morning? >> caller: good morning, greta. greta, your question about the law being changed, i think in 2004, there was a law that said that you couldn't have, i think, with so many bullets in the chamber, you know, one in the chamber and you could have like 10 --. >> host: the assault weapons ban that was put in place in 1994 but expired in 2004. >> caller: exactly. .. exactly. i think he got off all 30 rounds. also, president nixon and martin luther king said [inaudible] just one bullet. these people going around with these guns, like the guy at virginia tech. i do not think we need stuff

like that. we need laws that would restrict that. host: this is "the washington post" this morning. they break down what is on the books now. they place limitation on handgun sales. it came after the assassination of president kennedy. it prompted calls for gun control legislation, but it took five years and the deaths of senator robert f. kennedy and martin luther king, jr. to make it happen. then we have the assault weapons ban and the caller just talked about. that was enacted in 1994.

it was prompted, in part, by a 1989 schoolyard massacre in stockton, california. it expired in 2004. we also have the criminal background check improvement act, which was signed by president george w. bush after the virginia tech >> we leave this program to go live to university medical center in tucson part update on the condition of congresswoman giffords and other victims of saturday's shooting. >> the people of this nation if you're coming together on this tragedy, the amount of good wishes that are coming across is just absolutely astounding. all has been positive and we are very thankful for those good wishes. if you don't mind i would also like to take a second to thank the press. that maybe something that you not get very often but you guys are so cordial and helpful so we

very much appreciate it. we appreciate the privacy that you have given to patients and their families as well. my portion will be very short. the update as we have at the current time period is we saw six patients in hospital, one patient remains in a critical fashion. to our serious, and three are in fair condition. one of the patients got upgraded to serious for a little while because they were on a ventilator, a breathing machine right after we were doing surgery, which is very customary and normal so that's the reason why. the update on the congresswoman at this time period is it's going as anticipated. again, at this time period things can go very slowly and the progress can occur very rapidly as a particular type and can also go in a negative fashion, in a downward way as well. i'm happy to state it has not of a downward events have occurred

at this time which is exactly what we kind of want to happen at this point. we have really decrease the amount of sedation we are giving her, and as result of that she is becoming more and more spontaneous all the time. other than that there will be additional information that i will be getting about the congresswoman at this time and i will not be taking questions regarding the status. at this time. what i would also like to do is introduce to family members who are going to make a brief statement. after the brief statement we will open it up for very short period of questions and answers come and then we will conclude at that time period. we have the family members of ronde barber, jenny douglas is going to talk but we also have nancy barber, christian blake, jason blake, and william douglas. i got that right? if you don't mind i will repeat those names again. if you could just identify who

is who. nancy barber, christie blake, jason blake, and wayne douglas. that will help the press quite a bit. with that -- >> good morning. my name is jimmy douglass. i am barbara's daughter. behind me as my mother, sister, my husband, and my brother-in-law jason blake. i had a statement i would like to read on behalf of my family. we will take a few questions after that. we would like to let you all know that my dad is doing well after his second surgery yesterday morning. at the very alert since coming out of his six-hour surgery on saturday. he was able to see his four grandchildren on monday, which gave him great pleasure. we expect him to be released from the icu on thursday.

on behalf of my dad and the rest of our family we would like to give our heartfelt thanks to our extended family, friends and the community as a whole, for the overwhelming support we have received. specifically we would like to thank all of the umc staff, doctors, nurses and patient care technicians who have been lovingly caring for our dad and our family these past days. the level of care, compassion and professionalism is truly exceptional. we would also like to thank the tucson police department, sheriffs department and fbi. we would like to express our deepest sympathies to the families who lost loved ones on saturday. dad is so deeply saddened by the loss of his friend and fellow staff member, gabe zimmerman, and longtime friend, chief judge

john roll. our thoughts and prayers are with the other victims and their families during their recoveries. would also like to express our sincere gratitude to daniel hernandez, whose clear thinking and actions in the midst of chaos undoubtedly helped to save congresswoman giffords' life. would also like to personally thank and who applied pressure to my dads wounds. until the paramedics arrived. we are greatly indebted to her. my dad has worked in the public sector for this committee for almost 40 years. he was with the division of developmental disabilities for 34 years, most of that time as the director for southern arizona. he retired in 2006 and began volunteering in dealing with gabby's campaign what he was the committee outreach director. after her successful election, gabby appointed him as her district director.

we knew he worked tirelessly to give a voice for those who often were not heard in his career with the division of development of disabilities. it was hard to imagine that he could work more, even more in its nuclear with gabby, but somehow he does. with such a long career public service in this community he is touched many lives and now we're hearing from hearing from many of you who know him well. and some of you who just knew of him. he has friends across the political spectrum, and like his boss can't he just wants to do what is best for the people of our community. that is what to him to gabby and that is what binds them. throughout this ordeal, data singular focus has been on the well being and gabby, and he asks that we'll continue to pray for her recovery and her family.

>> this is the son of -- >> good morning. i'm going to be reading a brief statement from her mother, and simons. pam syme is a 20 outreach coordinator for congresswoman giffords. this is in her words. i'm incredibly grateful for the outpouring of love and support of my family, friends, coworkers and community. the wounds inflicted our healing, thanks to the amazing care of the doctors and staff here at the university medical center. i would especially like to thank doctor freeze. a deeper wounds and needless loss of lives severe injury of coworkers into many workers and the sadness of the act of violence will take much longer to heal.

i am touched and encouraged by the tremendous caring and coming together of the community, and i believe that in the days and weeks ahead that we will work together to solve challenges and promote healing. i asked for your continued prayers for gabrielle, my congresswoman and my friend, and that she has a full recovery. she is a leader who is truly needed in this nation. my special thanks to my wonderful husband, bruce, for his love and support, and for my children for being here throughout this time. thank you. >> okay, we will open it up for a couple of questions. please, for the barber family. [inaudible]

>> we are very sad about this tragic event. we are grateful that my dad is alive. we are very sad about the people who lost their loved ones. >> could you tell us a little more, please, about your father. >> my dad wants to see her. it will help him to see her. i believe they're going to arrange that. he is just asking about her every day. [inaudible] >> you know, he's doing as well as expected. and day by day he has to heal, and it's going to take a long time to heal. but he really wants to express to the community, this wonderful community of tucson, his love and discredited because we are a wonderful community and we are a

family. and we all join together, and he is very grateful for that. [inaudible] >> he remembers it all very clearly. yes. [inaudible] >> we can't share the information but i can tell you he remembers it very clearly. >> can you speak a little bit about his condition? >> my sister is a nurse and that's for her. >> by daddy's healing from his wounds remarkable he well, and we really think that's because we have so much love and prayer coming our way right now. he had surgery yesterday to close some wounds that were created during his original surgery. and he is healing incredibly well. his pain is being managed by his nursing staff.

and he is expected to make a full recovery, so we are really happy. [inaudible] >> we just found out who she was yesterday, and there was an article in today's star about a friend of the star helps me identify her, in a photo in sunday's paper. there's no identification. i'm sure the photographer couldn't get close enough. and so we were able to find out who she was and actually i spoke with her yesterday. anna is her name, and ron is very keen to speak with her. and as she was with the daniel hernandez, and he is hoping to meet with her in the next day or so.

>> thank you. i think this is as best, always thinking of others, especially the congresswoman. so that concludes the press released at this time. thank you all for your cooperation. [inaudible conversations] >> yesterday attorney general eric holder let a commemoration of dr. martin luther king jr. at the justice department. former new orleans mayor and national urban league president marc morreale also took part of his hour-long event. >> welcome to the 2011

department of justice dr. martin luther king jr. commemorative program. my name is richard and i'm the director of the division of equal employment opportunity staff and will serve as a master of ceremony for today's program. to begin, i ask that you please rise for the presentation of the colors by the junior rotc color guard unit of washington, d.c.,'s spin guard senior high school, and for the singing of the national anthem by ms. dorothy williams, peos see special civil rights division. following the national anthem, supervisor specialist of criminal section of the civil rights provision will provide the opening invocation.

♪ oh, say, can you see ♪ by the dawn's early light ♪ what so proudly we hailed ♪ at the twilight's last gleaming? ♪ ♪ whose broad stripes and bright stars ♪ ♪ thro' the perilous fight ♪ o'er the ramparts we watched

♪ were so gallantly streaming ♪ and the rockets red glare ♪ the bombs bursting in air ♪ gave proof through the night ♪ that our flag was still there ♪ ♪ oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave ♪ ♪ o'er the land of the free ♪ and the home of the brave?

>> right face. forward, march.

>> let us pray. god, we come to you with humble hearts as we stand together unified to commemorate the life and legacy of dr. martin luther king. we are humbled and grateful that we, too, have a part to play in the freedom that he so proudly fought for. continue, o god, to put it in our minds and hard to stand up and to fight for righteousness and justice, a man. -- a man. >> you may be seated. please join me in a round of applause for master sergeant kenneth tillman and the spin guard junior rotc, ms. williams and ms. jackson. [applause]

>> i would like to formally welcome our distinguished speakers at this time. versed it is my great honor to welcome our attorney general, the honorable eric holder, jr. thank you, sir. [applause] >> thank you, attorney general, for joining us today. i would also like to acknowledge our deputy attorney general, mr. james cole. [applause] >> as well as several other heads of composer joined us us today. thank you for being here. next we are fortunate to have with us mr. thomas bettis, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division. welcome, mr. bettis. [applause] >> i would also like to extend a warm welcome to our keynote speaker, mr. marc morial,

presidenpresident -- [applause] >> mr. morreale is the president and ceo of the national urban league, the nation's largest civil rights organization. we also welcome lisa jackson of the civil rights division and thank her for providing the programs opening and closing invocation. [applause] >> today we will remember and celebrate the life and legacy of the reverend dr. martin luther king jr., a great american and great leader who worked tirelessly for peace and equal justice for all. remember, celebrate, act, i day on, not a day off, remains the national scene for mlk day. it i was one of dr. king's most powerful philosophies that one of the best ways to achieve

peace and civil unity is to help someone. now, it is my honor to introduce the honorable thomas bettis, mr. bettis was sworn in as the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division on october 8, 2009. earlier in his career he spent 12 years in federal public service, most of them as a career attorney with the civil rights division, and later as the deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights under attorney general janet reno. among other responsibilities he chairs the interagency worker exploitation task force and was the late senator edward kennedy's personal adviser on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues. today he leads the civil rights division ongoing efforts to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all americans. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the honorable thomas bettis. [applause]

>> good morning. it's an honor to be here. it's an honor to welcome new deputy attorney general call and it's great to see all of my friends and colleagues as we gather here today to honor one of our nation's most cherished heroes. dr. king's unrelenting commitment to history and helped shepherd some of our most critical civil rights laws. laws that continue today to protect and to provide relief for those who reside in the shadows. everyday is martin luther king day in the department of justice civil rights division. his nonviolent activism and believe that the quality was inevitable set an example for generations of americans seeking to continue to perfect our nation, and it continues to be felt here in the year 2011. each year we celebrate dr. king not only to commemorate his great accomplishment, but also to honor his legacy and remind

ourselves that in the words of my former boss, senator edward kennedy, civil rights remain indeed the unfinished business of america. in dr. king's famous letter from the birmingham jail where he was detained because of his unwavering commitment to the pursuit of freedom and equality, he famously wrote that i cannot sit by idly and atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in birmingham. injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. tied in a single garment of destiny. whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. if dr. king were with us today, he would recognize the great progress he has made. i would imagine you'd feel quite proud of his great and lasting contribution to bettering our nation. i know he would be grateful, have great pride at the fact that we have attorney general

eric holder. he would see individuals, however, that are still targeted for violence because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, the religion they practice, or whom they choose to love. and he would speak out against all forms of injustice. he with the individuals denied access to housing or education, or employment or critical services because they look different, or because they have a disability. and he would take action. he would continue to work to promote justice and equality through peaceful means. dr. king's legacy is far more than the great civil rights laws that are on our books and that we have the privilege of enforcing. it is a mindset, a pragmatic yet effective approach to solving the critical problems of today that brings people together for a common purpose. it is a legacy of peaceful progress. each year we honor this legacy with programs such as this.

we also honor dr. king by dedicating ourselves a day of service to others, which i hope all of us will do next monday. but we should also honor dr. king by emulating him in our actions and in our public discourse. we should remember that face with the unrelenting and systematic hatred, keyes responded not with hatred of his own bout with reason and with love. i am pleased, i am honored indeed, to have the opportunity to introduce someone who carries dr. king's torch forward today, attorney general eric holder has been an unwavering supporter of our work in the civil rights division. he has our back every single day. he has repeatedly and consistently made clear that the enforcement of our nation's civil rights laws is a top priority for the justice department. he has backed up his commitment with action. we have made great strides in the last two years to restore and transform the civil rights division so that all individuals

can benefit from the laws that are meant to protect them. strides that would've been possible without the support of solid committed leadership. i am grateful to call the attorney general eric holder my boss. and i'm grateful that america has the privilege of calling him our attorney general. ladies and gentlemen, i bring to you the attorney general, eric holder. [applause] >> good morning i guess. >> thank you, tom, for your kind words and especially for your leadership of the civil rights division. i also want to thank you and your team, as well as richard and his colleagues in the justice management division for your work in bringing us all together. also want to say congratulations to great job done by the colorguard.

[applause] >> that's a school with a great tradition and you serve in that great tradition. thank you all for being here, especially our many distinguished guests and our keynote speaker, marc morial. today, as we join together to reflect on and to celebrate the life of dr. martin luther king jr., we are also bound by a shared grief and painful sense of loss. this weekend, in an unspeakable tragedy, 20 individuals were shot in tucson, arizona, at a constituent meeting with congresswoman gabrielle giffords. six people were killed, including nine-year-old christina taylor green and chief united states district court judge john roll. the senseless and shameful act of violence serves as an unfortunate reminder that, more than 40 years since dr. king's own tragic and untimely death, our world has yet to run its course of cruelty. and our work to combat violence,

and to bring those who engage in violent acts to justice, goes on. without question, threats against public officials, whatever form they take, continue to be cause for concern and vigilance. but i do not believe that these threats are as strong as the forces working for tolerance and peace. in times like these, times of inexplicable loss and unprecedented challenge, the importance of the justice department's mission, and the power of dr. king's example, are brought into stark focus. so as we pray for those who have been killed and injured, including congresswoman giffords and the many families devastated by this tragedy, let us also recommit ourselves to the work of this great department, and to our professional and personal efforts to carry forward dr. king's dream. for a quarter of a century now, americans have been coming together around dr. martin luther king jr. day to do just that, and to pay tribute to dr.

king's life and enduring contributions. each year, this time provides an opportunity for each of us to rededicate ourselves to dr. king's dream of racial, social, and economic justice. it is also a reminder of the power and importance of service to others. dr. king's example, and his enduring legacy, offer proof that the contributions of a single person can help to improve, inspire, and transform an entire nation. with his powerful words and deeds, and with both fearlessness and grace, dr. king helped to blaze the trail that allows me to stand on this stage as our nation's first african-american attorney general. and for every member of the justice department, his dream of a more just and inclusive world remains one of our most important guideposts. it has strengthened our efforts to safeguard civil rights, to improve access to justice, to expand opportunities to learn, serve, grow, thrive, and through

the work of our diversity management initiative, to ensure that all qualified candidates in current employees have an opportunity to meaningfully contribute to the work at the justice department. in the decades since dr. king called for equal opportunity and struggled so courageously to move our nation forward, and in the half-century since he traveled here to the justice department to share his goals and vision with attorney general robert kennedy, great progress has been made. now for some time, it may be tempting, when you look at the many accomplished attorneys and public servants in this great hall, to think that our nation's struggle for equal opportunity has ended. that is not true. but we have more to do. we have further to go. i believe that the best way to carry on dr. king's work is to reach out to someone in need and to make an ongoing commitment to community service. without question, there are great needs to be met in america and beyond.

and i encourage each of you to help make certain that our nation's dr. martin luther king jr. day observance is not simply a day off. it must be a day on. together, we can ensure that it is a day of national service and dedication to build on the progress that dr. king helped to achieve. on monday, i will be in atlanta speaking at a center that is named in dr. king's honor and was founded to advance his vision of social, racial, and economic justice. the day before, i will have the honor of addressing the congregants at atlanta's ebenezer baptist church, where dr. king served as pastor. these opportunities not only speak but to listen, to learn about needs and concerns, and to encourage community engagement, many are what dr. king's birthday should be, and can be, all about. just as surely as heeding dr. king's example helped to steer america from a dark past, i believe that honoring his legacy through service will help us build a better, more just, and more inclusive nation.

thank you all for your commitment to this work, and for the critical public service that you provide each day. i am grateful and proud to call you my colleagues. and now, it is an honor to introduce one of our nation's most accomplished and admired public servants. marc morial has served as mayor of new orleans, as president of the u.s. conference of mayors, and as a member of louisiana's of state legislature. he has distinguished himself as a ceo, attorney, entrepreneur, professor, and today as the head the of our nation's largest civil rights organization, the national urban league. and he is my good friend. please join me in welcoming my friend, marc morial. [applause]

>> first of all, thank you to attorney general holder, and let's give the general another big round of applause. i want to thank him for -- [applause] >> and let me say good morning, buenos dias. it's just great to be here with you today. and let me again acknowledge the great pride and respect that i have for attorney general holder. because for young people he is indeed a role model, who has worked his way up, who has accomplished so much. and i think is destined to be recognized as one of the great leaders of the department of justice. so thank you again, attorney general holder, for having me. thank you for your friendship.

