coverage, there is more coverage on that isolated attack that goes for days and days and there is of the automobile accidents and the 600 or 700 people killed in the major urban areas because of gun violence. it is painful and affects us. lets try to put it in perspective. if that's what he says, i think he's right on that issue. >> what's your number, two, our four four or six or two? >> what constitute the attack verses 15 years ago? >> someone of an assault weapon. >> if you are asking how many san bernardino or orlando type of attacks will we have in the year 2017, no natural expert or security is going to be in a position to quantify it.

>> can you even -- >> we have not ended the scourge and the threat of home violent extremism. people ask me what keep you up at night. that's thing number one. the prospect of another home grown or home born, violent extremists acquiring a weapon or a tool of mass violence and carrying out an attack some place here in the homeland. it cannot be quantified. it is difficult to detect and given the nature of it. in my view, what we and homeland security needs to do in addition to all the they thinks we are doing is to continually to remind the american people of all the things we are doing and 10 or 12 things we are doing and constantly securing our homeland but to also say to them there is

a role for a public of awareness and vigilance. you cannot eliminate all risks whether it is a terror attack or a mass shooting or gun violence. we cannot end it tomorrow. we can and reduce it as much as possible, consistent with our values and laws. but, the prospect of an hbe attack is still there and we need to address it. >> i think the secretary and i already agree. my definition, democracy is a soft target. just by definition because we are so open. >> everyday we got to get smarter and identify potential threats. the secretary is absolutely right. we are open because we are a democracy. we start closing ourselves.

when we start to stepping on our own toes and freedom, they begin to win. >> let me ask the secretary of this question. >> of cyber attack and bombs and election day attacks and which of those worries you the most? the nature of homeland security is you got to focus on it. >> everything is a priority? >> well, you cannot say everything is a priority. the way tom look at it and i look at it is that you got threats that are high impact but not necessarily high probability. then you got threats that are high probability but likely or

perhaps less impact like nhve attack which could involve as many as 50 or as many as 10. those that we consider high probability but there are those that like the dirty bomb prospect that is are high impact and we got to recess where we devote our resources and trying to prioritize it. you cannot say it is all priority. >> is it the fact that if something happens in one of those areas, you or you will be attacked in congress especially by the opposite party for not having done enough in that area.

>> we get attack on everything we do. >> that's a reality. yes. >> from what i am hearing -- >> all fairness and i think tom knows this, i think we have done a lot in the last several years to educate the public and educate congress on a lot of the good work that we do. given the current state of global terrorism and given the current state of homeland threat, people are focused on much more of the dhs mission. i think a lot of people see a lot of the good work we do. they see how example wait times at airports will reduce this summer after we devoted a lot of resources and efforts to it. there is always more work to be done. it is still very much a working process. our department is only 13 years old. i think we are -- i am certain that we are improving moral

within the department. and, i think there are a lot of people particularly in congress can see that. >> you have a way to go with moral according -- >> well, the fed's survey is coming out in a couple of weeks and we'll see how we did. i know participation, that survey went way up. >> you must be watching or going into a different set of congressional near than i watch and when i was doing this article. >> i am going to capitol hill. >> congress is learning to appreciate all the great stuff you guys do? >> i think people and i believe people who pay attention on our over sight committees who understand our work do. >> well, that's a good call. >> i do spend a lot of time on capitol hill. my first year in office, i testified 12 times. >> lets talk about that. we should not let the time go by without talking about your assessment of the job congress

does when it comes to homeland security in terms of organizing itself for over site or in terms of making constructive contribution to over site. it seems to me and i wrote this in the article the most undeniably bad actor in the whole homeland security scenario was congress in the sense that everyone refused and you have dozens of the committee who claims -- we don't want to give up our dujurisdiction. >> i think all the agency heads and in spite of a decade long appeal to the congress of the

united states and reducing the number of committees of over site, the refrain has been ignored for well over a decade. i remember the first year i was secretary, i testify on the hill and more often secretary roosevelt did and we were engaged in iraq. someone who spends twelve years in congress and the united states understands the spor importance and the values. it is this functional over site and it is a lot easier if secretary johnson has the opportunity to build relationships with a smaller group with men and women on the hill and to help him or her whoever that's going to be the secretary to continue to build on his unity of effort.

frankly, you still see the silos that we inherit from time the time and don't just run on your friends on the hill. you need to condense the over site. >> the executive branch in 2002, reorganized itself to deal with homeland security. >> did not. >> the way it should work and the way that it works when i was general council of dod, you got your committee in each house and your appropriations in each house and that's who you deal with. we have depending on how you count between 92 to 100 subcommittees in congress, that consumes time and i read every letter i get from members of congress and i get a lot of them. it consumes time to response to that. we have reduced the time it takes to respond congressional

letters down to 14 days and we actually say something in these letters. >> it is very difficult to get an authorization bill. it is very difficult to get a bill to authorize any of our mission when you have to pull in multiple different directions to get a bill out of the committee and handout of a house of congress if you cannot just look to one committee to make it happen. that hurts homeland security and i am hope thag oing that one of days congress is going to wrap with this just to improve the manner that we go by protecting our homeland. tomas is right, you got to have congressional over site. that's key to how separation of powers work, there is a good way to do it and a bad way to do it. >> let me ask two questions

relating to this -- >> first of all, election day coming for a year's plus, cyber has been the top of everybody's list of potential homeland security threats. what about cyber election attacks? >> it would be, steve, very difficult through any sort of cyber intrusion to offer the ballot counts simply because it is decentralized and so fast that you got states and local governments and county governments involved in the election process. it is difficult to alter the count. >> you offered to help. >> yes, we are concerned about bad cyber actors and state actors and hackers and criminals that intrude in our internet

presence and state election officials. we are offering assistance to these officials by way of information sharing and there is a lot of chatter on the internet about what that could mean and it does not mean a federal take over or state election systems or state elections or national elections. we don't have the authority to do that. what we do in homeland security and cyber security is offer system when people ask for it. i am trying to educate state election officials of what we are in a position to offer them and help them and manage their election. >> governor, i want to ask you and last question, you of the coach chair of the report issue of last fall by a bio terror threat. the report strongly said that

the current administration and department was not doing nearly enough. my question was when i am reading that of what happens on the days of anthrax attack that was on the top of everybody's list where we are running all kinds of money and running around and putting sensors on all over the place and apparently, it did not work. why are we worried about it? too it is almost as if we solve the problem. >> is it still a tlahreat? >> steve is referring to a bipartisan commission and one of the fee that's working rather well in washington dc.

face it, this is 15 years ago, anthrax and we don't have a strategy and an effort to respond quickly as we can. we were slowing our response to ebola and we saw zika coming and we response. whether terrorists weaponize pathogens or mother nature throws it at us. one of the long-term threat is bio. 15 years of after anthrax was struggling to have a strategy and operationalize a capability to respond with the vaccine and recovering with a contagious pathogen. it is a real problem.

>> let me give you half a minute to respond if you want to. >> i think tom is right to focus on this. we are focused on dhs and we spent a lot of time in ebola and the fall of 2014 through a lot of courageous effort. we were able to deal with it in west africa. and effective with the ebola virus and we dealt with it in this country and the few cases ta prompt up and it is been heroic and successful effort in west africa. >> i am not critical of my colleague because he did a great job responding to me. a lot of this is outside of his jurisdicti jurisdiction. we always react to it. one of these days friends on the hill or other agencies, we need

to be a lot more preemptive. we need mother nature is going to throw us something else. >> terrorists play around. the fact that the secretary is able toll lead an aggressive response, kudos across the board. but, we are always in a response mode. at some point in time, we are dealing with multiple threats that the secretary and i both identify. we have to start thinking preemptively rather than just reacting to the next incident. >> we got to stay on time. >> i am going to stay preemptive and and stay on time. >> can i say one thing? >> as you probably can tell that the prior republicans secretary of homeland security and the current democratic of homeland security and as well as two others have a good relationship. for the most part, 99% of the time, our relationship is bipartisan and non partisan. i spent last night with governor

rich and so this weekend, we look back to what happened 15 years ago with the world trade center, but we also have to look forward. tomorrow i am having a program to mark the government return. we are a remarkably resilience country in ways that we don't always appreciate. we come back stronger every time whether it is the boston marathon or 9/11 or oklahoma city and i hope the public remembers that. >> thank you. [ applause ] good way to close. thank you all.

