is the idea that we're getting it wrong a lot or getting it out of context. that is certainly possible. it's possible that there are things we don't know that we're mischaracterizing something. there was one good story, i thought, that we were getting ready to public. i was persuaded it was wrong because i'm talking to sources and i'm talking to the government. i had very specific reasons -- i received very specific reasons to believe that i had the context entirely wrong and we just killed the story. but what we're doing is we're try -- we are trying to shed light on the subject. we're trying to get it all the way right. that is not the case when it comes to the public debate on the part of the government. the government wants to keep the secrets. in a few outlying cases, people come out and say flatly false things to the public. everyone knows about the example of director clapper and the question from widen about

whether the nsa collects any kind of data at all about millions or tens of millions of americans. he said no. but much more often there is just radically misleading information. there are comments made. there is information provided that if a friend or family member did that to you, you would consider them to have betrayed you. you would consider them to have deliberately led you down the wrong path. here is an example, the collection of all the call records. he does keep coming back to that and not the overseas collection. >> i want to go through all of it. >> but for a long time the government said, we won't tell you at all how many times we use this power that the patriot act gave us to collect business records. it's the business records provision. it would -- it's top secret, which means it would do grave harm to the security of the united states if we told the number of times we used it.

then congress passed a law requiring them to disclose how many times they used it. they came out one year and they said, it turns out there's nothing to worry about. 2009 they said, we have only used it 24 times in the last year. don't worry about it. it turns out you needed four of those times -- four quarterly applications of this power to get trillions of records, trillions of call records, substantially all the call record, because it practiced the way the program worked maybe that it's a large but not -- a fraction of that but not the entirety of it. they say 24. it turns out it's trillions of records. they say we only take it when it's relevant to a terrorism investigation. their meaning of relevant is all of them. every one of them could possibly be relevant. we will collect every one of

them. if they had been straight with the american people, if they had said, we would like to collect all the call records and we will regulate our use of them as follows, and they had done that around the time they started collecting them before congress allowed it, soon after 9/11, or even if they had done it in 2007, they might well have won public support for it. but doing it behind our backs and the highly misleading statements about it have led to considerable degree of shock when people find out what tle doing. >> i would like to go systematically through a few things that you have both referred to. take three or five minutes on each of the following three things. the court and how it works. the 215 program and the third 702. starting with the court. it's my understanding they were created in the 1970s as it was referred to coming out of a recommendation from the church committee which uncovered abuses

in the american untell gens program before that. the spying on martin luther king and all of that. and to prevent that, they said we're going to create this court, this specific court. my question, general hayden, how does the court work? can someone who is an intern or young people like edward snowden or one of the american university students who are interning at nsa or cia, can they send an e-mail and say, i'd like some data on this person? or what is the process to have a request -- how is the request made, and what process does it go through? >> lots of things to be said about it. it's incredibly odd. let me tell you why it's odd. it existing. we are the only western democracy to take these questions to the third branch of government. other countries, last time i

checked that were democratic like the united kingdom issued them within the ministries. it's the grand american experiment to involve the third branch of government in what is essentially -- i told you historically an exercise of executive prerogative in terms of espionage. what's unusual is that we do it this way. in order to do it this way we put restrictions on the court because it cannot be as open as other courts in our system. it is not adversarial. on the other hand, tony soprano doesn't get a lawyer when the fbi wants to go with a warrant on him. unfortunately -- i mean this. unfortunately, when we set this up, we used the language in law for which we use warrants in criminal proceedings in order to go up on wiretaps in fbi and other investigations. there is a sharp distinction --

it's not very often made in the public discourse about this. this is a sharp distension between doing surveillance for law enforcement and doing surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. i read very often common teary of suspiciousless surveillance. that word has absolutely no meaning to me as a foreign intelligence officer. i don't collect information, particularly we want to talk about foreign nationals. i don't collect information on foreign nationals because they're bad. i collect information on foreign nationals because they're interesting. i collect information on foreign nationals because their communications contain data that will keep americans more free and more safe. they do not have to be bad people. do not confuse the two. so now the court is designed to warrant collection against protected persons. we have reason to believe that a, b or c is the agent of a

foreign policy. >> by row tektprotected, you me american citizens. >> anyone in the united states of america and american citizens, including diplomats and any organizations comprised of a or b above. in order to collect against them for foreign intelligence purposes requires a warrant. in addition, because of the way the law was written -- remember i told you it echoed the law enforcement statute? it puts specific restrictions on collecting on a wire in the united states that did not exist for collecting out of the air in the united states. i'm not talking about grabbing your cell phones. what i'm talking about are satellite bounces into the united states. >> when you want a warrant on a protected person, what do you have to give to the court? >> it gets a request for a warrant that looks like -- about the size of the phone book in

the city of cincinnati. it's about that thick. it's heavily laden with a lot of league jargon. it's not all boilerplate. it requires specifics. in an essence what you are trying to prove to the judge is that the individual you want to target is the agent of a foreign power. i recall in one instance -- >> not anymore. >> that's what it was. it changed in 2008. >> that changed with the patriot act. which is a lot older. >> protect america act which came between the two. >> but you are describing -- i will let you finish. you are describing an old model irrelevant to every story that's been written. >> that's not true. that's not true, bart. >> go ahead. >> in any event, to collect on a wire in the united states you need the court's permission because of the way the law was written. >> the big packet of information you were talking about, is that

submitted by anybody at nsa or c cia or department of justice or does it go through a lawyer? >> crafted at the agency that wants the coverage. it will go through a series of bureaucratic stops. it ends up at the department of justice. all the ones i'm aware of went through the white house for approval. >> one of the things that we hear is that they have approved almost every request that they have had. is this -- this gives the impression it's a rubber stamp, irrelevant process. that's why i was pushing for details about how it goes through. >> if the judge isn't happy with the application, it's withdrawn. it's not rejected, it's withdrawn. it's redone. there is a dialogue there. no one who has worked the process would describe it as a rubber stamp. >> is this your understanding of the process? >> almost everything that mike

is talking about still happens and is accurately described with one exexception, i think. that's not the stuff people are writing stuff about. that's not what public debate has been about. that's the old model. they still use it for specific targets. we have got something maybe just short of probable cause. it could be a suspicion under the law. but we have reasons to think that this person is not -- it used to be they had to be an agent of a foreign policy. it has to be relevant to an investigation of an agent of a foreign power. they have to demonstrate the relevance. this is an individual target. they want my records. they want your records with a name on them. it's in ones and twos and threes. there are a few thousand of those a year. the programs we're talking about now are -- >> let's make that shift to the 215 program. >> 215 and 702 -- there are four

kinds of data that george bush ordered mike hayden to start collecting after 9/11 without the benefit of a state ut and without the benefit of court supervision for several years. and until the justice department rebelled and two dozen people were about to resign because they judged it to be illegal. this is the famous surveillance from the period of -- it was disclosed at the end of 2005. there is metadata about data, records of who talks to whom and when or where they are or what kind of equipment they are using. that's metadata. then there's content. they were collecting broadly speaking both for internet communications and telephone. internet communications are not only e-mail. they are also your skype chats.

they are the documents you have stored in the cloud. they are video. they are -- it's the universe of content that travels the internet and then the telephone calls. and what happened after the justice department rebellion and after some public knowledge began to lead to debate, is that the court was asked to switch gears and did switch gears. no longer was it only issuing warrants for individuals joe and tom and jane and mary, it was now asked to authorize either quarterly or annual basis huge programs of surveillance in which the court would now say, once a year that you may collect anything that you like from google and yahoo! and microsoft provided that you certify that it fits the following targeting rules and that you treat it and handle it according to the

following minimumization procedures which is intended to protect the u.s. citizens. there's some protection there. i don't deny that. but not all of it is as airtight as one might be led to believe. in any case, the court is now saying, here is a program under which you have authority to do this. you don't have to tell me the names. you don't tell the court the names of the people you are collecting on. you don't have to tell -- there's not an individual warrant for that person. it used to be that in the intelligence world, it wasn't wrongdoing necessarily but there had to be a specific showing that the individual was likely to be a valid foreign intelligence target. that's gone now. the court has accepted and interpretations of the law that nobody in the public and frankly almost nobody in the community

of people in the unclassified world who study this stuff very closely and i would count myself among them, because several chapters of my last book were about the programs, i never suspected that the executive branch had told the court and the court had agreed that collecting every single person's call records was their definition of relevant to a terrorism investigation. >> why was that done? >> three or four things. bart's description of what went on under the terrorist surveillance program when i was director is not quite accurate. that's about all i can say about it. bart's right about the court -- about then the executive branch going to the court for warrants that were broad generalized warrants rather than specific targeted warrants against individuals. what i was trying to describe earlier was that the act put

restrictions on who you could target and on kind of the techniques of targeting on a wire inside the united states. and in most if not all of the generalized warrants that i think bart is describing, have to do with the reality that an awful lot of foreign communications, foreign communications are in the united states. and we approach the court then for approval to access those communications whose americanness was created by their temporary geography. not by the commune kants. bart is right. in any intelligence collection there is incidental collection of people. there are procedure torz protect u.s. privacy. your question was why the metadata? >> yeah. so as i said, we have the first warrant in 2004.

