personally made any donations at this point? that you've found. >> reporter: i am not aware of any. he may have given a few, but he's certainly not a giant in the field. >> russ choma, center for responsive politics. opensecrets.org. if you would like to go to their website and search some of their money and politics facts and figures. gautham nagesh, we're going to go to calls after this. what are some of the issues, legislative issues that facebook faces? >> well, i think first primarily we're dealing in privacy. and that's the prospect of regulations that would change the way web companies like facebook or google or twitter handle consumers' personal information. facebook as we're hearing has this ipo coming up, could be valued at more than $100 billion. i believe revenue last year was somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.5 billion. so obviously, there's

expectations out in that the enormous amount of personal information people have invested in facebook can be monetized in a major way. the government hasn't -- has a lot of say on how far they can go and how valuable that information will be. a law that bans facebook, say, from sharing information from advertisers or third parties without explicit content, which has been discussed though there isn't a lot of support at this moment would potentially be damaging to both the company's bottom line and its future prospects. so privacy regulations, security regulations, which are similarly a regulatory hurdle the company would have to comply with. and then some things like children's privacy. representative markey has a bill that would really raise the bar in terms of verifying the age of people who sign up for social networks. and that would be a huge impediment. there's millions of users on facebook who are under age, many of whom are doing so in violation of the site's terms. but they remain very popular.

and that's how you build a relationship with a site as they grow older. those are all issues on the r d radar. >> how involved was facebook in the sopa/pipa debate earlier this year? >> they were definitely out front. facebook has avoided taking some of these policy stances that other communities were willing to take. but they were against sopa. and my sense was behind the scenes they were making their instants known and again, facebook is one of those bold-face names that when they weigh in on a tech issue people pay attention. facebook supported cispa, as did many other companies, an information sharing bill in the house. and lawmakers pointed to that as evidence that some of the concerns were overblown. i think that's in large part due to the sophisticate of the people they've brought on. sheryl sandberg, facebook's

chief operating officer-s a former protege of larry summers. she worked at the treasury department. she's very familiar with how washington works. i think you see that reflected in how the town approaches. >> do google and facebook share legislative agendas? >> i think they share common goals. i don't know if their agendas necessarily would be shared. google is particularly invested i think -- the reason why their lobbying figure is so high is because they are the subject of an antitrust probe. so they are working very hard to change or build impressions and relationships. lawmakers who could be seen as potential allies if this becomes a matter that goes to court with the department of justice. but facebook doesn't have those sorts of problems yet. initially they were doing mostly outreach, now they're representing their policy positions. some things like policy legislation they have common goals. they both have a ton of consumer information. they both have likely very strongly against privacy regulations, that sort of thing. age verification, cyber security stuff. so they have some common goals. but think google has a much

broader set of concerns. >> what agencies -- i promise, final question. what agencies does facebook deal with on a regular basis? the fcc and what else? >> i think largely the fcc and the commerce department. we've actually seen something interesting where facebook deals with agencies that other tech companies don't because facebook is providing dhs or hhs or va services to help them accomplish their missions. so it's a future relationship. in that sense facebook probably has the ear of a broader spectrum of the government especially the executive branch than the average tech company 37. >> gautham nagesh is our guest. we are talking about facebook, the political power here in washington. >> caller: good morning, peter. don grace, sumter. i had a comment and a question.

my comment is to congressman king up here. he needs to study the entrepreneur henry ford who even back then realized that a strong and well-paid middle class was necessary to buy his product. that's just basic economics. my question to your guest is that all this lobbying's going on. facebook wants all this help from the government to promote itself. yet the owners, the ceos of the company are doing everything they possibly can to avoid paying taxes. they are extracting billions of dollars from the american public but now are renouncing their citizenships to avoid paying taxes. >> gautham nagesh. >> well, i assume the caller's referring to facebook co-founder