please welcome our washington director and the council. here to lead the conversation the national correspondence, the mpr. >> good morning, we have an all-star panel lined up. what is the u.s. doing that's working and what are the limits o of the u.s. or anybody else can do to counter the threat. i want to dive right in of the question that as i have covered this issue and covered all summer. to me, it feels like a disconnect between the fact that we keep on hearing battle gains in iraq and isis territory

shrinking. there was a new attack court. >> let me throw that to you first, i am guessing you have been struggling with that question as well >> the last twelve months, it seems like isil is having a horrific year and horrible year as once. mill military is getting pounded. i change my mind everyday how quickly it is going to happen. they are not really quite clear to me. on the other hand, they have been able to project power and relevance through this new phase which is attacks on the west and many attacks which they don't have much to do it literally but they managed to get credit for it anyway. what we are seeing now is isil preparing for this transition

whether there is no longer a physical presence in iraq. they are moving to this, what is essentially their roots which is an under ground services and protecting violence around the world and different from where they were ten years ago. >> they have mill industry experience and now be returning to their homeland and other parts o f the world to establish new control elsewhere. >> you have seen them preparing for the new phase, meaning the attack on the west. it sounds that you would agree or a lot of officials put forward which is that to a certain extent shrinking the faith on the ground and gaining on isis. >> the positives as you can see at the moment that by degrading the military, they lose a lot of

their propaganda. military defeats are bad for isil image. people are liberated of isil control and talking about persecution and mistreatments and that goes against isil. they are being damaged severely through this process. they still have a core following very determined fan atical fighters. >> i want to bring you in because i see you nodding. >> do we see any slowing? >> lodgisticly getting harder for crew to get to syria to iraq. >> those corridors have been cut

after. don't bother coming here and get ready to do something at home. >> it becomes less important of that pipeline. >> now, we are seeing of a slow down of a trajectory of going to the middle east. at some point that libya is the next place to go to but that's not the case because it defeats isis and suffering and other places in libya. >> that's a short term and the problem to some degree. where are these people are going to go? these people are radicalizing. we are talking about an credibly large number of people they are known to be radical but can help you charge. that's the big problem.

now, to some degree, law enforcement intelligence saw syria and iraq and libya as a place where people would go. >> now, going there, they are bitter because of the defeats and the suffer. it makes sense to people that at least some of them will carry out attacks in the west. >> love of the people that are being pushed away from syria and iraq and libya that's going to go some where. they are likely to go to new york and other places. the idea that whether it is part of a very organized plot dire direct directed directly. it is a likely scenario. >> do you agree with the assessment that isis is having the same time of having a

disasterous year? >> yes, the strategy is to solidify territory in iraq. >> that's the motto here. they are spreading in different parts of the world. and whether it is directly to different provinces or they have been building. some of them are quite solid, i would say or through a tactic of basically -radicalize individualindividuaed individuals and some of them have random group of individuals and in places like bangladesh of being moderate and not seeing a lot of jihadist activities and seeing home grown clusters of people and people coming from the west.

all these dynamics or simply an influence of propaganda, that's part of the strategy. that's one way isis will survive fec even if there is a dedemise. >> the first ever special representative to muslim community for the u.s. department. this is something in of itself created of this position and decided to reach out this way. you were telling me right before we came on stage that you visited 80 countries. >> yes. >> yep. >> what did you soo ee? >> things are going to get much worse before they get better. the physical field, you are missing the point. you need to think of the idea

logical field. i think of the millenials which is the group that i was engaging with. i travel all over the world whether it is a muslim country or one which muslims lives which is a minority. >> it is really important for your audience to understand. isis cannot be isis if they do not have recruit or any other groups. what we have to do is thinking about how powerful is the ideology and how is it spreading both off and online and what are we doing about it? >> if we look through that identity crisis and you began to think why 1 billion muslims which is the number under the state locally are dealing with this. you think about them asking

questions that generations before them did not ask quite the same way. there is a perfect storm where ideas are able to spread i don't think their peer groups all over the world. when they are asking how to be that uber muslims, there are answers that come from the bad guys. that's kind of ideology that's percolating in all parts of the world whether it is paris or detroit or san francisco, it is there. and what i don't see is a mammoth effort to be able to deal with the proportion pal threat that we face ideologically. >> the good news is we piloted a whole host of things that deal with this sort of persuasion piece of this ideology cal war. i am not meaning winning hearts

and minds. >> you are over it. >> you are getting pure influencers to provide alternative content for the young person so they understand themselves in a different way so they are moving in a different way. when we think about both of what you do and all day everyday at the amazing center and online space and understand what's happening to young people. you combine that of what's happening offline when these kids talking about their peers. hey, how do you do this and how do we be a muslim in this way. what i like to see is i like to see countries not just hours but countries around the world spending as much energy and effort learning from what we have understood with the programs and of these influence erps and sca ers and scaling them. we can be fighting in the heart, however spaces however we can.

we are not doing that. >> you are talking about recruiting gorecrui recruiting guys. >> we know what will work, we have not scale it up. >> tell us a story that help us personalize what you see as you go into the muslim communities are around the world and you are meeting young people and meeting pham lips afamilies and trying out what to do. >> there are dozen of stories. i will give you one from europe since we are talking about this. this is going to sound silly but it goes to how simplistic the question is. i remember being in landmark. i was talking to a bunch of young kids who were in a room. we were talking about what it felt to be a muslim in denmark at this time and what that carton mea cartoon meant for them and a young woman identified herself

as being an iraqis religion. i am danish and my mom tells me that i am not a real muslim. the kids sort of look at her. and she said "look at me." nobody could understand what she was talking about. she went like this wearing a jeans and a t-shirt. my mom told me if i am dressed like this, i am not a real muslim. >> that's so basic and abosurd o most of you in the audience. there is no reputation for this time for her to feel like she could belong as a modern young teenage, you know dane who happens to be muslims. that idea that emotional peace of wanting to belong and while trying to find something is a

really important piece for us to understand. >> we just heard that things are going to get worse before they get better. does that go with the research you are doing? >> i think we have seen a peek in terms of people cradicalized and mobilized. >> why do you think? >> there is as variety of reasons. and of what's happening in syria and the initial movement, and a propaganda on behalf of isis and in the west, we focus a lot of negative parts of isis. it is a message of -- of a perfect society and there you can be a perfect muslim if you come here. if i can think of stories, i think of other stories of young girl being interviewed.

we just ignore that. >> when you go online, you look for the stuff that you like. a lot of people atrack us with messages that they put out. >> one resembles as grooming but pedophiles do. >> again, with the west, the online component is nenormously important. >> sometimes we think it is all about the internet and we all know that isis uses the zernt internet. offline work are more important. >> a lot of activities are legal for propaganda efforts whether it is the first amendment in the state or the laws of protection or how do you stop it or intervene it. >> all right, i am interested it

when i asked him for an example. you both mentioned cases involving young women which we did not see out much in al-qaida. >> lorenzo, maybe you should take it first, as you are looking at people who are being radicalized, do you see pattern there? >> the screen, there is no profile. when did a study last year. which means the one single finger that we have or age goes from 14 to 55 point the comfort are again from all kinds of profile and background and latino and african-american and jewish and all kinds. and shea will become siemny chhuon the same goes everywhere

and we are talking about blu bangladesh. actual, no common fire. the woman is was of a new aspect. there is a study that's done in the european country who tried to join isis. >> a lot of the men wearing street thugs, knock l head and not -- >> low level crime >> most of the woman their graduated with a degree and education or in health. the assumption has been a lot of -- we have a strong set of empat empathy, they wanted the help but that sense of empathy exploit it and coming to syria and help here. the problem is there is no common profile from a law enforcement opponent of view and from a prevention bient of vow. >> how on earth do you count a

threat that has no profile? >> this is a really important point and we are sitting in washington where everybody's policy is oriented. you have to imagine the unimaginable. we did not. we limit our ability to think throw those right after 9/11 to this that it got to be mailed and coveraged a and surely made. i was not surprised. when that happens years ago, i thought oh, that's not going to happen. if you begin to think about the woel of women in a family, it is the most per fie thing of getting women ral radicalized. isis is teaching your child to be ahead using dolls. we have a huge different when these kids are older. it is saturated with the idea of

d deccentrias. >> i want to say one other thing about woman. am the same thiamin they are getting ralized, they should be the people we should look at. >> the mother is the one that see changes with their before anyone else douse. we taught to be a lot of time helping them to gnavigate and provide for them opportunities in the mental health space so they have a place to go with their children getting sympathetic to work. >> what has worked to counter our movement. >> it is affecting now.

