disturbed me. there was a group of people that were easy to vilify. the left did not like them because they were clinging to guns and religion and the right did not like them because they were not clinging to a religion that they recognized and the individual was probably a polygamist at waco, but that didn't justify what i saw. i saw tanks running over children's go-karts and dozens of people dying in a fire. another point they want to make is that in republican primaries across the country, most of them are either red or blue and they end up being a race to the right and a race to the left.

in my case it's a republican distri district. fortunately thanks to some of the efforts in this room, and thanks to the efforts of rand paul and another pieces of legislation. i campaign on that. it was obviously, it worked and i'm here. extremely frustrating. it was stripped behind closed doors from the appropriations bill bills there was nothing left of

it. that was very frustrating to see. i'll get into that little bit. let me describe my colleagues and myself as well. when i came to congress, i'm an engineer. i thought if you had all of the facts on your side you could win the day. and your case would be a closed case. open shut. what i discovered is that we're all -- we're not voting algorithms. we're soft mammals that go there and press buttons and we possess all of the faults that the general population possesses. no additional intelligence to speak of and a greater degree of humorous. some people think they got a chip that instructs them on how to know everything better than their congressman. in fact when it first got to congress, one told me that he was advised by an elder congressman when he got there

that i always vote the way my constituents would have me vote. unless of course i know something ability this legislation that they don't, which is always the case. and they use that mentality to their advantage. i mean the leadership which opposes any reform to the intelligence community's activities. we were actually working on that in the house, it had just been debated in the house. it has just passed when the snowden revelations came out. we can point back and say see, this is what we're talking about. but when they did it, it was

interesting. from the cray and nsa. and i have a lot of nerd pride so i can call people geeks. he was sitting there and doing a demonstration of how the russians could hack into your computer. he is actually hacking into the computer he was typing on. this was a novel thing i was doing. he was down at the root level. he could see what was going on in the windows and his program crashed.

nobody realizes your program crashed in this room. you could just fake this whole thing. they convinced everybody in that room that now they knew something nobody else knew. it is really the leader. he is the person that people go to in the house when they want to know how -- what the legislation really does. because he has an excellent staff and he himself pours through these bills to try to stop the bulk collection of all of your metadata. it is probably more dangerous than the actual content.

when they can realize how they can reign that in. let me tell you why this was an amendment to the appropriations bill. do not reform the intelligence community's activities. they just don't want to do it. the committee and leadership structure, they have so much power. we can introduce we're up in the hr up to 5600. 500 to 600 bills of introducing. those of us like justin and i that are trying to get legislation to the floor, we have to look for opportunities.

they are few and far between. this thing rotated. it was called a zotrope. it had little slits in it. if you look they occasionally pass through that drum. one of those opportunities is in the form of a limitation amendment. congress has the power of the purse. merely to keep their leadership because it would be a revote if they didn't.

you can write it down and submit it to the clerk on any appropriations bill. but it's very constrained. you can only limit how the money was spent. exit's very hard to achieve what we want to achieve. he caught the attention of the world. he caught the attention of the leadership. he had the world baring down on him for his efforts one of our colleagues had him in the media al qaeda's best friend. this is what you run up against.

and yet we almost got half of the house of representatives to go against all of the leadership on both parties and all of the committee chairman and ranking members.

and the same reason people watch nascar is for the wrecks. if you try to convince your constituents you're pro liberty and you're not, you're going to have a wreck. this presented an opportunity. they came back and said we have got to do something. we have the freedom act. he was the original author of the pariot act and he feels like

he was, you know, more or less misled when he passed the pariot act. it started out as a great bill and everybody wanted to do something because they were getting beat up back home. which is tremendous. and it had great reforms in there. closed the back door loopholes. stopped the bulk collection of meta data. it didn't die their hands at all. it was a great bill. and this gets me another point where it goes by and you have an opportunity. a great bill on its own is not

going to make it to the floor of the house. another opportunity is to attach it to something that must pass. so the pariot act is going to -- provisions of it are going to expire. so this was attached reluctantly it was attached to the reauthorization of those pariot acts. but here is what happened. it was gutted. and then to add intult to injury after it came out of committee and some of us were saying is it worth passing or is it not worth passing. as long as we're moving in the right direction.

