the ambassador nominations to egypt and iraq. the center for american progress held a discussion recently about the population and politics in the southern united states. former naacp benjamin jealous moderated a panel, talking about the release of the true south report, examining current voter and ridge sla registration problems.

this is one hour. >> thank you for being here. good morning. my name is ben jealous, i'm a senior follow here and a partner at cape work capital. we are here today to talk about the report true south, advancing democracy in the black belt 50 years after freedom summer. we are deeply honored this morning to be joined really by an all-star panel of leaders from throughout the region who are helping to transform the way that we see the south and quite frankly, the way the people in the south see the prospects for the region. we're joined by stacey abrams, who will be coming up here to speak in a few minutes and give the big speech, if you will, that we will all respond to.

stacey is the minority leader in the georgia assembly, the first woman to ever lead a party in georgia's house or senate. and the first black in the lower house. and she achieved that in her 30s. derrick johnson, the president of the mississippi naacp. and national co-chair of the mississippi freedom schumer 50th anniversary efforts. saket soni, the e.d. of the new orleans workers center for racial justice and the national guest worker's alliance. mayor steve benjamin. the first black mayor of columbia, south carolina, since reconstruction. and as we call her, mtk, maria teresa kumar, the president of voto latino. before stacey comes up, i want to talk to you for a few seconds

about this report. when you read true south, what you'll see is that changes here in the south, we are transforming very rapidly and quite frankly if more people paid more attention, we could transform faster still. let's be clear. the region these days is really typified in many ways, when it gets into the national press by voter suppression, attempts to really, if you will, put in state level latino exclusion acts. like the chinese exclusion act that we fought after the civil war. very targeted bills put in place to make it very difficult for immigrants of color to remain in the south. but the south, in my experience, as an organizer, 20 years, since i organized with stacey and derrick in mississippi as college students, is like a light switch. either it is on or it is off.

you can see it in the state of north carolina in the past ten years. in 2006 to 2008, major progressive changes. in 2010 and 2012, huge ultraconservative push-back. we say, in this country, that if two sort of cliches that have stuck with me as we wrote this report. one is, it is always darkest before it's dawn. when you organize in the south, politics -- it's just a light switch. there's no dimmer. things are either on or they are off. the other is that -- comes from conversations that i've had in this town with lots of people other the-year-olds who say, why should we invest in the south? nothing's changed. well, lack of investment is the surest form of historic preservation. if you invest, things change. what you'll hear from stacey and the panel is that things are

changing and there is great hope, because we now have the numbers to see things change faster still. stacey? >> i'd like to say thank you to ben jealous, my fellow panelists and the center for american progress. i'm here to talk about why this matters. why true south and why the history of freedom summer remains a prominent and i think critical legacy. earlier this year, there was a photo in the his berg american, and it's a photo of my father marching. it's a recreation of a march he did when he was 15 years old in mississippi. my dad was 15 years old, which meant that he was not going to benefit from that march. even if he managed to open the doors, he was not going to be allowed to walk in and cast a vote, but he did it anyway, because he understood that what he was doing today would have benefited him three years later.

my mother didn't march that day, but my mother was also very involved in the civil rights movement. and both of them raised us to understand that voting was a moral obligation. even more it's an opportunistic obligation. voting is opportunism. it is the opportunity to change the world for you. and i will say this. as the house minority leader, i also understand very acutely that progress is not partisan. that neither party and both parties have had a hand in helping and harming the progress of the south. and so i stand here today as someone who believes in progress. as such, as minority leader, i focused my attentions on, how do we build coalitions of voters who can change the dynamic and change the trajectory of policy? that change is built into three things. the first and most fundamental is understanding what you're voting for. and too often, our voters don't register because they don't know why they should bother.

that comes about because, if you don't understand that your state ledge slal or the is not responsible for picking up your trash, and that the president can't change the lights, then you're not going to vote. if you don't get it's the governor that decides the amount of money that goes into your schools, not your school board decide what the governor does, then you're not going to understand why you should vote. and so fundamental little our obligation is to understand the underlying impact of voting. but then the second conversation has to be, who votes? too often, these conversations focus on one party, whether it's latinos, because they're the fastest growing group, or the african-americans, because we're the largest group, or the asian-americans, because they happen to be mentioned, because they are in some of these states, my belief is, if we want to transform the south, we have to bring all three coalitions together. i worked very hard to pull together the latino, asian-american and african-american coalitions, because unless we all work together, we are all going nowhere.

as ben put it, it's not a dimmer. it's an on or an off switch. when the lights come on, if woour not standing together, we face the real risk of regression. to that end, this past year, i founded, well, 16 years ago, i started a nonprofit called third sector development and in 2014, my mission for third sector was to focus on voting. and that's that third part. registering to vote is the first claire jrion call for change. in the state of georgia, more than 800,000 african-american, latino and asian voters are unregistered. this is in a state where fewer than 255,000, 260,000 voters can change a state-wide election. 800,000 unregistered, 260,000 to change the future. we can register them and they can change the country. because if you change georgia, you begin to change the south and if you change the south, you change the nation. the demographics will tell you that the south and the southwest are the fastest growing parts of this country.

but if we have the most regre regressive policies when that growth happens, we run the real risk of standing here in 2024, having a very different conversation, about why we have the most undereducated, the most incarcerated and the least economically mobile populations that control the south. and so, for me, this is a clarion call, but it is also an opportunity. as i said at the beginning, voting is opportunistic. it is taking that sacred right and transitioning it and turning it into control of your future. with the new georgia project has done so far is register more than 23,000 voters in the deep south. in the state of georgia. we have focused on voters of color, because those voters are the lead. they are the fastest changing demographic, but they are also the ones that if you can engage them now, you can engage them permanently. investment in the south is an investment in the change of this nation. it is the change of progress so that we're not simply talking about ending incarceration at

rates that have not been seen anywhere else in the industrialized world, we're talking about closing that income and equality gap. the best way to close that gap is to actualize that human capital that exists in that community. if you want to see education change in the country, educate the poorest and those kids of color. all of those social policies that we like to talk about can be lived in the deep south. they can be lived in georgia and mississippi and alabama and south carolina. and if they are lived and realized, they can be exported to the rest of the country. as i said at the beginning, i am from southern mississippi. i grew up in gulfport, my family lives in hattiesburg. i moved to georgia, went west to texas and went north to thing land, came back south as soon as humanly possible, because i'm a southerner at heart. i don't like being cold. but more than that, i understand that the south is where change happens. i am honored to be here today, because i know that if we harness the power of the african-american community of voters, if we harness latino

