elements of that effort. i think that when people find out about the efforts of the buffalo soldiers, they appreciate more about how we became a great nation, and all of this happened right after the civil war right up until the end of the 20th century. >> many of your titles, all of them are biographies. they tell stories about people. why are you attracted to people stories? >> i think that people stories are important because most people don't envision black americans doing things that everyone else does. when you see their stories, which are just like anyone else's story, you get an idea of our common humanity and understanding that these are fellow citizens. they are not exotic creatures. they are fellow citizens and

trying to do the same things to help make this a great nation. >> your hope is obviously to influence individual young people. who is the biggest influence on you? >> i would have to say in so many ways, jackie robinson. i was a baseball fan when i was a kid. jackie robinson was also a role model in other ways. my mom always pointed out that he was very intelligent and articulate. he went to ucla. he ended up going to do ucla. >> you are on the campus of usc. >> we won't get excited about that. so much of what he did with his life was an example. after his sports career, he became a businessman. a very successful businessman. he pointed out things and with regard to economics that black americans needed to know about. he was very -- very much a wall model and mentor in many of the

aspects of his life. >> that's call from our viewing audience is lisa in nashville. caller: thank you for taking my call. i love c-span 2 and "book tv." mr. kareem abdul-jabbar, it is such an honor to talk you into here about the book you have written. i knew you were an author, but i did not realize how many books you have written. what was the title of your first book and how do you decide on the subjects of iraq's? >> the title of my first book was a giant steps. it is my biography. i'm a pretty tall person, i take long steps. that's how i got the title of my book. but i choose my subject matter with regards to how to impact people and explain things about american life that a lot of people are not really aware of.

>> raymond is your partner on books. how does your partnership were? >> bremen and i worked together in great ways. -- we sit down and work together and defined areas that we want to touch on. i will give him notes, and he will write some of the things that i want to say. if he has captured my voice on it, then we go back and forth. i rewrite things to give him things to edit and vice versa. >> is writing easy for you or is it a real labor? >> writing is a labor for everybody. you have to really have a real set purpose to be a writer. the longer i do it, the easier it gets. >> next question for you is from jane and calabasas, california. i'm sorry, first jane in new

york city. >> that afternoon. i appreciate you. you raised the question of of only one woman being in the book. you did not answer that question and i would like to revisit it. my concern is that there is only one woman. there are several women inventors. why out of all african american inventors fair, white is there only one -- why is there only one -- and all only one -- and all the ones we did during black history month, okay, joy, thanks. >> the ones that we were able to work fine, -- the ones we were

able to find, of course, there could be a book on women inventors. all the other ones we thought were significant and we didn't want to exclude women. so we made sure that we had our women's invention. the woman whose future. >> you are also very involved in education, which is a big effort to get science technology and math and engineering and the like. is this in concert without ever? >> yes, i think that is a fact that all the people that are heroes in this book, they are mathematicians and engineers and, a chemist and other people involved in science. it really is a key issue in what is talked about with regard to

education. so many young people don't understand that those subjects are the ones that will be the key for us having a job in the 21st century. it will be very technologically oriented with regard to the positioning for good jobs. people with good math and science backgrounds will be able to find jobs in many areas, and that is a key issue for any young people who are thinking about going to college and trying to pursue higher education and. >> it is time for jane now in calabasas. >> did you attend a catholic high school in new york city? >> yes, i did. i attended an academy. it is closed now, but i graduated in 1965. >> are you so they're? >> didn't have an influence on

you? >> i was wondering why the question. >> my high school definitely had an influence on me. it helped me understand what the fundamentals are and foundations of education. i know a lot of my friends went to school where they could take shop and stuff like that. you could not do it at my school. everything was academically oriented. >> julie in birmingham, alabama. probably the last. caller: hello? >> yes, go ahead, please. to . caller: julie, are you there? to yes, i am there be not. caller: i think that your book is a wonderful thing. it is a great idea. the reasons behind it are very