we sort of waited on the sidelines. we didn't condemn it yet. but when it came out of committee, they took it to six different intelligence organizations in this government and it got rewritten again. and there was no opportunity to offer amendments to it. so you know it's changed a lot if a co-sponsor won't vote for the bill. now the primary sponsor of bill s but to show you how bad it was, all of the people that voted against the amendment, the chair, the intelligence committee, the judiciary, the

majority leader, the minority leader, they all voted for the freedom act. and it passed the house and then recently there was activity in the senate. somebody else will have to talk about that. i didn't track exactly the changes that happened to it. i'm not sure if i would or would not have voted for the senate bill. it was a tough call. that gets us to our bill and amendment. now we're a full year after the snowden revelation and nothing has been done. and to describe the sort of mountain that you face when you try to reform the nsa or any of the i intelligence activities from a congress, i need to tell you a story or a joke you went

into the ibm store and they were on pedestals and you would check out this processor. it's got 512 k of ram and they would, you know, the salesmen would tell you all the wonderful things that this computer could do for your business. so at the time there was a joke what's the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman. does anybody know the difference? 2 computer salesman doesn't know when he's lying to you. we have no shortage of teams. some of them will lie to you

because they know they're lying to you and some of them probably a majority of them don't know what's in the bill. they just know it's their job to get you to vote for or against it. i wanted to read to you the advisement for the majority. fyi, deer colleague, and this is sent by on behalf of the permanent selection committee and house appropriation sub committee on defense. syria has become a vortex of jihadist state control has

collapsed in libya. released from began tan mow emboldening the terrorist. the homeland remains a prime aspiration and target. tracking the terrorists with direct connections to u.s. homeland. the usa freedom act which expressly prohibits the government from using communications. a similar amendment to the one offered tonight was defeated after a full debate.

with the tools it needs to keep america safe. now is not the time to stop intercepting communications of known terrorists. that's the letter that my leadership sent to every member of congress about this. that's the ones responsible for reading the bill and informing their congressman of what's in the bill. here's the sentence that the whip put out. there's like ten amendments. so they got one sentence here. prohibits funds from being used to fully exploit foreign

intelligence collected. so, prohipts us from catching terrorists. all our amendment did was require them to have probable cause and a search warrant. there was a second part which would prohibit the u.s. government from forcing our companies to put back doors in their products the government can make companies brain damage their products and they can do that in hardware and soft wear. in spite of this whip effort to keep everybody off of this bill,

we -- it passed 293-123. i think the reason it passed is that people had really worked on that

provision to keep the government there forcing companies to put the back doors in their product. so that passed. that was an elimination amendment which, by all right, should have been in this omnibus that got passed last night. but it got stripped behind closed doors and never showed up in the final bill, which is very unfortunate. i will have some good news for you, at some point, in this speech, i guess. so that brings us to where we are right now. which is what are we going to do in the next congress. let me bring you the good news. inside of congress, we have all of these caucus. the ready mix caucus, the diabetes caucus, there's a caucus for everything. and your constituents are always calling you up, why right-hand turn you on this caucus?

don't you care about my issue? i want to tell them, these caucuses never meet. they don't do anything. i don't tell them that. i just do what they want me to do. but there is one caucus that meets twice a month throughout the year when we are in congress, and that's the liberty caucus. this was started by congressman ron paul. it's an invitation-only caucus. you can't join to brandish your ceil den shls. we have about 36 people invited and we regularly have 24 that show up to this, and this is every other week while we're in session. and it's our opportunity to

inform or at least debate what should be in the amendments. and the good news is -- and we invite democrats, too. it's not just a republican thing. depending on the sitwiegs euati situation, like on cispa,we invited democrats to those meetings. it's a great thing. but it's going to get better. i think we picked up a lot of people who are informed on civil liberties. i think we're going to grow by at least ten people. i haven't met with the democrat freshman yet. and i think we're going to gain members there. if you look at how these votes break down, whether it's the amash amendment or co-sponsors

to the real freedom act, it doesn't break down republican or democrat. there's an aisle in the middle of congress. it does not break down that way. it more often breaks down on how long have you been in congress. how recently did you get there. and the ones who arrived more recently tend to be more in tune with this issue and more representative of the will of the people. the other bit of good news is that cispa stalled in its support for -- i'm sure there were a lot of people who voted for it in the house. that after the snowden reflat n revelations came out, wished they hadn't voted for cispa. it did stall in the senate. but i think it's going to be hard to get that thing moving again because of all of the new information that we have. finally, the patriot act is going to expire.