voters if we harness asian-american voters, but more importantly, if we tie them together in an unbroken knot, if we bind them together to look forwards the future, then the center for american progress will look no further than the south to understand what the future looks like. thank you. >> well, as the panelists take their seats, i think we can all agree with stacey, i think you can all see why i stopped telling stacey a long time ago what she couldn't do. she told me that she would be the first black governor of georgia. she certainly is on her way. i want to get things kicked off here and i'm going to ask you, steve, you, mayor benjamin, to start us off. this summer is the 50th anniversary of freedom summer. and one of the iconic sort of visions that we have of freedom summer is of young blacks and young whites working side-by-side to get -- to

unleash democracy. in mississippi and georgia and throughout the region. last year was also the 350th anniversary of a rebellion in virginia, where black slaves and white endentured servants rose up together against a king who was seeking to oppress both. can you talk a bit about the ongoing work in the south of sort of that holy grail of bu d building common cause between black and white communities and getting people to see their xhoon interes common interests across all racial lines. >> thank you, ben. thank you, stacey, for that wonderful presentation. i was elected in 2010 as the first black mayor of columbia, south carolina. it was -- it was not a matter of chance, it was by a very deliberate action that people came together across racial lines, across political lines, to support our campaign because our campaign was very much about

unifying our city. our theme, as you may have seen in cities and states across the country was about one columbia. about the fact that all the issues that matter to each and every one of us in this room individually matter to us collectively. we decided that we would run a campaign that focused on the better angels of people. and the reality that latino families care about environmental sustainability. that the group of conservative white businessmen i sit down with actually cared about black boys, when i brought the issue up and had a chance to dialogue with them and black families cared significantly about fiscal conservatism and making sure you are being good stewards of their tax dollars. all of these issues matter to each and every one of us. we decided we were going to run a modern campaign. we were going to see you on social media and see you in the super market. we're going to see you in churches, we were going to see you running a modern campaign with tv ads and very active

online campaign, that we're going to have direct mail and phones. running a modern campaign but most importantly, running a modern positive campaign focused on the issues that are important to the vast majority of people here. running on progressive issues. it's amazing how people can come together. but we've seen very aggressively a systematic dismantling of our electoral process and i believe this conversation that we're having can be a wonderful counter to trying to oppose that trend. but ben, i believe it's about -- it's about issues. it's about the reality that ideas matter, that issues matter, that people are more complex, that people are concerned about what's happening in israel and nigeria, they are concerned about the oppression of people in china, people are concerned. and if you speak to those issue, and you speak to them in a way that brings people together, it's amazing how powerful ideas

and issues can be. >> derrick, president johnson -- >> derrick is fine. >> some habits die hard in the naacp. look, you're right there in mississippi, the state that many people consider to be ground zero for the fight against poverty and the fight for justice in this country. it's 50 years after freedom summer. talk to us about the need for us, if you will, to make what's old new again and get back to what so many of our family members and here role oes were 0 years prior. >> there's an activist by the names of courtney cox. there's a coalition that stacey was talking about, who is being done to. and you add in working for awhile, you put that into the who. 50 years ago, the focus of those students and those world war ii

veterans that came together to organize an infrastructure in mississippi, they worked around four issues. voting, education, access to health care, ironically, it was established in mississippi during that time and created the community health care center as we know it, and worker rights. with voting, it was access to polling. free of both suppression and imtim statio imtimida imtimidation. education. ten years outside of brown versus education. they were resisting that supreme court mandate. and today, we're seeing school privatization taking place all across the country. bull particularly in the south. new orleans public school district ceased to exist as we stand here today because of a privatization movement that has not shown any real progress of providing quality education for all children. who is that being done to?

a majority african-american city with a rising latino population. access to health care. it is so ironic that the affordable care act, which will benefit many people adlosz country, but in mississippi, the benefactors are majority white and yet, you put a black label on it and you resist it and it provides better quality. finally, worker rights. none of this could be key if folks weren't trying to exploit for cheaper, free labor. we have a company in mississippi by the name of nissan corporation. everywhere it exists globally, it allows for workers to collectively bargain in south africa, in brazil, in france, in japan, everywhere it exists, but in mississippi, and in tennessee, the workers do not have that right. we have a deficit in morality, in the south, because people are not seen as people. they are seen as exploitable cheap labor. as we stay here today, we must focus on those four primary issues. if we focus on those issues if

we look at the who and not the what and the who organized, we can progress the south. finally, if you draw a line along the mason dixon line from the atlantic ocean to the pacific ocean, you are looking at the browning and the blacking of america. that is the real rise and tide. 52% of all african-americans live in the south. the increase population of la tee knows is in the southwest. you put thoseities together, along with the asian community and working poor whites, we have a moral majority that can have an impact in all of our lives. >> i'm in for that. saket, i think he set you up pretty well. why don't you talk about what you guys have been doing on the ground in new orleans and also what you're trying to do across the country. >> absolutely. you know, we got started soon after hurricane katrina, and i think everyone in this room, everyone in the country, remembers exactly where they

were when they heard about hurricane katrina, it left an indelible imprint. it was a sign post in this country's history. in new orleans, hurricane katrina was followed by, as the water receded, public policy that deeply divided the city and locked one group of people outside of the labor market and locked another group of people into the labor market. hundreds of thousands of african-americans were displaced, they were stopped from coming home, they could not participate in the reconstruction of their own city. meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of immigrants were brought in and sometimes, quite literally, locked into horrific working conditions. my organization, the national guest worker alliance, was started when a group of over 120 work earls literally escaped from labor camps and gathered in new orleans with communities around them and decided, in a

convention, to collectively raise their voice for workers rights. new orleans and the south generally has been thought of and southern region in general has been thought of more as part of the country's past than as central to a story about the country's future. i would contend, new orleans and the south have a lot more to do with our future at this point. than with the past. new orleans became a crystal ball and peering into it after katrina, it showed exactly the kind of demographic change that derrick was talking about. it also showed, though, that demographics by itself is not destiny. unless there is a shared protag nichl of those at the bottom. unless there are the freedom summers and the freedom riders, demographic shift by itself can lead to even more intractable inequality. even greater wealth disparity and new orleans and louisiana

show this very well. louisiana is the 50th out of 50 states to be a woman. it has a 20% poverty rate. there is only a 10% chance that a child that is born in the lowest 5% in louisiana will ever get up to the highest 5%. and so i agree with the mayor. i think ideas matter. and issues matter. and in our experience, it is possible to build a real strong multiracial narrative and coalition out of the basic bread and butter economic issues that workers and their families are facing. the importance of dignity at work. the importance of a strong safety net that catches workers in long periods, longer and longer periods of unemployment. and -- and the importance of building some kind of an economic collection -- coalition

