all get together and figure out how you're going to share that piece of it.

so stop trying to swallow the whole apple. were going to take one bite out of this and see if we can get it onto some sort of manageable scale. i think the instinct has been more the opposite. it's been the creation of the director of national intelligence office in 2004. it has been to try it out of there to bureaucracy that uses all these things together and get them to play along. and i think it's just too big and unduly. peter cummings said were talking about 200,000 global employees, a budget of $80 billion. it seems to be within the u. could probably carve out the small pieces that are manageable enough to actually get a handle around some of these terrorism problems and actually create a somewhat nimble and flexible organization, which members are exactly what terrorist organizations are. the government is still a bureaucracy and is operating as one vertically and i think you need to think more about what are the strong assets and pieces that you can kind of pull out and start there and stop trying to sort of swallow the whole apple at once.

>> thank you rematch. i'd be happy to sign books in the back if you'd like to buy one. [applause] >> mr. speaker, on this historic day the house of representatives opens is proceeding for the first time to televised coverage. >> thirty-one years ago america's cable companies created c-span as a public service. today we've expanded your access to politics and public affairs, nonfiction books in american history through multiple platforms, television, radio and online and cable television flatus gift, an extensive free video archive. c-span's video library. >> ariel glucklich, what are some of the best qualities of religion that you claim are also

dangerous? >> the single most important quality of religion is that it makes people happy. but the way it makes people happy is by social integration, by getting them to belong in a group. now, if the group demands that you do certain kinds of things in order to become a member, you become dependent on those demands. you might do anything. and if the group is their own kind of group, you might be actually a dangerous person. so the good thing is happiness, the bad thing is depending on that for your sense of fulfillment. that's the problem. >> who is dying for has been? >> people die for has been to feel like they don't belong and that they need to prove themselves in order to belong. the group that tells them that they are going to have an is usually a religious group, but the problems that they have to

begin with is not a religious one here the problem they have is that they don't belong and that's what's happening around the middle east that too many people no longer belong in any recognizable group. that's why you see all the violence there and not here. >> how did you come up with your theories? >> i've been doing psychology of religion for over 20 years. and i've studied other case is asked people injuring themselves or religion. for example, rites of passage or pilgrimage for the pilgrims walk underneath. or initiations and so forth. we've all seen the monks who are whipping themselves and not sort of thing. so i'm an expert on why religious people feel that they need to hurt themselves in order to get what they want, which is spiritual salvation. >> where do you teach? >> georgetown university. >> ariel glucklich, "dying for

heaven: holy pleasure and suicide bombers- why the best qulities of religion are also its most dangerous" >> timothy egan is now an opinion columnist for "the new york times." he's the author of five books and the recipient of several awards, including the pulitzer prize. he lives in seattle, so i know he's enjoying the weather here in tucson this weekend. today tim egan is here to discuss the big ring, teddy roosevelt and the fire that saved america. it's about more than just a forest fire that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. it was a time not unlike our own corporate interests were pitted against conservation, certain news outfits and politicians

were influenced by business interests and millions of immigrants were coming to the west to do the job that no one else was willing to do. tim egan describes the big personalities and the big ideas that led to the formation of the national forest and wildlife areas that we all enjoy today. through painstaking research, egan reads the story but also gives meaning to the buffalo soldiers, the hon hunt bettors and the roustabouts. please welcome tim egan. [applause] g out here. it is good to have c-span in the audience as well so you will have to behave yourself here. i really am happy to be here. i'm a third generation western night and i spent a fair amount of time down here, almost