movement as we know it and to look at the numbers and sees that the immunity, the community runs about twice in the community. .. if people fail to learn the lessons of history they are

bound to repeat them and i'm trying to sound an alarm here to make sure that people who have risen educationally and gain significant wealth just to remind them to look at the life of robert smalls and you can see with the stroke of a pen and a few court decisions they can transmit history as it once was. let us know what you are reading this summer. tweet us at booktv. posted on our facebook page or send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. in light of recent revelations about the nsa's domestic

surveillance program booktv has put together a collection of clips from programs we have featured on the nsa and the topic of publishing government secrets. over the next hour we will hear from authors james bamford, matthew aid james keefe and dana priest. up first is the author james bamford whose first book about the nsa the puzzle palace was published in 1982. he spoke about the follow up to that book "body of secrets" in 2002 at the independent institute in oakland, california. >> the nsa is an extremely secret agency and when i wrote the book he it was the first book written about nsa today never thought i would have to read a second one but after i wrote puzzle palace no one came along and followed in my footsteps so i ended up writing "body of secrets" 20 years later which is only the second book written on the nsa so i sort of have a monopoly on that topic at

this point. the government was not very happy that i wrote the "puzzle palace" and they twice wrote me for prosecution even though i never signed clearance forms with the nsa or anything else. they just didn't like anybody writing on the nsa. the old saying at nsa is that the nsa stands for no such agency and internally the joke is that stands for never say anything. then when the "puzzle palace" came out and said it that stands for not secret anymore. [laughter] but it was still very secret. i've barely scratched the surface. they also were unhappy that i got documents out of a particular library at the george c. marshall research library down in luxembourg virginia on the campus of the virginia military institute so they went

down to the library after the book came out and actually rated the library pulling off things from the shelves, ordering them to lock the faults and so forth. this is after the book had already come out. i didn't really understand the logic of that. if you do it before the horse is out of the barn i can see but as a result of that the government ,-com,-com ma as a result of the governments actions the library as well as the american civil liberties union and the american library association and the american historical associations sued nsa saying he shouldn't be able to go to a private library and pull out nonclassified private documents. these were not private documents these were private by one of the founders of nsa william f. friedman. so the history of writing on nsa is not a history of e.'s.

you have to fight the government every way. another problem with trying to write on it is the freedom of information act which is an important tool but nsa is the only agency excluded from the freedom of information act a little thing called public law subsections six which i know by heart. congress shall make no law requiring nsa to the bill to information about its organization function structure policy personnel or any other information. i had to find loopholes and 636. i was successful over a number of documents i requested. i ended up getting more than 5000 pages worth. the history is a lot of hard work and trying to get anything out of this agency. when i wrote this new book i approach the agency and i got the same response.

we are not going to help you. we are not going to give you any interviews but then a new director came along and the logic in allowing the book to be written about it. i had written the "puzzle palace" and the world did not come to an end after that and as a matter of fact the government ended up using the book as a textbook in the defense and intelligence college. it was really the nsa that was going crazy. the state department invited me over to give an address to the senior officials at the state department, then call the secretary of state's open forum and they invited me to the secretaries dining room afterward. at the same time the nsa is coming after me. with this book it was different. the new director came along and saw the value of having at least

another book 20 years ago when the "puzzle palace" came out. one of the key reasons was hollywood was creating his image as an agency full of assassins. the deputy director think it was assassinated a congressman because of the bill he did not like so nsa thought if there was an impressionable teenager who saw this movie in they are interested in nsa it might be useful to have a look that is in the library in the bookstore. they did agree to help me and they let me in the door and gave me tours of the agency and interviews with senior officials they didn't help me with the documents but once again i found loopholes and another couple thousand pages worth of documents. at the same time the agency when

the book came out instead of threatening me with prosecution this time they had a book signing for me which was very strange. i think originally they wanted access to the boat. they wanted to have access to see what was in it and whether it was good or not and i said having done this for 25 years i'm not going to start now giving censorship rights to government agencies. eventually they backed off and they gave me access anyway and i never had advance notice of events covered in the book. so the book is untainted by nsa's own censorship. nevertheless the agency you know, i think they realize the value of it and i think they appreciated the book and i think