[applause] >> and i also want to thank attorney general, for his leadership, and for attorney general holder and tom perez for revising, resuscitating, and reestablishing the commitment of the department of justice to the enforcement of this nation, civil rights laws. there is no higher priority. [applause] >> and let me also thank each of you, those public servants who work at the department of justice. this department since 1870 has been charged with the very important responsibility of carrying out the aim of justice as articulated and established in the constitution by the founding fathers. and has improved over time by

successive generations of leaders. and i especially want to thank the frontline men and women of the civil rights division. the civil rights division now for nearly 54 years, since 1957, has been a bulwark of civil rights in this nation, enforcing the law, educating the public, assisting citizens, and those who are committed to that very important cause of civil rights. so thank all of you for your tremendous service. it's an honor to be able to speak at anytime and anyplace about dr. martin luther king. but it is a special honor to be able to speak about dr. martin luther king here at the department of justice.

this your celebration of dr. king's life is special because i believe it is framed by a number of events. first, as the attorney general has mentioned, the tragic event in the state of arizona. my thoughts, my prayers and those of the national urban league are with congresswoman giffords, but with the family of those who have lost their life. that pain that we experience as a nation is no way matching the pain that the family members and loved ones of the people who lost their lives feel at this very time, because when death comes suddenly, when death comes in a tragedy, when death comes to violence, but when it comes in such a public way, those family members will experience

this pain for days and months and years to come. so if dr. king, the great nonviolent personality and profit, his celebration is framed by the events in arizona. his celebration is also framed by events that existed 50 years ago, because we began in 2001, this 50 year period, the 1960s. since that time when this nation dramatically changed, that decade of a great difference, that decade of great civil disobedience. but this celebration of dr. king is also framed by events of 25 years ago. because this is the 25th

anniversary of this nation celebration of dr. king's birthday as a national holiday. it's hard to believe. [applause] >> it is so hard to believe that it's been 25 years ago. i have vivid recollection of being out on the mall on a cold day in january of 1981. when i was but a freshman law student, and a great musical genius, stevie wonder, but a tremendous itinerant march to say to the nation in 1981 that dr. king's birthday should be a national holiday. and he performed that iconic, that iconic happy birthday song

to dr. king. and now 25 years after the signing of the king holiday, this is a year where this nation will once again recognized dr. king in a very special way when in august of this year the martin luther king memorial will be dedicated here on the mall in washington, d.c.. the first -- [applause] >> a first, not only for african-americans, but the first for non-president. a significant undertaking by not only the nation's government, but the many men and women in private life who contributed time and energy, and i'm proud that my old college fraternity, alpha phi alpha, tennessee and has led the effort toward the

building and the ultimate dedication of that monument in august of this year. and dr. king's birthday is also framed by the great recession. the great recession that we have seen as a nation. that record number of job losses. the record number of home foreclosures. the heroic efforts by the president and his team and members of congress to respond to this great difficulty there had been seven recessions since the great depression. none comes close to this one. in terms of depth and length. in terms of numbers of people who now find themselves long-term unemployed. this holiday for reasons i will

share with you are especially framed by that recession. now, i think it is fair to ask, fair to suggest that if dr. martin luther king were with us today, what would his observation be, and what might he say? i know that if you are with us he would be a vigorous 82 year-old man, collecting a social security check, relying on the very important medicare program. but a man who would look back, i think, he would look back to 50 years ago, through a little magnavox tv he might go to the internet. he might have one of those 50-inch hdtv. and to look back 50 years ago,

and he would see that 50 years ago, to the very month, was a month in which the late great john f. kennedy, the man asked not what this country can do for you, but asked what you can do for your country, was inaugurated. if you look at that decade of the '60s, which led this nation's eyes to birmingham, alabama, and a letter from birmingham jail and battle against bull connor and the way in which the fire hoses and the dogs shocked the conscience of this nation, and accelerated the coalition and the commitment towards civil rights. he would look back in that decade which began 50 years ago. it was a decade in 1963 when the

great steel secretary for the naacp in memphis at the -- in mississippi, medgar evers, lost his life while standing in front of his own home. a year 1963, when a quarter of a million people of all races, creed, color, religion, dispositions, national origin, marched on the mall in this city to proclaim a new commitment and a challenge to the nation to live up to the true meaning of its creed, that indeed we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, and i would say all men and women, are created equal. he would look back over that 50 year period and look at the 1963 march on washington, and recall

that it was not a march for television or public relation purposes, it was not a march whose aim was to give flowery compelling speeches, but it was a march designed to compel the president and the congress to pass a civil rights act, consistent with the ideals of this nation. and he would have witnessed in that year another unspeakable tragedy, the tragedy in dallas, when that great young president, john f. kennedy, lost his life. and in 1964 kennedy's dream and king's work, the civil rights act indeed was passed. and it was then that he won the nobel prize for peace, that he didn't stop there.

then the movement move down to selma, alabama, to the bridge and bloody sunday. which was not another marched for the sake of march. not another marched because it was a way to get on television. but a march that said that civil rights is incomplete without voting rights. and the challenge to then president johnson and the congress was to pass a voting rights act. and has that decade elapsed, dr. king at the moment and in the months before, before his untimely death in memphis, tennessee, begin and embarked on a new effort, and effort which recognize that economic justice, economic empowerment, was indeed

the next frontier of the civil rights movement in this nation. and he conceived of and begin planning for what he called, not a march, not a sit in, but a stadium. called the poor people's campaign. what would dr. king think if he had witnessed the 1970s when the congressional black caucus was created? when african-american mayors were elected in every major southern city the beginning of the election of african-american mayors in every major southern city, which 10 years before that, had been segregated. and sometimes as many as a third to 50% of the people of those communities did not enjoy the right to vote. what would dr. king say if he would have witnessed in the late

'70s and in the early '80s the effort by some to reverse the gains that civil rights by watering down the civil rights act and the voting rights act? and he would have been proud at the coalition, the bipartisan coalition that formed in the 1980s, to rescue and to save and to push back on those very efforts. and dr. king would be proud if he had witnessed the 1990s when the americans with disabilities act became a feature of this nation's civil rights panoply of laws. and he would have been proud, he would have been proud if he would have witnessed during the clinton years a ron brown, henry cisneros, a federico been yo,

alexis herman, a rodney slater, and a janet reno become members of the president's cabinet. he would have been proud. to see that occur. but what would dr. king i observe about this last decade that we experienced in this nation? at decade of the 2000 florida recount, or the selection of the president of the united states ended up in a court case in the united states supreme court. what would his observations and comments have been had he lived during 9/11 when 3000 people of all races, creeds and colors lost their lives to an awful terrorist attack on this nation? what would he think? during hurricane katrina in 99-degree heat with 99-degree

humidity. i can tell you, it's nothing you know in washington, d.c.. what would he have observed? what would he have observed that it would is the great recession and the subprime crisis? what would he have observed had he been on the mall in january of 2009 is a presidential barack obama inaugurated as president of the united states? what would he have observed? to walk through the front doors on 10th and constitution at this very building track to look up and see those photos on the wall and see barack obama, and eric holder their. i think if dr. king were able to observe the last 40 years, and

had he reflected on his work in the 1950s and 1960s, which was the work of many, he was the potential leader but like the national urban league and its great president at the time, whitney young, standing together in the battle and in the fight for civil rights. dr. king, dr. king, dr. king. would indeed feel a great sense of pride, a great sense of accomplishment, a great sense of legacy. but i also think that if dr. king were with us in 2011, he would observe the things in conditions -- things and conditions that would not bring joy to his heart. he would witnessed an

achievement gap with not enough young people finishing high school. dr. king was hit awful criminal justice crisis with too many especially young men of color finding themselves incarcerated in this nation, penitentiaries. dr. king would also see what i see, and that is a great and mighty nation of prosperity evolving into three america's. the america of wall street, the america of those, those who build a great deal of wealth, have high levels of income, and are in a position to live with great comfort. and america of main street, struggling, hard-working men and

women as in police officers, teachers and civil servants, nurses, frontline administrative professionals who work every day, small business owners who live in our towns and in our cities, big and small across the nation. who are working hard for stability and for survival. and then he would see as we see, and america of the backstreet. and america were record numbers of americans live in poverty. record numbers of americans are receiving food stamps. he would see the 16 million people out of work. he would see their struggles, and he would feel that pain. and he would remind us that economic justice and economic empowerment, and closing the

economic divide, is indeed the real unfinished business of civil rights in the 21st century america aired and he would observe -- [applause] >> and he would observe that while the civil rights movement was at its base and at its core about achieving racial justice and fairness for african-americans, it was about a broader principle. and that is achieving justice and fairness and equity for all americans. regardless of their situation or disposition. regardless of who they love, regardless of their national origin, regardless of their race, their color, and they agreed. and his legacy would be that civil rights is indeed that

great enduring principle. he would say that it is unacceptable for a nation, with so much prosperity to tolerate poverty amidst all of this. we cannot be and america of wall street, main street and backstreet. we have to be an america where everyone feels that they have a justifiable path to economic security. dr. king would also, he would also cancel us, that at this time of conflict and controversy and this time of competitivene competitiveness, that this is the time where we must all reaffirm our commitment. we must reaffirm our commitment to become one nation under god, indivisible with liberty and justice and economic opportunity

for all. we must reaffirm our commitment that civil rights was not simply a concept in period in american history. that civil rights is not merely a set of laws on the table, that civil rights is not just a powerful and compelling speeches. american ideals but in 21st century america, civil rights must be an american value. that civil rights is the fight in the battle. it's the fight and the battle to ensure that we the people of the united states, in order to form a more perfect union, and i would note, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, among the general welfare, for

the blessings of what? liberty, to ourselves and our prosperity. to ordain and establish this constitution and the station. dr. king would remind us that the founding fathers, they didn't use general welfare first. they didn't use tranquility first. dated news provide for the common defense first. first, they used to establish justice first in the preamble to the constitution of the united states. the fight is the quest, the work, the battle, the efforts to establish justice, fairness in this nation, indeed, for all people. dr. king would be proud. but dr. king would say this work must go on.

this cause must endure. it is not indeed finished. this hall and this very building are named after a great american, robert frances kennedy, who served as attorney general during that difficult time in the early 1960s. when he learned of dr. king's untimely death in memphis, tennessee, he was campaigning for the presidency. and here is what he said, and i close with this. what we need in the united states is not division. but we need in the united states is not hatred. what we need in the united states is not violence and

lawlessness. what we need in united states is love and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice. towards those who still suffer. and i add whether they be black or white or hispanic or asian or gay or straight, or of being bored without means. that is the true legacy of civil rights. happy birthday, dr. martin luther king. [applause] ..

participating in today's program. in addition to jfdi would also like to thank our dlj co-sponsors including the executive office for immigration review, the executive office for u.s. attorneys, the federal bureau of prisons and the u.s. marshal service. at this time i ask that attorney-general holder and mr. marc morial please take center stage.

to express gratitude for his inspiring remarks attorney-general holder will now present mr. marc morial with a token of our appreciation. [silence] [laughter] [applauding] [applauding] >> to conclude today's program we will have a final musical presentation by ms. williams, and a final program invitation by ms. jackson. ms. williams.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ back.

♪ ♪ ♪

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ at back. [applauding]

>> let us pray. dear god, we ask that each of us leave here inspired, remembering that each of us has no role to play in fulfilling that dream. we ask, oh, god, that you give us the conscious, the commitment, the courage to do our part, and we will do all that you have placed in our heart to do in fulfilling that dream of civil rights and justice for all. a man. >> before you depart today we ask that you please complete the evaluation form that was included with your program. you may leave them in your see your hand into a staff member at the back of the hall. again, thank you all of you, for joining us today. a special thanks to all of our participants up to this program.

thank you very much. [applauding] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] believe. [inaudible conversations] >> a look at the u.s. capitol with the flag at half staff as members of congress continue to pay tribute to victims of the arizona shooting. six were killed with 14 wounded. among them congresswoman gabrielle giffords. and a look inside the capitol where people have the opportunity to sign a book of condolences and support for victims of the shooting. we did get a medical update from the university of arizona

medical center's day, and congresswoman gabrielle giffords continues to be in stable condition and is responsive as she comes off having medication. president obama and the first lady are heading for arizona. they will take part in a memorial service tonight at the university of arizona. what's that live at 8:00 eastern on our companion network, c-span. >> an event with former cbs news correspondent marvin kalb who spoke with students about the current media environment. speaking at the washington center for internships and academic seminars to talk about the tone of political discourse. this is just under an hour. >> good morning and welcome back. again, my name is tony with the washington center for

internships and academic seminars, a nonprofit organization that for 35 years e has been providing opportunitieo for students around the country and internationally.for studentm intern happy to have our studentsat here with the inside washington 2011 academic seminar this week focusing on politicswh and the media. here to introduce our nextminare speaker is our faculty director, professor emeritus of telecommunications, professor steveto bell. [applauding] x. it is a privilege to introduce our next speaker was a friendly competitor, marvin kalb was the kaplomatic correspondent for cbs news. the abc correspondent for thelo

state department was ted koppel. i want to tell you, that was a raid team covering the state you department from the americannt m networks. the three of them did remarkabls things be. marvin no longer a friendly th competitor, but a friend. he has agreed to come back and really share with us this continuing conversation about how media and politics intersect with foreign policy and all of the policies that end up being part of the government. polics marvin is james clark willing presidential fellow at george washington university, and he it the edward r. burrow professoriy emeritus at harvard kennedy school of government. r also a continuing -- contributing news analyst for il national public radio and

fox news channel. in addition he is frequently called upon to comment on major issues of the day as one of the nation's chief contributors to the dialogue of how we go forth as a country boy. marvin is distinguished. his broadcast career. he has worked for both cbs andse nbc news. as i said, he was a diplomatic correspondent and also bureau chief of for that. he moderated meet the press when he was in his nbc years. he has won the 20,064th estate award in the national press club.on he has also won more than halfa dozen overseas press club more awards, lectured at many h universities throughout the country and abroad, a graduateay of city college of new york, and then the nba from harvard. ci he is a continuing scholar who d

is currently de just wrapping up writing a book on the american experience and vietnam. marvin kalb. [applauding] >> that you all very much. it is a pleasure for me to be back.>> tha i was here last year, not in this building. notin it was a good experience for me. when steve called and invited me back i said, yes immediately. aw my pleasure. what i know about you is thatid there are about 130 of you heret here for a weaker to. at think you are extremely're lucky. i wish that when i were ini t college i had the opportunity to on a group like this and the meet people like t. j. crowley who, in fact, are terribly important in the fashioning of foreign policies.

what i would like to do issecre dividecl this hour into. i would like very much to hear your questions and i would like very much to have the opportunity of talking about a questi few issues that i consider veryt fet a ant within the framework of what steve has outlined, which is the media, how it has evolved into its current shape, media, and power and importance. then the impact that it has on public policy.olicy. let me start by just asking a couple of hands that kind of questions.y how many of j you read, not just the sports page, but read the daily newspaper every day? just raise your hand. i am guessing that it is less than half.uessing b how many of you watch a

television news program everycha day? more than half. progr how many of you watch one of the sunday morning interviewf the programs?orni again, ngless than half. that is kind of interesting. but how many of you at the same time on any given morning willn. open up your computer and look e at the yahoo news or googol newd in order to get the headlines on what is going on in the world. lines almost everybody. that is absolutely an honest reflection of what has happened we have moved from a society that for the most part lived by the daily newspaper and radio into a society where we are absorbed with cable is,ciety occasionally hard news.

and theoc internet. we also of a sword with radio, surprisingly to a very highnglyo degree. there are generally speaking talk radio hosts who had mousmous political power, the eumber one being rush limbaugh,h who can attract 15 million people a week.ho can that is a law. being paid an enormous amount of money to attract that kind of ao audience. not ata comparable -- excuse met liberal representative of theibl world, not a comparable one. there are people who tried.le wo cable television is where you have the most fiercely articulated political points oft view.cely the question at the end of the day is, if cable television

news, fox, and as nbc, cnn, ifmn they exercise that kind of influence and clout what is there on the other side?nd what is called the mainstream media side to provide the underpinning for all of the opinion? the answer is there still are great and distinguished newspapers, and the networks are still provide a very important function with the evening p newscasts. for example, evening newscastsig of all three of the big ones,mef abc, cbs, nbc. something in the neighborhood of 25 million homes. that is not bad.ing in theeighbo that is very good, in fact.now, but it doesn't measure up to the doeective power of the

internet, the computer systems,e radio, not at all. i want to give you two examples of the danger in this world. i'm going to be a little skimpy on names.re bcause trble.r which is reputed to be the finest radio news operation in existence in the united newso states, npr last saturday when congresswoman gabrielle giffordr was shot went on the air an hour or so after the bullet saying that she was dead. what was that based on?t it was based on reports, npr's said.

what reports? where did they come from? there were reports on the internet and blogs, tots on the particularly which said that she partly, who when npr went on the air, what did it say? it did not say she was dead flap out. it said there are reports that oue is dead. now, in an of itself that is accurate. there are reports that she is dead, but she is not dead. so what is going on? what is going on was npr wasat' sucked into the modern world of communications where so much information is out there in then ether that it requires a very good editor or producer of reporter to go through all of ra the chat and defined something that is accurate. how is it accurate? how can you be comfortable going on the air unless you yourself?

as a reporter have checked it? and that is where we begin as a media to fail.s we are not checking things very much anymore.we're there are so many facts, ," ands "out there that it is difficulte for us to discern the true facts from the made up or incomplete fa from fact.de there were only two hours later that npr corrected itself. h another story. this has to do with cbs radio. in my time as cbs we had a five minute newscast the newscast ntw every hour. we would provide spots for theh. news. wuld

it was kind of fun. i enjoyed it a lot. you do 45-50-2 spot on somethin that was going on, something that you knew was going on. gog you did not concoct these things. right now cbs radio because the nominal pressure in what cbs journalism lives, cbs puts out bulletin's in the time it feels in the course of the hour between the hours to its entire network. the network does not have to ru them, but the network is provided with these bulletins. now, supposing you are one of the writers and one of the broadcasters for these of e bulletins. your editor does not get paid for the number of inserts, no, s but is regarded as a pretty goo editor. let's say he or she can getetty

three or four bulletins' in thes course of one hour. ou maybe five. so the pressure is there tofi produce. if the pressure is there to produce, everybody is producing it is a kind of mass production. what suffers, what suffers is the absence of a check. of the journalism is only as good as the validity, the soundness of the information that is being conveyed. otherwise in my book it is otherwise, ind worthless. so where an re we today in term of the media?worthles not in a very good place is the answer, unfortunately. i am not one of those who believes that if we only go bacn 30 and 40 years it was a mucht f better time. well, in some ways it was, and h in some ways it wasn't. it was in the sense that thereoe

were reporters like steve bell who could go out and cover and e the war in vietnam and people se like me and people like you werr able to rely on what it is that he said because you had a sense that here was a guy who had checked the information before h he would go on the air until you about it. that was a wonderful feeling.llt it was a feeling of comfort on the part of the american people. it was walter cronkite, who is the anchor of the cbs evening news, the guy that i worked for, walter was regarded as the moste trusted man in america. which journalist today is theed most trusted man in america? nine. of sorry? i did not hear it. say it again. hear >> call there and storage.phen >> coal barons toward? while.on mo trally have come a long way.

