>> we must also confront the alarming increase in the number of states that are incapable of delivering development and stability to their people. i'm deeply concerned about countries where transitions have faltered. we must strengthen our state-building tools. i'm also troubled by manifestations of enmy ty between different religions.

in europe and elsewhere, the scapegoating of my grants or minorities is leading to dangerous social tensions. intolerance and hate speech continue to fester in myanmar. this year as we commemorate the tenth an resterly of the ram -- anniversary of the ramadan genocide, we must create conditions that support women and children. we must say yes to education and no to violence for women and girls. we must empower adolescents and youth with opportunity and employment. this year presents many chances for engagement including the youth forum and youth envoys' crowd-sourcing campaign on the 2015 development agenda.

and youth will be central to seizing the chances that this year holds for shaping a more sustainable and equitable future. your hard work in 2013 set the stage for major progress now toward the year of 2015. we now have 714 days left this our deadline -- until our deadline for the development goals. we must be speed up progress and reach our target. member states have a road map to define our development agenda. political leaders are deeply engaged in the global discussions on development. economies are mobilized, and we increasingly knows what works. we must seize this momentum. we need progress on economic, social and environmental pillars of sustainable development as

emphasizeed at rio. this year we hold debates on 2015 issues from water and sanitation to south-south cooperation. we'll be in tampa for international conferences on small island developing states and landlocked developing countries. we will review progress on the program of action of the international conference on population and development, a crucial for sexual and reproductive rights. we will respond to the challenges of malnutrition. we'll continue to support member states in their work and get discussions on the post-2015 agenda. at least one-fifth of the world's population and about

half the poor and half of all school children live in countries experiencing violence, political conflict, insecurity and fragility. these are the very countries where the post-2015 agenda must have the most impact. that agenda must fully reflect the importance of institutions, governance and the rule of law as essential ingredients for success. the u.n. system will maintain its strong commitment to african development, as many african countries continue to achieve impressive economic growth and the continent as a whole carries out on the agenda of transformation. i urge traditional and new dollars to provide the necessary financing, capacity building and technology transfer in keeping

with their longstanding commitment. our development efforts are often hampered by natural disasters such as the devastating typhoon haiyan last year in the philippines. these extreme weather events demonstrate the urgent need for action on climate change. as we advance on development, we must not succumb to the belief that this is incompatible with robust climate action. evidence shows that the goals of eradicating poverty, promoting includive gross and holding global temperature below two degrees celsius are mutually reinforcing. low carbon growth can generate decent jumps, improve public health, safeguard essential ecosystems and make cities more

resilient. i'll host the world climate summit on september 23rd that will bring together political leaders as well as leaders from business, the finance community and civil society. as we look to the lima climate conference this year and paris in 2015, we look toward leaders to deliver the bold -- [inaudible] the world so urgently needs. i'll continue to do everything in my power to promote climate action and solutions. excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, i hope you will empower the united nations itself. this global organization should not have to plead with governments for troops, police, assets or resources while the victims of war and poverty die.

the united nations must be able to forge more productive partnerships with the civil society, the private sector and other key development actors. i solely believe in the value of managed mobility so that our dedicated staff can bring their great talents to bear with even greater impact. i urge you to approve these two critical proposals at your resumed session in march. as chief administrative officer of the united nations, i am determined to make the secretariat truly global, modern and effective. i look forward to continuing our efforts for a more efficient global and dynamic united nations. will be deployed more widely

next year, the next major step in the transformation of our organization. ladies and gentlemen, this year marks the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the first word -- world war. this senseless -- [inaudible] led to the establishment of the league of nations and, eventually, the united nations. over the years we have proven the value of this great institution. the united nations is a unique platform that help us all rise above human failings, that encourages wise and visionary leadership and that enables us to take advantage of the opportunities provided by a new global landscape. but i am gravely concerned at the immoral and irresponsible actions of too many individuals with influence and responsibility. the conflict i spoke of today

are devastating countries in doubt where -- now proud histories and every chance at peace and prosper the city. leaders there must now act on the historical duty to reach this potential for the sake of their people and our world. all of us must find the common purpose to forge global solutions toward common problems. last year the united nations hosted one of the world's youngest heroes, ma la la. she celebrated her birthday here with an unforgettable lee for the rights of girls. we also paid farewell to a hero for all times, nelson mandela, the incomparable global icon of moral strength. i'm sure new heroes will emerge

in 2014. but we all have within us the courage to care and capacity to act. excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, let us pull that power, let us make this year one of the extraordinary progress. this is what the world's people expect of us, and it is what they deserve. we must get it right. thank you for your leadership. thank you, mr. president. [applause] >> a reminder that live today new jersey republican governor chris christie will be inaugurated for the second time, and we'll have live coverage of his swearing in and the inaugural speech starting at noon eastern on c-span. also the u.s. senate has a scheduled pro forma session in a few moments at 10:30, about 20

minutes from now. no legislative business will take place today. we'll have it live on c-span2 when it gets under way. the house also has a pro forma scheduled at 11:30 on c-span. government officials decided to shut down the government due to weather, today's white house briefing will proceed as scheduled beginning at 1 p.m. eastern on c-span. as we wait for the senate pro forma session to get under way at 10:30, a conversation on a supreme court case involving campaign election laws from this morning's "washington journal." >> host: melanie sloan is back at our table, citizens for respondent and ethics in washington, here to mark the fourth anniversary of the supreme court's decision in united v. sec. our victory for free speech at the supreme court.

>> guest: well, what i'd say is it marks the victory of anonymous money funneled into our political system to fund vitriolic political ads. >> host: what has been theitri impact? >> talk a littleti bit more. what have you seen since the 2010 decision? >> guest: well, what we've seenh since 2010 is more and more money going into our political system, most of it anonymous. there are organizations called 501c4s which are social welfare organizations which were started initially in order to promote the social welfare. but now what we've seen ishave political people creating these 501c4s simply to allow donors to anonymously give their money, like the american future fund, crossroads, you'd have no idea who's behind these organizations, and they're funding nasty political ads, very disruptive in our politicaf system, but we have no ideatica who's funding all of this.fund

>> host: explain what the supreme court decided. >> guest: well, what the supreme court decided in citizens united was that they based it on a older supreme court case, buckley v. valeo, they said that money is speech and that corporations have the right to speech basically. while in the past there had been a ban on corporate treasury funds and union funds being spent, given to candidatesnds directly, they -- that was struck down. i'm sorry, not candidates directly, giving the money to, soft money what we call, that was what was struck down.date and what we've seen as a result of this, some of the things we're seeing now, actually, were already legal before citizens united, but citizens united opened the floodgates, it changed a mental imforimpressiof what you couldn't and couldn't do. while there waswa some use ofse these 501c4s previous to

citizens united, we saw this open the door to a whole new start of political funding. we've also seen now candidate-specific organizations, super pacs funded in the wake of citizens united, and those do disclose their donors, but candidates have not just their own candidate campaign committees them, but now they also have these candidate-specific super pacs which although are allegedly supposed to be independent and not coordinate with each other, in fact, generally have staff that are close to the candidates themselves, and it's hard to say they're not coordinating. these groups spend big money. both candidates and the party committees have less control over the message than they did pre-citizens united because there's all this money flowing into the system where they can start all these groups and say whatever you want. >> host: reason.com has five be ways citizens united makesite politics better after the 2010 decision. they wrote this in 2012, but it

still applies. they said that not so long ago, as recently as 2008, in fact, the only non-anointed candidate for president capable of staying in a primary race over the long haul was representative ron paul. that would almost certainly have been the case this year for former speaker newt gingrich and former pennsylvania senator rick santorum. >> guest: really that isn't true. rick santorum and newt beginning with rich are terrific examples, because those people were both in the race because they each had one incredibly rich supporter. newt gingrich had sheldon edelson, and rick santorum had