what it means is there also an opportunity to get some reform. that's the good news. those are the opportunities. and, in closing, i'd tell a quick story about my daughter. i have four children, there are 18, 16, 14 and 10. aened t and the youngest one, i think, is the biggest civil libertarian one in the group. she was nine when i had a staffer team on my farm. i brought all 15 members of my staff to my farm to spend a couple of days. my wife said where in the heck are they all going to sleep? and i said well, we'll kick the kids out of their bedrooms, most of them have bunk beds and the kids can sleep on the floor in the living room.

my nine-year-old daughter was waiting in the shadows and comes out of the shadows and says, "dad, are you really going to make me sleep on the floor just so those people from washington, d.c. can visit you?" . i said 00 e honey, it will be just like camping. she put her hand on her hip and said, "dad, what you're telling me is you're letting government get in my bedroom." and that's not even a talking point i've used in my e any of my campaigns. [ laughter ] >> she's definitely civil libertarian. i don't know if i have a minute or two to take questions. do we have some time? >> i think we have some time. there are audience questions? i think we have time for that before our first panel.

>> i like to play a parlor game when we have people over to my house. i ask my attendees, edward snowden, hero or zero? what do you think your constituents would answer to that question? >> first of all, when i'm asked that question, i think it's sort of a distraction. i will tell you what i think. but i think it's a distraction. they try to create animosity toward him to try to down play the issue. regardless of what you think about him or how he did it, it doesn't ameliorate the fact that we're all being spied on. and something needs to be done about that. i can tell you they think he's a trader. i can tell you they would love

to try him for treason and they're infur infur rated. my own opinion, i think he did tremendous service to this country by getting this information out. i will also tell you, this isn't part of the good news, but there's more to know. it wasn't a complete release of everything that we did wrong. i know as much that disturbed me just as much as the rovelation from him. so i think he's done a great service to the country.

>> your amendment would have required a warnt -- by the way, i'm david eisenburg from koskoff, connecticut. your bill would have required warrants and stuff like that before certain surveillance acts took place. but we also know there's a parallel construction committee going only in the more civilian-oriented law enforcement organizations. would your amendment have stop ed parallel construction? and, more genuinely, can you speak to the i shall shoe of parallel construction. >> absolutely. let motel you just a little bit more about the amendmented. the u.s. government collects tons of data, i mean, terabytes

of data under the presumption that it might have foreign communications in that. this amendment would not stop them from collecting the hay stack of data. but what we don't want them to do for civilian purposes, like the f.b.i. or the irs, to g into that data and start mining it for u.s. persons stuff that has nothing do cowith terrorists. or if they want to do it, they've got to have a warnt and probable cause. you can't go on fishing expeditions in there. if we could stop them from doing that, then it would somewhat obviate the need for construction. they're doing parallel construction because they found out something in an unconstitutional way. then they're trying to construct a constitutional way -- like a traffic stop, for instance. and just to be honest with you, i think a lot -- some

congressm congressmen, maybe not a lot of them, but some congressmen are afraid of this issue because they may end up in a parallel construction situation where the intelligence community knows something and they leak it to the f.b.i. who pulls over a congressman for one reason or another. but i'm very troubled by parallel construction. i think its's wrong. i think the best -- the way that i could stop it is to keep them from having access to that information unconstitutionally. thank you. >> thank you so much, congressman.

[ applause ] >> now, more from that cato institute. both the house and senate have held numerous hearings on the agency's collection of america's phone records. in november, the senate moved forward not to have legislation to collect the phone day e data. this is 1:15. so our assurance are being used

for legitimate purposes depends on our confidence in the mechanisms of oversiet that are there place to use these often extraordinarily secret programs and tools. so, of course, the vital question there is high reliable and effective can that oversite be? do you need greater transparency, not just to internal overseres but to the public to allow people to be confident that these great authorities are being used in a responsible fashion. again, because everyone has a biography packet, i won't spend too much time. i will elapse -- i think is joining us on her final day in journalism? this is her final act of journalism. i know it will be up to her extraordinarily high standard.

shobhan gorman. >> thank you for having me. noting the ratest effort to impose limits on the surveillance on the senate floor last month. and that was focusing on the mass collection of business records. >> where are we in monitoring these programs that continue

those we do and don't know about. one interesting thing that i've noted, one tangible change is turning nsa surveillance on itself with its sort of insider threat program, given that we haven't seen the congressional action that i think some were expecteding. i think it's a great time to take stock of the current oversighted apparatus. you have their bios, i'll keep it short. sharn flank lynn, reinvigorated

and given a rather clear role in the wake of the disclosures. prior to joining the board, she served for agt years of the constitution project, which is a non-profit legal watchdog group.

