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tv   BOOK TV  CSPAN  November 7, 2015 4:01pm-6:01pm EST

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>> next up we bring you book tvs coverage of the seventh annual boston book festival which includes a discussion on veterans and the keynote lecture by harvard university and literary christen professor james wood, but first, here's a panel on terrorism and surveillance. >> can you hear me? good morning. it is great to see you on this cold saturday morning. i will be moderating the great power ahead on this discussion on new threats in the modern age with three amazing authors who have contributed to dialogue that we have been having since the beginning of mankind. here's how today will start, i'm going to introduce the three authors and let them speak a few minutes on their book and given the opportunity to tell you with their book about and also eight moderated discussion and then we
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will open it up to discussion at the end. their books will be on sale at the end and they will be available for a picture and discussion. to start with my good friend doctor jessica stern and she has spent a career in counterterrorism and thinking about the threat that this nation and world faces with government physicians and academic ones and she is now a lecture at harvard university. one of time magazine theories innovative winners and is the author most recently of "isis" and that's a book she will talk about today. bruce schneier is the security technology. his latest "new york times" bestseller is "data and goliath" and in the house the collection of data. he is also a fellow at the berkman center at harvard-- harvard law school and many of you probably know about that
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center and his work in technology and innovation and gabriella blum is a professor of humanitarian law at harvard law school where she focuses on international law, negotiation and the law of conflict and is also the faculty director of the program on national law. gabby's new book of which-- why isn't it here? i should know the title because i read it and i to get right, "the future of violence". recent contribution by her to this notion of asymmetric threats, these new things going on not exactly armies, but are his risky sometimes as foreign armies, so i went to start with jessica, doctor stern, if you could tell us about your book and research is a bit we talk a lot about today, isis. >> thank you and i think i will tell you what i think is new about this organization. first of all, it holds
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territory. it is very good at capital labor and brand. it raises money through oil cells. oil production is much more resilient than anyone anticipated. they also tax rescue fee flows, so this is a perpetual resource for them. they create refugees and then they tax the refugee flows and are very good at attracting both locals, taking advantage of the disenfranchisement of sunni arabs, but also unprecedented leak good contracted foreign fighters come about 30,000 400 volunteers coming in, not just fighters, but also they are seeking doctors, engineers, people like bruce. i hope they haven't recruited
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you yet. [laughter] >> they really are capitalizing on a frustration with modernity is very well we see converts floating, people who are looking for a pure simple or life. that's two minutes. >> sankey. bruce, i wanted to turn to you about your new book and the threats you examined. >> my book is called "data and goliath", which i think is a really cool title. >> you when. >> people who pronounce it "data and goliath" justo get the joke. it's about the data that is produced by the computers we are an act with, phones, computers, atm machines, all of the computers in her life and it is about what happens to that data and who uses it, what makes it fundamentally about surveillance, as.
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they are companies that know data and know we are in this room. of time at corporate surveillance which is how a lot of the data is generated. government data, both good government and bad government who use that data for their purposes, which means the book is really about control, about the persuasion of advertising side, about social control and my personal government side. i talk about why this is important, why we need to think about our privacy with respect to die. really, i'm trying to talk about what i think is a fundamental issue of the information age, which is utterly extract data value to the group while preserving individual privacy and for example i use ways to get here this morning and that's why i'm on side. it works because everyone uses ways is under surveillance and he can easily-- tell me traffic payment, solana norma's group
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benefits, yet everyone that is using this is under surveillance. how do we balance this? whether it's law enforcement: medical, traffic, any other and we try to explore those in the book. >> gabby. >> you walk into a shower and find a spider and the spider can be real and it's harmless or the spider can be maybe surveillance drones semi- or next-door neighbor who dislikes your nosy dog and she's relating picture from you naked to a local sports bar or it could be a more menacing possibility that it's a lethal spider drone set by your business competitor. he is now vacationing, but uses a computer chip on that little mini drone to order the direct of the drone to shoot a needle into your left thigh and then
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orders the drone back through a crack in the bathroom window and orders it to self-destruct in need of the spider north operator are ever found. if you think this is sci-fi you and out-- and i can know perches from private vendors a aa battery sized drone that comes with surveillance with camera and making it lethal is the next step. this is a little taste of what drones or robotics more generally are opening up as opportunities for harm and we also know about cyber and the-- bruce is the expert on that. biotechnology is two steps ahead of us, but we can now again, you and i purchased genetic sequences online and lab equipment and what used to be complicated signs that only the most expert professors, but is becoming bruise it--. what is common to these
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technologies is they are becoming more accessible, cheaper, easy to handle and they distribute power mlo not just direct attacks, but remote attacks as well, so together in combination they create many threats. where every individual, group, state poses a threat to other individual group, corporation or state around the world and the lesson for us in the book is how do we cover the world of many to many threats and how do we govern it on the domestic level and how do we govern it on the international level? >> that was a wonderful summary so i will ask questions that draw out themes in all the looks that i read and hope for dialogue among others who read at the end i want to get into the governments and what can we do, what can people sitting here do, but i want to talk about this notion of age to age a threat. your book, bruce, you think
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about the revolutionary war, rebellion, freedom fighters whatever you want to call them that nations have always faced asymmetric threat and there are challenges in what ways is the modern age different, but in what ways is it similar to challenges that we face in the past? given it seems like technology is going faster than anyone can respond to it any given time. >> i think it is the same common theme in all three books herein if we walked outside and saw a tank we would know a military was involved because only militaries can afford tanks and that's a nice shorthand that we have been using to figure out who is attacking as. in cyberspace with emerging technologies and actually isis is a good example, tactics are democratizing from nation and
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non- nation state actors, corporations and maybe individuals, so today's top-secret nsa program becomes the next day's hacker tools in the stuff flows downhill. remember last november, when sony was attacked. there was a debate in the united states, legitimate debate among experts whether the attack was perpetrated by north korea, the 20 billion-dollar military budget or two guys in a basement somewhere. that's extraordinary that we can tell the difference. i think this speaks to ices as an organization, non- nation state actor, but it's acting kind of nationstate in ways we don't like because we have rules about nationstates. or if you look at some of these emerging, i think it's catastrophic, whether it's bio or nano and these technologies, which you think of as only the purview of government or someone with government like budgets
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democratizing in the hands of everyone and i think we are all trying to deal with how do we maintain security in this world of democratized the threats? >> jessica? >> i don't really have anything to add. i agree. >> i think most of the 4911, even now when we talk a ices or sacred categories this sense there is a national security threat and a personal security threat and somehow you can draw a line of the mint-- military and what is the business of the police department, but part of what the thread does is that it blurs of those lines, so we sought several near collision incidents of people flying drones near airports and passenger airliners where some guy landing a drone during the us open into a stadium. those were not even malicious intent, operation but will just
