data in the cloud. the question is, given the willingness of intermediaries -- companies like google and facebook and such -- to voluntarily turn over data to the government, how meaningful is ecpa reform, and what can we do about it? does anybody want to take that? [laughter] >> i've talked about it. [laughter] >> as a nonlawyer, i can take a stab at it which is to say, you know, i think that part of what we've been talking about on this panel is that legal solutions are not really the only solutions in place or that are in our tool kit with the ever-shifting sans of surveillance and privacy online, right? from where i sit, i see very little hope in reform for not just ecpa but also other existing privacy legislation. partly because it's such a complicated issue, and it's so

entrenched, and lobbying is really powerful. and exactly as the questioner kind of implied, that, you know, corporations can and will do what they want. you know, given a set of circumstances. so they may, in fact, turn over data if that is in their best interests. if that doesn't interfere with their bottom line, for example. so, you know, for me -- and we can talk about this later because i do, actually, want to hear what peter has to say -- i think we have to think broadly about how we engage in this issue and where we engage and what kind of long-term struggle we want to commit to to make things better. peter? >> yeah. um, yeah, i'm not going to speak against the power of some, you know, really interesting congresspersons to force some change by the corporations. representative markey just sent letters to the major

telecommunications providers asking about their assistance to law enforcement, and he got back some very revealing responses from every major u.s. telecom showing their 1.3 million requests for user data in 2011. that was, you know, two years ago. think about what it's like now. so these weren't voluntarily given, but this was a very effective action by a congressman, and it set a precedent. now we've got transparency reports, and i really suggest you look at these from google, microsoft, twitter, others -- >> what is in those transparency reports? what do they show in those transparency reports? >> they differ a little bit, which is good. we're still working out the formula. the basic data is number of requests, thattistics, aggregated requests for user data, different type of data from your basic sub viber information to your content, your location. >> i just want to jump in there. so he's talking about reports

that are produced by companies voluntarily -- google, facebook -- that say how many times the government has come to them and said i want to see user data. go on. >> yeah. their policy is for complying with those requests, for processing those requests, you know, who it goes to, what team of lawyers, how it's translated. you know, these are requests often from foreign be -- from foreign governments and how many they complied with and how many they rejected and on what basis. ..

government released their own data. wicked magic and for the corporations say but it's a wonder they been responsive. we are pushing telecoms to achieve their own transparency reports voluntarily. >> what i'm going to ask jonathan to do is talk about sort of, because i don't want to run out of time, what should we be doing? can you respond to what he said earlier but what is the take away for people in this room? we all have heard what i hope is terrifying examples of government surveillance and privacy invasion by corporations and others to work together, what do we do about this? and i'm afraid it's going to be -- the question i will be able to get to but i want to go down the line and hear from each of the panelists. all right, we get it, it's terrible. what do we do about it? >> i'll start with the question and transition -- >> you've got to talk into the microphone.

>> okay. so first i wanted, and i'm cheating a little bit. i promise i'm wearing my tech at. i will wear my luck that for a second. it would work a substantive change in the laws of the would be heightened judicial preclearance requirement, the law enforcement agency requesting user information would have to make a greater showing than they do under the current ecpa statute. so clearly it does provide data protection and i wanted to be clear about that. the second i wanted to make on ecpa was just why reform i finally passed. one reason is companies want their users to feel comfortable in providing their data, and that's one of the reasons why they put together these transparency reports. and so it can be good things that companies, that tech companies are starting to get their act together on lobbying or starting to be very active in washington. they do sometimes fight for their users.

but i do also want to make sure that there's a downside to that, to the extent that companies are willing to fight when it comes to making sure their users have information in control of that information that gets shared with the government. they are a little us, less producer when it comes to giving information control about sharing data with the companies themselves. so, in fact, in the eu right now there are some proposals for something of consumer privacy legislation and u.s. tech companies have taken positions that would undermine the law as it stands. said his initial proposal would have strengthened the law, proposals out of tech companies would actually wind up diminishing the legal protections from where they are now. such as to emphasize, organize tech companies lobbying, good on some information, not so good of others related to security privacy. and then he of the recent -- the

statute is so out of date that actually it's gotten jumped by the constitution. and so if law enforcement agencies think they're going to lose in the court anyways, it becomes a lot easier to agree to a deal on capitol hill. okay, that's all it wanted to say about ecpa. >> you have one minute to say what you think you should do about it. >> one minute. i think the low hanging fruit on the policy on politics site is pushing for transparency. so getting consumer control into law is really tough. you need to get a coalition in many cases are regulated entities to agree, getting data brokers or consumer data aggregators or advertising companies or companies that are in business of providing data processing, all of these to give really easy and comprehensive user information. that's a pretty long-term project. it's a lot easier to say, okay,

at minimum could you just tell people what sorts of stuff you're collecting, how long you keep a for, what your internal processes look like, even with some level of general the. let's start there. i think that's a reasonable place to start, and the particular i would look at legislation pending in california right now that would require some transparency about consumer election data practices. >> what's the name of that bill? >> the name escapes me. >> the right to know in california. i believe rainey right when you blogged about this. if you want to check it out. >> so i think that our whole lot of things we can do. one, you can join aclu if you're not already a member. also joined, give us lots of money. you should know that the fbi has i do know, like 40,000 employees of something and we have like two. [laughter] if were going to fight back against the government which is extremely powerful we need more

money, frankly. so that is one. second, when you to join the aclu and we know you say please click us, click it, okay? really. it makes a difference. so please click the button, and then third, for like much more involved things that you can do, you can get involved at the local level as we talked a lot about meditate brother issues but we haven't talked about little brother. little brother is extremely real. local police are increasingly acting more and more like agencies collecting their own surveillance information about all of us. like license plates readers for example. how many people envision have heard of license plate readers? great, excellent. i hope it's in part of the aclu's work. we have a bill in massachusetts right now which would limit data retention of license plate information. what i'm getting at is you can go to your chief of police in your city or town where you live

and say, what kind of surveillance equipment do you have? what do you guys use what you have license plate readers? when you delete that? write letters to your local newspaper. op-ed in your local newspaper divulging what you learned from your local police department. go to your city council meeting and tell them that you were worried about this stuff. ostensibly we live in a democracy and citizen should be able to control what the police do. so we should exert some of that power and tried to take control of our police departments back from the federal government, which for the past 10 years has been showering departments with the lives of dollars to buy all sorts of surveillance equipment that is then essentially sucked up by the federal government ultimately. so get involved by joining the aclu, giving money to groups, take the action, please click the button. and then get involved at the local level. if you want to learn more about how you can do that, go to my

website, there's a whole lot of information about how you can get involved and please contact me as well if you want to do that. privacy fosc.org/local police. last but not least at all, advocate. advocate, organize, get involved. doesn't matter if it's about union stuff, fighting, antiwar activity but what we saw with occupy wall street is that when you provoke their surveillance beach, it rears its ugly head. surveillance is the secret. so we often don't know what's going on. but when things like occupy wall street have and all of the sudden you see giant surveillance powers airport on the corner in new york, right? provoke the beast. it will elucidate a lot of information about what's going on behind the scenes. agitated system. [applause] >> so, i'm going to say yes to all of the things that have been shared already, but i do want to

focus on a few things that i think are particularly pertinent to the world that i live in. so yes, an education is really important but it's also important to invest in some long-term education and community building, whereby the communities that are most likely to be affected, to be targeted are empowered to know more and do more. so what i mean by that specifically is there are ways in which you can teach people about privacy and countersurveillance, i guess we will call it, and it's reasonable for them to engage in that kind of learning. so what i'm talking about is empowering organizations that are on the front lines of speaking for and serving for commuters, communities of color, immigrant communities, immigrant rights and so forth.

and what needs to happen is those organizations themselves really need to become privacy aware, right, there's currently a huge deficit and how many of our activist organizations and social movements groups use and share information readily and advise their communities and constituents to use and share information. and i think that's an important area that we can improve upon. i think five or six years ago there was an incredible push into philanthropy -- in the philanthropic community to really support the social networking without questioning some of the privacy and surveillance problems that might arise in being part of a networking indication system. we need is to think about that now, and i think the community groups that are closest to the most effective individuals are a great place to start. second to that, and this is just

my personal things that i like to get across is, for people that are using public access, internet, public community -- centers, lease, federal trade commission, national telecommunications and information administration, ferreting communications, state attorneys general office, please stop advising that these users by virtual private networks subscriptions to better protect their activities. it's simply an effective and unreasonable to expect that the person that is unemployed and really desperate to find a job or has been kicked out of housing will be able to do this. so we need to think about, specifically for poor communities better solutions that are the least burdensome on them. and i think that, again, what jonathan has alluded to in terms of privacy by default, including

technologies in public computer centers that are already ready, they already come to you as a user able to filter out some of the problems that we are seeing some of the types of surveillance we are seeing, that is one step towards having a more equitable situation. >> and, peter, what do we do about this? >> seconding all of what has been said, i just want to highlight a couple of things. we've had some success with the freedom of information act. that's a muscle when you deflect constantly. there's some great letter generators on line, reporters for free press has a great guy. data protection that jonathan over to in europe, it's not only your countries are lobbying for the u.s. government is very heavily lobbying, and so that

access will be releasing soon some preliminary e-mails and documents that we have gotten through foia request, freedom of information act request, that reveal the extent of u.s. lobbying, because they realize the interconnectedness of, you know, i visited laws in europe, points of a member state which are copied by latin american countries, countries all over the world, understand that could change the conversation in the u.s. and the u.s. government is lobbying. online campaigns, as i said, we the people, white house tools, pretty fun, and i think most of our groups, we've done some great work in collaboration as campaigns are wanting to look for right now. as far as telecom, i would say

one major security is to update them to upgrade the operating system or often to push these updates rather than forcing you to buy a new phone, and so that's one thing you can push were on the consumer side. also, watching the deregulation process in the u.s. the carriers are trying to say they are no longer, they're no longer obliged to provide access to everyone. that's something that is hurting rural communities right now. so keep a close eye on that, and there's some very specific groups working on those issues. and, of course, talk to your legislators about privacy and get more letters to the telecoms and the tech companies. >> i begin with integrity because it is so essential to who and what you ultimately will become. many of you have a career path in mind that many of you have no idea where you end up.

a few of you may be surprised by where life takes you. i certainly was. and in the end it is not only what we do but how we do it. spink you know i have to start by tweeting this would give me one second. [laughter] i'm a professional so this'll only take a second. when i woke up this morning and started writing my speech i was thinking about my -- [laughter] -- my first month on campus in september when i was a freshman, and the football team went into that season ranked number one in the nation preseason, and there's all this, remember that september when i got here there was all this excitement on campus. and our first game was at wisconsin, and we went up there and we lost our first game, 21-14 and there was this crushing disappointment afterwards. and i would like you to think

about soaring expectation followed by crushing disappointment as a metaphor for your next 20 minutes with me. >> next week and more stories and advice for graduates friday night at eight eastern with administration and state and local officials including fbi director robert mueller and florida governor rick scott, and saturday at 8:30 business leaders including twitter ceo dick cost of low and apple cofounder steve wozniak and find more business speeches online at c-span.org. >> the new america foundation hosted a discussion today on online radicalization. its influence on homegrown extremes in the u.s. live coverage gets underway at 12:15 p.m. eastern on c-span. and at six is an former state department official john brown discusses u.s.-russia relations in washington, d.c. >> now, nasa administer charles bolden speaks at a mars

exploration some of that happened earlier this month. in his remarks, mr. bolton talks about how a manned mission to mars would be a significant step forward in human space exploration. and what congress and the president can do to help achieve that. this is 30 minutes. >> thank you all very much, and i'm excited about getting the word from the next three days. i think you all will have a tremendous time just browsing through the agenda. i want to thank explore mars, inc. and gw space policy institute for allowing me an opportunity to kind of help kick this somewhat off. and i want to thank you all for bring the summit together. interest in sending humans to mars as artemis just mentioned,

i think has never been higher. both from our international counterparts and from a growing number of american commercial space countries, many of whom are also represented at this conference. and, of course, president obama has challenged us to send humans that are either 2030s. for me, it's really interesting because i go back to some of you were around when i first came to nasa in 1980, and i think many of you have heard me say before, when i came to become an astronaut in 1980 from the navy's test center down in maryland, my thought at the time since i've not been a lifelong, to become an astronaut, it was something that came about late in my life after i met the late great dr. ron mcnair, but once i decide i wanted to get into the space program, my vision was i would come to nasa, i would probably spend time at being trained to be a shuttle

astronaut. i would fly one, maybe two missions to space in the shuttle and then our efforts would turn to returning to the moon on the way to mars. that's just what i thought we were going to do. and challenger came along and it forever changed the course of history. i think seriously we know stand on the precipice of a second opportunity to press forward to what i think is man's destiny, and that is to go to another planet. and right now mars is that plant for us in our solar system. so i'm really excited about what you're going to do over these next few days. the original space race, which used to be a game of one on one, has suddenly become a tournament of rivals that looks more like the nba playoffs. the olympics, or the race for the triple crown. and i think that's a good thing. i recently did an interview on bloomberg business, limber government, when i was asked about the space race and the

potential for a race between china and the united states, and i said no, that's not where we are going. the race is already on. and the race right now is among our industry partners. to see who i was going to be the first to give us a commercial capability to take our astronauts to and from low-earth orbit. i'm excited about that race. and it is a robust race right now but we need the support of congress to grant the desires of the president and the 2014 budget to fully funds the commercial crew program so we can be on with it and allow us to spend our time venturing on to mars. competition has always been the engine of american ingenuity and progress, and nasa i think has always been a leader. as i've said many times, a human mission to mars is today the ultimate destination in our solar system for humanity. and it is a priority for nasa. our entire exploration program is aligned to support this goal.