local troops and people on the ground and our ally and intelligence that we set. there is a more difficult challenge of this how to dress the arts and minds. it is probably the biggest trouble of our time. >> we have not been successful at this. we keep on talking about, well muslim country should do more. >> they cannot get mor morae incorrect. >> these people don't have ability with jobs so they can talk all day long how this is not to is slam. >> they do not believe. duh, that's still a significant portion of this community. it is not something that we have

an easy answer for. >> my colleague was saying there is no way to spot who's going to be radicalized or new to the message. i want to ask open up to ask you are all of our questions. >> do throw your hands up and we'll cover to you. >> and while tr microphone is making their way out. quick answer. when we all gathered here, the 30th anniversary of seven. are we going to talk about omnivore other groups that we'll heard of. >> a lot of people will tell us you did not think that al-qaeda would survive 15 years after 9/11. not only it slive. they are urging people to do things like that around the world. but powerful and effective.

you can eliminate the cat fit but not the idealology. >> i am not sure that we'll be talking kpooktly about it. >> at the end of the day, different con negotiations. >> at least from the mid '70s in the airport. we in this west noticed that of a few sections in the 91. we'll become reyou are began -- >> i think of a different field. >> it is going to come to the next president is. >> do we have another hour to complete this congressman?

>> i serving a -- if the next president putting the money and resources to lead the way and doing a portional effort, other countries will be able to follow. if that next president does not do this. yes, -- the ideology is not going to go away. it is how we are dealing with it. >> i got a question right here. >> if you can tell us who you are and a quick question. >> i am russell back john. i go to high school at 14 cents. i am looking at this, on the one hand off a con treat and the other hand is you have an more yous, it seems like you are antagonizing of the entire crew that we have a country where we

are so diverse that it is it almost like counter intuitive. does it serve the interest of pr pros calulation to have migra e migraines in the area. >> i am christian. >> if you look at it. >> abraham in that context gave birth to both of them. whatever god he played to would be the same god. >> but, all i am saying is to look at one whole class of religion and make laws on their face. does that kind of rote our value values? >> we are not taking laos based on religion. we are not doing that. >> but, i will say something larger and to your point of who we are as we are americans. >> if we think that the rhetoric on any side for any group is

helping the situation, is not. i am not talking about lust reasons. >> i am talking about the crazy stuff and the rhetoric of the others. it in clufluences around the wo and no matter where in the world i went, young kids are listen to great interests. >> anne in the yiet, that sort of e ecosystem and looks that we love. >> did you feel if they were open to listening to you coming in from the state department. we hear so much of anti--democracy, we have not looked at it yet. >> there is a difference from talking to somebody and listening to what they have to say. my approach was to present. i had the vas majority of my considerations.

it was hard. it is porpt that we had the opportunity to do a lun bch of differe bunch of young people to talk. we are going to end it here. thank you very much. lorenzo and joby warrick. >> thank you. >>. please welcome to the state, ma sheel, here michelle lewis kelley. [ applause ] >> he low up there, it is like i was just up here. welcome to michelle. >> tell us what your role is. >> i want to reap in with a couple of questions about what she would do. so i am an informal advisor on

policy and that kind of thing but not being a circuit and forso forth. >> presidential politics and if you have to point to one aspect to national security, that would be different under president clinton than what we are seeing to president obama or what you are pointing to. i think when you are listen to secretary clinton over the years, one of the consistent themes she's talking about is the unique leadership role that the united states has to play. her instinct is to take a forward leaning posture towards engageme engagement. not necessarily military invention but using all the instruments of national power so that you know potentially

cohersive, she wants to see the u.s. leaning into leadership roles that that would include in the terrorism arena. >> what does it look like? >> what does it mean? >> i think you know. first of all, trying to get the coalition that's been built and more on the same page. we have a lot of great partners in this fight but they have a lot of objectives that's someone different than their own. we don't get the coherent that we need to be effective. i also think that there is room, the pressure that our military support to many of these groups on the ground is putting on isis is very, very important. that has to be apart of the campaign. i think that one of the questions that interests me is that how do we get ahead of the

threat. in places where isis is thinking a about trying to establish a foot hole, how do we get ahead of that with law enforcement and partners to try to make the environment very in he or she pittaab she -- in hospitable. besides himself, i had a friend, he's seeing the number of potential isis self proclaim followers and rising in thinks region and yet, don't have the sort of proactive focus of the way we did when we saw a violent extremist threat in the philippines >> how is he seeing that? >> he's seeing it through social media and intelligence reporting and he's seeing it tracking of the networks that they track in the region and his point was in

we wait for them to manifest here, it is going to be harder problem than if we do some practice things together to make it unfriendly territory. >> i am going to keep you there for a minute. >> president obama has said that isis will never be defeated until the war in syria has come to an end, until that situation is sorted out. do you agree? >> you know i think there is a lot that can be done and is being done to shrink and eventually if they lose enough territory, they'll revert to be a covert terrorist story organization that's in the shadows. the civil war that we have seen it elsewhere is the oxygen for groups like this to thrive and the absence of governance and the absence of any real states structure and so i do think that as long as you have the syrian

civil war festering in the middle east, you are going to have a significant terrorism problem, you are going to have a significant migration and refugee problem, you are going to have a spill over to the neighboring states that could destabilize them. >> that sounds like a yes. i think my own view is that none of the sides will win this on the battlefield. i mean there is no military victory that's decisive or anybody in the realm of possibility. what you have to do is how do we set the condition for negotiations to be taken seriously to negotiate some sort of federation of syria. >> last night in new york, hillary clinton said "the u.s. will never send troops to iraq

again." do you agree? >> how do you think about that given that there are 5,000 troops in iraq. >> there are special forces and others in the trained advised assist supporting others. what i would say is a major u.s. led, large round intervention in syria and iraq will not solve any problems. if you were to rank the parts o f this. the relatively potentially cost clearing territory. but then what? the key in these places that you have to figure out who is the hold force? what is the force that is going to govern that space, hold it, be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the population. it is why you can't have iraqi

militias clearing muscle, because they will not seen as legitimate. ultimately you have to have a force there that is going to be seen by the population or you are going to have the whole thing revert back to where it was before. so a large u.s. invasion is not going to solve the fundamental problem. it may make us feel like we are going something and we may have a momentary tactical gain, but it's not going to result in a sustainable solution on the ground. and, so, that's why we're in this slower, more frustrating, but i think correct approach of finding groups on the ground that have some local legacy that are willing to work with us and try to set the conditions. >> so it sounds like you believe the strategy of the u.s. has been using is the right one, maybe more resources. it is going to take time. >> i think a lot of the elements are correct, i think.

