>> it's an extra day of nonfiction authors and books on presidents' day . an examination of our officers pulitzer prize when a novel color purple, look at the end of the baby boomer generation, a report on growth of instagram and an interviewwith presidential biographer and longtime congressional quarterly ceo robert perry as well as many other author discussions . find scheduleupdates and at figliuzzi or consult your program guide . >> i'm john devarick, because vice president of media and editorial. the commonwealth club has shifted from in person online events during the pandemic. this is the latest of more than 360 online programs he presented and we are grateful to our viewers for making these programs possible. we appreciate your considering to support the club and if you wish to do so please text the word donate 241-5329 4231 or visit the

club's website@commonwealthclub.org. if you're watching our program live on youtube we invite you to submit questions for our guests via the chat box on our youtube screen and after the conversation between our two guests i'll return and get to as many of those as possible. today's program features and a jacobson, journalist, former editor to the los angeles magazine and offer a new book first platoon, two conversations with max brooks, a fellow of the modern war institute at west point and author of the book devolution. and a jacobson is well known for her bestseller pentagon brain, area 51 and operation paperclip. in her latest book she investigates the age of biometrics and technology that will allow the government toidentify anyone , anywhere atany time . he dives into the pentagon's ability to utilize scan, fingerprint scans, waste patterning, and more to track

human patterns as well as the ethical questions raised by what jacobson calls emerging surveillance state. she will be talking with max brooks was a fellow at the atlantic council phil, center for strategy and integrating and now let's welcome any jacobson and max brooks. >> thank you everybody, thanks for tuning in. i can testify i just read annie and he spoke, i listened to it and it's an amazing read but i'm not going to, i'm not going to tell you what it's about. i want you to jump in and just give us the quick overview of what awesomeness lies within these pages. >> first of all, thanks to the commonwealth club for having us and max for having this conversation.i am a reader and fan of your work and look forward to talking about some really interesting things that are affecting all

of us today . and the story of first platoon while it is set in afghanistan and tells the story of a group of very young soldiers who have deployment to afghanistan and abruptly in catastrophe and tragedy. it also tells the story about the defense department's quest to build the most powerful biometric database in the world. in order to tag, track and locate people and here's the rub, before they commit a crime. that's where i think this story is just as important today as it was in 2012 when the boys went throughwhat they went through . >> for those of us who are not award-winning los angeles times authors, what the hell

is biometrics? give us a rundown, what are we talking about. >> that was the first question i asked when i learned about this. biometrics, human measurements. so the most obvious ones are fingerprints. iris scans. facial images and dna. and when i say obvious, those are favored biometrics of both the fbi and defense department right now. but as we learned in the introduction, biometrics are expanding to include the shape of the ear, the patterns on your veins. the heartbeats, your individual unique heartbeats. these are all biometrics that can be taken without your knowledge or consent and unwittingly, the defense department calls it off that technology but the point of all this is to create these massive catalogs of individual people.

once upon a time, these catalogs that belonged to the fbi, these big databases had only criminals in them. that was explained to me by this many special agents of the fbi i interviewed for the book now these big data databases have information, biometric information on all of us. long before we ever commit a crime. and that really brings to bear this idea that we're going to talk about which is what is security and what is straight up surveillance. >> so from the book you describe that the whole point of this was that if you swept up into, if the us military went to an afghan village and then they could discern through biometrics and through dna and as you say in the book, dna is 99.29

accurate, to compel say an afghan farmer a insurgent because if they captured insurgents and fingerprinted them, we know the difference. as scary as all this sounds, it also sounds like something as scientific as dna would be able to counteract things like racial profiling, racism . politics because we know that certainly the united states, many people have been sent to prison because of corruption, bias, what not. justice would not serve and also we know that theadvent of dna , many people sitting on death row were exonerated. so is it inherently bad or is there a good and bad?

>> you raise this incredibly important issue to all of this which is what is the intention? because i tell the origin story here about defense department biometrics, i think it allows readers to kind of ask those very questions and then explore them as we move forward and in your own life and in society. the original idea, the fbi wanted to help the defense department to be able to do exactly what you're talking about, be able to identify bomb makers, saying this is criminalistics. this is law and order, this is a great idea but that very quickly went astray when the defense department said to the fbi special agents working with them originally, thanks so much for the help

but were going to go forward on our own and the reason that created so many problems was because the fbi database is governed by laws and acted by congress. so there's oversight, there's legislation. you can't just stop somebody at a routine traffic stop and say open your mouth, i'd like totake your dna to see if your wanted for rape in another state . but the defense department has no such oversight and no such guidelines. so it gets very complex, chaotic and ultimately out-of-control very fast because there's no one watching the watchers . >> we should state, we should remind everyone that the whole reason after 9/11 the global war on terror was given to the defense department and taken away from the fbi was caused the defense department overseas

could move much quicker with much less regulationsbecause up until 911 , the terrorists were watched and countered by the fbi but they lost that right because there was too much oversight and there were too many legalese, it was believed we could prosecute the war on terror quicker but now as you say it's coming back here. so now what can you, you earlier said in the two most important words consent anomaly so the danger is not that our government is building a biometric database, it's that they could potentially build one without us knowing and without our permission. so what safeguards are in place and what safeguards do you think need to be in place ? >> it tricky.

