>> it all centers on this house in yemen and this person to let him with our. i'll guarantee you until the person in this room that has actually been to that house. this is bin laden's operations center in yemen. it was where he controlled office spots from. i went there because i get documentary for pbs, and we did a documentary on nsa and 9/11. so i went to that house and we saw it.

that was where the first from 9/11 came from. is are all issues that feed into judge pauley's decision, the comments of the director of nsa. this is the key excuse for having the metadata program. what happened was in december 1999, the in is a have been listening to this house for years because it was a house where bin laden would call to set up is terrorist operations. it's the house with the impact the u.s. embassy, the uss cole and so forth. the nsa was listening to that house. december 1999 they picked up a communication and it was from afghanistan and it said, send khalid al-mihdhar to call them for the meeting. so we know that the nsa knows this is going to be a very big

meeting. well, the nsa passes that to the cia and other intelligence agencies. the caa since people, and they get the cooperation of the government and they're watching these guys. and then all of a sudden they go to the airport and they get on a plane, khalid al-mihdhar and his partner, and to fly out of the country. the cia in good intelligence people, they figure they are flying to bangkok because that's where the plane was going. the problem was they called up the station in bangkok to alert them. and it happened to be a saturday and nobody was working. so the two terrorists got off the plane, disappeared into bangkok. but the cia did know they're

going to the united states because they had a copy of their passport which had their visa in it. so what happened was the two of them flew from yemen to california. and since nobody had been tipped off by the cia, that they were coming, nobody was there to watch them arrive. they went down to san diego and they managed to get this house here. it was a house in san diego, was owned by somebody, a muslim in san diego and saw two people who need a place to stay so we let them stay the. the guy happened to be an fbi informant, which is very interesting.

they had two terrorists who were on their way here. the cia knew about it, didn't tell anybody, and then they're living in the house that's owned by an fbi informant. then khalid al-mihdhar, his wife was pregnant in yemen. he called fairly often, least once a week and the nsa was eavesdropping everything going in and out of the house in yemen. so what happened was that the cia wanted information from that house. they wanted to say, give us the transcript, give us what these people are saying. and the nsa wouldn't give the cia any information that they were picking up from the house. they went up three times asking senior officials at the nsa for that information. they wouldn't give it to them. so the cia into building their own listing post to pick up communications from the house but the problem is they're only

getting the downlink. they don't have a satellite so they're not getting the uplink of the communications. they go back to the nsa and i said look, we got the downlink, we have our own listing post. can you just give us the uplink because we don't have a satellite, we can't afford one over yemen right now. nsa said it again know, you can have that information. that's one of the key issues right now. this is another case coming up which i'll talk about an imminent. let me back up to this one for a second. that house anyone is the key issue right now because judge pauley's decision come accepted the nsa's argument that nsa can even the for two years they're listening to everything going in and out of this house, they were able to pick up, they were able to find out that the calls from the pals were going to the house in yemen.

now, i followed the nsa since 1982 and it's a very -- they have a lot of technology, and i've talked to a lot of whistleblowers and the whistleblowers just can't believe that the nsa is saying that they didn't have the capabilities to find out where those phone calls were coming from. but that's the nsa's policy. the nsa's policy right now that they didn't know where those calls were coming from. they were listening to the calls in yemen, but they couldn't tell if they were coming from san diego. that's the key point. so judge pauley accepted that argument and that's the argument for metadata. because the nsa couldn't tell where those phone calls were coming, were coming from, then you put everybody's metadata in the united states. so you have it in one place and

then you can go through it. so you don't have another 9/11, but that's their argument. so again, these are things that are somewhat complicated. they are not usable in a soundbite on television but they are critical to this whole issue of metadata and needs more writing about it in the journal community. a lot of this, whistleblowers are saying are you kidding? you know we put all this technology out there and you can't tell where a telephone is coming from? everyone has caller id. but the story is not over yet. there's going to be a third bite of the apple. we had the split decision, the judge in new york and the judge in washington. there's another case coming up that's called the church of los angeles versus nsa. i vital role in this myself. it's brought by the electronic frontier foundation, a case that

focuses on the legality of the metadata and so forth. but there's another little twist and there's also -- they are focusing on another issue which is important and that's the american rights of assembly. the government should have a right to know every time a committee for the republic is meeting here. to get all our phone calls and find out that we're having a meeting of the naacp or any political gatherings are antiwar catherine. so that's one of the other aspects of this case that makes it different from the other two. it should be decided hopefully in the relatively near future. but you have these three cases and then they'll go to the appeals court and then to the supreme court for a decision. we have this entry position here but i really do have -- every time i see judge leon i really do have two for the first time say he was right.