it's, think a came as a shock to everybody that they had a look signing and it went on for four hours. originally when the "puzzle palace" came out they had basically told the employees they could not diet and could not discuss it. it was interesting during the book signing seeing all these employees walk up with copies of the "puzzle palace." [laughter] i would like to get into about what the agency is about and how it works in some of the issues if all thing around september 11 and so forth. i will just give a brief overview. basically it's a largest intelligence agency in the world and the most secret intelligence agency in the world. to compare to the cia, the cia was formed by the national security act. it was, they had hearings and there was debate. there was nothing secret about the creation of the cia.

the nsa howard was formed in 1952 by president truman and formed by top-secret memorandum. a conference for the memorandum has been secret for many years and has just been classified in the last few years. that memorandum laid out the parameters of this very secret agency. even the name is sacred. its very existence it's very existence was secret. congress was not told about it. eventually there were two people in congress that were told about it and that was it. eventually the name got out because of the spy scandal and so forth but since that time nsa has remained extremely secret. even today when you care he care about all these things happening with the intelligence community you almost never read about the nsa. you read about the cia, the fbi and all the other agencies but nsa virtually never appears in the press or very rarely appears in the press. i did however do a piece for "the washington post" last week

in the outlet section, a long piece on the nsa's responsibility during the september 11 attacks. the agency basically grew out of world war ii. world war ii had the greatest successes in breaking the german and japanese codes and the german machine and the japanese purple code. the u.s. was in a bad position when the war was coming to an end. we were about to go into this cold war involving russia. the problem was russia was our ally during world war ii so he paid virtually no attention to russian codes with one exception. but there was very little attention paid to russian codes breaking so at the end of the war the u.s. and britain decided that to create this secret organization known as tight-end which even today is technically secret. the nsa still has a secrecy rap on thai con for another five years but i managed to get the

documents. what it was was basically the u.s. and britain wanted to get into germany as the war was coming to an end and capture the german codebreakers and code makers and a lot of their documents because they wanted to find out two things. they wanted to find out whether united states was vulnerable because if they had broken u.s. codes and number two they wanted to find out ways the germans used it to break russian codes so they found where the codebreakers were outside of london sort of like a monastery. these were people that spent the entire war sitting behind desks reading these intercepts and a lot of them are not in very good shape in the first place. they were former college professors and so forth and then somebody told them, you're going to have to show up at 0500 or whatever and get into the plane and start parachute jumping. they just couldn't believe it but they were trying to train

these codebreakers to drop on the frontline is the world is coming to an end. -- -- as the war was coming to an end. the first two or three jumps they decided to give up that idea so they transported all the coal breakers -- my codebreakers onto trucks and it works well. the u.s. found out that the germans never did break the codes, the u.s. codes very much and didn't do very well. they also found that the russians, the germans had done an enormous job in breaking the codes and the germans led the german prisoners led the u.s. to the location where they buried this enormous code breaking machine. once the u.s. and britain dug it up they were able to immediately begin intercepting and breaking russian codes. it was an enormous machine. i think it was 40 tons something

like that. so the u.s. was able to go seamlessly from breaking german japanese codes to breaking the german code in that lasted until 1948 when there was a spy and nsa's predecessor that gave the secret away in russia changed its codes and nsa was long known as black friday at that point. during the 1950s nsa supported -- not poured a lot of money into the computer industry basically to prime the pump for what is today america's enormous computer industry because if you are breaking codes the way to do it is to get more powerful computers. about this time the nsa came up with another problem and that was during world war ii there was censorship. so the western union and all these other communications companies had to turn over their messages to the government

codebreakers and intercept people. but once the war came to an end they added censorship and as a result nsa was without the raw data for its interception and codebreaking allegedly said they began working out a secret deal with western union and these other companies. it lasted for almost well more than three decades basically and this was a very secret operation, totally illegal. and it's a work of this agreement with western union and the other companies where western union would turn over every telegram going to the company during the the entire day and turn it over to nsa and nsa would get copies of them. this was totally without any kind of warrant. normally if the fbi or the other agencies wanted to look at one message or one telegram they would have to get a warrant from an impartial judge.