back up for a moment about the idea thatwhile isn't it great we don't have a big biometric database of all of us, you have to stop and say is that even a good idea ? people used to be able to live off the grid. they used to be able to say thank you, i don't want anything to do with law enforcement, with the fbi. i just want to leave my life and be a good citizen and i'll pay my taxes but leave me alone. that's kind of the foundation of western democracy. that you have that option and what we are seeing happen now with these biometric databases, you can see it just right now with all these insurrectionist being identified on social media through facial images which is a biometric. once upon a time it was a mug shot and then it moved to be facial images and now we have facial recognition software . so at the heart of the matter for we even get to is

this a good idea or bad idea because yes, we should ask the people be able to make the decisions but ultimately they argued in thecourts . and what we're seeing happening is that the arguments in the courts about right to privacy, about whether or not if your photo is taken while you're walking down the street and that comes into play in a public way, as your right to privacy been violated. those fourth amendment questions are being debated in the court at a snail's pace. in the meantime, you have these issues of civilian justice, civilian law and order happening at science fiction like speed, just like we have seenin the past week . the big fear among the lawyers that i on this is that will some of these cases

against the insurrectionist, could they potentially be thrown out because of these right to privacy issues . that's the fruit of the poisonous tree argument, if what you garnered to build your case on wasillegal search and seizure , then perhaps it can't be used. >> and it seems like there are clearly valuable arguments to be made on both sides. because as you said, you can't live off thegrid anymore . even if you are a law-abiding citizen but by the same token ,. ski lift off the grid. so it seems that you could make an argument for both sides but it seems like the arguments that themselves are not keeping pace with the science and it reminds me of the speech that eisenhower made about nuclear weapons

when he was born weapons of the militia were the canon and now it's the hydrogen bomb and i say to all the great science fiction of the 1950s and 60s was all about our power racing ahead of our wisdom. but what do you ask someone who studied this think could be done for our society, our rights, our laws, our national discussion, how do we do that here? >> let me tell you the origin story. the fingerprints for the defense department and i find this astonishing because it's almost like a puzzle within a puzzle. you don't really know the answer and it goes like this, this is the point where the defense department department started. charlie and i tell the story for my interviews with the special agent who was in charge of this program, paul

chan and he was working in the rubble of the trade center after the plane had taken him down . after 9/11 and it was his job as an fbi agent to locate fingerprints of all body parts. that's what his job was. and at the time, he learned that the cia, the paramilitary organizations and special operators were going into afghanistan and were going to be going after terrorists within weeks. call shannon said to himself, we've got to get the fingerprints, the biometrics of the fighters leaving the battlefield because these guys are going to be really important and they're going to scatter.that's the basic process of asymmetric warfare, you can disappear into the crowd and it's such a good idea that the director of the fbi, gave paul shannon and a couple other agents these both streams to go to pakistan and fingerprints the

fighters that had been captured leaving the battlefield, all of whom claimed i'm just one of, i'm just a cook they were captured near and around bin laden. shannon fingerprints all these guys, take their dna, takes their photographs, carries it back to the fbi and the system, the information goes into the database. not a few months later he gets a phone call that says you're not going to believe this, one of those 30 terrorists in that little tiny prison, secret prison in pakistan, he's been arrested in the united states. he's in the fbi database has to mean he was here in the united states and this is astonishing and as it turns out and i tell in the book but this was a man by the name of mohammed he was in

fact supposed to be the 20th hijacker on 9/11. there were 19 hijackers, mohammed was that the border. the customs and border patrol was suspicious of him, rejected him and his fingerprints were taken. imagine what the dod must of thought in that moment. this is the one in 6 billion person match it. so long-winded, that's a long-winded answer to my god. imagine the good it could do if we had these databases and known these individuals and you can stop them. it could be the difference between a terrorist attack but that was a very long time ago and technology like you said as moved forward at this incredible speed and are now in possession of these databases are to be. their control by a very small number of people and understood by even fewer.