important, and i just wanted to say thank you for writing the book. >> thank you very much. i hope you enjoy it, and i hope you get a chance to talk to your friends and let them know that there are some great types of information in here for young people and what the deal with. >> that was a nice way to end our segment with kareem abdul-jabbar. or is the book. "what color is my world: the lost history of african-american inventors." as we closer, you just accepted a request from secretary clinton to be an ambassador, cultural ambassador. he just started that. what is the job going to be? >> the job entails me going and speaking to people, selects -- select groups in young countries and emphasizing the value of education and giving them an insight into what life in america is all about. >> have you done any chance you? >> i have done a trip to brazil. it went very well. i had a great time. i had great interactions with the people that i met with.

>> thank you for interacting with the c-span audience on "book tv." we appreciate learning more about your writing career. >> thank you very much. thank you for having me. >> as we continue with the "los angeles times" book fair, there are new authors that are featured .. ..

and people out there will be guiding both them and you toward wherever signing area seven is. >> at think we should rename it. fifty-one. >> a little bit easier to find. maybe not so dangerous. anyway, the title of the panel is surveillance and secrets. and just going to briefly introduce each of these terrific riders and then ask them to speak about their own books for a few minutes. and we will have a discussion. outside the open it to you fairly early on because there will be a ton of questions about these subjects which touch all of those very, sort of,

immediately. the set down the and we have lori andrews. she is a professor of law at the illinois institute of technology . she has been a visiting professor at princeton. she is an expert on biotechnologies, the author of the clone a inch. much of what she has written has been about the legal implications of genetics, science, and research. her new book, i know who you are and saw what you did. [laughter] -- >> great title. >> of very scary read about the information that we give away about ourselves without even thinking about it every time we

go on the internet or log on to facebook or even just go to a website and not even buy something, but research something. it really does feel like my wife said to me when she saw me reading it the other night, this is as bad as i think. since what they found out, i said, it seems to be way, way worse than you can imagine. [laughter] sitting next to her is michael schirmer whose new book is called the leading brand -- to be believing brain, which is basically a study of how we come to believe some of the things we do believe and how those beliefs mutate. michael is a specialist in crazy thinking.

[laughter] he took a degree in psychology, a detail i did not know until i read about it this morning. he was a competitive cyclist and even has a medical ailment named after him. he's the editor and crete to the creator of the sceptic magazine and the author of many books. i know because i've been on a panel with him before. he's one of the most brilliant and entertaining panelists i've ever encountered in all the time i've been doing this. so michael has something to live up to. [laughter] here we have any jacobson whose first book, and ethical piece of research about area 51,

that huge piece of edwards air force base up in the nevada desert that the government still i think sometimes tries to say does not even exist where the above ground nuclear testings were going on through the '40's and 50's's and where various high-tech surveillance, the jets, the stealth bomber, before that the black bird was developed there, right? and of course it is the sort of locus in popular mythology of the place where the aliens were taken by the government when they landed in the late 1940's. if you all remember the film independent state, the nasty creatures that come from the

spaceship's, there being probed and investigated in what presumably is area 51. so anyway, i'll just ask each in turn to talk about their book a little bit starting with you. >> well, what did you reveal about yourself in the past 24 hours on line? did you post drunken pictures from last night? did you like a certain author you saw yesterday? did you apply for a job that your current employer does not know about? well, amazingly everything that we're doing on the web is being tracked by data alligators in one form or another. sometimes it, where a favorite band is playing. other times it may be used to disadvantage you. so google routinely search is g mail to craft ads. so if i e-mail a friend and say, i'm getting a divorce, they have

that information. if i google search a medical condition they have that information. if i search for guitars to buy, well, it turns out if i have done that and then i go to a credit card website there will use that information. if they think i'm about to get divorced or am in a band, and we know that divorcees and members of, you know, i rise rock bands are more likely to renege on their credit-card, the offer me a lower limit without giving me the chance to correct that. and so in my book i look at how that's occurring and what we can do about it. 2,205th anniversary of the u.s. constitution. so i bring up issues about why is it that our offline rights are more protected than our on-line rights and what will be need online to protect privacy and freedom association and right to a fair trial?