so, with that, i'd like to just kick off with some questions and we'll kind of go from there. the first, and i think most obvious is the current oversight structure. maybe we can get bob and curt to initially weigh in and then we'll go from there. >> so, i mean, it's worth probably just setting out the nature of the problem, which is that of necessity, you have to conduct intelligence acts in secret. you'll save a lot of money because you won't need to have an intelligence community.

and so the current over sight structure was set up after the church and pike committees. and the sort of trade-off that was made, there would be intelligence committees established in both houses of congress that are, by enlarge, with some exceptions, much more nonpartisan or bipartisan than other committees. and there's a statutory obamaly gragsz e gargs to keep the committees currently informed of all intelligence activities. i can't speak for anything of my time, which began with the obama administration. but we have a pret tell religiously adhered to that. we are up there hundreds of times a year it is worth noting that the surveillance activities that have been leaked.

there's also a whole aspect within the executive branch that ininspectors general, a under the influence of general council when you're talking about fisa activities. i think have dispelled as just a rubber stamp. they are searching and serious in the way they approach the legal issues. i guess, shobhan, i would quarrel with you because that's something that was entrained before snoweden. i think the attitude towards disclosure to the public.

i've said this before, and my boss, sidney and i have said it, the leadership in the intelligence community. we found a way to disclose to the public in advance that we disposed in a less sensational matter. it would have been much less con tro verse yal in the washington post. and i think we've taken that lesson to heart. there has been a degree of disclosure about our activities. not only what's been leaked, but what's been voluntarily initiated and is absolutely unprecedented. we've got an on going program to try to declassify things. i think there's some difficult lines to draw in e.

in general, i think we can be much more transparent about the legal authorities, the processes and the oversielgts then what we can about what we're actually doing. what we're actually doing is what needs to be protected. and i will tell you that it is indisputable of what has been damaged from that he has leaks. there have been communications that we're not used to collecting. what the long term impact is, it's too soon to tell. i think there's a genuine recognition that we feed to continue going forward to be more transparent. if we don't have the trust of the people in the long run, we won't be able to do our job. >> would you anticipate going forward that there will be sort of voluntary disclosures about programs that right-hand turn already known? so far what we've seen have been the legal justifications for the things that have been disclosed.

>> and do you think the kusht oversight is adequate? >> i think there's a difference between the adequacy of the orr sight process and concerns about the result. as i said, the intelligence committees and the judiciary and the executive branch all knew about these programs. the complaint isn't adequate oversight. since the oversight committees

have arrived at, what does that suggest. >> well, if you asked me about oversight, compared with 30 years ago, i would tell you it's virtually nonexist tent. i, as a fairly young analyst, remember going down to capital hill with very sex sensitive documents in our e my hand, unreported data. we had a relationship of what was much more in the nature of checks and balances.

the committees themselves, parts of them are not important to that process. so we've actually, since 9/11, constrained the oversight process from what it used to be under the guise that, well, the more people you tell about something, the more likely it's going to get out. that is true. it's a true assertion. but we have a democracy to uphold. and if we constrain knowledge to few people, we lose the very knowledge and capability to uphold the principles and capability that we stand for. i don't think surveillance is being checked upon in a truly modified way.

what's happened to the oversight committees? it can give approval to nsa probable cause queries within seconds, based on pre-established criteria eon. the thing about data, especially data that's generated by machines, especially when you use your e-z pass, you use your

acount, your name, your billing address, your location, et cetera. all automatically. and you're going through your world, whether it's your smart phone or your credit card, you're doing this hundreds of times a day, maybe. and the issue is, nsa can use all of that to establish a profile. that's a good thing. but why do you have to do it to hundreds of millions of innocent people. that's the problem. we need to observe the three legs of the government, the legislative process, the judiciary, as it was always intended. we need to get away from that.

a lot that's limited to the leadership of the committees. i can only speak to the 5 1/2 years i've been on the job. we did not brief the entire committee that that operation was going to be happening. >> i think it either has it or can get it. but i don't think that's the problem. i think the oversight process is broken in significant ways. and i think we can see it in the response to the snowden disclosures.