this was called operation shamrock and the way it worked out was the nsa built this phony television type processing company in new york. it was in the office building me made to look like a television processing company and the nsa people go to the rear door of western union and these other companies after midnight every night as per an agreement. the employee went through the backdoor and passed all the days telegrams run on all these computer tapes to the nsa employee who would take them back to nsa and duplicate them in this place in new york city and bring the originals back before daybreak and send the copies down to ft. meade for analysis. it was the largest, one of the largest illegal eavesdropping created in the united states.

it was very successful and nobody found out about it until 1975 and as a result of that they came to an end. a lot of reforms were created in the intelligence community. one of those reforms was the creation of the very secret court known as the secret foreign intelligence court. even a lot of the lawyers had never heard of the fisa court and it's a very interesting thing. it was created in 1978. since 1978 it has the unique distinction of never having turned government down. if the fisa court does turn the government down there is what is known as the fisa appeals court which is sort of the judges who sit on are the main judiciary since they were created in 1978. they have never once heard a case. so that is one of the reforms that were created after the

church committee. if the nsa wants to eavesdrop on what is known as a u.s. person that has to get a warrant from the secret court. >> in 2010 historian matthew aid presented his history of the nsa titled "the secret sentry." at the international spy museum in washington d.c.. during this clip and that offend mr. aid talks about some of the nsa successes and failures over the decades and describes how the nsa operates today. >> how did you answer your own question are we getting our money's worth and why or why not and secondly what are some let's say major successes over a couple of failures and how could they have turned into successes? >> a very good question. the short answer, and it's a personal opinion and you can talk to any senior cia official

and they will review a different answer. they are the ones who've have cia who have cia clearances but my feeling is that we have got an, we have got in our money's worth from the agency all -- despite all the failures and despite the gulf in 1964 which was an intelligence failure of the first order which dragged america into war but as dr. johnson in his multivolume history points out president lyndon johnson at the time was looking for a reason to go to war so if the tonkin gulf didn't happen something something else would have come longfellow would have resulted in us going into the war. it just so happened that tonkin gulf was sort of an egregious example of where intelligence failed and where it failed, it

failed that nsa and it failed at the white house on that level where you had a secretary of defense that was in such a hurry to bomb north vietnam that it didn't matter what the intercepts actually said. basically you tailor them to your premade conclusion. the weapons of mass destruction scandal and iraq is another example where nsa, you just had a small part of the intelligence failure. >> it was the political process that got it wrong? >> there have been examples where nsa got it right and analysts had finally gotten it wrong. for example the 1960s soviet invasion of czechoslovakia. all the evidence from intelligence and from other sources clearly indicated that the soldiers would militarily crush the czech government which

they viewed as an anathema and for reasons the cia's intelligence analysts at the national intelligence level said no, the russians will rattle their sword but they are not going to do it. this became, this was written in stone and they refuse to budge no matter how much evidence. the same thing with the tet offensive in 1968. all the evidence from the collection standpoint from nsa and others clearly support tell a major offensive in january 1968 by the north vietnamese and vietcong but the analyst said we don't have a complicity to conduct nationwide coordinated offensive. it just became, it was part of their mindset at the time. there are literally dozens of

examples of when the collectors get it right. in 1973 arab-israeli war another example where nsa got it right and the analysts at langley said the egyptian and syrian armed forces are incapable of taking on the israeli defense forces and there is no chance of war and so everybody was shocked when the egyptian army crossed the suez. so, and then we have, we have had examples where nsa has gotten it wrong but those examples are fewer than the analysts who are responsible for taking the mass of material collected by nsa and turning it into truth of policymakers. that is my gut conclusion. i can't empirically demonstrated. it's just that over 25 years i see more and more examples of where the analysts for whatever