the chief judge of the court. in actuality, it allows us to resume things that were the subject of very heated discussions only the previous march. we did it by not relying on the president's power to conduct foreign intelligence, but by involving an additional branch of government, in this case the judicial branch, in order to get a ruling as to whether or not what it was nsa was proposing met the reasonableness standard of the 4thamendment. we are not protected against all searches. we are protected against unreasonable searches. it was felt that the best way do this within the constitutional structure was to go to a court that is broadly familiar with surveillance and to ask that question of the judge and in this case the judge did indeed issue a warrant. >> basically, the collect of metadata, what it is is

collecting all of the phone call records and the nsa would store in its warehouses all of these records, which it would not access and not read except for when it had permission from a judge? >> no. let's take the 215 program. that's the one we're talking about. after snowden's revelation but before the president's speech, all right, so how it existed in that period, because it changes, nsa under the court warrant gets the metadata from the phone company which are billing records. those are records u.s. have shared with the phone call. these are third-party property. they belong to the phone company. they don't belong to you. nsa gets these records. you are not identified. all that's in there is fact of call. this number called, that number at this time for that long.

how many calls do 350 million people make a day? you get an idea of how much data goes in there. actually, what was happening was this program was set up by me when most of us were making phone calls through land lines. it's much more difficult and more legally complex and the fact that our cell phones done have individual call billing, it was more difficult as people then went to wireless communication to get the same kind of information in. so as time went by, the percentage of american phone calls that were showing up on a dale will you basis, phone records showing up in the database was shrinking down to about 25%. the database is sealed off and can only be approached by about two dozen people at nsa all specially trained in the machines they use to make kwirryes of the database are key stroke monitored.

what nsa does is take what is called a seed number, almost always a foreign number, a number that shows up in a safe house in yemen after it has been wrote up by special forces and we find it on an individual that shows he is affiliated with al qaeda and he has a cell phone. what nsa can do is go to the database and ask, does this phone number show up in here. if some number in the bronx says, yeah, i talk to that number once a week, nsa gets to ask that phone number in the bronx, what do you talk to. that's it. that's the metadata program. the change the president made in his speech is that nsa used to be able to do three hops, seed number to the bronx to who he called to the next one. president made it two hops. seed number, bad guy, bronx, one

hop out. the president also said nsa has to go to the court every time it makes that query. this is very unusual. keep in mind what the court is judging. the court is judging whether or not nsa has a reasonable, arcticable suspicion that that foreign number collected through foreign intelligence is actually affiliated with i'al qaeda. it's not you the court is checking on. it's not your rights it is double booking. it's looking over the shoulder of the intelligence professional to see whether or not their intelligence judgment was correct. last full year nsa has records, that yelling through saying anybody talk to them happened 288 times. >> and then 702 and we will open it up to questions. >> it starts to get -- people's eyes glaze over.

you are talking about nuances. this is complicated and difficult. let's take it down to fundamentals. i am not advocating a position. i know there are questions that belong in the public domain that we collectively -- boundaries we ought to decide. transparency enables checking society -- of the courts, of lobbying of voting and all the other -- and market power. people get to decide, i don't want do to do business with that company because it doesn't seem as safe. let's take big picture. a wallet goes missing in this room. what's the most efficient way to search for it? everybody gets searched. turn out your pockets. lots of societies do that. the british did that back in the 18th century.

that, the idea of a general warrant, was a principal cause of the american revolution. it was one of the main grievances of the kcoloradkol o. the nsa wants that efficiency because global communication flows are enormous and because it can. it's never been able to do that before until very recent years. probably most of the these programs couldn't have happened before the year 2000 or so and the amount of data that exists in the world and produced and transmitted since 2000 vastly eclipses all the data ever produced in the world in all of human history up until 2000. there's a lot of it. they want access to substantially all of it. they're not just collecting metadata. overseaing, they are collecting content. there's a access point called

muscular off the coast of britain somewhere at which the nsa and its british partner listen in on the giant flows of data, one strand of the cable transmits 14 times the print content of the library of congress every second. they are sitting on that. anything that looks like an address book, an e-mail in box or chat buddy list, they say we want that. they suck that in. that's considered content under law. when you intercept all the phone calls in a country or all the transmissions between google andrand yahoo! that's content. that's collected in bulk. the question is, are we comfortable with that? i understand why -- >> are people reading it? it's collected and sent to a server? >> obviously, humans can't lie eyes on all of that.

once they collect it and there are certain to be billions of transactions -- billions of communications that are americans, they feel free to store as much of it as they can store and believe that they can use. for example, address books. they don't want all. they don't want owner list address books. they want address books of people that wear the fornmat thy know whose address it is. but they keep it and they feel free to search it once they have it. >> while you are finishing, let me -- we should open it up to questions. we have 40 minutes left. we have two microphones, one here and one there. we will ask people to line up, please. finish your answer. >> that's unusual. that's good. i'm glad we had an hour for this.

>> so what i will -- carrie, okay -- i will ask you to just identify yourself and please ask a question, be brief. speeches you can save for later in the dorm. >> okay. i'm a graduating senior here. my question is for either or both of you. at what point do you want to start collecting on a terrorist subject inside the united states who is an american citizen? >> that's beyond my confidence. >> like -- you realize, we didn't collect on those kids. why didn't we? they're u.s. persons. they had a first amendment right

to visit any website they wanted to visit. their web surfing was not monitored. and there's not a program that allows us to. >> that's not why the fbi and others did not monitor. when they got the tip from the russian government that the brothers -- the older might be up to no good, they did a preliminary investigation. they looked into it and said, we don't see anything here and they stopped. if they wanted to -- the tip from the foreign government and any supporting information they might have picked up would have given them lots of authority to do the surveillance. it's because they didn't think they were -- >> i'm sorry. i wasn't clear. that wasn't the point i was trying to make. given the tone of a lot of the coverage of the snowden revelations, there's presumption that nsa is sucking everything up. the fact of the matter is, they are not. in order to do -- bart is right. in order to get that, we would

have had to have a certain level of suspicion and then go through the processes that allow them to be targeted. i get questions after boston, how come you didn't know they were going to those websites? because we don't routinely look at that. >> would you answer the question about the overseas collection of americans which is more intrusi intrusive? >> sure. >> here is google data center one. sheer google data center two in two countries. here is the line. the nsa goes in and sits on that pipe and tabs in anything and everything it wants even though billions of those communications with ill be u.s. communications ins dentally collected. why is that okay. >> let me make sure i understand the premise you are suggesting. you believe that g-mail should be a safe haven for legitimate foreign intelligence targets to

the united states? >> if that's how you translate your question. >> that's how i translate your question. if i'm not on that wire, i'm not collecting g-mail users. bart said, this begins to hurt your head. we spent your evening here and we haven't gotten off of 215. >> we are now. >> the approach you use in collecting signals intelligence looks like a funnel. all right? you have access here. the next step is you collect. and then you process. then you read or listen. you analyze. you draw up a report and then you disseminate. you get the picture here? the funnel gets smaller. very often people use the number out here that describes the potential access and then imput

that number way up the chain to the for more sophisticated and more narrowly focused activities here. that's not true. i go back to my premise. g-mail is not a safe haven. google is an international company. a lot of people you want to be -- google is a u.s. person in certain circumstances. by the way, that's actually not their cable. it's a virtual cable that they use. again, i ask you the question, hotmail, g-mail, safe haven? these are global e-mail providers. they are used by everyone. is your theory that can't touch it, eric will be really mad? >> i want to lay out another question. in one line, there's long distance to go between saying that g-mail should be a safe haven for terrorists and saying

on other hand that you should be as the u.s. government siphoning in all of the content that crosses that cable. including all the american communication. there's some room for gradation in between the there. >> there is. i gave you that steps in which you can conduct the gradation. not everything you can access is collected. not everything you collect is processed. no, sir everything processed is reported. >> one last thing to point out that that exists here. the prism program, the first story i wrote about the nsa, is -- gives the nsa pmore power to get g-mail, all the google content from the providers with -- under and annual authorization from the court. it had quite a bit of latitude. it was not allowed to go in and say, let's sift through everything on the server to see if there's anything that