foster freiss. sd ri and without those single donors, those two candidates wouldn't have been able to stay in the race. andse previously, before citizes united, candidates who didn't have widespread support wouldn't be able to stay in the race. more speech for the thes multibillionaire's and corporations. for the vast number of people there is far less speech. they say that imagine if world war union bosses were no longer controlled by the democrats were even occupy wall street could form its own super pack. citizens united allows people to pull resources -- guest: i would buy some of that more if most of the people who were funding the political

process weren't trying to stay anonymous. we have no idea who is behind many of these candidates. americans cap at the ads they see into context. if you knew exxon was funding an ad against a member of congress running for reelection who is pro-environmental regulations, you may take that as a different perspective than if you see the american action network is running the ad. what is being done by you or other groups to overturn or get new laws on the books in response to citizens united? guest: a group to say that corporations, for example, don't have free speech rights. corporations are not people as a result of citizens united. finish secondly, we have something called the disclose act that has had widespread support from democrats, not much support from republicans that would require more disclosure about the donors to these kinds

of funds. and then people are looking at different kinds of areas to work in. the crew, for example, recently filed a lawsuit against aetna. aetna is a major insurance company that claimed it was revealing its political expenditures on these political contribution reports that they post on their web site. but in reality, many of the contributions that aetna was making were not included in those political contribution reports, so we've sued over that. there are other people who are pushing with the sec to change regulations so that shareholders would have to right to know about political contributions, so there's many efforts on many fronts. >> host: on the constitutional amendment, here's people for the american way, they're part of this group. they say 16 states and around 500 citizen towns have called for a constitutional amendment to overturn the citizens united decision. and then the third metric on huffington post had this, posted on january 13th: there are eight ways to help overturn citizens united. a national lobbying day in d.c.,

national groups plan to get together today. people for the american way, public campaign, public citizen holding that on capitol hill today. let's get to phone calls. map chester, connecticut, independent caller, you're up first. >> caller: good morning, i love the show. melanie, how are you? researchers have recently discovered that the third tower of 9/11 wasn't hit by a plane and if had properly included these elements, the explanation for the building's fall would be impossible. now that an attorney has written to the department of congress, would you be willing to read his letter and consider having an organization review this issue? >> guest: well, you can, please, feel free to send us the letter at info@citizens for action.org, and we'll certainly take a look.

>> host: is that something you guys look into, or is it mostly money in politics? >> guest: we use the freedom of information act a incident amount from the government to obtain information it might not want to share. >> host: tom, republican caller. >> caller: yes. your guest is such a far left-wing guest, it's unbelievable. you should once in a while have a guest that's going to balance out what she's saying. >> host: stay tuned, tom. that's coming up next. >> caller: yesterday. you had three liberals on in a row. if you're going to have someone on when you're hosting. anyway, this woman is such a far left-wing prop it's unbelievable. and everything she says is probably very -- [inaudible] because she supports the unions, she supports obama. that's all she cares about. she doesn't care about think republican -- well, she wants republicans to investigate. that's her spiel.

>> host: okay. let's get a response to those two things. are you an obama supporter? do you support democrats, are you liberal, and do you only go after republicans? >> crew is a nonpartisan organization, and we've taken on both sides of the aisle who have had ethical issues, and money in politics is something we're concerned about across the board. >> host: massachusetts, democratic caller. >> caller: hello. my name is ralph. i live in massachusetts. i definitely think that melanie sloan is absolutely right with regard to citizens united. my opinion is we have to realize, democrat or republican, i mean, let's face it, it's really a lot of bologna right now. and i think democrats and republicans shoulder realize citizen -- should realize citizens united is very impressive in the last four

years. and versus the sec, i think that's fundamental to our liberties, you know? it's one of our main liberties, to do what melanie sloan has been saying on tv. i really agree with it. >> host: okay. all right, ralph. >> guest: well, thank you so much for your remarks, i really appreciate it. i think one of the things that is challenging is to convey to all americans how much the money in politics affects them. the fact is no matter what issue you care about today, whether it's student loans, health care, the economy, banking, every single one of those is impacted by the incredible amount of money that's anonymously flowing into our political system, and more americans need to be paying attention to this and making this a first priority issue. >> host: want to show you the financial times this morning. democratic lawmakers urged to hone their money-spinning skills. says this, recently: every few months democrats and

members of congress receive a party from their committee saying how much money they have raised, but recently these lengthy documents have an extra column that a number of members said they've never seen before. raiding their fun system,on a new point another quote from a congressman. here's a quote from george miller, california democrat, who's going to retire: rocket. here's a quote from george california democrat who is going to retire. members of cold n that's exactly right, and i actually tk that's on the low end, two, three or four hours. i think it's more than that. if you are running for congress, you win one day, and the very next day you're back out there trying to raise money. and who's most likely to give you money but the people who want something from you. part of the problem now is after citizens united, while we know how much money and who the donors are to candidates' campaign committees, when there

are these anonymous 501c4s supporting a candidate, we don't know who that money is and what the candidate may or may not be trading in order to get that level of support. >> host: former democratic majority leader tom daschle said a typical senator spent two-thirds of the last two years of their six-year term raising money. a senator has to raise $10,000 every day that they're in office, every day of their six years to make the average amount that's spent today in a senate race. >> guest: right. and it'll be more if you're in a very high-cost media market like new york or california or philadelphia, some of those are very, very expensive. so this is a major problem, and most politicians are pretty unhappy about it. they don't want to be spending most of their time raising money, and if they are, then they're not spending their time effectively representing us and worrying about the issues the people need them to worry about, and we have a lot of challenges facing our country.

>> host: the average cost of winning, of of a winning campaign for a house seat was $640,000 in 1998, $1.6 million in 2012. the average cost of a winning campaign for a senate seat, $4.8 million in 2002, $12 million in 2012. this was, it seems like it's gone up no matter what. each before, you know, even before the citizens united v. sec decision. >> guest: it absolutely was, there's no question that there were more and more creative ways that people were spending money on elections. you know, one of the main benefits of all of this has been political consultants who have gotten very rich working this system. but that said, it is something we now should recognize that we need to get under control. the last presidential election was basically a billion dollar campaign and really it seems like money could be better spent on more important things than vitriolic television ads. >> host: what are you afraid of? why can't anyone with money make

ads in do you think the public is stupid and can't id a super pac ad? >> guest: i think the problem is that the public doesn't really know who that donor is behind that super pac ad. and americans are busy. we're all worried about getting our kids to school and our workday and all our other problems, we're not analyzing even ad to say, huh, what should i know about them and what might they really want when they're putting this out? >> host: we'll go to texas next, tom is joining us. he's a republican. morning, tom. >> caller: morning, c-span, thanks for taking my call. yeah, i just wanted to say every year billions and billions and billions of dollars are spent by these leftist super pac like abc, cbs, npr, "the washington post," trying to elect democrats and defeat republicans. and since your guest seems to think that money doesn't have anything to do with speech, i was wondering if she'd agree to limit the spending of all these leftist super pacs that i

mentioned to maybe $100,000 every year to produce their products, pay their employees and pay all their other expenses. >> guest: well, the organizations you named are not, in fact, super pacs, they're media organizations, and the rules are very different for them. super pacs are not the biggest problem we have out there because at least those super pacs have the doe nones -- donors named. i'd say the biggest problem are a these 501c4 organizations which are allegedly supposed to be social welfare organizations but thanks to a lot of mishandling over at the irs, they've basically been allowed to act as political organizations with anonymous money funding our political campaigns. >> host: keith in new jersey, independent caller. >> caller: hello, how are you? >> host: morning, keith. >> caller: good morning. nowadays we have to know, it's nothing new. the chances of a rich man going into heaven?

no. the richer you get, the less you care about the small people. we know the money is tied to politics. big, rich donors, billionaires, only donate for a cause that benefits their pocket. when you talk about the middle class being separated, well, at the expense of some of them believing in some of the politicians sold them out. the piddle class, you're going to be poor. there's going to be no middle class. they kept us blind for so many years, we've never been able to see what the rich and the politicians have been doing in moving forward. this country is definitely this for a bad set. now, ask christie, the money he did not give to tony mac, we had to lay off 112 police officers. a record year of murder in trenton, new jersey. follow the money. why? just like he held the hundred back from hoboken, just like he held the money back from fort

lee, whatever. it's just the same. do as i say, or -- >> host: okay. melanie sloan. >> guest: well, certainly, there's always an element of political payback in politics when politicians who are elected can take out their anger against people who didn't support them. and, obviously, that's a problem, and chris christie is under federal investigation for exactly that right now. and i think that's a positive thing, and we'll see what comes of that. >> host: jim wants to know, melanie, would you be satisfied if donor names were required to be released? would that help the uninformed voter to decide? >> guest: that would help wonderfully. that would be a terrific turn of events. the case talked about the need -- >> see the rest of this discussion at c-span.org. due to the weather, the federal government is shut down, but the u.s. senate is about to gavel in for a brief pro forma session. no legislative business will be conducted today. and now live to the senate floor here on c-span2.

the state of new york, to perfom the duties of the chair. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c, january 21, 2014. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable kirsten e. gillibrand, a senator from the state of new york, to perfom the duties of the chair. signed: patrick j. leahy, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 9:30 a.m. stands adjourned until 9:30 a.m.