really come a long way. my point is that in those days, well, anyway, cronkite represented legitimacy faugh, respectability, and solid news. at the same time when i arrived at the cbs bureau in washingtoni we had one woman reporter, two women editors, and two women producers. today it is way over 50 percent. it is a totally changedit's wayo environment. in those days it was very much e man's world, no question aboutas that. and the people at the very top eight now to of the three topth evening actors are women. now that in and of itself gives youp a demonstration of the cane -- so tha change. oftself

we have come a long way, but ofe then time and time again by the the reporting was much more time sound. a let me give you an illustration cbs had a marvelous reporter named winston bird that is no longer her with us. winston covered italy, the vatican, and it was his responsibility every now and th then to wander into the middlets east. ev one day at the state department i got a call from a washington a bureau chief, a terrific chief named bill small. bill said, can you please check with the state department andd s find out where the heck winstonc is? i said, why don't you know in new york? new york the foreign desk has no idea where this guy? is. we think he went to yemen, but d we are not sure. yemen, today, is a pretty rough yemen terrain. then, even more so because we py

knew less about it.rrain. what happened was that winston andkn his crew simply left froms went off to yemen, and were there for three weeks without ye communicating. but when they emerged in cairo, as it turned out, one morning they got in touch with new york and their stuff was so fabulous, the report from yemen, that cbs put a special on that night. put that is the kind of remarkable,k self-generating news that was possible in those days. absolutely out of the question today. every newsperson walks around with a bookkeeper. everything has to be measured. how much money does this cost for that cost? oeen you are doing a program, id your program is not making moned

yooiu are out. there is no love affair, as there was in the old days. it is business. if you don't produce, your out. profits, up and up with the out.its. and that has to do with theup ap mindset. what happens with that kind of pressure on you every single day? every hour? every wycherley if you are in the radio business or in the associated press world you are in this kind of work under this kind of pressure at all times. how is it possible, then, to maintain the quality of newsall maat exists in 20, 30, 40 years ago today. ago uld maintain that it is not possible. however, on the plus side there. are paid advantages because of

the explosion of the new technology. people who never in a million years could have imagined what ahe world was outside of their own village or town know what ie is like today because of the advantages of modern technologyi because of the advantages of thn reporters going out into the field covering the war, coverinf a presidential campaign, doingg something where they see and hear thingspr and then conveyed that to the public. tha that is a marvelous thing.in asa the-within that positive is simply the pressure to get it on the air first no matter what.ur the desire of major newspapers,. even the new york times of quit naturally hoping that somethingv in zepa onen the internet, rath

than on the printed part of then new york times. they would rather have it, i'm told, on the new york times dot, com than even the front page of the paper. that is the shifting between the old and the new journalism. money. it is said it as a great cliche mone money is the root of all evil. i would never go that far in journalism. i think some oref the salaries pretty terrific, particularly if you are getting them. particuy f but, if the value system of a news organization is money then everything has to come in on the positive side of the ledger orhn else you are in serious troublee the pressure then is to produces profitable news, news that will

itof make money. so let's say you had a story mae about the economic life in had cincinnati as opposed to the sex life of the cincinnati mayor.sed which story is going to get onie the air? th thank you very much. why? is that because the mayor's sex life is more important than the economic underpinning of theor's city?ning no. of the is because of what you all want to see and read and hear about. it all has to do with thend relationship with the public.do if the public is educated to the need for information abouthe cincinnati's economy, it willto demand it.nformation the people who run the networkso dell end upmy providing it. but if it is clear that the

public with perverse of the lower scale, believe me, you will get lots of lower still, and you will get it in ler spades.scal there was a mue.rder of a young woman about ten years ago. of that murder created a big deal because instantly a congressman from california was involved.inl cbs at that time made a decisiot by dan rather who was the anchoa that they were not point to cover the story about the murder of this young woman, except the first day to mention it and move on. and nbc decided to go with the story every night for two weeks. t it was wonderful to see theweeks ratings.se cbs ratings would like that, and nbc would like that.that. which, i think, says an enormour

amount about the linkage betwees substantive news that is checked out and important and news that titillates. that is the verb.ws t the news that titillates is the news that you're going to watcht and see. the into this has come in recent years all of this opinion. ye i often big that the united states would be so much better off if we had no cable news at all. let's take a step back and eliminate all of the cable newsp operations. we would have no opinion. we would not have puns telling us what to think. i cannot tell you how often i ao surprised at the washington am dinner party with a very distinguished people, senators,y

congressmen, p.j. crowley, all of these people, to hear themngm talk about what they heard lastk night on keith alderman's keith m or what was on fox last night. and the thought that keeps what w on fough my mind is, do these people who are our leader spend that much time watching cable news, listening to the opinions?e it is an opinion poll that cheaply.s -- it is i know abundance to know nothing about stories, who speak with w total authority. wh pundits who may be terrific ona. domestic policy, but know verysy little about foreign policy, telling us about the value and importance of the war in afghanistan. well, i must say, that is difficult for me to take. that'y

the longer i am around the more memory goes back to times when k that would have been tim thataginable. w to g wet on these programs you have to say things that are outrageous. get on if you were asked on the prograa and the anchor ask you, what are doing inrogram afghanistan, what do you think? and you answered, well, there are, i guess, to points of viewn on that.u know, you might think about it this way or you might think about ita this way. you are not going to be invited back a second time. what they want is crisp authoritative answers based ons what is not important. it is what comes through. i mean, we have been told all the time since marshall mcluhan about the message. we live in a universe of messages today.told ahe those that convey the message on

the people with influence and therefore with power. i would like at this point to hear from you folks. at t herom yoave a question please come to either one of the two microphones, but i want to make b as you do that, of what tomi, make one other point which is terribly important to me. other when this country was formed we had newspapers that were highly partisan. there were newspapers that were created by a particular party or institution, and the newspaper r supported the party. that was it. it was only there for that onett purpose of supporting that one l party. it t was not there to give you e rty..

that only developed in the ned-19th century. the latter part of the 19th century we had owners9 encouraging reporters to just hd come up and create a war between spain and america. that would be a marvelous thing betw because it would increase the circulation in new york.n inew r the real what i would regard, anyway, as the area, the time in anay as history where we had relatively straight news was somewhere in the beginning of ws the depression in the 1930's bad right up to the end of the cold war in the 1990's when there cod were news organizations, believe it or not, who really wanted tos exist solely for the purpose of giving you the newest.

i want to believe because the first amendment's provides a special place for the independence and freedom of the press and speech and of the freo press. why did they put that praise into the first amendment? it was, when you read some of this documentation, because thet felt that people who are not questioned are apt to abuse thee power they have. someone who has power withoutin, anyone having the authority to question the power has absoluteo power. t absolute power, you are one step away from the arbitrary use ofue that power.on the exact opposite of a democracy.. for this country was createdsite with that idea in mind. people would be free.

one of the guarantors is freedom of the press. free and for somebody to stand up andra say wait a second, that is not right.ait a or classically to be able to stand up and provide the fact and let other people simply makl tand eir mind aboutas what it is that is right or wrong? i believe today that we are, oh, on the edge of sliding downof toward a time in our history when we don't respect of the of view. don't r i remember when president reagan was in office.v the speaker ofie the house was r o'neill, massachusetts cambridgs liberal. the two of them met most afternoons at about 5:00 for a afte

drink.rn they enjoy telling stories, good stories, dirty stories.lling i mean, it was a good time that od the two of them had. they like each other. they respected each other.r. even though they profoundly disagreed withct each other. we don't have that anymore. we don't have that anymore whether republican or democrat is in the white house.e we don't have the kind ofite hor bonding, human bonding that takes place to soften the edges of a political difference. and so their edges get hardened in an atmosphere of cable talk l opinion. can't talk without respect for the other side we are going to have lots of last t inturday's. last saturday in my book. last i no there are a lot the people

who say you cannot link this tom anything going on.re are i think that is nonsense. of course y you can. th all ofat the terrible talk that goes on, not only in arizona, but across the whole country. having to do with the nature ofu thfferences of political wi opinion. we must be able, not just to we tolerate, but to respect another person's point of view and not t believe because you heard it on television that your point of view is right, because it may r dead wrong. it may be right in your mind any may b mind of a pungent, but it mi and dead wrong and in any case empathetic to to what this country represents which is i openness to all points of view h and the tolerance of excepting s all of those points of view.eran >> okay. that is me. poin what about you?

[applauding] [inaudible conversations] >> and identify yourself. >> hello. my name is corey lance. my question, you mentioned how pundits and on these networks they sort of short and down these very complex issues into saidd sound bites. what would you say is a good way whatombating the idea that the simplest, most rudimentary not a very in-depth ideas are the most important waysi to get more complexities in the news? people more informed of theost actual issues that are involved? >> that is a terrific question s that goes to the heart of what i was trying to say. at the moment i do not believeri it is realistic to hope that the networks are going to change their operation or even ho newspapers and magazines oring

radio will change its operationh however, youan do have the doube power. you are the consumer.e a if you don't want to consume, you don't have to. you can turn it off and read toy book, read a magazine, go into n the internet, not for the blocka necessarily, but for all of the good things. i just finished a book on vietnam. i had some times -- you know, them, i could not figure it outd well, you go in and there itgur was. it has enormous positive there advantages. but the responsibility ultimately is going to end up being yours. >> hello. my name is monday. honest collegng be college. first i am -- icily appreciate

you appreciating the quality of journalism. it touches me. i just want to say, to you take your reputation, a public say appearance and income is worth.n sacrificing for the sake of thed first amendment? >> if you are making a great deal of money, is that enough ta sacrifice? >> for example, your reputation or the example that you gave of the money like holding a story?u >> the answer to that is -- iy. >> t could give you a very quick answer and say under no circumstances must sacrifice principle. i really believe that's, but i have also been alive for a bond time. i know that there are instances where your people like you havew a job. but tough economic environment,

and your boss wants you to write a story in a more inflammatory way. you are going to think, i don't want to say no to the guide book. he hired me, and i need this the job. you are apt to go along with th the. that gets back to cory's to question.rey's you are in kind of a slide where things happen, even though you don't want them to happen. happ even though your own instincts tell you it is wrong, but you o along with it the way thesects l young people at cbs last saturday had to go along with the death of somebody. along with tknow that she had died. in fact, she didn't. but they did put it out.fac that is the kind of -- it is a s scandal. i did a book in the 19 -- the

1990's called one scandalous ine story. it was about the way that the media covered the clintonhe polanski scandal. i will never forget in the etashington post" on a wednesdag morning at 7:00 a.m. when the morning news cast began the reporters who spoke about o inton's reported liaison with the swollen spoke about it ash t fact.h what was -- how did they know that? i mean, were they in the room? did somebody specifically tellr? them? no. the only way that they knew it was that it was in the "washington post" that morning.s that is lousy journalism.washin you have gotgt to check things. you have to be sure.

and do the best you can andyou's sticking asu closely to you can to the principles of the first amendment and the idea oficking freedom of the press within, i hope, a society that will remaim free for centuries. at the end of the day you of the one who goes to sleep. you may review in your mind what you did that day.leep if you can sleep comfortably your conscience in no wayhat bothered, good for you. conscio >> thank you. >> my name is kathleen dusty. i get to the university of san my diego. the you really feel that there will be a return to morewonderig substantial journalism and truet journalism in general? there seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with the news that is produced. >> no question about the growinn dissatisfaction with the news,

but we, as the people know a rather confused when we use that word.satisf that wouacld suggest that the pp people in it are newspeople. you have to ask yourself news questions. qution, of the pundits newspeople? most of they are, but not all. pu bute arend political people. fox, for example, hires politicians to do commentary. mike kuchar b is on fox, serra paladin. are they journalists?. no.now are they they live in an environment in which news is a part of a structure that at the end of ths day composes the public policy of the country. ya news is an extremely important part of that. is the -- it is the glue that ts smoothed out all of the edges and makes these things

happen. we are right in the middle.t the journalists are right in the middle of things.ha i was noticing that t.j. crowle. was speaking about an answer to a questioning over here.was he said that the stater to department does something and the media has devoted more attention to a problem.somethin we put the heat on a leader to do something and the leader in congress.ut the but the media is part of that ld circle. rt i cannot -- i cannot alter the fact. the facts are that right now int my judgment we are in the down time of american journalism. can it come back strong? i hope so. i hope so for all our sakes.pe at the moment i don't think we a are their. i really don't see the incentive, turning the current system of round. if there were away produce soliy

news and not have to make money -- you know, a relatively new outfit set up by an excellent guide who used to be the editorw of the wall street journal. they are doing some wonderful work. where did they get the money? waeet ery rich people in california. let's get a lot of the rich frople from all over the countr to give money to the journalistm toon create this news and take e pressure off of them constantlya to be making a profit.his ne >> thank you. a >> hi. i get to suffolk university.i. my question is, in 2009 a time . magazine poll stated that john stewart was voted with 44 percent of the vote to be the most trusted newscaster. coming in second was brian williams.ster a do you take that this inds not

wa only alarming, but an accurate o depiction off how people get their news today and to peoplemg dressed in telling them the an e news? >> a veryde good question. i could be dead wrong, but my sense is that people who watcheu john stuart and are entertained. the watch brian williams to get the news. an most people in this country,new unfortunately choose to be entertained much more than theys choose to be informed. en hooste people may end up watchig john stork.i the fact is that brian gets, i don't know, 20 times more brian viewers than john, but johndon' lives in this cable world whichn has emerged with enormous clout capable of having a big event o. the mall. why? because he wants one. a

i have never met john. i don't know the man, but i do know that most of my studentsert would prefer to watch him then f brian williams. but don't think that is the best testimony about my students. it is t the difference between entertainment and information.it yes, sir.in >> the university of san diego.r >> a lot of san diego people. >> a few years ago john stewart, and not to suggest a think he it the best news source, but he appeared on cnn criticizing the news network to participating id partisan hack three and a failure to hold public officiale accountable. fail at think he seemed to agree onic that.s do you think that this fuels'

the polarization amongstink thas political parties? >> the answer is, yes, i think it does feed the polarization of political parties. the polarization, moreon of pola importantly, a political opinion in this country among people whl opinn in thiscians. just ordinary folks have a very specific view of what politics s is supposed to be like. politics is tough. to yoube are trying to find an area of reconciliation between two opposing views most of the timea but if you approach that as warfare you want to destroy the enemy. that is where we are today. that i suspect that even after the tragedy in tucson we are goingav to return to come if we haven'to already, the very rough and re

tumble world of modern daythe vr punditry and laying the worst motivation upon the opposition rather than this idea of thetiot reagan ability to meet with the democrats and try to strike ato deal. we areit not there yet. i literally pray that we returne to those days very soon becausel the problems in the world today have become so complicated andy so dangerous that unless we have an informed citizenry prepared an live up to certain obligations we are all going to be in terrible trouble i mean, l crowley was used, an expression about if we don't have the mone to continue in operation in afghanistan it can be very bad.

this started, and we simply hav to continue. ago okay. there are a couple of questions whento it started was it right? was it the right policy? it could have been wrong, in which case it is wrong toolicy. continue. what does that mean?e that means you have to be able to discuss it. you have to be able to argue th point. but you have to tobe able to ara the point in a democracy, he po respects, not just tolerated, but you respect the view of the opposition. and i'm repeating myself when i say that i don't see us, at least in the immediate future, ngtting to the point. getti >> one more question. >> hello. i am from suffolk university s outside boston. >> i think that the gatekeepers ofo ant generations have done a

fabulous job of maintaining authority and accuracy in theres media. i wonder if a limited number of gatekeepers is, perhaps,curacy concerning and am wondering ifm. you think a hybrid system of network and cable this could phs work if cable is was dropped into the news level and was clearly identified. wor >> that is fascinating. i wish that he would read thelan paper of that thid ng. that would be interesting. find out if there is some way of bringing traditional networkth news and cable news together.atn there have been discussions, bye the way, between cbs and cnn about coming together, but there is the motivation is money. the motivation is to try to stoo the hemorrhaging of losses ands to create a t combination that would cove hr the news and make money. that is the mystery. that is the secret.

that secretncover itth would be a huge publicncovr service. so, your question is right on woul target. a there are dozens of seriousti people working on that problem, but i have not seen -- maybe i'm just not informed enough, but i but i have not seen in the document, in the study that says we are i docunt, any resolution of this fundamental problem. they keep. >> jerry brown it from them university of san diego.probl i was wonemdering if you that eah.e should be what we consider to be free press? it seems well on the one hand you can't argue the fact that the press should be able to criticize the government or publish editorials or factual opinion. p it does seem to some extent the press oversteps the bounds --t,t has overstepped the bounds inas the sense that they can publish

documents obtained illegally or opinions that are not factually backed up such as they adjustctl automatically assume that the congresswoman from arizona was -s - dead, but published something hat was completely untrue to you think there should be somee. extent where they have to have r the factual basis or at least ae grounding in what they publish as opposed to just being able to have carte blanche? oppose >> the answer to that question is absolutely yes.m there ought to be away.ion then the question becomes which way. if there was to be an outfit b created by congress or all of the university's represented in this room, the presidents were to get together and in good wilf intelligently, with a solution o to the current problems of the

media and supposing the new yorc times listenedo to them and sai, i have no interest whatsoever. what are you going to do? unless you're going to theit supreme court with the specific legal infraction your group, no matter how well-intentioned is 11 cadel., no journalism lives -- essentially it is very interesting. they live the pier, and yet they are financially rooted in thee,d business community. it is a business. yet it is the only business in. america guaranteed its freedom by the constitution did. freed it is such an extraordinary business, and it must be treated with that kind of tender loving,

care, which we are nothat kin of providing. i mean, your point is very well taken.rovided. >> good morning.ken. i am from miami-dade college. from your point of view, what is the psychological role the media has over society?the >> i did not hear you. and terribly sorry. >> from your point of view whatb is the psychological role that the media has on society, particularly in human behavior. >> psychological? behavior? we are not very good at psychology. i really don't know how to answer that question.know let me answer it in this way. tt it is unsatisfactory, i grantee. i worked for a network -- to

networks for 30 years. every now and then i came upon a boss who is psychologically was open to different points of view, different personalities, and knew how to balance of differst. the washington news room witheri cbs was loaded with the go. there was only a certain amount of room on the cbs evening news. you had to balance these stains. ro it was the most delicate psychological problem. but by bureau chief happened to do it very, very well. was th aside from him i cannot imagine anyone else who ever had in min, psychology in dealing with the i news and the presentation of. as a matter of fact, i think hee deliberately went away from thak cadel toward introducing

distance between yourself as thf collector ofro reliable news ane the public and the source. there is that trying go.rce. it is a trying go of crucialbli. importance. it requires professionalism on dll sides. most important on the side ofll the public. the public has to demand something better. if it demands something better i m absolutely certain it is d going to get it.t until its demands something better it is coming to get what they did today. thank you. >> thank you. [applauding] [inaudible conversations] g [inaudible conversations]now. conversations] [applauding] [applauding] my pasure .. is your payoff.