in the labor market that can change the city and the state. i would say, in terms of lessons from freedom summer, applied now and in the future, you know, we are up against more than we've been up against in the past. there is collectively, for example, billions of dollars of tax breaks goichb co s given to corporations, for job creation in louisiana, and if you actually look at the proportion of tax break dollars to the proportion of jobs created, close to $7 million, $8 million per job is spent in tax subsidies in a state with a high-def it is, the highest incourse ration rate in the country and increasing poverty. these are the kinds of unconscionable decisions that are made by public policy actors. and, you know, it comes down to -- we're not going to be able

to turn demographic shift into a proposition for unity and equality unless there's multiracial coalition and explicit multiracial strategies that turn current inequality into real voter rights issues. >> thank you. and i think, one of the things we're talking about today is that the antidote to voter suppression, we learned from freedom summer is massive voter registration registration. talk about what your plans are, what voter la ttino is doing throughout the country. >> thank you for having this timely conversation. thank you for the center for american progress. i think one of the things that the center always does is bring time little conversations to these issues. when we start about voter i.d. laws, voter registration, all comes back to the basics. you mentioned earlier, we've been doing this for over 50 years and i also times say,

while you were sleeping. while the american people were working, all of these voter i.d. laums that passed historically mostly in southern states, aren't by accident. they're because you see a huge demographic shift in this kun they we' try that we've never seen before. 800,000 latinos turn 18 every year. that's a congressional district. where is it happening? it's happening in the south. recently, shelby versus holder gutted the voting rights act. not a surprise, because shelby county is literally the fourth-largest county of latino growth by over 300%, from the last -- from the last census. so, what's happening is that neighbors all of a sudden don't recognize their neighborhood and the best thing to do is basically suppress them. and what we need to do is build coalitions, as you are discussing, but we have to build coalitions with likeminded

individuals. we need to work very closely with african-americans, latinos and asians, but there's an emerging single white woman that are feeling increasingly under attack and their friends and family. in 2018, this new emerging majority is going to be the most eligible voters, but unfortunately, their voting participation is close to 12% below the baby boomers. so, when we start talking about, how do we actually create this man any fesation of our destiny of america, we have to enfranchising folks at a basic level with a lot of education. that's very critical. what we find is that it's not about party, but it's definitely about issue. when you talk about the tone of immigration, it's become so personal and so caustic that that's what's getting the latino population to wake up and participate. but they're participating by -- this is where it's, to me, very personal, the ones that are participating most are young latina women. and they're participating

because, yes, immigration is something that is a resounding problem to them and very personal, but it's when the women's right to choose becomes on the table, they say, not on my watch. sfwhi because the average latino is 27 years old, roughly 12 years younger than the rest of america. when we're talking about access to health care, education, right now, the legislation that we're seeing in our country directly impacts a generation that is living it right now. student debt, they're living that right now. the work that we're doing right your voice. with the idea of building off on social media platforms. we are partnering with rock the vote. it's not enough to sign a petition, but you have to register and you have to participate at the polls. texas alone right now has over 2 million young latinos that are unregistered to vote. there are two congressional districts, to illustrate how powerful this is, that were basically won with less than 1,000 voters. congressional districts.

you had over 60,000, 80,000 unregistered la t eed latinos i districts. so, it's all about the numbers. unless we start talking very frankly about the money in politics, but that also the vote is the one that is all of us, then we have possibility and opportunity. and something they always like to say, well people say, there's too much money in politics, yes, absolutely, there is. but rich people vote. so, they know that it doesn't matter how much money there is in politics, they still have to get up in the morning and they have to go and participate. so, one last thing that we need to address is the time tax. and that time tax is the tax that people have to stand in line, unfortunately, it's mostly for the working poor, minority and people -- and young college campus folks that have to wait hours, we're not talking about two, three hours, we're talking about to 12 hours to cast a vote. and that's a time tax when someone has to figure out if they going to participate at the

poll that day or they're going to have to make sure they make ends meet to put food on that table. >> thank you. stacey, one of the things we do in this report is, we go through and we look at how massive voter rid registration could change the balance of power. people often say, why should i vote? because nothing ever changes. talk about what's at stake in georgia and what's really motivating people this year to really get out and sign up their neighbors to vote like they haven't done in it a very long time. >> the new georgia project, which is the project that i am spearheading, what we did before we started registering to vote was to ask that very question. i was talking to maria about it. if you are an african-american man in georgia who did not vote for barack obama, that's probably the closest thing that would motivate you to vote, if

you didn't vote then, why not? and the issues are three-fold. one, voter intimidation. they hear about voter suppression, but if you have never voted, you don't know what it means. you don't know if you're going to stand in line and cause trouble, you don't know if you're going to lose your job, you don't know what that card is that you hear about, you know you don't have the idea they think you should have. making sure we understand how to talk about voter identification in a positive waiver y versus a negative way. most people don't know what a congressperson does, so, voter education is part of it. and the third piece is the policy piece, it's what steve talked about, it's what derrick talk talked about, it's what saket talked about. it's the issues that matter. what we're trying to do is bring all of those together, when we're talking about voter registration, it's in the context of actually seeing something happen. as much as there's a time tax, there's a cost to not voting but

if you don't know that you're paying that cost, then it's like having a credit card balance that you never look at. but if you keep running up that tab, it's going to come due. so, part of what we're trying to do is to have conversations with neighbors to talk about, how do you register your friends to vote? how do you talk to them about why voting matters? because we take for granted, those of us who vote for a living, we assume everyone else does. if you are willing to talk about it on a granular level, talk about the issues and talk about the outcomes, you start to see a lot of change. the other people is that in georgia, in the last decade, more than 1.5 million people moved into that state. the vast majority of whom were people of color. they're new to georgia, which means, for us, this next election is the first time they've had a chance to really see what transor ttorransformat. we're a state that's a little ahead of louisiana, mississippi, but not by much. we have a few more people, so, we get to skew the data a little bit. we face all of the pathologies

that face every other state in the south, but if we change those dynamics this year, we send a sig gnnal for 2016 and 2, but we send the signal for 2020. that's the year that every southern state everyone should pay attention to. if we can start thinking about it today, we send the signal, invest income the south makes sense. if you want to see long-term return on your investment, this is the year to start paying attention. if elections get done this year and they get done well and we start to see that real strong trend, because it's a really good guess at what destiny can look like. if we can get them registered this year, we send a signal how kit be done not just in georgia, but be expected to every other state. >> i think what you are mentioning, the 2020 census is incredibly important for our future. and one of the things that i encourage part of this work to be is, how do we change how things happen when it comes to