because some jurors are not actually posting the facts of the case on facebook, in one case a criminal case, and asking their friends to the upper down on whether they should fry the guy. those are some of the things i talk about. >> michael. >> so my book is based on what i do for a living which is published sceptic magazine, science based magazine in california that investigate claims of paranormal pseudoscience fringe groups and cults and claims of all time. unless you been abducted by aliens and then in area 51 for the past few decades universal lot of it out there, nonsense. some people call us debunkers, but they're is a lot of bunk. it's our job to debunk it. more importantly try and understand why people believe those things culprit things. so the short answer why people believe weird things is because

we have to believe things, and weird things are a subset of things. we are not good at discriminating between correct and weird or incorrect. as a matter of course the whole cluster of cognitive diocese that help reinforce our beliefs as troops turn out to be very powerful. you're not objective, rational reason there's. we're not the embodiment of the enlightenment idea of rationally calculating human being. we aren't like that at all. the reason we need sciences because it is still the best system we have for getting at what we think israel in terms of not just what i think, but what you can go out and check and run the experiment in the same way in check the data as well as i can i might be biased and you might be biased, but there is some other black double in value in debunking our idea. the competitive nature of

science is what gives us confidence that there is some hope to figure out the way the world actually is. surveillance and secrets, the closest thing might chapter on conspiracy theories. the reason in part, they're are secrets. governments do conspired to do all sorts of things, not just governments, everybody. whenever two or more people get together to talk about what they're going to do that's technically by definition a conspiracy. that happens all the time. so it's not unusual or unreasonable to be suspicious in thinking that there might be people conspiring against you. the problem is, how do we know which are true and which aren't. some are. lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy. there was a conspiracy to decapitate the entire link in cabinet. watergate was a conspiracy.

here's a clue, the most powerful administration on the planet could not even break into a hotel room. the idea that they can run a world economy like the alumni the, 12 guys in london running the economy and doing a crappy job of it. i sort of go through a bologna detection kit of conspiracy detection. the more people that are involved the less likely the theory is to be true. two reasons. most people aren't confident and most people can't keep their mouths shut. the most it -- more people you have involved the more leakage and bumbling and fumbling your way through. the more elements that have to be involved, the have to come together it's just the right time it's just the right place perfectly, the less likely anyone will be able to do that. the bigger in grander the conspiracy is the less likely it is to be true. most involve very specific, target things.

conspire to collude about the price of a product or control some little market or spy on some particular government agency that we are not sure -- those are more likely to be true then global dominance of the new world order to build a highway that goes through the entire north american and south american continent and they're building concentration camps to put americans and in places that are invisible. the more grandiose the less likely it is to be true. so the fundamental principle of science, the null hypothesis, your hypothesis is not true. this is our assumption. whenever your idea, it's not true until you prove otherwise. we have to do that because most of india's people have are not true. i have the cure for cancer. 10,000 of these.

99 percent and not true. the fda just passed to start off with that. your cure for cancer is not true . you have the studies in controlled experiments, then we will consider. that's the way i think we should apply to everything. you're crazy idea might be true, but probably not. go ahead and give us your best shot. >> what a great panel to be on. secret and surveillance. there is certainly in my opinion no greater place where secrets and surveillance me, and that is at area 51, which is located in the nevada desert about 75 miles north of las vegas. yes, you are right, the government has never officially admitted that area 51 exists, although it certainly does. i assure you it does. i interview 74 men for my book. they're stories are in my book, and they all worked and lived

there for extended times. it worked for the cia, airforce, atomic energy commission, department of defense and are living, breathing human. i did not come across any aliens when i was researching my book, but i did come across some very, very strange, dark ideas about conspiracies and why they might assessed. i have a couple chapters which i write about black propaganda. area 51 is tied to ufo's for a very good reason. the surveillance that was developed their starting in the 50's, starting in 1951 surrounds us today. when you read, as you may have last month, when president obama on valentine's day gave the faa $63 billion to revamp the rules of the sky and made, and a very secret way, room for what is going to be 30,000 drones flying