but we have taken a very reluctant, incremental approach. wheres a, i think if we would have more impact if we sort of took -- sort of took the strategy and fully resourced it up front and leaned into it, i think with the same resources you might have a better impact or same or slightly larger resources. >> more money? more troops? >> i think it's first of all more fully resource politically. i think really working with coalition and trying to resolve some of the differences with our partners and -- and -- and doing some negotiating with them to get us on the same page. secondly, i do think it is more fully resourcing as certain aspects of the military campaign without putting large conventional ground formations on the ground. and then all these other dimensions. i think you were just talking about counter cv, the counter narrative, the more proactive

approach with intelligence and law enforcement, cooperation in areas where isis isn't fully manifest yet. >> donald trump says he has a plan for isis, but he is not going to tell us what it is. >> a secret plan. >> it is a secret plan because he doesn't want to broadcast it. serious question, does he have a point? i don't think it's a general in history that said they should telegraph their plans. >> it is a fair part that there are certain parts of our military plans that shouldn't be broadcast ahead of time to an adversary, but that is not an excuse not to outline in general term what is the plan is because, you know, there is no evidence that he -- you know, that he has a plan to accomplish what he says his objective is, which is not only defeat isis but beat them decisively and quickly, which i think it is an open question to if it is possible. >> so you are looking for actual

details. >> i am looking for some description that gives us a sense of what he is talking about without telegraphing details to the adversary. >> let me shift gears and ask you pbig picture. we are sitting here 15 years after 9/11. and you have been in washington a long time. >> i joined in the clinton administration in '93. >> were you here in 9/11. >> i was. >> were you at the pentagon. >> i was across the street from the white house. >> as you look at what has been done to try to present that from happening again, if you had to point to one thing that has been done really well, we got right, thank god we fixed it and here we are and we're in a better place today, what would you point to? >> i would say two things that go together. one is sustained leadership focus that forces intelligence fusion. so -- >> what does that mean? >> when i was undersecretary,

part of my job was going with secretary gates or for him to a regular nsa meeting that the president would go to that would look at every active threat stream, every possible threat to the united states of america and run it down. and i think one of the reasons we have had not a substantial complex attack coming from, you know, an outside group coming in is because both bush and obama have kept this relentless presidential focus on forcing the intelligence and law enforcement agencies to continue to share, error on the side of what you know on the table, put the puzzle pieces together, raise the gaps and the things you are uncertain about when you are so that others can offer something that helps clear up the picture. but i think that has been sustained across two

administrations and is a big part of the reason why we have had not a major 9/11 type of attack. >> and i want to follow it up. let me give you a heads up. we are about to take questions. if you have one, raise your hand. we've got mikes coming around and we will try to get one to you. when you say sustained, what does that actually look like? are you taking about the creation of the dni that is forcing on a daily basis agencies to share information? >> certainly there have been a lot of organizational changes that support that sharing. i think there has been somewhat of a cult -- actually, there has been a culture change from the need to know and hording information is my power to i better share this or else if i don't share it and then at the end of the day that's part of the problem i'm going to be held accountable for that. >> so counter intuitive in the intelligence business. >> there's a desire to put it on the table.

and then it is down to literally going through specific threat streams, what we know, what we don't know, where are the intelligence gaps, how can we move assets to better cover, are there allies we can call for their information and really getting into the details of just, you know, what's necessary to disrupt and prevent plotting. and i would say the sustained pressure that's put on these groups by our special operations forces and those of our allies. >> well, as we know intelligence sharing and figuring out how these institutions should work remains a work in progress. >> it is not perfect by any means and i don't mean to imply that, but certainly better now than it was before 9/11. >> gentleman here please. would you mind identifying yourself. >> i'm david dan berg. it sounds like you are talking about offer balancing, working with regional powers, forming

coalitions. i guess my question is, is this possible with the available regional partners? do new partners need to be brought in the mix? and how achievable is that given all of the difference rivalries between some of those regional partners in the region? >> you know, i think in the middle east case, we have all the right partners in the coalition. it's like 60-something countries. the problem is really for everybody but the united states, you know, isis is on the priority list, but for no one is it number one. so they are all working other agendas at the same time they are helping counter isis. i think there are some agreements to be reached with individual allies and cluster of allies. for example, the gulf states how about how see the region more broadly. one of the challenges is i don't think the united states has articulated a vision for where are we trying to go in this

region. not that we have the pen and can single handedly write the history of the middle east, but to the extent we have leverage to pull and we can shape where it's going with our allies and partners, where are we trying to see this go? and i think those are the questions that animate them most and if we had a more satisfying answer we might be able to get better buy in for them on some of the tactical aspects. >> one more year. >> david icen berg. i think everybody recognizes the point that when the current phase of operations again isis and other group sends countries in question, syria, for example, afghanistan, iraq, libya are going to be facing monumental reconstruction challenges. and to date, our record on that, to put it lightly, has not been very good. it has been documented by groups

which is interest of full disclosure i once worked at. before they went out of business they issued a final report called for the creation of the soco u.s. office of contingency operations in order to better plan for future reconstruction, get people on the same page beforehand. would you endorse such a thing? >> do you have a question? >> would you endorse that? what changes would you make in our current approach to construction so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. >> great question. i think the first thing is to start with what you're doing here today, which is try to take an accounting of what should we have learned from the last 15 years, what worked and why it hasn't worked so well and why i think the question you're asking is a big one. we could spend another 15 minutes on it. but i think one of the challenges we have had in reconstruction stabilization is first of all, it tends to come

as an after thought. it is not integrated as part of the up-front planning so we underestimate the enormity of the task. second, we don't resource the u.s. government or the instruments of our power to do this very well. it was a huge effort to just get 1,000 civilians into afghanistan, and we could only sustain it for the year. it's not the state department isn't trying, it's that they weren't resourced to be an expe dish yar agency. we have never done that. and the third is we too often try to create systems that are familiar to us that we think others should enjoy, as opposed to really assessing what would be sustainable in this context. what is likely to be -- to resonate, be sustainable and manageable in the local context rather than aiming for receiver

sewn yan democracy. >> and to wrap this up, we have been hearing a lot of campaigns to take back muscle and rack ka in iraq and syria and the battle plans to do that while not easy are doable. the big question is what comes after. >> there the biggest issue a more fundamental political shift, decision on the part of the iraqi government to end its campaign of marginalizing the suni politicians. this will only work, ultimately, if there is some effort at reinclusion of giving resources, some greater self-governance capacities to the sunis. if that happens, they won't be inviting isis back in. if it doesn't happen, this will be clearing a tremendous cost and the political conditions will once again be fertile for groups like isis to come back in if they don't address this

problem. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. next to the stage, please welcome susan lan dow professor at wossy institute. matthew and susan spaulding, undersecretary for the national protection and programs director at the department of homeland security. here to lead the conversation is atlantics washington editor at large, steve clemens. >> hello, everybody. how many of you watched the commander in chief ceremony last night? this is that matt olsen hillary clinton referred to. i wanted to make this clear last night. we were at dinner and his iphone began buzzing like crazy and it was because he was mentioned without warning. so congratulations for that. is it good for you or bad. >> it can't be bad, i suppose.

my mom is happy. >> i recently had a conversation with a senior national security official, very senior in this administration who went off on issues related to syria and china and kind of the global problems. at the end of the conversation he said the issue we just are having to get our heads around and it is so, so serious if you know what i know is cyber and i think it was talking about things far and behind even our democracy potentially being hacked. but i am interested in the world where we're 15 years later after 9/11. 15 years ago we weren't carrying all these smartphones. we weren't densely as connected as we are today. and when looks at the high profile, whether it's information from health companies or target or various sorts of things that we have been able to learn about, sewnny and its interactions vis-a-vis

north korea, it looks like this is a pretty crappy situation. so i am interested in given what you do how do you prioritize this cyber world because it has become a catch-all for all sorts of things. but what are our national security priorities today as you look at it. >> that is a great question because that is exactly the way you have to approach this. the cyber security challenge is so huge that if you don't prioritize your efforts you are never going to make progress on it. and the prioritization, let me just say, from the department's perspecti perspective. i know the secretary mentioned this morning one of our top organizational and legislative priorities is to work with congress to be able to stand up the first operational component since the creation of the department, a cyber and infrastructure protection agency. the operational work that i am going to talk about today is currently undertaken by a headquarters component that i lead called national protection and programs direct rit. and it's an outstanding group of

men and women working very hard every day. but they are engaged in operational activity and it's very important that we recognize the importance of that by standing up this operational component. so we are working with congress to make that happen. that operational activity is prioritized in the cyber arena. first look at getting our federal house in order. all right? so we work very hard with our department agencies -- >> how many years will that take? >> right. it will be a work in progress forever. but we have made great progress on that actually. and, so, we lead the efforts to help all the departments and agencies to improve their cyber security and we do that in a variety of ways. we deployed a set of tools that help with the perimeter and inside your network. we have best practices and binding operational directives that require adoption of best practices like prompt patching and we have automated information sharing of threat