interests us. that's what it is doing in the overseas collection. >> bart is right. there is a -- binary is too strong a word but i'm going to use it. there is protected communications and then there's everyone else. nsa truly does have an awful lot more freedom of action going after foreign communications. it's the nature of the business. that offends some of our european friends who do not attach privacy to a particular sovereign. but attach privacy to a softer, more generalized human right. i got it. that's a subject of discussion. but right now the american approach to this is that it is really a binary world, protected persons, persons who are not protected. nsa's ability to work over here under 12333, the order that bart suggested earlier but not without congressional oversight is really quite powerful. >> let's take a question over

here. >> this is something i heard about reading newspapers about how various governments are trying to segregate internets from. germany is thinking about doing this. what would this have on the nsa's ability to collect information. is such a thing possible? is it possible to cut off the german internet from the american internet in. >> i have a few thoughts on it. one is there a lot more people and countries talking about their desire to sort of cut off the global internet and keep all their data at home than are actually taking steps to do it or will do so. because you are cutting yourself off from the world. it's tremendously damaging. it's not practical to -- there are people -- there are countries that say google, yahoo! from now on all the data produced by germans has to stay

in german data storage. it can't do anywhere else in the world. it can't go into u.s. territory. the entire structure of the interne internetdoesn't allow that. then there are countries that want to -- at the extreme end, north korea want to cut themselves off, cut their citizens off from free debate, from free information and are taking this -- are using this nsa stuff as an excuse to strengthen that argument. in some ways if it were possible, it would be cleaner. it would take us back to world war ii when you could break the german military code. nobody would see any down side to it at all. this is a code that is being used exclusively on networks used by the enemy in a war. now if you try tro break

encryption, you are -- everybody uses almost -- almost everybody uses the same stuff. when there's stuff that shows that the nsa knows about this or that entity that's got its own home brew, we're not writing about that. we're writing about things that have general public interest. if you are breaking the encryption -- the basic standards that run the internet because you want to get the bad guys, you are breaking everybody else's encryption. that's the way it works. >> question here. >> thank you both so much for coming. i'm a freshman in the school of international service. i'm a native of pittsburgh. i have a question -- >> we're from philadelphia. we used to think we needed a visa to go to philadelphia. >> i have one question with two parts. one for mr. gellman and one for

general hayden. i would like to talk about the future. we live in a world of edward snowd snowdens. i don't think that will go away. ma my question is, in the future in the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years, this increasing demand for transparency and this general sentiment, the release of information, what kind of implications does this have for the future of organizations like the nsa and the cia and how they deal with those problems how they might change as a result? and for mr. gellman, what do these changes have among the sentiment of the american people and how the media responds and interacts with this information? >> i will go first and be very quick. number one, we have to recruit from the generation that

produced edward snowden. that's a reality. that generation has a different point, a different come pass which it comes to transparency and secrecy than my generation did. that's reality. that's something that my old community is going to have to deal with. particularly since one of the major muscle movements in my old community has the generalize sharing of information. we used to have a principal called need to know. now the manta has been near to share. now you have snowden and this is really, really hard. one other impact of this is that when you decide to undertake an espionage activity, what can i gain over here and what can i lose over here. let's take the ones we have been talking about which is signals. what can i gain? i may be able to hear the head of state. and i hear the head of state's personal views. that's cool. what could i lose?

you could really be embarrassed if that was made public. you make that judgment. this hand over here is not a moral hand. it's a political public relations hand. this is what i would lose if it were made public gets multiplied by the likelihood it's made public. and the general factor of the likelihood of signals intelligence being made public, particularly when you grab a signal out of the air, that factor is kind of like zero. it's undeteabltectiblundetectib. although the gain might not have been massive, the potential loss wasn't quite measurable because you couldn't figure out a way in which it would become public. with snowden, that number over here is never going to be zero again. you are going to have to factor in the insider threat that will make operations known that the

target nations are never going to detect. that actually might be the strongest governor break on aggressive signals intelligence collection against some countries, not american guilt or american friendship. it's just that cal coup lous, the national interest has a new factor over here. >> i will try to be brief. in july, a month after the revelations started, keith alexander was then the director of the nsa gave a talk. and he said that he wished he could bring every american into his huddle, tell them the plays he was calling. but the problem is that if he did that, then the bad guys would know, too, and so it's too dangerous. that is true.

it's true that if he reveals his capabilities then everyone can hear it. there's no more encapsulated communication in global affairs. but it's also true -- this gets to your question of how the american people react -- that when we did find out what was happening inside his huddle there were a lot of americans that did not like the plays he was calling. that is among the reasons why the existence of a classified stamp does not end the inquiry for me when i'm deciding whether something should be public. there's all kinds of stuff that's classified that's just sort of self-evidently trivial. i have in my possession a navy laundry manual for how you wash clothes aboard a ship that's stamped secret. i have also noticed that there's interesting variations in how classification works depending on the forum. there's an internal nsa report i

wrote about and general hayden did not like my story in which i talked about the number of compliance incidents, either errors or violations of rules and occasionally of law. how many times did we have this kind of compliance problem? the internal report classified that as secret which by definition means that it would do harm to the national security of the united states if we knew the number of times they screwed up. that is relatively hard to defend. when they reported it to congress, it was classified top secret, special intelligence, compartmented and 91% of all staffers couldn't read it and it greatly restricted the oversight possibilities. the american public reacts when not only there's something that

the u.s. government is doing, it's something they didn't know they were doing. something that they might have accepted if they had known in advance or had been openly debated. >> thank you. >> i wanted to return narrowly to the question of call chaining and ask if my understanding is correct. you mentioned there were only 288 i think was number. >> inquiries. >> but each of those which was until recently three hops, over the course of a year a phone call is on the order of 1,000 numbers, that's 1,000 is the first hop. the second hop would then by 1,000 times 1,000, a million and the third hop -- there's overlap. i'm overextrapolating. i wanted to -- when you talk about three hops, you are not talking about 288 things. you are talking about. >> the question was asked -- i'm relying on statistics who the

former deputy director put out there. his final statement, we got 24 people who can do this. we asked it 288 times. in chris' words -- i've been doing this for a long time. chris' words in those inquiries implicated 6,000 numbers. i agree with you, that's not the raw number of hops out. this is an investigation. you are looking at this. it's just numbers. no other identifying data is there. what they are looking for are patterns that may -- you have the spider chart coming out of this chain. then you have this other dirty number that hits a number in buffalo. it's interesting when the second hop out of buffalo hits a second hop out of some other place. it's done an investigation. we are looking for links that might merit further investigation. >> chris didn't explain what he

meant by 6,000. it's almost -- there's a saying in newsrooms, danger reporter doing arithmetic. it's hard to imagine how you can go one hop with -- on the order of 300 numbers and touch only 6,000. that means you have -- that means that you are multiplying only 200. that means that each number called an average of less than one person per year. here is what chaining is from a non-computer science person. we have heard six degrees of separation story. six degrees of separation on average. this is not just a play and a novel but also some important computer science work that was done a few decades ago which said that the mean number of hops you have to do to reach -- to touch every person in the world or to touch from any one person to any other person is six. let's 'spsuppose 300 people cal

100 people and multiply that by 100 and you get to 10 million. that's still a large fraction of phone numbers in the united states. >> it gets to you 1 million. >> 1 million. i count on my fingers. >> that's more than 6,000. >> it is. it doesn't mean they did chain three numbers from each of the numbers. they also said it was fewer than 300 numbers in this one year. they said the numbers have varied from year to year. you can be quite confident they have not varied downward. those statements are perfectly consistent with the possibility that some other year they had 5,000 seeds. they would not have lied if they said it this way. but that is exactly the kind of massaging of data in their public statements they have done. >> let's take two questions. >> i hail from gchq.

my question is a little less technical. it's for either of you, both of you or neither of you. it's simply pretty obvious for the most casual observer that there's a national tragedy in the u.s. or any country, example of pearl harbor and 9/11, there was a reaction for -- we give up liberty for security. the patriot act. it takes time and then sometimes society scales us back. is it concerning to both of you or either of you that given multiple 9/11 or events of that nature in a short span of time that we could end up giving up a lot of liberty for a lot of security, whether or not you agree with the programs that we're engaging in? >> thank you. right behind you.