>> works very well. thank you. >> and now as we used to say, i'll tell you the rest of the story. paul harvey used to say that. he wouldn't tell us about it, but marvin actually wrote fiction as well as very learned nonfiction. in fact, he and koppel co-authored a spy novel some years ago, and one tomb i asked ted what was the most difficult thing about writing the book,

>> chief justice shirley of the supreme court sworn in the new governor who then gave an

address. >> raise your right hand and repeat after me. i do solemnly swear. >> do solemnly swear. >> that i will support. >> that i will support -- >> the constitution of the united states -- >> the constitution. united states >> and the institution of the united states of wisconsin, and that i will faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of the office of governor to the best of my ability so help me god. [cheers and applause] [applause] ♪ [applause]

♪ [applause] ♪ [applause] ♪ [applause] ♪ [applause] >> good afternoon. i'm matt walker, and i'm alex walker. our dad has worked hard to become the governor of wisconsin, and he'll work harder to get the state working again. he's been through us through all of our schooling, sports, and church events. he's been with us to the games, brewers grams, and scoker games too. >> whether it's riding on the back of his harley or a buss, we traveled all over the state of wisconsin. >> he and my mom have taken us to the fair and camped all across the state. we've learned a lot about our

father, and now we get to share him. ladies and gentlemen, it is our pleasure to introduce the 45th governor of the great state of wisconsin, scott kevin walker. [cheers and applause] [applause] [applause] [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] [applause] >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. chief justice ab brameson,

members of the supreme court, governor doyle, and governor, i want to commend you and the first lady for your incredible support in this transition and for your service to this great state. [applause] governor earl, thompson, senator cole, senator elect johnson -- [cheers and applause] representatives brenner, cine, moore and representative elect duffy -- [cheers and applause]

lieutenant governor clayfish -- [cheers and applause] attorney general van hollen. [cheers and applause] treasurer sheller -- [applause] superintent eggers -- [applause] members of the state legislature -- [applause] tribal leaders, general dunbar and other members of the armed forces those serving today as well as those who have served our country in the past -- [cheers and applause] reverend clergy, state employees, family, and friends, and most importantly fellow

citizens of wisconsin -- [applause] it is with great honor that i stand before you today. i am your servant. i want to thank god for the privilege of living in such a remarkable country and for growing up in the greatest state in the entire nation. [cheers and applause] i also want to thank my family, my rock, my support, my love, she's going to be a great first lady. [cheers and applause] our two sons, i can't say boys anymore, our two boys, matt and alex. i just marvel how they have grown up in front of our eyes, they are outstanding young men,

and it was an honor to have them introduce me to the rest of the state. thank you, guys. [applause] to my parents, lou and pat walker, who always set a powerful example for me and my brother on how to serve others, i love you. [applause] my brother david, my sister-in-law, maria and two beautiful nieces. i love you guys. thank you so much for being here. [applause] my father-in-law tony and to all my family who is here from all across wisconsin and from across the country, thank you for all of you for your amazing love and devotion, not only today, but the days up until now and many days in the future. thank you, i love you. [applause]

thanks al to all the participants in today's ceremony, but i particularly am grateful to the members of the 132ndarmy, thank you so much for your performance. [applause] to them and all the other members of the wince national guard, not only for their services today, but for their ongoing support of the men and women who are deemployed all across the globe. you are in our prayers each and every day until you return home. thank you. let's give them a round of applause. [applause] most importantly, i want to thank the people of wisconsin. so many of you have offered your support and your prayers during the last couple weeks leading up today and the years before that, we want to thank you. we really appreciate that. today i stand before you not as

the governor of one political party or another or a governor for one part of the state or the other, but today i stand before you as the governor for all the people of the great state of wisconsin. [cheers and applause] as your governor, i make this pledge. wisconsin is open for business. [cheers and applause] we will work tire leslie to restore economic growth and vie bran sigh to our state. my top priorities are simple, jobs, jobs, and more jobs. we'll right state government by ensuring government is providing only the essential services our citizens need and our taxpayers can afford. [cheers and applause]

my fellow state workers, i invite you to partner with me in this necessary work. we'll focus on the long term creatively improving our education system so our children can participate in the global marketplace. we will protect our natural resources and honor and respect the role of the family in our society. my fellow citizens, that is my pledge to you, a pledge for a new and better wisconsin that we build together. just moments ago, i took a solemn oath to defend our constitution which rests right here. our constitution is a document of, by, and for the people. it is bigger than any government, any legislature, or any governor. when the citizens of the wisconsin territory approved our constitution in 1848, they envisioned a brighter future for themselves and their children. it was a constitution born of

conflict and controversy, first rejected, then approved as the people came together to form a pioneering vision to drive our state forward. it begins simply and speaks to the source of our liberties. we the people of wisconsin grateful to almighty god for our freedom, in order to secure blessings to form a more perfect government, ensure tranquility and promote the general welfare to establish this constitution. powerful words. our rights as free people are given to us by our creator, not the government. among these rights is the right to knewture our freedom and talent through limited government. these rights were articulated in our original constitution. they were never amended nor revised, and these rights are evident and express in our cherished freedoms, among them freedom of press, freedom of

speech, and freedom of religion. article i section 22 of the state constitution reads so e qently, the blessings of a free government can only be maintained by affirm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, forgalty, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. today, in this inauguration, we affirm these values and fundamental principles. it is through forgalty and moderation in government that we seek freedom and prosperity for our people. [applause] now more than 162 years after the writing of this constitution, we stand ready to chart a new course for our great state. we look to the past, not to lay

blame, but for inspiration, and we look forward to the solutions that will help us reach new levels of economic prosperity. our first step is to rebuild wisconsin's economy, and how do we do it? we open wisconsin for business. nearly two years ago, i met a couple who had a fabricating company. times were tough, and they had to layoff their employees, sell their building, and work out of their own garage. still, like the spirit that fills so many others in this great state, they wanted to get their business again and hire back those workers and maybe more in the future. they had a dream of renewal. the dream born there gives me hope for the future of our great state. it is upon their dream and the dreams of millions of our fellow citizens that we build a plan for renewal. [applause]

it starts today. to begin our trance formation, we will work with our legislative partners in both political parties. we will pass a series of bold reforms that will send a clear message, wisconsin indeed is open for business. we have an ambitious goal. 250,000 new jobs by 2015. i know we can do it because we did it a generation ago. in january of 1987, governor tommy tompson declared here, our greatest priority will be jobs, more jobs, better jobs, and most importantly, secure jobs for wisconsin's workers. by the end of his first term, the people of this state created 258,000 jobs. [cheers and applause]

>> to kick start our plan to create a quarter of a million jobs, i will call a special session of the state legislature starting today. [cheers and applause] here is the official call that i will present to our new leaders of the state assembly and state senate. we will present a bold set of reforms help aimed at helping businesses create jobs. we have worked with lawmakers and leader from all across the state to develop a blueprint to improve our business climate and spur job creating economic growth. today i ask my friends in the legislature to unit and pass these reforms into law to unleash the power of economic freedom, to create more jobs for our citizens. our message is simple.

act swiftly, act decisively, and pass our jobs plan by the end of february. let us get wisconsin working again. [cheers and applause] our job's plan provide relief from taxation, regulation, and litigation costs for employers. it makes it easier for workers and farmers to afford health care. we will transform the department of commerce into a public-private partnership to promote commerce throughout wisconsin. we need more commerce. our citizens are hurting. let us come together to work for passage of these needed reforms. we have businesses in this state that are in a position to hire new workers in the short term, yet time and time again, employers can hire people who tell me that they are uneasy

about the future, and most are concerned about what the government might do to them next. the changes that we promote as part of our special sessions on jobs will send a clear message to job creators. now it is the time to invest. to the business owners of the state, i say simply this. stay here, grow here, invest here, and to businesses all across the world, bring your jobs here. we have the most talented work force in the world. men and women who work tirelessly and deliver quality. [applause] creating a more vibrant economy, however, will not happen without a return to forgalty in government, returning to our fundamental constitutional principles. [applause]

soon, we will lay out our plans for the next state budget, and we will successfully tackle the $3 billion deficit. we will do did without raids on segregated funds or excessive borrowing, but let me be clear about one thing. increasing taxes is off the table as it will counter our efforts to provide economic growth. [cheers and applause] instead, we will make tough, tough but compassionate decisions to balance the next state budget in a way that will get wisconsin working again. under our administration, state government will do only what is necessary, no more, no less. we will fight any action that keeps our employers from creating more jobs, but we will not abandon our fundamental responsibilities to protect our

families and our property, to provide for a high-quality education for our children, to ensure care for the most vulnerable amongst us, and to enhance the quality of life for all of our citizens here in wisconsin, a high quality of life, however, is not the result of a bigger ever-expanding government. as president ronald reagan said in his fair well address, there's a clear cause and effect here. that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics. as government expands, liberty contracts. [applause] in wisconsin, we will define our quality of life as the expansion of liberty, freedom, and economic opportunity in neighborhoods all across this state. our government will not only be smaller, it will be better, more

responsive, more efficient, more affective. in january of 1971, governor patrick lucy said here that public officials and civil servants must expect to do more with fewer resources than in the past. his words ring true today as well. in wisconsin, and all across america, state government is basing the toughest challenges of our generation. with these great challenges, it brings opportunities. we are up to the task. this is wisconsin. we can do better. we will do better. we will lead the way. [cheers and applause] we have often said that traveling across this state has allowed us to fall in love with

wisconsin all over again. you know, from superior down to kanosha to platville up to the hudson, waw -- wausaw and everywhere in between, this is a remarkable said. we have multigenerational employers who treat their employees like family. they have a work ethic. we are a state blessed with abundant natural resources. no other state in the union is surrounded by two great lakes and the greatest river in the u.s.. we have 15,000 inland lakes. i love this state. i love the scenery, the attractions, the citizens who live here, and the employers who choose to do their business here. what is failing us is not our people or our places. what is failing us is the expanse of government, but we can do something about it starting right now, right here,

today. [cheers and applause] we, we the people of wisconsin, have every right to reclaim our rightful place in history. we can make this a wisconsin we can believe in. more than 162 years ago, our ancestors believed in the power of hard work and determination. they envisioned a state with endless potential. now, it is our time to once again seize that potential. we will do so at this turning point in our history by restoring limited government that fosters prosperity for today and future generations. [applause]

justice, moderation, frugality, and injure chew. these are the values upon which our state was formed and the values upon which our state will journey forward. god bless you. thank you for being here, and may god bless the great state of wisconsin. [cheers and applause] [applause] >> a look at the u.s. capitol with the flag at half staff as members of congress continue to pay tributes to victims of the arizona shooting. six were killed with 14 wounded. monk them congress wam congresswoman giffords. he wouldn't say what he bought at wal-mart. he was then pulled over for

running a red light, but he was let go with a warning. a short time later, he had a confrontation with his father over a black bag and jared rehberg took off running. he is accused to going to representative the event at a tucson grocery store and firing on the crowd. president obama and the first lady have left for arizona. they'll take part in a memorial service tonight at the university of arizona. watch that live at 8 eastern on our companion network, c-span. >> consumer and privacy right

advocates took part in a day long conference analyzing the body scanners and enhanced pat downs in u.s. airports. the electronic information agency center hosted the event in washington. in this panel new jersey congressman rush holt. >> i'm president of the electronic privacy information center. epic is a public interest research organization established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging privacy and civil liberty issues, and on behalf of epic, the organizers, and speakers at this conference, it is my pleasure to welcome you this morning. i think we have without question a controversial topic, and for those who are here in the room following us on c-span or twitter, i'd encourage you to go to the website,

epic.org/events/tsa. participate in the discussion and the site is scan tsa, we welcome your comments and engagement. it is also our pleasure today to welcome as our opening speaker, congressman rush holt. it's fair to say there's few people in the united states congress who combine the legislative background and scientific expertise as does dong man holt. he's a man on science policy, and he's been an outspoken advocate on the issues of concern to the participants of this conference, but also, i believe, a leading spokesperson for the need of careful scientific evaluation of

government programs. there's no question that the tsa's proposal to subject millions of american air travelers to these new body scanning devices requires a careful scientific explanation, so it is with great pleasure that we welcome congressman holt to this conference this morning. thank you. >> thank you, mark. [applause] >> thank you, thank you, mark. i thank the organizers, mark and others the electronic agency center for inviting me to speak. your program looks very good. i'm sure i could learn more than i can teach. i will be brief in my remarks, and i look forward to getting roforts on -- reports on what else is covered. of course the goal here is the protection of people. the people's safety.

it's not a simple matter in this age of high-tech terrorism. it's important to remember that some of the questions i guess i would say in principle, most of the questions are age old. they're -- the technologies may change, but the questions of how to confront those who would do us harm and not squelch the american freedoms that make us prosperous and give us our quality of life is not a new question. when i learned last year that the tsa was moving forward with the deployment of these x-ray back scanner scanning machines, i did a couple of things. i first wrote to my colleague on

the house appropriations committee and asked that they not allocate any further funding for the machines pending the completion of the government accountability office's review of the machines and of related airline security issues. now, the gao review is still in progress, and i regret that the continuing appropriations resolution that we passed that will continue appropriations through march of this year did not, in fact, halt the funding for the deployment of these systems. i do plan on revisiting the issue with representative mike and rementsive -- other members who expressed concern about this. i also wrote to tsa director, john pistol, last fall, and expressed my dismay at the video of the crying 3-year-old who was

patted down on camera by a tsa agent. i guess this was, in fact, the daughter of a television reporter. i began my letter to the administrator by noting that, "when americans witness 3-year-old children being aggressively patted down by tsa screeners, our airline screening system is clearly broken. of course, the problem is the procedures and policies and the flawed technology and approach of the tsa leadership that has imposed on the screeners and the traveling public these ill considered practices. now, many of you in attendance today are well aware of the health and safety questions

raised by the extensive use of this technology. a number of respected scientists have suggested there are potential health risks to people, especially children from the x-ray back scatter scanners. they've used phrases like cancer multipliers and so forth. there's much yet to be studied and made available to the public, i think, in that area, and we need to have a far better understanding of those risks before we should allow the machines to become standard practice in airports. epic and the several liberties union and other groups and individuals have correctly questioned the civil liberty implications of the use of these machines. can we be certain the images

will not be misused, retained, or retransmitted? at the moment, no. we need independent evaluation of the offhand tsa claims that they have disabled machines so that the images cannot be retained or re transmitted. there's a real issue the ethics of these machines and of the practice. can they consistently and reliably uncover explosives or other dangerous devices on terrorists? the government accountability's office questioned this in their march 2010 report on advanced imaging technology, they call it ait, noting, "while tsa officials stated that the laboratory and operational testing of the ait included

placing exprosive material in different locations of the body, it remains unclear whether the ait would have been able to detect the weapon terrorists use in attempted attacks based on preliminary tsa information we have received." as i noted in my letter to the administrator, the headlong rush to embrace salable technology gives the public the illusion of security at the expense of their privacy and dignity and without assurance that the use of these machines and practices will actually detour and detect terrorists, in other words, make them, the public, any safer. finally, i'm troubled by the overall assumption underlying the use of these machines and

the evasive pat down of pages. -- passengers. the truth is these measures must be used on everyone because we don't know who is aterrorist and who is not. the tsa's approach is thus the only one that makes sense in light of this perceived threat. this is what i'm thinking about when i referred earlier to say that these are really age-old questions. it really gets at the heart i think you'll be discussing today and that the country should be discussing intensively at this time of the larger problem of how americans and american authorities are facing the threat of terrorism. it is an age-old question. you know, every policeman, every

police officer knows that in his or her community citizens are going to be assaulted or robbed or even murdered. police often, usually, don't know in advance who is the perpetrator, who is going to commit these crimes. but we don't live in a constant dragnet. we don't arrest and search every person who is standing on a corner with his hands in his pockets. despite the lack of threat information, they don't preemptively haul everybody in

the police house and question them about every potential crime they might be thinking about. our state doesn't presume all citizens are potential murders and thieves. it is a central premise, you know, today on the floor of the hoys of representatives, the new majority has asked that we read the constitution. it's, you know, of course, our constitution is a truly ingenious document. it's well worth considering even daily. in fact, i carry a copy. it's not because i don't know what's in it or because i have to read it every day. i like to keep it close to my heart, but a central tenant of our society and of our government is that we do not regard people with suspicion first. people -- it's not just a presumption of innocence. it's a pro presumption of

identity and rightings of citizenship. we don't have separate classes of citizens where people are regarded as less than full-fledged citizens and less until they prove themselves of good standing. this is an old question, and we have to consider it in light of what we confront today. well, any of you who have visited capitol hill know that the u.s. capitol police do not take this kind of intrusive approach. they understand that the u.s. capitol and all of capitol hill

must be considered a prime target by people who want to either send a message or disresult our government -- disrupt our government or harm americans in a very public way, in other words, capitol hill is a target, but the capitol police use metal detectors and scanning technology, metal detecting wands and other measures when they need to, particularly when they see an anomaly or an alarm is raised, they doesn't subject every citizen who visits capitol hill to unevaluated, highly evasive scanning technology and mandatory invasive pat downs. they don't do that, and yet i feel, and i think all of my colleagues would say, we feel