you will hear more about the specific of our plan from some of our senior leaders of our human exploration space technology and our science mission directorate later on today and through the week. i want to set the stage by giving you just an overview of how nasa's overall strategy supports our scientific and human exploration of the red planet. and have the backing we've received from both president and the congress moves the ball forward. as many of you may recall, three years ago president obama paid a visit to the kennedy space center, where he set a goal of sending humans to an asteroid for the first time in history by 2025, and making a crew journey to mars by the 2030s. a few months later, the president signed nasa's 2010 authorization act into law, extending the life of the international space station and committing the nation to foster a growing commercial space industry. all of which freed us, nasa, to

start work on building a next-generation heavy-lift rocket a multipurpose crew vehicle needed to take our astronauts beyond low-earth orbit and into deep space, including a planned mission to mars. if anyone thinks that interest in human spaceflight has diminished, since the end of our shuttle program, let me remind you that last year we received the second highest number of astronaut applications in history, over 6300. less than 20 would make the final cut that will be announced in coming weeks. these astronauts will be among the first to be trained specifically for long duration space flights. last year, we also announced that nasa's scott kelly will undertake a one year mission to the international space station in 2015. that mission will add to our knowledge of the effects of microgravity on bone density, muscle mass, strength, vision and other aspects of human health. this research is essential as we plan for long duration flight to

mars. while nasa has not been immune to the economic downturn and the budget battles that have raised in washington in recent years, we remain central in the presencpresident's strategy of investing in science, technology and innovation as essential to jumpstart our economy and winning the future. the president has supposed fiscal your 2014 budget for nasa a $17.7 billion. this budget ensures the united states will remain the world leader in space exploration and science discovery for years to come. while making critical advances in aerospace and aeronautics to benefit the american people. is a budget that reflects today's fiscal realities and outlines nasa's full spectrum of activities to meet the budget -- the president challenged to send humans to an asteroid in 2025, and mars in the 2030s. this budget makes it clear that the administration remains committed to a vibrant and

coordinated strategy of mars exploration, and continuing america's leadership role in the exploration of the red planet. right now on the international space station, our research is helping us prepare for missions to mars and other deep space destinations such as an asteroid. our activities and experience on the iss are making significant contributions to sending humans to mars. nasa and our international partners are handling on a daily basis challenges that are critical to sending humans to mars. sending humans to mars. hopefully that resonates with what you were thinking about. this includes improving life-support systems and the challenges of maintaining them as well as learning about and handling the effects of microgravity on the human body. including human health and performance. we are also using the iss as a

testbed for technologies and systems under development for mars exploration with humans. our goals include both new game changing robotic missions to mars and a groundbreaking asteroid mission on the way to our ultimate goal of the human martian mission. as you've all probably heard, nasa is developing a first ever mission to identify, capture, and relocate an asteroid. followed by exploration and sampling of the asteroid by astronauts using our human spaceflight assets under development. capturing and redirecting an asteroid will allow us to accomplish multiple goals. first, it takes advantage of the hard work on our deep space technologies that will provide valuable experience and mission planning and operations that are needed for future crew deep space mission, including our planned a visit to mars. second, it will allow our astronauts to internet -- to interact.

and third, it will inform our efforts to prevent an asteroid or other near earth object from colliding with devastating force into our planet. planning and design of this mission has already begun and will continue into this coming summer. leveraging capabilities throughout the agency we plan to use a high-powered -- to run a few, capture and direct a small asteroid into a stable orbit in the lunar vicinity. from their our astronauts will be able to visit and return samples using the orion spacecraft launched into space on the sls rocket. this mission represents an unprecedented technological challenge, raising the bar for human exploration and discoveries, while helping protect our planet and bringing us closer to human mission to one of these mysterious objects. and let me stop for a moment and just, just speak to an issue that seems to be a rising over and over and over.

moon astroid mars are not either or. humans will again return to the lunar surface. there is no question in my mind. it is a matter of resources now and a matter of technological development, and the u.s. has demonstrated that we know how to get to the moon. what we have not demonstrated and what i think everyone in this room, well, most people in this room will concede is that their technological gaps in sending humans to an asteroid and to mars. and so every single moment of our time, and every single dollar of our assets, must be dedicated to developing those technologies that allow us to go beyond low-earth orbit, beyond the moon. unfortunately, in this fiscal time we can't afford to be the leaders in both. and so the president and the congress, most in congress, have decided that we should be the leaders in going places that humans have never been before. and thus we differ on our

astroid strategy that will take us to an asteroid helping us to develop better life-support systems, better propulsion systems and the like that will make it a little bit easier for us to venture on to mars. so the is no either or. humans will one day return to the surface of the moon. our astroid strategy of which this nation is just one piece brings together the best of nasa's science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve the president's goal of a human mission to an asteroid faster and at a lower cost to taxpayers and continuing with business as usual. the astroid strategy is preparing us for mars of journeys with technology development and operational capabilities that are needed for human missions to the red planet. our astroid mission builds off our experience on iss and prepares us for even deeper space exploration by offering a

test environment that is very different than low-earth orbit. this experience exploring and astroid will be critical for future mars journeys. it's worth noting that america's mars exploration program and our track record of successful missions to mars are second to none. the u.s. is still, the u.s. is still, the u.s. is still the only nation that has successfully landed missions on the martian surface. and our investments in mars exploration since fiscal year 2000 total more than $6 billion. ongoing and future missions will continue to improve our understanding of mars, allowing us to make better site selection for future lander missions, and to better understand the mars atmosphere to support precision entry, descent, and landing all while continuing to make scientific discoveries. nine years ago, we landed the

spirit and opportunity rovers on the surface of mars, and we currently have two satellites in mars orbit on serving the planet. last august, after the most harrowing atmospheric entry and landing in history of planetary exploration, the curiosity rover touched down on the martian surface, and is now assessing whether mars was or is today an environment able to support life. the science being conducted on curiosity is also paving the way for a future human mission. in fact, we will soon have radiation data from an instrument on curiosity that will help us better understand and overcome the challenges to human life in the martian environment. on the heels of curiosity, the fiscal year 2014 budget includes funding or another mission to the red planet, continues operations of our rovers and orbiters already there, makes possible the maven missions launched scheduled for this coming november to discover the

martian upper atmosphere, and the launch of the insite lander to launch in 2016. we also have returned to partnership with the europeans, in their program while will be providing the orbiter communications package for their 2016 mission, and for the 2018 mission. over the past year, we have recalibrated our mars science program in order to optimize both what it can achieve scientifically and how it advances human exploration building. as a former astronaut who was flown for missions on the space shuttle, including the 1990 flight to deploy the hubble space telescope, i've learned a scientific discovery and human exploration go hand-in-hand. nasa's vision is to reach new heights and explore the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind.

i believe that unraveling the planetary puzzle about life and climate on mars is essential, is the essential next step in realizing that vision. by better courtney nasa's scientific and human exploration programs, we will achieve our goals of discovery quicker and at less cost to the taxpayer. you have an exciting lineup of presentations and discussions at the summit over the next three days and i look forward to hearing about the findings and recommendations out of this important for them. thanks again for allowing me to be here to help you get started and i look forward to the excitement that all you're going to hav have and look for to lisn in now and then when i can sneak away from office and visit. thanks very much. thank you, artemis. [applause]

>> we have plenty of time for a few questions if you'd like. if anybody wants to come up and go to one of these might makes right here, we still have a few minutes. thank you. spent one never knows and doesn't want to mess with the agenda. >> good morning, general. >> our you doing? >> if one looks at the nasa timeline for return to american spaceflight, it seems a lot of the heavy lifting comes after 2016. what is your interest -- the foundation is being laid for continued and expanded human presence, american human presence in space? >> well, let me to a couple of things. american human presence continues. american human presence in space has been uninterrupted, actually since sometime before the

columbia accident. when we started construction of the international space station and for the first crew members aboard with bill shepherd, sergei kirk along and another crew member, that was the beginning of an unbroken tenure of humans in space. so humans have been in space continuously for the last almost 13 years now. uninterrupted. i think what you're alluding to is the ability of the u.s. to put on as no much in this spacet as i mention in the early part of my prepared remarks, what is critical to ensure that the u.s. will have the capability to put our own folk in space as a 2017 is full funding of the president's budget request for commercial crew. $821 million is what we have requested we feel that that will allow us to continue to work to move on to contracts with one or

more commercial providers and will have an american capability to take action us to the and seven begin in 2017. that is critical. that's a critical first step. we are on schedule, i don't come and you will hear some pretty technical presentations later in this forum where you will hear how we are moving judiciously along the next year, the fall of 2014, when we will launch in an crude version of orion on the delta four. that will provide us with critical data, particularly about reentry of the orion spacecraft to give us some idea about how robust it is, whether it is to robust so that we can make subsequent adjustments down the road. didn't the first combination or integrated flight of orion and sls will occur in 2017. here again let me make a plea to those of you who are here and represent the heavy lifting you do. we don't need 130 metric ton vehicle in 2017. what we need is a 70 metric ton

vehicle that we can put with orion to demonstrate our ability to fly at least a trans lunar mission if you will and back to earth safely, and then moving on to hopefully an asteroid mission in the 2020-2021 timeframe, and then onto mars but what happens if we are forced to go right to 130 metric ton vehicle is that we are perilously on the way to what happened with constellation, where we have a very robust launch vehicle and no money, no assets to develop the other systems that allow us to explore. so we have a very measured, evolving process for developing the vehicles and systems that we need. and i'm hoping that we will be able to work with congress and help them understand that so they find us a probally to continue with that evolving system. >> thank you, general.

>> so i was wonder, what is your opinion on mars, do you think will succeed in colonizing mars by -- [inaudible] >> tell me to i think it's to i think a second what did to i think it's about what to think of was was the inspiration speak with know, mars one. >> mars one, i'm sorry but do you we will colonize by 2023? you know, i don't know. i don't, i don't know what, i don't know what the plan is. i am, i am supportive of anyone who wants to foster the development of the capability to put humans in the martian environment, but i can't, i can't comment on what they're doing or whether plans are. i can tell you that, as i just mentioned, the plan that we have in place, the strategy that we have in place, the mars strategy as supported by the president and funded will have humans at least with nasa in the martian environment in the mid-2030s.