the committees are supposed to serve as a proxy for congress and the public as a whole. they are given access to the things that the rest of us are not allowed to see. but when snowden tipped that system over and made that information available to a broader cross section of congress and the public. the response shows that the committees are not serving as a proxy. there is a fire storm of opposition, concern, out rage, efforts to change the policy. it's true, as shobhan said as the legislative attempt to change failed, but it failed because we no longer lived in a system where majority rules.

they only got 58 votes out of a hundred. we need a supermajority now to change policy, it seems. but, at any rate, the point is that the oversight committees are not accurately representing the full spectrum either of c congressional or of public opinion. i just want to say it's especially true on the conservative side. there are zero members on the oversight committee. i think that shows -- >> that's not right. there are members of the house committee that are quite on the libertarian side. i've been interrogated by them. i prefer not to identify my source. but i've been interrogated by them, i can assure you.

>> sharon, you've had a change e chance to take a look at this. how do you rate the mechanisms? >> the liberties oversight board is the new kid on the block in the oversighted arena. shobhan mentioned in her opening that we're newly-invigorated. >> i almost said re-invigorated and i said no, invigorated. >> yeah u we didn't exist. it only came into existence at all in the fall of 2012 when r our -- four of our board members are confirmed. our chairman wasn't confirmed and he started on the job four days before the snowden leaks hit the press. four days before, it was immediately thrown into this arena and spent its first year of having five board members

with just a couple of us as staff looking at the section 215 telephone records program as well as section 702 and providing a fresh, independent look at those programs. we hope that will continue to be a productive role and a part of the oversight arena. we are situated differently than the intelligence committees in congress as part of the executive branch. so some of these conversations can be easier in terms of the process privileges.

we found they were all very responsive to our requests. we had full access to the programs. the majority of the board found that that program was not properly authorized by the section 215 statute and recommended ending the program. that program was within the statutory office. the majority viewed it was not effective to justify the program, different conclusion with regard to the section 702 program where the board did find it was an effect ef program. so we look forward to moving as

an important part of this oversight realm. as you rate the system that you were a part of, how would you engage the adequacy of the current system? >> i don't know that we're in the place overall. it's the intelligence community. it has a lot of operations. i wonder if you could guide us through your sense of role in

transparency in the oversight process. >> well, right now, transparency is a significant barrier to effective oversight. it really impedes communications. between the oversight bodies and the public and the intelligence community and the public. i mean, a few examples. a lot of criticism in the senate and intelligence committee on c.i.a. interrogation, that they were provided inadequate, incomplete, incorrect information. that's not the way things were supposed to work. the department of justice inspector general sent several reports in 2013 and they were still not available.

i would say, i think bob said a very important thing that he and the d.n.i. have said before, that, in retrospect we would all have been better off. it's clearly going to meet the criteria for classification. the problem is, we have to have lots of information that is, "properly" classified.

but that should be public chlts nobody has defined a good mechanism for disentangling from that which should never theless be in the public domain. and i think that is the major task that remains to be undertaken in secrecy reform. >> i'd go further than that. i'd say there's no enforcement mechanism for proper classification. >> i want to pick up on the thing that steve was articulating there. the board, i think, had a very positive experience in that regard.

>> at this point, a lot of programs where the government is target i targeting abroad based on the state of public disclosures and leaks. and so i think a very important role that the board completes and we then sought public interest declassification. we reached out, as we're required to do, were the custodians of this classified information.

we were able to engage a very productive dialogue. we were able to talk through what the board's request was.

there's a six page narrative, describing how the program operates. it's one of a hundred e dread newly declassified facts. they will be much more sensitive. it will be much more classified that could not be legitimately released. but, hopefully. it is a model that, in some sense, can be declassified. just one other point while i still have the floor. the board's enabling statute includes that we are supposed to inform the pub lick on our

reports to the greatest extent consistent with the protection of classified information. so we have that affirmative obligation to try to make our reports public. sort of really any through in a way that that isn't always necessarily happening. >> i actually agree, surprisingly, with most of what steve said. there is a provision in which both steve and sharon overted to which provides that information can be declassified based on the determination that the public interest in disclosure out weighs the need for secrecy. and that's the basis on which the dni ordered the declassification of the portion of the senate intelligence committee.

the intensive process was just about a month. >> declassification is not easy. it is very resource intensive. and we don't have a lot of resources to devote to it. to a great extent, there are thousands of lauts pending. we have judicial deadlines. it makes it hard to step back and say what do we think as a matter of what good governmental public interest what resources ought to be released.