indicators. lots of tools and ways in which we are working with the dot gov. >> if you were to grade governments and agent sis on their prep, who would you give an a to? >> i get that question all the time. >> i sorry it was an original question. >> sorry to burst your bubble, but i never answer that question because our work with both the federal departments and with the private sector it really depends on trust. and we are not going to continue to maintain that trust if, whether it's a department or an agency or a state or local official or a private sector company that we assist and then we run in front of the microphones and then we tell everybody about it and throw people under the bus. so we don't do that. we do have internally we do look at how folks are doing and we have metrics to see whether we're, in fact, improving cyber security in the ways that we

need to. our -- the app -- in addition to the dot gov, we have the lead for working for critical leaders across the country. and there we have to prioritize our efforts as well. and we do it in the same way that we tell all of our stakeholders to prioritize their efforts. and that is looking at a risk management approach. not starting with your it professionals who want to talk about your it but starting with the people who know your business. in business, what is the business that you are about? and then what are your cyber dependencies? how could cyber affect the most important things that you do and that you care about? how do you identify those high value assets? so you are going to do basic cyber hygiene. that will get 85 to 90% of the malicious activity and with that last 10 or 15% you have got to prioritize your efforts. that means bringing your folks

who are your physical experts, your business experts and your it folks to the stable to make those decisions. >> thank you. let me ask all of you but i want to jump to matt. matt, i am intrigued by your new company. you run iron net. is that right? iron net security. and i am interested. is that iron net and when we think about how the public ought to think about its vulnerability, how to think about what suzanne was just talking about in terms of cyber exposure, i remember when all gore would talk a lot about the lock bach and the confidence you could have. are you setting yourself for failure even in the name of your company to have this notion that we can be so capable that, in fact, that setting up the wrong expectation if it were going to be in a situation where we're always tilting towards dissaser on tieber. >> i hope we are not setting

ourselves up with the name of the company but there is a sense for sure that the cyber threat is so complicated. i think it's really great to look back at today, you know, and think back 15 years ago and the terrorism threat and look at when i was at the national counterterrorism center we looked at how that changed in the last 10 or 15 years where it's become moredy veers and more expansive and it's become -- the threats adopted. that's on the terrorism side. now look at signer and all of those same features kraktize the cyber threat. you have sophisticated actors and criminal gangs that are at the level of what we would have thought are the capability of nation states a few years ago. you have the nature of those attacks changing from simply disruptive to businesses to destructi destructive, destroying data and hardware. one of the things we think about where i am now is the challenging that the offense has

the advantage and typically the offense wins and it is a little bit like terrorism. i didn't talk about the fact that it's really basically impossible to stop every terrorism attack, but that's the truth. and suzanne your point about risk management applies in the terrorism realm. you are managing risk but the same thing applies in the cyber security realm. you are managing risk. you can't stop every attack. >> did you see president obama beat his chest the other day and said our cyber capabilities beat everybody else's by far and we were talking about this last night. >> right. >> i am interested, if you were to rank the next biggest cyber threat to the united states on a scale of one to ten of the united states as ten, where would you put the next biggest threat after the president's comments? and were you happy that the president said that? >> yeah. well i think that's right what the president said in terms of our capabilities relative to the rest of the world. there is a number of ways of measuring that. but overall, we are ahead of the

rest of the world. but we do have some significant adversarie adversaries, particularly at the nation state level with china and russia, iran, north korea and you can tick off the attacks that are knowingly attributable to those governments or suspected to be those governments and their leaguen. but below that level, then you have to rank the most pervasive type of attack are basically criminals. the attack on target, that attack which was quite significant really cost a couple thousand dollars in terms of the malware available on the internet. so those groups are getting increasingly sophisticated. >> scale of one to ten, next biggest threat. >> i would say the next biggest threat is in the 7, 8 area. >> so given that and suzanne, son if you have thoughts in this realm, too, it raises this question if you are in this new world of the ability to create

consequences with cyber capabilities in another country, in another government to another electric grid, which we have already seen happen in ukraine and arguably with stucks net in iran. whoever made that virus, i don't know. but when you're at that level, what do you think when it -- when it -- when it comes to these allegations about russia and hacking our democracy. do you think the u.s. government could send a signal by hacking the chinese and pew tan's office or where could it go? >> it depends on what effect you want to achieve. and if you want to up the anti, we are more vulnerable because we are more engaged in cyber, and they may not be the right way to go. so the chinese signed an agreement with the u.s. and signed the agreement in large part because it was in their interest. they wanted to dam m down the amount of communication and democracy that was happening in china as a result of cyber. this was to their advantage.

right now it is not to pew tan's advantage to damp down things. but we can send signals through quiet channels. i want to move back to something. with cyber, it's often what we want to think about is resill yansy rather than reliability. so if you think about the power grid, the power grid has always operated on the idea that if one generating system is down, the system would work. resiliency is if a number of them are down it should work. but resiliency is also if some of them go down and we have a situation like in ohio a few years ago that started with a tree and then snow barrel, what happens? how do you come back up? how do you come back up quickly? what are the right ways to build cyber to enable resiliency and that is something we have not built in 15 years ago but something we need to have now and something i'm sure your agency is working on. >> just with all of you, how

vulnerable, do you think our national electric grid infrastructure is, suzanne? how good a job are you doing presenting -- >> we are doing such a great job. >> what is your biggest blind spot? >> let me say. i am serious when i say i actually think we are doing a very good job with working with the electricity sector and that is in large part because the private sector, our partners are the electricity sub sector particularly are very forward leaning and very aggressive about this. so i am leaving in a few hours to head to new mexico for a quarterly meeting with ceos who come together to meet with us on a very regular basis to talk about how we work together to continue to improve the security and resilience of our electric grid, and a lot of that work is led by kit lin dur ka vich. so our electric grid is actually much more redundant and resilient than people give it

credit for. but i will say what we are very mindful of is that part of a great deal of that resilience comes from the fact that so much of it was built in the '70s before we were cyber dependant. the cyber efficiencies, if you will, have been tacked on. and so when those go down, often there is that physical mitigati mitigation, that physical redundancy that you can rely back on. as we get upgrade that -- as that ends its useful life and we upgrade that and move to smart grid, et cetera, we've got to be much more mindful that we are doing this in is way that preserves that resilience, which is critically important. and that won't always be an it solution. >> right. >> oftentimes that resilience will come from putting in a hand crank, having paper copies, things like that. >> and one of -- >> going back to cash. >> right. one of the things one needs to think about in an attack is

right now the attackers pick the time. if you talk about a hybrid attack on a bunch of systems, they don't necessarily have the advantage because they have to get at the power grid and the banking system or whatever else they are going to at the same time and that is a much harder job to do when they go after sony or target on their own calendar on their own instant, which makes us somewhat more secure as a result. >> let's talk about good guys and bad guys. we did a talk before. fran pretty much lam blasted sony and said there are criticisms all around that can be shared but sony did nothing it should have been doing along the cyber level and cast a lot of the blame along the private sector side of that equal librium. and i'm interested on the good guy side of this, which is a public that doesn't want to be ripped off or have its e-mails taken or have its operation

systems suspended. what is their responsibility to protect themselves and what is the government's responsibility? it seems to me we talk a lot about companies and what they need to do, but they can't watch government. suzanne? >> so and i come at this from the notion of comparative advantage, right? so we have often talked about rules and responsibilities and kind of we're going to dictate that in a kind of command and control way i think comes out of the military context, which is not appropriate here. but we need to come to the table and understand what each of us bring to the table. >> right. >> in terms of comparative advantage. so we have a comparative advantage with regard to deterring state action, which is -- and i think we succeeded in doing that in the agreement we were able to reach on china on economic else peonage and companies have the comparative advantage with respect to the immediate protection of their

systems and networks. we have to work together on response, and we're now developing with the private sector additional play books and annexes for that response in which we have to understand, again, what resources each of us brings to the table and how we are going to work together. >> matt? >> i agree with suzanne in terms of relative advantage. but the challenges that this is -- to your point, steve, we put a lot of burden on the private sector. and going back to the analogy to terrorism, we would not say the same thing about the private sector's responsibility to protect itself against a terrorist attack. if you think about a physical attack against a property or company it's clear what the u.s. government's role is and it is well organized or better organized than it was 15 years ago. and i think we're getting there with cyber but we have a ways to go to understand what is the responsibility to the private sector and how much can they do themselves. but what is the responsibility of the u.s. government when you have a nation state undertaking