eduardo saverin who is a brazilian naturalized citizen who decided to renounce his citizenship. he spoke in the "new york times" yesterday. he said that that decision was actually made last january. regardless, the impression has been by many people that he is doing this to avoid paying taxes after facebook goes public. he will actually have to pay capital gains taxes on his entire holdings. i've seen "the economist," which owns cq, estimated that to be as much as a half billion dollars at the current valuations. that is still of course a bet that the shares are going to be worth more in the future. mr. saverin says he simply has decided to move on, he's an international citizen-e wants to be based in singapore, which doesn't have capital gains taxes. he's originally brazilian. i understand the impression. it doesn't look great. i think it's difficult to argue that overall eduardo saverin's from 1998 to 2012 as ab american citizen was not beneficial to the country, though. facebook has created a platform

that allows mobile app developers and software developers to create abz apps, create jobs, bring money into the country. as i say, he's probably going to have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in capital gains taxes anyway. one of the things about america is that we allow people to immigrate here but we actually have a higher financial penalty for leaving than almost any other country in the world. so actually he's paying more than you would have to do in other countries. so although i understand how it looks, i don't think taxpayers are necessarily being taken advantage of by eduardo saverin. >> from the washington times this is an associated press cnbc surv survey. 83% of americans would hardly ever or never click on the online ads found on facebook. 70% have not seen the movie "the social network" about the founding of facebook. 59% do not trust facebook to keep personal information private. 56% have a personal facebook page. 54% say they do not feel safe

purchasing goods or services through facebook. 51% say facebook's stock would be a good investment. 50% predict that facebook's stock market value will be overvalued. and 43% say it will be successful over the long term. auburn, nebraska. darryl, thanks for holding. you're on with gautham nagesh. we're talking about facebook. >> caller: i was wondering what kind of policies the lobbyists have in effect giving all kinds of personal information to facebook and google and that, what stops the hackers from getting all that personal information and data about individuals and using it against them to ruin their credit. >> the safety. why don't we address the safety

aspects of social media. >> absolutely. i think the caller actually touched on a very pertinent issue, which is security regulations for this date p. that's commonly referred to as data breach legislation or laws, which is a company that collects personal information from consumers like facebook or really anyone what sells something online. how well do they protect that fox? what do they do if they're happened and someone steals it? when do they notify consumers? the common knowledge is that right now there is no federal law in this area. the states have separate laws which are widely varying in terms of their regulations and how strict they are. some are have, very harsh. some states have no regulations at all. companies would complain about this. they would like one unified standard. there's bipartisan support for the idea of a national standard but the details are the holdup. we haven't seen a prospect until after the election but it's unlikely before then.

however, it is true that companies like facebook and google generally are lobbying for those regulations to be less stringent because obviously then there would be less liability for them in the event that they are hacked and 100 million people's information was stolen. >> cambridge, massachusetts. frank, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: hello. thank you for taking my call. i heard two divergent reports yesterday. one was in the headlines of the boston herald that facebook is falling out of favor, out of cachet with the younger harvard people, the younger class, the educated class, and they don't want to participate in this social media thing. one guy actually said he just does his business -- he spends two minutes, 2 1/2 minutes, he's on and off.

the other one talked to an investment adviser, and he said that a lot of people are selling off their stock to get money to buy in this upcoming ipo from facebook. they're thag goiey're going to killing. now, they would have made a killing if they would have spent -- they would have quadrupled their money if they'd bought google stock at the beginning at $100 a share when it went up to $400 and they could have sold it and quadrupled their money. but the point that bothers me is people forgetting what i learned as a child when any parents used to tell me don't tell anyone your business. and people getting on this social media and just divulging all this information and starting to backtrack. the point is you don't know who's reading that and what they can make out of it -- >> all right. frank, i think we got your point. gautham nagesh. >> i think he speaks to really what is a societal change and a

shift in values. mark zuckerberg has repeatedly emphasized that when given the option people choose to share more information. that doesn't mean that everyone chooses to share more information or that even that all the people that are sharing information are sharing most of the information about themselves. i use a variety of social media products. i use them differently. i don't think anyone who looked at any of them would have a real picture of who i am. i think it's a way you present yourself. people in 2012 are comfortable with a lot more personal information about themselves being in the public. that is something that regulators and lawmakers i think have in part struggled to comprehend because it is a generational shift. but it is also undeniable. i think if you look at everything from the proliferation of open source media and twitter and facebook, people no longer view these barriers between public and private in quite the same way that we did a generation ago.