reasons, there are many examples where they got it right and nsa had no collection on the issue whatsoever. but on the major crises of the 1950s and throughout the cold war, you know in like 70% of the time the nsa was right. so i mean that says a lot about how massive and global the nsa was. at the height of the cold war in 1967 or 68, the nsa had in excess of 95,000 oteri and civilian personnel and close to 100 posts which was truly a gargantuan effort in virtually every and virtually every nation in the world was being listened to. the united nations, ngos, you name it, everyone was being monitored and i mean i would be willing to admit that gargantuan

effort you miss a few things but i'm always surprised at by how much they actually caught. >> i have a simple question. could you give us a concise description of what the nsa does operationally and organizationally? how does it work to pull all of this information? >> that is a big one. the nsa put simply, nsa is, nsa has basically two primary missions. it has a host of corollary missions and basically it does two things into things only. it is the nation's eavesdropper with which probably accounts to 60 to 70% of its effort and it's responsible for protecting the governments communications infrastructure whether it be computers, e-mails and how it does it? well, okay i will speak to it in general terms.

nsa and i hearken to the fact that today i assume many of you have children or grandchildren who are enamored with cell phones and have the little registers in their hands at all times racking up huge bills. nsa, i will give you a very good example. in baghdad in 2007 general david petraeus was sent over to baghdad iraq security situation is failing rapidly. petraeus as i can fix fix it fou mr. president. he goes over to baghdad and the first thing he is confronted with is we knew very little about the organization of the iraqi insurgents and al qaeda in iraq. it turns out that nsa had come up with a couple of lovely devices which basically could vacuum clean all of the e-mail

digital pager and cell phone traffic for the greater baghdad area which is roughly a couple million people crammed into a very small place, and then there was a corollary computer system that basically could ram through all of the call data and figure out who was an insurgent and who was just ma and pa calling in to the local store. and what i think we have to wait for nsa to classify material on the subject that i have talked now with a couple dozen people who have basically said through this vacuum cleaner intercept system that imparts on a man-made mountain out near the baghdad international airport, it looked basically like the compressor, the ingersoll power

compressors that you see where the guy is sitting there with a jackhammer and is jackhammer is connected to a little power pack behind them. that is exactly what the intercept system looked like. there was nothing unusual about it. it just had this capacity to basically up everything within a certain frequency range which is what cell phones, cell phones all operate on cells. this thing basically was connected to all the different cells in the baghdad area. everything fed into basically this computer system which then could spit through it and say ah-ha we have an insurgent cell here and an insurgent cell here. it could locate them based on their telephone number. it's just like what are police systems here use in the united states. we pick up a cell phone. they can actually track the use of it. they know exactly where you are. this is how the system worked in

baghdad and then general petraeus was able to send in what they called door crunchers, basically infantry squads to the locations by the system and sure enough one insurgent cell after another after another went down thanks to basically, it's a simple process but it's much more complicated than i'm making it sound. that is an example of how the system works. it takes a vast amounts of computer power to do it and nsa is the only agency in the world that has the technology, the money and manpower. russia used to have a much larger and the soviet union before the economies collapse had a larger intelligence system but then they fell on hard times after the collapse of communism. they are on their way back but they are still a shadow of their former self. does that answer the question?

>> i don't mean to be disrespectful by asking this but nevertheless what does your book do different from the multivolume of dr. johnson in his years in executive summary of his? i don't mean to sound disrespectful. it's been a common note disrespect taken. actually, i am almost tempted to drag, pierre and let him give his side of the story but what i tried to do -- tom's multivolume history is wonderful except that there is still huge chunks of it they remain classified. a i tried to fill in some of the blanks and in some cases with some success, and others not. i tried to add material that was not contained in tom's multivolume history because with all due respect to my friend back there, there were many