attack against a u.s. company on u.s. soil and going back to the point i made before, it's very difficult for these companies to be able to defend themselves against the level of cyber attack that we face from sophisticated actors like north korea. >> whatever you are about to say, i know you have been thinking a lot about crypting to gra fee and what we are beginning to see out there on the bad guy side of the equation is going dark and the inability -- there is now a reaction out in the drug lord world and in the isis world and other sides of nefarious networks, basically going off the grid. >> so let me -- i'll take that, but let me add a little bit. i have known and my colleagues have known for years that anything we don't want on the front page we don't put in e-mail. sony executives didn't seem to know that. sony films have been leaked to places not like youtube anywhere

which doesn't show those things but before -- before being shown in movie theaters for a long time. and, so, i completely agree with matt and suzanne that a company can't withstand a nation state attack. maybe a large company that's in the defense industrial base should be able to. >> but we should live with a little bit of fear with what we do. >> but there are elementary precautions that aren't there. going dark. the fbi has talked about going dark for the last 20 years. so how have changes changed? in 20001 we had what happened. but also the change in export controls that allowed companies to put strong kriping to gra fee into their systems. here is where i get to lam blast the companies because the computer companies didn't really start doing that as a standard thing until post stode nerks.

this is not true. google was beginning to protect between data centers communications with crypting to gra fee. but if you look at the extent to which we have gone to communicating electronically, we all carry smartphones in our pockets. we all have computers in our pockets. there is 80% penetration in the united states of smartphones. there is also blackberry has gone out of business essentially. and blackberry had a secure communication system. the smartphones have not. what we have is to a certain extent the government was playing two sides. you could use kriping to gra fee but the fbi kept saying we're going dark. what i have seen quite clearly is that the nsa and defense side of the government says you bikwy tus kriping to gra fee is important. you need to secure the devices partially because they are

crucial for second factor communication. >> god, i wish we had another hour or to. can i say one thing on that. i am with susan on the value of that. it is a real problem in the terrorism front that there are -- that there are communications occurring between isis fighters that are even crypted and that we can't see. and that is a real serious problem. >> you are telling us we real, really, really can't see them. we're not just telling them we can't see that. >> this is a real problem. >> i have some thoughts but let's talk some questions. >> let me open up the floor. right now in the back. oh, i guess i'm being directed here. my apologies. >> hi. i'm alex mitchell with fox global here in d.c. i have a question more along the cultural and society aspects of this conversation. what is it going to take as far as an attack to get more political pressure on lawmakers, on the government to start taking actions that are more

preventative towards cyber attacks? for instance, if in an armored van went up to the office of personnel management and drove away with a bunch of records or the statement thing happened at the dnci feel there would be more pressure and i feel like what is going to take? is the concept too abstract for people to grasp? >> i abreeshuate the question sglt when you buy a computer and leave it there and don't do anything with it it is no good a few years later because it is easy to hack. one of the things lawmakers have not understood is in order to provide proper security we have to fund maintenance and it is very important. that is a serious thing. the other thing is we haven't gotten responsible about holding companies responsible. so when there is a data breach and i get two years worth of credit reports for free, that's not enough. >> got it. but to be fair to his question,

what can you do to bring pressure? at what point does this cyber stuff that seem so distant become con nettic. is that what you need? that's what you're asking. do you need that to happen, a dissaser to happen that's physical and things, you know, can be seen and felt as opposed to just theorizing that that could -- this is really bad stuff? suzanne, a minute. >> two days before christmas last year there was a cyber attack on the electric grid that brought down power for a quarter of a million people. this is not academic. this is not a theory. didn't happen here. it happened in ukraine but it happened. i think actually we -- again, we made great progress in getting this into the board rooms of companies all across the country. congress has actually acted in a bipartisan fashion to even fact five or six cyber security legislation, including very importantly automated

information sharing, liability protection for companies that sign up for our machine readable, machine to machine near real-timesharing of cyber threat indicators, and that required congress to come together around some tricky issues and they enacted it. so i -- we have had the attack. we do have people's attention and congress is actually taking some action on this. there is a lot more to be done. >> matt, last word. >> i will have to go back to the 9/11 anniversary. cyber responses are one way to respond to an attack, but there is a whole realm of other ways from diplomatic to intelligence to law enforcement to prosecutions. so there is a range of tools that we could bring to bear when we can attribute an attack. but i do think as much as the cyber legislation on information sharing was a great start, it is sort of just the beginning i think to your point. >> i wish we had a couple more hours. this is fascinating.

i want to ask you what you guys dream about these dissaser scenarios. i want to thank you very much. suzanne, matt and suzanne spaulding with the department of homeland security. and young lady, next time i'm up here you get the next question. [ applause ] please welcome former senator joe liebermann now a senior adviser to the counter extremism program and former representative mike rogers, host of something to think about. here to lead the conversation, please welcome back mary lou wis kelly. >> hello, again, everybody. senator, congressman, welcome. i have to say i have been really looking forward to this session because you two are both out of politics, which means you can tell us what you actually think.

>> would that ever stop us before? >> you were just telling me that the last time you were up on stage, you got into a fistfight, so we can only hope for a repeat this morning. >> we were joking of course. >> we'll see. we'll see. senator liebermann, let's start with you. you may not recall this, but you and i both had occasion to meet in 2004. i showed up at your office on capitol hill. pretty spring day. and i showed up because i was working on a story about tee tick. anybody remember tee tick? a room of blank faces. this was one of the marquee post 9/11 reforms, the terrorist reform integration center. >> it was the predecessor to nctc. >> john brown was running it. long time ago. so long ago you were a democrat

then. >> right. >> you told me on that pretty april day that you feared tee tick and a lot of these other reforms were and i'm quoting you potentially calamitous and your condition as i diligently reported on npr the next morning was you feared we were creating these huge bureaucracies that would work across purposes and still not really talk to each other. so have we created these bureaucracies that work across purposes and still don't really talk to each other? >> i actually remember that information, and i believe that the -- to continue a seam that will probably be reflected in all panels, that nothing is perfect. but we have made great progress in that regard. i think the last panel used the word dissaser. we experienced a national dissaser on 9/11 15 years ago. and one thing it did was take us

up. notwithstanding the truck bombing at the world trade center in '93, the bombing at the embassies, the uss coal, et cetera that we were in a new kind of war. so that was the first thing. second, we did act and incidentally we acted on a bipartisan, nonpartisan basis. the whole purpose because to bring people together. and incidentally the big battles in that legislative experience were not between republicans and democrats, they were between people close -- basically arguing for a given agency that didn't want to be blended under the department or in the intelligence reform that followed 9/11 commission report. >> so would you say we have made great progression, what would you point to? what's worked? >> look, together the department of homeland security creation and the reform of the intelligence system in response to the 9/11 commission

constitute the biggest changes in our national security apparatus since the late '40s, which was the beginning of the cold war. so we were beginning a new area of conflict. and i just say every day at the nctc through the director of national intelligence, the department of homeland security, the various agencies of the federal government are sharing information, are working together. i mean, these are big burr rock ra sis and a lot of people are involved. so it occasionally inefficient or top heavy, but, boy, they are recognizing the economy and talking a lot more than they did before. and i guess the bottom line that i would say, i believe, is from my own review but also for the 9/11 commission. if the reforms that exist today existed on 9/11, the 9/11 attack could not have been successfully launched against our country. >> congressman, let me let you

jump in here. what have we got right since 9/11. >> we are much better integrated. i think those organizational events were important because it strarted driving integration in a way we couldn't do when they were separate. do i think there is lots of room for reform yet? yes, i do. but we started dispatching nsa analysts down range. never really did that before. >> what do you mean by that? >> so the nsa was a -- is a big signals collection intelligence agency. and it was separated from the combat environment in a way that probability wasn't helpful prior to 9/11. so you had trooped in combat in iraq, afghanistan, other places in world. they started to do this and this wasn't done by legislation. this was done by this integration effort they had the opportunity to do. they dispatched analysts down range. >> you mean getting them out of fort meade. >> putting them in afghanistan,