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tell you what is possible out there, so it's not just the nation verse individual, if the motivations, why do people do these things and blurring the lines that how we think about national security and regulating every day technology that we use and rely on. >> some of this is good. we like it when individuals-- let's think of syria, iran, china and we want this democracy. we want the state to have less power and individuals to have more power, so there is this good and bad here. >> what i would say is i see very much the latest of julia's work that believe it or not moms are absolutely critical to stopping the flow of foreign fighters and they are in many ways more important than at law
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enforcement. i have been doing work in a somali refugee community and the kids who are attracted to isis, their moms can't figure out what they're doing because they don't actually speak english and they certainly don't speak internet, which is a big problem. they need to go and get trained. one thing jessica, where isis, that threat differs and i will be the cynic here to read what you'll describe is threats like caffeine improves describe our threat and they are scary, but whatever, they might be bad and a few things happen here or there, but land is what manners to the enemy at his word jessica's work with ices really does differ in some sense, the
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traditional notion of foreign affairs and national security that isis has been able to use new capabilities and new technology, but that's only consistent with an complementary to the massive amount of land that they no cover in parts of the world. so, first of all describe how those two pieces of isis work to make it as successful as it is and then challenge me on that notion that i'm in the 20th century world. >> land is both isis's drink and a vulnerability because it means that it's possible to attack them in a way that wouldn't be possible if they didn't have a location. the reason land is so important to this group is its eight proto- stay, an organized criminal ring extraordinarily
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successful criminal activities. in fact, it was founded by a secular folk who found religion. it's important to them because they are most-- their most important revenue is what they call taxation and what we would call just set theft. so, that is one of the things that makes this group difference. it's both its strength and its vulnerability. >> i think land is very important for a group like isis that declares a state and there is a sense of domination and control over territory that gives you a special seat at the table of the international community if you want, but for most times the threat we talk about you don't need territory-- it doesn't matter where you are
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physically to attack someone on the cyber you can be anywhere around the world everly doesn't matter. to start a bio threat, bio weapon or release some harmful bot-- a virus, it doesn't matter where you are physically and the drozd nash drones as now allow remote attacks were doesn't matter where you are physically, so i think if anything new emerging-- emerging technology diminish the importance of territory and on the flip side i think chesky is and-- the united states has no jurisdiction ultrapure if you have a cyber attack emanating from somewhere else-- it now relies on these companies that bruce is talking about so think about the bp oil
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spill. who deals with the bp oil spill? is at the government? no, it's bp. bp is the only body that has expertise, resources capacity to plug the well and clean water. the government survived-- provides primary support, but in terms of its sense of reliance-- [inaudible] >> same thing in cyber space with a coming is attacked, the company does a cleanup and even sony when they were attacked by north korea. i like this notion of land being both an asset and a liability and is. depending on who you are, you are going to choose to be land or not depending on how that balance goes. if you are isis, you tried to become a state and try to get into i guess the un.
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in the government club so and is an asset. if you are a criminal group, a hacker, land is a liability and now, we know he where you are. when you see this democratization of tactics, you are seen as gaby talks about a lot of tactics that don't need land. this, i think, this changes the history. land as where power is centered is really only 1400s till now. before then the caso, what's important. the land around it was the relevance. you could be besieged for years and land around it did matter now, late-- nationstates are fading more in the notion of land as the locus of power is still important to the united states, but it's getting fuzzy or and more diffused.
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imagine a big climate change negotiation. who do you think as more power, exxon or bolivia? it's not even close. the land has no power in this sphere and we are seeing more security-related spheres that have that curators asian. >> a common theme and i don't know if you know it, but all three of you mentioned the challenge between security and privacy in dealing with either population mmb online or access to data. all three of you sort of suggest that we should not view it that way that is not a versus that it's in and and it seems to me as though in reading that-- help the audience figure out how can you conceive of it as an and when the government can do this
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in terms of data analysis or drop drones anywhere in the world or monitor muslim population in the united states to make sure that a violent extremism is a going on. alcan people think that in the future given the threats you are facing that privacy will be a factor in any of this stuff? >> it's not just privacy. we tend to think about security and liberty more generally as a balancing act and if you give a little bit of something in exchange for the other and there is sort of a zero sum game between the two and we think it's more accurate to think about in terms of hostile where these values sometime conflict, but sometimes actually mutually reenforcement and a gift pen on one another, so security without
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liberty is largely meaningless, but it's also true that you can't have liberty without security, so we tend to have these debates about surveillance, for instance, and i think this is where bruce and we covet disagree on the government surveillance as an evil, where its privacy versus security, but not think about airport security. we don't call it surveillance because we don't like the word, but it is surveillance and the reason we submit ourselves and go through the tsa airport security procedure is because we think it enhances our security and our liberty to fly. it wouldn't be flying otherwise, but when we have government resolution that protects our medical regulation we don't trade liberty for-- we think it enhances both and the protection of our medical records enhances both our security and our privacy, so in this complex world where there is only actors, the big brother, but so many little and medium-sized brothers out there, it would be
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wrong to just think about it as you always trade one for the other and a lot of the time you are trying to maximize both. >> i also use the term liberty. i don't use security versus primary, liberty versus control and security versus privacy comes from the belief that surveillance enhances security. we surveilled muslim populations because it counters terrorism. it actually doesn't. what we know about is it is very invasive on the population and they feel less secure, less the state, more hostile towards the surveillance and there's excellent documentary on community interests chicago, muslim community that was really surveilled-- beautiful
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commentary on what he does to the fabric of a community. it doesn't make a more secure think the security versus privacy comes from the false belief that if you have less privacy yet more security, but we don't pine for chinese level surveillance or pine for east germany. we don't wish we lived in iraq and we actually like the fact that privacy and that gives the security. we are not secure when we are observed. there's a really interesting primatology relationship. we feel like praying because surveillance is like predators. of course, there exists examples of sometimes when we have to give up some liberty to get security. airport security is a great example. we want the fbi to be able to investigate crimes and peer into our lives, so how do we work to make that trade out? we have some mechanisms and it's pretty simple, transparency over accountability.