redistricting? one of the main things, and you see the beauty of it in california, where they actually appointed a public commission, where it was individual citizens that were voted in and they got to create the map that accurately reflected california. that impacted -- across party lines. doesn't matter if you were republican or democrat. up had a chance to recraft, so, it was reflective of your community. one of the biggest problems now in congress is that all these districts are gerrymanders, so, it doesn't reflect the american public. where did a lot of the african-americans in louisiana end up? they ended up in texas. in the last census, there were four congressional districts because of the boom in texas. that boom was attributed to three -- should have been assigned to latino community and one to the african-american community. that's not how it ended up going down. but it was because of the gerrymandering that was happening. one of the best ways to actually go against gerrymandering is to

insure we are as part of the work that we push forward is public commissions. >> so, when you look at a 2020 strategy, you know, it's very similar to what the right did leading into 2010. mississippi, we have had perhaps the most successful redistricting. we had an explosion from 1965 to 2010, more elected officials than any other state. much of that happened as a result of concentrated voter registration -- >> more black. >> more african-american. followed by 14 years of litigation and nine trips to the supreme court, which forced them to open up the process, and we doubled the black caucus from 21 to 42 members. but that only happened because of aggressive work on the part of citizens across the state. the shelby decision turned that

completely around. right after the supreme court decision, voter i.d. amendment passed in 2011 now -- it's now reality. we was able to stop it because it did, in fact, discriminate against african-american voters. the first election last week, we had in mississippi with voter i.d., our secretary of state comes out afterwards, talks about the success that it was and only 300 people were denied a vote. but items you a lot, because in close elections, 300, five, one vote can make the difference. and as this demographic shifts takes place, we have to be ever mindful that the small changes in suppression laws can have a devastating impact long-term. >> just to put it in perspective, you talk about there being 17 black sheriffs in the state of mississippi that's a state that's 35%, 36% black -- >> 38% is african-american. that's a state -- >> you have about 82 counties -- >> that's right. 82 counties, 17 african-american

sheriffs. it's 15 now, i think two are no longer in office. >> that shows us just what a hard push it is. that probably was the high water mark. >> high water mark, you know, you look at mayors, we were up to 81 mayors at one point, you know, but after the shelby decision, we're going to begin to see a reversion of those protections to insure that all citizens are able to cast a vote. >> again, that's why voter registration becomes so important. because, you know, people want to say, look. progress in the south is ultimately short-lived. you can look at the 19th century and reconstruction, big changes, dies a pretty quick death. you can look at the new south in the '70s and '80s, big changes, dies a pretty quick death. the difference this time is that first of all we aren't just coming out of slavery of segregation. we're much more sew fist kated than we were, say, 50 years ago, 150 years ago. but the other big changes, the numbers have changed.

that presents a challenge, right? which is getting people to see kind of, if you want, see, if you will, the one as being bigger than we've been struggling to in the region. steve, can you talk about, and stacey, can you talk about people, who are in office, what it is like to get people to see themselves as one, when we're not just dealing with black and white in the south anymore. >> sure, well, absolutely. just in the 27 years i've been in south carolina, it's changed dramatically. we -- south carolina, we talk about some of the tax breaks, has the largest percentage per capita of foreign direct investment in the entire united states. people coming from all around the world, not just from south of the border, but from canada, from france and germany and japan. we're seeing a very multi-ethnic, very positive growth, becoming -- columbia is becoming a very cosmopolitan

city and we're excited for that growth. but talking about here, trying to ingrain in the future of the south and as a result america, we're really talking about playing some chess rather than playing checkers. we're talking about long-term strategy that allows the true america that we all believe in, to emerge. and that's what -- and that really comes down to the issues and the ideas that cut across every -- every false line we have dividing us, the message. it does, and at some point we're talk about the fact that registering, good organizing requires capital. it's message, it's money and i love to say manpower, because it flows better, but we know it's womanpower. >> not because we're right here, right? >> all of my campaigns, if i didn't have my wife and all the other ladies helping -- >> you have to remember who votes most. >> my daughter -- they said how

impressed they were, i get my looks from my mother, my brais s from my father, and she said, my broth mother still has all her brains. it really -- it's about playing chess. very thoughtful and deliberate, but coming with the positive spirit that we're building a country together. and that we're preparing our country not just to be equal and fair, but very -- the very clear sense, also competitive, because of the challenges our country is currently facing, has faced over the last 50 years, and 50 years, for many of us, i don't think it's by chance this report is being released 50 years after the death of goodman and cheney. as dramatically and will continue to dramatically effect the competitiveness of america as this world continues to become flatter and flatter. and that's something that we have to continue to keep our eyes on. we have to play chess and not play checkers.

>> and thank you for -- it was on our hearts, all of us walking into this room, that this is the 50th anniversary of those deaths in the freedom summer. and we have a great debt to their families. we have worked with those families and been touched them by. they understand, in pushing to open up our democracy, they are opening up our economy. that voter suppression and poverty go hand in hand at the end of the day. stacey, can you talk about what you're trying to do in georgia to make not just our democracy work for everybody, but our economy and how the two things are tied together. >> it goes back actually to immigration. i have the distinction of being the legislator of the year for the hispanic chamber of commerce one year. it was in part because of the work i led our coalition around immigration reform. too often, our community is black and white. the reality of the south is, black, white, brown, yellow, and every other shade. and so we have an obligation to

think about it that way. immigration reform was an economic issue, because you had black farmers, you had latino workers, you had white farmers, you had folks who were going to lose -- restaurant owners and restaurant workers who were all losing economic capacity. $300 million in the first six months of a terrible bill that was by and large completely dismantled by the supreme court, except for the show me your papers piece, which we're still working on. but what that meant was that we had to not simply have -- this was not a latino issue. this was a georgia issue. an issue that required that every person who thought that jobs were important had to come together. when you talk about workers rights, those are economic issues, because the human capital that is lost every single day when we undereducate our population, when we don't pay a living wae ing wage, when tax breaks that a only break the backs of workers and doesn't generate any real tax revenue, every day we do that undermines ourcapacity as a