putting them in other countries around the world rkts putting them in places like iraq in ways they hadn't done that before. so you had all of our intelligence services sitting in the same room, looking at the same problem set and every one of them could pick up the phone when you ran into a problem and call the mother ship and say can we work this out? how do we apply the resources we have to solving a particular intelligence problem? i think we really saw huge benefits from this almost immediately. so we've seen those kinds of things. that part we have gotten right. i think the ptb. >> president's daily brief. >> president's daily brief is a much better product today because of the dni structure. >> why? >> i was a le luck tant dni supporter to be fair. because you have a coordinated effort. no agency says they information is more important. we all think our intelligence

agency is the best. everybody has that belief. and what the ptb now represents is an accurate picture from all of the agencies. sometimes an agency isn't going to be represented. maybe the cia isn't represented in the ptb today because the information that cross pollinated now you can get the best product on the president's desk for the best solution. and i think that is a positive result from the dni creation. >> do you get to read that as chair of the house. >> not in the form as in the pdb. the president sees it for a little bit. as a chairman you can get all of that plus some. but we get our own daily briefs. >> you are talking about all of the different agencies together putting information in that you could get some more balance product. on the other hand, sometimes one stream of intelligence reports is more accurate than the others. and as we know from the iraq war

fiasco, there is the danger of not connecting the dots. there is also the danger of group think and you get ady lewded product if you pour everything in together and say everything gets a voice. >> they don't say. maybe i missed that part. they don't get a voice. some days the cia might get in. the next day it might be all cia product because if that is the best most timely situation given what the situation of the day is for the purpose of national security decision. that's why i think it is a better product. you might get a little of this and that in there, any other about know anymores. i might be able to get them all, maybe. and, so, that's the benefit of it. and it could be a one -- you could have one analyst, you know, three-quarters of that thing be from one group of analytical product that makes it to the pdb because it's that important, that fresh and that accurate on that particular day. in the old days, i'm not sure that was the case. when we looked and took a

historical look at it, the agency that ran it is the cia. they will wait realistically to the cia product. you get great cia product. now you get great other products as well. that to me was one of the big benefits. >> senator liebermann, staying with this theme of things have have been fixed, reform since 9/11. dhs is your baby. i remember you fighting for that a long time. a lot of battles on the hill. hand over heart, do you think it's been a useful -- has it worked? >> i am not good at denying paternity here. this baby occasionally acts in ways that has all of our children, too, that you're not so sure about. but i know -- incidentally i was actively involved. i was glad to be but it was really bipartisan. fred thompson, the late, great,

fred was working with me. there were people on the house in both sides. but the bottom line was we took then 22 significant agencies brought them together and -- >> and you wanted more of them. you wanted the fbi to be in there, too? >> this all started -- i don't take full credit for this because it was a report earlier in 2001 before 9/11 by a commission that foresaw a terrorist group taking advantage of the disorganization of the american security agencies and striking us and recommended something like the department of homeland security. you know, this is going to be -- there's plenty of reference points, but once somebody sent me a speech that fred smith fedex gave to his employees and he said the journey to better service by fedex has no final

destination point. in other words, we're going to have to continue always to get better and better and, you know, there's still more of that to do. but are we safer as a result of having a dhs of all the component parts working together? we sure are. >> i guess, i mean, it prompts the question of how you get the balance right. with we safer? okay. you could point to the fact there hasn't been anything on the scale of 9/11 since 9/11. >> that's a significant fact to point to. >> significant. on the other hand, the number that's being put on what's been spend to prevent that from happening is around a trillion dollars. nobody would advocate that. on the other hand, that's a trillion dollars that hasn't been spent on schools and hospitals and that sort of thing. do you think we got the balance right? >> i don't know the number.

i can't judge whether it's accurate. i will assume for the moment it's accurate. the first responsibility of the federal government, we all say this, it's true, so to protect the security of our country. without security, you don't have freedom or the opportunity to really get kids well educated. so can i say that if it is a trillion dollars that every dollar was spent officially, of course not. but we were under attack on 9/11 and we have stopped similar attacks, but we are obviously still under attack by this spreading menace of radical islamist terrorism which has expressed itself since 9/11, mostly in loan wolves who have been radicalized over the internet. and that's something the counter extremism project which i'm here on behalf and i helped found two years ago as worked on. because here, again, the

terrorists as they said on 9/11 using our aviation system, they're using a wonderful development in our world, which is the internet. but they are using it to communicate, to radicalize and sometimes to attack. and for instance, the counter extremism project is focused on putting pressure on twitter, which is used a lot by radical extremist groups to deny them that access we've developed a wonderful man named hahn nay per reed, a scientist at dart mouth college a program which he first developed to automatically find child pornography on the internet, now to do the same for images and words that are associated with extremism and terrorism. so the government -- the bottom line here is government is not going to do it all, and we're under continuing threat because

of how few people can do enormous damage to us on this unconventional battlefield. but we're pushing them back. >> i was struck by a point in the atlantic magazine article that i see a lot of you have got asking the question about tsa, for example. talking about a place where a lot of money has been spent and a lot of effort has been made to get it right. and the question was how many hijackers have armed air marshals tagen down since 9/11? and the answer is none. and, yet, we're having invested and spent and trained thousands of thousands and they are flying around the country as we speak. how do you weigh that as somebody who controlled the pursestrings on this? >> let me tell you a story. and somebody that believes this is an important thing and the intelligence community is what is going to help us prevent problems from happening and

prevent a bad policy positions from being engaged. so i argue it has an out sized impact on what our national security is going to look like in the next few years. we don't get that piece right, i guarantee you the other pieces aren't going to look right either. when i came chairman i decided i was going to go to every bad place in the world that was on the front edge of this thing making that work. and all of that time spent on the road with these great americans was that they had some problems. one of those problems -- and this is going to shock everyone in the room. are you all ready? there is politics happening in waugds. and what happened is the politics was driving the spending that if it was a counter terrorism case they got all the money they needed. people were wheelbarrowing it in and dumping it in the office. but if they had an intelligence matter that didn't fit the ct

they couldn't find a dollar to work on. and i heard this on multiple places around the country and i see one good old friend i had those conversations with. i won't say where you are. good to see you, tom. he's retired, so i can say tom and not get arrested. i look bad in orange jump suits. one of the things we found is we had lots of great money. but could you save money? we came back after a three-month tour and called the directors and said i'm cutting your budget next year. you might want to come up and see me. dead silent on the phone cht like you're the guy. what are you doing. and what we did is how do we spend what we have better. after 9/11 we threw a lot of money on this problem and i argue rightly so. i'm with the senator on this 100%. you didn't have a lot of options. that was the best spending money when the first goal for us is

difficult. we were able to take out the first couple years about $3 billion and we did it through merging. we didn't take away from mission. the mission had the money. we gave more flexibility to the counter terrorism fund so they could use it on other national security issues because in some issues they had to get money back because they couldn't spend it on ct, then they wouldn't spend it on nuclear proliferation. i don't know about you but that keeps me up at right. we had to change that. we have to go through that same review. and you are going to have some hard conversations. but we're able to cut that money and not impact mission. many argued we had more mirgs dlars at the end of the day and we spent less money. i believe it's completely possible. it's hard and teed yus and everyone has their own budget lines. they argued how much fuel they spent on helicopters. i wish i were kidding you on an intelligence operation. on the other line they were buying boats because they had so

much money they didn't know what to do with it. >> i want to open it. we will have some time for a quick question. let me press you on this. it seems as though the most effective things that have been done since 9/11 have been, a, local and pretty cheap. i am thinking of the example in boston that boston carried out about six months before the bombing, carried out a big emergency preparedness drill and figured out if we were to have a mass casualty attack what would the exit routes be and where should we position the emergency medical position and they think that saved a lot of lives, that the hundreds got treatment that was live saving. is that the model going forward now that we've done the restructuring in washington? >> it's not the exclusive model. but this is part one of the big advances that came about because the department of homeland

security that's not much talked about is the department of homeland security by direction of congress created a section that interfaces directly with local and state law enforcement. and, you know, that gives -- i forget the number. i used to know it. hundreds of thousands of personnel to join the effort to stop terrorist attack. and i bet that drill in boston, i don't know, was either encouraged or financed by the department of homeland security because we did that and we have done that in major cities throughout the country. >> still your baby. >> yeah. i'm a proud and i would i guess i'd say protective father to that. >> i think you would agree. at some point we have to say we have this huge amount of money being poured in the funnel at the top. maybe it's not coming out the way we want at the bottom. can we restructure it?