>> it sounds like this is the age-old argument in any democratic society of whereis the power ? it's the same thing with nuclear weapons, it's the reason that every time a nuclear missile drill is conducted, it has to have two teams by two separate people have to agree. it's the same reason a policeman was read you your miranda rights and had you not been branded in you can walk. so we have these safeguards but it sounds like this is moving very fast. and i like to segue but point out that at least this is our government keeping a database on us. there are safeguards, maybe they don't move so fast i these representatives of the judges and if i like the way

things are going maybe i should get more of my friends to vote and maybe i should pay more attention. however, these massive databases are also in the private sector. and we learned this after 9/11, we learned while he was getting so angry at the bush administration for collecting data from our online searches, google, one of their biggest companies had made this their entire business model . so what safeguards are there and just another fine point, maybe these corporations are local . china owns sitcoms of every kid not only is building a database on them so in the private sector, what are the safeguards to protect our privacy? >> there are almost none and that is, that's the bad news and bad news because then i think even worse than the lack of safeguards is the

utter lack oftransparency . cause you could say transparency or you could say desire to know. and then we can sit here and eat out about biometrics and we are but at the end of the day a lot of people say oh my god. i dinner to make the laundry to deal with and you want to know about these high polluting, hightechnology big data systems .i'm just going to trust that this is being taken care of by someone and i think the story is first to mix explicitly clear is in just a simple tale of a group of young soldiers in afghanistan and in the aftermath of what happened how all those ideas i'm being taken care of you just said as well are actually not true. they're not in place, they're not true the system is spiraling out of control far faster than anyone is catching up with, with the

way in which to understand these systems. in a simple manner, not just a esoteric asymmetric warfare geek manner. >> you have this story, one of the lines of the book is a war crime but a war crime has been committed and the perpetrator was sent to federal prison. however, there was a part of partner on the table and the partner not on the biometric data as i understand it alive about my own biometric data, that's for the biometrics that would have done the right thing, the science itself would have kept this murder in prison . but it's the people who are able to lie about it and when they cover up any evidence, >> it's right, is a twist on

this idea that science doesn't lie which it doesn't. humans live so as you create a more and more rarefied world where no one understands biometrics, they don't understand how they can be captured, they don't understand where the information goes once it is captured, then ultimately information can be used against you and the whole world with the example of the road army officer i tell them first platoon, he goes to leavenworth convicted of a dome murder, war crimes as is appropriate and if you read the book you can, it's all cold from the trial transcript and you can make that decision for yourself and decide whether his sentence was there. but if convicted, he goes to prison and then he is released after president from is presented with quote unquote, dna that proved the

people that killed were not civilians but in fact terrorist bombers. it's sort of hijacking the public sentiment about war and obligation and the role of young soldiers in a foreign country to fight for america's war. it's just taking all of it and turning it upside down and manipulating the reality of the situation because people are too busy to understand what's going on but i heard everyone to just pay the tiniest bit of attention because at the end of the day is not as, it's a little bit like the emperor's new clothes area is not as complex as it's made out to be. >> you keep coming back to the idea that we are busy and it seems like this is the issue and this is basic human psychology that we can do not

want to deal with the problem until we have nochoice . and you could argue whether that is true or not but you could argue that the reason that kennedy and chris jeff did not destroy the world was because of hiroshima and nagasaki and hiroshima and nagasaki had not happened it would have been a bomb in an empty desert without the horrific casualties we could have seen. chris jeff would not been able to imagine that sort of devastation all around the world so with nuclear weapons you've got a bad and you put in safeguards and as a result we've not had a nuclear explosion since 1945 this seems like if i understand it, this seemslike a slow creep . it seems like it happens and happens and one day you wake up and you realize it might be everywhere. >> and there's a story i tell in the book is very simple and frightening where

involving dna because dna as biometric is both powerful in the criminal justice system to be able to get other evidence from the crime scene at the perpetrator left behind. no doubt this is a fundamental rule of law. the system doesn't from taking two years to 94 minutes you can now do a rapid dna test. thanks to dod money area but i tell the story in the book which was originally reported by two new york times reporters.where a 12-year-old boy was called into a detective in new york city based on his suspected involvement in a felony crime. he's offered a mcdonald's soda which he accepts then when he's done with it the detective wearing rubber gloves takes it away, takes the straw out of it, pulls

cell samples from his lips. and that 12-year-old boy is genetic fingerprint goes in to a database. he was later asked, prison had nothing to do with the crime it took his mother extraordinary amount of time to get her son genetic information out of a database. that happens, can happen to any of us and as you say, it sounds a lot like once that happens far too late. >> and it is like we would need once again, not the science, the transparency behind because when you are running, when you are arrested and your part of the policestation they fingerprint you.but you know you're being printed . so it sounds like there needs to at least be if not consent, awareness that you