can you all just give your name and the organization you're affiliated with when you ask a question? just the people will no. >> i'm francis and i'm a student. >> thanks very much. >> thank you. >> good morning general. andrew, technology consultant and aerospace engineer. i was wondering, what are your biggest challenges from congress and the current administration, and what areas are you seeing the most pressure to either reduce funding or cut programs? >> i and the administration so there's no question from me. i know what you meant to. because the administration is a big organization. the primary pressure right now or the prime resistance from

congress, actually it may seem like it has nothing to do with exploration but it has everything to do with exploration. and that is sufficient funding for our commercial crew. you know, the road map on which we are presently embarked requires a certain amount of funding for technology development, development of solar electric propulsion, you know, and what we're trying to do is instill competition at every step along the way, engaging interest, academia, international partners, the private industry. the private, the public, if you will, lockheed martin and nasa announced something that i'm really excited about. it's called an exploration design challenge. we announced that i want to say although more than a month ago down at the kennedy space center, where we've opened it up to anyone and we are really focused on school kids. so we are hoping that we will get kids from kindergarten through 12th grade who will submit proposals for systems that can protect astronauts from

radiation when they go into deep space. and where no idea what will come up, but i was at a funky this past weekend where the vice president of lockheed martin mentioned that to date we receive more than 34,000 applications, 34,000 ideas from school kids around the world. not just in the u.s. but around the world. and to me, i think that's really exciting. i think it, it foretells at least, a hopeful future for us when we have had many young school kids you're interested in trying to help make it possible for astronauts to go to deep space. okay? >> thank you. no more questions? >> one more. never get away. one more. that's all right. >> good morning. guess, i'm a transportation engineer and consultant from

philadelphia. my question is, as you're preparing the executive branch is going to change in a few years. what kind of things are you doing and nasa are what types of things is nasa preparing for for that eventual change in administrations? so we can follow through with the road map that we are on right now, knowing that is going to be a political change, where ever it is that the going. and i know that recently there were some capitol hill visits that i participated with, talking about advocacy for sending humans to mars, and i heard from some congressional offices that there are some people on capitol hill trying to think about funding nasa differently, so it's not in annual funding type of procedure, but something more on the lines of how transportation

is funded. what are your thoughts on that, and how does that relate to transferring to a future administration? >> i'm not going to venture into the last question, guys, but i will say what i did my hearing, my confirmation and, i mentioned to the congressman and i mentioned every time i've gone back that there are three things that i promised the president and all of you, the american public, and the congress, and that was that any program we brought forward was going to be affordable, sustainable and realistic. i honestly believe that the programs that you've seen us bring forward right now, what is emergent crew, astroid strategy, human missions to mars, all realistic, very realistic. they are also affordable within the budget framework that we have right now, and they are sustainable if we can come if we can get over this initial hurdle of getting full funding for commercial crew so that, so that

gets out of the picture but i hope everyone understands, you know, commercial crew means nasa is out of the business of owning and operating spacecraft for transportation into low-earth orbit. and it means that once we get to the development period that we're in right now, we a word contracts, and one number industry partners again to provide transportation. that the budget line item that comes off nasa's budget. several years from now you won't see commercial crew in the nasa budget it will be just like today, you don't see anything that says -- that's because it's included in the international space station budget for crew support, crew transportation. am i getting that right? so you know beginning in 2017 you will see us transition to a point where the won't even be a commercial crew line item in there. it will be included in the

international space station budget as crew support. that allows us to progress with the technology development that we are currently funding. we need an increase in the amount of funds that would put towards the technology development. challenges remain in getting the cost of operations on the international space station down. we have done something in the u.s. segment in that we have brought on a non-governmental entity, and so their responsibility, they work under contract. we pa paid him a flat fee and tn they go out and recruit for scientists, engineers, technology developers who want to fly on the international space station. they select the experiments to be fun and then they operate getting them there and overseeing the operation. that is a way we think is, over time, decrease the amount of money that nasa has to pay for standard operations. so they're a number of things they're trying to do. if we can demonstrate to people

that are plan is, in fact, realistic, affordable and sustainable, subsequent administration and subsequent congresses are more likely to live with that. what we have, the biggest hurdle right now in sustainability is to try to get all of us on the same sheet of music in terms of the roadmap. as long as we have people are waiting, the term we used is when us growing up in south carolina was waiting in the cut, as long as there's somebody waiting in the cut on the next administration so they can take us back to nasa doing a human lunar mission, it's all over. we will go back to square one, and my belief is we will have missed the second great opportunity for humanity to go on a deep space and do what humans have wanted to do for hundreds of years, to be quite honest. so it's really important that we all develop, because i know we are not all of one mind.

i can, i can vaguely see some people out there who think that we are fooling around, waiting, you know, to go to mars in the 2030s, that we should be going right now. well, i don't know about you, but i'm not ready. i don't have the capability to do it. nasa doesn't have the technological capability to do that right now, but we think we're on a path that will get us in the 2030s. but that's a path we've got to follow. if we start straying from the path going to an alternative plan where we decided we would go back to the moon and spent a little time, you know, developing the technologies and the citizens we need, we are doomed. we will not get to mars in the 2030s and if ever, to be quite honest. not in your and my lifetime. so that's one man's vision, and as artemis mention, that does not come you know, that terrible alternative does not support my commitment to enable my granddaughters to go to mars.

okay? one last question. yes. >> good morning general. if you can -- why gene commend sos? >> we have need for 70 metric in vehicle and 130 metric tentacle over time. and you know, that's, we are well on the way of doing that and so that's the reason we chose it. when we looked at using atlas and delta, other systems, the number of launches required to support a human mission to mars begin to make it very difficult and decrease the probability of success of those missions that an there will be some people who will talk later about how we happened to get to where we are today. and you know, we'll just see how it goes. unicode you're talking about a thousand nine. falcon nine is not what we need for deep space exploration spend

what i'm saying is just for the launch phase. it's going to cost you a lot more when you could just meet your astronauts in orbit spent you're talking about a totally different strategy. the strategy that we have right now, i think, michelle, are you going to talk about this? are you presenting, or bill? okay. [inaudible] >> okay. wind bill gerstenmaier comes up, the cook is back your, you can ask a variety of people, how did we get where we are today? how did we get to sos, how did we get to the single vehicle as opposed to multiple launches of many vehicles. what you are talking about we've got to be successful in developing in space retooling be posted we're well on the way we think to developing a capability for cryogenic propellant storage. we're not there yet. there's a lot of people who, like what you're proposing, think that this stuff is going to happen overnight.

we have a long way to go and we can't wait until the technology is available, if we want to explore. we could sit back and wait, you know, for a commercial entity like spacex to develop a human rated falcon nine and for someone to develop in space profound and storage depots. we won't get to an asteroid in 2021 and we definitely won't get to mars in the 2030s. in my estimation the that's an opinion of one. and gypsum experts will be here today that i would repost the question to. thank you all very much. [applause] >> more now from the mars exploration summit with a panel of scientists discussing current and future unmanned missions to mars and what those missions are trying to accomplish. this is just over one hour.

>> thank you. now for our less panel, last one of the morning. really exciting when. we have an update, which i think we're all interested to hear what the most recent results from all the various mars missions ours. leadinleaving this discussion io stranger to the mars world, space expiration in general, jim garvin who is currently chief scientist at nasa, he's been amazing number of impressive divisions all around nasa and the space community. and he will lead this discussion. i think you have a all the different discoveries of curiosity, upcoming mission to deny that is going as well as curiosity and serious. soleus engine, jim garvin. -- so ladies and gentlemen, jim garvin up [inaudible] >> i'm just going to give one second opening. the echo is, i feel like i'm at a u2 concert but anyway, a brief

opening. this will be a science update, both looking back at what we do now and looking forward. we have four distinguished panelists. i can attest to you what they have to say will be compelling. we are going to run through their presentations in about a seven to 10 minute presentation per member of the panel, and then we will have questions. so first, religious in which member of our commuting and p5 for the maven mission, a critical step as we move forward for mars but also i must add one of our most distinguished chair people who care to include some of the transitions have gotten us to the program where today. on it personal, thanks for that. he's a professor at university of colorado and associate director. next after him is paul mahaffy, danceable investigator on the service analysis at mars and local payload, return to that mode of exploration for the first time since viking.

not the poll is -- but a return to that mode. he will share with us some of the present findings from the curiosity rover and his experiment in the overall mission which are put into context how we are reaching forward with signs to enable the human exploration of mars. after that, distinguished colleague andrew steely will describe some of his recent observations of the martian materials here on earth, delivered by good old mother nature and implications for the after biological reconnaissance of mars and all these colleagues by the way are experts in astrobiology. and, finally, and not least of course dr dr. michael mayer, usr lead scientist at nasa for mars. he has been to mars and back at least in his mind's eye, i've been told. but michael can fill you in. people talk about the bigger program context of the science of our program as it bridges the gap to the era of human

expression but if i could just have the next slide, i just -- i just wanted to point out the real context for today's panel is stitching together mars as a system, the quest for signs of life, past life come in opening the gateways for human explorers as you heard all morning, and i know lunch is soon, so as we've heard today so far, bridging that gap with signs as the agent of information to help us get there. so without further ado let me turn it over to bruce who can describe his mission here. >> thanks, jim. is a real pleasure to be here today, and to talk about the maven mission t because of it on the panel at least knows i will talk about anybody who will listen. i'm especially interested in the

science behind the humans to mars program. i think pascal and reach this point talk a little bit about and want to talk about some of the science that is going to take place in the meantime. and i want to start with what i think most people will recognize as the overarching question for mars scientifically, is there life today, was their life? certainly mars meets all of the environmental criteria that we have set forth as being necessary to support life. of course, maven isn't about finding life but it's about understanding the context of life. mars is a very complicated environmental system, and that when much like the earth but it's very difficult to ask a question like, is there life, without understand all the different components because any measurement you would make pertinent to live really requires understanding the way that many different processes play into what we see in the

surface and atmosphere today. with mars, we see a lot of evidence that there's been water on the surface, i'm jason mars, on the surface, and the subsurface, and more recent times. and one of the real questions has been what happened to the water, how did that affect the habitability of mars as a planet, habitability by microbes. and in that context we can ask where does the water go, what is the co to go from early mars? two possible outcomes. they can go down into the crust, and we have evidence for water in the crust. with evidence for co2 in the crust, but it can also go up and be lost in space. and one of the big uncertainties in the evolution of the martian environment is what's the relevance and importance of that down in the crust versus up in the space? with evidence that each has happened but i would say we don't understand the extent to which one dominated over the

other comment and if we are trying to understand the context for life, if we are trying to understand the context for habitability we really need to understand this. so with that in mind, maven was designed to explore the upper atmosphere. we look at the upper atmosphere to understand launch into space because it is the conduit through which all the gaps would have to pass as it is leading atmosphere and going to space. this cartoon shows a lot of the different processes by which we think gas can escape to space, and i'm going to go into tremendous detail on each one of these. sorry, guys, you thought you had some time. i'm not going to talk about these. we designed a mission that we think can measure all other things relevant to each of these processes, and also is robust enough that whatever we find out about the mars up her atmosphere we're hoping to characterize it and understand the processes kind it.

lass.. >> we get measurements directly that tell us about the composition, structure, dynamics, energetic state of the upper atmosphere, and then we have instruments that make measurements using remote sensing to take that point, detailed point measurement and extrapolate to global properties. the spacecraft is being built by lockheed martin in south denver,

south of denver. it's a three-axis stabilized spacecraft shown here. for scale, the high gain antenna in the middle is two meters in diameter. the whole spacecraft with the solar panels opened up is about the size of a school bus end to end. the solar panels, the high-gain antenna are fixed, and we communicate with the earth by rotating the whole thing twice a week to point the high gain at the earth. the instruments are either fixed on the spacecraft and, therefore, oriented with respect to the sun, or for those that want to be oriented with respect to the planet, at the bottom we have an articulated payload platform with two-axis gimbleing, and we can orient them to get their proper measurements. the mission starts in six months. what's the date today, the 6th? six months, 12 days and about 2

hours. but the hours may be off. i can't do the crossover from daylight savings time to not. we have a 20-day launch period, november 18th to december 7th. this year we're launching on an atlas 5401 from cape canaveral. we have a ten month ballistic cruise to get to mars. of course, we have the usual slew of trajectory course, change maneuvers enroute to make sure that we're on track. orbit insertion, if we launch on the first day of the launch period, it's on september 22. that shows in the lower left the trajectory after we burn and get into orbit versus if we fail to burn and just sail on by. and i have to point out the one on the lower left is not to scale. the one in the lower right is to scale, and it shows the final mapping orbit relative to the planet. we're in an elliptical orbit that ranges from 120 kilometers to 6,000 kilometers above the

surface. that lets us sample the entire upper atmosphere from the transition to the well mix part of the atmosphere all the way up to the top and is solar wind interaction. the orbit evolves with time due to the forcing from the nonuniform distribution of mass within the planet, and this cartoon on the left shows how the orbit evolves. it allows us to get upstream solar wind measurements in the magnet region. with regard to the solar cycle, we pecked about the report -- we picked about the right time to go to mars to understand these processes. actually, we didn't pick -- nasa did the competition at a time that allowed us to get selected in order to get there at the

right time. the fuller cycle is shown here. we're just about at the peak, and the vertical gray bar shows when maven will get there just after the peak. that's actually the ideal time. it's when you get the most and the most be intense solar storms, and we're very interested in understanding the impact that these solar storms will have on the upper atmosphere structure and on the escape rates. just a couple of pictures. right now the spacecraft is fully assembled. all the hardware that's going to fly except for a couple of solar blankets, mri insulation blanket, is on the spacecraft. it's in environmental testing. here's a couple of photos showing it. on the left it's in the acoustics testing, on the right it's on the shake table. it's gone through everything except thermal vac which is coming up. we shift top cape in about -- to the cape in about three months, and then we have a runup of

about three months to get to the launch pad. the lawn are. vehicle, atlas 5, is essential aassembled. shown here. and my last chart, schedule shown up at the top, it actually runs several years further to the left because we started this in fall of 2003. so we're coming up on ten years in order to get to the launch pad. on the pad it will be ten years. the maven development is on track in its technical development. we're where we need to be. we're on schedule. we are on budget. and equally importantly, all of the science instruments, the spacecraft have the full capability that was intended. so it looks like we'll get to do the science mission that we proposed. and stay tuned, launch period coming up in six months and change. thank you, and i will turn this over to paul mahaffy who's up

next. [applause] >> thanks, bruce. so maven's upcoming curiosity's been on the surface of mars now since august 6th of last year. i expect most of you saw the exciting seven minutes of terror getting down to surface. we've been on the surface and doing really incredible science. it's been a really interesting experience. we went to gayle crater, this 125-kilometer crater, and here what you see is note a couple things. it's an artist's conception in this 3-d representation of the crater of those layers that are perhaps going throughout the central mound. but it really was these layers