i would love to step back and say okay. >> i think that when information, you know, leaving aside whern something is not classified, say something is classified for laws of embarrassment, which if terms of the order forbids. there is some tayloring. i think it's appropriately classified? if it was, then you can

appropriate classify evidence of crimes. >> there's a difference between classifying something for the purpose of illegal activity and classifying something for security interest that happens to involve activity. there is no question that there's stuff that's classified that could be embarrassing. but i have not seen it. gld when you classify something at nsa, because it's being reviewed for intelligence purpose, it's a pretty simple process, believe it or not. your typical analyst learns the rules of the game.

the rules are pretty general if anything is leaked. or gets out in the public. so maybe one or two people are involved in classifying a report for classifying nsa. but to declassify it is almost an act of god. it's difficult. >> god or a whole lot of his minnons. >> right. it's very, very difficult. two things happened last night that hopefully all of you noticed. in the heat of the moment to pass an omnibus bill. one new bit of legislation described in something for section 309 was introduced into the legislation.

it takes away due process. the other thing that happened was that the constraints that congress had already put into place, to constrain nsa, were conveniently snatched out in the moments before vote. i just don't know what provision you're talking about. i can talk about section 309, which is not part of the appropriations bill. it's in the intelligence authorization bill. and it absolutely does not do

what people have said it does. it does not give any authority to the nsa to do anything. what it does, in fact, is impose restrictions on the surveillance. what it says is when you collect information about americans, regardless of the thoerty you collected under, whether it's under fiza or any other authorities, you must limit the retention of information to those people. i don't know why people are misleading this. >> if i'm referring to the correct position, i think it imposes min mization including 12333. that can be interpreted as ratifying or it can be interpreted as imposing stabd ard standards where there are none.

this simply says if you do what you're already doing, you have to have restrictions on it. >> and my primary point is, this will be debated, no doubt, by wiser people than myself. why wait until the last moment in the heat of an omnibus spending bill to do this kind of thing? this was debated and then passed through. >> i wanted to go back to the earlier discussion about declassification. going forward, now that we've

had some of the conversation about the importance of transparency and a better understanding of where those lines need to be drawn, that when the fisa court decides when a case involving a legal issue or a novel application of technology, that the judges can draft an opinion with an eye toward there being a declassified version and they've already started to do this. if they sort of think, going forward, this is something that could be easily blacked out, that that will facilitate that process so that it will be much easier to proactively declassify those kinds of documents. >> i would just add that the intelligence authorization bill that also includes a provision calling on the d.n.i. to provide

recommendations on how the declassification process could be improved. >> right. >> more money, more people. >> well, that's one answer. but i think there has to be a better answer than that. i think, you know, if you follow the demand, there's a new issue every day. the day before, there was a resolution introduced by senator udall saying we want to see the records of c.i.a. covert action in indonesia in the mid '60s, associated with the coup there.

it needs to be upgraded and improved. >> and i'm saying in all seriousness, i would welcome the opportunity to sit down with you and welcome your thoughts. >> i'll tell you that -- i think the crucial step is to take the issue is to take it outside of the originating office. if i ask the c.i.a. document, they are protective. they're looking out for their

own interests, understandably. if it's given to a body that has a broader cross section of interest. even if i'm not -- i'm not saying i should be on it. but i'm saying somebody who has a broader division, a broader understanding of what the national interest might justify. then you're likely to get a different result. and i think that would be a useful step for requests of a certain magnitude or public interest. >> sorry? >> in the executive order, it gives a lot of the authority to the original classification authority. that's who gets delegated to make the decisions.

there is expertise, but there is also the highest possibility of interest. so broadening it is part of that reason. >> i wanted to circle back a little bit to a point that bob and steve have hit on when you were talking about the kind of briefings to congress and how sort of that processed those. and i was wondering if catherine and bob could sort of help us understand and frame the issue here. it comes to an understanding and then it sort of tapers off from there. and there is some sense that on certain programs, congressional staff are not braught in until later on.

oftentimes, they have the greatest expertise in helping lawmaker who is have responsibility for many things, you know, to better understand the particulars of an issue, especially technical ones. so, maybe, catherine, if you can talk about, you know, what the issues are there. and this is sort of the on the assumption that yes, the intelligence committees, you know, by enlarge, will get a fair amount of information, specifically the lawmakers. but the staff of the intelligence committees and, you know, some other committees also have equities there, too, or expertise. there are few intelligence pictures now. and it's not quite true that the intelligence committees knew everything.