are being genetically fingerprinted. at least you know that is having so at least then your lawyers have the ability to trace that because like you said, it was the dna that got him off and you mentioned in the book they got the golden state killer and if you talk for a minute about that at the other side of wheredna can be a force for good .>> i think the concept here that you're heading on his identity dominance. that's why it's in the title of the book, first platoon. a story of modern war in the age of identity dominance. this idea that the defense department or any law enforcement organization for that matter wants to dominate my identity. that's a bit frightening and what it means is they can and perhaps will have all these disparate pieces of information about me, about you, about anyone at their fingertips unintended to be

able to then dominate a situation when the question arises, is this person guilty or not? and that is something that merits a much larger discussion and is going on right now you have a questionnaire thati forgot . >> i was talking about because we talk about the dna and i would say you also mentioned in the book about when it's a force for good and you have several examples so thought for a second about the golden state killer because when you say they have our dna, what do they know but by the same token there are people who have something to hide who gotaway with it or worse . tell us about that. >> that stories interesting for two reasons. one, i told the origin story of rapid dna in first platoon the eyes of its inventor, a

man named doctor richard feldman, a harvard educated microbiologist and brings that the frankenstein versus doctor frankenstein. when scientists create something they believe is for good and it gets out of their control. and you know, doctor selman certainly presents a great case that what he believes he has done with rapid dna, the ability to determine someone's dna in 94 minutes, what that means is the person is in the police station is built in the police station after 94 minutes and you're waiting for the test results. whereas before, used to take up to 24 months and the guy would be in the wind by. you have this idea that dna is moving faster and we can keep up with. and with the golden state killer was found through this civilian company called jet

match, just to retired businessman in florida who were sort of history ancestry fans and they wanted to help their database whereby other people could figure out who their ancestors were. again, for the greatergood . this idea that maybe people that were adopted that were searching for their birth parents and it became extraordinarily popular overnight. but what was unknown to all the users was at the same time, state and federal law enforcement agencies were using this database, taking samples of old dna, maybe the cigarette butts something left behind at a murder scene and they were using this database to try to do what is called familial genotype which is to figure out who people are based on who their family members are.

this is how the golden state killer was found after decades on the loose. but what i also thought was interesting about that was even doctor richard selling invented the rapid dna tests told me he could not have foreseen what jet match was capable with familial genotype. that's where we're talking about annie next can't think through these ideas and what they might mean and might be next and what they might foretell.and your analogy witheisenhower and the bombs is so important here . it's the actual scientists can't imagine my god, what will become of this, what monsters can be unleashed? again, not terrifying people, it's that whole thingof the quote eisenhower it's the knowledgeable , it's the informed public i'm paraphrasing him. that is a key component to

making a democracy work. and we. >> we should take a step back and remember that's why we have these systems, because there's differenttypes of intelligence and you and i , we know the science. we know scientists, we've worked with them but we also know they get lost in their own work and they get excited about , they are not horizontal thinkers who see the big picture, they are vertical thinkers and they drill down . oppenheimer who invented the animal had to watch it go off before he said my god, what have we done? you didn't know this, you worked with joe, you had to blow it up? thanks. so that's why we have judges and courts and lawyers and journalists, one of the most important factors of a democracy, journalists who can inform like me who go

well. i want you to talk or another because while were talking about our society let's jump back . another example as i think i remember, when biometrics was a force for good health encounter itself talk about the man in book. >> on the one hand you have these young soldiers, capturing biometrics on the ground with surgeons like, the program in afghanistan was for the defense department's to capture 80 percent of the biometrics on 80 percent of all of the afghans so that's that catalog that has to exist. then on the other hand you have what is called persistent ground surveillance which is actually an overhead system in an arrow stat which is a big giant balloon or otherwise ground surveillance where full motion video video

with geolocation data embedded inside tracking individual people who are anonymous on the ground. but all of this data needs to be processed by ai, by intelligent machines that are run by a software system called palantir because no human can keep track of even one billionth of this let alone all of it. so these two systems are working hand in glove. and what was shocking to me interviewing the persistent ground surveillance operators , they were actually watching the movement step-by-step of the soldiers. this was completely unknown to any of the soldiers. and yet operators are watching thesoldiers every time they step off the outpost . technically, so that they can

warn them of ied's that are buried in the ground because they have all that matter at least a lot of it. it didn't work out well that we had all. as you can read in the book. and at the same time, the operators are tracking individuals who they think might be insurgents and that comes to the story of the man in the purple. the operator named cabinet gave me a series of these remarkable interviews whereby his watching this man in the purple hat and he has to watch everything, he watches and go to the bathroom. there's no indoor bathrooms but he's watching him do that. he's watching him praying, watching him wash his close in the river, is watching him go home and he's always wearing a purple hat. what the operator is looking for is what are called three interactions with the earth. then that meets the qualifications to kill the