state. georgia is a state of 10 million people. if we can do it poorly, think about the impact on the states that are slightly smaller than we are. if you do it right, you send a signal, it's proof of concept for what can happen. so, another important part of the new georgia project is getting the voters registered, but talking about the economic issues. i liked what steve said about being fiscally conservative. true c conservative means you don't change things unless they need to change. it eelgs not what it's been appropriated to mean. and most people of color are fiscally conservative. we don't have enough money to squander it. we can't get to that conversation of thoughtful tax policy, of thoughtful engagement on economic issues when we aren't at the table making the choices. there's no one that i'm looking at that looks like me, if you're not -- this is a wonderful are not at the table, you are on the menu. and when it comes to tax policy, in particular, people of color are on the menu and we are the

main course. we pay a lot in taxes. we don't get as much back as we think we do in terms of social welfare. but more importantly, all of those decisions are made on -- at our backs. we talk about appropriations. if you are in the middle of a chess game, you don't care about prop rations. it matters a lot less. it's a question of where they got the money from. so, we're not the ways and means conversation, making your tax policy, if we're not arguing about why instead of debating cutting social security, we're not talking about raising that cap, if we're not talking about cutting the payroll tax, if we're not vk the economic conversations together as a coalition, we can't change the dynamic. and that coalition, if it looks like this panel, and you add in very thoughtful white women who also are the most victimized by our tax policy, that's when you start to change not only the political future of this country, but the economic future. when we have more, we spend more. as a small business owner, i like people who can buy my stuff. i don't want people that can't afford it.

it's in all of our best interest to build these coalitions. >> look, we're going to take some questions. before we do, thanks to my friends here at cap, marvin randolph is here. and i want to thank c-span, who is carrying this right now. with that, we are happy to take questions. yes, you sir, right here. >> good morning. thank you for hosting the panel. mr. jealous, my name is curtis johnson and i'm originally from chicago, illinois, and i saw first hand at the age of 7 where harold washington's campaign completely changed the demographics as far as voter registration, so, i'm on board with you. in that regard. for everyone else, increasing the volume of voters is one piece, making sure that they're actually eligible to vote, considering voter i.d. is a whole different ball of wax. i startled an organization called about face, focused on

helping connect voters with their identification. there's three paths to voter i.d., or, to combatting voter suppression. one, the legislative path of getting a new voting rights act. two, the legal aspect of fighting it in courts, but three, if neither of those are working in each selection psyel it's connecting voters to their i.d. and doing the civic and education and engagement. having a hard time starting and i wanted to know, from your perspectives, is there room for an organization like mine that simply wants to get the voters what they need to combat these laws? >> so, president obama, right before the election basically said, we have voter i.d. so, you need to find out what it is that you need to get in order to participate in the polls. so, i'm of the mind of absolutely.

because until we can actually start beating back some of this legislation and changing hearts and minds, and i say that, because in the latino community, when you ask a latino if they should an idea, their knee jerk reaction is, absolutely. they donald realize that the nuances of what that means. in texas, as many of you may know, you can have -- you can have a gun-carrying license and issue that as your i.d. at the student vote isn't valid. so, i'm of the mind of, yes, absolutely, because one of the things that, by not doing that, you are preventing voters, until we have legislation that basically combats it, i think your project is incredibly important. >> i agree. i think it's exact little the route to go. and i applaud you and your vout for having the vision to see through this incredible myriad of challenges before you.

>> ma'am? yes, you. she's coming. sorry. >> hi, i'm mindy riser, i'm involved with a number of social justice organizations, including the american friend society. a question about some interesting ideas in terms of voting by mail. that's done in some states. early voting, again, a lot of this has been trashed because of the legislation in different states, but are you is supporti of these initiatives and what difference would it make in terms of the folks that you work with, getting them to vote and indeed how would you do voter i.d. by mail, how would that even work? >> well, in fact, it don't. that's why the state of mississippi, only individuals who go to the polls in person will have to show idea but folks who are voting by absentee ballot by mail don't have to show i.d. there's never been any proud

proven of someone going to the polls, trying to vote under a different name. that hasn't happened. we have a history of voter freud, people voting by absentee ballots. guess who votes in person, guess who votes of absentee ballot. we are in support of anything that increases access to voegt and anything that suppresses voting, we oppose. early voting is a tremendous opportunity for people to have access to voting. we seen it take place in 2008 in north carolina. because of progressive legislation that led up to the 2008 election, we seen a record number of individuals able to go vote early and as a result of that, it really changed the political dynamic in north carolina. now, 2010, it changed again, bubut access to voting is paramount to making sure this democracy work. >> yes? and while the mike is going, i want to thank ben robl, the

primary researcher on this report. >> hello, my name is jasmine, i'm a senior at stone college. at a college student, one of my biggest question is, how do we get involved. so, as i think about what's worked in the past with involvement, i think students, and i think about the future of who we need to mobilize, i think students, so, how do you think that we can -- how can we mobilize college students as fellow student, as someone who is trying to advise administrators on how mobilize students? what are your thoughts? >> we'll let the former student body president raise this question. >> she's not a plant. though i am a big fan of hers. i think there are two things. the student population needs to understand the voter i.d. laws, as well. too often, students don't change their voter registration when they go to college, know most states they and they don't vote

where they're from. students should understand they vote where they leave. they spent nine months out of the year on a college campus, they vote there. that has to be the message. vote where you live. not vote where you're from. that's the first piece. and making sure that they have the i.d., because in georgia, as in texas, college i.d.s are not allowed as voter i.d. and that's the sect pieond piec. college campuses are in every one of these communities where you have the largest populations that need access to voter i.d. about face is a great idea. if students made it their mission to get every person that needed i.d., get them identification, that would transform elections. i agree. i agree, voter i.d. is here. let's stop whining about it and working towards it. harness the power of students to go out, get their own i.d.s first, like being on the plane. put your mask on first and then help others. make sure every person you talk to has an i.d. what we are doing with the new

georgia problem jekt, we ask you if you voter i.d. if you don't, we need to make sure you get it. it doesn't matter if you register 1,000 or voter i.d., t doesn't matter if you register voters if they can't vote because of a simple piece of paper. >> i would also encourage identifying existing organizations. for example, voter latino organized and create a college for the sorority on the campus that winds, we'll have a special treat. last time we had a concert with the campuses. try to figure out how to work within existing organizations and plug in nationally. >> i'd say this, i hope i didn't beat derek to the punch. you mentioned college students, active, civil rights, advocacy, many moons ago.