senator finestein says there's certain things she didn't know about 12333. the f.b.i. apparently still doesn't collect that number for reasons i don't fully understand. by enlarge, the members have less information. there's less information to staff. this is actually in the supreme court decision. the supreme court says that members of congress simply

cannot function without staff. but intelligence matters that are so complex and technical, ther e they are sometimes expected to do so and it doesn't work. this is else spishlly acute in the house. both the house and the senate have a rule that personal office staff can't hold top secret sci clearances. only committee staff can. so that means that there are members who have no personal staff to consult with. members of congress really like to have their own staff. if a congressman wants to get briefed on something, he may just have to go himself. >> he doesn't have to get a staffer who can get tsei briefings.

>> i would say the rule you mentioned, personal staff cannot get the highest level of clearances, means that members of congress who don't sit on the intelligence committee or judiciary is a member of kpleerns staff. you will not have a staff er tht directly has a clearance level. this certainly would come up with regard to your records program where the intelligence committees were fully briefed, as we understand it. judiciary committee to some extent, as well. but if you don't sit on one of those committees, you would have to, yourself, go in and get that information. and this goes back to the early conversation where you draw the line on what is public.

as you mentioned, we should have been more transparent about the scope of the 2:15 authority and what we were expecting it to do. what we're interpreting it to cover. if you can have a public debate, if you can have members of congress, all members of congress, have that debate and have full access to that information, you may need to allow the staff in there and have a greater level of public transparency about the rules. >> i actually don't have a lot of sympathy for members of congress who like to have their own personal staff. i'd like to have a lot of things as well.

there are an awful lot of staff members with clearances. we offered before these statutes were reaut rised, we had about eight members show up. >> i'd like to respond to that. first of all, there's no question that members, just by reading the press and asking questions can make a lot of

difference. >> but he did show up for the briefing. >> yeah u and so some of it is will. but the 234u78 beryls bob just gave, they are tiny. >> i was sort of curious what the panel thought of the recommendation on wednesday to have the declassification of the inspector general report on the at gagss that the c.i.a. was

improperly accessing senate files and then the finding of the i.g. that, indeed, some c.i.f. officers em properly accessed senate computers on this particular network having into the agency's interrogation and detention program. just sort of -- we can kind of go quickly down the line, i'm sort of curious what the view is of the advisability at this point of declassifying something like that. in the sort of pulling together a lot of the themes, because that would be perhaps an area where transparency would be leading to accountability. but we also discussed how difficult it would be to declassify things. so maybe just -- >> i mean, i naturally think it ought to be declassified. there may be privacy considerations of the individuals that deserve to be protected. but it's an issue of, really, of constitutional significance, separation of powers, and it's

an example where the agency that has the most immediate interest in the cia should not be the one making the decision as to whether or what gets declassified. >> i think it should be declassified. shocking. you may find me -- i didn't have time to get senator udall's speech into the conference materials. you may find me handing it out in the halls later if i can find a copy. it's so important. it's the sequel to senator feinstein's speech in march. and i think it's a lesson of what happens when oversight takes place in the open, and what happens when somebody steps back and lets it happen behind closed doors. since senator feinstein's speech two things have changed. the justice department decided it will not prosecute the staffers who wrote the torture report. and the report will not be

suppressed. so both of those are very important things. i'm not sure either of them were going to happen at one point. so that's a huge relief. but as far as getting answers on what happened in march, we're no further than we were. and there's a passage of senator udall's speech that -- >> we need to -- >> no, i'm not going to read. basically it says that he describes getting stonewalled by the cia for nine months. and i think that's going to keep happening unless either the -- either that's released, and that's only going to get released if the public demands it. >> i agree. put sunshine on it, get it out there, let's find out what's going on. that's what transparency, that's what oversight is. >> i think there's a real importance to oversight being able to be conducted independently without interference. i cannot speak to this specific context at all. >> generally speaking -- i'm not going to talk about the specific document. i will make two points.

generally speaking, i favored declassification and things that can be declassified and released. i would note there's still pending an accountability board at the cia which is being chaired by a former member of the senate intelligence committee. i think it's important to get it all out. to the extent it can all be declassified consistent with the privacy concerns that steve mentioned and released, i generally favor that. >> there was a news report that the sergeant at arms investigation had ended. >> i'm sorry? >> there was a news report that the sergeant at arms investigation had ended. >> had ended? >> yeah. >> then i would hope they would release whatever their findings are as well. >> i want to kick it to q&a. but if -- because there was earlier talk of recommendations, if there are any other sort of recommendations for improvements. >> i suspect steve has more. but we can talk about those offline.