and i'm glad that he was right on this issue here. so what i did was i wrote an amicus, or actually help, i taught at berkeley at one point and a law student at boston wanted to help them, a friend of the court brief, for that case, the third case that will be coming up. what we focus on largely was looking back to the church committee, for example, 1975, the church committee, and we can show that, look, before the church committee in nsa was just running amok. they had this operation shamrock, the use everybody's telegram in and out of the country, millions a day. eavesdropping on antiwar protesters but it's only when the church committee came along and made it transparent, publicized it, through their hearings and through their

reports that there was change made, that was the creation of the foreign intelligence surveillance court, the first court to ever put any kind of leisure any kind of regulation on nsa. and it worked really good for 30 years. it wasn't perfect. they never turn the government down but at least it was there and it did make some, i think it was some, i used to make jokes about it but if he actually did do a fair amount of good work and certainly better than not being there. so what happened after 9/11, they just -- the bush administration went around the fisa court, violated the law and just bypassed the fisa court. soon after years later after "the new york times" revealed the program, then they created this thing called the foreign intelligence surveillance amendment act which basically legalized what they were doing in the first place.

now we're at the point where we were at just prior to the church committee where the nsa has run amok, and we need another church committee to look at this. i admired the president spent because they actually came up with some really good suggestions but it was just a panel that looked at some of the issues for a month or a couple of months, whatever it was, and that's it. been they are gone. i think what we really need is a church committee to do this. it's been since 1975 looking at technology the nsa has picked up. look at the amount of weaknesses that they have created in the foreign intelligence surveillance court. and then i was down in rio back in november and i saw -- each of the one of the documents he had. and i thought it was very fascinating. this one here -- this is just an

excerpt from it, and i've got another slide you can actually read. it tells a little bit about what it was. when i read that i thought, wow, we finally arrived at the point we were in 1975 when the government was doing a lot of really bad things. back then what you're doing was they were looking for ways to get martin luther king, who is considered a radical at the time, and they wanted to discredit him in front of his followers. one way of doing that was by finding out what kind of sexual activity he might have and then using that to either blackmail him, extort him, or basically just discredit him in front of his followers. that's what this document was. it basically says the same

thing. it was dated just back in october of 2012, and what it argued was that -- and the director of the nsa, general alexander's title is at the very top of it, it said they look for personal vulnerabilities, viewing sexually explicit material online and so forth. a lot can be learned by people visiting sites. besides, it's probably more fun than listening to the north koreans. [laughter] so then the idea here is -- i was amazed the language they use, like nobody would ever see this document and less use of vivid language as possible. so then they would exploit these vulnerabilities of character, his radicalizers. they said we're not talking about terrorists you. we're not talking about criminals. these are people who are radical.

and it actually identify the people. i saw the original document when i was down there. i actually saw the names, but it was, you know, i agreed they shouldn't publish that. but when i saw the name, there wasn't any division between -- at least one of the names i saw was a u.s. citizen, or use person, and others were foreigners. so there wasn't any division. we're only going after the foreigners. americans or u.s. persons and foreigners. it was interesting to me, among the distribution list was the justice department and commerce. is this because they're trying to regulate the industry or something? i didn't get what the commerce department would be getting a top secret document from nsa about eavesdropping by people such to sites. there's a lot i don't understand about nsa.

going back this is what happened back in battle days of the 1960. the fbi used wiretapping to neutralize the target such as radicalizers such as martin luther king. back then the idea had come up with j. edgar hoover, the longest-serving director, that comes from general alexander, the longest-serving nsa director. it says something that not letting people stay in a job too long. and nsa played a role back in those days and liberal as part of eavesdropping on antiwar protesters and so forth. they would pick up some of the information and pass it on to the fbi. in terms of reforms now, i couldn't see anything that i really disagreed with on those