we need to re-evaluate and the whole of government approach, that's one thing we haven't gotten right. it hasn't got to where we need to go. the nsa and cyber command is likely to split. i think that's probably a good decision here for a whole host of reasons. that means we are going to have changes and change these horses midstream. and also on the state department working with the military, working with our intelligence services, i'm not convinced we exactly have that right yet. and i think that that will -- that change has to happen pretty soon going forward. and the next president is going to inherit i think dysfunctional is too strong a word but a layered burr cattic national security council operation decision-making process that i don't think works for the better of our national security. they will have to go in and change that and neither one of will taken that issue. >> a bureaucracy in progress. we are tight in time but i want

to squeeze in one question. we got a quick one from the back. >> rachel eleven son walt man. i am interested in terms of the conversation about dhs and whether that money was well spent. of course dhs sent millions and millions of dollars to fusion centers with very little oversight and it seems that that money did vary a little. and i am interested if you think that money was well spent in terms of looking back an dhs thinking, yes, dhs did contribute to national security, whether you would extent that to fusion centers and vested something different or do something different in the future. >> with the benefit of hindsight. >> it was a good idea but the sense it literally brought together federal, state, local law enforcement and related agencies. and i could tell you from the state level, it mattered a lot in local levels to those groups to be involved, and they in turn helped the federal prevention

and law enforcement effort. but, you know, i'll go back to the fedex analogy. there's no destination point for making this better. it's just got to continue and i agree with what mike said. really, an oversight role, very active oversight role has to be played by congress and the relevant committees constantly and there is an opportunity for the new president, whatever it is, to do the same to do a top to bottom. it is 15 years, and i don't question that these agencies, dhs, dna, nctc have made us safer. could they use a review? of course they could. and it ought to happen soon. >> congressman, a quick last word on that point. >> yes and no. yes we use the centers help. you need to trick them down. i don't think we needed as many across the country. some of them become a status symbol to have one. so major cities, you can imagine

los angeles, new york, chicago, detroit, places that were hot beds of activity made a lot of sense to have a fusion center. we put them in other places that -- if you looked at their metrics on success, boy, they got really creative. there was some great creative quiters hired and they were taking other people's work and reprinting it. we don't have the funds to tolerate that kind of loose operation anywhere. so i would have them but really target them around the country and then you'd have more money to spent on collecting local officers to participate. some of them were having a hard time filling their obligation and they had so much value in those fusion centers. but yes i think in all of those. great idea. implementation we have some work. >> spoken like a true former bl

book and history programs. stay up-to-date. c-span's radio app means you always have c-span on the go. now more from the atlantics national security summit. this panel includes white house homeland security advicer lisa monaco and michael mccall. it is two hours. please welcome to the stage karen green burg, director of the center of national security at the florida university school of law and the director of the national security project. here to lead the conversation please welcome back the atlantic's steve clemens. >> greetings, everybody. i'm back.

and don't forget, you will get to ask the first question, so back here. karen green burg is the author of reeg justice, a book and we wanted to note for you in advance because she's very cool and very sort of underexposed here in d.c. and a great thing to have you here that you are going to be signing your books for those of you who want them after. let me start for a moment and ask. we are thinking 15 years. what has happened. and a lot of our discussion this morning has focused a little bit on the getting the bad guys. i am interested in what the state of our soul is as a -- you know, part of the equation was targeted killings, rendition, drones, a whole new infrastructure of dealing with detain knees in guantanamo and, karen, i want to ask you. in the waves of fear that drove a lot of decisions on how we deal with people we identified as enemies, whether they were or

not, what is the state, what is the price we have paid as a society for that? >> it's big. the price we have paid is much more than we can imagine. i think. and i can talk about this a little bit. there are things that we now accept as a country that we never would have accepted on september 10th, 2001. >> like? >> 15 years ago. most obvious the low hanging fruit is of course torture, which is still mentioned in presidential debates of the candidates. which came to an end before the end of the bush administration and, you know, definitively with the obama administration. but let me just mention a couple other things. one is the concept of indefinite detention. being able to be held without trial, without a sense of end of hostility. so you're just kept in limbo, you know prior to 9/11, this is

not something that would have been tolerated in the american legal or constitutional mind set. now what we have done is president obama has said let's close guantanamo, but that does not mean what it used to mean. it used to mean ending indefinite attention. now it means closing the doors on guantanamo and keeping some people in indefinite detention, which is also keeping a category of indefinite detention alive within the american mind set. so that would be another. >> let me open this up to her as well. i would argue if you went out to poll the american public, and i could be wrong on this, that that might not seem like a bad thing. they might not be aware or think about the consequences. is this just karen green burg being an obsessive compulsive about an issue americans have lost track of and doesn't matter anywhere? why when we did see horrific things happen, beheadings and horrific human rights, terrorism

directed at the united states, i guess my question is, so what? i mean, you know, not speaking on behalf of myself, but on behalf of many people i know and around the country. how is that? >> okay. so here is why. here is the answer to that. yeah, that's two dozen people. we don't care about them. we're over it. we understand it's because of 9/11. but it is such a thing about mission creep and who we find as an enemy and that could change at my moment. this is not a legal principal that's been codified or voted upon that we accept as part of our body of politics. that's why we're keeping gaun tan know, one of the reasons. if you think you can contain this, that's one thing. >> let me interrupt, steve, if i can, which is part of the answer to this so what? five years ago, we wrote a

report at the aclu and it is called a call to courage and it was essentially a call to courage on the part of our policymakers to remember that resilience and a form of strength that comes from the constitution and values embodied there are written into our national character and we were in danger of loosing that and i think we're still on that trajectory. part of the are we safer is to remember one of the things we're looking safety for and from in addition to the undeniable risk and threat of terrorism is safety from government overreach, safety from government violations of the law. and there is a system, obviously, of structural checks and balances written into the constitution, as well as the framer's formation of the bill of rights, right, fourth amendment essentially says basic

principal government does not surveil us unless there is suspicious of wrongdoing in advance. fifth amendment, due process rights. and i think that system is in danger of continuing to be broken down. it has been violated. let me give you a couple examples. 2001 aunf, specific language states when congress passed it rejected wholesale authority on the part of the executive to go to war without defining a particular enemy. now, two administrations, republican and democratic, have used and invoked the 2001 aumf beyond its purpose and beyond it's breaking point and that is a failure of structural checks and balances with respect to perhaps the most important power that congress should have, which is the power to declare war. now, this is not just a post-9/11 failure. that has been happening for a while. but i think one of the dangers, and this comes back to the targeted killing policy, is that

based on that 2001 aumf, we have had first president bush, now two terms of president obama claim the authority to engage in massive legal strikes in violation of the international legal frame work that the united states helped establish that maintains international peace and security picking from bits and pieces of the most per misive aspects of the law while ignoring the restrictive aspects that protect the right to life, as well as security. >> hahn that, i have heard. i was there when the president gave a speech, essentially my short form would be stop me before i kill again was a national defense university speech where he basically said rur targeted killings policy needs review, needs controls, needs standards, needs frames. and called on congress to help work with him to set those frames. this was a president inviting some sort of frame work to

manager the system that he and others have been making. the call happened. but to my knowledge, the frame work building hasn't happened because you have a congress that seems unable to work for it. and i'm interested because i understand and appreciate the frame you are coming at on this, but the fact is targeted killings are continuing but the president of the united states, obama, seems to me anyway to be trying to navigate something that isn't completely disconnected from legacy. am i wrong? >> you know, it's one thing to say ate and another thing to do it and another thing to blame politics. it's political i try but i can't. but i just want to talk about something.