other things written on specific operations and specific aspects of the agency and i tried to bring them all together plus bring in -- there was also 25 years of research at the national archives and other document repositories. most of the interviews i have done with former cia and nsa officials basically i tried to do basically the same thing that he did but from an unclassified all source perspective. >> yeah, i think i would like to put a perspective on what he did and i will tell you the story of how i met matthew. i was in nsa's program and it was writing this multivolume book and one of my jobs was to

view all of foia's coming into the agency. almost all of them had something to do with things that will happen rather than things that happen. they all crossed my desk and i started to notice there was a huge pile for foia coming in from the national security archive and every single one of them had at the bottom matthew a so i immediately concluded he was a competent person and not only that there was a pseudo-who would be named matthew aid. in 2001 i was invited to speak at a conference in toronto. i went there, and there was matthew aid. i introduce myself and i have no idea and i apologized. and so, i read the paper he presented on korea and i have already written one that was one of the chapters in my multivolume history and also the

same one. i realize his was better than mine. i had access to all the classified documents and the reason his was better was because he had brought perspective that -- could never bring any at a critical eye that i simply did not have. i was a nsa patriot and i could not step outside of the agency to review it from the perspective that matthew had. i can say a lot of other things but in short that is what his book brings to the evaluation of the nsa. thank you. >> up next james keefe the author of "chatter" -- though

this is from 2005. >> i first got interested in this sort of thing and the late 90s about five years ago. i started hearing about this sort of planet spanning eavesdropping architecture, something that i've not really been covered in the american press. i was living in the u.k. at the time and there was a lot more coverage of it there. this caught my attention and i basically spent the better part of the last five years looking into it. so what i thought i would do is start with a little episode fairly early on. this was the summer of 2002 and the character that i met. i will just read you a page or two about him. we live in a world awash in signals. in the wonderful opening scene of kristof you saw skis film red he dials the number of his lover in geneva. as the man dials he takes his

camera along with a phone cord seemingly into the line itself through dense weave of tiny red wires into a clinic patients cable running underwater and back up out of the water under cities and through forests through more wires and cables and switches and eventually up to the woman's phone geneva. we follow the signal and the instant it takes between the last number he dials in the ring of the phone on the other and. we get an insight into the hurdle and the flux of the communication system we so take for granted. signals coarser wires that are beamed by satellite ground stations whose signals are from your cell phone to the microwave tower and from that tower to another to satellite and another string of microwave towers and the phone of a friend in another country all in an instant. your internet activity is broken down into data packets that travel by fiber-optic cable to your pulses of light coursing down the thickness of a follicle of hair. when you make long-distance phonecall a long-distance phonecall over satellite network to signals travel through cables

are between microwave towers until it reaches an uplink station and is stopped by a satellite 22,000 miles above the earth. in order to get a sense of the world of signals as a material physical thing i arranged a meeting with a man named alastair harley. a-listers a good-natured former mi-5 surveillance man in his 40s so this was in great written and he works for the british domestic intelligence agency mi-5. with the boyish grin and short long-haired. in the early part of his career he would sit on hilltops between microwave relay towers and are sifting calls and messages and acting on the intelligence they produce. now that he is out of that world he works as a freelance computer and communication security expert. from what i could glean this seems to involve hacking into the computer systems of various companies and organizations and then telephoning them short laughter they have identified the breach and offering services in preventing that from happening again.

i met him in the cathedral town outside of cambridge england. we walk through the train station parking lot until we reached his car a small blue sedan bristling with antennae. a dozen wires of various sorts jutted out all over it. yup, that is mine alastair said as we approached. the porcupine. over the next several hours alister and i alastair and i drove around the area near his house. the dashboard of his car was a jumble of switches black wires and knobs. he fiddled to get the frequencies as we zipped along listening to the messages flying around this. as we drove down empty roads without a person inside the inside of the car sounded like a cocktail party in full swing. cell phone conversations, the bark of walkie-talkies and cb radios the gibberish of encrypted calls. this was in the summer of 2002 in on the other side of the planet the war on terror was underway. we stopped at the largest