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i mean, those mechanisms are in place and we feel secure giving the police abilities to invade our privacy because we know and we can verify that they are not going to do that capriciously or in self-serving ways. think how this might work in a country like china where you don't have those checks, which is why like nsa surveillance, which doesn't have transparency, not accounting snowdon, doesn't have oversight, doesn't have accountability and this is surveillance that's making us less secure rather than more secure opposed to something that the police might do which would be more transparent. that's kind of a long-winded answer. >> i would like to give a counterexample theory to the president announced in february of this year that there would be
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three pilot cities where there would be a countering violent extremism program and one of them is boston, another los angeles and another minneapolis. there is a lot of concern about civil liberties when the government starts trying to work with individuals in a community that may be ripe for krugman. by the way, there are many converts who as i said earlier who are becoming foreign fighters for isis, but i think of how i would feel if i was worried about my child. what's happening again, the moms want help. they are desperate. they know they can do it without the government and get the government can do it without the moms, so there is an example where on the one hand there is a civil liberties concern, but the people who are most actually affected our sin aren't as concerned as those who are thinking about it intellectually
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of jessica brings a good point up in her book, which i want for you to draw out of it, the challenge for government especially in terms of ices at least right now is that there is a legitimate intelligent interest in allowing extremist to use social media up to a point. that there is a dance in some ways going on and if something bad happens you don't have to think about isis, the about child pornography or in a more traditional law-enforcement asset. can you describe it a bit, i mean is the government able to actually sort of monitor, but then be able to tell okay, we are past the point of this being a dance now this person is radicalized and about to jump on a plane. >> this group is good at using social media and they have been using especially twitter. you to and facebook took down ices isis recruitment more
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quickly than twitter. is a form of information the way they get recruits, sometimes standing up to 100 hours trying to recruit one individual. that trade-off is if you take it all down as the united kingdom is trained to do, how do you continue to be aware of what's going on when you take down one twitter account another one pops up and what my colleagues jm berger, my co-author vent is that what happens is the new twitter account, there are a lot fewer people like us. obviously, there are a lot of academics who are following these isis accounts. how do you find that and you're right, julia, presumably that applies in child pornography as well. there is a trade-off and i think unlike the united kingdom, we
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haven't banned, we haven't insisted that every single one of those sites-- accounts get taken down immediately. >> this is again the democratization of tactics, so we see ices use twitter as an organizational tool. hokkien syrian dissidents, so these tools of communication, organization are incredibly empowering for everyone, both the good guys and the bad guys. the only thing keeping our society afloat right now is there are met-- way more good guys and bad guys a the organization does use these sites with this system with whatever the modern technology for good. i think it's interesting to watch. syrian dissidents use facebook to organize i screwed the syrian
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government uses facebook to arrest its citizens, so we see this, get a power-play between traditional power, which i think of government corporation in this more distributed power, which might be isis, might be a criminal organization that wants to assess and people of drones, it could be anyone. this balance is changing and we are seeing this democratization, which really gets to gabby's notion of many against many and i set you up for that. [laughter] >> is a bit related to our previous conversation about the privacy and liberty and security there is this notion that the internet is a spiritual place that needs to be sacred because it's spiritual, it's where our thoughts are an sort of other self and that's why no one should be in the business of washing what we do their.
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but, there is a sense in which it's not virtual at all. it's where we are very real loves and relationships and financial transactions and medical records and you wouldn't want to be a place that's policed in the physical world i'm not sure i want to be a place that's so-called policed in to the spiritual world to read basic are wonderful because it raises, what do we as citizens, what claims do we have those corporations that really give these platforms to the wonderful things they create, but also the potential harm said to him the claims against them and here i think we share very much the same sensibilities that think about product liability. we have demands from companies all the time to make sure what they give us or produce for us is safe regardless of whether it's security related or not, so think about drug and food administration. the government can't make sure
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that the food you consume or the medicine you take is a safe. with a can do is these companies to make sure it's safe and i think a lot of that will have two feature the conversation not just what we want in our relationship with the big brother, but what we want for these corporations and how much self monitoring. do they take down the sites or allow them? is there something that our citizens demand from them that don't just leave it to market forces, but says here is the line that you cannot cross anymore. >> an example, last week at john brennan, the director of the cia, his aol e-mail account was hacked by a teenager. >> why does he use aol? [laughter] >> because he's of the generation i got an aol account and was never hip enough to change. more important, he did nothing wrong he didn't have a lousy password. he didn't write it down. he didn't share it. what the hacker did was call verizon, pretending to a verizon
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employee and got information about him, credit card information, username, e-mail address and a bunch of information used that, called aol customer service pretending to be john brennan and got the e-mail password. john brennan is having dinner with his friends and to companies unbeknownst to them are tricked into the hacker getting into his e-mail. who is at fault their? it is those companies faults. brennan can't really do anything about it. it has to be the government that says to those companies, you can't be this sloppy. we just won't let you. this is a matter of public safety. so, we do agree that government needs to take a stronger hand in these commercial systems.
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>> of the government and in particular specifically the us government comes off in these books as both fumbling and big and not hip enough and using aol accounts compared to the twentysomethings who are-- >> beyond e-mail. >> my daughter tells me don't e-mail me. they don't do e-mail anymore. i still print. also, though, perception or narrative about the government of being all-knowing, all-powerful, and maybe both are true, the given the threats that you all described i think my overall question is, what can the government do? what should it do and doesn't have the tools necessary given the kinds of threats that we described and jessica, i will start with you. >> i think there is a limit to what the government can do both about what's happening in iraq and syria.
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where americans think we have to fix every problem. also, we played a role in creating a problem, so there is a sense of moral imperative and at the same time i'm not sure how much we can do without making things worse. when it comes to recruitment of foreign fighters, it's very hard the private citizen rates can play much bigger role. i see on army of individuals, muslims who have decided to take on this problem of recruitment who are actually responding to kids online. in fact, yesterday i spent quite a bit of time, i don't usually do this, but there is a kid in libya who is telling me he's about to join isis and we have been in communication for months and he says he's in libya.
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i said that them, but i don't know where he is. anyway, we have been having this long conversation. i also think the state department is trying to respond to the online recruitment was someone called think again, turn away and it basically says isis is really bad, listen to us. it's a bunch of middle aged people try come up with something. >> aol accounts. >> exactly, and it really needs to be 19 -year-olds who are doing that, so i will be participating next fall in an effort to get its students to compete, to develop the best online platform to respond to this. i think that's important for the private sector to get involved at. >> to pick up on what jessica said, the challenge for the national security.
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also, security clearances, the traditional notices of the y kaiperm arkansas who speaks three languages getting recorded by the cia. our next great government employee might have been arrested for pot use and a couple tattoos and is really good at hacking it will have to change the notion. >> i think it will be an overarching theme is that the notion of government is slow and ponderous, but the very powerful. the more distributed users are fast and nimble, but less powerful. we are going to see this tussle-- tussle is a bad work, battle between the quick and the strong. there is the cyber criminals and the fbi and the author of
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procurement process and get someone a clearance. you don't have to get a clearance to join isis and is probably best you don't get one, so this group moves even faster. this group will be stronger, so it's kind of a little david and goliath thing here and it really isn't open question, will win? traditionally big and strong winds. go back 10, 15, 20 years, fast one, but now governments are realizing that they have to the-- acted differently, so can they learn nimble? can the fast learn strong? when new technologies emerge, which side will it benefit? getting back to syrian dissidents, the syrian government uses facebook. who will win? woman in the next platform, twitter?