man. the government methodology in afghanistan is called find, fix, finish. the biometric system find, fix and the operators fix them. they figure out where they are and a drone is called in or another form of aircraft to finish them meaning kill them. and i told the story of the man in the purple hat because it indicates how muchcan go wrong . the operator has been watching this man, they know he's a terrorist and are going to kill him and he comes in outpost one day and his company says not to kill the man in the purple and the operator sayswait , he notices that the man in the purple hat is on a very expensive tractor. the kind that really can only be used in actual farmer. and i won't give away the whole story but suffice to say a man in a purple hat became extraordinary close,

the farmer on the tractor was mistaken for the man in the purple hat and became extraordinarily close to being executed. this is the kind of thingthat can go wrong . >> because once your dad can't come back, you can't say we made a mistake. >> you can't say check my fingerprints, it wasn't me. >> it's too late, when you use lethal force, there's no coming back fromdeadly force . but now, after the capital insurgency it looks like we are entering a new phase of domestic terrorism. which we haven't seen since the 1970s. even my generation, gen x is too young to remember a time when there were bombs going off all the time. when there were homegrown lefty insurgent groups everywhere. and now the right seems to be doing it but now that we

enter thisnew phase , how do you see biometrics being used in a way that protects peoples worries but also keeps people safe because let's remember when we talk about surveillance, law-enforcement we are not just talking about beating up for people or people who are innocent. we're also talking about as you mentioned in the book, the guy is to blow up abortion clinics. we are talking about stopping someone from going into the next black church with an ak-47. going into the next synagogue, we are stopping the next timothy mcveigh so how do wedo that ? at the same time, not looking at all of us going to the back. >> these biometric systems absolutely can be used part and parcel to rule of law. as it is intended to work in

a western democracy and you have to have a situation where is part of the social contract to have one group of people in charge and allowed to enforce rules and laws. that's the basic proponent so in an interesting way, if you want to be hopeful which i think we should be , we can look at the situation that is upon us now whereby we have, we saw both ends of the spectrum in terms of protests , unrest, civil unrest. we've seen it since june. and it culminated this past, just a few weeks ago at the catheter. and let's see what law-enforcement does with the biometric tracking system. but i think it's going to be

a great opportunity for everyone to be involved and to put their sort of best western-style rule of law on and say to themselves where does privacy factor into this and what rights and i willing to give up for the greater good of society because that's like a foundation since the age of reason. >> we agree as a society to give up a little bit of our freedom for a little bit of security . in the 60s we thought tops were going to bar so we put it all these great rights and in the 70s maybe went a little bit toofar the other way and a lot of bad guys got out . but now the needle shifts and the needle is always shifting in our country. it's a good healthy thing but if you can, you don't talk about as much in the book but certainly we're talking about just for a few minutes about country doesn't have that

back and forth that we have. talk about the chinese, they are big data and the trust index that they are now building among their citizens . >> china is their best exampleof all that can go wrong . and china specifically as the program called physicals for all and this was a biometric tracking program to catalog every single chinese person of uighur dissent and china has a database of 2 billion uighur and this includes their social images, iris scans and dna in the frightening part about the dna is its belief in that way we talk about what you can do that the chinese government is doing to actually use the dna to determine who else might be of uighur blood which sounds to me like what

went on in nazi germany. this is a frightening program. very dangerous and when came to their bison great journalists a few years ago that had been covering the story, human rights organizations around the world went while with this is so terrible. not one single place all the research i did i ever see a human rights person make the connection that this program is almost precisely of the defense department playbookin afghanistan . >> we should say they are using without any safeguards, using biometric information to racially profile. an entire community and i don't know whether you know this but it would seem the chinese communist party would then have a surveillance state within a surveillance which would then curtail movements, which would contain jobs, which keeps an

entire community essentially in a giant reeducation camp so my fellow liberals who i love, let us all remember when we all israel, we are doing this on the phone. made in the country is putting 2 million muslims in every education can. >> i saw a photograph of uighur cemeteries being taught doug up and the idea, very frightening idea is the chinese government going as far as pulling up skeletal remains so as to get dna and build out this database to racially profile anyone who is even the slightest hint of uighur dissent and this is frightening on top of frightening. >> this is a country that makes our shoes and our iphones and everything else and we'll talk about boycotting or divesting or anything like that . because god we would, they

could be made in michigan but god for bid i might have to pay a little bit more. >> time for questions from the online audience and here's the question really either of you or both of you if you may respond to and that is going back to putting the biometrics inyour , as a journalist andresearcher , masks and military strategy of course, defeating the zombie menace , as it had any impact on your work or your access to sources and things like that? any, you first. >> so i will hold about you know, i think that much can tell us about how it affects science fiction because sometimes you can learn as much about the subject