american air force base in england. bombers and supplied plants bound for afghanistan and maneuvered. a-listers fiddled and soon we were listening to exchanges between ground crews in the control tower as the planes were ready for takeoff. it works out well alastair told me that i considered the end of the runway and look like an aircraft spotter. for the first few minutes i didn't register the voices were not british but american. it was a peculiar kind of voyeurism, the knowledge that the flight plans of american f-15s would qualify as extremely valuable intelligence and the signals were there in the air asking to be listened to. if you listen to the ground crews at night he told me with a grainy explained as a general rule if it uses radio waves there's nothing that can be stored. they're not there is not a lot

around here that i can intercept and with the agency's equipment it must be -- so having had that experience i gained an appreciation for how easy it is to intercept communications. i started looking into the agencies that do this. in united states primary agency is the national security agency which a lot of people haven't heard of which is larger than they fbi and cia combined. it's the biggest in the world and it's fascinating they have 40,000 employees in maryland at their headquarters but another 20,000 employees scattered all over the planet at these listening stations where they intercept communications. so i will read you a little bit about the biggest as of the stations which is called mental leaf hill. i went to see this base which is

really in the middle of nowhere and fairly illuminating experience. you cannot help but note the juxtaposition. here are way from the world amid rolling pastures and attractive land where the air is redolent of cow dung flies the most sophisticated eavesdropping station on the planet. england's moors are after all cow country. leaving the victorian spot town at taxi winds west through eight miles of countryside. i have been warned and seen photos. i know what to expect. but as the first dome covers and decide i catch my breath. via khalid road rises and falls and as we dip and rise again and crest a hill the tip of a great white sphere shimmering in the summer heat becomes visible in the distance. one giant dimpled dome a great kevlar golfball and then

suddenly others flow into view above the hill. a dip in the road and again inside. as the taxi rounds the perimeter it flashes through road of trees. the white gloves are called -- and beach houses a powerful satellite dish antenna protecting its elements and masking its orientation. the dome itself is just the kind of skin. i count 28 of these domes in all ghostly white against the grain of the countryside. they look otherworldly. in a sense they are. the dishes are hidden inside the ray domes because there are sensitive antenna are trained on a corresponding set of satellites covering 20,000 miles above through through some of those if mitigation satellites to transmit messages to other installations around the world. some are spy satellites which take photographs intercept communications and use global positioning systems to pinpoint the locations of various individuals or vehicles around the planet. some of the satellites are regular communication satellites

the kind of transmitter telephone calls and internet traffic across the oceans be the first two varieties of satellites were built to correspond with the base. this third kind however was not. the satellites are managed by a company called and tell the sad and the signals they were via our private medications but the base collects the signals ceaselessly intercepting great flows of private communications every minute of every hour. the sign at the gate reads raf. i approached the sandbagged entrance smiled at smile at the great military policemen who stand guard and i peer inside. raf stands for royal air force but the name is a deliberate misnomer. the base was built in the 1950s on land purchased by the british crown but in 1966 desai was taken over by the national security agency. thus while the station is nominally an raf base it is actually home to more than 1200 americans. these people live in housing

within the perimeter of the fence and send their children to primary and secondary school within the fence, use their own grocery store post office pub in bowling alley all within the fence. the bowling alley is a questionable piece of nomenclature of america's nuclear program called the strike zone. there are houses in the chapel and playground in the full-size track and baseball diamond. the whole base covers 560 acres. beneath the curling ribbon of razor wire armed men with dogs patrolled the fence. while we were accustomed to this age of american power projection to the idea full-time military personnel living in this type of enclave abroad i was surprised to learn that the majority of employees at man must hill our engineers or civilians, engineers technicians mathematicians linguists and analysts. the nsa has always employed large numbers of civilian contractors professionals generally with technical expertise to satisfy the rigorous background tests and security clearances to work at