>> i'm a journalist -- i'm an aspiring journalist. my question has to do more so with investigative journalist. in light of snowden's leaks, we have seen journalists have been accused of co-conspirery with whistle blowers as well as congressional members or pushing for them to be put into trial. i was wondering what your thoughts are on investigator jou journali journalism. >> i will jump in on the 9/11 thing. here is how i do my personal cal coup lous on this. despite my professional role, we're responsible for our actions as citizens and human beings. one of my great fears is that we do not use the authorities

available to us right now. i use this metaphor. if that's a box you want us to play it and we can legally play in -- bart's articles raise issues about national debate. nsa will say, i got a president, i got a court that says it's good to go. until told otherwise, we're going to play 215 way out to the edges. all right? we're going to take the hops however many they take us. in the background ethical argument for that is that if we don't play fully within this box and we fail and we have another catastrophic attack on the homeland, the box you will demand -- not the one you will accept, but the box you will demand will be out here. so in one kind of reverse psychology sort of way, playing this aggressively within the law

now is actually a protection against dangers to civil liberty in the future. >> do you share that, bart, that that concern that if any of these revelations make it easier for another terrorist attack on the u.s., that in the future it will perversely lead to demands for much greater surveillance? >> as an aside, everybody wants to talk about terrorism. that is not -- that doesn't account for nearly anything close to the majority of u.s. intelligence gathering. there are different purposes. it's an emotional trigger to talk about all this stuff as -- some of it. some of it isn't. our society has always had pen due lum swings. the different is what happens under a regime of extreme

secrecy. when you intur japanese citizens and you can look at books and there are the pictures. we know when we have overreached and we can come to a calmer decision after a certain period of time and say, i don't like that picture. that doesn't seem like it was the right thing to do. the supreme court reverses it. when you are doing everything in secret, then -- or very large parts of your reaction are in secr secret, it's hard to decide whether we've gone too far. we are still all these years later trying to resolve the torture debate. the senate intelligence committee has voted to recommend for declassification some hundreds of pages of the executive summary of its 6,000 page report. it cannot publish its report under current arrangements, under current understandings of

the way these things work. there's no law that says that only the president gets to decide what's classified. classification is an artifact of an executive order. in any case, we still don't know what happened. still don't know happened. very fully. i mean there's 6,000 more pages of conversation about it that they want to have and right now as of this date they're still precluded from publishing. when you have taken steps like let's collect all the content that flows across this cable or let's collect all the data about the phone calls that you make, or let's set up a set of rules that allow us incidentally to put tons of your communications in a repository and we will, by our own best lights with good motives try to protect you decide what to look at and when, we don't get to debate those things. we would not have this conversation if it weren't for

snowden, disclosing things that the government internever intended to disclose. >> i add one minor thought to that. those of you who are americans in the room, you are citizens of a nation with the most transparent intelligence community on the planet. there is no one anywhere near us. that doesn't make illegitimate barts argument that it has to be more transparent. debris that it does but you need to understand the baseline from which you're working. you have more information about your country's espionage, freely available than any other citizenry on the planet. >> let's take two questions over here and we'll close that. >> my name is james manning, graduating from the school of international services and my question you've heard a lot tonight about classification and how there's a shock reaction about sources and methods and my question is then how do we go about having the debate without compromising intelligence

undertakings with the current sources that are being used while also sort of avoiding these shocks that americans are appalled with particularly as i mentioned in general hayden's answer. >> actually the two speakers just before me pretty much covered the questions i was going to ask so someone else from this side. he hasn't really answered my question. >> about the journalistic -- i'll be happy to answer that, i got distracted from it, sorry. on the journalistic one, there are some alarming signs. there have been more leaked probes, leaked prosecution under obama as everybody's read than all previous presidents combined. they have used pretty aggressive means of surveillance against the associated press and against fox news. their legal construct is that a leak of classified information is a counter intelligence

problem. counter intelligence is a legitimate foreign intelligence surveillance target and therefore that makes reporters doing reporting legitimate targets of quite intrusive methods, electronic surveillance, so i spend a lot of my time and a big tax on my time and efficiency trying to protect the security of my communications not only from the u.s. government which has been my threat model as an investigative reporter for a long time but foreign governments who want documents that i have that i don't think should be public and might want to try and come get them. all that being said, you know, i'm sitting up here on a stage, a free person, not in handcuffs. having a civil conversation with general hayden and you could read the espionage act or 18 usc 798 or otherious other statutes. there are ways to read it and various ways of prosecution under which i could be charged. it's not because we don't have laws that could be used to

prosecute journalists that we haven't prosecuted journalists. it's because we have a legal and political norm in this country that says that's a line we don't want to cross without reasons very different from what we're seeing right now. and so by the way, when you ask about what sanctions or controls that are on me, i'm certainly well aware if i were to publish a story that clearly and obviously led to some gigantic security disaster, that could change the legal and political norma cording to which i am not charged with a crime. >> i wrote an op-ed for cnn.com on the investigations and i don't come out quite where bart is and i'm closer than you might think. i thought the prosecution of thomas drake at nsa collapsed of its own weight because it was such overreach. not that he didn't do things that deserve some response from the government but not that and i was quite troubled myself by kind of the scatter shock subpoena on the associated press, and then the

identification of rosen as a coconspirator. that's somebody with my background, all right? transparency and how do you make that work? it's very hard. i don't have a good answer. we are going to have to, we, the intelligence community has to be more transparent than it's ever been before, because if we're not, you're not going to let us do this stuff in the first place. all right? there's one caveat. by being more transparent, we will indeed make you more comfortable. it is inevitable that we will also make you less safe. that's the deal. >> let's take two here. >> thank you both so much for coming. both the president and the congress in the usa freedom act and several other bills introduced the concept called the special advocate. this is a privacy and civil liberties advocate which will be

placed in the foreign information surveillance court, fisc, in some proposals of this official you would be granted the power to appeal decisions of the fisc court of appeals to federal courts, potentially ending up in the supreme court. i was hoping to get your general thoughts and comments on this position in general, its potential effectiveness and also whether you think the granting of standing was going too far. >> okay, and one more. >> hey guys, thanks for coming. my name is alejandro alvarez, a sophomore in the school of communication and my question for both of you is as follows. former vice president dick cheney spock at our campus. he believed 9/11 could have been prevented if the nsa had the capabilities back then that it has today. do you agree with this statement

and why or why not. >> there's been enormous amounts of scholarship on whether 9/11 could have been prevented with today's technology, but it's actually, it's been fairly well established, it certainly was the view of the 9/11 commission that 9/11 could have been prevented with what they had then had they used it as designed, had the coordination between fbi and cia going the way it should have been and so on. that's sort of beyond my qualification to speak. the issue of the fisc advocate also beyond my competence. i've followed a lot of the stories, i've read a lot of fisc opinions and fisa requests in the past. any proceeding before a neutral arbiter is going to be, in the long run, work better and make better decisions if there's a checking power, if there's an advocate.

we know that this fisa court blessed, you sort of had a number of big decisions for the first time in history that said certain programs, very large scale programs were lawful when before it only considered individual warrants. we know that the first time that a federal judge considered that program in a contested legal proceeding, the judge found it to be unconstitutional. another one considered it, you know, shortly after and said no, we think it is constitutional but that's the whole point of a contested proceeding tends to bring out the best arguments or the best evidence, so in principle i'd be for that. >> very briefly, no advocate for individualized warrants. we don't do that in the criminal justice system. i'd entertain the arguments for an advocate and the generalized warrants in which an entire program then is blessed by the

court because number one, it happens far less frequently, so it's just manageable and number two, it has far-reaching implications and so you might want the benefit of an adversary process there. with regard to 9/11, who asked that question? yes. what vice president cheney was referring to were two guys in san diego, khalid midhar, we at nsa intercepted seven or eight of their phone calls from san diego to a safe house in yemen. clearly the selector or the target was a safehouse in yemen, and we detected the calls going in. there was nothing in the physics of the intercept, like how we were getting them or in the content of the call that told us that these guys are making the call from san diego. so we just have people speaking arabic, calling into a known safehouse in yemen, i think one

had a wife who was pregnant and he was continually asking after her welfare. intercepted seven calls, i think we pushed out reports of significant intelligence on two or three, but again, nothing in the physic of the intercept and the content of the call, they're in san diego. with the 215 program, when you go through the transom with the phone number in san diego the phone number in san diego raises its hand and that's what the vice president was referring to and bart's right, there are other ways we could have done better prior to 9/11. you know, saying that you could have done it otherwise, therefore you don't want to do this is like saying all i want to do is win games close. no coach ever has that as a game plan. i'd like to have the additional capacity. >> when you say the number in san diego then would have raised his hands under the 215 program. >> yes. >> because that number was calling other places --