reading science fiction as you can reading science fact. >> the role of the storyteller is hopefully to teach us something, if we do our job right we all have an eye defense mechanism. sometimes if you give people a little too much truth, people tend to tune out area but if you wrap it in a veneer, then you are able to get people just familiar. you introduce them to something novel which annie does in her book, she talks about minority report which is a science fiction movie minority report introduces us to the notion of pre-crime going to commit a crime . and it really is something we have to deal with because as i was reading this part of the book i thought oh my god, i was literally airing on cnn story the fbi had been tracking much more dangerous, not protesters but insurgents who are arming and preparing

to go to washington dc and the fbi got in their way and said you have committed a crime yet but we know what you're planning and if you go to dc you will be arrested and theydidn't go and as a result alot of shots were not fired. a lot of love is not still . so that was minority report in action . i tell you biometrics, it happens to me in real life. as someone who after 9/11 has been pulled out of god knows how many airlines, i can't tell you how many i've been pulled off just because look at me. in the days after 9/11, was i yanked off and went away for a while. then when i was coming back from london with my family when i went to the uk, you have to look through and then they take a picture.and this, when i was waiting to

get on my flight they came in with a list and basically said you, you. pull us all out and we all took a little room and my little boy was scared to death, why are they taking daddy away and we're sitting in the room with everyone while different countries and we're all laughing at each other. where did you go, we all know about algorithms, whatdid you do ? and i looked around and i realize, where all parties. >> ..

it's not perfect. this is what "first platoon" is trying to warn us about -- annie is warning us about. wait a minute, your algorithm is wrong and if we don't ask this you could destroy lives. the worst thing was some time out of my day, but what if it's something bigger? what if it is a drone strike? what if the fbi shows up at someone's door and that person god forbid gets angry, this is america, where all armed,, flashes a gun and then his shot? what annie is trying to tell us, biometrics as a tool of law enforcement is not inherently bad or good but when any new tool comes into the toolbox of society it must be examined and debated by all. >> are there any ways to fake out or get around biometrics?

as in the direction of no way to stay off the government radar? >> there's almost no way to stay off the government radar. however when i was writing the book i went to several different biometric conferences one of which was an emphasis on dna. a little detail that could be straight out of science fiction that it is science fact, you can never fake your dna, right? i listened to the story of a man who had undergone a bone marrow transplant for a very severe form of cancer, and over time his dna shifted to that of the person who provided him with the bone marrow transplant. and my first thought was, my god, this is what the arch criminals, the top level russian

spies are going to begin doing to be able to escape that biometric capture net. what i will say is the book about before this was called surprise, kill, fannish. it was about cia paramilitary operators and travel to a number of foreign countries while i was working on the book, including cuba and vietnam. and let's just say there was a lot of tension going through those iris scans that max is talking about because all of them had been profiled. >> in the work i have done there's always a low-tech solution. this is a history of warfare, especially in history of the united states of work. we love big tech. that's a bread-and-butter. constantly warfare we come up against an enemy that has a stone age solution that we thought, we went to afghanistan

we thought with the drones especially drones armed with thermal cameras with heat signatures the day of the ambush was gone. that was just no way. you could just track them. we didn't some had invented the wall blanket, that the taliban uses, a nice thick big wall blanket that they drape over themselves at night when they sleep under it. so yes, there are ways. >> someone asked, annie may have just said this but you think we will eventually have this full identification and tracking of all citizens that we are seeing china roll rollout? is this an inevitable thing? another question from the audience, is this likely to continue a pace under biden and the laws under trump and the laws under obama? >> i think the biometric systems are nonpartisan. the rule of law issues have a

little more to do on -- the access on party lines. but i think we are only going to see more biometric systems because the big data systems that are processing the data, that's where so much of the money is. it's like the defense department military industrial complex, or as one defense department insider told me, they call it self licking ice cream cone. there are 85 million ground-based surveillance cameras in the united states. we have the largest per capita surveillance state, and that's larger than china per capita. >> i can say that this come back to conversation i had with a friend in the intelligence community who once the torture scandals came out in guantánamo bay. the bush administration's

argument was we need to torture these people, we need to waterboarded because god forbid there's a ticking bomb, and if we don't the bombs going to go off and kill people. we are torturing people to save lives. have lives ever been saved by torturing? he said i can't tell you that. i said then we don't have a debate. that is only a debate if there are two sides to it argument. when it comes to power, any form of power, in our society it needs to be open and clear and then we the voter can decide what it says. but the bush administration set the precedent of the sheepdog saying we know better, you don't need to know, we got this. we got this doesn't work in a free and open society, no debate. i think that there needs to be

full transparency and there needs to be a reckoning every time something new walks in. >> how does it work in a time of when you have got very active forces misinforming the public? we've all seen these people say that covid vaccine has got biomarkers in it? >> that's what annie was saying that this is the crux of climax of her book, is this war crime is double down not by that site or by some voodoo technology, just people lying for politics. i've done a lot of work on file warfare because we talk about vaccines, and really it takes people of courage like we've seen like in liz cheney to stand up to the fanatics and the self servers underside. we got plenty of fanatics consult service on our side. so it's going to take people in the middle to be able to take on