that were the target of curiosity. how did he end up selecting gale crater? well, it turned out in 2006 the first of one of five landing site workshops took place, and it was just about the time mars global surveyor was ending up its beautiful massing, we had this beautiful topography from thal tim try, and mro was launch inside that year. mars reconnaissance orbiter was getting just spectacular resolution images and then speck toss comy. you can understand from the high resolution imaging, it's really widening our options of where we might want to go on mars. the other thing that really is working to our advantage is the landing ellipse as we went along with the advance in technology, the ability to kind of steer

yourself down to a specific spot is getting better and better. so whereas with the mer rovers, quite a few spots were passed by just because of safety concerns. in the end, when we boiled all those 60 sites down by the fifth landing site workshop in 2011 to kind of four prime science sites, the work from the engineers would just go to any of them. we're not going to tell you where to go from the safety point of view. they're all green, none of them are yellow. so we have this choice of four really terrific sites. for example, the upper left was this delta, one of the prime objectives of the mission was to look for organics, but to look for different environments that might be habit bl. deltas are a site. another crater, holden crater,

was interesting with water flowing in and out on the other side at some point in time, and then mawrth, perhaps one of the oldest sites on mars, and the min rolling there was screaming come take a look. and in the end we ended up going to gale, and it's turned out to be an interesting site. just a few words on the capabilities of this rover with the mass that we could land with the technology, with the edl system that had been developed, a really diverse payload could go to mars. a couple of the new things up on the mast. not only cameras which you're seeing in stereo giving you very good resolution, large memory and so on, but this experience which is able to shoot a laser at a rock and then put a lot of energy and just a brief pulse into the rock. and then the plasma that's created can be imaged and

spectrally analyzed to really tell you what the rock is made of. so it's one great tool to take a look around you. i think they've taken 40,000 spectra so far and interrogated rock, so you really can understand where you might want to go and drill and put samples into the interior of the rover. there's a russian-provided instrument which is subsurface, looks for hydrated minerals, and there's, of course, a station. you can't go to mars without measuring the temperature. so halfway up the mast. and then this arm not only has elemental analysis tools on it just like mer did only a little more powerful, but it also has a scoop and a drill. so a really complex device out there which has instruments and the ability to bring samples into the rover to analytic instruments which i'll briefly talk about. so getting down to the surface,

just spectacular images coming very rapidly after landing from the mast cam. this kind of surreal image taken from the image around the arm of the mast, the image through the dust cover, kind of gives it that surreal view. and started off with some interesting measurements. this is pressure and temperatures really on from the net station. there are these huge swings, of course, from day tonight. the atmosphere so thin that it gets very, very cold at night. you have 80-plus degree swings between day and night, never quite getting up to above zero most of the time. and then we've already talked about the radiation hazard to human exploration, and we're acquiring that data as we speak, almost on a daily basis we're

getting radiation data which will be very useful for understanding safety issues for eventual humans to mars. this is a real cool plot that shows the correlation between the atmospheric pressure measured by the met nation in blue and then the radiation that's reaching the surface in red. and you can see that this day/night variation in pressure, kind of this 10% variation in pressure is reflected in the radiation that reaches the surface. so the message there is you're on the surface, you need some shielding. just the atmosphere itself is not going to give you all the shielding you need. so you might think we'd land and head vague for the mounds which was a primary target. we landed and headed in exactly the opposite direction. and one reason was that the geology of this mission with the high resolution imaging and the speck toss coby had been out, and there was this very interesting triple junction of

three geologically different sites. that combined with the morphology of an alluvial fan that we could see from space which suggested that water might be flowing down toward this region really kind of made it an attractive target. so we headed off in that direction. we're actually still there. what we encountered along the way was really interesting. this conglomerate essentially looks like broken-up concrete somewhere, but it's showing rounded pebbles which shows really a lot of water hat flown down -- had flown down from the rim of the crater and formed these con come rates. -- conglomerates. one is sam, contributions from our french colleagues, contributions from our honeybee robotic colleagues with the sample manipulation system which put samples into a little oven.

we then heat up the samples. we look at the gases that come off. that's one of our simplest experiments, and we've done both that experiment i think eight times now, and we've sampled the atmosphere several times as well. so very briefly on the atmospheric results, what bruce talked about with regard to the study of how the atmosphere is currently leaving, how you might extrapolate back in time to understand that mars was in the past a much more habitable environment with a heavier atmosphere and the ability to support surface water, we're starting to get at the answers to those questions by looking at the isotopes, the ratio of heavy elements to light elements in the atmosphere of mars. those measurements are all listed on the side there. and we're able to do this with a precision that's not been done on mars before at all. we have some information from meteorites that come from mars, but measuring these isotopes

directly in the atmosphere is really what we need to start this study of how the atmosphere might have been lost. the basic story is that the light stuff leaves the atmosphere easier than the heavier stuff, and so the heavier isotopes get enriched in the atmosphere, and by golly, all the isotopes that were listed here are much heavier than they probably were billions of years ago. over in this yellow nice day, this triple junction that we went to we see these cross-pedded hayiers. clearly, the e -- layers. clearly, the effect of water, sedimentation and so on. and then we actually got our first drill hole in that area on february 6th of this year, our first-ever hole drilled on mars. and that really is his to histoc spectra from another experiment.

it's x-ray defraction. x-ray defraction was discovered about 100 year ago, so this is really the first time the x-ray defraction has been done on another planet. and this is just a ccd measuring x-rays with a little bit of sample which which vibrates. the spectra on the left is dust. the spectra on the right shows many of those same minerals, but down at the low angling scat oring you see the evidence of clay, that's the evidence of the type of environment we came to mars to find. and what we're seeing with our heat up the sample and look what come t off experiments in sam is i'm just showing here 4 out of 435 map values that we've done over time as we heated it up. the most abundant thing that came off was water, and just to point out that that very high

portion of the water peak that comes off is a distinctive signature, also, of these clays. is and so we're analyzing this data. that environment is showing both oxidizing and reducing compounds. it once was showing evidence of hoss of water, potentially -- loss of water, potentially a lake. exactly how long the lake lasted, we don't know for sure. the ox sizing and reducive species being there at the same time could have made it an environment that -- [inaudible] because they are sources of energy and so on. so we were just absolutely delighted that these are the types of things we became -- we cake to mars to look for. the search now is finding out how much diversity there is in the mounds of gale crater. we're getting ready to pull up anchor and head out, hopefully, in a few weeks on our march to the pounds of gale crater, so

you'll be hearing lots more from curiosity. the 6-year-old at the time from kansas who won the name the rover contest, has these couple sentences in her, in her application. curiosity's a passion that drives everyday life. we've become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder. [applause] >> thanks, paul. next we'll hear from andrew steele who's from the carnegie institute here in washington. >> so we heard this morning a few times about one of the reasons why we're going to mars and one of the most pressing reasons is to look for life. i'll just recap some of the thoughts about that and how that fits in with more of a robotic

strategy to the exploration of mars. earth and mars about 4.5 billion years old. with know from the start of life on earth round about way back, 3.8, 3.5, earth and mars are pretty similar round about that time. we have several bits of evidence that show that life had already started. didn't take very long to start on the earth. so if it didn't take too long to start on earth, did it start on mars? that's roughly the question. now, when planets form, there's a lot of raw materials that go along with that, a lot of nascar bonn chemistry. you can see -- is carbon chemistry. we know that a lot of the carbon chemistry, in some places very complex chemistry, can form in the conditions that formed the planet initially. so we know that this material is ubiquitous and widespread during

the formation of planets, so earth and mars got an inventory of this material. we started to find life way back on earth. on mars, who knows? actually, on earth we find places where organic chemistry is still ongoing. so if you think about it, mars is made up of carbon bonds. we're very complex bits of carbon chemistry. carbon chemistry can be done in many other places, many other ways. carbon chemistry can be very simple, the formation of amin know acids, the uri miller experiment in the '50s showed you could make quite complex carbon chemistry from simple gases and an electrical discharge. on earth we have these places like deep sea hydroventers spewing forth hot water and producing organic chemistry, and

in those environments there's a huge amount of life taking advantage of the organic chemistry and simple chemistry done in those environments to actually forge a living. here you can see all the worms at the bottom in the red here, all these kind of tube worms at the bottom of a hydrothermal vent way down at the base of the ocean on earth. those were actually discovered the same year the viking -- [inaudible] went to mars. we know a lot more about them than we do about mars till. and where i came into this story is i went to work for a gentleman named dave mckay in 1996 who thought he'd try and relic evidence of life on mars. and that created a huge debate at the time as to what, whether or not there was life on mars, whether or not he'd found ed of life on mars and how we would find life on mars. and here you can see one of the fossil-type that he postulated

were, was evidence of life on mars. i came into it as a microbiologist and started looking at the rock and realized there was a great deal of terrestrial contamination with dr. mckay's help at the time. so all of the instruments that were thrown at the major -- [inaudible] at that particular time to try and prove life on mars said there was, you know, mostly said there was no life. and there was. there was terrestrial life. so, obviously, there was a bit of a disconnect between what we wanted to find, how we wanted to find it and what we could use to find it. this is an image of another martian meteorite, and in this meteorite we find terrestrial organisms growing all the way through it. i put this up to be deliberately provocative, because as you can see from this, the small black line at the bottom here is one micron. now, that's the normal size of a bacterial cell on earth, roughly

speaking. the rest of it is tiny. those branches are extremely small. it -- terrestrial life as we know it is not hammered down. we don't know much about the vast majority of microbes on this planet. we can only culture 2-3% of the organisms on this planet. we know that due to the genetic fingerprint. but there are many things we don't know about life on our own planet. this is showing an organism that grew across the surface of one of these meteorites and died. this is a fungi, terrestrial fungi, and it brings up a couple of interesting points. number one, the meteorites we look at are all contaminated. we can't help that. the planet earth wants to make soil out of most rocks. so from the point of view on doing science on these rocks, you have to be quite understanding of the limitations

of the contamination that you're looking at and also understand that, get smarter about how to look at the rocks in a additional -- different ways. it also means you have to look at the rocks insit due to get a comprehensive understanding of what's in the rocks, because the stuff here, like i say, it's always contaminated. however, a juxtaposition x that is between using robotic, very, very capable robots like msl and curiosity at the moment and what you can do with this sample as a person with the instrumentation that i have available to me. for instance, this is some speck toss coby of alan hills. the bottom line is when we look really carefully at this rock, we start to see, we start to see features that show organic chemistry did go on in the formation of this rock. it's part of the explanation why they were picking up organic

molecules that could have been signs of life. and we, but we have to look at this at extremely, extremely high resolutions with a microscope and prepare the sample very carefully. what you see here is graphite, and you can see -- it's pencil lead, and it's forming through a nonbiological reaction. it's stuck in the middle of these carbonates, and to get it out we have to dissolve them out, we have to isolate them and put them into an electrical microscope. you can see an image marked "k." the difference between those layers are single atoms of carbon, okay? and it's going to be very difficult to get to do that with a rover at this point in time. this is another meteorite that fell, and this meteorite fell in august of 2011. it fell into the moroccan desert it was brought by a lot of

locals to a meteorite dealers and it immediately went around the world that this was martian, and samples went out left, right, center and everyone has been looking at it. good news is, it's pristine. bad news is it contains pieces of the moroccan desert. as soon as it hit, basically, big dust pile, and the cracks in the rock become a sorting mechanism for those tiny little grains. so now we have to get smart about how we kind of tease them apart. what you're looking at here is less than the size of a bacteria. it's less than one micron. a micron is about a hundredth the width of a human hair a, roughly speaking. so what i've done is cut this out using an im beam very, very precisely and then put it into a microscope and started looking at it from all sorts of different points of view. and what we do see is trapped inside this assemblage are small bits of organic carbon, and

around it are all the catalysts needed to convert very simple compounds like carbon dioxide and water into complex organic materials. it's there, they exist. this is trapped in a little mineral bottle. you can see the bubbles coming out of it where it formed during its time on mars. so we know it's there, but it's there in extremely weak and small concentrations. but the instrumentation that i had to use to do this probably would fill this stage and cost about $15 million, and there was like seven or eight different instruments in this analysis which is why bringing a sample back or having a human in the loop will get us to this kind of resolution and the resolution that's needed and the next step of exploration of mars. there's one interesting part about all of this. we know that terrestrial contaminants will live all over martian meteorites, so you know

if you've got a heat over the water of an organism, they're going to live on it. most martian rocks are basalt. you generally get the idea of how much food there is in these things. we are seeing signs of organic carbon, which is great. we're not seeing -- i personally will work from a null hypothesis. i'm a biologies, so i want to assume there is no life, and i wawnt to disprove that. it means a bit more work, and it keeps me awake at night, but that's what we do. but the single most compelling reason we do this is to find out about ourselves. where do we come from? how did we form? how did life on this earth form? that record is, basically, almost completely destroyed. but mars isn't. the oldest planetary material we have is from mars. it's four billion years old,