overhead by 2014. that traces back to area 51. that is where we first began developing drones, the cia. many people think i'm part of the cia. i'm not. that is where we developed drones. very interesting, in 1960 they could go mocks three. this is astounding that the still holds the record for speed if you believe that it still holds the record for speed the government tells you it holds the record for speed. 2,300 miles-per-hour, drones in 1962 out in the nevada desert. that is some very serious advanced technology. people often ask me what i think is going on now, what kind of drones' they're coming up with,i can only imagine. i know that to be on the panel with these two interesting authors, you know, all of our ideas kind of meat and merge in this idea of secrets, surveillance.

for me to write about really the military and has been nuys, elements of surveillance, it's fascinating that the private sector and the military sector, people see now how they merge with a look at drone stay. of course this goes back, you know, to the 1950's when it all began out there in area 51. i love answering questions on this. >> i wanted to ask you -- i just want to play devil's advocate for a moment here with your book. hey, you know, if i go on amazon and amazon remembered that i was looking for a novel by, i don't know, he as michaels and suggests he might want to try been opry. isn't that just a kind of furtherance of the excellence of capitalism, isn't that something that we should all be applauding

? what was it that kind of first really kind of spooky about the net and what prompted you to ride a different kind of book than the ones you have written before? >> you're totally right that these tracking technologies started with amazon. remembering my credit card number, remembering what i like to, which is a real benefit to me, but then it got a little wild and terms of the type of targeting they did. imagine you're a 13 year-old girl and your feeling fat. you put in, you know, i'm interested in weight loss or something on google. now every place you go, movie time, feeling fat, you should take this. it's sort of psychologically harmful but also can be financially harmful, socially harmful. google admitted in 2010 that

when young people were saying on a google chat room, you know, i'm thinking of committing suicide using x chemical an ad appeared to the same time now to for one x chemical. there's something about it that gets to be creepy. you may have all followed the girls like me application. nothing illegal or wrong, but what it did is if you were in a bar you could see pictures from the facebook pages of women. a sense, you know, 13 year-old can go on facebook , young people really were, you can click on it and find their whole page if they had a public page. it just is like stalker had been . one woman's rape her found her through tokyo. my thought is you should at least be asked. amazons and said you want to your remember

. average of 14 books. i love dictionary dot com. it puts 233 tracking mechanisms on my computer without tracking. >> michael, and one way there is a common ground between the three of you and this idea, the interior world, the individual in habits supposed reality, whenever we mean by that, which is kind of out there, and then this nebulous area where the virtual world belief system act on them both and the days between the two, between what we mean by the real and what we mean by our own personal consciousness in ways that can come to seem

manipulative. >> so that is why i mention science. it helps us get out of our own skin in terms of the competitive nature of it. if i don't identify my own cognitive by cs and slant on the data that i put somebody else will be motivated to do so because they can actually gained career advantages are whenever by debunking my ideas. that's the idea of peer review. it's not perfect because there is the problem of collective ignorance for people collectively think that everybody else thinks x even though i personally don't think so. i think you think so and therefore i don't want to stand up too much so i pretend like i do and you think the same pretty soon the whole room is actually thinking one thing but saying something different. we know how that works psychologically. the three matching lines. four out of five people, they

all identify the other line, the obviously incorrect line 65% of the time the subject will go along. there's a whole series of these readings, literary criticism, tasting wine. if the subject things everyone else in the room lights the vinegar there will go, yes, and so rich even though they don't really think that. this goes a long way to explaining how totalitarian regimes can last as long as they do even though most people in the country don't really believe the line. dick think everyone else does and have to send the signal socially -- they think everyone else does and have to send a signal socially that they do to. a party meeting in moscow under stalin where he got some award on his birthday or something. they gave him a standing ovation . no one dare sit down. finally after 13 minutes some