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who will that favor? all of these technology, current and future will affect this quick versus strong and that's what she got to watch whether it's a strong corporate, strong governments, whether it's quick criminal quick decisions or quick anything. >> i think there are several principles here in the first that we shouldn't try or attempt to respond every threat. here i want to echo what julia has written about, at great length, there is resilience that if you want to be a free society and if we want to be true to the values that we need to live with a certain degree of threat. that is true in our everyday lives. it's true in our global life and it would be it grave mistake and i think jessica makes the same in her book that we shouldn't try to respond everything. is not possible and it has huge
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detrimental counter affect enough the first principle. second principle is that the government cannot do this alone. bruce describes in his book that great reliance with the great nsa, which is actually impotent without the private sector, the verizon's and even aol's of the world. the government must rely on them for partnerships in order to perform security functions and the third is that we as citizens have a responsibility to engage in the conversation about preferences, taste and value. two examples of the social attitudes we have towards regulating where the government's role, if you want in regulating technology. one is handguns. we made a choice in the constitution to have the right to bear arms and therefore, any regulation can only be minimal
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and very restricted. now, think about a different technology of mass empowerment, the passenger car. passenger cars are 2 tons of steel driving at high speeds on public roadways, operated by millions of people who are more or less experienced at doing so. sounds crazy, absolutely crazy. the reason or way we can enjoy driving at some risk, but not an intolerable risk, we think, is because we also have a very interest-- encrypted system of insurance and testing of the vehicle and the driver and we don't really have a social conversation about whether we have an unalienable right to drive without government interference. i think the same kind of cars at we will have to have about these emerging technologies that are
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sort of hip and novel and the young people's world, but we as citizens now have a responsibility to think what is the sensible way of control or addressing these issues that allow us to enjoy all the benefits of technology without putting us at an intolerable risk. >> talking about making the discussion more democratic, we want to open it up to any questions. i see a microphone. there is a microphone right here if you could come up and my only demand is that it is a question for the authors. i will give you a few seconds. any questions for the panel? yes? good. see, if you wait long enough. we have a few minutes. >> i guess my question is that if we did nothing about isis, what would be the scenario? >> i'm curious to, actually clec
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i can think you can all hear that the question was if you did nothing about isis and let it be , what would happen? >> obviously i don't have a crystal ball, but we do know that terrorist groups, go and they, it's almost like that has. isis is fashionable today. at the same time i think they are are the people are asking quite a bit of us and they are asking for military assistance and that's difficult and there is a humanitarian crisis that i think we must respond to in part because we did play a big role in the rise of this organization. it was formed in response to the invasion of iraq and then when we left iraq the way we did in
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the hands of a secretary leader, that led to increased sectarian cents-- tensions which ices has taken advantage of. isis will disappear. i do feel competent in saying that. the question is, what will be that humanitarian impact of it. see that this is primarily for bruce and that is in cyber security you see so much more of the users, take your password and make them longer people don't do this in my question to you is what do you see now that makes it easier for users to make that have to do less work rather than more. >> i think it shows there is nothing with the john brennan story and i think when we make
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the manse on users or plain users is actually a failure of the system that we as designers have failed that we need to have security mechanisms that work for the average users, like for my father who has to be able to use security and i know my father, he's not going to take a class as something that the work, so i say-- i see that is good. right now after decades of trying to get people to use e-mail encryption pgp, most of our e-mail is now encrypted not because you are doing anything, but because we now have a dozen e-mail providers and yahoo and google encrypt the mail between them and yahoo and google and microsoft and apple, so there are all these arrangements, so behind-the-scenes you don't even see it. your e-mail is encrypted, which means criminals can get at it. that's fantastic. when you pick up your cell phone
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, that radio call is encrypted from your phone to the tower. you don't know that is happening, but it means someone with a radio is not listening in to your phone call and i saw, so what i see as improvements in privacy and security and encryption are the things that happened behind the scene because it has to do with the user that has no skill and partly it's market forces that solve it is the so there's more than one e-mail provider, so there will be one with more privacy tools and that will take care of it, but a lot of times it will be enough because there's also kind of a monopoly or cartel of what around it, so a lot of these companies absolving themselves by providing very very elaborate licensees agreement that you have to click accepts. when was the last time you actually read through them at?
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did i, ever and it's a way of transferring the responsibilities from them to you, but that is just wrong. >> i should say in bruce's book on the end of bruce's book are recommendations for government, the private sector and the rest of us, so there are some things and it's helpful for people who've peeled overwhelmed by this notion of cyber threat or data mining and things like that. >> what are the best strategy for protecting ourselves against reading your book? >> all of our books is the single most effective thing you can do to keep safe. [laughter] >> never trust the market. [laughter] >> actually, if you buy the book and give it to your friends. [laughter] >> special discount for people with aol e-mails. >> none of us really-- we are
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all using these mobile devices and apps that require the seeker kind of access with our phone and we push except accept accept, so my question is, when you talk to people for those of us were not writers, we talked your friends a look at you like you are this crazy conspiracy theorist and i'm just curious, what to you talk to your friends about? of how do you communicate without arm waving and like here she goes again. >> i change the topic. i don't know about you. i think one of the reasons there's a lot of what we could do is around the edges. five years ago your data was on a computer and i will tell you how to secure your your computer and now you're dies on google, facebook, iphoto, it's in the cloud controlled by the company's. and you can to anything. you or level of control is much
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less. remember last year, iphoto, celebrities. they posted their photo on iphoto believing they had some security and privacy and found that apple messed up. i mean, they can read the 87th page license agreement, but all it will say is you have to trust us and if we are lying to you, well, sorry it's just business. there are things we can do any of my book i talk about it, but it's largely around the edges because it's so much out of our control. this is why i really believe we need government solutions, regulation because this deals a lot like food safety. in should use a refrigerator, but if you have the peanut butter that has salmonella in it when you buy at there's nothing you can do. it also has to do with expectations, so given that we live in this semi- virtual but very real spiritual world and we get a lot of benefits from that as bruce and others have suggested.
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and this goes back to the point about resilience. you have to accept and expect some degree of infringement upon a. so, this is where bruce and i have different this-- i assume the nsa reads on my e-mails and i don't particularly care. >> i hope you entertain them. [laughter] >> it's much more my colleagues reading my e-mails that i dread. >> she's the one going to isis websites. >> i should say we are at a book festival and jessica, for a way to talk for second because all three of you have managed to write mainstream books about either very scary or very technical things to audiences that aren't necessarily in the field 24-seven, but your particular actually sort of engage the enemy. can you just spend a bit-- i
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think people will be curious about how you actually do that, like physically. anyway, tell us. [laughter] >> i don't-- i used to go and hang out in pakistan with g hotties and i can't do that anymore, but-- >> why not? >> honestly i'm afraid of pakistani intelligence agencies more than anything else because they don't agree. now, it's quite easy to engage with other kinds of terrorists online. so, the world has changed including in research of this topic. >> do you pretend to be a g hottie or are you yourself? >> i never have engaged--
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>> i'm a high academic can you explain? >> don't answer without a lawyer [laughter] >> as i said yesterday someone had read my book, actually. a couple books ago. he started quoting the book, this guy who was saying why he would like to join isis and that's how he first came to me. he was quoting my book as saying he wanted to join isis. >> that wasn't the intended intent of your book. [laughter] >> know, so i wrote-- told him please write me an essay why you want to join a wire not going to joint. i'm an academic, so that was my solution, write me an essay. the things he keeps engaging with me, the guy who brought al qaeda to america has gotten out of prison and he really wants to get involved in communicating with others online and he was a
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part of the solution and he learned in prison and that's easy to do, but the answer is i never pretend to be someone i'm not. i thought i wouldn't be very good at it in person and we can't do that because of human subject requirements we can do that. >> talkies about rules that universities basically prohibit falsities going on. we have time for two more questions if you can be quick with the questions. >> all of you all much and soap are government regulation is more of a necessity. given the state of the united states congress, deese foresee that happening anytime soon like within my lifetime? >> you are young, so yes. [laughter] >> no time soon, yes, government is pretty darn dysfunctional.