just slightly older than the oldest rocks we can get at that have signs of life on earth. we have no rocks from the prebiotic transition. we have no idea how that happened. mars will give us a second insight into that and, therefore, by looking at it we will get an insight and understanding about ourselves. so if there is no life on mars, why isn't there life on mars? why not? why? what so different about it? and if you do find life, let's face it, you know, everyone's going to go up, they're going to look at i. biotech companies will be all over it. you hide low temperature washing powder or whatever, they'll isolate whatever they can. so it's a good reason to go, and it's a journey to find ourselves in itself. humans to mars is part of the long-term strategy to look at these samples and personally speaking, it's a very doable thing to do. we know a lot about how to find

life. all you have to assume is that life is made of carbon and will concentrate the essential elements it needs to do its job and to undertake reproduction and replication of the metabolism. thank you very much. [applause] >> and then last but not least, michael meyer, who will bring it all together beyond the full hypothesis. the null hypothesis. >> memory of dave mckay. this is actually part of steely's talk, but i feel the sentiment. [applause] so what i'd like to do is kind of -- we're in a fantastic position. we're going to launch a mission to mars to look at this upper atmosphere and see the evolution of mars be' atmosphere because we think that's a huge key in

terms of its habitability. we've been able to put a one-ton rover on the surface of mars, so it's kind of, you know, how did we get here x where are we going? usual good question, particularly if you're on a long trip with the kids in the car. [laughter] in 1995 nasa put out a report looking at the extra biology strategy for mars exploration. and basically, it laid out the central premise that looking for life somewhere else is not easy. it's hard. it's a difficult process. and the only way to go about doing it is to understand the planet as a whole and understand the regions that you're exploring. otherwise it's like a treasure hunt, and you just look one place and go is life there? no. okay, i lost. how about over here? so what you need to do is have a context, and you have to understand the planet to understand its potential for life. as jim will remember early on in

the, i guess the early part of this century, we're looking at the strategy for mars exlo ration, and -- exploration, and we actually had several different pathways because we weren't sure whether or not the potential for life on mars would actually pan out as a way to explore the red planet. we didn't know enough. so what i'd like to do now in the next two slides is actually talk about what we have learned since 1997 when we got mars global surveyor in orr -- in orbit. and it's been fantastic. part of the recommendation was to approach the planet in a step-wise fashion alternating orbiters and landers so you can feed back with each other, so you can build your knowledge of the planet and figure out whether or not it even had biological potential. so this particular slide shows things we have learned since then. one carbon in alh, the mars

meteorite, we know at least early on in mars history there is the potential for reduced carbon which is one of the things which might be very useful for organic life. on the far left we've got topography of mars, a really good understanding on the meteors, the elevation across the planet to see its shape, looking at geomorphology so we can discern processes are going on. central in this slide is a picture of the magnetic field which early on showed that mars probably most likely had a magnetic field, and then something happened, and it disappeared. in this might be one of the real keys as to why mars, we think now, was habitable once upon a time and maybe not today. we know there are aquatic processes going on. on the bottom left, one of the things with having the long-term capability of orbiters around mars, we're seeing things that

on a, quote, day-to-day, on a year to year kind of scale where we now know sort of what the impact flux is on the planet. one of the side benefits is that we're seeing fresh craters, and we now see that there's ice, water ice even in the mid latitudes and lower because in the fresh -- [inaudible] you can watch the ice. so we're finding ice in places we didn't think was actually stable and possible. on the far right, recognizing modeling that's going on and also we're finding out from where ice is being found that the planet tilts on its axis rotation. its procession can vary anywhere from 0-60 degrees on the orders of tens of millions of years. so this actually gives you a planet that is somewhat dynamic in that you're placing ice in regions on the planet that aren't stable today but actually provide somewhat of a

disequilibrium for places even on mars today. and it helps us sort out sort of what is going on mars in the present day compared to what may have been going on hundreds of thousands of years ago, even tens of millions of years ago and certainly how this acted in the context of the planet four and a half billion years ago. so the other thing that by formulating a mars program and kind of coming up with the teem of how to go about exploring, one of the keys we recognized is that we need to find places where there might have been liquid water because everything we know from this planet is liquid water is the ingredient that enables life, at least here on earth. and so flu a series of orbiters -- through a series of orbiters and landers, we've gone through the process of finding much more water than we thought possible using mars, the neutron detecter and also the gamma ray

spectrometer, we see water in the near subsurface in a much broader extent than we thought previously. so that gives you more material to work with. but it's not exactly liquid at that time. so also looking at the morphology and with the mars reconnaissance orbiter really hit this home with having such high resolution that we can see flow channels on the planet, channels that don't look extremely ancient. and so we know the processes are still going on even in geologic today. and the far bottom left we see from the orbiter that we're finding minerals that are evidence of water on the surface of marses. one is the little blueberries that made the news quite -- not too long ago, and then also more recently finding the mineral gypsum, calcium sulfate, in veins on the surface of mars demonstrating that you had flow of liquid water with the dissolved mineral that then

deposits it in these veins. and then on the far right as paul paul mahaffy mentioned, we landed in gale crater, we have the hopes of -- we see mineral signatures and geomorph logical signatures, and lo and behold within the first half of the year of the mission we are roving across what used to be an ancient river bed. so we are finding a mars that was habitbl at least at one point in time. and this is very encouraging, and it helps pushes along the lines of understanding mars' biological potential and whether or not life could have ever formed on that planet. finish and who knows, maybe even there today. so that kind of broad view of mars has kind of coalesced into a way to think about mars as it was early on and mars as it is today. and we see from our measurements, our orbiters and landers that early on mars was a more neutral planet, it had

liquid water on the surface. we even see minerals such as clay that form in that kind of environment. so by all intents and purposes, early on we have a mars that was very much, was much more similar to earth than it is today. and so we see the planet is capable of having a habitable environment, and then as the atmosphere thins or the magnetic field diminishes or one and the same time period, mars starts to try out, and we start to see minerals that are evidence, minerals that form as you remove water. and then as you move even further, mars becomes acidic and the cold and dry planet that we see today. so our thoughts about mars and a place that it might be and what it might tell us about formation of the solar system, it points to a period of time that it had

potentially habitable environment at the same time that life started here on earth. mars, by its very nature, can tell us something about what was going on in the solar system when life formed on our own planet, because mars has much better rock history of its first billion years, of early solar system formation and early planetary evolution. that is well worth exploring to understand what went on with mars, whether or not life ever got started, maybe even just what the cookbook ingredients are for how to get life started in the planetary system. it's all there for us to explore. and so with that idea of the framework of understanding that mars has potential to tell us something about life on our solar system, a whole program was formed. and i just went through some of the highlights of how we got from there to here. and now let's talk a little bit about the future. we have collaborations.

in 2016 we have with esa for a trace gas orbiter. we also have a discovery mission in sight that will look at the seismic activity on mars that is today, tell us much about the planet and it evolution. in 2018 xl mars is a life detection experiment. we have part of an instrument on that. in fact, paul's involved in that. looking for bio signatures and looking for organics. and then in 2020 we have another mission going that we're going to take full advantage of the capabilities that we developed to get a metric ton onto the surface of mars by sending another rover with a different instrument suite. and the goal to look for bio signatures. one of the things i can't say too much more than that because we have a science definition team still in the process of setting the goals or objectives for that mission. but put it this way, we're going to take advantage of all the

progress that we've made in terms of engineering and what we've learned from the missions we've had so far and particularly as msl curiosity unfolds, what it's learning from the planet today. so inform us of how to explore in 2020 that really gets down to the understanding of whether or not it was possible for life to have formed on mars, whether or not it ever did. and with that, i'd like to end my part of the talk, and i guess we'll go to the panel. [applause] >> thanks, michael. and thanks, everyone. i think we have some time for some questions. i don't see chris yelling at me, so what i'd like to do is pose one question to the panel and then spend a little time seeking questions from the audience. and the question for the panel is very simple. um, it's really two parts. the first is do you think, panelists -- we'll go through all of you -- it would ever be possible to say as we advance

scientific knowledge to say that mars did not have the kind of, well, i'll say terrestrial-style life that we sort of know how to define? do you think that's something you could address? could we say, no? anyone willing to take that? >> ask the question again because we're getting -- >> oh. would it be possible, colleagues from the panel -- i'll stand way back, is that better? to understand whether mars absolutely did not have the kind of biological processes that we call life here on earth as a result of the scientific exploration we are embarking upon now that will continue until a time when, hopefully, women and men can go to mars? is that a possibility? we have heard a little bit from all of you about that. anyone care to take a comment? i see hands going up wildly. [laughter] anyone? >> let me take a crack at that one, jim. obviously, if you're searching

for life, you make measurements at a particular location, and at that location you could say either it is or isn't there. if it's there, you found it. if it's not there, it tells you about that location based on your current understanding of life. but the ability to extrapolate globally depend on our understanding of global processes. i think that as we put together a better understanding, we're going to be able to learn more from a few locations than if we just went to those locations. so i think that as we improve our understanding of global processes and properties, we would still have to go to some finite number of locations. but whether it's five or ten, it's probably not 500,000. and if we don't find anything, i think at that point we might know enough to say that with some certainty. >> thanks, bruce. anyone else? paul? >> yeah. let me just add to that.

in addition to this radiation question that's going around, how long might humans be habitatting the surface of mars, radiation is also manager that can destroy potentially evidence of biosignatures that we might be looking for in ancient mars. so a really first starter question in order to kind of get at bio signatures is can we find sites on mars that preserve organics, that we can look at? for example, they might have been buried a long time ago and then recently reexposed, that type of thing. and that will tell us really whether some of the tools at our disposal like looking for pie owe signatures are going to help us out or not. but, of course, the only places we're accessing now were in the near surface. very deep on mars there may be liquid water.

and we're discovering as we go along on earth even in those very deep environments life exists as a well. >> yeah. let me follow up on what paul's saying. on this planet we know life has been here for quite some time, and if you've ever gone out fossil hunting, you'll recognize that even when you have a fairly complete idea of where to look, you still may not find a fossil. how things happen while they've been buried, even if you understand everything pretty well and you don't find any evidence, that doesn't mean there wasn't something going on then when those locks were laid down. so it's -- when those rocks were laid down. it is one of those things where after a while you convince yourself life never got started on mars. what you do is it's not worth your lime took looking anymore

because it doesn't seem to be happening. >> just to follow up on that, life tends to change its environment, and life tends to adapt with its environment. and so over the course of exploring mars what you would look for, i think, is the way in which mars has been changed beyond which you can predict by chemistry. and that, i think, would -- it's, obviously, going to become more confident and result in more places you look and the more times you've looked. you'll get more comfort in the negative results. very difficult to prove, negative in a lot of ways. but whether or not life kick started or not, even the philosophical understanding of what it takes a bunch of chemicals to kick start itself into life, how you actually approach that problem and how you try to hone your search parameters both on mars and through experimentations and the understanding of possibilities through laboratory instrumentation and laboratory

experiments on earth is a huge, a huge endeavor, but it's also one that is constantly makes us understand mars a lot better from the point of view and being able to apply that to earlier and ourselves. so i think that whether or not we can ultimately say that there was no life on mars, the actual search itself will reveal an awful lot about what we need to know about ourselves. >> okay. well, thanks. so one follow up that comes to mind and a question that often is asked is do we have to understand whether there are present day life systems, biological life systems on mars before we take the risk of taking women and men to that planetary surface? not orbit be, surface. is that a question that is worth asking? is it a question to be solved by our great engineers, or is it

the sort of go/no go? any comments, crowd? >> i think you have to take a careful approach and at least understand the environment which you're going. certainly, if you're going to say, well, we're not going to send humans until we're convinced that mars never had life would be a long time before we sent humans. but on other side of it, we want to make sure that as we're going to one place to explore that we don't want to contamination or wipe out the very thing that we're trying to study. so i think there has to be a reasonable level of understanding of the biological potential of the particular place you're going to. and to make it more concrete, we may arrive at the conclusion that, yeah, it's possible that life started on mars. we think maybe we have something that, you know, the science community's arguing about whether or not life actually got

started. but we don't see any evidence of it today. we don't see any activity. we are pretty confident that nothing is going on on the fashion right now, but there is the potential in the deep subsurface in aquifers or something like that that there might be, you know, residual martian life. well, i think in that particular case you might be able to send humans because you're fairly confident that you're not going to contaminate the deep subsurface. that's not a statement of fact, that's sort of line out, you know, where the debate might be in terms of whether that would be acceptable. and maybe the only reason you can actually get a handle is, in fact, by sending astronaut rowdies to the surface of mars. >> can i follow up on something michael said? >> please. >> because i think it really gets at the heart of this that the possible distribution of life on mars, if it exists, is hard to predict in advance.