guy stopped clapping. he was promptly arrested. this is how that -- this is the problem. there is no good solution. i call that belief dependent realism. reality is dependent on relief -- belief in the only hope we have a some kind of check and balance which is what science provides, not perfectly but better than nothing. >> in a way what lowry's book says is that, you know, you could not elect a totalitarian regime in america, the whole ideology of american democracy is so powerful that it could never happen, but in a way this defacto capitalist form of totalitarianism has happened to the internet which is extraordinary. we have given away this stuff. >> one of my favorite quotes is from a security analyst to said, think about if the government

tried to get this information that we post on facebook or google. you know, the most intimate information, political belief, sexual preference, where we are various points in time, what we like and don't like about our life, family, boss. if the government tried to get it it would take money, lawyers and might even take guns. yet we posted, you know, freely. 93 percent of the time when the government asks google for that information they cough up. some people have been tried entirely based upon their google searches. heaven forbid, like my sister should disappear because i have written three mysteries and google search date rape drugs, that death of -- depth of lakesr group poison. if i'd taken away in cuffs i didn't do it. >> it's also important to remember that it was the apartment of defense that

created the internet during the vietnam era it was the advanced research projects agency, now known as barbara. when you looked at were a lot of the finances coming from it's certainly not necessarily with google, but general atomics, the people that are creating and learning about these informations systems and providing them in the private sector, they're funded over here by places like darpa. there is an interplay. on the subject of a totalitarian regime, it is important to remember that area 51 the reason why surveillance was born, and it was born there in peacetime, peacetime overhead surveillance equals area 51. that was to track essentially the soviet union. the whole idea of government surveillance is so that you don't know what's going on, and that is the underlying premise that i find fascinating when people look talking about the internet because there could not be more of a conflict of

interest of giving your information out and at the same time trying to remain private. i just love looking back because i think it's interesting to look forward. one of the earliest drones that the cia created and this was in 1971 and i saw this, little version of this called the insect of softer. it was designed to look like a dragonfly. it beat the wings and it was filled with a thimbleful of gasoline. that was then. of course now we have hummingbird drones. much more realistic looking. we go from the internet tough what is outside your window looking at you. >> and your pocket. you know, a perfect situation for surveillance. and iphone, there are applications that people down love that seem innocuous. if i'm watching the good life on tv it remotely activates my

phone and can tell what i'm watching. puts me in a chat room with other people watching that. ads come on. all this. you don't realize that by remote activation of your microphone and also collects data about things like, dishy in a restaurant, at home, have sex with someone of the same sex are opposite . very technologies can be used to spy on us. a high school in philadelphia give laptops all of their students and did not tell the students or parents that the web kemp could be turned on from the school. the school tech people took tens of thousands of photos of both the teachers and students. only supposed to be used if your laptop was stolen, but think about high-school students, open in their bedroom coming out of the shower, friends over, during who knows what. yet that, you know, no one was

prosecuted for that. it only came to light when one kid was called and, and the principals showed him a picture taken of him in his bedroom. he was shocked. said you're using illegal drugs. he looked at what was in his hand and it was mike and i can be. a warning about the actual technology used, what you -- google collects information when you have turned the gps often iphone. looking at the 9-0 supreme court decision about how gps tracking can be an invasion of privacy because it tells things like whether you have gone to a synagogue or a church or whether you're at an aids treatment center or abortion clinic. you can't find that out through gps. we may be our own worst enemy in terms of what we buy in terms of applications and so forth. >> in your book the details that make it so concrete for me was

the school story with a send out the computers. the girl who notices that the computer, the light is blinking after. she thinks, why is it doing that. >> yes. so now i have a posted on the laptop camera in my hotel room. >> in principle why couldn't you just do that across the board? if you get ads on amazon ignore them. to what i do every time a guy in a pickup truck pulls up next to me listening to rush, roll up the window. >> most of us don't know it's occurring. >> change the channel. >> but it's not a matter of changing the channel when this is on the back and so that when my web searches and used without my knowing it in terms of whether i get a credit card or not. so under the fair credit reporting act if the credit rating agency said something bad