46 recommendations that came out from the white house panel. you know, i'm hearing all these rumors that the president is not going counties going to do sort of cosmetic changes her own. not a new a substantive which we very to the 20 -- disappointing but goes along with his track record. he's the guy that tripled the number of people, triple the number of forces in iraq instead of ending it the first six most. i'm sorry, in afghanistan. tripled the number of forces in afghanistan when he first got into office instead of ending it in the first six months. george bush had one drone attack in yemen in eight years, and obama has declared war on yemen. there's drone attacks going on all the time. the first attack on yemen was and even a drone attack. it was december 17, ma 2009. that was when he launched his

first attack on yemen, which was very telling. there weren't enough drones in the area. they were all in afghanistan and pakistan, but there was a navy ship. it was either an navy guided missile cruiser or suffering, one of the two. he used that and they thought that there was some terrorists down and the real rural part of southern yemen. so they fired all these crews missiles at this group in this tiny little village. crews missiles happened to be filled with cluster bombs, outlawed in 109 countries. this is -- i voted for president, really? shooting cluster bombs, rather, yeah, shooting crews missile's with cluster bombs at a country we're not at war with, and then missing the target and killing 50 women and children.

but that wasn't the end of it. the next day he made a very public phone call to the president of yemen thank him for such a great terrorist operation to be performed and when the president of yemen had nothing to do with it. it was entirely the obama administration. but he had agreed to go along with it. is it to the point i'm making, the point i want to make. we find out a lot of these things not from the us government from whistleblowers. a lot of this came from and through that was leaked by manning, chelsea manning. what happened was among the documents he released was a meeting between petraeus and the president of yemen, saleh. at that meeting which took place a couple months after that attack, and after that attack thathere was more. there was one on christmas eve and other attacks in yemen.

and in a meeting there was a transcript that was leaked by the manning documents and it says the -- they were laughing about it in the meeting, the president of yemen said i'll keep lying about it. as a matter of fact, i'm even lying to my own parliament about it. so petraeus and saleh had a good laugh about that. so these are the reason why i really admire whistleblowers, because they tell us the things we really have to know rather than the things they want us to know. one of the things i thought was really fascinating, i think i knew a number of people at the church committee, they were able to get nsa to come up and name a lot of the people that were targets of their eavesdropping, the antiwar protesters and so forth. there was 16 of them and they came out with names, real or some people like dr. benjamin

spock, joan baez, jane fonda. people you really have to worry about. well, there was one name. they are actually a couple of names but one in particular that they refused to release to the church committee. despite all the pleading, they never released this one name to the church committee. but that name was finally released. i think it was last september it was released. and here's who it was. which is why we needed another church committee. anyway, thanks very much. [applause] >> i'll be happy to take questions and i think john has a microphone.

>> fabulous presentation. i think the audience learned much from the narrative recounting the national security administration any beginning. one of the things james admitted it was created by a top secret memorandum by harry truman in 1952. there was any congressional debate, no public debate. it sort of emerged. but i'm sure that harry truman thought would be embarrassed via discussion. >> that's true. it's the only agency in the u.s. government that wasn't created by a law in congress but it wasn't created by hearings or by a bill through congress but it was created by a top secret memorandum signed by harry truman in 1952. that was even the congress wasn't allowed to know about it. it's the only agency in u.s. government that was a born secret. >> which is the opposite of our government, must be transparent

and don't have government by consent of the government. it seemed very a. and conspicuous to me that other than a few cameo appearances, really nothing in your narrative involved congress. we have whistleblowers but where's congress? article i -- >> at least not since 1975. >> that was just sort of in episodic instance anything. we're talking about the constitution of the united states. article one, section six specifically endows all members with what's called speech or debate them into. it was exercise in the pentagon papers. he was invested for espionage act by the nixon administration spent i think i know where you're going. all right head spin in any event, the reason for these observations are, you can't depend upon our liberties that some brave whistleblowers from time to time will expose the wrongdoing of the executive branch. it needs to be institutionalized