>> the senate is away on break this week. they'll return next week for further debate, and we'll have lye coverage here on -- live coverage here on c-span2. you should also know that the associated press is reporting senator david vitter of louisiana, republican of louisiana, will be running for governor of louisiana in 2015, and we'll have more on that as the day progresses. again, senator david vitter of louisiana will be running for louisiana governor next year. quick reminder that live today new jersey republican governor chris christie will be inaugurated for the second time. we'll have live coverage of his swearing in and the inaugural speech at noon eastern on our companion network, c-span. >> i didn't see myself as a sort of prophet who has a message for my world, but i do see myself as a person trying to understand my place in it, trying to situate

myself. i think the idea for the book came to me when i was giving some lectures at the u.s. air force academy in colorado springs. and one of the very nice, very well educated, broad-minded, liberal young air force officer who was assigned to look after me had lots of chats with me which i found very interesting. he told me he was a liberal. i think he wanted to create in my mind an impression i might have got from the media that the u.s. air force academy is right wing and full of strange, radical, biblical fundamentalists. he told me he was a liberal. and he told me that he was in favor of immigration, which i thought was very big of him. but, he said, when people come to this country, they should learn the native language. and i didn't think he was speaking about comanche or ute, so i said, yes, i quite agree,

everybody should learn spanish. >> the settlement and evolution of the united states from a hispanic perspective. our america, saturday night at 10 eastern and sunday at 9 on "after words," part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. and online at booktv's book club, you still have time to weigh in on mark levin's "the liberty amendments." go to booktv.org and click on book club to enter the chat room. >> did i feel prepared? yes, i really did. first of all, i wasn't elected, so it didn't make that much difference. i did notice, though, the difference between being the vice president's wife and the president's wife. it's huge. because the vice president's wife can say anything. nobody cares. the minute you say one thing as president's wife, you've made the nudes. so that was a -- the news. so that was a lesson i had to learn pretty quickly.

>> watch our program on first lady barbara bush at our web site c-span.org/firstladies. or see it saturday on c-span at 7 p.m. eastern and live monday our series continues with first lady hillary clinton. >> on friday president obama announced changes to the government surveillance practices aimed at increasing transparency while protecting privacy and civil liberties. among them are ending the nsa's ability to store data collected from millions of phone records and requiring intelligence agencies to obtain approval from a special fisa court. and now reaction to those changes from a group of panelists including a former cia analyst and a british defense official. this form rum l was -- forum was hosted by the brookings institution here in washington d.c. it's about 90 minutes. [inaudible conversations]

>> so i think we're going to get started. welcome to the brooks institution. my name is ben kit he's, i'm a -- wittes, i'm a senior fellow here, and i'm going to be very brief on the introduction side, because i want to leave as much time as humanly possible for the substantive discussion that we're going to have here today. thanks for coming on very short notice, and, you know, as you all know, the president gave a major address this morning on signals intelligence, the nsa and reform of the authorities and policies in connection with the snowden disclosures. these issues and the speech raise just an incredible array of discreet policy ask legal

questions. there are the domestic authority or questions, civil liberties questions, there are foreign policy/diplomatic questions, there are internet governance, there are u.s. industries which are losing very large sums of money as a result of loss of confidence in overseas markets, and there are privacy questions. and so one of the remarkable things about the brookings institution is just the array of people that we have working on various components of stuff that relates to this. and, you know, across a number of our programs. so we work at the foreign policy program to put together this very quick event in which we're going to offer some, a bunch of different reactions from different parts of the institution. keep in mind the speech was only

given very recently. it coffers a wide range -- covers a wide range. and so i think certainly a lot of what i'm going to say, i think, is still relatively tentative. and some of my thoughts may be subject to change over time on that. i sort of want to be candid about that up front. with what i think we're going to do is each of us, starting with bruce and then cam kerry and ian wallace and then myself, we'll speak briefly, give some overview thoughts. we'll have a brief exchange, and then we'll try to leave as much time as possible to take your questions and go in whatever direction you all want to go. we have a twitter audience as well. people will be tweeting in questions, so if you see me taking, being handed little slips of paper, i hope those will not be things telling me that i've been completely wrong and i should correct myself, but

they will be questions that people are sending in. so with that, i'm going to turn it over to bruce. >> thank you, ben. and is like you, i think they are trying to give a very preliminary reaction to what is a really large amount of data we got here today. we have a speech, we have a document, and we have backgrounders. so we have a lot of material to work with. i would characterize it as a very good speech. i would characterize it as classic, maybe even vintage barack obama. this is a man who we all know to be very deliberative, very thoughtful, who likes to reach out to as large a group as possible, and he's done that in this process. if there's a message here to his handlers in the white house, i would say it can be summed up in let him spend more time in hawaii, it's very good for the deliberative process. [laughter] i'm not going to try to go true the whole process and every document. i would just highlight a couple of things up front. i think the emphasis here is on

transparency to the extent possible and oversight rather than fundamental changes in the collection programs that the nsa is carrying out. those programs, as i see them, remain largely intact with a few fixes, but with more transparency to the extent that's possible in secret programs and more oversight. the presidential policy directive that accompanied the speech, ppd-28, is, in my judgment, unprecedented. in two hours i couldn't really check, but i don't think we've ever had a document like this that lays out the protocols, principles for american signals intelligence collection. and i think that's good in two respects. it's good for the american public, the global public, to be able to read it and see what those principles are, and it's good for the national security agency, because the national security agency can say, see, what we did is legal, it's allowed under ppd-28. and, of course, the biggest

issue, as we've all herald, the section 215, collection of megadata, we largely have a punt. the question of who's going to hold on to that data is going to be resolved by looking at it for the next 60 days or so by the dni and the attorney general. this is a very complicated, very difficult issue, rightly called the hot potato of this problem. i'm not sure 60 days is going to come up with a solution, but i think 60 days is probably enough time to identify whether there is a non-u.s. governmental entity with the capacity and the financial willingness to carry out. one last thing i would stress from the overview, as the president said in his speech and as was made very clear by his aides and their backgrounders, the president has found no abuse of authority by the national security agency. and he said that over and over again, and his staff has said that over and over again. they found no evidence of an abuse of authority by the nsa. where they found mistakes were

made, they've also emphasized those mistakes were corrected rather quickly. that's a pretty important judgment to put out there. let me deal with a couple of questions that were on my mind before the speech was made and how i see the president responded to those questions when he made the speech. first of all is the question, how did he portray the national security agency in particular and the american intelligence community in general? did he portray them as the nation's defender? after all, he's been on the job five years. this is his team. did he embrace them, or did he distance himself a little bit from the nsa? as we've heard, some unnamed white house advisers do over the last couple of months, saying, well, maybe they didn't do it, but they were kind of out of sight and maybe a little bit out of control. on this i think the president was clear and unequivocal. he identified the national security agency as the spiritual son of the sons of liberty and paul revere in 1775.