>> because that metadata would have recorded the connection between that u.s. number and the yemenian number. >> okay, so we've got two last questions, one here and then here. >> hello, my name is chris ayers, i'm a sophomore in the school of public affairs and my question is mainly for mr. gellman. you mentioned all the data that you get that you have to protect, make sure you're not only a target from the u.s. but outside countries. what do you do with the data that you consider to be too important to publish but then also, and do you delete that data or do you keep that and do you know what the other main receivers of this data have done? >> yes, go ahead. >> for the final question, thank you very much, both of you for getting very much into the details of this program, but to return more to the normative where we started out talking about, we've talked about how radically data collection has expanded in the last decade, and mr. gellman you pointed us to

this intercept between google centers and the bulk data collection. so since data collection has changed so much in the last ten years, should our concept of surveillance and what it means to be surveiled as an american change? so when we're talking about data going from private company to private company where we as americans have literally given up that data to a private company that is not under control of any source as publicity zens, should that still mean the same thing is when the government is surveiling us as individuals and what it means to us changed? >> all right, security. for reasons that i think will be obvious i'm not going to go into all the details, but as a general proposition, what i've done with the benefit of the expertise of some of the world's best people on this, because those have been available, is

i've kept the material physically secure, there are physical barriers to where it is. it is on computers that are encrypted with the best monitoring encryption which actually is now something that when you get to actually the frontal attack on encryption, the encryption still stands against any country in the world, and it never touches the network. it's on a computer that never has touched the network. it is, there are other things but i'm not going to go any further than that. i have actually the ironic thing is i've been asking since the very first day, june of last year, have asked the government for a more secure way to communicate with the government when i tell them what i have each time i'm going to write a story. i say i'd like to talk to you about this story. i'll tell you every single fact that i have that i'm contemplating publishing.

i want to understand whether it's correct, in the right context, whether you want to tell me anything about the damage that might be done. i've said it's crazy to have this conversation over and over in an open phone line or an e-mail and nine months later they have still not provided me with a secure means of having those conversations, which has, you know, as simple as a key but it's not bureaucratically or legally simple at all for them and so we have these odd conversations about you know, page 17 and a squiggly looking shape on the bottom left and two words that rhyme with each other, i mean, literally, two words that rhyme with each other on the page, so as to avoid putting it all out on an open phone line. there are ways that security could be improved. >> let me just end, let the record show bart retains the data, just like nsa does.

>> if you think that's the same, then we have more to talk about afterwards. >> on the last question, really, on the meaning of privacy in a digital age, right, in an age where every time anyone uses easy pass or go shopping or uses google, we're giving all sorts of information to private companies, right, voluntarily, right? so we're comfortable giving away tons of metadata and content of data as everyone who has ever gotten a pop-up ad after they've made an inquiry knows, right? so does this change how we think about these topics at all? >> yes, of course it does. i mean, privacy is the line we continually negotiate between ourselves as unique creatures of god and as social animals. and that line changes, and i

think it's rapidly changing now the digital interconnected page. that is a nightmare for security services in a democracy who are sworn to protect reasonable expectations of privacy or the definition of reasonable is a movable feast within the broader culture. >> there are two things going on here sort of legally and conceptually. in terms of privacy. one of the third party doctrine which you mentioned which is to say i voluntarily told verizon who i was calling and i voluntarily transmitted my voice over communications which cross all sorts of other companies. therefore, i have no lawful or moral reason to believe that it's confidential. privacy is relational and

situational. i might be happy to tell you something but not all these other guys and certainly not the government or certainly not some company that wants to sell me to an ad network. it's just not the way it works. the third party doctrine began as an analog pencil and paper thing where you robbed a bank and then you made a deposit in another bank and you voluntarily told this other bank you had $300,000 and therefore you waived your right to privacy on that. now you could have kept it under your bed. now the equivalent is i'm going to cut myself off entirely from civilization, because there is no way for us to function in this city or in this society or be employed or be students without using these communication methods, so the idea that if we allow google to know that we're sending a love letter to our love interest, that we're happy to have anybody in the world reading it, that'

just preposterous. the other part is reasonable expectation of privacy and it's been interpreted by the u.s. government to mean that once you know that the means exist to be intercepted or overheard, this is one element of it, then you have no reasonable expectation that it won't be happening to you, so if i tell you that we have through the wall thermal imaging then you understand that your sex life in your bedroom is not immune from vans driving around and taking pictures of you through the walls. that technology actually does exist. so you're all warned now. i mean, both of these concepts have been stretched sort of beyond all plausible shape in terms of our intuitions and there's a lot of work being done right now to try to bring that back into reason. >> well, thank you both very much for an illuminating and provocative conversation and we'll continue to surveil your further thoughts on this as they develop, so thank you very much. [ applause ]

>> montana has one member of the house of represents and is he leaving the house to run for the senate. in the race to replace him republican ryan zinke and democrat john lewis metaphor their first televised can he bait ov debate over the weekend. >> tell me how you put sanctions against a non-nation state. maybe perhaps we should write a tersely worded letter. our southern border is no longer an immigration issue it's a security and immigration threat, a nation that can build a panama canal in the 19th century certainly can build a fence in the 21st. unfortunately, it's going to call for america to lead. and you cannot control isis by air alone.

in the words of general conway, four star, former xhabd commandant of the marine corps, "there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that air operations will work," and i agree. secondly, limit our ground forces to special forces, to supply and support. we make sure our coalitions that we choose are watched and efficiently trained. and limit our involvement but make sure isis is destroyed. >> quick follow-up because no one answered how we are paying for this. we put two wars on the credit card. would you be willing to support a war tax to support as donna said a perpetual war we seem to be in? >> there's two clearly different approaches to this situation here on this issue. i'm saying, we need to be thoughtful and responsible decisions. no, a letter is not going to get the job done. but this is somebody who called for invading mexico a few weeks ago because we have an american

in jail in tijuana. that's not the kind of judgment i want representing me in congress. his instant reaction to the president's announcement that we would have air strikes was, let's send in more troops. he also said a couple years ago that when president announced that women should serve in gatt roles in this country, he said that is nearly certain to cost lives, nearly certain, women serving in combat roles. that's not the judgement we need in congress. it's a good question, jake. how much is this going to cost? it needs to be debated in congress and authorized. >> quick rebuttal, ryan, how do we pay for this? >> we pay for it by having a strong economy. a navy costs money. bridges, schools, infrastructure, that all costs money. paying for medicare, social security. we need a robust economy. john, i know you didn't serve.

but tiramisu is a marine that has been languishing in a prison in mexico for over six months. every man woman -- and i've served both and i've commanded both. everybody that serves in this country must be sure that america has their back. when america doesn't have their back, like benghazi, like mexico, what happens is, it sends a signal to every veteran fighting, you know what? america is not going to be there. i did not advocate invading mexico. i advocated the president doing his duty in doing by all available means to get the young marine back. >> more campaign 2014 debates on c-span tonight at 7:00 p.m. eastern, pennsylvania's republican governor tom corbett and his democratic challenger tom wolf meet for their final debate, live from pittsburgh at 7:00 p.m. eastern on our companion network c-span. tomorrow live on c-span at 7:30 p.m. eastern a debate from the 17th congressional district of

illinois, inchem dunt democratic congresswoman debates bob shilling. pat quinn debates republican challenger bruin browner at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> this weekend on the c-span networks, friday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on c-span, a memorial service for president reagan's press secretary james brady. on saturday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern, former secretary of state colin powell talks about world affairs and sunday evening at 8:00 on q&a author robert timberg talks about how a marine in vietnam a land mine explosion nearly killed him and changed his life and friday night at 8:00 on c-span2, author and activist ralph nader calls for an alliance between parties to take on the issues that plague

america, saturday night at 10:00 on book tv's afterward, an author on why he feels medical science should be doing more for the aging and dying and sunday just after 7:00, naomi klein on free market capitalism and its impact on climate change. friday at 8:00 on american history tv on c-span3, curator and director of the cia museum in virginia toni hyley explains the preserving of history and saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern the king georges war of the 1740s, how it helped the american colonists engage. sunday night at 8:00 p.m. president ford's congressional testimony on the nixon pardon. find our television schedule at c-sp c-span.org, call us at 202-626-3400, e-mail us at