about me i would have a right to correct it. if however the credit-card agency thinks because i, you know, looked up things on suicide for a novel that i'm likely to commit suicide after running a public bill and they make these decisions, i can't change the channel because i don't know i'm on it. >> what we're talking about is the difference between what the cia would call him it corset. human intelligence or electronic intelligence were signals intelligence. again, using the note to pat -- the analogy of espionage the reason we created surveillance platforms in the first place is to spy on the russians because the iron curtain was so difficult to penetrate that the human intelligence, the spies on the ground were unable to deliver that information to the cia. they so desperately needed it to advise the president to make, you know, decisions on national

security. along came the idea. i right in my book, the precursor to all of that took place at area 51. the first nsa agents. they say it used to be a dirty word. people at that upper echelon of government did not want to be looking at signals intelligence and electronic intelligence. it was foreign and to scientific. they liked the idea of men on the ground with the cloak and dagger aspect. see how far we have come and you can certainly see how much easier and how much less expensive it is to have eyes in the sky. suddenly the stakes are a lot lower for the united states. the predator. fighting in entire war with the drone with a few missiles on it. >> you get into that. in a very concrete way the issue of what they were actually

trying to produce an area 51 all looks like, why wouldn't we want that in one way. then there is the other side, well, once you open that door we certainly did and i wonder whether we can actually close pandora's box now. i know you are appealing for the constitution about the way the nets should operate, but do you really think that that can -- isn't that pie in the sky, that hope? >> constantly working on hopeless causes. seventeen years trying to get a genetic discrimination bill passed in congress which ultimately happened. i think the fact that in your we do -- there are more protections. you can find out what companies know about you and an austrian law student wrote to facebook

and requested information and get a pds with 1500 files. you have certain rights to collect. the big issue, whether some, this being capitalist countries, a market economy, whether some of it will come along and create some more privacy enhancing technology. for example, some people are working on digital tax in those so that they self-destruct after two years so that my law students in chicago who i don't know why they think is a great idea, drunken st. patrick's day green river froze in chicago wouldn't exist when they went out to the job market. >> it would suddenly behoove the department of defense to have that technology because when our drone recently went down over iran the sentinel, our

top-secret stealth drone developed at area 51 and the iranians get ahold of it, it did not self-destruct. the first people they invited to come look at it with the chinese someone asked me, well, reverse engineering is difficult. well, that's not true. my kids do it with light goes all the time. reverse engineering is the way to find how something works, and that's a big part of area 51 and also a big part of why they call all of this a race and not a standstill. as things move forward and people are in a race the technology cumulative. >> i'm sure that lots of you're going to have questions. if we can get ready for that part of this panel. if people would step forward to the microphone. >> an example of a camera spy run by the government that is

very invasive. a red light camera at wilshire and the beverly hills hotel that if you were going east on wilshire and turn right on the red light, there's no street, just a driveway into the hotel, off $4,709 ticket. why do you suppose they put it there? because anybody going to the beverly hills hotel has money and don't live around here so that won't fight the ticket. >> with a live around here and they're with someone they should not be. >> and the high-video. you could definitely see. that would be an example. >> that could some questions going. >> i have two different e-mail addresses with two different domain names. i'm wondering if i send myself and e-mail talking about islamic jihad and permanent where warfare how long it would be before i get an answer from some

government agency. >> well, the department of homeland security does have a group of 350 words that they search. i talk to us some of them in my book because some of them are pretty innocuous, pork, vaccine, even the term social media. if the l.a. times promoted this in any way talking about social media it would be picked up. maybe that's why conspiracy's fail so much. they have created a lot of information which also they did with the early surveillance in the cold war. at a friend's father worked in that program and told me all about the naked russian women on the tops of apartment building sunbathing that he has pictures of. you get a lot of stuff that may not actually be what you can most use. >> this did not dissolve after five minutes. [laughter]