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>> something i'm involved with on the homeland security side, it looks like there will be some cyber legislation passed given what happened yesterday, so take a look at where there is sort of a common, there might be a common ground with various pieces of both parties may be falling on the sideline, so there might be some legislation passed. >> my guess is you will see-- recently the faa said they would regulate all drone use that example that can be done without congress. >> part of it is evolution of power to the states and now you see a lot of efforts at the state level about their efforts to see what they could do in the state without federal involvement and also just like in any other context, if on a whim we see a terrible thing happening then there will be government response and this is the unfortunate way things work. they don't always respond to the
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most recent emergency. we are gritty ratcheting up and not good at that ratcheting back down and that is unfortunate and part of your guys work on terrorism, bush response to terrorism and have a lot to do with his body to whatever's out there and as long as we are dealing with identity car theft and things like that, not too bad. if and when a catastrophic event happens, the response would be different. >> last question. >> could you speak-- he spoke earlier about licensing for cars. how would you feel that security would be enhanced or the opposite of that if we had to license internet users or had some kind of identifier for internet users? >> i wouldn't license internet users. all sorts of problems that are beyond the scope of what we have left. i would put onus is on providers. of why does an isp passed through all traffic and require
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my father to have a personal firewall. that seems nutty. i don't see as a place to regulate as the same way you would do cars. i'm more interested in that car dealers with a gas companies that are providing services to the users. to me that's a much better points, smarter people regulating and more ability to make changes, so i would regulate more there than regulate users, but we can talk about internet drivers license number has been people writing about it and you could argue either way, but i tend to be against it. >> as i mentioned earlier, the incident where a guy flew a drone into a open stadium and he came in to retrieve his drone. had he not done that, there was no way to trace the drone back. if people are going to use these
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things in these ways i went to be able to trace a drone back to what operator and the same is true with companies that sell gene sequencing online. i want some kind of obligation to monitor-- monitor purchases what these websites. >> i'm going to have to end it here and first of all i've been asked to remind you there are survey cards in your pamphlets if you could fill them out. so, we would love your feedback and then just before the round of applause for our great panel, i do want to say again that given the world we live in, it's easy to tune out and these are three authors who have taken the time to provide narratives about new threats in a scary world, so to speak in ways that are very sensible, so please buy them and support their efforts. jessica is a book, isis, the state of terror.
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gabriella blum and now you probably data. >> data. >> i set it right the first time, data and goliath by bruce schneier and they will be back in the room in a few minutes to sell their books, so thank you all for coming out on a saturday morning and think of them. [applause]. >> now from the seventh annual boston book of festival, a paddle on veterans.
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..
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on our own, it's exciting for me to introduce the host of today's discussion, ms. lisa mullins. >> thanks a lot. would you like me to go up there? i have the pleasure of telling you foreign things like please turn off your crfns -- cell phones, you can take some pictures, but if you want to see the whole presentation you can ultimately see it on c-span because they're taping this with all other sessions. there are surveys in your program at the end of the day if you can fill out the survey. it's really important to the boston book festival. fill it out and put any recommendations and put in the boxes that you'll sigh -- see in
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venues like this. i think there's a microphone. feel free to ask questions of our authors. they would be more than happy to sign personally their books for you. so thank you. it's a thrill to me to talk to authors whose books are so relevant and in this case from different background. it's incredibly relevant and also one subject dove tails with the other. if you're not familiar with their work, you'll know what i mean. author of many books including
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charlie mike, finding way home. anybody know what charlie mike mean in military terms? joe. >> continue to mission in military radio code. >> go ahead. >> okay. well, it's kind of weird for me to be here and to have written this book because i was political columnist starting here in boston at the beverly times and at the phoenix and the real paper and i retired in 2000 from my job as washington correspondent for the new yorker, i retired for eight months and 11 -- and ten days. on the 11th day of the nine month i was living in a small
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town, could you tell our kids why their fathers died. i had a mission and i figured i had -- i knew the region some. wanted to learn intelligence and wanted to learn islam and i got involved doing just that. i was against the war in iraq but once we were there i felt like we had a moral responsibility so that the iraqis could find their own future, if there was such a thing of iraqis. early in 2006i wrote a column and the idea for those of you who don't know is that it's the
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exact opposite of playing where you go out and try to find the bad guys and they always allude you. you try to protect the innocent. you try to protect civilians and in the hopes that they'll tell you where the bad guys are. so i wrote this column. next day i get a phone call from a guy of david betrayas who had sent to kansas in the outer darkness by donald who in my 48 year's of experience is public the worst public servant i ever encountered. you're on the right track but you don't know anything, and he said, would you be willing to come out and study with us. and i said, sure. he said, there will be a reading list. within a matter of minutes he
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sent me a list of 30 complicated articles in military journals and so i went out to kansas and met with his group of advisers, all of whom were either road scholars or first in their class at west point. these were do most intellectually rigorous group of people i had ever met and i had read the articles a liberal arts major could read them. everything was off the record, of course. when i asked the question that was in the reading, i would immediately be taken up, full spectrum warfare and military review followed by another guy saying, looking at my shoes,
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you're too lazy to tie your shoes in the morning. naturally i feel in love. when he was asked to take operation, seven months later, i went and i embedded with him in iraq and embedded a number of times in afghanistan. i wouldn't be here today if i hadn't been there. i kept going back to the same town in afghanistan and what i saw a succession of 30-year-old captains, young americans who commanded companies trying to provide public works and security in an impossible situation. i would go out on patrol with the troops and we would do something that had never been done before in human history. we would ask the people, what do you want, we have some money,
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you know, what would you like us to do, the answer was absolutely unanimous and they wanted us to reopen a very nice school that the canadians hat built years before and the taliban had closed and booby trapped. 90% of the area and the 10% that we controlled. it was right in a very precariuos place. the captain, the fourth one, ellis, had to sell this to both sides, he had to sell it to the local council, war lord who wanted them to do something different. they wanted them to use the money to build a canal 12 miles west of town to where the war lord had some land where we later learned he was planning to plan to plant poppies and give
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to taliban. well, how are you going to protect the kids if you don't have troops there? he dealt with all of that and it was one day when i was out on patrol with him and he was talking to this local land owner who had a house in town with two stories overlooking the story and he want today use that as an oversight position to make sure the taliban weren't leaking in. as he sat there negotiating under fire in a different language, an impossible situation, the lightbulb went on in my head. if this guy ellis here, he can go back to iowa and ran for governor. i said, did you ever think about the fact that training is giving these kids a different skill set
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than american troops had ever had before that propels them to public service, and he said, wow, you may be right. after that i enlisted him and a number of other people to be on the lookout for american troops who had come home and gone into public service, and i found -- i found a lot of them including congressman on the north shore of boston, but i decided to tell the story of two amazing guys who were linked by a tragedy. he was the guy who would try to save the world one spring break at a time. when he was at oxford he would have six-week breaks, he saw all
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these children with legs chopped off and he got very angry. the innocent of the world need heavily armed moral protection. he decided to become a navy seal. probably the only navy seal that worked for mother teresa. he started walking the wards asking the severely young people there, what do you want to do now, what do you want to do next. the answer is always the same. the answer is i want to go back to my unit, he said, well, you didn't want -- you can't do that when you get out of the military. well, i want to be a coach, i want to work with the police department.