the forefront of the most secret field in american intelligence. these people come from aerospace and technology firms that do regular contract work for the government pay them of their belongings and families to the base drawn by the allowance is made for them, free housing free shipping of furniture and cars and most of all a tax-free salary. they work in three, eight hour shifts of the great interception machine is not shut down. they worked christmas in your stand through the routine protest outside the gates of the base on the fourth of july. there are linguists trained in arabic farsi hebrew and the gamut of european languages. with another 400 personal in the british ministry of defense a single quietly humming spy station was the vast majority of british american civilians have never heard of has a staff as large as all of britain's domestic intelligence service, mi-5. they of course would not let me in so i surrounded the base and as i walked around the base i took notes on what i saw and

photographed it in what have you. ultimately i resorted to my only option in the british countryside to go to the local pub and ask around. >> in and 2011 "washington post" investigative reporter dana priest appeared on booktv's "after words" program to discuss her book "top secret america." she was interviewed by douglas fife former undersecretary of defense for policy under president george w. bush. in this clip they talk about the responsibility that journalists have one publishing secret government information. >> host: i would like to return to this question of who in a properly ordered society should be making decisions about what kind of information should remain secret in the national interest, and you have made a powerful argument that

journalists are a crucial element of our system for establishing accountability for government officials on these matters and the only way that journalists can play that role is to be able to probe and find information and then using their judgment and their various sets of considerations the reporters bring to bear in their conversations with their own editors and with government officials, make decisions in many cases to take classified information that they have gotten an unauthorized fashion and make it public. so they are second-guessing government officials about the effect on the national interest of making that information public. now -- you have explained in a number of cases where you have dealt with it and you say that you believe you dealt with it in a responsible way. you obtained a certain amount of

information and kept some of this secret and then you published others. you are making judgments on them. i want to bring it though do not the specific cases where you think you handled it right to a more generic discussion of the problem, because there have been cases where information has been revealed in newspaper stories as a result of leaks, where there really has been harmed to the national interest and there was of course a very famous case during world war ii when the "chicago tribune" published a story revealing that we had broken japanese codes and a prosecution got underway and then interestingly enough the war department ultimately decided that since the japanese did not change their codes as a result of the story that they would like the prosecution dropped. but that was an example where

essentially a private businessman as i do think it's important to point out that journalists are for all of their role in society they are working for private businesses. a private businessman in chicago made the decision that could've really endangered the lives of many thousands of our members of the armed forces. now, if a journalist makes a decision to publish what he or she knows is the secret and even though you have gone through your own review based on your own considerations and analysis and you think you are being responsible and it turns out that you are wrong, it turns out that the government didn't know it was doing when they classified it and it's extremely harmful. harmful. you have publish something and people have died as a result. if you take the wikileaks leaks

recently, there've been a number of stories that they are exposing the names of people abroad under circumstances where those people are likely to be very severely harmed. if that happens, do you believe that the government should be able, and i understand your point about no prior restraint on publication but after the publication should the government be able to prosecute journalists and throw them in jail for revealing information that really is enormously harm or -- harmful to the country? >> guest: well i have to point out a couple of things. one is you had to go back to world war ii for good example. i say in the book and i really believe this is true and i will look for another example but i still think it would be hard to make the case, that when you look at the words that define secret and top-secret, it

gravely damage national security. that is the version of what is classified top secret. this is going to sound crude but even the loss of a low-level source doesn't gravely damage national security. it may be immoral and it may be irresponsible but it does not gravely damage national security. the problem is -- what you have constructed as a question is something that hasn't happened much or at all and it ignores a much larger problem that the government has. that we as americans have which we talk about in the conclusion which is hard government is like a sieve. wikileaks did what it did not only because it got information from individuals but technologically people in government, they don't understand how much of the

information is easily gotten from hackers. what the wikileaks postmortem showed done by counterintelligence officials was that the government i.t. systems, information technology systems, the people in the government don't know how much information is out there that shouldn't be out there. i went up and interviewed the company that happens to have tried to collect information about corporations and hired them that shouldn't be in the public domain and they have found all sorts of government secrets out in the public domain through a very simple software that unfortunately is like file-sharing like opening the door of your house. anybody that knows how to use that can come into your house and look in every room and take out the file that they want.