and, in fact, the scientific question isn't go there and find the life, it's go there and find out if there was life there or if there is any today. in our interest be in finding out whether there is life elsewhere in the solar system or universe, mars is the closest, easiest and best opportunity to go someplace where it might have existed and see what we find. and if we're going to answer that question, we need to think about an approach that will let us bring all the tools to bear starting with the in situ analyses that we're doing, moving to robotic sample return and eventually sending people there to do it and figuring out how to do it in the context of protecting the people, protecting the earth from return samples that have the potential at least to be hazardous, protecting mars from contamination from the earth. but if we're going to answer the

these questions, this is the only way we can do it. >> thanks, bruce. any other comments? steely? >> yeah. the deep sea outer thermal vent several kilometers down was involved at the same time viking landed in the '70s. and we had to adapt quickly to be able to study those environments safely for the people studying them, bring samples back. as a microbiologist, you know, you have to using aster lille tech nike so you -- sterile technique to so you don't end up observing yourself in your experiments, and you don't end up dying from ebola, whatever you're working with. so we have a lot of these technologies already developed, and a lot of the philosophies, and we've put them in practices like about arkty ca, so i think we're well equipped to do it philosophically. the next step, obviously, is the

engineering and material signs to do it. >> so i thought it might be appropriate to end up. we have a panel of expert scientists who know the mars we see and we'll be exploring shortly. so questions from the audience? i can take tweets if press allows it. just kidding. but we could. so let's -- we'll start with you, sir. please identify yourself. >> i'm jack, retired from international trade. spirit and opportunity lasted far longer than projected. theythey were a good value for e taxpayers, curiosity has a projected two-year life span. what happens if it goes longer? what do you have in mindsome. >> so, michael, maybe you start and then, paul, since you guys are experimenting. >> that's not a problem, it's great. [laughter] the longer the better. certainly, it has to be born in mind that the two -- well, the

one mars year lifetime is sort of what the warranty is. and we fully expect that the rover will last longer than it warranty. it has a power source, it has a half-life of 80-something years. so i expect that the first astronaut we send there can go there and shake curiosity's hand and thank him for all the hard work that he's done. [laughter] >> isn't the arm rather heavy? anyway, just a commentcomment. thanks, michael. i guess we'll move on. thank you, sir. >> okay. >> sir, please identify yourself for the audience. >> bob jarrett, mars society. i have a two-part question, one for the maven investigator, one for dr. mahaffey. on maven, are you employing hydrospectral imaging, and what are we kind of learning from that? and on curiosity, sam, you showed a radiation curve in

those marvelous unis. is there, presumably, a calibration crew for that instrument? and if i looked at that instrument in calibration, what sort of milligram per hour am iing in the swings of that radiation overnight? >> so on maven, if i go strictly by the definition of imaging, we're going -- we're doing it. it's not what people think of when they use the grade hyperspectral imagining. we're intending to study the upper atmosphere where you don't need the high spatial resolution that you would if you're studying the surface, and you use different labelings than if you're studying the surface. so we're relying on other assets that have made measurements of

the lower atmosphere, the surface, and in a cost-con trained environment -- constrained environment we're focusing on what we think is the new and exciting measurements to answer our scientific questions. so in what i think is the spirit you asked, no, we don't have hyperspectral imaging. >> but i must add we've gone to the extent of flying one to reso power down to sub-20 meet pers covering a large part of the planet, and that instrument is frying and was selected for that purpose to spatial and mineral only call innovations. so we aren't avoided that great joy of measurement, if you will. oh, i'm sorry, you're up. >> yeah, i think the second part was about the calibration of the radiation experiment. >> yes. >> that's a actually not part of the experiment that i'm leading, but don is the principal

investigate or on that. they've calculated carefully, and they've announced some of their preliminary results. i think it's something like, you know, if you spend 80 todays going to mars and thend 1 l 0 days coming back, you get about the equivalent exposure of six months on the space station. you know, so it's kind of near the limit of what nasa currently has as a limit for astronauts, but it's kind of encouraging. it could have been worse. >> so it's not incompatible for one's -- [inaudible] >> no, i this think the total dose for that to mars and back is about one. >> [inaudible] >> but, again, you have some information on that, and i'm not the expert this that. >> thank you. >> our next colleague. yes, sir. >> hi, my name's finish. [inaudible] i'm from cornell university,

mechanical engineer. before i ask a question, i've seen you a lot on the -- is good to see you. >> thank you. i won't all astronaut stage. [laughter] >> you were asking about how to understand the martian geological composition. you already checked things that you were talking about. now, companies, oil and gas companies that use similar processes to detect, you know, chemical so much decision for example, like shale and stuff. so my question is, do you guys see any advantage in the future of using one gas company such as schlumberger to perform drilling operations on mars? because they have years and years of experience in this. >> michael, do you want to? >> okay. i think if i understood question, are there uses on mars

for future drilling projects? yeah. i sincerely think there'll be sob some sort of -- some sort of grown-penetrating radar if we help to do any trilling the subsurface. trying to do it in the blind is, you're apt to just pick the wrong place and have it not be particularly successful. >> michael, i think this is another point. colleagues at nasa have invested in technology studies using schlumberger's down hole technologies. they've been actually proposed as extensions beyond the kind of experiment we have on curiosity now with active neutron sources and broad spectrum neutron and gamma ray protecters. they have not flown, but they have been proposed. >> yeah. certainly, yeah, get the idea of water and elemental composition in the subsurface would be very

useful. >> i didn't know that. thank you. >> i think we have time -- if chris -- well, i guess he's not killing us. okay. next colleague, please. >> my name is shannon jones, i'm also a student at cornell university. my question is, you mentioned that we can use deviations from iowa biotic -- [inaudible] for detection of and present signs of life, and that has a strong focus on organic chemistry. i'm wondering how flexible our definition of life is in our research, and if we find life, what happens next? >> oh, my goodness. anyone? good question. comments? steely? >> yeah, it depends. the definition of life is one that's been argued for hundreds of years really. but do you really actually need to define it to find it? that's where the looking at organic chemistry and making minimal assumptions comes in.

you assume it's carbon based, you assume it will not use all the materials available to you. if you look at the meteorite, over 10,000 separate chemicals within that meteorite, and there's a full range of amino acids from c2 out to c5 to c10. yet biology chooses, you know, maybe 25, 30 mostly -- [inaudible] there are exceptions to those rules. ..

those organic chemicals seem to be skewed one way, say instead of ac tng have avalon and op. it doesn't particularly matter. that concentration really is something very interesting and is not something you can predict or find in experiments or an actual environment so i think you don't actually need to define it to find it. you need then to study it to understand it and if you do find it i personally think that the -- was not too far off the mark. how that life relates and how it uses chemistry different and what biochemistry you need could be helpful to us as a species and not just how will -- where we came from but how we will be

ex--- exploited. what are we going to do with it? i think that's an intriguing question. >> that me out a little bit to that. we find life elsewhere with the next yogurt or brad? [laughter] it is kind of interesting, if we do find life elsewhere that actually might help us define life because right now we don't have one example. everything on this planet is so related to each other. we use the same cellular mechanism, the same chemistry. everything is minor variations on a process and so finding it elsewhere may open our eyes so we can actually understand what life is and the definitiodefinitio n is not just descriptive of what life does but actually tells us what it is. >> i think folks we have time for one more question. one more question i've been told by the boss so thank you panel and one more question.

you are the last one so identify yourself. >> i'm joshua and i work with -- which has no relationship to the topic whatsoever. i'm just here in my own. i am curious to what extent on a geological sense mars is being studied not for its past but its future meaning all systems wayne where the earth is going to cool and the crust will eventually stopped moving with volcanoes like they do on earth as to what hotspots are left. what eventually will happen to earth? >> let me comment on that to start with. one of the reasons we are interested in understanding mars is the evolution of the environment over time and the fact that we went from an environment that was more

earthlike to one that seems to be coldcold, dry and very different in i presume that is the basis for part of your question. the processes that we think operated on mars are different from the ones that operate and continue to operate on earth, so i don't think we are about to see a transition or we are at risk as seeing the same sorts of transitions from a wet environment on earth to cold dry environment like what we see on mars. the mechanisms are different. the amount of water to be moved, the amount of atmosphere to be moved are different so i don't think we are on that pathway. >> i think you should also note serve that one of the key measurements for the insight mission is a spot sampling of the heat glow over time which will be a boundary condition for understanding e. flow for another planet relative to the

moon and i think that will frame some aspects of the long-term thermal evolution of mars. on the side of one is not many so i think we will have meant -- insight from now. >> just, jim gave us a specific more general answer and as we look into other planets and understand what we think we know of planetary processes. we only have a earth as earth as an example and looking elsewhere we can test whether or not it works under slightly different starting conditions and that helps us understand much better how planets do involved. >> folks, i think we are going to have to come to a close because everyone is hungry. i would like to thank our panel -- our panelists. [applause]

>> intends to be a denigration of the u.s. military by some historians that whenever one battalion fought an american battalion or one regiment fought an american regiment that the germans tended to be tactically superior. the mono e mono it was a better military. i think this is just nonsense because it's pointless. will the war is a clash of systems. it gets which system can produce the wherewithal to project power in the atlantic, the pacific,

the indian ocean, southeast asia. which system can produce the civilian leadership to create the transportation system, the civilian leadership that is able to produce 96,000 airplanes in 1944. a group of on line privacy advocates spoke out against government surveillance in an event hosted in denver. the group free press organized the event and included a member of the aclu and the cybersecurity specialists. from april, the this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> i am extremely pleased to have a very distinguished group of panelists who actually none

of -- many have flown in from different parts of the country. it's a particularly interesting group today because we have technologists. we have researchers. we have got an activist and we have a lawyer so we have what i think of as the perfect spectrum of digital rights defenders sitting in one room today. talking very frankly about their thoughts on government surveillance, what the problems are so what you and i should be trying to do about it and whether or not there is even anything we can do about it. i'm hoping to sort of move back and forth between government surveillance issues and privacy issues as far as consumer and corporate collection of data. so as this moves along feel free to write your questions down. i'm going to go through and introduce people and then we are just going to jump into it. panels have long introductory

remarks and i promise this long introductory remark will be the only introductory remarks you'll have to suffer through. our first panelist is seeta gangadharan. raise your hand a little. she is a senior research fellow at the new america foundation open technology institute. her research is on the digital inclusion including the potentially harmful aspects of internet adoption into datamining, data profiling and other forms of on line surveillance as part of the practices. she is a longtime ally of the media justice system. peter micek, a policy counsel for access telecom advocacy advancing the dialogue for more rights respecting the mernit worldwide. a lawyer, peter campaigns new

cybercrime laws in countries from peru to iraq. jonathan mayer is a graduate student in computer science and law at stanford university where he is the cybersecurity fellow at the center for international security and cooperation and the junior affiliate fellow. and kade crockford is the director of technology for liberty program in massachusetts where she quarterbacks challenging the drone surveillance and defending poor first and fourth amendment and due process rights. i am going to kick off this discussion by describing one of the major surveillance battles that we have been facing over the last few years and it is particularly close to my heart which is the story of mark kline. mark kline was a 64-year-old retired at&t technician who came

out publicly including coming to my organization with schematics, plans, detailed blueprints from at&t's facilities in san francisco. each plan showcased a secret room based in at&t facilities. it was locked on the inside and you can actually see pictures of it. inside this room were cyberobject that created a copy of the internet communications of americans and sent it to the national security agency. kade i want you to kick off this panel are talking about what are the kinds of surveillance use for everyday users? >> thank you. and thank you everyone for waking up so early to come and hear us talk about this very subject. i hope it doesn't give you nightmares tonight. so yeah it's an organization that is extremely secretive. we actually don't even know how

much money we spend. there are 30,000 employees and is larger than the cia. it's a really huge bureaucracy actually and over the past 12 years since 9/11 we have learned a substantial amount about what the nsa has been doing only because of people who have left the nsa and blown the whistle on some of the abuses going on there. so i'm just going to give you a very brief chronology of what has happened since 9/11. after 9/11, we now know the nsa nsa -- is how people have described it. that is to say the nsa for a long time, its mandate was to survey a overseas communications, to look for you no information in foreign countries so that you know the nsa could another which listen to people in england having conversations with people in

pakistan without a warrant. this has been the case for a long time but the nsa's first amendment as whistleblowers thomas drake has said was for the longtime that the agency never spied on americans without a warrant. that changed after 9/11. the gloves came off and suddenly the nsa was up vast quantities of our implement foreign communication, you know datamining and looking for operating a dragnet which included the private communications of americans, people in this country and doing so without specific warrants. so we learned that actually into ways. in 2005 as a result of a "new york times" story that broke that news to the public. "the new york times" by the way, "the new york times" said on that story for a full year.