i can't imagine a better description in the eyes of fort meade than the one the president gave them. he called them the world war ii codebreakers of today. the whole first five minutes of the speech was about how the nsa is protecting our security, our liberties. he even went turt than that. it's -- further than that. it's protecting the security and liberties of people around the world. now, an awful lot of people aren't going to believe this. but it, a, is a powerful morale booster at fort meade and, b, a powerful anecdote about the demonization of the nsa and the american intelligence community. how many movies, how many tv shows have you watched in which it looks like the ns, a is spying on everyone with no controls, with willy-nilly oversight. and the president pretty much said firmly and categorically all of that demonization by hollywood, by be television, by parts of the media is just

hogwash. secondly, how did he characterize the effectiveness of these nsa programs, especially section 215? over the course of the last several months, we've heard a lot of attempts to defend them in terms of foiling various terrorist operations. the president was here, i think, a little bit on more shaky ground. he said multiple attacks have been thwarted, but he gave us really no examples of that. that's understandable. a lot of secrecy has to go into this. but it's, again, going to raise the issue, can you actually provide us data that backs that up? the only specific he launched into was september 11th. and he said if nsa had had the megadata program, it would have been able to realize that when california leadal my tar called home to yemen, he was in san diego. the problem with opening up that pap doer rah's box is that we know the cia knew he was in san diego.

the problem here wasn't the intelligence community didn't know about it, it was that one hand didn't tell the other hand. i think this is an area where probably the administration will regret having opened up the pandora's box. but in any case, or it's not really crucial to the president's statement today. third question on my mind ahead of time was, what's he going to say about edward snowden. is he even going to mention edward snowden? there were many who thought his name wouldn't come up. in fact, it did come up. it came up very clearly, and the president paid his views on edward snowden pretty clear as he has before in the past. edward snowden is not a whistleblower in the president's eyes. he's a man who violated his secrecy oaths. he's a man who leaked information in a sensationalistic and often incorrect way. and most importantly, edward snowden has put out information which the president said will harm our national interests and

our capacity to collect intelligence in the future for years if not decades to come. the president, in effect, associated himself with the remarks of britain intelligence chiefs including the head of mi6, john sawyers, who in asking the question what has edward snowden done, al-qaeda will be lapping it up for years to come. that's pretty strong words, and the president came out pretty close to the same area. last question that was on my mind was what about the so-called no-spy deals? the five 5s agreement in which we share intelligence and agree not to expand, not to spy on each other. no word on that. the question of would some other country now qualify to be in a no-spy deal never came up. i'm not surprised. this administration has been dealing with this issue since it came into office, and it has consistently said, forget it, we're not going to do that with anyone else.

there is agreement that friendly allies, heads of state -- but only the heads of state -- will not be spied upon. and we're told that a couple dozen or so have already fit into that category. i would suggest one of the great guessing games of 2014 at various international summits is going to be am i in the good guy category that doesn't get spied on, or am i in the bad boy category that still does get spied on? it's a very important question, actually. not a trivial one. how do you make those kind of determinations? and does behavior over time change whether you're in one category or another? what the president has done in setting up the ppd has said there's going to be a constant review of that process at the highest levels of the american national security bureaucracy. one last point i would like to make, and that's, i think it's worth remembering that only a few months ago we had a similar big speech on drones. and that speech on drones a few

months later has often been, is a good one to look at in comparison today. because a lot of the things that were talked about in the drone speech are still works in progress. the transfer of drones from the cia to the department of defense, it'd be charitable to call it a work in progress. and secondly, a lot of it requires the congress. for example, the question of transfer of drones from the cia to the dod. the i can't think has said, no, we don't think that's a good idea, and we're not going to go that route, mr. president. so this is a steppingstone, this is a first step to work with here, but an afghanistan lot of this yet -- awful lot of this yet has to be transferred into implementation, and a lot of it will depend upon what capitol hill wants to do. >> thanks, bruce. before we go on, for those of you standing in the back, there are actually a bunch of seats in the front few rows that i would urge you to sit down and be a little bit more comfortable.

cam? >> thanks, ben. well, i agree with bruce on the tenor of the speech. he, the president began with, as bruce said, a strong defense of intelligence gathering and then ended it with a strong defense of american values and the importance of america upholding those values. and i think the sort of testament to the balance that he was able to strike there is i tell you that in the room with a sizable portion of law enforcement and intelligence community there as well as a number of privacy advocates, that both went away smiling. i focused on, certainly, what

this says to the international community, to our allies in europe in particular but also around the world. and what it says for privacy issues, what it says for internet governance. because at the end of the day, as great as the impact on intelligence gathering may be, i believe that the impact on trust in the united states government, trust in companies, trust in the united states model of internet governance has been far greater. and that had enormous economic policy fallout. and, you know, i think the president accomplished a great deal. and i think went further than

expected in declaring that we are going to extend protections to non-u.s. persons, to non-u.s. nationals regardless of where they are. l and articulated a set of principles that will apply to signals intelligence gathering involving non-u.s. citizens. many of those are principles that have already been applied by the intelligence community. but the significance of having those, you know, in a presidential policy directive, as bruce says and as i know the first of its kind, goes far beyond that and i think will resonate with the international community.

in the statement by the president, highest levels of policy. and it is binding, and it is public. so those are all important things. and, you know, the president and the presidential policy directive declares that everyone is entitled to dignity and respect more their privacy -- for their privacy regardless of where they live. it also goes beyond some of the existing policies in articulating a set of criteria for what constitutes legitimate intelligence gathering related to nuclear proliferation, terrorism, etc. and, you know, that, i think,

helps to not only provide some reassurance and trust, but to advance the international dialogue on norms in digital space. the president alluded to that, and i think it sort of helped to kick that off. but i think the important thing here on that score is that the united states has taken a lead here in defining what is legitimate national security protection. that is a key piece of international norms discussion. every country collects intelligence and conducts some forms of surveillance for national security purposes. the key elements, all right, what are the national norms that define legitimate national security protection?

the president has put down a marker on that, has put down a marker saying the united states -- regardless of what other countries do -- is going to bind itself to a set of norms. so that is, you know, an enormous step and something that i think will advance the discussion and help to repair some of the short-term damage, and in the long term, help to begin a serious discussion rather than a sort of view with alarm discussion, a serious discussion about international norms. >> thank you. ian? >> so contrary to what you've already herald, i wanted to draw -- heard, i wanted to draw attention to three things the president didn't really emphasize in his speech and i think may have been significant for that. not necessarily a criticism. there are things that are deeply

complicated and you maybe wouldn't have expected them, but i think there are things that will continue to fester within the wider debate and to remind ourselves of them is an important part of situating the context for the speech. first of those is the organizational questions which, to some people's surprise, were reasonably prominent in the review panel's report. there are a few organizational ideas, proposals -- i guess, decisions -- of the p be pd -- ppd, changes to the committees that oversee some of the intelligence gathering. but not so much focus in the speech as some had hoped on how the collection is organized. there were proposals this the review report -- in the review

report, for example, govern nance tuption away from the nsa which i think probably would have been a mistake, and there was plenty of discussion over the last few months about whether the nsa commander and cybercom commander currently should be separated. and that decision was clearly, or that opportunity was clearly not taken by the president. i think that reflects, to pick up bruce's point, an endorsement of the operational significance of what nsa provides potentially over and above the presentational benefit. it reflects the fact that he thinks he got those presentational benefits from some of the other measures that he took. one of the ideas that was floating around was this concern

that certainly within the u.s. system, possibly in contrast, for example, to the british system where this hasn't become such a public issue at least not to the same extent as in the united states, is the fact that the political risk owner is not necessarily the person who has the benefit from the intelligence. and questions of whether you could designate nsa as a foreign intelligence organization, take way some of its military or functions to clarify that, and that was largely not focused on in this way. and i think that whole issue may continue to rumble on. but again, i think take bruce's point, this was an endorsement for the intelligence community's way of doing things. second area was the whole issue of cryptography, question of