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eric came up with a killer forward sentence. it was we still need you. it wasn't just thank you for your service. it was we still need you and he came up with the idea of giving six-month public fellowship to wounded veterans. he called the mission continues and there are thousands of them now who have been out working in the communities. one of the early fellows was a guy by name jack wood who was a football player from the university of wisconsin, dean's list and was watching the haiti earthquake on cnn about a month after he got out and he said to himself, hey, i want to go help, and so he called a bunch of his
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buddies and four or five responded. they hooked up who had supply of medical supplies that they wanted to move in and within four days they were running the emergency room in the largest hospital in port of prince. i asked how did that happen. we do chaos. 300 members of team organized 10,000 civilians for the disaster relief and cleanup of the rock aways in new jersey after hurricane sandy. they are mobilizing right now to go down to méxico, they are in south carolina, they are allover the place. the thing -- i want to tell you what this really means for us because it touches on themes that identify been thinking
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about for my entire career. first thing i learned was this, that being in the military and only 1% of the public has served in the active military, they call the rest of us the 99%, being in the military has given these people values and disciplines and a sense of community that the rest of us have lost in this country. in fact, being part of that tightly knit caring community where everybody has a purpose, everybody has something to do each day and everybody knows that they're part of something larger than themselves molds their personalities and their spirits, and what we've learned, beginning to learn that a good part of posttram --
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post-traumatic stress was communities they lost and went back home. her name is natasha young, she was a surgeon and explosive ordinance unit. she came back with a raging case of posttraumatic suppress. what i did was deployed myself to camp couch where i was the commanding officer and my military was to stay on camp couch. her best friend from the marines was a mission's continue fellow who saved her life. this is a book about lyes saved but also about what the rest of us are missing. it seems to me that there are two political spectrums, left, right but communitarian,
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orlando, the governor of new york, the greatest enemy of a a republic. how do you keep a republic coherent when it's not at war? we had a pretty long experiment in this country. my whole life we've had wars but not that were threats, we had financial problems until receptly none that were real society-wide threats. during that time, we lost the habits of citizenship. the result is what you're seeing in the 2016 election, low-information voters who lost the habits of citizenship, you know glomming onto candidates
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who make wild pronouncements. they may not be ready for democracy, but they are ready for reality tv, and it's really difficult to have a democracy without citizens. and i think the message of charlie mike is that we should look to these stories, look to these amazing people like eric and jake wood and take a lesson from them, you know, these guys are classic, many of them u.s. military classic majors. first thing eric said to me, first thing you have to do is read the oddesy. boy, did he have a raging case of posttraumatic stress. that was expressed.
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and i started reading the greek philosophers as a result of these people, but my favorite philosopher comes from new jersey, bruce springsteen, we have to start saving for stuff that money can't buy. that's the message. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> i think actually before we go to bryan i'm going to ask my question now if you don't mind, joe. eric who you mentioned is now running for governor in missouri. >> yes. >> and he is among a group of republicans, he's not at the top in the elections next year.
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when you find that people like eric get into public service or people like jake that goes to places like haiti, i mean, it's amazing that he went despite the red cross saying, you don't qualify, get out of here and him saying -- >> the red cross has changed the position, they now look to team for guidance. >> well, that's what when he doesn't take no for an answer. >> right. >> it's really interesting in the book that they had the pilot on the plane, look, we need help here. if anybody wants to take detour. >> that's how they recruited the doctors. >> can you tell the story, how they got the first group? >> the first group were jake's buddies, most of the marines don't have escorts. they got on plane, his partner grew up a jesuit, the slogan is that you are a man or a person
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for otherses and got in touch with the jesuits in his hometown of chicago, they put him in touch with a monk down in haiti, brother jim, and -- and jesuits broughts the supply to santo domingo and spent the first day working in a refugee camp helping people. he was just blown away by the haitians. the haitians not only were very calm and respectful, but they triaged themselves the most badly wounded were brought
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forward first. they went on the second day to mother teresa's hospices and they sent mcnolty to the hospital, he asked for more medicine and they -- more medicine for his team, you have doctors, we need them. and so by the next day team was set up there and more medical supplies were coming in from chicago. what they realized it was a transformative experience for them. brother jim, first night, this is something that happens on deployments, would you, every one of you can go on, by the way. i've been on them after tornadoes in oklahoma. at night there's a military
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debrief of what was accomplished and what we have to do tomorrow and an emotional debrief. people start talking about the things that happened overseas and their feelings of loneliness here and how much importance and satisfaction and sense of purpose this -- this brings back to them, and you know, i only ask how many of you feel can i havic sense -- civic sense of purpose. we live in new york, you guys live in boston. there are people in the military that are from these communities but not many that i knew before this. they have something, the sense of purpose and desire to help that this society could use a lot more of.
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>> what happens when they get into office, when a veteran gets into office? >> the interesting thing is -- i just saw zeth. he sends his best to his constituents. he reached out to the guy, look, you know, the guy was from oklahoma. he said, when we have lunch talk about what we have in common and eventually the two of them wrote which i was privileged to get published. when i heard from veterans on both the left and right, is that they feel they have more in common with each other than with other members of their own party, and you know, what eric is doing in missouri is very interesting. i got him into some trouble this week when i was on morning joe
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and i said he was running for governor as a republican who had taken positions in favor of gay rights and also immigration reform. oh, oh. you know, alarm bells went off. he's running against four people who are going to be dragging the whole race to the right and eric called me worried and then an hour and a half later he said, the hell with that, this is why i'm doing this, i'm doing this to make government better. i'm doing this so that the republican party won't be about silly -- social issues, he didn't use the word silly, i don't want him to get in trouble again. [laughter] >> in eric's case he's very concerned about education and he doesn't believe that the democratic party can address education because of the power of the teachers' unions. he had very good ideas for the
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education of boys in poor neighborhoods. that's the spirit that i see coming. eric and zeth talk to each other allot. jake i hope is going to run for office as well. and what they're going to bring is a sense that we can actually get things done and that we don't have to be cynical. i've always had this -- this saying that i came up with, which is that sinnism is what passes among the mediocre and our media, my colleagues, our society have been ruled by and
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you're going to have a democracy based on -- >> thank you. >> so theater board is a project i started years ago. i had a classic degree. everyone told me i would never make a living and end up borders, i ended up becoming a defense contractor which was a surprise to many. the idea is simple that ancient greek plays, tragedies written more than 2500 years ago would have something important to say to service members, veterans and families, the reason this idea sort of came to me and to others working in the field was that
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greeks were at war for many years. the father of western theater lie it is greatest play, the audience would have been comprised of 17,000 soldiers. through this lens a form of story-telling of ritual communication emerges developed by an ancient democracy by its veterans. the idea behind theodore bore something probably would happen. the military had a lot of doors shut in my face, some slammed. i had a day job running a national nonprofit organization
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in new york city, at the point where i was growing tired of the rejection i read a report in "the new york times" about veterans returning from iraq and afghanistan suffering from the signature wounds, the invisible wounds pts, moral injury, an article about homicides, an article of suicides and it was the first wave of consequences to our shores. like joe, i was against the war, i marched in new york city. when i read about the nation's army hospital being underresourced by the very administration that had sent our service members to worry and
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they are returning to sub standard medical care, waiting in hallways, black mold in our rooms, i couldn't sit any longer, all i had was greek and latin. fortunately for me they still teach as war strategy in most of our military colleges and academies. there was a reference for the greeks. but in this article "the new york times" there was a section in january 2008, an ancient connection in which jonathan, award-winning till recently psychiatrist who worked with vietnam veterans here in the boston area and wrote about it. story telling in the western
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world, in that same article there was a section called agent connection which quoted jonathan and followed with a quote by a navy psychiatrist who was working with marines. he had been in the battle and had earned his stripes with the marines. his name was captain william p pnash. i begin all of my stories with a-jackson. i got on the phone and started e-mailing and i heard back from captain nash. 400 marine in san diego in a conference on the combat stress in august. i had attracted great actors.