comments@c-span.org. join the conversation, like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. "new york times" reporter james ricen was subpoenaed in 2008 to testify at the trial of a former cia officer accused of leaking information on iran's nuclear program. in august, mr. reisen spoke about freedom of the press at an event hosted by the institute for public accuracy. you'll also hear from former talk show host phil donahue. this is about an hour and ten minutes. >> good afternoon, i'm president of the national press club and i'm pleased to welcome everyone on a day that is important to press freedom of this country both regarding the james reisen case and what it happening in ferguson, missouri, where journalists are once again on the front line, courageously trying to cover news

developments in the most difficult of circumstances. late last night the national press club issued a statement expressing its deep concern about reports at least two reporters from "the washington post" and "the huffington post" who were covering the unrest in ferguson were manhandled and detained by police officers there before being released, other reports backed up by video show some television crews were hampered by authorities from their professional duties. this is all unacceptable and we urge police and other authorities in ferguson to let the journalists carry out their professional mission to report the news in an unfettered manner, to do otherwise is a violation of the freedom of press enshrined in the first amendment of our bill of rights. also unacceptable very much also unacceptable is a threat of

prison being faced by james reisen of the "new york times" bus aof his work as a professional journalist. this morning a petition signed by more than 100,000 persons was delivered to the department of justice declaring "we support james reisen because we support a free press." >> those petitioners include 20 pulitzer prize winners who declared their support for mr. reisen who is refusing to name a source for information about a bungled cia operation in iran that appeared in his 2006 book "state of war." we are pleased and honor james ricen still under threat of prison could be with us today. he was presented with the freedom of press award in 2012 for a career of reporting material the government would

prefer to keep from public view to give iran flawed nuclear weapons designs and also honored for resisting government attempts to get him to reveal his confidential sources. i am proud that the national press club through its active freedom of the press committee under the leadership of john donnelly continued to support mr. ricen as well as today's petition. i would like to introduce norman solomon, and executive director of the institute for public accuracy. he's author of a dozen books on media and public policy and recipient of the ruben salazar journalism award and george orwell award. he coordinated the petition campaign in support of james ricen. mr. solomon? [ applause ] >> thanks.

>> here we are and it's fitting because it was 60 years ago that perhaps his most well-known and well remembered tv broadcast edward r. murrow said we cannot defend freedom aboard by deserting it at home. he said that at a time when journalists stepped forward to lance, boil, fear and intimidation that gripped official washington for years and the entire country as well. that was 1954. here we are in 2014 and the events today are part of i think a very strongly accelerating effort across this country to lance a boil of fear and

intimidation. we don't talk anymore so much about a chilling effect, we talk about a freezing effect, we talk about ice cubes that congeal, we talk quite properly and accurately about an obama administration that seems determined to gut the meaning of the first amendment. as the petition that we presented this morning to the department of justice spells out, it's really the functionality of the first amendment that matters. it's a brief petition that i would like to read the entire brief text to you. to president obama and attorney general holder. your effort to compel "new york times" reporter james risen to reveal his sources is an assault

on freedom of the press. without confidentiality, journalism would be reduced to official stories, the situation antithetical to the first amendment. we urge you in the strongest terms to halt all legal action against mr. risen and to safeguard the freedom of journalists to maintain the confidentiality of their sources. well, as myron mentioned and it was 14 on monday, statements released on that day by pulitzer prize winners, since then there have been six more who have approached us to add their individual statements, all of them are posted at roots action.org where people can also find a way to sign on to petition, which is ongoing and let me briefly emphasize that the names on the petition we dropped off and that are on screen, they're not just names, they're an activist network. we know how to reach them, we do

reach them, we have everybody's e-mail addresses, and we're just getting started here. it's all about organizing at this point, in terms of mobilizing the kind of social understanding and a political pressure that's to be necessary to turn around what is truly a deteriorating, dreadful situation. the many organizations involved are only part represented here and folks that we're going to hear from today are speaking for just one of the or a few of the many groups that are involved. and i want to emphasize really that we're embarked now on something that might be unprecedented, a collision between an administration that talks good and does bad, and a mobilized citizenry that increasingly understands what's

at stake. today really marks the culmination of one phase of that growing effort and theish in nation of the next. so we're going to move ahead now with the news conference, another part of this effort to lance that boil of fear and intimidation that's been doing so much damage to journalism and to democracy in our country. i would like to now introduce greg leslie. he is legal defense at the reporters committee for freedom of the press. he's been an attorney with reporters committee since 1994 and served as a legal defense director since 2000. he supervisors the journalism hotline services. he served a lot of positions, i'll just mention a couple. member of the american bar association's fair trail and

free press task force and many other positions. before and during law school he worked as a journalist and research director for a washington business and political magazine and here he is, greg leslie. [ applause ] >> well, thank you, and i'm happy to be here to support james ricen and encourage him. at the reporters committee, we have been actively involved in the case from the start and we have been working with the department on reform of its own guidelines regarding media subpoenas, and while that certainly can feel like a sisifian task, it nonetheless is critical to engage the government on these issues,

even incremental progress is something, but -- must be addressed by enactment of a meaningful shield law that recognizes that reporters need to be independent of the judicial system. not because they're above the law, or because they want to avoid the burden of participating in the legal system, but because journalists need that independence to truly help hold the government accountable to the people. the reporters committee was founded in 1970 over this very issue, the threats to reporters from subpoenas that led to the brandsberg b. hastes case and the need for a federal law. there were over 100 journalist shield bills introduced in congress. the effort was taken up in earnest after the valerie plame incident in which "new york times" reporter judith miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to disclose her confidential sources. those shield law efforts that started then are ongoing. it takes a while to get these things through congress. in 2007, the house

overwhelmingly approved a shield bill. and when that didn't pass through the senate in 2009, a similar bill passed on a voice vote under a suspension of the rules, meaning it was so noncontroversial that a role call vote wasn't even needed. the senate hasn't passed such a bill yet, but in 2009, the judiciary committee did send a bill to the floor. it failed to win a place on the calendar as debate on something called obamacare suddenly took over the agenda, that kind of sidetracked things for a while. but the latest attempt to pass the journalist shield bill came after last summer's disclosure after a massive subpoena of the associated press's phone records to track down the leak about a cia operation in yemen and the revelation that the department of justice had successfully obtained a search warrant of a fox news reporter's g-mail account by telling the court in order to get the search war rangt that he was involved in

the crime, either as an aider, abetter, and/or coconspirator, end quote, the government came out to say, a reporter asking a government employee for information was guilty of aiding, abetting, or co-conspiring within an espionage charge. so when the action against ap and fox news came to light, president obama ordered attorney general holder to review policies of subpoenas of journalist's work. and a policy statement was released as a report to the president in july of last year. while the media representatives involved in that process fought for provisions that would make such efforts more difficult for prosecutors and at least lead to greater notifications to journalists before their third party records were subpoenaed, we knew at the same time that of course the department of justice was saying that it fully intended to subpoena reporters in the future if they really needed the evidence to prosecute a leaker.

the ap and fox news incidents also propertied more congressional action on the shield bill, and a bill was approved by the senate judiciary committee last september, so almost a year ago now. although it still awaits senate floor action. the house hasn't taken up the legislation at all yet this year and of course the current makeup of the house is not quite the same as it was in 2009, so we don't know what will happen there. but the fight over the right to keep journalists' sources confidential is literally older than the public. printer refused to disclose the authors of a tax against the colonial governor of new york in 1734 and thus was himself charged with is asad ishs libel. a century later in 1848, news of the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo ending the mexican-american war was first reported to the

american people after a newspaper reporter, john nugent of the "new york herald" was told of the still secret terms. nugent spent a month basically under house arrest in the capitol. 50 years after that in 1896, john morris, a "baltimore sun" reporter, reported that a number of elected officials were taking payoffs from gaming sources. when he refused to name his source before the grand jury, he was in prison until the grand jury's term expired. the significance of this case is that this jailing prompted baltimore journalists to push for the then unheard of legislation that would protect them from having to reveal sources identities in court, a reporter's privilege, much like the spousal privilege or the doctor-patient privilege. the statute has been amended a few times but the state has never felt the need to rescind the protection. in the centuries since then we now see 38 states and the

district of columbia enact such shield laws. it is those state shield laws that provide the real protections to journalists as right at the federal level is weaker than ever. thanks to the state efforts, we know that shield laws work. now more than ever it is time to demand that congress pass a meaningful shield law. congress must act now and acknowledge that the government's accountability to the people comes primarily through independent watch dogs, including not just journalists but whistleblowers as well. one of the greatest things those in powers can do is enact limits on their own powers, and congress must take that bold step now. thank you. [ applause ] >> next speaker is ahmed ghappour, he's professor at uc hastings law where he directs the liberty security and technology clinic.