the wing and say no, no, no. maybe that hurts me, but that's not true. that's john mccain saying to that woman no, man, he's not an arab. he's an american who loves his country as much as i love my country. and he lost the election in that moment, but he gave back his soul and if we don't all do that, then we believe ourselves open to the monsters in the box. >> it's absolutely a middle of the root issue as max is talking about. anyone who has kids can begin to kind of see that because there are extremes that don't get you anywhere, but where the most productive discussions about how to move as a great society that we are at all of these liberties that we have in balancing rules of law within that, it's being

able to be a centrist about it and not having such an extreme idea about i am right they are wrong. that is what biometrics are trying to do is to divide people into groups, us versus them, good guys versus bad guy. that's the danger. that's what you start to have totalitarianism come in. dividing people into groups. >> i would say also biometrics is just another form of science and the problem with science with the data is a sometimes it makes you not feel good about the believes that you had going into an argument. you believe something, you feel good, you going and look at the facts and go i was a little wrong about something. every side is guilty in this. you talk about anti-vaxxers, the anti-vaxxers movement did not start in some rural town in arkansas. it's right down the street in my hometown of santa monica a few blocks with. we got one guy doctor death who

said i believe vaccines cause autism that i have no proof to back it up. that's a medical doctor. if we value our feel goodness more than we value the objective facts, we are finished. >> we talked a lot about china and the united states and their role in biometrics but what do we know about other countries? are the united states and china the two most aggressive in pursuing this or are there some other dark courses in this? >> dark course is a good question because those are the ones you always want to look out for, what is saudi arabia doing, who are they tracking with their biometrics? the indian government recently showed just how big and a fast and effective a biometric program can be.

by capturing and less than a decade biometrics on 1 billion indian citizens. that was for the program for food but again the setup was essentially well intended. the idea was people were handed in their chips and sort of getting someone else's food. the idea kind this was if we have everyone's iris scans will be able to authenticate who has been given what. good intentions but that's 1 billion biometrics right there. >> i did not know that. that's why you wrote the book. >> leading up to 9/11 there a lot of intelligence critics who said that the united states had been over rely on technological spine and an investing in the on the ground human intelligence.

is biometrics another lower into misappropriating of focus in money and attention may be under investigation and others? >> good question, wow. >> we spend a whole hour on that but the question that i think maybe the metaphor is site doesn't like on humans do. on the access of humans which the questioner is talking about, human intelligence, there is always going to be the balance of the human foiling the science, and that's espionage. >> you have to have a mix of both. after all the black lives matter marches, there was this narrative that the rioters, the looters, the bad guys had infiltrated the peaceful

protests and had used that as cover in order to some really bad stuff. with biometrics we would be able to prove that. no, no, no, we know these people. they of rap sheet a mile-long, they've never been involved in any black lives matter before. they were there to cause trouble. that why you do that you also need to have that kind of police chief that we had in l.a. who took in the with the protesters and by the way, a lot of flak for that and said what i thought, i grew up in l.a. in my life i never had the police chief of the lapd say listen, my job is to keep the peace, and if that means taking a new approaches i will do it. i will do whatever i have to do to keep the peace. so you need both. you need science, you need head and you need heart. >> is there such a thing as they bring too much information being accumulated for it to be useful or in the days of big tech, is that not a challenge?

in other words, we have the issues you will be talked about about the human use of it but is or even going to be a problem of the systemic understanding of this as tens of millions of people's data, biometric info gets accumulated, or as i said is big data solve that? >> well, that's the end game that i think is frightening, which is were ai comes to important. because only ai systems, only seen systems that can learn and handle this data and process it. there is simply too much data coming in with all these surveillance systems we now have to be processed by anything other than ai. and that is your military-industrial complex potentially gone awry in the field of surveillance. >> and we have to remember that in an age of globalization,

chinese companies are still very much chinese. russian companies very much russian. american companies are global and that's how they think,, that's their business model. we had tim cook who said i'm not going to go to iphones to track terrorists. we have to remember that if we are not watching who are corporations do business with, because remember a lot of the big data corpse farm out to cheaper corporations which may be contractors would be working overseas with other laws. we know this now. so may be an american corporation but it is the server itself, if that data is being handled in another country where the laws are different, and even though we have the right to protection to at home, our data is sitting in your sextant. i think we're to keep an eye on it and the something we have, that's called the committee --