which is the whole reason why you have congressional oversight in the speech and debate clause. until that's a change we make it had snowed in from time to time and it is going to change the dynamic of us there's a systematic insistence by the american people and congress that has been made public. i don't see any of that generation. you ask for another church committee. diane feinstein or mike rogers? it is a joke. if anything they help the cover-up. and just to show -- spent exactly. that's one other point i make is that i'm not asking for it church committee in congress. i'm asking for an external church committee, a committee that would be like a 9/11 commission. and also went just other former government officials on it, one that has a civil libertarian, a journalist and so forth. we've got to get of the questions. >> that was my question, which

was who is frank church of 2014? >> yet. that was why -- unless we could find somebody with a medical ability to bring him back to life and put him back into the senate, i wouldn't put the senate -- i would allow the senate, or the congress to do this committee. look where they have come so far. i've been following this ever since the church committee, and with the church committee, they took it upon themselves. their mission, at least the way to look at it, they with a buffer between the american public and the nsa, or the intelligence community. it's revolved now so that the intelligence committees in congress feel that they are the protector of the agencies, not the protector of the public. they argue for a bigger budget

for the intelligence agencies whenever there's a cut in the budget or they argue for more freedoms for the agencies. where were they doing the two and half years until the times released the information get out about the war in eavesdropping which came from a whistleblower? not from our overseers in congress. yes, any other questions? deborah is a really good friend of mine. she was the lead attorney on the tom drake case, and i worked on the case with a tremendously successful case. tom drake was a whistleblower from nsa was charged with five counts of espionage for making some rather monday and information. i was able to show, with the help of debbie, that the information they were charging

him with was not only unclassified, and they wanted to put in jail for 35 years, it was not only unclassified but it was in the public domain and put there by the nsa and the pentagon. so when it came time for the trial, the prosecution threw the case out and asked them to please just sign this thing agreeing to a misdemeanor with no jail time and no fun. and the judge spent 20 minutes yelling at the prosecutor and the nsa. so it was a really good case. i appreciated babies work on that. thanks. [applause] >> -- debbie's work. >> it's good to see. thank you for that. >> for embarrassing you. >> slightly. i'm going to take a different role, play devil's advocate a bit, it's driven in part by this

uncomfortable feeling that i have with edward snowden actually and it's driven in large part by my experience in tom's case which is coming, i've read articles in the post and the times that there are millions of documents -- well, i guess 1.7 million documents he took, only a small snippet of which we've seen in the vast majority of the documents that are in greenwald's position and i presume you saw have really nothing to do with metadata were spying on americans. in fact, one of the slides he showed was a map of the world showing where our malware is. and i don't want to comment on whether we need to know about that, but at what point is edward snowden going to be not as glamorous hero but at the? >> no. that's a good question because that's one of the major questions that people have. the question is, you have 1.7 million documents and we've

only seen a little bit. snowden didn't show me all these documents. i was just down there and he happened to show me a couple. but yeah, this is a really good question, the major questions are, could the chinese have gotten access to a? for the russians have gotten access to? according to a snowden said, they didn't get access to it. speaking in snowden defense to some degree, you know, if you're a whistleblower and you're trying to get the documents out and you don't have time to sort of edit those documents while you're sitting there at your desk at nsa. the idea was to pull the document south, and not just sort of put them up on the internet but to give them to responsible journalists and journalists would go through them. that's what happened with dan ellensburg was a good friend of mine. he did that. he gave it to the new york times and the "washington post." we ended up helping to shorten a

war that should never gotten into. yet, there's no perfect -- i don't think he went to whistleblower school. he probably didn't read how to be whistleblowers for dummies, or whatever. i give them a lot of courage, a lot of credit for the courage he had for wade. i think there's a lot the government is always saying that come into, the world is going to come to an end. they said the world was going to come to an end when yardley wrote the black chamber. they said the world was going to come to an end when david kahn wrote the code breakers. they said the world was going to come to an end when i wrote "the puzzle palace." they say the world is going to come in and every time i write something. so far the world is still in pretty good shape and the main problems we have is getting in wars that were not supposed to be and.