i'm old enough to remember a world where we didn't have cell phones, but a lot of people aren't. and so this is the world that they're used to and they post their pictures out there. >> just to go to that caller's first point and to tie in tony's tweet here, isn't facebook just the social network du jour? aol, myspace. and that caller said younger folks are not necessarily gravitating immediately to facebook. >> well, they speak to something interesting. i have seen evidence of facebook apathy in certain groups. actually, my immediate peer group, facebook was introduced while we were in college so, we were some of the earliest users, and i've noticed that people immediately older than me tend not to use it because it was something used by people a little bit younger than them. that's not universal, of course. i'm not citing statistics. that was within my own immediate circle. but i think that it speaks to the fact that yes, there are some people who probably don't see a lot of use for these tools

or perhaps the harvard square crowd or people in silicon valley have something better and hotter and more exclusive. i think the initial appeal of fbs afghanistan was xluftsty. if you watched the movie, they rolled it out at very exclusive schools and it was only available to college students. there was even sort of this class divide between myspace and facebook, and we know who won. because exclusivity in today's culture tends to be more marketable. so there is always a possibility that another company will come along and replace facebook. i think that will be difficult in the short term because of the adoption rate and how many people have already uploaded so much information and how integrated it is with other applications. but sure, if someone came on with much better technology, maybe something mobile and location-based that caught fire, then that could cannibalize facebook's business, potentially. >> do your parents in jackson, michigan use facebook? >> my father has dipped his toe into the facebook waters, but he is, as most people i think of

his generation, very suspicious of sharing information about himself online. he's a quasi-public person. it's a small town anyway. my mother has no use for that sort of thing. and i can't blame her. >> here are some statistics from the "new york daily news" about facebook as their ipo is getting ready to launch. 901 million monthly users. 53% fooemale. 47% male. 20 minutes spent per visit on average. 300 million photos are uploaded to facebook daily. 3.2 billion likes and comments per day. 526 million daily users on facebook. the number one most searched for word in search engines -- facebook. and $1 billion in revenue during the first three months of 2012. and that translates into $205 in

profits. dayton, ohio, kathleen, democrat thanks for holding on. you're on the air. >> caller: could you tell me how mr. saverin benefited from becoming a citizen of the u.s., and could you explain further if he would have maintained his citizenship what his taxes would have been like in regard to maintaining citizenship in regard to facebook. and then the other question i have is if there was a constitutional amendment that took money out of elections, which most americans, dems, republicans alike should be calling their reps about, if there was such an amendment pass, the way i understand it is citizens united in regard to the supreme court, that that constitutional amendment would actually sort of squeeze the supreme court's decision, and how that, if there was this amendment added, how that would change, say, for instance,

facebook or at&t, how that would change their lobbying efforts. >> gautham nagesh? >> i think the second question was if the citizens united case were overturned by some form of legislation how would that affect the lobbying. it wouldn't i don't think affect lobbying a great deal as we see it from some of those tech companies because a lot of their money is invested in direct lobbying and political donations, which strictly speaking i don't think were affected necessarily by the citizens united case, which dealt mostly in super pacs. i think we've seen a lot of that funding in the primary campaigns. we'll probably see a lot of that in the general election. and it's been, you know, largely electoral stuff. tech issues are not electoral yet. sopa, the online privacy bill we saw earlier this year, cyber security are crossing into that territory. but for the most part people don't know based on whether or