>> i was the youngest of the group, right? >> he was not. but actively engaged and i will tell you that if you look at the goodmans and cheneys and if you look at what we were doing 25 years ago, and you look at the opportunity and the capacity and the ability to affect social change that you have now, what we were able to do 25 years ago and what was able to be done 50 years ago pales in comparison. the advent of technology. you are smarter than we are. you are brighter, you're much more digital. it amazing what one person sitting in their dorm room, how they can touch millions of people, if not billions with the click of a mouse. it's amazing what you can do. so i would encourage you, all of have wonderful ideas, some being implemented as we speak. think of tapping into existing organization, think of starting

your own organizations. but this is really very basic math and blocking and tackling that we're talking about right here that we have to capitalize. >> freedom summer was not about a bunch of old men and women. it was about students who organized across states. bob muzzles was 25, hollis was 17. they thought that bob was old. the rest were between 17 and 21. stacy was a the spellman, bill was at columbia and we would coordinate across states. so tremendous impact has always happened when students are aligned and focused if on a target. guess what you are you're going to make a bunch of mistakes. half the thing we did we had no clue. but as a result of some of the

stuff we did, we saved historically black colleges that were publicly funded from being closed. up ha you have the power to make a tremendous impact. >> we're coming to the end of our hour. i want to thank our panel and thank all you. if you're in a state that has voter i.d. in the black belt that stretches from delaware to tex and and you're trying to figure out who to get beyond this moment, this tells you how to change the balance of power in those states. i want to choice with this final thought from frederick douglas, who years ago in his speech, his compass ut nationality, his tirade against the chinese exclusion act said that every country has a des anywtiny that defined by its geography and its

character. and the geography of each nation is unique. we are connected by two borders that attach to us friendly countries of different races. he said our destiny based on our character, defend as us at our best and our very unique jeeg is to be the most perfect example of the unity of the human family that the world has ever seen. the politics of the people on this stage or the politics of this report that, is the promise that we are seeking. the promise that united white endentured servants to rebel and united blacks and whites to come together 50 years ago and today blacks and whites and latinos and asian-americans and native americans to all come together for a true south, a south in which there is absolute democracy for all of us. thank you and god bless.

this week house republicans will hold elections to replace house leader eric cantor. kevin mccarthy and raul labrador will run. we could see other announcements off candidacies before the vote on thursday. here's more about the election and some of the other items on the agenda this week in congress. >> let go now to niels lesniewski.

thanks for being with us this morning. >> thank you. >> what is on tap for congress? what are the three biggest things you're watching this week? >> well, the biggest story obviously is on the house side with the leadership race that's going to be taking place, although some of the suspension seems to have already come out of it at least in the majority leader's race with kevin mccarthy of california. the current whip seeming to be on track to be able to take over as the majority leader following the primary defeat of eric cantor. the whip race itself could be more interesting. there's obviously the jockeying that's still going on for the whip race and i think that will be -- so that will be the item that gets the most attention, which interestingly means that something that would normally be huge news on the house side is

likely to fly under the radar for just a bit. the house this week is scheduled to consider the defense appropriation bill for the next fiscal year, which is somewhere on the order of defense spending overall, it's obviously a huge portion of the discretionary budget. but that might well be drowned out in terms of something that people are paying attention to. now, on the senate side, over there we're looking at an appropriation week as well, which is rather remarkable that the senate is actually reaching the point of being able to at least ponder debating spending bills and they're going to try to move forward with what the last time they trained to be called a mini bus, which merges the commerce justice science

agriculture and transportation housing appropriation bill all into one big bundle. those are the sort of big picture items for the week that i'm looking at. >> i want to ask you about the defense appropriations bill and going on in the senate. do you see either of these getting ryders attached, perhaps this issue of iraq that we've been talking about this morning. do you think there's a staging ground for that? >> certainly the iraq issue is right on target for inclusion in the defense spending bill in the house and it would be no surprise to anybody to see some sort of attempt to attach a ryder that either says on one hand that you couldn't put u.s. forces back on the ground, i suppose or on the other hand, you might have some sort of

reporting requirement that would seem to encourage more interventi intervention, none of these bills are in the senate bundle are really the ones that would particularly affect the v.a. however, the other thing that we're probably going to see is if we just look back just a couple of weeks to the trade of the five taliban figures for sergeant bowe bergdahl that we had just a couple of weeks ago, it would seem logical that there would be efforts in the house appropriations bill and in the senate with the funding for the justice department if we saw another round of attempts to either prevent the transfer of detainees from guantanamo bay or some sort of ryder that would attempt to once again block the

transfer of any of the detainees at gitmo to military or civilian prison facilities in the u.s. >> niels lesniewski, we earlier heard comments from senator lindsay graham on iraq. what is your sense of what lawmakers think as the violence continued over the weekend. >> well, it goi's going to be certainly a topic of discussion this week because it came up sort of back on the radar so abruptly for the masses last week. thursday morning i believe it was there was the closed briefing of the armed services committee last week and the emerging voices out of that briefing were sort of a prelude to what we heard over the weekend from senator graham and

from others. and i think what we're going to see in the coming weeks is probably more of these sort of closed briefings to try and figure out what exactly is going on on the ground there. obviously one of the immediate concerns is the safety and security of the embassy facility in baghdad and other issues with u.s. personnel who are on the ground there. but the other thing that's going to come up and senator graham was one of the people who mentioned this over the weekend is that if there are in fact, as we're now seeing reports that there are these back channel negotiations or conversations of some sort with the iranian regime, that will be something that will certainly get the attention of congress. and it tells you what kind of a world that we're dealing with and that we're seeing in iraq if

talking to the iranians is necessary for regional stability, which is something that i'm sure not a lot of people could have fathomed just a couple of years ago. >> niels lesniewski, you can read his reporting at cq roll call. thanks for being with us this morning. >> thank you. >> coming up, we'll hear from john neg rowponte and then norman ornstein, who will talk about eric cantor's loss. we'll take your calls, facebook comments and tweets. live every morning at 7:00 a.m.