[applause] and if we don't have whistleblowers occasionally, it may not be perfect people, may make mistakes, then, you know, we're going to have these more wars and have government that we don't want and that we don't know about. anyway, i'm always happy to debate you, debbie. you're such a great lawyer. i feel like i'm up against the greatest challenge but i appreciate it. thanks for your question. >> i wanted to pick up and follow a bit further on the khalid al-mihdhar and foreign intelligence surveillance court this is because you probably know that this is, part of this is the subject of the 28 page section of the original joint congressional investigation into 9/11 that was suppressed by president bush and remained suppressed by president obama.

this section, from what we can derive from other writings and speeches by senator bahrain who chaired that committee, indicated a line of investigation on saudi intelligence connections with the two hijackers in san diego, funding mechanisms, and apparently also the fact that the fbi refused to allow the congressional committee investigators access to the informant who owned the house witwhere these two guys were staying in. >> inet -- >> i wrote a book on 9/11 but just give me the predicate of your question. >> two members of congress have introduced a bill him of walter jones and steve lynch, calling for every member to read 20 pages and have it declassified. i wonder what your thoughts are on that dimension of this? >> i completely agree and i actually have a lot of admiration for walter jones. walter jones, a republican from north carolina, and he was the

person who put a bill in when wenwewent to war in iraq to chae the name of french fries to freedom fries because the french weren't supporting our war. and then one day he read the book i wrote on iraq called a pretext to war and to complete changed and became one of the most vocal antiwar opponents within congress. so i've always had a great deal of admiration for him for admitting a mistake and then trying to get out of this to change also. it's amazing what's still classified in those reports. i have no idea what it says. i haven't seen anybody leak it to me. i don't know what the saudi part is. there's a lot of people who speculate what the saudi parties. so i don't know, but the committee did a very poor job on the nsa aspect. which i wrote a lot about because they never focused on

what the nsa knew and what they did know and so forth. and i agree with you that that should be released as soon as possible. >> a comment and a question. several years ago i was told what it is a really meant was no such agency. >> yet. now it stands for not a secret anymore. [laughter] >> you might want to ask those who are visiting here to give their comments later on from nsa. so my question is, in light of the situation where the nsa and cia were cooperating before 9/11, and if they had it might have prevented it. going forward, what do you think would be the proper balance between this kind of data collection and analysis for national security and protecting individual privacy? so, what should whatever an essay turns into or other agencies be doing and how should they cooperate with cia and others to protect interest while

still protecting privacy? >> well, you know, one problem here is, first of all i would like them to lease start telling the truth about how useful some of these programs are. the nsa went for years telling congress how useful the e-mail metadata program was. it wasn't until senator wyden and senator udall put their feet to the fire and said come back and show us what's been useful. nsa couldn't do it and nsa had to shut that program down in 2011. the internet metadata program. then when we're discussing this telephone metadata program, the director first came out and said there's 54 cases where it helps prevent 54 attacks or something like that. and then it was down to like 32 or whatever. and then all of a sudden we found out he was only talking about the metadata program, the

215 program. he was talking about the prison program. where you knock on the front door of the agency, the company with a warrant or in order from the fisa court. so when it came down to the actual metadata program, it came down to one success. one success. and actually the deputy director actually admitted this on -- just left the nsa, admitted it on public radio about a week ago, it was just this one case in the case was a guy in san diego who sent $8000 to some group in somalia. he didn't even have anything to do with the united states but that's the one success for collecting all your telephone records since 2001. so that's what i really hope is that we could start starting

understand the useful programs from the useless programs and to apply not just the standard of some guy in the back room of, or a woman in the back room of an nsa listening post, but people who are in the civil liberties, privacy community here, other places in this debate. spent i would like -- my question is just about this, do you think there is -- [inaudible] in american society? >> is there what? >> in american society to really retreat, to really and this kind of retreat the activities of the nsa, consider the speech about the permanent threat of terrorism? that it stands up -- a study shows the nsa is extending,

extending. >> it's a good question because the question is basically, do you think there's any public support for this. the problem is you're going up against the terror machine, fear-mongering machine. how do you argue, if we don't do this we're going to have another 9/11 tomorrow, or whatever? that's always the problem, rational, putting a rational, making a rational argument when you're getting a rational arguments -- a rational arguments from the government and the fear, so that's one of the key things is to try to get the press, showing the relative nonsense of so much of this fear. we've had what, 23 people have been killed from terrorism in the united states since 2011. half of that was major nidal hasan, the army major and the fbi in san diego have been picking up his conversations

with on al-awlaki. so wasn't a question they didn't even know about it. you know, i've always been amazed that the united states, how it's against the law to take a bottle of shampoo onto an airplane but you could buy as many assault weapons as you want. [applause] what sense does that make? that's a good question but, unfortunately, i'm only going to answer the question where there's a mic because this is being recorded by c-span, so if i answer a question where there's no mic, they won't have the question so i have to go to john henry with a mic is. >> i'm with the institute for public accuracy. i want to highlight two people will have an event tomorrow that will -- would have some of us whistleblowers you mentioned, they will be there a nearly following obama's address so people can check it out online. it will be live streamed at