whether the national security agency prevailed upon nist, the standard setters, to weaken cryptography to make it easier for nsa to spy on people. and there's certainly been a lot of concern within the security community that this was a breach of trust on behalf of the u.s. government. again, and so, for example, a large number of quite significant security consultants have said they will not attend the rsa conference, big cybersecurity conference next month in protest over the idea they may have taken some money to weaken some security standards. and, you know, the important thing to note here is the internet is heavily dependent on the geeks outside government to, in order to operate. and undermining their trust in

the wider cybersecurity community, i think it is going to be something that the government has to work hard to regain. that wasn't addressed here, and that probably is a reflection of the fact that there are no easy answers to this tension between counterterrorism and cybersecurity. it's not been particularly explored within the public dialogue because there are no simple answers. again, i wouldn't expect to -- [inaudible] today, but i think that's another reason why this isn't the final word on the this issue. and finally the other area that wasn't particularly emphasized was internet governance. this is going to be a crucial issue going forward this year because of a big debate that was already happening before snowden between countries who wanted to maintain the current international oversight mechanisms which involve private

sector, civil society as well as governments and another set of governments who prefer more governmental knowledge. and i think the concern was that with snowden many of the governments sitting between these two camps were beginning to distance themselves from the united states. there is a lot more to do in this, and i wonder if president's setting up a position that the state department is sufficient to take that forward. but be i also tend to agree with cam that by publicizing if not particularly changing the basis op which foreign national is handled by changing the way in which foreign leaders or policies governing whether they're surveilled will actually help some of those governments who themselves are engaged in

signals intelligence activity and need to be able to find a ladder to climb down their criticism now as it begins to be exposed that they are engaged in similar kinds of activities. that may help them get out of that fix. and allow the u.s. government to take forward a more positive engagement. it will not, however, alone solve all of these problems. i think it gives a basis on which the u.s. government can change the dialogue and reenter the norm ors debate in, hopely, a more active and potentially a more positive way. .. the bottom line therefore, this is a base system. i don't think it's the end of the story by any meavepbs means. >> i'm going to do two things. i want to talk a little about the tone of the speech, am identify on some things --

amplify on some things that have been said already and then i want to geek out and talk a little about the substantive legal l areas the president has talked about. i essentially agree. i think the speech was sort of a surprisingly strong endorsement of the essential activity of the intelligence community broadly and he end of the nsa in particular. i say surprisingly not because the president, you know, has doubt on this in the past but because he has been under enormous pressure. the review group that he appointed came out with a series of recommendations that were quite dramatic really in the scope of the reform they were proposing in certain respects. and i think he really did have a choice to make today, whether he was going to be somebody who

essentially came in and you know, saw an out of control and intelligence community under his watch and was going to be the guy who reformed it, or whether he came and described it as a situation in which it was lawful and important intelligence collection activity taking place in his administration, i.e. his administration, his intelligence community. and that certain changes were needed to increase the perception of legitimacy of that lawful appropriate activity. i think he very solidly chose the second option. i think up until relatively recently, what direction he was going to go in that was somewhat in play, at least according to news stories, and sort of other signals and trials.

so i think that is a notable thing, this sort of high art. in particular -- high arctic. in particular i want to focus on one thing he said that i think will have, was unsure not an accident that he said it and really reflects and anxiety in the intelligence community that is pretty pervasive and pretty, strongly held. i think it will mean a lot to a lot of people that he said it. there is a portion of the speech, i should've highlighted it and read it, but where he said these are people who work every day knowing that the next time something terrible happens, they are going to be asked why they didn't connect the dots. and i think identifying with the dilemma, that when you talk about removing authorities, the anxiety that this in genders is the anxiety of people who believe that they will be held accountable for not having

exercised the very authorities that were taken away from them. i think the president, it was quite a savvy thing to include a very specific references to comment and identification with the dilemma that the intelligence community is in on a basically hourly basis as they decide what authorities to use and not to use and how aggressively. i want to talk briefly about three substantive areas the president addressed in his speech. first, the 215 authority. second, the 702 authorities which is the content collection, and third, the total victory of the fbi and the justice department on the matter of national security letters. on 215, this is of course the core of the political debate. it is actually not the molten core of the issue that faces

either from my point of view the intelligence community or the civil liberties community. which is to say, this is a comprehensive collection program but its comprehensive collection program aimed at a very narrow category of data, which is to say collectively metadata. and so it's capacity to either do great good, as bruce described, or frankly, to do terrible damage in the civil liberties arena is actually much less than either collection under 702, which i'll come to in a minute, or collection under executive order 12333. it's just not that broad-based a program in terms of its them in terms of what gets collected and analyzed and how. so what the president did here is he basically said, he basically adopted in a limited sort of way the review group recommendations, which is to say

move the program outside of government, and allow it to be queried. keep the capabilities that allow it to be queried with an order of the fisa court. the problem is that, of course, that's actually very easy to say and very hard to do. and so what he did, which is clever and the question is whether it's too clever, by how, if he said all right, we will intimate part of it now, which is to say we will limit the number of analytical talk people are able to take right now. i can do that on my own. he also said he could do on his own, requiring that they get an order from fisa court to query it. i don't think that's right and i'll be very interested to see if the fisa court buys that. i have a feeling the fisa court was a weir we have no statutory authority to entertain such orders. but then he says i'm going to study the problem of how to really move the data off-site

until, for the next couple of months and then we will work with congress to figure it out. what that basically means is i'm going to do minor reforms all my own, and then if congress can sort of design a system, we will give them some guidance about what we think they can do, but if they can influence a larger system, great. by the way, if not, he doesn't say this in his speech, but we can keep living under the existing authority. him so i think at one level this is an adoption of the review group recommendations, but at another level it does not seem to dramatically impede the ability of the agency, at least in the short term, to collect and query we need it with appropriate supervision, the data in question. 702 strikes me as an even bigger win for the agency.

702, unlike 215, is a massively important program. it is a bread-and-butter collection program devoted to overseas intelligence targeted at non-us persons. cam is absolutely right. the president for the first time, and it's a very important statement, a kind of spiritual level, that we acknowledge that non-u.s. persons have privacy rights in the context of our overseas collection. that is very hard to overstate the sort of spiritual importance of that statement. the practical importance of that statement may be dramatically less than the spiritual importance. and the reason is that the intelligence community actually doesn't collect and disseminate willy-nilly, you know, stuff about overseas targets that has no foreign intelligence valley. they don't do it not because it's illegal but because it's a total waste of their time. when you have a program and you

limit it and you say now foreigners have privacy rights in belgium or tajikistan and we're only going, we'll have minimization rules that only cause us to disseminate met through a foreign intelligence values, values, i suspect that is not going to cause big problems either in any foreign intelligence agency that's doing its job with minimal confidence. i actually think this might be an area where the spiritual statement goes a long way without actually changing very much. i will be very -- it will be very interesting to see what documents, if any, gets produced that over the next few months that implement this at a more granular level. finally, one of the big surprises in the review group report, because it wasn't a feature in any of the snowden

elites, and it doesn't involve the nsa, involved the fbi's acquisition of national security, the issues of national security letters which are demands a national security investigations to telecommunication providers to turn over certain basic information. these are done without perspective judicial review and they're done at a fairly junior level, fairly low level of the bureau. they are quite controversial. they have nothing to do with the snowden lakes. the review group, i think it's their second recommendation, quite high up in the review group report said this stuff needs to be subject to prospective judicial review. this did not go over well at the fbi. and the fbi, unlike the 215 program, which is a few hundred orders a year, queries a year, this is thousands and thousands and thousands of requests. so this is really part of the

daily bread-and-butter of fbi activity. there was a real interagency squabble over this, and the bureau one. and the president actually sound a lot like, in his speech, sounded out there that like the fbi director did in the discussion that "the new york times" reported on or some of the immediate report on a few weeks ago and said it shouldn't be hard to get these phone records for the fbi in a national security investigation than it is for a u.s. attorney or an assistant u.s. attorney to get bank records in a criminal fraud investigation. i think this was an area that was a little lower profile and doesn't relate to them but turned into a significant interagency dispute. and again the intelligence community came out of it pretty much where it would want to be, i think. so i'm going to stop there and,

if you have questions, hold your hand up and wait for the mic to come. serve. sir. >> thank you so much. martin from the german weekly. bruce, i heard you not mentioning the nonce by agreement means actually also a law. i do agree, i just listen to the speech at the justice department. but i have a question what does it mean, the extension of privacy rights to foreigners? what could it mean? you, come on, just as the spiritual effect might be bigger than the practical effect. what privacy rights could be extended to foreigners? are they thinking about the privacy act of 1974 or what could it be?