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wonderful actor name bill camp. we performed in san diego for 400 marines and spouses. plays about betrayal, isolation and aband -- abandonment, after the performance -- what we do is steroids, bringing all their skills to bare on ancient material. the full spectrum of the emotions demanded of greek trial judge are being realized in front of our eyes. of the 400 that came many expected to see a fully
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reenacted depiction sports play and were disappointed to see actors in their street clothes. about 40 minutes in all of the cell phones went away and the military audience leaned forward, they did what they call in the military locking on, staired at the target which was a play with pure natural level of concentration and there was a silence in the room and who knows whether it struck or nerve or hit a cord.
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my husband went away four times to war and each time he came back just like the character a a-jacks she gave permission to everybody other spouse to quote and relate those lines to personal private stories they never shared with anyone else let alone 400 of their pierce and this incredible truth telling began and we held a 45 minute discussion, lasted three and a half hours and had to be close to midnight. it was then that this classic major that even know i knew what they were about, having up with this crazy idea, i needed to
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military. as joe demonstrated the military from the ancient world in highly quoted manner, and so it was at that moment that we discovered that -- this ancient tool. create a moment when those who had been to war were given permission to feel what it would be appropriate to feel about the things they had experience. the greeks knew that it was not adaptive to try during a battle and we know that too. but they knew and only starting to understand is there has to be a moment where people are rehumanized and given the opportunity to feel again.
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for the last seven years we performed more more than 65,000 service members veterans all over the world and what started as one project has now grown into 14, they all use the methodology of presenting usually ancient material, usually plays in front of audiences that suffered some type of trauma to create conversations that would never have happened had we not performed the plays. after an early performance a vietnam veteran stood up and he said in new york city bryan, it makes me feel a little less alone in the world and i always ask the audience, why do you think as a general wrote these
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place and all the violence and all of their graphic depictions of war and aftermath and performed it for 17,000 citizens and soldiers in a century where they saw 80 years of war and after an early performance a general stood up, the highest ranking psychologists in the army at the time, i think he wrote the plays because he might have been the minority with regard to compassionate he felt with individuals he was portraying in the plays. i think he wrote the plays to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. that's been our mission and continues to be, the mission continues. we are brought together and comforted with what divides us in desperate experiences and were divided in the country. we could have reaction to
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suffering on stage and if that reaction is discomfort, which i'm now convinceds convinced asy element of the work. this work is about shared discomfort, tragedy is about e - eliciting discomfort. i think he wrote play to boost morale. what's morale boosting with watching friend and ultimately take his own life on stage against the pleading of his family and before i could finish asking the question, the young man shot back, because it's the truth and because we are all sitting here acknowledging it together.
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i'm convinced that the hope and traj is -- tragedy in the stories but in the community that bear witness to their truth. if anything this work has taught me is that we have so much more work to do in this country among the divides that separate us and cynical climate of political discourse to face darkest aspects of humanity together and acknowledge human beings and to face our tragedies together with where our device is off for a couple of hours. that's mind the idea and that's what we have been doing for the last seven years. [applause]
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>> tell us how much time we have left. >> i think it's like 20. >> 20, excellent. >> okay. >> good. get your questions ready and, in fact, if some of you want to start coming up to the microphone that would be great and while you do that i'm going to ask a question to you bryan. i'm guessing that you are one of those keen observer and you see so many people witness these various plays, but essentially in terms of ajacks, is there a part in the play that you can see a visible reaction to among the audience members and -- and, you know, a line or two that might make an impact. >> one thing is i know nothing of rivals of western literature. he takes us in the mind of an
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individual that wants to take his own life. he takes us inside. in 2007 the army handbook said if you attempted to kill yourself in theater you could be court marshalled. the very moment that you displayed the moment for mental health services they would be stripped from you. that's been a major shift in the military in terms of what is the state of mind of somebody who is thinking about it. they feel the world would be better off if they ended their life. and so it takes us inside and the last she talks about is the friends he'll missed and the places he played as a boy and then he takes his life and what the play does and what i see in audiences night after night, i
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see a validation that this is not weakness that's being displaced. then, in fact, this is epic. so what i'm going to answer your question is the moment -- this is a little bit of stage trick on our part, we collapse time in the reading and we bring his wife on immediately and she discovers his body and then the greek there's a word in greek that's more of a sound, sound of a scream, who would have thought my name would some day become sound a man makes in despair.
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when his wife discovered his both shee makes an inhuman sound. one of the notice before they go on stage is make them wish they'd never come. again, back to the sense of shared discomfort. the military audience is made to attend. being volun-told. if your core value is to never leave someone behind, look how hard it seems to be saying to live up to that, look how hard it is. the sound of a woman discovering her husband's body.
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you see visible response as transcends receptors and goes back to the person who is watching it. and for me, that's what translation is. it's not about words. it's about the impulse behind language itself and how you translate that 2500 years later. >> i neglected this before. most of what we hear about veterans are all of the disaster stories. that's not the whole story. and what we are beginning to see
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and there's some academic literature on this, just the very beginnings is that the act of helping others is a way of getting past your obsession with self- and the guilt that you've been feeling for what you're part of. it's the way natasha got off of camp couch is to start helping people. there's a literature that points in this direction and it has to do with the elderly. there are a lot of studies that show -- i'll give you one example in ohio state study that had two groups of people in a nursing home doing fruit baskets. one were told that they were doing for themselves and the other were told that they were doing for poor people in the community. and the people who did them for poor people in the community had better appetites, slept better,
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were more responsive afterwards, and when you think about it, a couple of brilliant women socialists came with the idea, combat veterans have a lot in common, number one is the sense of loss in many cases. number two, is the fact that they can't function on the same level that they had before. three is a sense of isolation that the first two qualities have given them. and, you know, my feeling is and having seen this in real life that one way to prevent suicide -- first of all, you have to go through the scream.