i went and visited them and they showed me the things that they stumbled upon that are out there, classified information in the public round. >> host: it's one of the more chilling parts of your book. >> guest: it is but the thing is it's not going to get any better. >> host: if i can move you back to my question, should the government -- let's put it this way. what i'm trying to look at here are the relationships among government officials, journalists and society in general and should society in general through its laws, should it say we want decisions on what should be secret in the national interest to be made under the law by our elected officials and duly appointed officials with proper authority who are serving the national interest and just their government official, or at

least they are supposed to be serving the national interest or do we want it to be catches c.a.t. scan and anybody who runs a business and calls themselves a journalist -- though there are people at more twitter followers in some newspaper subscribers. >> guest: the whole system is broke and. so if for instance we were to tighten that up and say we want to create more and if you break these you will go to jail and we can send into beforehand. it's like putting a little finger in a huge dyke and worse for the government is a makes government officials believe that they can operate in secret. when in fact the decision-making is more vulnerable to unauthorized leaks not just from common not just to journalist but to the larger world through the sieve that the i.t. system

is. wikileaks, that kind of thing is not going to stop. so what the government should do is really say what is it and this is what we say in the end of the book, what is it that we really need to keep secret and then concentrate resources on keeping that secret. right now there is too much that is secret. there is a way to keep it secret and they are not doing that. and another thing is, let's talk about the broader public policy implication for opening up the government. so as a reporter you will be surprised to know that i think the more public knows about terrorism, the strength of al qaeda, the weakness of al qaeda, the better and with the government in its best efforts think it needs to do the better

we all are. because we can then get the public's by and public's buy-in for those and not have to swing back and forth perhaps quite so much. >> host: i grant you that the government keeps too many things secret and what they do keep secret they keep secret for too long. i'm not arguing with you about that at all and i think our whole society is better off when people within the government err on the side of keeping it publicly available. >> guest: then how can we bring in the press on that? >> host: i'm not talking about muzzling the press. i really want to think through, if you and i were sitting down if we were designing the system and looking at it the way the founders did with all the different branches involved including the unofficial state and we said you know what would be a proper system? >> guest: or what i say the

proper system would be -- >> host: of me just ask, with one element of that system be bad when a journalist makes a decision, he takes something that has been properly classified and to make a public and if it turns out that really is harmful what should the system provides that the government can prosecute a journalist? >> guest: my answer is no because what you would give up and that is much more valuable than if that ever happened in first of all i am saying i don't know when that has ever happened. people make the theoretical argument because they have never come up with anything of the cost to the overall system of putting that out there which the cost would be there with many fewer papers willing to take on national security issues for fear. papers are already afraid to do

it but for fear of making a mistake or causing some loss. >> host: but there should be feared. >> guest: no, there shouldn't be feared. there should be professional very seriously taken discussion between the government and the media when these things arrive. that is the best you can do. you cannot, you cannot muzzle the papers beforehand without the result being a much more difficult environment. >> host: i'm not making a argument for prior -- let me just say as far as examples go i don't want to get into detailed examples. dean schonfeld has written a book called necessary secrets. for people who are interested in are there examples can certainly

look at that vote. what i think is an interesting question is, there are laws that say classified information should be protected and the secrecy of classified information should be protected. a journalist who decides to violate the secrecy of the classified information by the public, would you agree, is to some extent engaging in some form of civil disobedience? >> guest: is the responsibility that the founders gave us. okay, if i fail in my role to figure out what the government is doing whether it's classified or not i don't deserve -- i -- i feel that strongly about this because things go wrong inside government and inside of a classified system. one thing we haven't mentioned is what the government does do

is that it can prosecute its own people for breaking its own laws. now when you look at the success of that, it has not been very high and i certainly would abdicate this is a widespread practice but in the instances in which they have tried to do that it essentially falls apart. but you know government can come it does have its own rules and people who break them should be held accountable. so that is how we enforce this. see you can module the probe and and is featured here in their entirety on the booktv web site. go to booktv.org and insert the author's name book title or subject in the search box.

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