>> from my understanding from the different folks in the cna that i use the sources, most of the words they're looking for are coated because the coach art, you know, somebody isn't going to say thermonuclear weapon. it's more like popeye resulting. there actually were -- an interesting legal opinion because drug dealers, they smartened up and are not carrying drugs in a jag wire or maserati but they're using a gray honda. so cops from florida to pennsylvania stopped every gray honda because there were drug lords now using normal cars. the judges finally said, you cannot have a rule that something is suspiciously normal people using the word pork for some incredible reason like could you pick this up by the

store on the way home gets swept in has potential funders a long with people who are actual offenders. >> a fascinating panel. i have a dozen questions. i agree that you could term the data collection that goes on every day as insidious, but if we were to actually care about it with debt not be paranoia? do we actually think that the government really cares about all these little things that populate our lives? >> my concern is actually less the government then social institutions. fascinating that no 75% of employers require their human resource people to look at your online profile . one-third of employers say they

don't hire someone if they have a drink in their hand on facebook, even an innocent one glass at a wedding . as a big deal things to me because it's not like something i can knowingly avoid if i don't realize that going on. i'm more concerned about people being disadvantaged. do we really want -- right now if you play college sports they're starting to require that athletes -- if you think social networks are valuable and all should they be, you know, constantly monitored for signs of bad behavior? right now if women in a custody case post anything sexy on their facebook page they lose custody of their child. that shouldn't be. that doesn't relate to their ability to mother. those are the concerns, private institutions and court use. i would change that.

>> is there a point at which caring becomes bothering? >> strong libertarian leanings of liking privacy. i don't like the idea of government spying on us, but evil happens in secrecy. facebook, this is a good thing. everyone has a camera, it's harder for governments to pilaf violence against citizens which in the long history of civilization is the norm . we are the exception in america. government normally suppress people using different tools in secret. so i like that aspect. >> go ahead. >> it's an interesting question. from the standpoint of looking at the military and government, most of the surveillance project they're working on or four were fighting, be they defensive or offensive. the average person is absolutely not important to them as the

gentleman pointed out. however, it does create technology that as you're writing about can be used for those purposes. >> i just finished a book that painted a very detailed and explicit picture about how certain groups in this country are immune from the wall. i listened to progress is with intelligent and exclusive analysis of what is being done to us. i listened to the news where in tennessee they're going to balance out religion with science on an equal basis. it seems to me that while as middle class you from los angeles and not about to go out and commit domestic terrorism, it seems to me the only model that stance against this is what we are seeing in afghanistan with the taliban and where they're not electronically depend and where they're saying, we ain't going for this.

i put out a website called per daily dot com where i talk about the purposeful paling -- failing a public education. i look at the get those, 44 years after the walkout in east los angeles latino education is worse than ever and no one pays any attention. i go to seminars like this. i finish my question is, would you address yourself to the possibility of domestic terrorism in the not too distant future as the only response to was going on? >> while. [laughter] >> the first part, well, so i'm not sure about the school stuff. in general i guess i would repeat what i said. evil happens in secrecy. there is a trade-off, and there are some benefits to their being surveillance, i guess, in that sense.

i don't know. i wouldn't take conspiracy to far because for the most part governments are incompetent at using that but not 100 percent. i don't know. >> you brought out, you know, twitter and facebook contribution to the arab spring. you might recall, you know, a few days into that egypt, you know, shut off the web. they called the internet service providers. you may think that couldn't possibly happen here, but there is legislation pending to have a director of sever security for the united states that could slow down the internet and homeland security has a proposal to put digital tags where they could keep out other countries from communicating with us or if they did not like what i was saying. >> it would be an argument against allowing that. >> so one of my -- my first rate is the right to connect. i agree that is a way to get