well protected by the capitol police. in other words, there are other sound models for protecting both people and infrastructure that don't involve subjecting american travelers to unnecessary health risks or violations of their privacy and civil liberties. this is the disconnect in tsa's scan and pat everybody approach. during my years on the slebt committee of intelligence, i've seen how much we spend annually to acquire intelligence to tsa on airline threats. what is clear is that none of that or little of that intelligence is being used to berm who should receive the kind of additional invasive screening that all american travelers are

now enduring. the tsa's current approach actually makes it harder for the screeners and intelligence analysts to spot real threats. screening every american means that tsa is deliberately injecting a huge level of what is known in the intelligence business as background noise. in this case, when you're treating e roan nowsly the 30 -- erroneously to the 3-year-old girl, you're taking away the attention from what might be real threats and taking away from the deadly real threat lurking nearby. if tsa's approach were more calibrated and the screening and pat downs were conducted on individuals identified by intelligent sources as potentially dangerous, it would

be more effective and less troublesome. just as wiretapping, willie willie-nilly with only the vaguest of suspicions inprovides people's civil liberties, it also leads to poorer intelligence. in other words, less protection of americans. the idea of the forth amendment which i hope we don't skip that in the reading on the floor of the house today is not based on some vague abstract idea of civil liberties. it is based on the very real understanding of human nature, the very ingenious observation

that we get better information, a better understanding, a better sense of what we're doing if we have to prove to somebody else an objective observer what we know what we're talking about. intercepting electronic communications on the basis of a vague suspicion results in bad intelligence. similarly i think a overly exuberant heavy-handed approach to screening travelers leads to a less effective, less protective system. i understand that this week during her visit to israel, secretary of homeland security

said that israel's model is not applicable to the united states because of their size of the country. it seems to me once you get above some hundreds of controversialers or thousands of travelers you with scale it to millions because, you know, each airport is one unit, each airplane is one unit. now, i'm not saying that we should absolutely duplicate what israel does, but i'm saying we could learn a lot from our allies. the claim that this just wouldn't be applicable in the united states i don't think really has been tested. i asked administrator pistol to tell me in detail why the israeli model wouldn't work here. i'm asking questions more than giving answers. i'm not advocating we follow that, but i want to know what we

can learn. i suspect the real reason for the resistance of trying other models or modified versions of them is the fear that it would, in fact, work. it would undermind tsa's creditability. it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a federal agency resisted change because of o not in-- a not invented here and let's not embarrass ourselves mind set. i want to make clear that we should not, i do not, will not support the racial profiling as an appropriate tool. when i say we use intelligence, again, it should not be this intellectually lazy shorthand that we've come to know as profiling. there's clearly some important lessons we can learn from our

allies, lessons that allow them to protect the traveling public without exposing their public to needless health hazards and health violations. i just want to say how much i value the work that you're doing. i think that the conference today is getting at some really important questions. your role in our democracy is an important one, holding public officials and agencies accountable, demanding that our government work smarter and ever smarter as it seeks to protect us, so keep it up. i look for good results from today's conference. thank you. [applause]

>> the topic of airport security continues now with rights advocate ralph nader calling for more oversight and enhanced security measures at the electronic privacy information conference in washington, d.c.. other comments come from the libertarian party and academia. this is just over an hour. >> there's also a web page devoted to the conference which is at epic.org/events/tsa. we hope you will participate in the conference discussion that's taking place. the first panel if you would come forward please. thank you. i'd like to say also a few words about the moderator for our first panel, someone who i'm sure is known to all of you,

ralph nader, who has been a champion for consumer protection here for many years here in the united states and around the world, but what you may not know is that ralph was also a key figure in the early efforts to address concerns arising from new forms of airline technology and particularly the use of new screening technology because it was actually in the early 1970s when the federal aviation administration proposed to integrate new screening technology that ralph brought a challenge to that practice, and in a case that was decided here in the district court in washington, the court concluded that the faa had actually violated the law when it introduced this new screening technology without giving the public the opportunity for comment. we're going to be coming back

almost to that exactly same issue on a panel discussion later this morning, but it is a remarkable fact that ralph nader was the first to address the issue we're addressing today about the processes of the airport screening technology. ralph? >> thank you, mark, panel, and ladies and gentlemen. the major issues affecting the recent deployment of airport screeners have been and will be continually discussed to deal with if they are affective, and certainly they are not in terms of cavities. do they have hazards? yes. the question is there are people who are more susceptible to

radiation than others who have different medical conditions, people who have religious concerns, moral concerns that impede their use of conventional air travel. we have a person, for example, who had a wireless incul lin pump -- insulin pump, and he had problems going through the screeners, pregnant women, children, and there's the privacy issue that is also a moral issue. it's a slippery slope. if americans think, well, they don't have anything to hide, what happens is incrementally is they lose their freedoms, and they break down their resistance to any understanding of what invasion of the self involves, especially with modern science and detection technologies, dna, biometric, all the rest of it

floating around the world through software, misused, commercially used, ect.. there's also the opportunity cost. whenever you have dragnet enforcement, not only do you get intelligence and waste money, you demoralize workers. when workers day after day process hundreds of thousands of people who are innocent, first of all, they wonder what they are doing. second, they feel that their alert function goes down. anybody who knows anything about guards knows that when nothing happens day after day, their alert function goes down, so i want to say a few words today to amplify what mark and epic have done especially in their lawsuit where they claim the violation of 4th amendment, the violation of the religious freedom restoration act, the violation of the video prevention act, the

violation of the administrative procedure act, the tsa has not held public hearings and the tsa in many areas is a sphinx, the sta is a -- the tsa is a basket case collectively. when you have a risk manager working in tsa who says he felt he was working in a culture of insanity, he was saying this is a fundamental irrational strategy that tsa is pursuing, and one documented repeatedly by the government accountability office of the u.s. congress where they have decried tsa's ability to monitor the contracts, decriered the ability to conduct a risk assessment or

cost benefit analysis or establish quantifiable performance measures and honest new technologies. as a result, according to the gao, tsa does not have assurances their efforts are focused on the highest security priority needs. now, we all know what the problem is. tsa moves when any terrorist attempt is disclosed, and so it reacts, so you have the shoe bomber. we take off our shoes. the failed shoe bomber fortunately. you have the christmas bomber heading to detroit, filled, so -- failed, so now we have these new scanning machines. the puffer machines were installed because of a failed suicide attempt on a russian airliner, and those buffers were deemed ineffective and wasteful, and they were pulled to the cost of the taxpayer of $30 million.

here's the mind set of the tsa and department of homeland security. they cover existing threats that failed because they don't want to be excoriated by congress and congress itself is part of the problem, and so if tsa operates on the premise of 100% success against any terrorist threats, why do 15,000 corporate aircraft not be screened? why do other tens of thousands of general aviation not be screened? why aren't airport terminals screened? you have to have bomber in a crowded airport terminal. what about trains, busses, subways? well, it has happened yet. you haven't had an attempt, but with that logic, tsa is willing to engage in dragnet enforcement

of tens of mills of people. as a secretive agency that doesn't have to explain itself with a virtual blank check on appropriations by congress, we're dealing here with an authoritarian enclave that doesn't know what its doing but knows it has to answer to congress on any lack of reaction to a bungled threat. in fact, it doesn't even answer if all these enemies are suicidal and they hate us, why there haven't been these suicidal events day after day in our country. why are we in iraq and afghanistan? why are we provoking these people? why have the three bungled efforts been freelance efforts of the most absurdly, fortunatelily, ineffective carry outs? they weren't even trained

experts. they were not subjected to any analysis in terms of what the threat really is. the government accountability office is the key advisor to the congress. congress advocated its role, and all it's doing is appropriating money, not doing oversight of tsa, and continuing to hold this sort of thing over tsa in case something gets through that was all precursed by a failed effort such as the shoe bomber. the reality here defies caricature. we have to save tsa from itself, not only protect the various rights of the american people. we have to ask what is it doing to the tsa employees? what are they thinking? what is their exposure day after day?

we have to ask, is this bring driven in part by corporate hux steers who are swirming over tsa with their preferred lobbying shops here in washington? whatever happened to cost benefit analysis which is raised in the gao reports repeatedly. we have to ask what is the evaluation of human life when hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on terrorism threats, but virtually nothing is spent on 58,000 americans who die every year from occupational disease and trama or 65,000 people who died from air pollution or 100,000 people who died from hospital malpractice or 200,000 people who die every day from hospital induced infections. it's as if if they are not sourced to terrorist activity, they are ignored. we need a comprehensive

evaluation here on deploying resources in an effective manner that's minimally invasive, efficient, and obeys the constitution and federal law. finally, i want to ask where are the scientists around here? some have spoken up around the country and are ignored. where are the airlines? why aren't they speaking up? where are the airline workers? because there are other fish to fry, because they are intimidated, because they cut deals, because their not standing tall for the interest of the american people, that they are uniquely equipped to protect. i think what we have to do is continue what epic has been doing and put the pressure on all points as you'll hear in

today's conference. i think we also need to demand a new administrative process under strictd congressional -- strict congressional oversite by the congress. an administrative agency that operates like a dictatorship is unworthy of our government, constitution, our statutes, and empirical reality. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much, ralph, for those comments. i'd like to go now to our next speaker, wes ben diblght who is the speaker of the libertarian party. we are pleased to have you wes, and mention also for the people here, there are complete biographies for the speakers and people who are watching us on c-span or following online, you can get that information at the web page, epic.org/events/tsa.

we. >> thank you, i want to thank the committee for putting together this conference and creating a diverse group of panelists. i'm wes benedict, libertarians standing for free markets and civil liberties. the party strongly opposes the full body scanners program. i recognize that different groups oppose these scanners for different reasons. .. advocate and sees a role for government in providing safety. libertarians would like to see the government do less. when libertarians and ralph neighedder agree a -- ralph nader agree a program is bat, it's time --

bad, it's time for our government to listen up. [laughter] [applause] i'm glad we have a congressman or two participating today. i wish more republicans and democrats took our constitution and bill of rights seriously. the transportation security administration is rapidly rolling out a program at our airports where you have to choose between getting a full body scan where tsa agents can see an image of you nude or getting an intrusive pat down like a criminal. we'll here from aviation experts, security experts, and others that the scanners don't do any good. republicans serious about cutting wasteful spending should take a look at cutting this full body scan program. democrats talk about defending civil liberties. these scanners are an invasion of privacy and intrude on our

civil liberties. we should not treat every american who wants to fly on an airplane like a potential terrorist. government is supposed to protect our rights, not take them away. this is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. i often wonder if bin laden is laughing at us while our own government terrifies us. the tsa wants to use machines to see us naked before we get on an airplane, but if you don't want to be seen naked, then you can be felt up instead. when is enough enough? the terrorists win by tricking us into letting our government overreact and trample on our rights and waste our money. you'll hear from experts today

who will show you that these full body scanners do nothing to make us safer. that's why we call this security theater. it's just the government putting on a show for us by making it look like it's doing something even though it doesn't do any real good. this is a perfect example of a solution that is worse than doing nothing at all. i want to know which corporations and which lobbyists are making how much money on this miserable program. i wish more congressman had the guts to put a stop to this program. i'm hopeful that this conference will help inform and rally americans to put pressure on our government to put an end to this wasteful and insulting program. let's not forget the root cause of our situation. our government's intervention into the foreign affairs of other countries inspires

terrorists. these full body scanners are a bad reaction to an unnecessary situation. while we can't undo what we've already done, we can stop it, and we can control our own reaction. what would libertarians do about airline security? many airlines are probably glad to have the federal government take responsibility for security, but it's the airlines who ought to be responsible and they should be bear the liability for what happens on their flights rather than have a one-size fits all approach imposed by government. passengers and airlines should be free to work together to determine what methods and levels of securities best fit their needs. since we don't have a libertarian free market for aviation security yet, let's at least stop the worst abuses of our civil liberties and the

wasteful spending for these full body scanners. the libertarian party has more information at lp.org. once again, i want to thank the organizers of the event and other panelists. working to the, i'm hopeful that we can get rid of these worthless, wasteful, useless full body scanners at our airport and stop them before they start showing up at other places too. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much, wes. while several of the speakers already talked about the need to bring some expertise to this debate, and i can think of no perp better qualified to help us understand this technology than -- and one of the very first people to draw attention to the problems of the tsa programs.

>> thank you. i don't belong here at all because i'm sort of in different to questions of privacy, and liberty and all that stuff. my only function is on functionality which is flying through airports, landing, and taking off, and security, real security. my presence here is actually quite absurd because there's an organization called iata, international air transport arks. association. it including 113 airlines and it is well-funded, highly experts, and very well staffed, certainly better than some of the pure bureaucracy created in the last few years, and this organization prepared after four years of highly expert funded study a document called vision for

intelligent aviation security. it's called vision for intelligent aviation security. this document has absolutely no references to privacy, freedom, or any such thing. it's only reference is functionality and real security. now, this iata is consulted every day by airport authorities, national aviation authorities all over the world for expertise on air traffic control, airport functionality, grand security, and the whole lot. the only organization that did not respond where the full staff responds to this document called the vision for intelligent aviation security was tsa. they simply didn't respond. now, what it says in this vision, this vision incidentally is based on many considerations of which i'll go through fast,

but actually based on veto study of three peculiar airport. airport number one is nurita. it was known for -- when you go to this airport, when you are in a buss or car entering on the freeway to get there, there is a check point where they simply look into the car, look at the passengers fast without stopping and make sure that everybody is a page or legitimate with the passenger. that's it. that's to prevent a breakout where people do not attack the airplane, never go through check point. they simply enter and disrupt. their concerns there is with demonstrations, but in rome, the

munich airport with 2,000 people there the concern is the terrorist arrives in a taxi and opens fire. that's a richer target and disrupts an entire airport more than an airplane. i earnestly never advise you never to fly. it's 830 passengers. [laughter] now, what has been the case in the second airport is changing. it's a singapore airline airport, and here passengers are instructed that if they want to board successfully, they have to arrive within 30 minutes of takeoff. 30 minutes, not three hours, two hours, not an hour and a half, but 30 minutes. how do they do that? simple. they are mobile screening gate by gate. the screeners, the machines and everything go from one gate to the other. they don't screen.

they have a prescreen to make sure you don't have a bunch of people carrying machine guns in their hands which is just done visually. as you enter, the rest without stopping anybody, the rest is at the gate. therefore, they have gate selective security methods, so they have let's say the flight that goes to japan or korea, the usual bunch of 45 schoolteachers all together who all know each other, and they just look at them and wave them through. the flight that flies to saudi arabia, they know on the flight the people can't carry liquids or bottles or anything of the sort, and therefore they have adjust the. they have a new york thing, an istanbul thing according to it, and the result is 30 minutes including 8 minutes for shaping. that's important. they look the at the the

airports in tel-aviv. they are supposedly the highest rated facility. here you don't remove your shoes. there is indifference to liquids unless you carry something labeled 50 tons of glycerin or something. [laughter] nail cleaners, little scissors, things like that, they don't care about. this was interesting for the study. now, this study recommends another solution. it says let's grow up, realize that despite the efforts of the libertarian party and other parties, today research companies know what color underwear you prefer. they do. airlines with frequent flier programs and records and marketing data, they know a lot about a lot of passengers, and what they recommend is to use the equivalent of the booking system of the end point to

monitor all this and to identify frequent travelers, frequent fliers of all airlines automatically. the moment you buy a ticket, you get a boarding card, you get a sign on the boarding card saying you're a frequent flier, and it's a probability based risk assessment. if the guy flew 50 times in 50 weeks and in the previous 50 times he never blew up airplanes, it's unlikely he'll do it on the next flight. this screens out people. screen bookings by identifiable groups like the japanese teachers. i keep mentioning them because they represent a major part of the traffic due to the sad fact that japan teachers are glossily overpaid because they like to have good schools and they travel all the time. twice a year a normal. boarding cards get printed, and when you arrive at the airport,

you go through a visual nonstop passage check point, okay? secondly is a category for people they are not sure about, and they go through whatever the question in country -- the country in question has in its system. no question about shoes or scissors. third would be people who are suspects for whatever reason because they appear somewhere on some list or whatever it is wherever they are, and that -- those people are subjected to whatever the country's prior search system was which is whatever the system because iata is not the will of the government, and they accept the fact that people do have these regimes, but the only -- for example, the tsa regime currently existing without scanners in which they have a separate section, without scanners is suitable for 10% of pmgs who are suspects. the treatment every passenger gets, prescanner is ready and

suitable for suspects, not suitable for passengers, okay which they estimate can never been more than 10%. finally on scanners, they did the full-scale study of scanners. they employed a group in germany whose only job was to bypass both and back scanner and the third scanner which i will not mention which is also emerging, and the expert guys who were all prison guards, german prison guard experts, their job was to bypass the systems. they did it with such ease that the iata says there is no case for scanners, and i won't go into the details of it, but when i was a kid in the british army, we had plastic -- it's the same as the usual glycerin or whatever, but it's playsic. why? to make it easier for deemlations because it's plastic.

therefore this can be the rib of a shirt. that's it. i don't have to tell you more, and they don't interrupt the scanners. there's nothing. no. the final point is about the details of the selection in how it works. the thing that i personally find infearuating, absolutely frustrating is that i go to israel a lot. every time i go, i meet with security people, and they tell me, oh, yesterday there was another group from tsa. you know, they stayed and had a good time, we gave them the briefing. they go there, you know, when the weather is cold in detroit, they fly to tel-aviv -- [laughter] because you can swim until november, okay? each time they are given the briefing on the system, and each time they come back, and they misrepresent the system. they make it sound as if they

are using racial racist religious profiling. okay? whereas the data base of the analysis they use is consistent of an irish pregnant woman of two elderly frenchmen, japanese young guys, a blond blue-eyed with a russian and tush irk passport. that's the base, and anybody who goes through the system knows they could care less whether you a japanese or a jew. they are asking you entirely different questions, and the questions are simply though, what are you doing on this flight, what are you doing, and why? the christmas bomber would be -- they would have asked them are you a student, are you going to study, and why christmas, ect.? are you visiting relatives?