12:30. obama is speaking at 11. they can go to accuracy.org to get the inside of the whistleblowers in need of the following obama's address. i'd like to ask you a brief question about sort of a pushback on the international scope of it. certain nations spy on each other, but should we have some kind of limits on, and the nsa spy on democracy in tunisia, for example? is this delineation between u.s. person and non-u.s. person the most genuinely meaningful one we want set up? thank you. >> again, that's another good question. this whole issue doesn't really resonate at all in the united states and that's, turns out the rest of the people in the world, we don't care about any of the people in germany or france or anybody else. yes, they have their own intelligence services, spying, a

still, it's a question of sort of digital ink realism in a sense. and i hear that argument a lot. every country spies. we all spy. every country spies but every country doesn't have the nine largest internet companies home-based in their backyard, and when you do have the nine largest internet companies in your backyard, you can force them to do things that other countries can do. you can go to google and force them to give you whatever you want. but the nsa goes well beyond that. that's the front door. they all go to the back door. they tap into the fiber optic links between the data centers. no, i think of something i would like to see at least addressed, is where is this leading in terms of worldwide surveillance of everybody? and is it rational we're paying for this and are we just doing

the haystacks a high that you will never find a needle? those are good questions. >> i'm marc rotenberg from electronic privacy information n center. i want to thank you very much for your talk and all your work on this issue. as you know, it was epic the brought the original challenge to the nsa telephone record collection program last summer to the supreme court. we felt were supported in the effort by dozens of legal scholars and former members of the church committee agreed that under section 215 there shall be wasn't the authority for the nsa to collect all those telephone records on american citizens. what i want to ask you about is the historical significance of the president's speech tomorrow morning. and it seems to me that if we take a step back and think about the significance -- significant reform efforts in this area, we recall for example, the congress of 1974 post-watergate that

passed the privacy act and strengthen the freedom of information act, and the congress after the church committee the established the foreign intelligence surveillance act or don't you think we have sufficient evidence at this point that points towards comprehensive legislative reform in light of what we know to safeguard privacy in the country? >> well, i certainly do, and at that is a critical decision, i've been on the advisory board for them a long time. they originally thought nsa during the 1990s when nsa wanted to do a thing called the clipper ship. that was where the nsa would force the encryption companies in u.s. to turn the keys over to nsa for letting them use the back door. and the public and the congress rejected that largely because of what epic was doing.

and then we find out with a stone document it didn't make any difference because they're going around the back door anyway and eavesdropping. it's a good question. what the problem is as someone mentioned, there isn't any frank church in congress anymore. we have dianne feinstein. i don't see an awful lot of momentum in congress to actually pass some privacy bills with teeth in it. i would like to see that happen. we are living in this, still living in this post-9/11 period which was living in back in those days. and as an aging, it's a fear machine and it gets, it is self generating so you get the congress people who know that they have to go up for reelection every two years. they know that if they vote against a new budget increase

for nsa or they vote for -- thereupon is going to say well, my opponent here, he is weak on terrorism. it will be his fault. that serves as a disincentive to these congresspeople to push for progressive legislation and pour more and more money into the intelligence community. that's one of the reasons why i'm advisor to epic because they do a great job. job. >> there's been a couple of references here, at least one, to the fact way to balance our rights against national security. a vigorous effort by a lot of people who frame the argument went to balance the constitutional rights versus ash is good. the bill of rights was really the means for us as a sovereign

people versus we were present subject under a monarchy to be the overseers, provide oversight to our government meaning for malfeasance or thesis of government officials. going back, some of us are only old enough to member the '70s. the army, agency of department defends spying on antiwar activists to suppress the free speech and right to know. here we have the nsa, doing it on a massive scale worldwide, and the question seems to be, why are we willing to relinquish the government officials military especially who have a very narrow focus, have a right to know that we as american citizens should have because i think vietnam was the best example showing that the army, the military was wrong and antiwar activists were right and they were the ones who managed to keep us from building -- degrading into the same catastrophic failures that the soviet union did only 15 years later because we have rights to