>> cam? >> sure. there are several procedures outlined in the presidential policy directive, data, minimization data, retention, limitations, and potentially by implication at least limitations on how databases are queried, where the operative principle is that the same procedures, same policies will apply to u.s. and non-u.s. persons. so that's where the operational significance will be. a lot of that is tbd because it's delegated to the director of national intelligence and attorney general, to put those

procedures together. i guess what i would add is, sort of broader structure of things, is one of the recommendations the president adopted is in shoring that consideration of privacy and civil liberties, commerce, international trade, internet policy, our part of the discussion. that's embodied in the ppd. and i can tell you as somebody who often was one raising those issues in discussions here, that that is an enormously valuable thing. it is not that people in law enforcement or in the intelligence community are not in tune are receptive to these issues, but they are not built into the discussion. now they are. now they are as result of the

substantive criteria in the tbd, and they are there as a result of the review procedures, looking at the intelligence gathering of the produce, at the targeting, through the national security council, deputies committee and principals committee which ultimately approval by the president. that ensures that a wider set of eyes, considerations, going to the imitation of the intelligence gathering. those i think are important steps, but, you know, to what ben said about this validating what the intelligence community has done, is one is, look at from the perspective of those other issues, i think this came

out in the right place. in terms of the structure, in terms of the limitations. it's not everything that the review board recommended or that some have advocated. but, you know, i think i do differ is significance in metadata. it is potentially highly significant. one of the rich evidence of research these days is what you can learn from social networks. come back here, the 18th of february, one of the leading scientists from mit in this area will be here to talk about his new book, social physics. but what's key here is what do you do with that data. how you manage it. that will be made more robust.

but i think the validation of what the intelligence community is doing is because there has been a strong set of protections in place. now, coming from a different perspective, at the end of the day i would not structure a lot of the privacy protections that differently if i were in the united states making those decisions. this is really because the our robust set of protections in place. they are being made more robust. they are being broadened in terms of the scope of who they will cover. so in that sense it is a very much a validation of what has been done. >> i just want to --

>> please identify yourself. >> rick leopard, professor, university of michigan. i want to suggest that the devil is not so much into details here as in the bureaucracy. i spent some time at the site state of division of the department of homeland security, nsf, so i've seen some of these bureaucracy. just to give two examples. obama near the start of his administration issued an executive order on class identification which, in essence, said we were classifying too much and that we should err in the direction, if you will, of openness. i certainly have not seen evidence that they bureaucracy picked up on that directive in any realistic way. second example, department -- and this deals with the implications of this appoint

u.s. privacy law overseas. dhs in fact did that. at least in some experiences i had there was research that we wanted to do, which would involve the collection of pii, personally identifiable information on a very small number of individuals who i would say it was quite legitimate to do this research. they were great delays, indeed, some research was may be thwarted. i think if you really applying to u.s. privacy act and its rules about what may be collected and held, there could be more significant effects, particularly in the realm of doing research into issues that may help us over time -- >> can we bring this to a question, please? >> i'm just making comments. this is the end of the comments, and i throw it open. particularly to one question, how is the bureaucracy going to

be able to transform this? are they going to be able to transform this? will this be accepted and followed? >> just to clarify on the privacy front. the review group actually did recommend that dhs like policy level application of the privacy act, to the extent, as a policy matter to non-u.s. persons. the presidents speech does not do that. at least not as i read it. it talks about recognizing that non-u.s. persons overseas have privacy rights, have privacy rights but it does not do it with reference to the privacy act. and i think it's actually a bit of a step back from the recommendation of the review group. >> can i add one thing to that? it's an interesting question about bureaucracy. the big winner out of all of this in terms of enhanced power is dni.

when we think about it, in historical terms, when the dni's office was set up about a decade ago it was very clearly intended that this was to be a small office with a small staff, without its own building, which would largely be a coordinating role. well, here's one more step in the increase of the dni's authority. the dni now is on par with the attorney general in establishing all of the bureaucratic mechanisms, that kind of flow out of this. which means that the dni is not going to have a small staff. they will have a pretty big staff, he's going to get into privacy issues. it is as you said, it comes down to how does the bureaucracy implement this and i think the question it comes down very much to how aggressive will the dni's office be?

how tech that would be able to work with other agencies? will the nsa listen to it? i think it probably will. it's a winner for general clapper and company. >> go ahead. >> ring the microphone over to gary. just very quickly to say that i think one sort of comment on how they bureaucracy operates is, they bureaucrabureaucra cy is going to be under a lot of scrutiny. just to pick up on and choose point about the idea that the commercial interest will be brought into the decision-making enabling except that will be a good thing for u.s. power more generally. but it's more important in this area perhaps than others because the private sector has to be convinced that it is really happening in fact rather than just in theory but and if they don't they will engage and the

u.s. government will be not able to operate through the soft powers that the u.s. tech sector delivers. that's going to be really important in delivering some of its national security objectives to the internet. similarly i think the international community will be watching some of this very closely. i think obama has given himself the opportunity to change the nature of some of those international debates, and move things forward. but if there's a sense of what is happening is not what he has promised, then they will move back from that and that will move without progress. something to be a fair amount of scrutiny on this going forward, which will keep the bureaucracy on its toes. >> one point on your point about changes in the bureaucracy, one other thing that the tpd does is say that it will be a privacy officer at omb and that office

of science and technology policy will also appoint someone who will coordinate with dni. and that's something else that ensures there is additional perspective, and brings one of the main points of contact with the tech community into the intelligence discussion, the intelligence oversight. >> gary. this time for real. >> i write the mature and i want to not let a comet that two of the first two of you on the panel, bruce and ben, made. i want to be -- i want to check it. both of you did a kind of, at the outset said, you know, don't

write this inning. i'm going to need some time to think about this, and my views sometime down the road may change. and i want to ask whether that is, whether there is more than a sort of generic, wise, this all happened this morning, i need to get ready for this afternoon observation, or whether, and perhaps i was a, surprise, indeed, slightly swayed by how well he did what he did, or whether components of what he touched on that raised some yellow flag's for you. i think ben specifically talked about fisa court jurisdiction relative to section 215 as one example. so was this a sort of generic,

general hold on, folks, or were there some places where yellow flag's might be, signs, might be flashing? >> it's a very perceptive question, at least in the psychoanalysis of me. [laughter] i can't and won't speak for bruce. so in my case, there are a number of areas that i'm at this point aware that i have not analyzed with sufficient thoroughness to know what my opinion is going to be. let me just flag them for you. i'm not entirely sure i understand what the implications of the privacy rights -- acknowledging privacy rights for non-u.s. persons overseas is. and i'm not sure we will understand that until you hold up executive order 12333,

section 2.3 against existing minimization procedures can against minimization procedures that they're going to have to write for this. there's this little phrase in their that says, as cam pointed out, these have to be the same as the minimization procedures for u.s. persons to the extent feasible and consistent with national security. well, until you put all those puzzle pieces together, and i understand how consistent, how feasible it is consistent with how much national security, and what those minimization -- how similar and how different they're going to be, i'm going to be a little tentative and how i react to that. there's also a part in the speech where the president says, you know, suggest some reforms of u.s. -- 702 vis-à-vis the incidental collection of

material on u.s. persons. he does not elaborate what he means by that. and, in fact, sort of punts it to i believe also to deny, to go back to bruce's point. i want to see what that looks like a whether those reforms are encumber singh and with a privacy protected or are they incidental and on important. i think there's a bunch of stuff that just you sort of see the headings here, but what they're going to mean in the granularity of practice is very much to be determined. probably also some stuff it's very clear what needs. i just don't understand it yet. >> i'm not go to psycho analyze myself. what ben said applies. i will highlight two of his points. there's a fair number of places in the speech and in the document where there is language which you could drive a truck through.