they knew, they had received information about what was going on before the 2004 election and they did not tell the public until after the election. they did that on purpose. they said that they did it because the journalist needed more time to research the story at the request of the bush administration. it's clear to anybody with a brain that they did it to wait until after the election, right? so anyway 2005 this is what we learned. later there was a massive outcry in this country opposing warrantless surveillance so what does congress do in 2008 with the fisa amendment act. the fisa amendment act utilize this warrantless program not only to legalize the warrantless spying program but immunized conan -- companies like at&t as rainey discuss provided medications without warrants. so the u.s. public can't do you

at&t now because they violated because congress protected them. so, the fisa amendments act of 2008. so, that's 2008. just recently in december and i should back up again and say that day that the fisa amendment act passed and was signed into law the aclu filed the lawsuit opposing it. there has been recent developments just within the past few months that are extremely important as they pertain to the nsa surveillance and the fisa amendments act. one of them is that in december of 2012 just days after christmas when everybody in this country was paying zero attention to what was going on in the news congress rushed through a reauthorization of the fisa amendments act with hardly any debate. it's really shameful actually what congress has done in this respect. past the fisa amendments act through without any of the very

minimal privacy and transparency amendments that some sort of valiant senators have proposed so we now are stuck with the fisa amendments act through 2017. there will be no debate about this law. there is no opportunity to challenge it now because it was just past in february the supreme court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the aclu challenging the fisa amendments act could not even be heard on the merits because our clients a group of human rights lawyers, activists, journalists who essentially said to the government look, we believe that because you are spying on american communications with foreigners without warrants that are private communications that are very very sensitive having to do with people who have been abused by the u.s. government, lawyers who are handling cases at gitmo, they said you know we think it's unconstitutional. the supreme court said 5-4 u.

don't even have an opportunity to sue because you cannot prove you have been spied on. this is the sort of catch-22 -- is actually garish and nightmarish the illegal situation we have found ourselves in. congress and the courts have entirely abdicated responsibility and so you know, that is a much larger problem. i think that some of the things we are going to talk on the panel and we will elucidate that. congress if it's done anything in the surveillance of privacy it's to make things worse and we have a whole separate set of issues which peter we'll talk about about electronic communications privacy act and the communications act which are so obsolete that they essentially don't protect our e-mails from warrantless government searches. so congress hasn't acted to update privacy law, to bring it into the 21st century and on the other hand it's actually has said is way way back by doing things like passing the fisa

amendments act again for five years without any debate and without any transparency or any kind of amendments. the last thing i want to say is that people like dell who defy some of the datamining programs that the nsa still uses for the whistleblowers, has now said that he believes that the nsa is going beyond even what fisa allows which is to say that he believes that the nsa is up all of our communication's even domestic and essentially maintains the file of e-mails, every phonecall ever made, every text message so what he has described as a totalitarian society could be turned on with the flip of a switch is what he says. the systems are all in place. the nsa is building a data center in the middle of the desert in utah which is going to be able to hold essentially all of the information, the digital information produced in the world for 100 years. after i have really uplifted your spirits i'm going to pass the mic on.

>> thank you kade. so i wanted to read something. i wanted to read the fourth amendment of the constitution which is supposed to protect people from unreasonable search and seizure. it says the right of the people to secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unusual searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall be issued but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. seeta you are a lawyer. how can the government be doing all those things that he describes and in this mass surveillance without running afoul of the united states constitution? >> thanks for the question. it's a good one.

i just want to take a step back and look at the fourth amendment, which i think is pretty good. it sets out the substance, unreasonable searches and seizures and talks a little bit about what it covers. it sets out some procedural aspects as well, so all things told this is a pretty good principle to put in place and i will talk a little bit about the limitations but i just want to acknowledge that it is set up a pretty good system whereby this one principle can be reinterpreted you know for the years to come. a couple of limitations though i want to highlight are structurally in the amendment the bill of rights. it was designed to detect us against -- perhaps because it didn't exist and the structural limitations i could talk about personally

using data to a corporation. i just want to say in the summer of 2001 i had a computer problem. it was crashing so i sent my machine in to a computer manufacturer in taxes and then i went abroad. while i was over there 9/11 occurred and a couple of months later my mom got a message back while i was abroad that suspicious literature had been found on my machine. the computer came back sans hard drive so either a pretty bad postman took my hard drive or -- so i am very privileged. i was able to buy a new machine but the fourth amendment was not designed to protect me from that very unreasonable search and seizure of my hard drive as it applies to the government. the second limitation is the language. unreasonable. what does that mean? it's up to judges to decide.

what does it cover? it talks about your house, your papers and effects. it doesn't talk about things in the cloud until now. so one of the things i wanted to lead to us one of the interpretations of unreasonable searches. that is what is known as the third-party defense doctrine. in the 60s, courts were starting to get hip to wiretapping and starting to draw the balance of. the fourth amendment talks about her houses and what happens and we leave our houses and what happens when data leaves the house and talking about the bounds of public and private. one of the decisions in the miller case looked at tank records, information you share with an institution like a bank and saw the incentive to share that information with them and decided that it would carry over

for whatever way that institution wanted to share your information be it with the government or a third party. that is the third-party consent doctrine that has corollaries with wiretapping. it has a lot of implications these days because we share so much. we are transmitting information right now that we are sharing with our telecommunication's providers, equipment makers who don't necessarily know these things and the government is able to use this doctrine to get data because of the way the fourth amendment has been interpreted. more specifically, -- 10 years later the historic communications act became part of ecpa the electronic communications privacy act. this was dealing largely with e-mails which kind of was really

at the forefront. the author saw that e-mails was been downloaded from servers onto people's machines and try to come up with a threshold for when that e-mail, that store data, the content information with sensitive business information of hours was no longer so sensitive and came up with a 180 day limit because if you didn't download something and he left it on some server you obviously did not want it, right? >> the goal of ecpa was to protect by the sea. yes, so it was put into place in 1986 to protect privacy. >> yeah so things have changed but congress hasn't caught up. the law is still in place and so the government can without a warrant, simply a subpoena which can be issued by an attorney can go before a judge.

there are number of other laws that have been stretched and wrangled and really destroyed in order to kind of adapt to the internet age and them mass amount of electronic communication and these laws are not designed for today's data. >> i have to say, it's true that congress has thus far failed to update ecpa but that might change very soon. if you are not already you should have received the e-mail from the aclu and you will receive it about ecpa reform. it seems like we might actually get a warrant for e-mails within the next couple of years or maybe sooner than a. this has been a long-running battle and i think we might actually win. so please get involved and call your legislators and tell them you want your e-mails with a warrant standard.

i think they might actually have it so that's the good news. >> i second that. i wanted to talk in particular about the role that corporations are playing in government surveillance because i think we have already talked about that. we talked about how at&t have put together a secret room with fiber optics. if there's nothing else you walk away with this channel there is a very important role that corporations play in allowing this to take place. in december of 2011 the whistleblower web site began a very interesting document. it was documents about the surveillance industry. today there are to date there are 287 files on a web site about this. these documents detail the activities of surveillance companies, the companies that built the back on the surveillance like government in egypt libya, china and other

places. i wanted to read a little portion of wikileaks media. they said the industry is practicing unregulated military forces are able to silently and secretly intercept calls and computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunications providers. users physical locations can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone even if it is only on standby. jonathan, you are a technologist. can you talk to us about how this is actually happening? how are these companies able to take over computers specifically track locations of phones? how does this work? >> in short it's not that hard. technical surveillance is something that the internet was

not built to withstand. the internet was built to be resilient against parts of it stopping functioning. it's very good at connecting networks but there aren't really privacy or security guarantees built in. so if some entity whether it is an internet service provider or government that sits between you and whoever you were talking to decides they would like to intercept your traffic, modify your traffic to a first approximation the internet is not going to do much to help you out. the way computer scientist think about these problems tends to be in layers, so there is a layer that represents the physical connection between your device and the networks and there is a layer that represents the internet protocol and the protocol that all the devices on the internet speak and above that their applications you may be running better talking to each other.

and, at each of those layers there is a possibility of compromise building in all sorts of backdoors and the possibility of building and various sorts of privacy and security guarantees. and so, while it's easy to build intrusive technology it also turns out it's not too hard to build technology that provides protections for users in ways that perhaps the legislature sees in this country and other countries and the courts have been someone's reluctant to do. ..

>> this brings me to the second poi wanted to be sure to address about consumer protection or user protection as against interception modification by companies or government. so it's really easy to get this stuff wrong. and so the best way to insure that a technology you're using to protect yourself against some sort of surveillance is having it vetted. there are plenty of experts who spend all their time making sure these technologies are implemented correctly, and there are some technologies that have been thoroughly vetted. there are many that have not

though. so, for example, you may have seen in the news over the past few days some discussion of whether the government can intercept i message communications, apple's chat protocol. and it's not entirely clear. in part because the i message protocol, you should hold off on making bold claims about what is or isn't interception proof until we have a much better idea of what's going on. so let me give a concrete example of that, research done in my lab at stanford looking at implementations of secure web communications by mobile apps. so in theory these properties of confidentiality, integrity and authenticity are fairly well solved in the web. if you've used a browser, you've seen some sites you go to are prefixed with https instead of http, that means your browser is

making some attempts to guarantee those three properties. it turned out some mobile apps were using https to communicate but in the process had not actually checked the identity of who they were communicating with. so there was a bug in these programs. so as long as a server responded with some valid https response, not necessarily identifying itself as who the mobile app was talking about, then the app would go ahead and chat away, share user credentials and information. so this is a great example of secure in practice -- secure in theory, insecure in practice. the last point i want to touch on in the design of these technologies, um, that could protect users in ways that the courts or legislators have not is in their design. the first component of that being whether it's a security property as between users or

devices, so providing these guarantees between the users and devices using the system. so is communication encrypted, authenticated, from, you know, my phone to whoever i'm talking to's phone, or is it encrypted and authenticated to whoever the cloud provider is for this messaging service. but then once it's in the cloud, the message might not -- no longer be encrypted. so if government was listening in to the communication between my phone and the cloud, they couldn't get anything. but the government could, for example, order disclosure by the cloud provider. so let me give a concrete example of a time when this has come into play. the david petraeus gmail debacle involved a communication service, gmail, that is secure from a user to the cloud. so gmail uses https. the nsa presumably -- not that

they would have, but suppose -- presumably could not have intercepted the e-mails going from david petraeus' computer to google. but, of course, law enforcement could show up at google with a warrant, valid warrant, and google could produce those e-mails. this is, actually, a very ambiguity that's playing out now in the imessage news coverage. there's an open question, open in part because the imessage isn't documented. when they say it's secure, are they talking about user to user or user to cloud? so if law enforcement went to apple and asked for historical imessages, could they provide them? we don't have an answer right now. okay. the very last point i wanted to make touches on user experience. and increasingly, i think, computer security researchers are recognizing this is kind of the whole enchilada, no matter

how well you design in theory or practice, if it's not very usable, then you haven't really accomplished much. and so let me give some concrete examples of where user experience have gone a long way in security and privacy. so there's a feature in the firefox web browser called do not track that is intended to limit data collection and use by third party web sites, so web sites you don't interact with. in firefox 4 the do not track button was under the advanced preferences menu. in firefox 5 and later it's under the privacy preferences menu. so seemingly kind of meaningless user interface change. just a different tab. it actually looks like very roughly that moving the check box from advanced to privacy doubled the uptake of this feature from, from its initial release. so user interface matters a lot. another concrete example, there is a feature in the safari web

browser that blocks certain third party web site cookies, information that might be used to track the browser around the web by default. there is somewhat similar features in the other major web browsers, but they're not enabled by default. roughly 80-90% of safari users have third party cookie blocking enabled. roughly 1 2% of non-- 1-2% of nonsafari users have it disabled. i'm an apple user, and i don't think that makes me smarter than everyone else when it comes to configuring my privacy settings. [laughter] so i think the thesis that sometimes is bandied about is ludicrous, but the notions that, hey, apple users just care more about their -- oh, come on. yeah. no, 80-90 percent versus 1-1 percent, it's the user interface. the last example i want to give is this update to firefox that

just moved into alpha yesterday. it's a patch i wrote that implements a feature very similar to the safari cook cookie-blocking feature by default. so presumably will increase adoption rates from the low single digits up to the high double digits. and unsurprisingly, the response from companies negatively impacted by this change that are in the business of collecting consumer information of this sort very hostile. the initial response from one of the trade group vps was, i think, called it a nuclear first strike or something like that. [laughter] yeah. and that's all about user interface, right? firefox has had a third party cookie-blocking option for roughly a decade, but because this one's going to be enabled by default, the game has totally changed. so that's the closing note i wanted to make sure to include, that even if you have this right in theory and practice, it really takes very careful design