on c-span. >> next, the increased use of roboti robotics, part of a robotics conference in florida. it's just over an hour. >> it's a great honor to present and discuss a paper by two lawyers who i greatly admire. there's a good overlap between the privacy law and policy community and if any of you nonlawyers, if you care about your digital privacy rights and have sort of been hoping that people have been minding the store for us, kevin and amy are two of the most able and committed store minders on that front that we have and they've done great work and ten to do great work to protect our

privacy rights and our other digital rights. it's a great honor to critique and comment and pull apart their paper for you. so the paper, which i don't know if it is -- if the title is inspired by the hall and oates song, "robot eyes are watching you," it basically makes the thesis that robots are reading your male right now, reading your e-mail, and asks the question whether private sector and in particular government nsa automati automating, scanning, filtering and processing of our contents and associated meta data of our e-mail is a legal problem, particularly given the fact that

with automated bulk scanning, the robots or the algorithms can spy on all of us all of the time. in some respects for a mixed crowd, this is a difficult paper to talk about. it is a very artful, impressive, geeky analysis of the legal code of private -- digital privacy rights under the fourth amendment and under the electronics privacy act. originally i was tempted to really dig in and talk about smith d. mayv. maryland and som the other cases i'd not heard of but i realized for this crowd interested in the broad policy question, if we privacy lawyers were to do that, it would be a

bit like the computer scientist talking about which protocols they prefer for various sorts of packing switching functions and it would get very boring very quickly. so i'm going to talk less about the law and more about the policy questions and the implications of this. okay. so a little bit about the law and what kevin and amy argue in the paper. the paper asks whether bulk collection and scanning by the government is illegal. and the answer they have is yes. it is illegal both under the constitutional requirements of the fourth amendment, which grant all of us a reasonable expectation of privacy, and in this case confidentiality of our e-mail, assessing smith v. maryland and caps a bunch of other important, well known and

lesser known cases. they also talk about the federal wire tapping act. originally created to deal with the problem of phone tapping by government and private entities, the electronic communications privacy act. the e.c.p.a., say it is illegal for anyone to intercept the contents of an electronic communication using a device. the legal question is whether the nsa is using a device, in this case the robot in room 161a, to intercept the contents

of a communication. and a very sort of important and interesting close reading of the legal precedents, kevin and amy conclude not only is there interception of the contents of an electronic communication of the statute and relevant precedent of the supreme court and lower court, but also there is a violation of something in which communications, parties, us, senders and receivers of e-mail have a reasonable expectation of privacy. so i want to take a step back because this is, after all, a robot, conference and the thesis of the paper is that robots are reading your mail and that we should care about it. and i think whether or not robots are reading our mail depends quite importantly upon what actually is a robot and

whether that matters within our definition of robots and what we want our definition of robots to do. so of course -- i don't know if bill is here or not. the seminal definition of what is a robot is the paper by richardson smart presented here two years ago and those eminent robo law scholars concluded after three or four sentences of analysis that a robot is a constructed system that displays both physical and mental agency but is not alive in the biological sense. that a robot is embodied and it manipulates physical things in the world as distinct from a disembodied a.i. under the richards and smart definition, the robot in 641a is not a robot at all, unless you can put arms and legs on it.

but the activities are purely computer processing, perhaps -- even if it is in sort of one unit, it isn't technically a robot. it's an algorithm. it's a computer program. perhaps it's artificial intelligence, whatever that means, which gets into other definition al problems. my point in saying this is not to promote my and bill's definition of a robot, it's not to pull a shifty jurisdictional game and say this a robot conference and you're not talking about a robot so get out, we could do that and go to the bar early but it's a bit early for that. the reason i want to make the point is because whether or not it's a robot is an important

question. what legal work, what technical work, what policy work do we want the definition to do? if we think there are a particular set of legal or social or technical problems that are roboty, that are worthy of separate treatment as robotics questions, we should define robot in a way that captures those problems so that we can deal with those problems on their own terms. i would say my personal view is this is not a robotics question in the way that self-driving cars or drones or other physical embodied things are robots. but that isn't to say it isn't a

tremendously important question. how we deal with algorithms and digital sniffers -- i don't quibble about the fundamental importance of the question, both at a technical and fundamental legal civil liberties question. the method that they use to address the question is crunching cases, and they do a -- for the nonlawyers in the room, they do a simply magnificent, masterful job, not just in determining what the law is but in marshalling cases, some of which don't -- wouldn't initially appear to support their position. but really doing close read of the important cases and much of

the important scholarship to show the original and nonobvious ways why our natural intuition for many of us that al gore rhythmic machine, nonhuman monitoring of our communication is illegal both under the fourth amendment and under e.c.p.a. i guess i want to push a little to the correctness, in my mind, of the conclusion. what if the law didn't say that? i share their ideological enormous commitments on privacy and digital rights, but what if it wasn't convenient, the best reading of the law just happens to be the one that we want the law to be? this is a problem because if

we're bound by sort of metaphorical, an logical reasoning for historical precedence, if we're bound by looking at what the cases say and leaping from there entirely we could get into a problem if it turns out the reading of the law isn't the best reading what we want the will you lau to be. this rather smiley fellow is a guy called ron old stead, a former police officer, sort of the al capone of west be the largest bootlegger of the west and at one point the largest employer in the puget sound region. he brought down barrels of whiskeys. olmes stead was none to be a bootlegger. the police installed a wire tap

outside his house on a phone line. they found all sorts of evidence from the wire tap krans scripts that he was a massive boot leg exhe was convicted on the base of those recordings or transcripts and sentenced to a long prison term. he appealed to the supreme court arguing that the police should have had a warrant before they monitored his communications. the supreme court rejected the argument, and engaged method logically the same analysis that kevinon and amy engage in here. they look to notions of press pass. they noted that the fourth amendment talks about protecting people's persons, papers, houses and effects -- not in that order but tangible things or papers or persons, our homes. an electron ek consideration an electric communication along the wires was none of those things

when it was merely electrons flying on the telephone wire. and that because there was no physical trespass into the homes, into the papers, into the effects of roy olmstead, there was no search or seizure and therefore there was no need for a warrant and therefore the evidence was admissible. it's essentially the same methodology that kevin and amy use except those precedents were not as far reaching or maybe chief justice taft didn't have the imagination and the legal skills that kevin and amy do. olmstead is best known for the dissent -- looked not at the narrow focus on trespass but looked what the should the

fourth amendment protect? what does privacy mean? why does it matter regardless of what the precedent says or what analogy we can draw, why does it matter that our phone calls be protected from government surveillance? that i think is the question that really we want to ask here. which is why is surveillance bad? why is this a problem? not whether it is a press pass or whether there's a reasonable expectation of privacy, but i think when we move to technologies, it's easy to follow the -- of course practicing lawyers have to follow the trail of precedent because that's call the practice of law. more generally, i think we can take a page from brandeis and ask what the normative questions are. if the papers are missing anything, that's what missing from the paper. it talks about privacy and it