not a lawmaker supports net neutrality or new cyber security regulations. perhaps they should. especially in places like silicon valley, where this is the local economy. but not yet. >> catfish kim tweets in, "i just dumped facebook for their founders outrageous display of greed and selfishness. such a sign of the times and very sad to see." now, gautham nagesh, you said that mr. saverin, a chunk of his proceeds would go into the u.s. treasury, correct? >> yes. >> and michelle tweets in, what is facebook's plan to successfully monetize their product? we saw the gm pulling out of facebook. stories yesterday, et cetera. >> they discussed this a bit in the regulatory filings. it's largely advertising-based. facebook advertising is really going to be the main source of income. now, we've seen also application developers can pay a fee to

conduct transactions over facebook. i believe there's some sort of online currency. zynga, which is a game developer of games like farmville, which are very popular on facebook, is a significant source of revenue, but advertising is the primary source of revenue. and i had i it's fair to say it will continue to be that way. there's a lot of debate over the efficacy of facebook advertisements. gm pulled out. that's still an open question. anecdotally i've also heard very pod things. if you like a brand on facebook you're essentially signing up to receive constant engagement from them. i know that people have referred to it as a branding tool rather than a marketing tool. perhaps that's a nuance that's beyond most of the viewers' interest. but i do think that there is unrealized potential there. people spend more time on facebook than any other portion of the internet. and so that's a captive audience. >> what about when it comes to

cyber security? has facebook in the past cooperated with government agencies as far as giving information? we've seen these stories about verizon and at&t and google, et cetera, sharing information with government agencies. >> i haven't seen the specific numbers on facebook's-q a number they turn over, but my understanding is yes. almost everyone who has communications that are sought by the government acquiesces. we saw twitter recently resist handing over user information. that is news. it's almost never -- if facebook was resisting, i think we'd hear a lot more about it. so i can't say that i've seen evidence. but for the most part companies agree to turn over that information when asked by the government. >> any word on twitter having an ipo? >> unfortunately, i'm not that well sourced that i would know if twitter was going to have an ipo or not. but it would seem premature. facebook has been around since 2004. i think twitter has been around

i believe since 2006 or 2007, but it really has only gained i think mainstream traction in the last three or four years. so that would be very early i think in their life cycle. >> very quickly, this call from marrion, ohio. richard, please go ahead. >> caller: yeah. it's interesting. with are we seeing a trillion-dollar bubble take off here? we know in the dotcom era how it really cost us a lot of years to get back after it exploded. we have legions of people putting lipstick on the pig. gm says something and everyone goes after them. we also have someone who will not give voting rights to their shareholders to try to keep it in check. i'll hang up, hear your answer. bye. >> i think that there is justifiable concern that not just facebook but tech companies at large are overvalued right now. again, i'm not a financial analyst. so i could not give you a definitive opinion on whether or

not they are. i will say that having covered technology and covered the markets for some time there are signals and signs of epithucnth that are similar to some of the things that took place at the turn of the century when we experienced the first real dotcom bust. one of them is that regular people are selling shares to buy facebook. that's not a comment from me on facebook's long-term prospects but rather this idea that everyone thinks it's a way to get rich quickly, that if i buy these shares they're definitely going to go up. perhaps that's true in the long term. if facebook has a long story, it will probably be profitable. the stock will probably go up. but in the short term stocks go up and into, regardless of how good the company is, based on market conditions. and i question, whenever anyone thinks there's nowhere to go but up there's usually when things go down. so i would be concerned if i were looking at it from the outside. when everyone is saying the same thing and telling you to ignore the problems, that's touchily an

indication that you should pay closer attention. >> well, we've been talking about technology companies and their influence in washington and their increasing presence in washington. sitting right out in front of our building at the very moment is some new technology. and that is a google self-driving car that we've been reading about for several months. they've been testing that on their campus out in palo alto. but it is sitting right out in front of the c-span building as we speak. did you know this was going to be in town at all? >> i did see they were going to be in town, that the car was spotted, they were driving it. they're actually going to be lobbying in favor of it in some fashion. i don't know xawhat aspect of -- i would imagine a car that drives itself would present challenges for the current transportation infrastructure. but that's an example of what a company like a google or a facebook could offer. google was a search engine when it started. like yahoo. and now they build cars that drive themselves.