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>> you can't avoid that. >> one way to start -- to deal with the pain is to reestablish and make them help in communities where they are not just helping each other but they're helping the rest of us and that is extremely powerful thing that i see every time i go out on either a mission continued service project or team disaster deployment. >> thank you. >> i just want to -- i know we want to go to questions. >> let me invite anybody that wants to ask a question to come up. >> you know, i totally hear that. at the time we started theater of war was a gesture. part of what we've been doing is creating permissive culture where people have been able to talk. in one of the -- in the play
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when he decides to take his own life, he has a moment of serenity that people sort of recognized in a contemporary world. he says i'm fine and he walks away and goes and kills himself, metaphor for what happens in with his life. i knew he was thinking about killing himself when he walked away, deceived his family and told him he was okay. i don't think he knew he was going to kill himself till he was alone. i said this at an air force shout, those were demons. we heal as groups. we don't need the evidence-based lit -- literature to tell us that. i'm not a therapist. how many different ways do we
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leave individuals alone to do battle with themselves and how do we get them off the sand dooms, what's our moral obligations. >> we have some questions. could i just add one point in that regard, one thing that both people and the mission continues have noticed is that there's a tendency to crash when you're back home alone after having done this. you know, you do this thing that you're actually helping people acting as a military unit and not firing at anybody or worrying about taking casualties and then you go home and crash and both groups have turned to the organization given hour which is an organization of 6,000 psychiatric counsel.
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because of proceeds of charlie mike they have given our staff members on both the staff of the mission continues and team rubakan, when you buy the book, you are supporting that particular effort. >> that's terrific. >> if you buy the book. i hope you do. >> thank you, could you just say your name? >> sure, my name is ben and i live in the area and one of my professional interests are -- okay. is helping young men in their social moral and emotional development, i ran mentoring program for young men. i'm quite interested in the ideas that you mentioned. i forgot the name because i was taking notes. >> you know, you shouldn't do these without talking about someone else's book, right.
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the great military historian wrote a very slim novel. it had a lovely title of keeping together in time. and what what his theory was if you went out by yourself to kill a lion, you wound up being dinner for the lion. early on it began dancing together, doing the kill-of-the-lion dance. that was the source of close order drill that bonding is hard wireed and whatever the idea is before you put boys in a
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classroom, specially, you know, middle school hormona boys and high school hormonal boys, is do physical training first,phis-ed during the day. >> that wasn't my question but that was great. just briefly, you're a journalist, i like what you said. i think it's growing and as a result of social media. >> traditional media. >> fair enough, but as journalism moves more and more online, i worry quite a bit about the lack of progress you seem to be able to make on who men need to be in the modern era. >> men need to be? >> yes. i wonder what you have to say
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about manhood as much as war because war is an interesting subject in that we see both the absolute worse men can do but often some of the most compassionate, but the problem is every time i think specially in a man tries to speak of something kind of, that's social scientists and socialists and scholars can't pinpoint why so many males are drawn to this, whether it's movies or whether serving in the military. i felt like a conversation is cut short by discussion of violence and values, i think there's -- that absolutely is part of the conversation that needs to continue to happen, but as a man teaching young men, i think there's something powerful about the stories of war, of why men watch these action movies.
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there's also a lot of problems with it. >> hang on one second. >> there are other people behind you. >> vs. very helpful. if you can keep your answers short, that's great. >> well, you know, over time we socialized war. i know all the arguments against profootball but i'm still going to be watching jets-patriots tomorrow. i'm sorry a jets fan, sorry, guys. the way to take this that boys in particular have toward action and if it can be guided toward helping other people. you know, i was in a mission continues community service project in brooklyn where we were cleaning a school, special needs school, there's john
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stewart cleaning up the playground. i will tell you something, at the end of that day when the school was done, we all came away with it, including john's kids with a tremendous feeling of personal satisfaction. it ain't shooting someone but it is using your muscles for the good of the community. >> there's a theory that ancient greek tragedy was a form of story telling but also a form of training for late adolescent males who were about to ma -- matriculate to the military. the list goes on and on and on of young people who were thrust into impossible ethical situations in which every decision will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
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so seen through that lens, story telling and tragedy itself for democracy in the ancient world was a way of preparing young men to enter into democratic paurpción and into the military. i think we've lost touch with story telling as a training, tool, beyond violence for expressing themselves. >> thank you. all right. >> hi, my name is david. my question is address to mr. klein. how have they addressed the issue of campaign finance. [laughter] >> well, i don't they that they have addressed it. i think that, you know -- >> i think you have to turn to -- >> yeah, i think also this. i think campaign finance is a
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major problem we have in this country, but it's a less important problem the farther you go up latter in elections. i covered 11, god help me, elections. in 1992 they tried to throw everything at bill clinton. in 2008 with barack obama, the public was involved. the greatest available to us with the current composition of the supreme court, campaign financing scandal that is this country is citizenship. the more the people are involved and made themselves aware of the elections that they have to make choices in, the less impact big money will have. >> that happens once they get in. first they have to ask for donations. okay, thank you.
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>> my name is rich, i'm not very much enlightened yet on making any sense of war, but the conversation that you folks are having didn't help me much with the ten buddies that are on the vietnam memorial in washington and i have seven brothers, five of us are in the military and two have passed away because of military situations. how do we make sense of the war and how do we take your wisdom, knowledge, your experience with just a small group of people, veterans and we are great people and not need things like wounded veterans organizations? we should take care of them. what are you folks going to be able to do not just to impact young men but young people to -- in our schools, in our communities, in clubs, in churches, wherever it is?
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it's only two of you. where are the rest of us? >> we are talking about something else too. i'm not so -- you know, my concern isn't about young people with regard to that. my concern is with old people who send people off to stupid wars including both vietnam, iraq and the expansion of the war in afghanistan. there are real enemies that we have to confront. we have not be defenseless, but the way which these kids were sent off was an outrage. as for vietnam veterans, one of the most moving times i had was on team deployment in oklahoma when a woman got up and said i'm not a veteran of your wars and for the first time tonight i feel as if i've come home. vietnam veterans are now
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welcomed in deployments and also in mission continued service projects. not only vietnam veterans but spouses of current veterans are in these -- and widows are in these platoons and for the rest of you, civilians are welcomed too. it's one way where we can make the rest of society aware of the sacrifices that are made. but i'm still worried about talking to marco rubio or jeb bush about, you know, tearing up the nuclear agreement with iran just because netanyahu wants them to. >> do you want to say something? >> no, thank you so much for your question. >> this is going to be the last
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question. i'm not sure if there's someone behind you. >> we want that last question. >> okay. >> we will keep it short. >> i will keep my short too. suicide is nothing knew but i wanted to ask you about society and shootings in bases. ..
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>> that is fueled by a sense of isolation and betrayal and also, and i said this earlier, a vocabulary of violence, a lack of syntax, a lack of ability for this young, this perp in -- this person in the play and in society, more our young people to express themselves any other way. >> could i say very quickly that the suicide bombers arehe

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