work to make sure users can actually take advantage of one of these systems. >> rainey, can i answer that question in a slightly different way? >> yes. >> okay. you guys should check out the wikileaks spy files because craze i stuff is in there -- crazy stuff is in there. essentially, what they are is a set of promotional materials produced by companies that make highly-a advanced equipment for government. and there are like powerpoint presentations in there that these companiesing have produced which they presumably trot out to in nsa and the cia and the fbi when they want to sell this stuff. and it's incredibly revealing. you can see there are programs that exist that enable, you know, law enforcement and intelligence agencies to bug your phone in a way that not only allows the government to see what you're doing and, you know, read your e-mails and intercept all your communications, but it'll also turn the microphone of your

phone on, right, when you're not using it to eavesdrop on you just when you're talking to someone in the same room to take control over the camera and take photographs and video surreptitiously. all sorts of really crazy stuff. so there's like, you know, there's the interception side where the government presumably goes to google sometimes with a warrant, sometimes with a subpoena to get information from the service provider, and then there's also the government installing malware on your machine, right? that's a whole separate issue. so they can actually turn your own computer against you. and i just, you know, i think one of the really key things to note about what these, all of these promotional materials say if you look through them is they all say, you know, we provide lawful interception capabilities to governments, right? what does lawful interception mean in the united states in 2013? it's not pretty. so, you know, until we change the laws to reflect the basic, you know, principle of american justice which is that unless the government has individualized

suspicion to believe that we're involved in a crime, probable cause, and shows that evidence to a judge and gets a warrant, they should not be involved in our business, right? we don't actually have assurances right now that that's what's happening. so anytime you hear a lawful interception, be ware -- be wary. >> i just want to, really quick, would the user -- anybody on the panel -- realize that their computer was bugged in this way? would somebody talking on their cell phone be able to tell at a glance, everyday users, something who doesn't have the ability to -- does the everyday user see, is there any way that they would know? >> well, it makes your phone hot, that's one thing. i mean, literally. like, you know, if you're not using your phone and you touch it and it's warm, that's a warning that something's going on, that somebody's using your phone while you're not using it. i think the same is also true with computers. if you find that, you know, there's a program running somewhere on your computer that's taking up all kinds of

disc space and you can't figure out what it is, that might also be a warning sign that something tricky's going on. i don't know, jonathan, if you have somebody to say -- >> i would say if that's the case, then whoever wrote the malware isn't very good. [laughter] malware has gotten a lot more sophisticated in the past decade plus. if an entity really wanted to go out of its way to compromise an end user's device in a way that was fairly surreptitious and had access to what in the field's jargon are called zero day exploits, so exploits that are not generally known, have not been patched yet, old exploits that can be used, it certainly could be very possible to take over a device. and i want to be -- i'm really glad kade raised this, because i want to make sure i caveat everything i said about security

in theory and in practice and the design of security with at the point of which your computer, your phone or your tablet has been compromised, the technical term for the security properties you've gotten are hosed. [laughter] you are out of luck. [laughter] you are hosed. >> i'm going to jump in here to piggyback on not just the conversations that have -- >> [inaudible] >> am i not talking into the microphone? thanks. so, um, i want to jump onto what jonathan was saying about theory and security in practice because that, that touches upon some of the work that i do. and i also want to simultaneously try and ground the conversation potentially in a different way than it's been talked about thus far. so i'm a senior researcher folking on digital inclusion -- focusing on digital inclusion in

online privacy issues as rainey mentioned at the new america foundation's open technology institute, and for the past year i've been looking at, um, if we want to call them a user community -- i wouldn't necessarily use those words -- but a specific portion of the population that doesn't have access to the internet or is thinking about using the internet or internet-enabled devices for the first time. and so within this world of new users of the internet, i think that issues of privacy and online surveillance are perhaps thought about in a slightly different way. so, you know, a lot of the conversation here and a lot of the conversation among surveillance and/or privacy advocates -- not surveillance advocates, but you know what i mean. [laughter] has been around thinking about rights and individual rights and, you know, the relationship, for example, between having private communications and being

able to dissent as an individual and free speech rights and all of that. and i think what i'm seeing in the field as i go out and talk to people is that, first of all, it's not just about rights. it's really about power. because the way in which both technical features of surveillance are enabled by corporations and then the practices that are put into place by either government or corporations that do surveilling and data mining and targeting and tracking and so forth, that effects to existing social inequalities x. i think that's important in the fore ground of this conversation. and related to that, it means these issues around surveillance and privacy are not just about individuals, they're about communities. so, again, the communities that i'm interested in are the communities that don't have access to the internet or are just coming online for the first

time sit at the intersection of a variety of inequalities. they live in communities with high incarceration rates, they have, you know, the school -- the public schools around them are closing, they have low literacy rates, there are a number of problems that they confront on a day-to-day basis. so when you're talking about, jonathan, the security and practice concept, most of the security solutions are the privacy-protecting solutions that are in place right now are a complete failure for the end users that i'm looking at, right? they simply just do not have, um, both the time and the know how to download tor and use it, to use a plug-in, to use -- >> [inaudible] >> oh, well, i'll leave somebody else to talk about tor.

i don't want to get into that just yet. [laughter] so the types of tools that are out there for people to use to protect themselves are really out of reach. i've looked at a number of communities both through classroom observation, you know, people that are taking classes, intro to computers and internet for the first time, i've looked at, i've talked to people in public libraries and senior centers and anti-poverty organizations. this is not what people are thinking of, first and foremost. they come to the internet, and the type of surveillance that's in place is invisible to them. perhaps even more invisible to the average internet consumer or the average internet user. and there they're a long way awm being able to understand how these practices of surveillance and corporate tracking take place. you know, if you're learning how to use the computer for the

first time, you spend a lot of time literally trying to figure out where the cursor is on the screen and how to drag it to the other side of the screen, right? so i've sat in classes where instructors are trying to get people registered to an e-mail account, right? and there are all sorts of problems that are involve inside there, right? -- involved in there, right? some people don't know how to type on the keyboard, there are spelling mistakes, they need to ask the instructor how to design a password, the password is then recorded on a piece of paper that the instructor has, you know, the instructor may, for example, tell people to run through the privacy policies and consistent with other research on how infrequently people pay attention to terms of service agreements or privacy policies, they just click through it. it doesn't mean anything to them. what i'm trying to say is that

for this portion of the population learning is really, really slow. that's not to say that people can't learn or won't learn. it's that the expectations that i think a lot of people have around learning how to be the, you know, perfect privacy-protecting end user is simply out of reach. and it's something that we have to think about as we're pushing these conversations forward thinking about who the most vulnerable populations are and also thinking about end users. the other thing that i want to say is that in the research that i'm doing a lot of the communities that i've seen, for them privacy is really a luxury. it's not -- people don't think about their first or fourth amendment rights, right? they come into a public access center, you know, say, for example, a library. they're under pressure to fill out their benefits forms. they will ask the library provider to help them register

for an e-mail account. they don't have one, right? again, all of this divulging of personal information happens over and again. and then on top of that, they're divulging more information to the benefits providers whether it's for family assistance or, you know, for unemployment or otherwise. to, you know, again, reveal bits and pieces of their lives in ways that the ordinary or average internet, excuse me, internet user isn't normally subjected to. and i think when the conditions of your internet use are, when your entry into the internet is under a condition of chronic surveillance, a problem, right? -- there's a problem, right? and we need to think about how we solve that problem collectively. >> i just want to remind everybody if you want to participate in the twitter discussion, the hash tag is

nprcpriv. jonathan, did you want to respond? >> i'm really glad to see the access to knowledge among users. something else i wanted to make sure to flag as a sense sensitivity in the space is the eshoo around international users and international governments. >> talk into the microphone. >> language in some cases may be different. so, too, the rule of law may be very different in foreign countries and the very legitimacy of government may be very different. so whatever the merits of american law in this space, i promised i was going to wear by tech hat today, so i'm not trying to opine on that. i think we can all agree that practices in some other countries are really pretty concerning. so china, iran, and so on. what we learned after the fact about tunisia. and this, in fact, has given some rise to some tensions within the federal government

around user protection against surveillance. so, for example, tor, that's an anonymizing tool that operates at the network level, so below applications, above the physical link between your devices and the network was funded in part by the department of defense. and the state department has given out i believe it's tens of millions of dollars to projects to promote privacy and security tools for use overseas. meanwhile, we hear from the department of justice that there's a need to revise federal law, in particular a law called calea, the communications assistance to law enforcement act, that would require certain forms of back doors for authorized surveillance. >> what do you mean by back door? spell it out. >> so, so intentionally-designed loopholes in the guarantees i

talked about earlier. so if you have a system that's designed to provide confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, you build in from the get go some way of undermining those very properties. >> so that -- >> so that, for example, if government were to show up with a warrant, then the provider of the service would be in a position to provide government with whatever information it requested. so an example of this in practice might be skype which for a long time did have some, at least it was generally understood to have had very good security and privacy properties. and following the acquisition by microsoft, there is fairly widespread speculation that some back doors were built into the products that facilitate compliance with law enforcement requests. the jar gone that gets -- jargon

that gets kicked around the department of justice for inability to surveil individuals because of their use of technology that have privacy and security properties built in is going dark. and so you may see in hill hearings or statements out of various federal law enforcement agencies there's concern around going dark. and we should have legislation to remedy the going dark problem. cacalea 2.0 as some pitch it. related to this and the very last thing i wanted to note was this imessage issue, the inability to intercept imessages. yet another issue of this tension. some part of the department of defense, some part of the state d. saying they want to facilitate, and here we have a memo out of dea saying that they're concerned that this tool that apple's put in the hands of countless people provides security and privacy properties that they would like to be able to work around if, for example, they had a warrant to intercept

imessages. >> if you've got a piece of paper with a question on it, go ahead and raise your piece of paper, and somebody's going to come around and pick them up. peter, he talked about what we found out in tunisia after the fact. he talked about all of these problems in countries all over the world. can you -- you've worked on these things. can you respond a little bit? >> yeah, sure. yeah, there are -- you know, take what happens here and make it much more egregious, and you can imagine the situations in syria and iran. and luckily, we've had some opportunities to really look at the files, and in tunisia, you know, once the government offices were raided, the same as in egypt after the uprising there, we saw the transcripts, we saw the calls, we saw the text messages that were being recorded through surveillance equipment often provided, sold

by providers in the u.s., in canada, in england that are perhaps still being maintained. there's a lot of these authoritarian, abusive countries. and it's sold sometimes through third parties, sometimes through third party countries often illegally under u.s. law, and our sanctions regimes. but the software has capabilities to to have everything -- to monitor everything. there is some backlash once, actually, in libya the -- some of those tortured, who were arrested and tortured for their communications were able to see those records. they filed lawsuit against the equipment maker which is part of bol in france. there are a couple of lawsuits like that. this is all coming to light after the fact, unfortunately. one thing we do at access is work with the company, the

telecoms. because in situations lacking rule of law, there's little civil society can do. you know with, we talked about multistakeholderrism involving civil society in these questions, but a lot of times the companies jump into these emerging markets that lack protections, lack rule of law and, you know, make a huge buck and then find out, you know, five years later the contract was gotten through bribery, and users have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured. one anecdote i just want to pass on, the longest running tv show in the world, i guess, one country -- one act from every country in europe, musical act or what not is put forward, and you have to vote for some other country's act. this guy in azerbaijan really loved this armenian song, thought it was great, voted for it via his cell phone. he was arrested and brought in

for interrogation by his police force asking why he voted for azerbaijan's sworn enemy, armenia. that not only showed the extent in the realtime monitoring that's possible, but also, you know, how brazen these security forces can be. so it's something to think about, you know, as we look around the u.s. >> i see two people responding, and then i want to -- i had another question. both of you go. >> i was just going to say i think that, um, just to kind of draw the connection between what i think is happening or what i think the problems are here domestically and what's happening abroad is -- and jonathan has certainly alluded to it -- is there's a terrible asymmetry in the type of power that corporations have and governments have versus the type of power that the end user has. and, you know, in terms of like i don't know what the mobile phone penetration rates are in

iran or china or in other authoritarian regimes across the world. but as these areas increase their usage of mobile phones and other mobile or web-enabled devices, we can only expect that this type of surveillance is going to increase. and so i think it is really a moment to think about how, as jonathan referred to earlier, how do we think about privacy by default and privacy by design so that we can avoid some of these problems from the get go. >> i just want to take issue with what i think is often the false dichotomy that's created between this country and so-called authoritarian regimes elsewhere. i think that someone who, if he were alive to talk about it, would really take issue about that is the 16-year-old u.s. citizen from denver who was

blown up by a u.s. missile strike fired from a drone while he was eating lunch with his cousins in yemen. the u.s. government is still imprisoning 166 people in gitmo indefinitely without charge. you know, the u.s. operates secret prisons all over the world at so-called black sites where torture still occurs to this day. a yemeni journalist -- i'm sorry, a somali journalist is currently being imprisoned right now at the request, direct request of barack obama himself for lotterring things about -- for reporting things about, actually, cia black sites and prisons in somalia. so the notion that the u.s. government is a democracy and other governments are authoritarian nightmares i think is really something that needs to be contested, because i don't believe it's true, actually. [applause] and i think, i think it's really