so there is an up side to having these technology companies with significant resources. it would be very hard to develop that sort of product in your garage. >> and very quickly, gautham nagesh, is facebook a high-tech company anymore? >> i think. so facebook is cutting edge in technology. when people compare facebook to my space and some of these other networks, they're selling themselves short. fbs tbs was not always the most cutting edge social network but they have consistently shown an ability to evolve in a crowd pleasing way. they have some of the best engineers out there. it's one of the most desirable places to work. most people there are going to be rich very shortly. so they are definitely a high-tech company. >> gautham nagesh with cq roll call. thank you for being on the "washington journal." >> when immigrants start to show up in significant numbers, which is somewhat the case in the 1820s and 1830s but really very much the case in the 1840s and afterwards, they're showing up into a political environment in

which they're already qualified to vote as soon as they become citizens. just to give you a sense of the kind of politics we're talking about, this is an image from "harper's weekly" in 1858 around election time or just after election time, and it shows a saloon and a polling place. if you wanted to vote, you see the door all the way in the back. you had to go in there to vote. >> this week, from muncie, indiana ball sedate professor james connelly analyzes immigration, voting and the roots of pluralism in the united states. part of american history this weekend on c-span 3. >> when people are saying to him don't take the vice presidency, right now you are the most -- you are a powerful majority leader, don't take the vice presidency, you won't have any power, johnson says power is where power goes. meaning i can make power in any situation. his whole life i said nothing in

his life previously makes that seem like he's boasting because that's exactly what he had done all his life. >> sunday night the conclusion of our conversation with robert caro on "the passage of power," volume 4 in the years of lyndon johnson, his multivolume biography of the 36th president. sunday night on c-span's "q & a." >> on monday the communications director to former british prime minister tony blair testified for a second time before a panel examining the culture and ethical practices of the media. the questions focused on the prime minister and mr. campbell's relationship with the press. mr. campbell denied that there was any deal between rupert murdoch and tony blair to gain support from the british newspaper "the sun" during the 1997 election. alastair campbell served as tony

blair's press secretary and later communications director from 1997 through 2003. this afternoon's witness is mr. campbell, please. campbell, you're still on oath from your hearing on the 30th of november. i told you you'd be back. >> yes. >> and you provided us kindly with a second statement, dated the 30th of april of this year. and you confirm its contents as true, do you, mr. campbell? >> yes. >> i'm going to do this by way of theme, if i may, mr. campbell. first of all, mr. blair hiring you in 1994, we have one version

in your diary, another version which is very similar in mr. blair's book, "the journey," page 75. he considered you as part of a short list in discussion with mr. mandelson. do you remember that? >> no. i wasn't involved in that discussion. >> it's unlikely given they were wondering whether you were the right person. >> and mr. blair said he wanted a tabloid person and thought alastair campbell would be the best. did he discuss that with you in terms of the need for a tabloid person? >> no. what he said to me when he finally approached me was that he wanted somebody that was strategic, that understood the press, and that would be able to do the job that he wanted done. so i don't recall it being particularly that he wanted somebody who was from the tabloids, but he wanted somebody that kind of knew that world.

>> yes. by that stage of course you'd been political editor of the "mirror" for a number of years, hadn't you? >> had been. but by that time i was an editor on "today," which was then known by "news." >> and according to mr. blair, "i wanted a hard nut and thought he was good. what i got was a genius." >> sweet. >> the last bit i won't ask you to comment on. but the hard nut is obviously an attribute which would be desirable in that post, wouldn't it? >> i think it's possible for somebody who's not necessarily a hard nut to do part of that job. but i certainly think the way that the press and the media were developing you had to be pretty robust and not shy of engaging in difficult debate. >> in effect you were