his case work addresses constitutional issues that result in espionage around counterterrorism prosecutions. ahmed was lead counsel in the first criminal case to challenge bulk metal data collection after the snowden disclosures and he currently represents journalist barrett brown. formally he taught at the national security clinic at the university of texas school of law and he was a staff attorney at -- where he represents -- where he represented guantanamo reque detainees in their habeas corpus proceedings. [ applause ] >> good afternoon. it's really an honor to be here today, not only because i admire mr. risen's journalism but because what brings us together transcends mr. risen, it transcends the freedom of the press foundation it transcends the roster of supports who have spoken and written in

encouragement. what brings us together today is first amendment of the united states constitution and specifically the portion of that amendment guaranteeing the freedom of the press without persecution or unnecessary prosecution. it was thomas jefferson that once claimed that a democracy cannot be both ignorant and free and the framers of the constitution believed that if u.s. citizens failed to take good care to share information completely amongst themselves, they would be worse off than they had been as subjects of the british monarchy. to that end the first amendment recognizes that freedom is not just a luxury but a necessity. in order for a democratic form of government to function and continue to exist, the people must be informed. a simple mantra for a great nation and indeed the development of our free society is the result of the public debate and disclosure that journalists like james risen provide and the core of our free society is the press. and forgotten amidst a particular reporter's public

persona or front page scoops is the crux of their profession, and that is news gathering. at the heart of our freedoms and the freedom to publish the news is the freedom to gather the news. and as justice sutherland wrote in 1936, the newspapers, magazines and other journals, this country it is safe say has shed and continues to shed more light on the nation than any other instrumentality of publicly and since informed public opinion is the most poe tent of all restraints upon this government, the suppression or abridgement of the publicity afforded by a free press the conbe regarded otherwise without brave concern. so it is with grave concern that we gather today to confront a real threat to our nation's security. for who are we if we are not secure in our ability to hold the government accountable? now of course these freedoms are not without limitation, but to be clear, mr. risen broke no law gathering the news. he broke no law in proliferating

the news and publishing his articles and books. nor can the justice department make such claims. indeed, there is no law that mandates a press to obtain government approval about lawfully acquired information. there is no dispute that such a law would be unconstitutional on its face as a prior restraint of speech and would threaten to transform this great country from being a democracy to becoming a totetalitarian state. yet mr. risen delayed publication for years out of an abundance of caution until it was clear to him that the government's desire to sensor him was not a matter of national security, rather it was a matter of national embarrassment. to be clear, the government does not seek to compel information from mr. risen to put an end to an existing threat to stop a terrorist attack or even an

existing crime, an ongoing crime. the government seeks information ordered to investigate an alleged leak that occurred years ago by someone else. and quite frankly, i am puzzled as to why the doj needs to use mr. risen to make their case for them. you would think with all the resources expended on federal law enforcement, the fate of our nation would not rise and fall at the feet of a 59-year-old reporter revealing his sources. and i'm sorry to give away your age. by initiating and executing investigations that monitor e-mails, phone calls and even credit reports of journalists, the government has made it clear that it does not fear the chilling effects to our free press and does not value the dogged investigative reporting that has contributed not only to our great democracy, but to the history of mankind. either way you look at it, mr. risen and indeed all journalists are faced with a hobson's choice, either to practice a form of journalism consistent with the first amendment and risk prison or potentially

bankruptcy, or practice a form of journalism that the executive wants them to. to release only information that the executive permits them to and to tell people only those facts which the executive deems fit for public consumption. mr. risen as chosen the past consistent with the first amendment and it's not likely that many will follow in his footsteps. in the end, it's the american people that have paid and will continue to pay the price. thank you. >> our next speaker is jesselyn radack, from the government accountability project which we also known as g.a.p. which is the nation's leading whistle blower organization, it focuses specifically on secrecy, surveillance, torture and discrimination. she's been defending against the government's unprecedented war

on whistleblowers which of course has also hit journalists very hard. among her clients, she represents seven national security and intelligence community employees who have been investigated, charged or prosecuted under the espionage act for allegedly mishanding classified information including edward snowden, thomas drake and previously she served on the d.c. bar legal ethics committee and worked at the u.s. justice department for seven years, first as a trial attorney and later as a legal ethics adviser. jesselyn radack. [ applause ] >> good afternoon. anyone who doubts that the war on whistleblowers is a backdoor war on journalists should study the case of jim risen. threats to reporters are the

undercurrent in the obama administration's record setting espionage act prosecution of so-called leakers. one example where the press is implicated is when the justice department subpoenaed associated reporters phone records impacting over 100 different journalists. in the case of another whistleblower, steven kim, the justice department got a search warrant on the reporter, jim rosen, by claiming that he was a, quote, co-conspirator. in the case of my client edward snowden, the administration has made noises about reporter glen greenwald being an aider and abetter. considering the obama administration's use of the espionage act to kill speech, it should be no surprise that

threats against risen also come from an espionage act prosecution of another whistleblower, jeff sterling, and risen's honorable commitment to protect a source on the disaster government operation gone wrong. whistleblowers need the press. there are no safe and effective internal channels for most national security and intelligence whistleblowers. channels that do exist often turn whistleblowers into targets of retaliation and rarely correct the underlying wrongdoing, especially when the wrongdoing is perpetrated by senior levels of the u.s. government. the press, i would submit, also needs whistleblowers. journalists depend on whistleblowers for information in the public interest.

without whistleblowers, journalists would struggle to unpack government and corporate spin without differing perspectives or in many cases documentary evidence. as a whistleblower attorney, there are a small but essential handful of reporters i feel confident will accurately report information and protect their sources. jim risen is one of them. and if he is jailed, or forced to pay harsh daily fines, the pool of reporters who know whistleblowers are essential for accurate reporting will become even smaller. the threats to jim risen are an attack on the entire first amendment. most prominently, the right to a free press, but also the right to speak and associate with whistleblowers and reporters. government surveillance of reporters, subpoenaing of reporters to testify against

their own sources, and threatening them with contempt of court create a freezing atmosphere where neither whistleblowers nor reporters are safe to hold the government accountable and keep the public informed. committing journalism is not a crime. the notion that it is, is a dangerous trend we should deprive of oxygen. it demands that the government withdraw the subpoena of reporter jim risen immediately. thank you. >> our next speaker courtney radsh is a journalist, researcher and free expression advocate who writes and speaks often on the intersection of media and technology and human rights with an emphasis on the middle east. she's advocacy director currently at the committee to protect journalists, where

she's leading the right to report in the digital age campaign aimed at ending surveillance and harassment of journalists. prior to joining cpj, she was at unesco where she created the freedom of expression strategy in the arab region. dr. radsh also previously managed the global freedom of expression campaign at freedom house. and she's also worked for al arabiya, the daily star in lebanon and also the "new york times." courtney radsh. [ applause ] >> thank you. the committee to protect journalists is seriously concerned about the actions taken by the department of justice and the ongoing efforts to subpoena jim, which could have a chilling effect on the u.s. media and journalists if it has not indeed already has that impact. cpj was founded in 1981 by a group of u.s. correspondents who realized they could not ignore

the plight of colleagues abroad whose reporting put them at risk on a daily basis. since then cpj has promoted press freedom worldwide and defended the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal. last year we decided that the crackdown on leak investigations and revelations about the extent of surveillance in a post-9/11 world necessitated us to look inward and weigh in on the threats to press freedom in the united states and this is why we are here today in support of jim. as a former colleague of jim's at the "new york times," i'm also personally happy to be here in solidarity with his efforts to protect his confidential sources and the integrity of the journalistic practice. the obama administration has pursued eight prosecutions of leakers under the espionage act. that's more than twice the total number of such prosecutions since the law was enacted than any other administration all combined and the subpoena

requiring jim's testimony as part of the broader crackdown on leaks and whistleblowers as you've heard, a cpj special report published last october concluded that the obama administration's revelations about broad surveillance programs and moves to stem the routine disclosure of information to the press shows that the president has fallen far short of his campaign promise to head the most open government in u.s. history. several journalists interviewed for the report told cpj that leak investigations and surveillance revelations had made government sources fearful to talk about sensitive information, and prosecutions such as those of jim have had a roh foundly detrimental impact on the practice of journalism and as you heard on the first amendment. publicly speculating about bringing charges of espionage or prosecutions more generally of

journalists for doing their job serves to intimidate not only the individual journalist, but journalistsmore broadly. journalists more broadly, and has a serious chilling effect on the press. this is likely to be even stronger among journalists who do not have the backing and protection of a major media organization with legal resources, charges about resources. revelations about targeting of surveillance and hacking of journalists at media outlets is also problematic. you heard those described earlier. and having read jim's affidavit explaining why he cannot testify and detailing the extent of government harassment and surveillance of his electronic communications, it is clear that if he is forced to testify, he would likely put at risk the confidentiality of his source. furthermore, these type of aggressive prosecutions send a dangerous signal to governments elsewhere that would seek to use national security and anti-state charges as a cover for clamping down on journalists and press freedom.