who are your relatives? in other words, why are you on this airplane? that's what that ask, and that's it. the people who ask are extremely young people because they don't want experienced judgment. they totally don't want the guy who knows, feels, and senses. they are monitored with realtime, there are microphones on their body so they hear the questions and answers and somebody intervenes and says ask him what's the name of the mayor of his town. he claims to be from this town. they ask him the name. it is a small town. never mind. this misrepresentation reflects the nature of the tsa which is described by ralph nader as a kind of run away bureaucratic regime and as said in the beginning, the iata the fact they were the only organization who didn't immediately appoint a

staff group of the best people to respond to vision -- by the way, if you are interested in the details, they have disclose the -- disclosed the information on the website. you read the prescreening where you first remove all people who are fliers, passengers, citizens, and not suspects which therefore -- and then you have the 10% being examined. this would deal with most the problem. thank you very much. [applause] >> this is a really remarkable panel. we began with ralph nader, and then a leader of the libertarian party. we've heard next from the leading expert in aviation security, and now you are about to hear from a leader in the human rights field. it's our pleasure to welcome

chip pits, who is part of the b of rights committee. [applause] >> i'd like to add my thanks to mark and to epic, to amy, and the other organizer the conference. hard to believe this is the first major conference on the body scanners that's taking place in the nation, and it's a very important subject. i'm like wes from louisiana talking beforehand. i was born in baton rouge and so was he. we were trying to figure out if it was a naked body scanner or a naked body scanner. it's a charade. we're going to narrow out the intellectual landscape that was painted for you. in those -- looking at the comparative dependence

dimensions, i have four points. i took a look at what different countries are doing, and i was surprised to see how much the u.s. is going it alone in this area. that's the first point. the second point is all the issues you hear about. the health concern. there is a right to health. there is a right to not be discriminated again and a right to effective security. it's an article. if you have not read it, i commend it to you. it's a short document on human values and rights. you can read it quickly, and article iii talks about the right to life, liberty, and the right to personal security as does by the way, the 4th amendment, the privacy clause which talks about the right of people to be secure in their homes and personal articles and effects as do the international treaties on the subject. these rights are international law, but i also want to make the

point, and i'll come to that at the end of my brief presentation that these are also moral rights, and there's a significant reason that my panelists asked me to just highlight the facts these are moral as well as legal concerns. i'll spend most time looking at the current practice briefly in various states. you heard about japan and israel and singapore and this very important organization, the iata which rejected body scanners definitively. on the first poipped, i want to just reiterate that no other nation in the world has this level of intrusiveness. no other nation in the world has this double whammy of intrusive pat downs or being exposed to radiation. as the opening remarks said, that's pretty unique. there is one nation in the world that occasionally not systematically uses x-rays to radiate people, and that's russia. they expose the russian females

who such levels of radiation that they pure into the body coveties. whether that's going to be next is the question. the rights we're talking about at the international levels and regional levels and in our bill of rights in the country that inspired rights and count institutions and statutes and laws all over the world now. these are the right to health, the rights of children, elderly, the disabled, the rights to freedom of thought. in a sense, these are all related in a critical way to prief vie. -- privacy. if you think about it, so many of the bills of rights provisions relate to this idea of boundaries that cannot be crossed. we're dealing with a serious boundary, the actual boundary of bodily integrity whether you are exposed to radiation or a naked image that someone else sees.

now, i want to spend time on the third point about what's happening elsewhere with the focus on europe. shortly before 9/11, the europe union did not have a common approach to aviation security. after 9/11, they shifted to that. the aviation conventions and europe was resistant to body scanners and so was u.s. congress, but before that, the eu commission and the top executive body has been more positive towards the idea of using body scanners and propose to draft regulation using scanners as an approach. the reactions of the people and representatives could not have been stronger. the european parliament just like the u.s. congress in the following year in 2009 actually protested this in a vote much like the u.s. congress that had almost 400 representatives and

that resistance was a companied by the member states, politicians, and the commission withdrew its proposal. ..

but in that looking at three of the five reported the state for a more privacy respected scanner could be used that therefore the scanners might be an alternative to the existing screening methods and on this basis the commission said the overall outlook was very positive. the problem is italy rejected the standards and they forgot that. they also forgot the u.k. government before september 09 tested and found them to be ineffective and three of the five say that the protected version is adequate is just not adequate. switzerland also tested body scanners and i had a student of mine confirmed a swiss practicing lawyer that the swiss experience was very ambivalent. they also tested them for a couple of months and if you gates decided they were not going to go forward with the scanners so as you have heard israel, singapore, japan and of course dubai, the largest in the middle east is rejected these,

nigeria which was given a couple body scanners and had to buy ten more under u.s. pressure is having them sit unused to this day. they are not being used by nigeria. why? delisted mainly muslim countries as subjected to their citizens pat downs and body scanners and they thought it was discriminatory and the backlash resulted of internal pressures putting them on hold. so globally there is overwhelming resistance what we are seeing. it's used and if you allies like canada, australia, but the momentum of the body scanners has stopped. why? because the same legal issues later on today and the legal panel. i won't steal their thunder but basically the overarching test in the u.k. and europe is similar to the test in the u.s.. is their justification for the scanners? first will do the work appeared, do they in the end being sought

and the answer across these countries the the the protection of doherty is, ministers of countries are increasingly saying no these are unnecessary and invasive a fundamental human rights which is where i return to five fundamental final point that these are not just legal rights. when we are looking at the women who are survivors of breast cancer have to take off their prosthetic breast in public or the three-year old that was referred to who is being groped. if we are talking about a bladder cancer survivor who is listed by the tsa to the point he was covered in his own urine because the bags broke that is offensive to all of us is it not? that is a moral issue. whether or not that glove look humiliation, whether or not it should be protected is not the point. we have to ask what has become of the nation when we are allowing ourselves, and i've been through these body scanners many times, to touch our

genitals, to have naked pictures of ourselves even if you are not bothered of that personally, many people are coming and the idea is we have empathy for concerns of people that experience those sorts of humiliations and those are important issues like eink in addition to legal issues we can't lose sight of so i will stop there and i again want to thank you for the fine work you are doing here. [applause] >> i'm going to ask the panelists a few questions. we will have a chance for the audience to ask questions as well. but because we are also streaming and because we are also tweeting being followed on the order we welcome comments from people following the conference in real time if he would just like to tweet to scanusa we will pick up and ask the panelists. i want to begin by asking the

ralph nader our conference is meeting today the same time that the 112 congress is beginning. the members of the congress are carrying around copies of the constitution and i gather reading the text on the house. i was wondering if you could tell some of the things that you would like to see the new congress do about this body scanner proposal from tsa. >> thank you. they have to do comprehensive hearings and to the strategy. they are not providing a stream work for tsa. the are delegating everything to tsa and the are incorporating a lot of the issues and concerns that you will hear about in this conference today. the have to be more aggressive in their appropriations oversight as a huge amount of money being wasted here in the new government accountability office as documented and it's just going to get worse.

as to put more of these machines on and they have more training people they have to get on, etc.. we noticed that airports that they now have reverted back to more metal detectors. and the question is why. i mean, i like that. to go back to metal detectors that are they having trouble with the machines? the third is they got the fourth seeded the department of homeland security to be more responsive to the public. we've already lost our rights to this department wholesale. a lot of the concern today is we may lose this right or that right. we've already lost our rights. this is a dictatorial department that justifies everything with words national security, doesn't think it is to meet the administrative procedure act which is something the congress has to look into as well as other laws and finally, the

question is do members of congress have to go through this? are we seeing a vip treatment? speaker boehner was whisked past these machines late last year. what is their own experience and their own family's experience with this? i always think when congress is part of the risk they are more likely to be part of the solution. >> thank you. you talked about how, you know, people across the political spectrum, consumer advocates, democrats and republicans seem to be unified in this country and expressing their concerns about the tsa practices, yet we don't see much change in washington. is anyone listening? what will it take to get the decision makers here in washington more focused on this issue? >> i think it's up to us to keep this topic out there and the public and make sure that people

continue to think of it. republicans and democrats, whatever the case congress doesn't listen to us unless we continue complaining. we found -- i don't have the exact numbers on this, but we had this initial outburst of complaints are around thanksgiving time when these were coming out, and looked like tsa was putting some of these machines aside and not losing them completely. it seemed like that may have been happening around christmas time hoping that we will forget about it, go back to our usual routine and stop complaining and the issue would go away. so i think the only way that we make sure something is done about this is we keep complaining about it, keep pointing out the problem and not let congress hear our complaints and do a better sales job on this. we need the congress to get rid of these machines not just find

a better way to accept them. >> tsa will readily concede that these devices are not a new screening technique is perfect but they tend to argue at least this is a step in the right direction at least we are making things better. at least according to the tsa we are reducing the level of risk. but as i understand for what you have said and written elsewhere this may not be a step forward. it may not even be is that sideways perhaps it is a step backward. could you tell us a little bit more about some of the security risks that might result in the further deployment of these airport body scanners? >> what i wrote was before the publication of the vision for intelligence and national security. and they did eight of course in

the article in the "wall street journal." in essence the reason is the following. you have a piece of machinery and this piece of machinery is extensive and complicated. you have a number of people on site at the checkpoint. the focus becomes operating this piece of machinery. this piece of machinery isn't perfect as tsa at meds come therefore the security resources in terms of people, attention, is coming years, brains are focused on operating a piece of equipment that doesn't work. as opposed to doing the job and understanding who you are looking at and looking at passengers and in doing whatever other procedures. so therefore, it's not that this machine like all other human artifacts isn't perfect. it is rather the fact that it occupies the center stage inevitably and becomes a focus of inactivity and that activity is not aviation security but it is the operation of a scanner.

now if i may raise the point there's something i don't understand. i'm not ralph nader, i'm not a politician, i don't understand this at all and that means the peculiar and responsiveness of tsa, the kill your response. given here in washington is rather calmly and other [inaudible] coming back from visiting a consulate in houston and what it [inaudible] coming back from visiting a consulate in houston and what it meant but what happens is the tsa in this report isn't a boon dhaka airport quite and was described by a group of people who refer to her as the indian ambassador that her identity document happens to be a diplomatic passport identifying as the indian ambassador. take this as prime evidence of suspect. to them this was evident suspect

because no doubt they believe india confused in the with him and or whatever it was. [laughter] they then submitted her to the most extraordinary intrusive personal pat-down and everything else performed by a person who she describes as a female on her identity papers only. that is how she described the person within the pat-down. she then comes back to washington and as an experienced diplomat tried to contact the tsa and informed them of what happened. the tsa's the answer is that security comes first and that isn't -- that is the ambassador to india who in the presence of the staff accompanying was submitted to extraordinary procedures. by the we all heard things were opened up in public and everything to get out and putting her diplomatic dispatches which were not

suspected. so if you have this question where this person can't even get an answer, you know, those of you who read the bible remember that john when he complained finally complained he lost all these -- god take away his kids and god answered him saying shut up, job, i know what i'm doing. tsa didn't even answer. [laughter] and i don't understand why because even in the notoriously responsible to brokers is answered. when you make a fuss they get an answer and we don't get an answer and that i don't understand. >> they are not answering, tsa is not answering again and again year after year why they are behind screening cargo. cargo and passenger planes where you can have far more devastating for an object. that is the asymmetry i think congo is very much in the

fishing and emphasize on it and pointing out that when you scan it and aaa scan and moreover congo doesn't for the known cinders to the recipients. talking about the legal issues i have to say for those lawyers to litigate the administrative cases which in the required agencies to respond to publications he just hit a home run and reminding us of at least god answered job so why doesn't the tsa respond to the american public? i wish i had that in a brief last night. in going to go next to chip and i wanted to ask this question i'm sure people who are following this conference the are listening that maybe they are agreeing with the panel was

saying that the same time sure there are some people who say listen it's really not that big a deal to go through one of these devices and i'm tough, i can to get and that is what the government asks us to do. i will do it. i'm sure people feel that way but then they look and see the children or their wife or somebody else been subjected to this and they may have to start second thoughts and when we think about certain groups, when you think about children and the elderly you think about rape survivors and began to ask ourselves as the point you raise about moral rights how serious is this intrusion of the tsa is now engaged on a routine basis. >> it is serious. the harm he mentioned often are tangible. you can see the year in mabus plater, you can see sometimes the effect on a rape survivor,

the trauma is sometimes visible on the face. often it's not so the harm can be tangible or intangible but just because they are not visible or they are less apparent doesn't mean they are less significant. that is an important point here. why the idea never been treated in a fashion doesn't respect fundamental personhood, humanity. that is a violation of the norm of the entire concept of human rights violation of personal dignity. in their response to the tsa is to give this false information, the false choice of its to live on three the growth radiation that is also a moral as is the corruption, as is what was referred to the degrading nation to become a teacher and you mentioned this as well if you are treated like cattle, you lose the ability to be an autonomous agent and exercise the responsibility of self-government which are

essential to a democracy so all of these are moral concerns as well as legal concerns even if they're less tangible. like the inside of the lot of people have, like the people you won't even hear about and the muslim women that didn't travel to got some attention but there are scores of other muslims, religious jews, catholics and people of conscience who don't want to see their children treated that way, their burden of movement is now right to free travel is burden, so a lot of the intangible harms are important to take into account as well. >> we will go to questions in just a moment but i did want to ask the panel and maybe we will simply go down the line. one of the other tough questions that is sometimes asked of people who have raised concerns, raised objectives about the tsa body scanner program is to say what you do? if you don't want us to do this what would you propose we do as we have a responsibility to safeguard the public, the flying

public, and i will go down the line and ask you how would you answer that question? >> it's simple. what we do instead of having these body scanners? we would do nothing different. we were doing before, these were better than having them today. so that's a very simple thing. i talked earlier about how i think airlines should be responsible for what happens on their planes and the consequences of when they fly in a true free-market, passengers and airlines work together and come up with various things to be we don't know which ones work the best or which customers would like the most, but having that choice out there would be a good thing. but again, the security we had before these body scanners was rolled out was fine. we don't need these new body scanners. >> welcome to will hear much more about this of course from bruce snyder this afternoon, but the first thing we've got to do

is stop being terrorized. to realize there is no perfect system, this was a nation founded by risktakers, the famously venture their lives, fortran, sacred honor the new the would be executed as the american revolution failed. this is the land of the free and home of the brave and after each incident taking off our shoes, getting rid of liquids, evin chollet there will be cavity searches if we continue that logic and so the thing to grasp is as europe grasped there is an amicable risk to living in a free society so you've got to live in it. when it comes to aviation security even the european commission has admitted later security is not adequate decided of tears that respond to the last war. the are also calling for more holistic approach. holistic approach in the body scanner a riga is accept may be secondary screening by the less privacy interests of millimeter scanners that give not the naked machine but the machine that

jeff rosen also a panelist is afternoon has written about in his books and articles. and in addition to that we have to have rights compliance security, intelligence approaches, law enforcement that doesn't focus on the last resort but tries to identify as what was said people who are risky as opposed to their techniques they can always change the techniques and so it is a question of growing up, living with risk and in doing intelligent rate based enforcement and i have to agree with the panelists who also said we've got to stop reading terrorists, occupying land. that is what al qaeda said and was the reason that they are terrorizing us understanding that is not justifying it and we won't really get to the policy dimension of this and making headway against it unless we stop violating human rights. >> i completely disagree with the notion that terrorism is by invading countries. most terrorism never reaches the united states.

its interregional and religious terrorism one set of muslims killing another set of muslims those casualties are ten times the casualties of all of the attacks against non-muslims. so that has nothing to the invasion but i totally disagree. on the ever had, to answer the question specifically here it is extremely difficult to identify a suspect even to implement all of your intelligence database. however it is very easy to identify them on suspect. this guy was 30 times or 40 times or 50 times last year and he is not a suspect because the probability of them switching is so terribly low. so the first thing is identify them on suspects. bye removing the suspects who are 50 come 60 come 70% depending which airport, which time, how much seasonality, how much leisure travel and on that particular group on that

particular time you first of all or allowing people to go through faster and allow security to focus on the much narrow group and then you can do serious things and therefore you will never in bark on things like putting the scanners that have all of the above disadvantages mentioned plus the disadvantage that matters to me that don't work. and here the decision is critical because italy is world the and other things but it is certainly the world leader in terrorism. not by accident. they have lower tax in spain and france and england and italy mips them in the love bug. the i talions look at scanners with their long experience of terrorism began in september 11 but terrorism is an italian tiramisu, going on for decades. with their experience they need to figure out and listen to the called the airports in addition to other things. what we need here is

professionalism. that's all come professionalism. i would accept any professional professionalism. i despise this operation. >> with great respect i have to comment roberts new book. >> yes. it's not yet -- >> [inaudible] >> no, no. i protested all of these fears buddhist attacks which go on and around the world. nonsense, this is nonsense. this is the whishing to adhere to this american concept that all religions are equally good. i believe you're equally bad and this is quite a different attitude. >> so we have a topic for a different conference. [laughter] >> first it is unfortunate tsa refuses invitations to conferences. they even refuse to come. is their anybody in the tsa here in the audience? see what i mean? now that is an example of a

closed off for terrie in mind. if they don't want to participate, why don't they come here? you know where they go? they go to corporate conferences on the latest security technologies. that's where they go, to see what the latest machines and the latest gadgets etc. are. that's number one. number two and they have got to vastly prove their scanning of cargo. major aircraft have been brought down by cargo explosion. there are dozens of them all over the world. it brought down in this way. if you of the conventional approach for what edward is talking about you had better watch lists come intelligence gathering and training security officers to look for suspicious

behavior. that is for many experts in this area as well as the government accountability office adviser to the u.s. congress, the major of decatur in this town of its responsibility. finally, and here's where i disagree with that word. when you invade countries that don't attack you and you violate the constitution and the statutes and you violate a series of international treaties to help develop and sign on to and millions of people or shall we say more than discomfort, they are terrified, they are refugees, they die. it's not out of the realm of probability. some of these people or their children are going to plan attacks against the united states directly or indirectly or against the united states citizens abroad and we've got to

make sure that general casey and former head said in his statements we do not operate in countries like iraq in a way that provide fertile ground for producing more people who have more reason to apply violent approaches to the security of the american people. finally, and this is very important in terms of the public, most of the public does not understand what the invasion of the cells does to their civic role. edward's privacy everything he has private because he wants us to function on function of the which is important. but we've seen all over the country when the government acts arbitrarily, and is not just invading people's privacy. when it is interested in many other ways, people's resistance

to arbitrary government, which is the spirit of our bill of rights is ground down. growler down in a thousand ways. someone who is left up at airports for no reason at all goes back home. are they going to be standing up to something going on in the city hall? are they going to be intimidated? are they going to be eroded? so we have to say just because we cannot quantify this with some formula or equation that it's not serious. we must always resist efforts by arbitrary government often inclusion with commercial firms who want to profit from this arbitrary behavior we must always resist. the or arbor term the and reckless bureaucratic attempt to justify their own presence at the expense of the bill of rights of the american people. and i would add one thing.

this is a cartoon this sends the message. this is what we should not be doing in this country. >> who says we bureaucrats are out of touch and adis a tsa agent groping someone. [laughter] his comment is a great segue into one of the comments we are seeing on the twitter feet feed and i want to ask west benedictus talk about the importance of free market should we abolish the tsa were to be more precise and the tsa knows this committee reports in the united states to have the legal authority to say to the federal government know we would prefer to do this hour own way and find options other than the tsa and forced security standards. what is your thinking right now for the prospect of the airports moving in a direction? >> certainly as a libertarian i would like to see the tsa abolished and for airlines and passengers to come up with

different solutions to read the security at one line at the airport might look vastly different from biosecurity at another airport with another airline. the important thing is that these airlines also need to remain responsible for the results of the actions of people on the flights. an example from another industry, the oil industry where the bp oil well leaked out in the gulf. that happened largely as a result, the circumstances that led to that was the government removing liability from their responsibility of what happens if a deep well fails. as we need to have airlines responsible for what happens when they don't have good enough security. but let's let the free market work out what are the best options. so yes i would like to not have the tsa exist. it does exist and i like the fact that some airports are

considering getting rid of tsa and some of the other options that might be out there. but i don't think just contacting things out to private corporations is an automatic good solution. big corporations have a lot of money to make from the government who pays them. when there is millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at stake, those corporations start lobbying their congressmen and government and big business get in bed together and they take our money and they take our rights. i think that is what is happening with fees' body scanners and so i do appreciate that we have a lot of different groups out there watching out for our rights, consumer safety advocate, ralph nader comes at things from different perspective than i do but on this particular program i think that we agree largely. >> thank you very much. unfortunately we are out of time on this panel now we want people to take questions. we will have time i think leader

in the morning for questions. i do want to thank the participants for has been extraordinary discretion and i think we are glad to have more extraordinary discussions today as well. i would like to ask the second panel to please come forward. we will move immediately into the next discussion, and while the next panel was coming forward i would remind the viewers that you can get more information about the conference proceedings on the internet at the web address pity it is epic.org/events/tsa. you can follow the twitter feet. the hash tag is scantsa. you will be able to add your comments, participate and also see the comments of others who again the first panel for an extraordinary discussion.