know. so where's the outrage i guess is my question? >> that's always the problem, trying to create outrage. i write books and articles and i do document is and so forth so i'm always hoping that we're going to create some momentum for things, but it's hard getting the american public to get energized between issues that don't deal with saving them from the terrorists or saving them from iraq or saving them, you know, and i don't have the answer to that. i wish i did, but you're 100% right. during the 1970s the army actually was used in the united states this by, to eavesdrop on u.s. citizens. it's another outrage, another reason why the church committee was formed. so motivating the public, if i knew the edge to that i would be

selling toothpaste or something and make millions of dollars but i don't know how to motivate the public. i just allowed to write the books and whatever. >> i'm curious, you warned of the danger of inadvertent release of all of this vast information. but to your knowledge are we intentionally sharing any of this metadata with foreign countries? if so, do you have any idea which one? >> it's really interesting, people don't really realize this but it's not just the nsa. the nsa is just one element of a much larger organization. it's called the uk u.s.a. agreement, otherwise know as the five eyes. i don't know why they call it the five guys. it should be the 10 years, but that's why they call it. that's the united states, the uk, australia, new zealand and

canada, basically the same organization after world war ii it was a very successful world war ii code-breaking machine in germany, the purple machine in japan and so forth. so the countries wanted to stay together to continue doing their code-breaking and so forth. so what they did was they divide the world up in terms of spheres of eavesdropping capabilities. uk could eavesdrop on your very well the u.s. could do south america. australians and new zealanders could do the south east asia and so on and so forth. it's one big organization that does the spines everything has picked up by the mistake is shared with those five countries, that there's a lot of sharing that goes on beyond that. one of documents i thought was very shocking that i saw from the snowden release was that the nsa was turning over to israel all the raw data that the u.s. was collecting. without even ever going through,

having some oversight or overview or something, just turning it over. so that's the problem you have when you have a situation like that. you have a government that collects all this stuff. there's nobody overseeing it, nobody saying you're not allowed to do that. they just give it to whoever they want. i don't particularly what the israelis do know i'm calling every day or whatever. why should they know? so no, i agree. where is this data once they collected and once they collected it's going in this big place i wrote about in utah which apparently is not a very big success. it's $2 million, 1 million square feet and every time they turn a switch on, one of the servers melts. they haven't had a lot of luck with that but that's where supposedly it's going to be stored and they can share,

digital information they can share it easily. they can share with whomever they want. >> you mentioned senator church. senator church who is from idaho came from a distinctive political culture. is and such was probably destined many people think of as a terrible isolationist but who, in fact, was a great opponent of centralized power of governmental tyranny. so the question that we've all raised, how come our citizenry is a more active or more outraged over how calm the aclu, protest and editorials in the times and so on, but there isn't a kind of study, broad-based protest? and probably the answer to that lies in other features of our

political culture, namely the jacket the system of our social institutions of the fact that when you find a contract or phone, you are saying something away, you are powerless in the face of these very sizable institutions, whether they are big banks or communications companies. i would suggest that this induces a kind of general paralysis which requires people to post and nobody knows, everybody's forte. >> exactly. that's why whistleblowers are so rare, because a society like this is much easier to go along. if you're in certain areas in society and you are saying that there is no threat to terrorism,

people are going to look at you like you're a screaming radical or something like that. if you actually look at the statistics, the person with the absolute right that it's this fear mongering that goes on. that is, the worst part about it is the fear mongering and it's not in the press much either. what to do about it? i really don't know, what i try inhibiting a right to sort of indicate the level of risk and the level of risk is very small from things like terrorism when its very large on our gun control and things like that. but anyway, i wish there was some magic solution. i just don't have it. >> my question is, earlier you were describing the 54 events whereby they were trying to come up with evidence. do you have any idea how much money they spent specifically on the program and how many people