for example, they can't seek out metadata except in emergency situations. welcome you know, what is an emergency situation? that's a judgment call. one of the points the president was making about this whole thing is, we don't need to just think about the judgment of this president, we need to think about the judgment of the next president and the president after. when you have a lot of those rather loose formulations, it's a subject for worry. what would a next president do on something like that? and then i think there's the other question of throwing it to the congress. but maybe i'm just influenced because i'm reading bob gates book right now, but his characterization of the congress

is the uglier it is, the closer you get, the more uglier it is, certainly applies to our current situation. and the notion that this congress is going to be able to come up with creative and useful solutions to some of these very, very difficult problems, what strikes me is the triumph of hope over experience. i just don't see that happening. and that's a worry. we could find out that instead of a path forward, that's a path to nowhere. >> i'm not going to psycho analyze either ben or bruce, and i guess what i would say is, i've had similar conversations, one after the event with people there, and in another which we were preparing for this discussion, both trying to parse exactly what the president said about the 215 program and where it is going from here. that's going to take some additional analysis, parsing of

the language of the speech, probably some further explanation as well. >> other questions? >> yes, thank you. i'm laura, with the u.s. department of state but i used to work with cam kerry. i continue to work on a lot of these issues. it's good to see cam to get it out of on voicing on behalf of iraq's to because i am a career federal bureaucrat, and it really goes to the climate in congress and congress' willingness to reform. to my experience, oversight cost money, transparency costs money. if the president issues an order to improve transparency in government but the size of the foia offices doesn't increase can you get pretty lackluster dissolves -- results. on the one hand we're hearing a lot of mandates being place on some of the very people that

didn't work on over the issues on these issues now. some of those very people are subject to furlough. they have been sent home on furlough. independent review group was forced to stop working for two weeks because of a government shutdown. so from the congress do you see any recognition from them that oversight -- the desire for oversight can be expressed with a commitment of resources, or is there a danger that we're going to see a new set of unfunded mandates and a requirement on agencies to sort of rearranged the deck chairs another way to make it happen, possibly in lackluster fashion? thank you. >> a couple thoughts on that. the short answer is no. congress, you know, the congressional oversight, and this is a very dangerous point in this area, because these are highly elaborated, highly -- they are very dense statutory

schemes that were put together with just enormous care over many, many decades now by congresses the works better than the current congress does. that care and feeding of the fisa regime, which has gone through several, a great many rewrites over and long period of time, because technology changes so quickly, it actually requires regular revisiting not just for the oversight reasons that you describe, but also because the technology changes and it becomes out of date. and the point that bruce made about congress is actually right, and it is in this area devastating that every time it gets harder and harder and harder to reach a point in which the congress can work in a bipartisan fashion, and this

legislation always has to be bipartisan, on a technically dense area of enormous legal complexity. that's getting harder and harder. and when you layer on top of it they need to create these oversight mechanisms that the executive then has to interface with, workload burden is enormous. and it's actually a real problem. >> had heard anything about what mike rogers, diane feinstein have said about it? what bothers me, the nsa situation doesn't bother me. actors bother me. i have access to the information before. but i really feel that the dni

now is going to lose that when. the previous dni works out booze allen. snowden is -- work at booz allen. are getting too much power to corporations to have the actions the? this joker nuts with the question i was just handed from one brandon andrews the rights, do you think americans feel more safe with phone metadata in the hands of private companies or the u.s. government? and if so, why? so i thought that open to any other panelists. spin a globe, let me begin on that. because that was one of the architects of the administration's privacy blueprint and consumer privacy bill of rights, and i certainly would like to see progress move forward on that. we do have a significant issue with the private sector as well as with government.

i think in many respects those issues, big data era, you know, collectiocollections going to t. we are moving into a world of ubiquitous -- we need to figure out how to deal with that in the context of government collection, whether it's metadata or other data. we need to deal with that in the private sector as well. it has certainly been a difficult environment to do anything on that front while the snowden disclosures were out there. wouldn't sit very well for the administration to come and say, we really are to do something on that, the private sector collection. i think maybe now we can put some of this in the past. we can put all that in the past. there's a lot of other documents out there and will have a report

next week. other things that will continue this discussion. but at least we may have reached a point of deflection that we can now look at, look at the private sector issues as well and begin a discussion, how do we manage that collection, how do we ensure that is appropriately protected in ways that meet consumer expectations and ensure that our two choices that people want to make in their lives, and don't get affected. >> are you safer at fort meade or are you safer at target? i think the answers you are a lot safer at fort meade then you are at target, for the average

american in terms of what really matters. you do raise the thing though, additional, very important question. and it also relates back to the question of bureaucracy. unless the congress of the united states and executive is prepared to enhance the strength of the career professional service, most of these issues are going to be outsourced to contractors. we will see more and more security evaluations, and more and more data collection handling in the hands of contractors. if i think there's one lesson of edward snowden, it is that's a big mistake. that is a really big mistake. how does a fairly junior contractor in hawaii find a way to download top secret budget of the united states intelligence community, and nobody in his office seems to notice that he is doing this? it's outrageous.

and the congress should have long ago called the booz allen and others and asked them those questions and made into something about it. but i don't see that happening. i think, unfortunately, the congress is part of that contractual world, to. when congressmen and senators move on, where do they move onto? the board of directors. [inaudible] >> right. >> more questions? >> the speech was mainly in reaction to snowden disclosure. d.c. the speech having an impact in changing, changing, i guess giving the u.s. government a higher moral ground debate? or do you see it as being likely

in the long term? >> ian, do you have thoughts on the? >> i do. i think the u.s. government is moving away from having, facing its policy on moral authority, in the particular regard. in what i think the speech will do at least in the context of internet issues, and international tech issues is provide a basis on which the government can now proactively engage internationally and the way that it probably felt a bit inhibited before. there's enough in the speech to allow other governments to engage with the u.s. if they

feel that it's in their interest to do so, in a way that they can self act to their own public. and i think how that actually translates into outcomes depends on how the administration takes that opportunity and what it follows up with. i happen to think the u.s. actually has an almost, on a larger scale, and almost moral authority when it comes to the internet government debate, for example. the values on which the internet is built and was driven for success of the global internet, sort of opened the freedom of a multi-stakeholder is far more attractive, and should be more attractive, to people and countries around the world than the more authoritarian model of government regulation. but i think people have been

stepping back from the united states because of snowden and this may open up the dialogue, and hopefully will start the process of building a coalition around a better way of taking a step forward. >> i agree with what ian said. you know, i'm tempted to answer the question yes, it gives the united states greater moral authority. i don't think it's really a matter of moral authority. the greatness of america lies not in being more enlightened than any other country but in her ability to repair her faults. again, i think in this discussion, sort of laying out a set of procedures, a set of principles, creating greater transparency, that the president has established a model that really puts it to other

countries around the world. i think he was quite pointed about that. certainly one of the effects of the snowden disclosures and one of the things i think has tempered some of the international outrage is that the press and other countries has been asking the question, looking at some of the snowden documents, to find those answers, what are our countries doing? what our governments are doing? and so certainly a number of countries have disclosures about their own activities, most notably brazil. that's enormously helpful in the discussion, norms and governance. you know, it was head of the u.n. we know the multilateral

system of government of the internet. we have one today. it just happens to be a largely nongovernmental one. many countries would like to put this under government control. irrespective of governor interest, more respectful of borders. this helps i think to move the discussion back to a better model of governance. >> i'd like to ask -- to actually disagree. i think it's really worth drawing as sharp a line as is possible him and it's not completely possible, between the internet government questions which do actually rely in a profound passion in a profound way on moral authority and espionage, which is a deeply amoral exercise in which we all pretend to be outraged by the things that are done to us and