according to cpj research, nearly 60% of imprisoned journalists worldwide are imprisoned on anti-state charges, such as subversion or terrorism. that is far higher than any other type of charge such as defamation or insult, and it is a favorite of repressive regimes who see little value in a free press. furthermore, undermining the principle of source protection and the idea that journalists like doctors and others have the right to keep sources confidential has implications for the robust practice of journalism. indeed in 2012, the justice department argued that reporters privilege should not apply in national security cases and compared journalists to someone receiving drugs from a dealer. preventing journalists from being able to promise confidentiality to their sources undermines the key aspect of journalism that is central to so

much reporting on issues that are central to the public interests like national security, like anti-terrorism and are central to holding government accountable and to the democratic process. the u.s. government's ongoing legal pursuit of jim sends a terrifying message to the 124 journalists jailed worldwide on anti-state charges and detracts from its normative moral power abroad. i don't think that the united states wants to join cuba in becoming the only other country in the western hemisphere to have an imprisoned journalist. and that's what's at risk here. it is much harder for the u.s. to be taken seriously when it advocates for press freedom and journalistic rights abroad when they are abridged at home. governments have many obligations, to enforce the law, to protect citizens, to prevent attacks, but they also have an obligation toup hold the skongs

obligation to uphold the society upon which it's built and to ensure the principles upon which this society is built and to ensure the functioning of the democratic process in which the press plays a central role. the committee to protect journalists calls on the united states department of justice to withdraw a subpoena seeking to force journalists james risen to give testimony that would reveal a confidential source. [ applause ] >> our next speaker, delphi delphine halgad has worked as the director of the washington office for reporters without borders since 2011. she runs the u.s. activities for the organization and advocates for journalists, bloggers and media rights worldwide. acting as reporters without borders spokesperson in the u.s., she appears regularly in american and overseas media, and she lectures at conferences at u.s. universities about press

freedom violation issues. she previously served as press atta attache at the french embassy in the united states. she's working as an economic correspondent for a range of french media focusing mainly on macroeconomic issues. dehine halgand. [ applause ] >> thank you, norman, thank you to root action for all the work you did to put this mobilization coming together and thank you to all of you for being here today. i will be short as a lot has already been said and i'm as looking forward as you are to hearing jim risen. so the united states is ranked at the 46th position in the reporters without borders 2014 word press freedom index.

the word press freedom index that reporters without borders has published every year since 2002 measure the level of freedom of information in 180 countries, it reflects the degree of freedom that journalists, news organizations and bloggers enjoy in each jou organization and bloggers enjoy in each country. one explanation for the united states to be around the 46th position, the whistleblower is the enemy. eight alleged whistleblowers have been -- which is the highest number. there is no true freedom of information, no true freedom of the press without protection of journalist sources. leaks are the live blood of investigative journalists. given that narrowly all information related to national security is classified in this country. it is then safe to say that this

crackdown against whistleblower is designed to restrict all but officially approved version of events. this highlights the need in the u.s. which could protect journalist sources at the federal level. for the moments, the senate project supported by the baum administration still has major flaws. remain the year of the scandal, the department of justice that it has seized the news agency phone records. 2013 will be remembered as the year where the whistleblower was condemned to 35 years in prison. 2013 will also be remembered for the revolution of edward snowden who exposed the nsa

surveillance. and will 2014 be remembered as the year when he was sent to jail for doing his job? i hope not. and we hope not. reporters without borders is deeply worried by the continuing efforts taken by the department of justice to force to testify against his confidential source. and reporters without borders calls to halt all legal action. reporters without borders is the largest press freedom organization in the world. with almost 30 years of experience. thanks to its unique global network of 150 correspondents investigative in 130 countries, 12 national offices and at the u.n., reporters without borders is able to have a global impact by gathering and providing on the ground intelligence and defending and assisting news providers all around the world.

and today, we are here to defend, to defend the first amendment. freedom of the press is the most important freedom. the freedom to all of us to verify the existence of all other freedom. thank you. >> i should mention that this news conference is being hosted by rootsaction.org and co-hosted by the information accuracy. there are more than a dozen organizations with logos on the petition that's online. i hope you'll take a look at that constellation of groups and get in touch with them and you can, again, look at that petition at rootsaction.org. our next speaker pioneered the audience participation talk format on television as hosted of the donahue show for 29 years.

phil donahue has 20 emmy awards, nine as hosts and 11 for the show. as well as the peabody award, as well as the president's award from the national women's political caucus and the media person of the year award from the gay and lesbian alliance. world leaders and news makers. there's so much to say, and i'll be very brief. but i certainly personally vividly remember as millions of people do how in 1985, he introduced the satellite space bridge telecast between the united states and the soviet union in the midst of a lot of the very cold part of the cold war. and then brought his talk show to russia for a week of television broadcasts. phil donahue was the first western journalist to visit after the nuclear power accident there. in 2006, phil coproduced and

codirected the documentary "body of war" the very powerful journalistic cinematic focus on one young iraq war veteran left in a wheelchair by enemy fire. and the parallel process of machinations on capitol hill. phil donahue. nations on capitol hill. phil donahue. >> thank you, norman and congratulations for assembling this very important event. i was a journalist, i was a journalist first for wabj in adrian, michigan, the proverbial 250 watt radio station. and i wondered what ever happened to wabj, so i googled, wabj and there it was, the washington association of black journalists. wabj is gone now, but it's a place where i learned a lot about journalism.

i was 21 years old, i must have looked 12. i had a tape recorder with literally vacuum tubes. and i could stop the mayor in his tracks. i covered city hall, i covered the first -- my first murder. i played ball with the cops so i would cultivate my sources. and i began to really understand what noble, noble pursuit journalism is. and now, here i am at the press club with a lot of the people who are really -- if they were all men, they'd be the sons my mother wanted to have. i am very flattered to have norman ask me to make an introduction of james. and i have monitored my talk show meter now, which he's saying all right, all right now, get off, get off.

by i asked the patience of the good people at the press club for this just one observation. every major metropolitan newspaper in this country supported the invasion of iraq. jonathan lande are exceptions, but their own papers didn't. many of their own papers didn't publish their work. they're saying, wait a minute, where's the evidence? wmd? where? this is what you get with corporate media. when i was a reporter in adrian, michigan, i didn't have to take a test. i just said i was a reporter. and i was. i didn't have to pee in a bottle. all you had to do was get out there. that's the way we want it. that way you have more people getting the news. that way it's more likely that somewhere in the collective middle of this large crowd will be found the truth.

today, that collective middle is occupied by five multinational companies much more interested in the price of their stock than they are in funding investigative journalists, which, by the way -- who by the way are not necessarily cost effective, as we know. investigative journalism can lead you down a rabbit hole with nothing to publish when you're finished. and that makes what james risen has done all the more important. at a time when a journal -- mainstream media has a lot on its mind and a lot to be ashamed of. the president said during the iraq build-up, you can't take pictures of the coffin. and the whole media said, okay. we aren't biting back. and if we ever needed to bite back, it's now. with the bill of rights being eroded, a fundamental values of our founders.

we have no habeas. we have people in cages 15 years, no nothing, no phone calls, red cross, you know, miranda, schmiranda, don't make me laugh. and the american people are standing mute. and how much bite than bark have we heard? from our media as the bill of rights and the fundamentals of this nation are eroding before our very eyes. into this environment comes james. we think we should put him on a pedestal and eric holder and apparently the president believe he should be put in jail. what's wrong with this picture? and as for that reason we assemble here today hoping that the 20 pulitzer prize winners who have lent their names to this will be joined by thousands

and thousands of other americans who agree that we've sent thousands and thousands of thousands of people to die for the right of a free press and james risen is one of the people who took advantage of that right, who doesn't want it to die. as we stand here mute as people in power don't want to be embarrassed and begin to listen on your phone and mine. now is the time for more of the kind of journalism that james risen is doing. and it's for that reason i have this once in a lifetime opportunity. a great american, a patriot james risen. >> wow. i don't know if i can live up to that