it would use up the rest of this panel, and the rest of the day. >> i would just say that i think there's benefit in establishing as many points of contact as possible among the different parties that are concerned here. the press, the public, the congressional committees which are not represented on this panel. the executive branch. you know, bob litt has other things to do, did not need to be here. i would like to express appreciation. i see him, or hear him, or, you know, see him debating in public much more frequently than any of his counterparts or inter lock you turs in other branches of government. i would like to express appreciation for that. i think it speaks well of him and his agency. and it helps clarify some of the issues, or at least the points of this agreement. i think we need more exchange and more interchange.

>> and i will simply say in the same vein that we have an annual conference, lawyers from across the intelligence community each year, and we invited steve to be one of our keynote speakers last year. and i think he was very well received. he did not hold anything back, but i think it's important for the lawyers in the community to hear that perspective. >> let's get to q&a for a little bit. >> steve winters, local researcher. i'm pretty sure i have my memory correct here, but about a year ago congressman amash gave a talk here at the cato and outlined the extreme difficulty he found in getting to these meetings that were described, where he could find the information which was legally required to be available to him. it clearly was a case where he said every effort was made to schedule it at convenient times

to do this, to not inform congressmen. i just throw that out. check with them on that. in terms of the expert, you know, people with a security, whatever, clearance as assistance to congressmen, not the staff people, but you talk about their own staff, personal staff, there's an interesting story from bruce schnir, security expert, very well known, was given access to some of the undisclosed snowden papers for a certain period of time. there were requests by some members of congress for bruce to come and brief them on the details of some of these programs. and the whole thing turned out to be impossible to do, because the security clearances didn't work out right, even though the point that he had the information that congress was trying to find it out. presumably if they had a staff member with the right security clearances, he could have briefed that person. >> was there a question?

>> the question was, it's the same issue that comes up with foia, there's a lot of stonewalling going on. so what do you really propose to do about this? in particular. because you mentioned amash. >> i'm kind of stymied by the question. go ahead. >> okay. so, i'm not a hill person by any means, but i did do a short fellowship in a congressional office. what i learned there is just how limited member time is. and how the breadth of issues that they deal with. you know, i specialized in certain issues for ten years. suddenly i had to learn everything. and that's as a staffer. so when there's a trade agreement, say, that's hundreds of pages long and the only way a member can read it is to go down himself and read the 100-page

document, that doesn't work. he may not be able to discuss it with his staff afterwards either. i really do think staff is essential. >> this is mainly a question for bob. a very friendly question, i promise you. of the 70 congressional staff that work in the house and senate intelligence committees, i'm wondering how many of them have a technical background. and there have been proposals over the last year to have a special advocate be allowed to present before the fisa court. they have smart lawyers that understand intelligence law. i understand the court does not have any full-time logical staff. if you read the declassified fisa opinions, it's clear that this stuff is really, really complicated technically. and i think the fisa court really didn't understand how some of the programs were being implemented. would you support a special

advocate that was technical? would you support the fisa court itself employing full-time technologists? and do you think the senate and house intelligence committees should have either some or more technical staff who can advise them? i also welcome the thoughts of the others on the panel. >> i have no idea what the technical background of people on the staff is. i know there are some people who seem to have some technical expertise. but on the congressional staff, i don't know the answer to that. on the fisa court, the usa freedom act, which you know we did support, contained a provision to allow the fisa court to appoint experts, technical experts to assist them in particular cases. and i think that's generally a good idea. i wish the usa freedom act had passed. we'll have to see what happens in the next congress. >> the oversight board made recommendations along those lines. including that the court should turn to use existing authorities.

we understand they don't need any legislation enacted to do this, to call on outside technical experts on their issues, i imagine with them getting clearances, they would have to take steps to make that happen. that's certainly something the board supported as well. >> marcy wheeler. >> did i convince you on 309? >> i can see both sides of the issue. >> okay. >> but i think -- >> that's an improvement. >> if odni had not spent so much time making less than credible arguments about ratification on section 215, it wouldn't be such a concern. >> we can agree to disagree on that. >> okay. i want to know if you have any special insight of the fbi oversight. i have concerns about nsa, that's where we've all been focusing for year and a half. but fbi -- steve mentioned the ig report, that happened to be the 215 report which