[applause] .. first panel which was an evaluation of airport screening techniques looking at the consumer protection concerns, the security concerns, human rights concerns, as well as issues that have been raised about effectiveness. and now we will begin our second panel which looks at the publich response to the tsa's airport screening procedures. and for this panel is my pleasure to welcome as the moderator of the panel, ar of lecture at georgetown lawt center, the chief informationere officer, pablo molina.

>> thank you, marc. thank you for being here important topic thank you for being here. i thank you for the members of this particular panel or time in their comments on these issues. i am also a professor of ethics and technology. this semester come of my students chose this topic for their class papers because they thought it was a very interesting normal dilemma in our daily lives. this is the panel for we the people. if the shoe stand that we say deployment of the counters in airports across the nation, american citizens and visitors to this country no longer face

only an economic decisions when traveling. they now face also a moral decision. and this is why you would like suggest that airline traveling site like travelocity.com or expedia.com, that they add one more option whenever it they displayed slate search results or travel search results. and then option would be not only the low cost options with the one with the least outs, but would also like to suggest the one with the least painful moral choices that people can select when making their travel plans. i would argue most americans have faced moral decisions, than many of them have not traveled yet. in spite of the service-connected and statistics set up and throw at people, that we still don't know how most of the people in this country feel

about being subjected, themselves, their children and their family member to the treatment in airports. we are going through the scanners are going to repack down. i'm the last panel is diverse. this one is not so first. this is made up from people who have devoted their time and effort to defend the rights of privacy for many travelers or simply to oppose the idea of the newest counters being rolled out. it is very hard for me to do a search on the internet that would leave something might cut down or bumper stickers that read, i'd rather be going through scanner instead of being out for. so with this panel, i like to start with kate hanni. kate hanni is the founder, the executive director and also the chief executive officer for

flight rates airport and one of the most advocating and passionate defenders of airline passengers rates in the united states. kate. >> thank you, marc for inviting me here today. it's amazing to be speaking up for the first panel, so i hope i can bring something to the conversation that is unique and maybe a little bit different. kat >> we are the largest, non-profit airline passenger rights association in the world. i founded the organization because, a, my family was stuck for an hour and 17 minutes on the tarmac in austin, texas six weeks before jet blue had their melt down. he felt it was not right not to have the opportunity to get off a plane and denied access to

food or water and to be sitting in conditions with overflowing toilets and smells that most people would not ever smell outside maybe a morgue. i believe that the airline should treat their passengers as human beings, and we've had great success in treatment of passengers in the last four years. if they are not familiar with our success, it took three years to get it, but we got a rule passed preventing airlines in the domestic u.s. from holding you on the tarmac for 3 hours, but after that, they have to provide you with food, water, toilets, medical treatment, and we're still working on air-conditioning. now it seems we need to force the government to treat airline passengers as human beings at tsa check points. i'm here to tell you why air travel security is a passenger's rights issue, and then i want to outline the grave concerns we

have about the new security measures effectiveness, safety, and constitution noelty. finally, i'll state what our members in our airlines want. security is an airline passenger rights issue, so why it air travel security an issue? to be honest, until recently, i didn't think it was. we very relocket at that particular timely entered this conversation. it's different to take on the tsa and dhs than it is to take on the airlines. obviously, we all want to be safe when we fly. we rely on the airlines and faa to provide safe flights from engine start to engine start down. after 9/11, we accepted the increased security even if it seemed silly and relied on the faa to provide that for us. security became a passenger rights issue when the tsa rolled out new equipment and procedures

not proven effective. it may putting our health at risk an tramples on our rights. having fought for so long to be treated like human beings by the airlines, we were dismayed to see our government was proposing to treat us like we were criminals because we wanted to get on an airplane. concerns over effectiveness, saist, and constitutionality, when the public began to learn the tsa body scanners in what they call enhanced pat downs, i received hundreds of communications from our members. we have a hotline for those who don't know that. it's a toll-free hot line. 1-877-533-937 # 6. people left pretty horrifying messages about their 3-year-olds being patted down, their grandmother having tsa sticking their hands down their pants because they had a medical device. they were subjected to absolutely horrifying treatment

at the hands of the tsa agents who were not changing glovings in between these. i don't mean to be graphic here, but in the history of our organization, over a month period of time, i must have said a thousand times the word genitals, annal cavity bombs, breasts, things i have not had to say until october of this year. would they detect threats that drove implications as the underwear bomber? many members who are medical professorials demanded to know why thought routinely exposing us to radiation was safe. othersmented to no -- others wanted to know about the 4th amendment. there was a general feeling of outrage that our government's casual assumption to assume every hard working american was

a terrorist who had to be strip searched or groped. are the body scanners effective? if not, why is the government insisting, if we don't use them, we can't be safe. tsa put these advanced imaging technology scanners through both laboratory and operational testing, congress' own add iting agency says it remaining unclear they can do the job they're intended to do. i want to add this bill is on the record as saying they have never tested a bomb like the under pants bomber once in these scanners. on top of that, the machines radiation penetrates to a depth of only 1-tenth of an inch and will never find explosives that have been swallowed or hidden in body cavities. if there is explosives hidden

that way, are we then subjected to body cavity searches? in today's warp speed advance of technology, do we place our lives in the hands of designs that old? there must be a better way. many medical provingsals objected this. there's no safe exposure, and the exposure is cumulative over our lifetimes. we have been given no evidence that the scanners are safe. the tsa assured us a long list of agency, fda and the laboratories among others were involved with the ensuring the scanner's safety. aol asked each of the agencies about this, and they pointed out they are in no way responsible for the safety nor have they been doing regular testing of the units. we've seen recent stories of how

machines delivered concentrated damaging doses of radiation to patients. who is making sure that's not happening to airline passengers? we all know everyone, well, everyone but the tsa who subjects us to radiation, is required to undergo extreensive -- extensive training and radiation. what radiation training are tsa officers subjected to? they're not wearing led vests. again, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and see sures, is not violated and probably cause and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. do we as a country want to agree that electronic strip searches and invasive gropings are reasonable? are we willing to accept that

walking into an airport means we give uprights that are granted to street thugs? rights believe that airline passengers deserve better than that. this issue is particularly galling for our members who served their country. a retired air force officer who held a top secret security clearance for 17 years was again granted a top secret clearance as a contractor after his retierpt is outraged that his government considers him a potential terrorist. another member of retired u.s. senior navy chef chief who held a clearance in the nuclear weapons industry for many years feeling deeply betrayed by his government for the same reason. there must be a better way. what might some of those better ways be? this afternoon's keynote speaker will address that same issue. we addressed it early in the year when they started deploying

the scanner. we believe canines can detect explosives and many, many possible meths that could have been explored that would not have violated our basic rights. thank you so much. [applause] >> i'd like to thank kate for sharing the views of her organization and other members with us today. the next person in the panel is the commercial pie lot. michael roberts who on october 15 of 2010 was denied access to the memphis international airport when he refused to go through the scanner or alternative pat down. mike? >> it's important to think clearly about what we're resisting and what effective

resistance entails. throughout history, citizens of every kind of government facing all kinds of crisis cried out to the state, deliver us from evil. the state invariably answers, there must be given more control to meet the people's demands for protection and provision. governments were made powerful only by the concession of the government. the people take comfort in creating for themselves a higher power to stand between them and the uncertainty between them and things out of their control. the state has established and has the power to meet the needs and desires of its creators. it's interested in the transference of power away from the many into the hands of a few. whatever ancillary agendas or obligations it has, the primary business of the state must be to secure the strength needed to bring its intentions to pass.

promises are exchanged for disproportioned share of the power equally endowed by the laws of nature and nature's god to the people themselves. now, as it happened throughout history, the shift is underway and the relationship between the people and the government, the united states and indeed throughout much of the free world. roles are being reversed for who is accountable to whom. in our context here today consider law-abiding travelers are ordered about by government agentses, told to remove shoes, belts, and prosthetic body parts. we are instructed to stand and nod in compliance and pose for the imaging of our naked bodies or sometimes in addition too the invasion of our personal space and literally bodily and sexual

assault. announcements are made in terminals warning us we may be arrested if we dare question or openly ridicule this madness. it may be difficult for the infrequent traveler to believe this is happening. right now in america, we are bartering our personal sovereignty in exchange for the ability to move about within our own borders by air or perform our work or atepid a conference to express our indignation against the state's egregious assault against our dignity. we must choose carefully from one alternative to that of another. on october 15, i was confronted with a choice between access to my workplace and my central dignity as well as the right to be secure in my person against unreasonable search and seizure.

countless others have to decide too. the choice to fly or otherwise and simultaneously enjoyed insurances granted by the 4th amendment and the rule of law in general we will not be accosted by governmenting agents has been taken from us without due process. if passenger airlines were permitted to offer their services in a free marketplace with or without humiliating mistreatment of their customers, perhaps an accurate adjustment could be made. fortunatelily, however, the determination is evidently been made, we, the people, are not fit to choose nor ourselves in this regard. when the executive decree was handed down to use federal recovery act funds, stimulate the economy by abusing the traveling public, the people most affected, those who work within the industry, began to question whether the value of our jobs outweighed that of our

personal rights and liberty. that was not the only exchange we had to consider. first, officer pington of u.s. airways placed the values of his passenger's safety of that of his own livelihood declaring himself unfit to fly as a result of his screening experience. his flight was canceled, and the airline passengers couldn't reach their destinations as planned. i've spoken with many crew members who mentioned the psychological upsetting and performance degrading effects of the tsa's unlawful and invasive actions but who nevertheless have chosen to fly under the direct of fear to do otherwise affects their employment status. other flying professionals have begin similar reasons to subject themselves to these abuses. to reiterate, people are continuing to subject themselves to these -- i'm sorry -- people

are compelled to comply with the violation of their personhood and even the degradation of passenger safety because they are afraid of what will happen if they refuse. o ergs by fear called by any other name is nevertheless the very e petmy of terrorism. politicians make promises in exchange for power, the leveraging of fear to control the actions and decisions of others in society is a work of tyrants. we will not -- we are not talking about security at all here. this entire situation is a national embarrassment and disgrace, but above all, it is our security itself that is most threatened by the attack of our constitution's domestic enemies, many of whom are somewhere in this city with us today. their criminal actions clearly violate the legitimate bounds of the state's constitutional jurisdiction. if our bodies belong to the state, we belong to the state.

i urge everyone to carefully consider to value with which you regard your natural rights and liberty and whether it's justified to peddle them in the market at any price. what will you profit even if you gain the whole world and forfeit your own soul? [applause] >> thank you, michael for sharing your words with us today. as a member of the transport community. our next panelist is james bob. he's a libertarian glass roots activist in the philadelphia area. when the scanners were coming his way to the philadelphia international airport, he joined forces with fellow activists and the two of them created wewon'tfly.com. the website is a great resource

for people concerned about the issues around body scanners and pat downs. >> thank you, mark, and epic for hosting this event. thank you to my distinguished panelists. it's an honor to be with you today and thank you to the audience. it's an important event and an honor to be with you. i'm james babb, one the cofounders of we won't fly. it's we wontfly.com. i'm here to tell you about the abuse. i believe you have the right to be e radiated. you have the right to be groped if it makes you feel safer. we have the right to be swad led, examined or x-rayed. however, no one has the right to force these procedures on someone else. this doesn't change when you put

on a piece of government issued jewelry. we all have an inherent right to be secure in our persons. we each own our own bodies. there is no power with the miranda rule authority to strip -- moral authority to strip search against our will. we are opposed to the full body scanners. when the new porno scanners were heading to philadelphia in the fall of 2010, i realized my ability to travel by air with my young daughters was in serious jeopardy. i began researching and organizing local opposition. my friend, george donnelly, built a website to support the cause. it exploded within days resulting within millions of web hits, tebs of thousands of facebook fans and dwitter followers. we were in the heart of the resistance movement. our success was largely due to

plog posts containing firsthand accounts from travelers about the tsa's new invasive procedures. these stories and videos of average americans being molested spread like wild fire. we had the opportunity to interview tens of thousands of americans across the world about tsa abuse. the stories that took off were those of average people. people are shocked to see what's happening to mothers, grandmothers, cancer survivors, children with special needs, people with implants and prosthetics. the most vulnerable in our society were the first to take the brunt of the abuse. now no one is safe. i was asked to tell you traveler tales today. we have hundreds of stories and bold proclamations from angry travelers now refusing to fly. the videos of tsa in action have

been our best advertising tool like the video of the traumatized 3-year-old pleaded stop touching me as a tsa employee continued to grope her. no one can bear to watch women and children being violated by blue-shirted thugs without screaming for justice. the aclu filed thousands of complaints. mary in texas reported, the tsa agent used her hands to feel under and between my breasts and rammed her hand into my crouch and was touched. she moved her hand across think pubic region to my thighs and repeated this procedure on the other side. i was shocked and broke into tears. allen from nebraska says i was visibly upset and when he started to fopped l me inappropriately i said i wanted

to see a supervisor. i asked if he would legally allow to grab my genitals, and he said he was allowed. after that, he groped my butt and told me to have a good flight. rosemary in virginia says the entire affair was punitive and humiliating and time consuming and disstressing. when i got my things, i walked into the women's restroom and went. scot in new mexico says while in a private room, the agent inappropriately touched me more than once and made me feel up credibly uncomfortable. the agent pulled down my shorts about halfway and asked the agent to let me pull them back up. i was inappropriately touched, groped, rubs, massaged and ha rased. the procedure was violating, degrading, invasive, and humiliating. trk sa officials suggested that parents make the tsa assault

into a game for their children. they are conditioning an entire generation to submit to any abuse these thugs dream up. what is going on here? this has nothing to do with security. this is humiliation and conditioning for reflexive submission to the badged class. do we need a congressional hearing to know this is wrong? do we need a study on how much radiation is unhealthy during a virtual strip search? of course not. anyone with a sled of decency knows what the tsa is doing is unacceptable. this is well beyond conservative, race, age, or economics. this is a matter of basic human dignity. this problem is beyond the point of reform. there is no better way to strip search a child. there is no more professional way to feel up our grandmothers. this is not an issue of tsa training. it's not an issue of security. this is about the fundamental coercive nature of government itself.

the tsa is just the latex covered -- the latex glove of the iceberg. the public is outraged because they see a hand reaching in our waste band, but everything the government does is a hand in our pants. the government is outraged about scans of our families, but the irs has us reveal more. they wage wars of aggression abroad, participates in change, foreign elections, and poses sanctions and blockades and then grope our children because crazy foreigners hate us for our freedoms. the police stay at home, and this is flipped. in classic government fashion, every blunder is followed by an expectation of more power and more of our treasure, and of course, please don't pay attention to the wind fall profits of homeland security who works for rape scan systems selling scanners to the tsa. we moved into a bizarre world

where everything about is us open to government inspection and everything tyrants do is in secrecy. attempt to protect your privacy, and you're a terrorist or domestic extremist, whatever that is. so what is the alternative? we need flexible, decentralized, innovative security that only a market place can provide. we need the freedom to select the level of security that we are comfortable with. those who want a full prostate examine can have it. those that prefer modest techniques can have that too. let grope and scope airline compete. it's better for security, privacy and avoids the constitutional issues. instead of trusting the same poll fissions that -- politicians that betrayed us, it's time for a mental shift.