is extent. committee on foreign investment in the united states. it was specifically set up to make sure that we did not farm out anything from the private sector that could be used against us. we need to look at cfius again with the eye of big data. >> we have now reached the point and a program will be a time for just one more question, so we'll try to in this on a hopeful or at least hopeful tone. and that is we talked about certain types of regulation or oversight or something that could be done. maybe get one or two specifics on what you would like to see as the government either comes to grip or attempt to come to grip to tackle something -- [inaudible] >> just the slightest bit of information and understanding

and learning about the topic of biometrics, and then from there you ask yourself the question that max is talking earlier, which has to do with the fact that society does evolve and technology is moving us forward. we have to think with the new set of eyes about how to deal with it. that means putting away some of our old ideas but really moving forward for me certainly as a parent, the idea that rule of law is a good thing. it's just that we have to help this law enforcers work within the society that they now have. that comes from opening up the lens of your own perspective on what you think might be right, might be wrong, who is the good guy, who is the bad guy and looking at things with a

hopefulness towards the new era we are now in. >> great. i think one safeguard, this is a long-term safeguard that we could put in place, is get civics taught back in the classroom. because all the kids i know, they don't know how their government works. they literally don't know about the three branches of government. they don't know about checks and balances. that must be taught but i would go for the company should be taught by veterans. the money should come from the department of veterans affairs, not the over strap department of education. i think our veterans many of whom need a purpose when they come out of uniform should be retrained to become schoolteachers and teach come here is her constitution, here are our three branches come here's all right, here's why we have rights. because a lot of them can speak not just from the headbutt from the heart about places in the world they have been and where these rights do not exist. i think we talk a lot about people not trusting and

institutions, they don't understand it anymore. we need what is called a culture of ownership again but not ownership in terms of owning stuff. owning our institution, owning a government. that will start in the classroom and it will be long-term but it took us 50 years to get from the greatest generation to where we are now. maybe if we turn it around in 50 years will have another greatest generation. >> okay, i'm going to add one last thought on that, dovetail off that idea that a think the place to begin with getting rid of your old ideas in the vote is precisely on that. for whatever reason the sacrifice of veterans has been sorted sidelined in the past 20 years in the war on terror. it's almost as if veterans issues and become an issue of the republican party. this is an absurdity and i think both parties need to realize the

incredible sacrifices of people like the young soldiers in "first platoon" and the millions who had served recently without merely the kind of acknowledgment that needs to be given to them. >> which also i think there's a lack, and irresponsibility in thank you for your service. we have seen that since 9/11 where people go thank you for your service, you are so amazing, wow, now go away. in my dad's generation no one said thank you for your service. even if it meant blackout curtains but everybody did something to contribute to the current events. i think that the military house to get off its high horse and we need to get off the couch and understand what affects one of us affects all of us. >> that's a great final note to

end on. our thanks to journalists annie jacobsen, author of "first platoon" which you can purchase at your online or local bookstore ethics also to max brooks. we thank you, our audience watching today. this concludes this program of the commonwealth club of california. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> you are watching booktv c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors your booktv on c-span2 created by america's cable-television companies. today were brought to you by these television company to provide booktv to viewers as a public service. >> the american enterprise institute in washington, d.c. hosted a virtual event with former second lady lynne cheney who discussed four of the first five president who all hailed from virginia. here she weighs in on the debate

over the removal of statues of america's founders who owned slaves. >> i am not opposed to taking down the confederate soldiers and confederate leaders. they were traitors to the union, and i think they should take those statues down is fine, but i do, i mean, i'm appalled actually went statues of washington fall fall of wh. government has a a commissiont suggests that if we don't start explaining the washington monument and the jefferson memorial better, then maybe they should be moved to some other place. they can't do this because those statues and those monuments are on private land. but i'm appalled at this, and the hook for it is usually they were slaveholders. they knew slaveholding was wrong.

jefferson i think i'll do a stain on virginia, and others of them spoke of it as a mortal sin. jefferson called it a sin against god. they were fully aware of the dilemma in which they lived, the contradiction in which they existed. but they found themselves unable, the circumstances were not such that they could achieve the full emancipation that justice demanded. that didn't stop them once they understood what a unique place they were in, what a unique time they were in. they were all educated in the enlightenment, in the scottish enlightenment. the ideas of freedom and liberty and justice and equality were central to that, the scottish enlightenment, and they were all, washington educated himself, but the other three

went to find schools and learn to this. so they were perfectly ready to start a new nation based on the very highest principles, and that's what they did. you are right, get, it is a contradiction, but i sure am glad they did it. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org and use search box to look for lynne lynchine title of your book. >> to knights programs going to be an exciting one paragraph dra retired professor of history, taught history for more than 30 years, has written 11 books and we're here to talk about her most recent. just fascinating biographies of james buchanan, of mary todd lincoln, of marcus anger. tonight she'll talk to us about her latest book "building america: the life of benjamin henry latrobe." dr. baker will be joined in converon