things, you know, done. and i do agree that we need better it educational system. the science is so key to everything here. my heart breaks to see that there are schools in east l.a. where books are actually stamps outdated because things change . i mean, i think that's one of the great things about supporting libraries and books. >> solution is better technology , free internet access to all students everywhere instantly. [applause] >> i'm going to disagree with the idea that that television does not rely on contemporary electronics because they do. mahomet auto was the first taliban commander killed by the u.s. military. the way they tracked him was by himself on. there was also interesting, to bring in around to surveillance, he was the first killed in

afghanistan by a drone, although it was reported for several years that it was an air strike because back in 2002 no one in this room, including me, knew that we had drones that were equipped with missiles. we believed -- the general population believed at that point that there were just still lies in the sky >> thanks for having such a cool interesting and important magazine, first of all. looking at subjects or issues in the magazine, has there ever been anything you looked at, paranormal were just interesting that you could not really debunk and thought it was intriguing that we might not have heard about? >> lady got out. [laughter] no explanation for that. [laughter] sorry. [laughter] it's a good question. there is an actual serious answer. probably most of the stuff

related to altered states of consciousness or explaining consciousness. there is a little -- we know a lot about the brain but little compared to what we need to know. most of the great mysteries involving that are still out there. the origins of the universe, why should there be something instead of nothing. we don't have answers to that, those kinds of questions. there are a few of these conspiracy theories. they're not going to lead us into area 51 with cameras to find out what's going on. maybe someday we will know, but there are certain things that will remain open. there's a skeptical principle. the fact that i recant explain it doesn't mean that it is in support of your pet theory. ufo just means unidentified. that's all it means. it just means i don't know what it was a three in the morning in a former boss field the fact that i don't know doesn't mean it's extraterrestrial.

it just means we don't know. it's our principal for anyone to grass because a brain is a vacuum just like maj. we have to fill it with an answer. >> or on jump in and say we do know what it was and it was a spy plane but no one can know that because that's a secret platform . will just go along with terry, we being the cia, that it is actually a ufo . the propaganda of that idea works for itself. let the people think it's x because then they won't know about why. >> this gentleman. >> i recently saw someone speak about area 51 supposedly according to ham the cia is training and iranian terrorist.

he said definitely reliable sources about it. can you comment on it? also if you want to find out more about it he wrote on line about it, an extensive article. he says this obviously. [inaudible] >> i could not quite hear the question. [inaudible] says -- and i saw him on television speak about it extensively that the cia is turning an iranian group, a terrorist group in terrorist activities in area 51. >> i'm going to definitely go home and read the new yorker block. >> i saw it. >> i mean, we have in the past trained -- i do know for a factory trained in vietnam in

area 51. soldiers from south vietnam. the equipment, put it on the her achievement trail. having foreign folks come and train. >> illegal according to u.s. law. terrorist group hamas terrorist activities. >> that i don't know about. >> it's definitely. [laughter] >> he must be right. [laughter] >> he said he has reliable sources. >> i love your buck. i read it covered a cover. >> it's coming out in paperback next week. >> i want our back. >> my dad worked on the youtube. one question i had from your book was from the walls well crass .

>> contents of the one. >> i don't want to give away the best part of the book. the language, the alphabet found by the kraft put away because of the concern that the american population would go nuts if they learned the soviets could get that far into the united states with this type of technology. can you describe what must have been a rubber or something? a disk type object. how were they able to get that craft over here? >> well, you might just preface that question by answer to that question by telling about roswell. >> area 51 has always been linked to the conspiracy theory about roswell. in the last seven pages of my book i write about what a source told me about what that is and how it links up. as for the riding mysore's who handled this

round shaped disk that was used as a means of black propaganda , that's how he described it. but i always love hearing michael talk about this topic. this is his area of expertise, black propaganda and how it works. we differ a little bit on the idea of how it actually has an effect on american pop culture. michael. >> in the late 1950's a ufo group summarized all the great cases of the last half century. the most important ufo sightings it was like the top 500 roswell wasn't even on the list. it did not become the roswell incident until the 1980's when nbc made them made for television movie about the roswell incident. then the eyewitnesses started coming out. i remember where i s