airplane security should not be an issue between airlines and customers. it should be an issue between airlines and customers. it should not be an issue between poll titionzs and -- politicians and lobbyists. accept who compromise. we must a bollish the tsa now. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, james, for sharing your comments today. i want to start by posing questions to the panelists. i would like to start with a two-party question for comerl pilot, michael roberts. when the three big u.s. auto makers came to washington about two years ago to ask for the bailout, they were embarrassed publicly by being asked how they got to question. that's my question for you, how you gt here and why, and also a follow-up question on a serious

manner, about the lawsuit i understand you and a fellow pilot have against the department of homeland security and the transportation security administration. michael? >> well, how i got here is i drove my trusty airport car 14 hours, and -- yeah -- [applause] yes, we are suing that poll tan know and their capacities and seeking the restoration of our 4th amendments rights and freedoms. it's simple as that. they need to stop doing what they're doing. i would like to see security placed in the hands of professionals as well. i agree with that approach, but in the near term, the main thing to do is to restrain the politicians and bureaucrats and put them back inside the

boundaries laid out by the constitution, so if we can get that done, that's back to where we were which is better than this. >> thank you, michael. i'd like to continue with a question for a question for kate, founder and secretary directer and ceo of flier rights. many of us are taking different approaches to this as individual citizens. for example, myself, i'm reaching to low cost airlines because at least out of wash, they fly out of the low cost terminal which is terminal a and i feel safer on two accounts. first, terrorists who are on a suicide mission are not as price sensitive as other people. [laughter] most importantly is because they don't have money for the high cost scanners, so if you fly out of terminal a, you don't have to go through a scanner or a pat

down, just a regular metal detector or the investors who are manufacturing and making and markets scanner-proof under wear for americans who prefer to do that. you can have motives in your underwear, but the serious question here is what can passengers do in response to this new trend? what is next in the horizon on trying to join forces, trying to put a stop to these scanning and pat down movements? >> well, if you go to flier talk -- can you hear me? oh, good, i love it. we were actually loving -- all i did was a google search looking for airports that don't have the scanners, and there's an entire list of all the airports in the u.s. and the terminals to go to without the

scanners, and if there's no scanner, you aren't subjected to a pat down, and people with disabilities then won't be subjected to those intrusive pat downs either which is fascinating. for many people, that could be a good alternative. the way that people can advocate. we have an infrastructure, a flier's right that is by design meant to help people get a hold of their congressman and senators and the tsa and any other government authority that's willing to listen, so when folks call our hotline or e-mail us or blog, or on our forum, we track that activity, and we're actually communicating with anyone who contacts us in any way about how they can be active. when was regarding the passenger rights issue, it was writing to the department of transportation and now it's the tsa and congressman and senators, and also forming events. our plan is to form events that

will be visually demonstrateble in the future and assuming we can make them really effective, we should be able to make some head way with dhs and tsa. unfortunately, many of the events planned that were effective because many people didn't travel the day before thanksgiving, what the media missed was travel was down. when the reports we were getting from our members over the holidays were that the lines were empty and that the scanners were turned off and that people were being waved through the detectors. in essence all the drive behind we won't fly and national opt out day, those programs worked, but it was missed by the media. we'll be doing more events and participating them all over the country in the coming months. >> thank you, kate.

she's with fliersrights.org. next is for activist and founder of wewontfly.com, james babb. the question is this. talking about the scanners in the context of airports, but should these technologies prove popular on the citizens? one could imagine you have to go through similar devices to get your daughters into school, to visit the institutions. i know there's museums all over the world and to access your place or work or petition the government. what do you think the grass roots movement that you have started can do in order to put a halt to seems what a difficult way to stop progression?

>> you've raised an excellent question and good point. this technology is not limited to airports. there is no reason to believe it's going to stop there. we can merely stop flying to avoid this abuse. they are already experimenting with it in train stations, subways, and buss stations. people are subjected to these invasive sexual assaults. it's totally unacceptable everywhere, so as activists, we just have to say no. we have to resist at every turn. we have to draw the line here and now that this is absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances. there's nothing they can say to us that should justify submitting our families to this kind of abuse. it is absolutely unacceptable for human beings. if we do nothing now, we will see it on the streets, at the train, at the schools. we will not be able to escape

it. we are at the turning point right now. this is why we must take poled action -- bold action now and not compromise and let them say, look, we're going to do nicer groping because it won't end it. we need to end it firmly and without compromise right now. [applause] >> thank you very much, james. i'd like to move on and ask a question to another person that happens to be sitting at the table. mark. i understand that the epic work on the case of the scanner devices being used in other locations other than airports? >> do we have a lawsuit, is that the question? >> yes. >> yes, i think we do. we're going to be talking about it on the next panel. it's a complicated lawsuit, so we decided to take an hour. it's our conference, so we gave ourselves an hour. >> all right. thank you, mark. this panel is for the people, by the people, so we would like to take questions from the audience

or from the online participants. >> carnet from afc which is -- [inaudible] i would like to ask mr. babb and mr. roberts, the pilot, you have spoken out strongly, the whole panel has, about these invasive pat downs and the scanners, but -- and you're saying you should basically turn this over to free enterprise i believe. some people are saying that, but can you give us hard and fast examples of what you would do to fix it? what you would do to change it because we haven't really heard that yet. >> sure. airlines invest billions of dollars in their hardware.

they have incredibly valuable employees that require huge amounts of training. they have their entire customer base to protect. do you think stockholders will have an interest in keeping these assets secure? of course, they have an extreme motive to protect these incredible assets. the motives of politicians are very different. that's what we have right now. politicians need to look like they're doing something. that's why we end up with security theaterrer. that's why we have end up with a centralized bureaucracy. we get 67,000 tax feeders participating in a make work program that ends up becoming a sexual assault, so the point is trust in the incentives of the airlines, they have the best motive to protect us. >> but low?

did you -- but how? can you give us an example? should we go away from the machinery? should we focus more on training the people who work for the tsa who are giving us pat downs, who are supposed to be interrogating us, you know, asking us pertinent questions? i was born in morocco. i had my passport stolen in paris self years ago. i'm american. when i come into this country, i always get this or to any country, i'm always oh, your going to morocco and i say yes, but i left when i was 2. they drop the subject. they ask me about my stolen passport, and eventually that's removed from your record because they wasted their time and mine. in israel, you know, you get the same questions, but they move on more quickly. another example, i had a friend

who when she came back from egypt, she was asked if she met egyptians. she said, well, you know, what do you think? she's arab-american. it just seems to me that we're, you know, the tsa instead of going to the conferences in the sunny places when it's cold here, they should be sending the people who we're all complaining about who give us the pat downs and teach them a better way to screen for would-be terrorists. it's what others were saying, but we're not just well complaining, but not giving any solutions. that's what i would like to see as a frequent traveler. >> if i may, what you're describing is you would like to see professional security procedures. in order to have that, we need to put the decision making process in the hands of professionals and not as jim

made the point, in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats drich by other motivations. professionals care about the mission. i fly the plane and think about what i'm doing. i don't think about business deals in back rooms and kickbacks. i think about my job right in front of me. professional security, people who work in that industry whether it's in-house with the airlines or as contractors, and i'm not talking about using contractors to carry out tsa's mandates. i'm talking about the decision making process being placed in the hands of people who have invested interest in the quality of their work, legitimate professionals. that's what you want and just described. good luck getting it from the state. >> very good. kate? >> i'd like to take a stab at answering from a flyer right

perspective. we all agree that the scanners and new intrusive genital pat downs are something we can't live with and need to be made at least as a secondary screening method for people who present a risk, but like i said, i was reluctant to take on this. i represent passengers who travel a lot. their main concern is safety when they travel, and most people were not at all convinced that they were safe, and so they automatically were accepting these new intrusive measures. i began and exploration with a number of professors and people who are experts in different types of detection, and it does appear to me that there was no exploration by the tsa into any alternatives. they appeared to have signed contracts in 2006 in the prior administration that they were

committed to keeping the order for these units made in october of 2009, two months before the terrorist got on the plane. he was -- he just actually benefited rapid scan in terms of convincing the u.s. this was the only solution to solving our security issues, but canines are actually a much better detector of explosives. if we're committed to finding explosives, that would be one possible solution, and they are used around the world. biometric technology which has been mentioned here where you can give an iris scan and fink the prints and have a background check which i had with fly clear i find to be an acceptable way of being a low risk group, i guess a fly list of people who can move quickly through the security process where the focus is on people who do actually present a risk. there are other answers out there that would not create these sexualized intrusiveness

you have with the scanners and these new pat downs, and many other alternatives i'm sure we vice president heard about. -- haven't heard about. the thing i'm negatively impressed by with this is corporations seem to be driving all the technology em pleaation into tsa and it has nothing to do with what is best for us? ? >> well, any other questions here in the room? >> i was just wondering -- i live in west virginia, and everything is -- [inaudible] i do a thousand people, every single one of them think it's right to give up their rights because the government is correct. half of them have never ever heard the tsa thing. our stations are different than the news for some reason.

have you found this? it's a problem that the local airports wants tsa, but i'm trying to stop it. those people with going to jail. you don't touch their child. they are a group of people that are rough, and i've seen them shove police, and that's what's going to happen -- [inaudible] i'm sorry -- [inaudible] >> i think what we noticed and we talked about on many of our conference calls before this event ralph nader said it at first was that people who didn't have an experience, the people who at first last year when they found out about the scanners, a lot of people overwhelmingly partly because they were afraid were saying, oh, i'll give up my rights.

i don't care. none of the scanners were there yet or introduced the new pat downs. anyone who had not experienced it or who really hasn't thought through what was going on at the tsa check point was willing to give them up after they had experienced it. when they rolled out the scanners and added this layer of ridiculously intrusive pass down, and weapon believe they were implemented to force people through the scanners because people wrnt -- i travel a lot coming from california, and people were not when i come out the international airport in san fransisco, there was two lines. there would be 50 people in the line to the metal detector and three in the line for the scanner. when in history have you ever seen people choose the longest security line; right? so, you know, i think you make a

great point. i'm the first letters that i began receiving were from people with small children. the very first letter i got when they announced the implementation was of a 3-year-old. he was pleading with the hotels to come to his aid and help the american flying public not have to did through these pat downs because he wanted to travel and take his family, but he refused some tsa agent who was not screened in a back law look at his naked 3-year-old daughter or allow her to be patted down. i'm zill going to travel, but only by car. overwhelmingly, since the scanners and the pat downs have been em plimented, the poles and -- polls and surveys continue to show a larger and larger group of people saying they would find alternative means of transportation if these were the methods that were going to be used in the airport and couldn't

get around it. they would find another way or not travel anymore. >> may i -- [inaudible] >> i've seen what you're talking about and i think kate makes a good point that a lot of this is ignorance. people don't know what this entails. it's one thing to hear a description of it and, you know, people are being frisked, well. we've seen that on tv. one actor frisks another to simulate what law enforcement officers do with criminals when they are finding out whether they are concealing something that might kill them. a real frisking is invasive rough thing, and it needs to be. a lot of people that i've heard from, just tons of feedback, have said, you know, they really didn't think it would be such a big deal. they entered the security line, okay, i'll opt out like they're

doing something. yeah, i hate that word, but then after being, you know, groped and all the rest, they come away feeling understanding after the fact they have really been violated. the pilot i mentioned is a great example of that. he was just going to work, and it was so rough and so disturbing to him that, you know, he was livid, offended, whatever you want to say he was, he was violated to the point where he couldn't fly. he didn't see that on the front end. there's a lot of confusion about what's going on. the other example is the 3-year-old that's been mentioned a few times. the mom is restraining, and the dad is film, and then the dad comes on tv because he's a news reporter, and tells the story about what an outrage this is that they did to my daughter in the airport. people were -- what's wrong with that picture? where were you dad and mom? we are confused as a people.

i think we're collectively losing our minds, and i'm not saying that to pontificate us. what is really going ob? >> i'd like to continue by powsing a question by a remote participant. one asks whether the panel opposes the technology, the process, or both? >> can i go first? >> please. >> okay. i think that the technology could be used if it was voluntary. the problem is it's being forced on people. if you want to go to, you know, if you want to say, look, i'm flying on scope and grope airline, okay, go ahead. okay? as soon as you start forcing that on someone else, you're the bad guy, so the technology is inherently possibly dangerous, certainly there's been a lot of risks associated with it, but as individuals, we have the right to choose the level of risk

appropriate for ourselves, so i say security, make your own call. the overall procedures 6 what they are -- of what they are doing, absolutely opposed to that. the entire process? absolutely opposed to that. >> other panelists? >> you repeat the question? >> one of the remote participants asks is whether the people on this panel oppose the technology, the process, or both? >> okay. we oppose both as a primary screening method. we don't believe that regular human beings should be presumed to be guilty of anything when they approach a security check point and they should not be automatically, all of them, put through the scanners or pat downs. now, if someone presents a risk, they could be used as a secondary screening method which is what we are encouraging the tsa to do.

retire them unless people support a risk. >> [inaudible] my question is there's the back scanner, the moment of which there's going to be more technology that comes down the pipe. you allow yourself to go through metal detectors, why not through the wave detector? i understand the radiation causes of scanners. my question is would you impose the security measures that we've accepted with the metal detectors and x-rays of our bag and even some searches, and then they creep more and more of the technology, and now the process is very skewed, i agree. i don't know why we search pilots because they fly the plane. you can have a gun, explosives, take it all. you fly my plane. this is just absurd, all right? >> it is. >> that's why my point is is it the technology? is it the process? is it both?

>> it's my understanding that the millimeter wave scanner as well as the black scanners take an image of the body. the millimeter scanner present less of a radiation risk than the others, but i simply fundamentally and our group simply believes that we or as safe just going through the metal detectors, and if you look at what they detect, and there's videos on youtube take b in the -- taken in the netherlands. a television crew had a rapid scan unit and a guy had declared that he had one pocket of low density powdered explosives before he went through the scan, went through it, cam back, and the rapid scan gentleman interpreting the scan only saw this when he in fact had a detonator in his mouth, explosive in his socks, stuff in

his pocket, and he pulled them out. it's clear these scanners are not effect effectiveness at finding at what they tell us they will. when they are missing so much, what are they really doing for us that the metal detectors didn't, and why are not not looking at the people and prescreening with risk-based intelligence driven security? >> i will agree with what you just said. i think there is -- my point is tomorrow there's going to be the next system, all right? the next system is just a block and there's a blob. there's no person's body, it's just a color pointed blue dot here in the shoulder area. >> the machine i saw dmond straited was the black scatter blob machine, and from a lack of invasion privacy point, i'm sure it is, but they have the radiation component. >> if i aintervene, we are

running out of time. i want to give the panelists just a few seconds to leave us with last words. please, michael? >> well, i'll try to just continue to address your question there. i can tell you what my thought process was through the years about the metal detectors. it's redak los -- ridiculous like you say. not just because i'm a pilot, to my shame, you know, i barters that part of my inliberty to go to work because it viewed it as a hassle more than a total violation which is what i've, you know, what i see what's going on now, but let use our brains and stop using all the extensive pieces of equipment because many guns and metal octobers get through security

and have for many years even with the metal detectors so it's the fundamental approach to the whole thing, the process, the technology. you know, technology might be useful if it was used in a lawful way, but i mean, strip searching virtual or otherwise, don't do that until, you know, you have exhausted other ways of screening, and then it's time to get law enforcement involved if you need to take somebody's clothes off. that's a big flaw in the process and the technology. i don't care if they use scanners or physically strip search somebody when it's justified, but it's nots when you walk in the door. looking forward with the technology, biometrics. is that a solution in in the next few weeks and months you'll see that's touted as the solution. okay, we'll stop touching you, just look in this, you know,

iris scanner and you'll be on your way. well, does that give the government more or less control over our comings and goings? i think we need to be real careful with that. >> kate, without debating, any last words? >> thank you. [laughter] >> thank you very much, kate. >> i would like to close with something positive, something people can do to help oppose this. i'm not writing any letters to congress. i have no interest in politing asking them to adjust the position of their boot on my throat. [laughter] the position of what we won't fly is doing is we are telling people to opt out of tsa abuse. just make your choice for yourself and family. say no, do not fly. if it means you have to put up with this, send a clear message to the industry that says, no, we will not purchase your services in it means we're going to be abused, period. thank you very much. [applause]

>> thank you, everybody, particularly the privacy information center and the pammists as well as the audience members in the room oar remotely -- or remotely participating today. thank you very much. [applause] >> those of you watching us on c-span or following the video or the sweets, i just want to remind you you can learn more information about this conference and this topic at epic.org/events/tsa. we also have a twitter hash tag which is scan tsa. as for our program, we will have one more panel this morning. there will be a break for lunch, a keynote speech next by bruce schnier, and then the closing panel today looks at next steps for reform, and that's a

particularly interesting panel. we will have on that panel, new york city counsel member david greenfield who has introduced a bill in the new york city counsel to simply ban the airport body scanners in new york. we're also joined by a staff member for congressman jason which many of you know as the person who sponsored the legislation that passed the house in 2009 to prohibt the -- prohibit the tsa from using scanners as the primary screening technique in the u.s. airports. although we have a brief break between 12:30 and 1:30, we'll be back after -- with a very good prosecution by bruce, and then a closing panel. if we could get underway, please, with our third panel. the bios are included in the

speaker pact. they are available on the internet site, but it is a particular pleasure for me to be able to enter deuce our first -- introduce our first panelist, jeffrey rosen from the university school of law. i think among all of the people who have written and talked about the significance of surveillance, the human body, and privacy, there's probably no person whose written as broadly and as thoughtfully nor as with keen insight to what the direction the law might take us than professor rosen. he is the legal columnist for the new republic, a frequent contributor to the "new york times," and did a piece, in fact, in the "new york times" magazine after he spent time in london looking at surveillance

cameras there. several important books, but as i said, this ability to on the one hand understand the broad significance of these types of technologies and at the same time, think how the courts and even particular judges and justices might assess this within our legal framework manges us very fortunate to have with us today jeffrey rosen. >> thank you so much, mark, for those kind words. much of what i learned about the unconstitutionality of the body scanners has come from mark and epic's path breaking briefs and work, and i'm delighted to spend a few mints this morning evaluating the constitutional arguments for and against the body scanners. i have initially concluded that l it's not a knock-down case, there's a strong argument that the scanners are violations of the 4th amendment that protects

the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects without unreasonable searches, and the body scanners needilyless invade privacy and also they are ineffective. other than that, they are great machines, but those two aspects of the scanners the fact they could be designed in ways to protect privacy and that they don't work makes them constitutional unrepublicanble. it's possible as you mentioned this morning to design scanners that provide just as much security without invading privacy. what's remarkable about this is the government knew this eight years ago. that was the time when official at orlando international airport tested the scanner machines at the current uproar, and the designers of the scanners at the laboratories offered the government a simple choice. blob machines orke