pretend of the great moral principles lie behind our ability to do it to the other guy. i think at the end of the day, there's a lot of faint anger as well as from real anger -- as well as some real anger. i don't believe the loss of moral authority and espionage space was ever quite that great, and i actually don't believe that this will do much to restore it. because i think the real issue, with respect again, bracketing the internet government side which can be hard to bracket is the real issue is a whole bunch of stuff got found out that is embarrassing to us and this advantageous to us to have out there. and that's not fundamentally a moral issue. it's fundamentally and embarrassment and unpleasantness

and diplomatic ramifications and business ramifications. >> you had a question, sir? >> thank you. tom curry with nbc news. on monday or tuesday, he drew attention to a recommendation that the panel made that he said hadn't gotten any notice at all, and that is to expand nsa's authority, give it emergency power when a terror suspect was underused surveillance outside the united states enters the united states for the first 72 hours, gives nsa authority to track that person. did the president addressed that? and how significant is that? >> so, the president didn't address it, and i think you can assume that the reason is that if you're giving a speech about, you know, imposing new

restraints, by the way, asking for new authority i in the contt of the speech is over the dissident with the larger message. as in fact it is dissident with the larger message of the review group report. there is a group of reports from nsa that suggest that the problem of what are called roamers, which are people who are legitimate subjects of intelligence collection overseas, and to wake up one morning and you find out that there in cleveland, and all of a sudden the intelligence, collections are illegal. we do know when that happened is we shut them off and those show up as compliance incidents in these reports. it's a fairly common cause of compliance problems. and so one possible way to think about that is to say, well, okay, there's no problem. you know, when it turns out that

that surveillance is illegal, we shut it off and they notified the fbi. another way to think about it is a huge problem. there's compliance issues and the nsa is behaving illegally. and the they're doing all the illegal surveillance which is the way the press has covered it. they just counted it as illegal surveillance. the third way is hey, it's a policy problem. we're turning off surveillance of the most dangerous people. these are legitimate targets who show up in the united states. these are exactly the people you should be worried about. the review group took that position toward it, and i think rightly, and i suspect that the president will not talk about this very much publicly. but i wouldn't be at all surprised to see the incented -- the senate until just me or the house intelligence committee take a hard look at the recommendation.

>> we have a couple of questions that came in over the transom. which are the most significant review group recommendations that the president didn't mention? ian, these go to the sort of molten core of what you were talking about. can you do still what's the most significant thing in the internet governance encryption space that the president didn't and what should he have said about? >> i don't think we have good answers on the cryptography. i would defer to others who may have better ideas. i think that may be why, neither the review panel particularly or the president got into that space. where i think he did, not engaging whole group of issues, is on the future of the structure of the nsa. we have potentially an opportunity coming up with the

general alexander moving on to do a number of structurally different things, and either, certainly to split the nsa from used cyber command and give it more, give the nsa a more explicitly foreign intelligence function, taking away the military, its use. you could in support of the sort of international detente, the administration is involved in, put a surveillance had -- you could conceivably take the nsa out. it is sort of vaguely hinted at. >> and there's a separation of information assurance. >> absolutely. and i think what you got from the speech was the president saying this would have a short and medium term operational impact, which i'm not going to

take, but they don't think the presentational advantages of that are necessary, given the other things that i'm doing. and it remains to be seen. you think of speech is basically an endorsement of the current arrangement with a number of measures do know if i.t. constituencies, we will have to see how those constituencies react to that. but i think the community on encryption and, indeed, on the structure will probably still fail. he needs to move closer to where they are. >> another question from twitter is how significant are the reforms the president proposed to the foreign intelligence surveillance court, i suppose i can answer that. there were a few. one is this idea that the fisc should approve specifically

every query to the metadata program. that is a significant reform to the metadata program, independent on how many requests -- how much it brings down the number of requests but it's a significant workload burden for the fisc. the fisc, the judicial conference which is currently the executive of it is a former head judge of the fisa court itself, john gates, wrote a letter earlier this week to senate intelligence community basically saying the review group of course is a man -- is a mammoth workload. some of them requires a lot more resources and more judges are so ththat you taking program is relatively small in terms of the number of queries, and that's certainly a manager burden for the fisc, but there is an institutional impact of there. the more significant impact, the

president endorsed a public advocate before the fisc. he was i think very intentionally vague when he did so about what exactly he was endorsing. there are two basic visions of what a public advocate could be. one of them is basically give the fisc the authority to appoint amicus counsel to argue against the government position when it feels it needs an adversary briefing. unsurprisingly, this is the vision for fisc favors, that the judicial conference favors but they want the judges in control that. the more expansive vision which has been some of the legislative proposals as well as in the review group is, of having basically a standing office of public advocate that gets to intervene when it wants to, and argue against the government's position. they can be sort of, words can

be read to be either poor or just leaving that question up in the air. and i think that's one of the things he's punted to congress basically, how significant it is institutionally, is largely a function of what congress does with that. >> yes, sir. >> matthew paris, competitive enterprise institute. there's been a lot of talk about congress acting on a lot of these reforms. congressman -- congress doesn't receive a lot of information directly from intelligence agencies, that they're very obscure and respond about some of the programs that are going on. so what is the likely of any reforms on that front? >> does anyone have thoughts on that? >> i'll take a hangar at it.

yes, congress, and many congressmen and senators have long complained that if you don't ask the question precisely the right way, you get a very misleading answer. right way, you get a misleading report. secret intelligence agencies collect secrets to have a secret, not to give them away. the congress of the united states has not established a track record on very sensitive secrets that leads anyone to a great deal of confidence, other than to see if they can maintain that secret. strong bases in pakistan is it one example. i think one of the things the president has done here, by endorsing the n.s.a., biby -- ing him the 21st century

by he says we have new documentation that says that is legal. and we're going to tell you what we're doing. the problem of getting agencies to answer the question, even if the question isn't rightly phrased, is usually, not always, but usually, been a bigger problem with the sfraltbs -- intelligence agency than the national security agency, because national security l programs are, for the most part, ones that can be articulated to congress fairly simply, whereas a lot of c.i.a., especially covert action programs, there are elements of it which are if g to be at risk, misinterpreted or loose lips put them out thrt there in the public domain.

>> mike nelson with microsoft. one of the things you haven't talked about is the president's promise to have a high-level group led by john podesta looking at big data. i'm curious what two or three questions would you hope that group would try to answer? and do you think within the year we'll have another obama speech on the broader question of big data and privacy and will we have a brookings panel on that speech? >> on second thought -- >> we have had many panels on >> well, i'm ver >> i'm certainly very interested in that inquiry. it's, frankly, not clear either, you know, from the ppd or from the speech exactly what the scope of that inquiry is going

to be. it's on a fairly short timeline which, i think, makes, is going to make it challenging to address those issues. but, you know, as i said before, this is an important issue to, important conversation to have both on the government side and on the private side. i think, you know, we are at a stage in this world where we can't just focus on the issue of collection. you know, it is going to take place in ways that are beyond all of our conception today. and as you know, it's expanding at an enormous rate. i think on both the government side and on the private side, you know, we can't just say stop the collection. we have to, we can't just disregard data that's available. sort of like, you know, like

dealing with replay review in baseball. it may be nice to say, you know, we just want to disregard the information that's available. but there are going to be times when you wish you had access to it. and, you know, there are enormous gains, enormous risks, and we need to focus on how we manage that data. i think we've, certainly, had a discussion from the president on that today x i want to see the discussion move forward on that on the consumer side as well. >> so we have time for one more round. why don't we take questions and just we will go down the, go down the panel for final thoughts. so so if people have questions, let's get them out on the record now. >> hi, my name's anwar, i'm a student. throughout the years we've seen profiling and surveillance

whether it's de facto or day your ray with the muslim community in particular and other groups of color. moving forward, do we see any protections against this type of profiling with surveillance through the nsa but with other types of surveillance in general? i mean, the president mentioned it very, very briefly. again, do we see any of these protections moving forward? >> okay. had one over here. >> thomas stevenson, also a student, george washington university. so would the nsa or would cyber command take over the security of our armed forces instead of, like, if the nsa was removed from military operations? >> okay. anybody else before we close the question floor? all right. ian, a brief wrap-up from each of y'all. >> so a spic