are being employed to do nothing essentially? >> now, i have no idea. but nsa's budget just keeps growing and growing. it was all top secret into the snowden document came out. and said what the budget was. so there's a huge -- nsa is the largest intelligence agency in the world. it's 35,000 employees and they've got another 15,000 or so that are contractors. so you've got all that money and all those people out there, and yet, that's the big question, what do you get out of it. it's almost like they are doing it because it's an academic exercise because we can do it, or we are eavesdropping because we can so we will. that's really the problem. that's why, if you have a senate intelligence house committee

that doesn't hold of the to the fire like the church committee, wasn't just church but there were other committees back in the '70s that did that. you're going to have these programs. again as i mentioned, nsa kept arguing that the internet metadata, the e-mail metadata program was a roaring success until they were forced by only two senators, udall and widen, to put up or shut up and they couldn't put up so they had to shut the program down. while i'm thinking about just so i could mention it because i forgot it before, that we were talking about whistleblowers and so forth, and you become penalizing whistleblowers. where's the penalties from u.s. government for breaking the law? where is clapper? he hasn't even been criticized let alone indicted. how many people from the ward

was eavesdropping operation were ever prosecuted? that was complete violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act. i know that act inside out to even in the time of war the only have i think five extra days to do war was eavesdropping. after that you go back to the warrant. but nobody ever gets punished. it's this lack of accountability. general alexander, head of the nsa, he was the equivalent of a captain of an aircraft carrier that just ran in to the rock of gibraltar. with a navy captain still be running the ship? so there's no accountability within the administration. you've got to start with accountability before you start getting any reform. how can you get reform if you let the same people make all the mistakes continue making them? >> i'm from the government accountability project, and we

represent edward snowden and tom drake and bill binney and kirk wiebe and ed loomis. i just wanted to point out that the congress actually took out the whistleblower protection enhancement act any protection from retaliation for intelligence community whistleblowers. and therefore their portable to any action the government takes against them or the private corporation. do you see on the horizon any enhanced protection from reprisal coming from the congress or the obama administration? >> yet, to point out some really important facts there, the fact that the whistleblowers don't have protection and that's one of the things the administration keys talking about, well, you know, they have the proper channels they can go to. they don't have the proper

channels and i don't see any legislation. i've been watching this for years, you know, my bread-and-butter comes from whistleblowers. that's what i write a lot of the things i do. to give you one quick example there, one of the people that i quoted from in my last book, "the shadow factory," was an employee of -- who was in nsa, what they called voice intercept operator down at the inn is a huge listening post in the state of georgia here where the eavesdrop on a lot of middle east medications. remotely through satellites and so forth. he was among the things they were doing was eavesdropping on american, journalists or aid workers are americans who happened to be in the middle east who happened to call their spouses in the united states who were having bedtime conversations and so forth.

and she didn't particularly want to listen to that. she said it was like reading someone's diary. so she protested all the way up from her low position at the listening post in georgia, all the way up to the head of the army intelligence security command, which ran off at. his name happened to be keith alexander at the time. and i got nowhere. so then she climbed up the ladder on the congressional side. got all the way to the senate, the senate intelligence committee chairman leahy, and again nothing happen. so she finally talked to me and i really asked her to go full faith and full name and let me use that. it is otherwise the government can just say, oh, you're just making that up or whatever. it was a very brave act under par. she felt very strong the government was doing this and

this is the problem whistleblowers face. they don't have any real protection. we were able to get a few things behind the scenes that got her protection. within two hours of the time we came out with my book, was on abc news. senator rockefeller, chairman of the senate intelligence community at the time, agreed to hold a hearing -- not hold a hearing but agreed to an investigation and they neatly asked her if she would testify and she said she would, which made her a witness before a committee so they couldn't prosecute her without obstructing an investigation of congress. so you have to do all these things in order to protect sources but i've never had a source ever get arrested or prosecuted, and i want to keep it that way. >> we told c-span we would quit at 8:15. there's so many questions out

here, would you stay and answer some questions to? yeah, i do want to keep people here who don't want to be here. i'm happy to keep asking them. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> thanks, john. thank you so much. i really appreciate it. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> by the way, i think they're selling books out there and they asked me to notify you that my books are for sale at the capitalist society here.

>> you have been watching booktv, 48 hours of book programming beginning saturday morning at eight eastern through monday morning at eight eastern. nonfiction books all weekend every weekend right here on c-span2. ..