talks about interception. and we hear about the nfl. but what's miss teg middle is why for the unconvinced -- i'm fully convinced and i love the paper, for the unconvinced, for the people who might think that an automated reading of your e-mail or scanning of your e-mail, it might be a reading, depending on how we define the practice going on, why that's bad. at the risk to more promos of my work, the thesis of my book is that surveillance is bad for two reasons. it's bad because it menaces the intellectual privacy, the privacy necessary when wh e are thinking, reading, making up our minds. when we know somebody is watching when we are reading or sharing half-baked ideas not on,

you know, publicly being recorded and streamed, but when we are more privately or confidentially making up our minds, if we're being watched, we might not ask the question, we might not read the article. we night not wonder. if we care in a free society about eccentricity, about individuality and about freedom to engage with ideas, any idea no matter how dangerous, we need privacy in that context. i think that's the insight that underlies justice brandon's dissent in olmstead, that underlies the adoption of that view in the famous cats case in the 1960s and it's that normative statement of why this really matters, not that we can line up the precedence but the reason why we should line up the precedence in this way and the reason why if they don't line up this way, we should discard them or distinguish them and come up

with better tools to protect the fund al value that animates not only the paper but the work of kevin and amy in their day job working protecting civil will be ert. in ways that are familiar to us, we have to use met as for. we have to use and a logical leeps that say this is kind of like the. >> the one that runs through the paper is but others, i said is it self? i'll stop because i want to have

a broad discussion about these question, why this matter, why this is bad, how we should craft the law to promote human values. the but the point i want to make about met fors is that mets for, analogy are tools just like law. we need to pick the mets for because they do normative, political, ideological work for us and not just follow the existing ones because those are the ones we've always used. met as for are tools, robots are tools at as well. there's nothing unnatural about the use of a particular metaphor or technology or development, whether it is robotic technologies or software a.i. i think what's most important in this area of the law and this area of technological design is we need to work out in advance to the extent that we can the human problems that we want to solve. and the human values that we want to be sure we preserve in

those solutions. and we need to pick the right tools for the zwrob do that. whether those tools are screw drivers, whether they are computers, whether they are robots, whether they are computer code or rules. want to stress that kevin and amy have given us a very important paper on an essential topic of civil liberties. i think it's a testament really to what a good paper it is and what good lawyers they are that their paper raises these really essential and critically important legal, technological and ultimately human problems. >> thanks.

ne >> what we describe is all the traffic going over the internet back room, being filled with computers looking for all the e-mails and looking for a list of targets in the content of i don't ever e-mail, seeing if you are talking about one of their targets. and if it sees identifier, it saves that and sends it down another network to the nsa and if it doesn't see that, it just passes out of memory. the question, sort of a tree falling in the forest type of question, is if it looks at your e-mail and doesn't see an identifier and hasn't stored your e-mail, has your privacy been harmed? first off, it's actually happening and a critical question. you might still ask why does it matter? who cares what the answer to this is? it matters because it depends

and we're both practicing lawyers so neal's point about this being a very doctrinal focused paper is a fair criticism. we're lawyers and we want to sue people. and whether or not you're prophecy has been harmed is if we do not know whose e-mails have been selected to be looked at, that puts news a catch 22 woor we can never sue the nsa. we first learned about this infrastructure from a whittle blower at at&t. that was part of the impetus.

a lot of these ideas have been. and so -- and i also want to clarify the paper doesn't address whether or not this stuff is illegal. i think that would actually require a great deal more analysis. we're asking the very threshold question of whether or not this is an interception under the wire tap act or a search and seizure under the we didn't go into what because in part that would have been a much longer paper but in part because we're not writing a paper about the nsa. we're simple country lawyers. we're not coming that the as a philosophical question. we're coming at this as our best -- speak for yourself.

well, yeah. for me at least, my best way of answering the question does it violate prophecy is looking at the laws that define with when our privacy has been violated and answer the question based on that. that along with the time pressure is one of the main reasons the paper is especially law focused. i do think there's room to do more about the particular harms of even automated surveillance. the one that we address specifically and we do this in part through story telling is the particular danger of mass surveillance that is enabled by automated surveillance. for those of you who haven't looked at the paper, we stepped through a series of interluds describing the surveillance in the room and then al analogizing that to what if a person was trying to do that sitting there

reading and like your doctor, tafine everything. it not and i don't see how that is distinguishable from, that that would be an interception and that would be a search and seizure. >> so we are trying to thein, this automated proots, "it was recently said. son son agents are enabling presumeans to violate your privacy more.

by scaling up to something massive that the to and and the course of surveillance making sense of. >> she taught those. and now we are enkrechld. >> what. >> so i think i've wa what addressed some of the things that neal has brought up. >> reporter: i think one of the first questions that neal brought up or are we talking about row about the. and if we're not, at least kevin

and i should go drink and -- i'm going to use more met as for. if you had a team of humoid row bats in a row and this -- he had heat regulations that reminded the dog of being a pot does it

matter if you have the same effects occurring in thit is a physical piece or a bunch pi. that is something certainly important. >> and then you asked, what do you do if the law does gooy way? but but cats where they recognized that that test won't federal reserve prp and prp where they started recognizing that woo doesn'ts in will there

is still a property interest but prmt spbt to have a reasonable exe exand that's very important as well because in rule, it is time to shift away in places. you could argue that nen a and is that the future for the fourth amendment when you're spying on everything all of the time? and i think jones and the the per stss is specific and we

we'll have usually. so let me say maybe three or four sentences. i suspect this is a ge that almost everyone in wnl and i really like haley's sfchlt but this was the problem in olmstead and the doing trin was a physical doctrine. the question is when the

physical trespass reading one as male by the physical police officers pb whether we needed to adjust the but that i think is ultimately -- irthink maybe i point of disagreement or at least the point i want to push them on is why is that the case? and what values are served by changing the test? pause the test, after all, like a robots is a tool. and simple country lawyers are not. i like that metaphor, though. they are sort of high pousse tear litigators. but they are litigators and what litigators have to do, even those that don't appear before juries, is they have to tell a story which explains to the

unconvinced because i don't need any convincing that this is right but if we -- if we were to roll out this argument, it will not be met with universal acclaim. either in the corridors digital or physical of the nsa or in the federal judicial based upon what values were important, prevention from trespass the dock trien al important need to be intertwind in a legal story. absolutely. but that story is a necessary piece because just like software code, legal doctrine is maliable and can be constructed and used

to build any sorts of things. but we want it to build good things. if order to figure out what a good thung is, we need that political, idea poj and to those who are either unskrounsed or on the fence wanting to be convinced but not having heard the story that justifies the changing test or interpretation of the ambiguous doctrine, in a way that, protects this. i think kevin is exactly right, that the agency and the discovery that's they've done and told a good.