this. i trust that he will. so we allowed some school districts to allow canned, frozen, dried fruit. as a pilot program. 2014 and 2015. some of these cans of fruit are just loaded with sugar. people say, i won't mention names, happened to be a congressman from california, by the way, said if they can eat grapes, they can eat raisins. i said, wait a minute, no, no, no. that's not right. if a kid eats 8 or 10 or 12 grapes, that's okay. does a kid eat 10 or 12 raisins? no, they eat a box. 30 or 40 at a time and it's just concentrated sugar in those raisins. anyway, all i can tell you is they've been trying to get in on this program for a long time. i hope we can keep them out and keep it fresh fruits and

vegetables. but that's how they try to get in on some of these things. then we started the farm to school program. great secretary of agriculture. in 2013 and '14 school districts nationwide purchased over $800 million from local food from farmers and fisherman. this is 105% over what they've done before. more and more skills. let me mention a couple of other things and i'll close, that both good and bad. good, soda taxes. by god, maybe we're finally going to get some soda taxes. i know berkeley, california had done this before, if i'm not mistaken. but now this year it is on the ballot in several places and in june of this year, philadelphia city council passed a big soda tax, 15 cents per ounce on their sodas. goes into effect on the 1st of

january ppt wouldn't you know it they filed suit just last month. filed suit against them in philadelphia. but this is now picking up a lost steam in different parts of the kcountry. so i know very soon we will see this big thing turn and more and more jurisdictions will soda taxes and i hope that it passes. i think is on the ballot in san francisco they tell me and oakland. this year, right? i keep my fingers crossed. worrisome things. national parks. do you knee there's an effort under way right now in the national park service because they are so hurting for money that they are now, there's a proposal of the national park service to go out and get corporate money. to come into national parks. and there is a, you as you know pb right now there is a rier

requirement that parks must remain free of commercialization. they want give parks naming rights. i just went to yosemite for the first time in my life this summer. i can just see it there. brought to you by mcdonald's. on yosemite falls or -- this is just a bizarre things. that's what they are doing. that's what they are trying to do. so you have to be cautious about this too. because they are hurting for money. other thing, you saw an ad here from teacher night. mcdonald's right now in various places around the country are going and getting teachers and school administrators to put on their -- put on their branded things for mcdonald's. they go behind the counter on an evening. advertise this aep kids and their families can come and have a mcdonald's and a certain portion of that money goes to the local school. this is happening right now in america.

teacher nights. this is, again, schools are strapped for money. so so wh so what can they do? teachers of l.a. denounced the policy. you tried it out here and teachers are opposed to it. ways in japan about three weeks ago on another issue. this is what came up. pokemon. pokemon. yeah. pokemon stores over there. anyway -- pokemon. now there's this pokemon go, you know, that you play on your games. and kids follow around and they get a hot spot and then they get to go to the next level. well, now they have pokemon hot spots in japan that are mcdonald's. in order to get to the next level you have to go to mcdonald's. and if you buy a happy meal, you get a higher score.

it's coming here too. be prepared. someone mentioned that they tried, mcdonald's tried in florida, to do a thing where if you get a good report card you get a sticker and then you get free happy meal or a reduced priced happy meal or something like that at mcdonald's. these are are the kind of thing that we just have to be careful and just keep our eyes open on this. let me close on this. successes. healthy and free hunger kids act. i tried all during the '90s to get soft drichks out of schools. by god, there are no more soft drinks in school today. we are making progress. all foods in schools must meet nutrition standards. i mentioned farm to school.

school guard yengs aardens are all over america. i mentioned the fresh fruit and vegetable program. that's great. but they are trying to water it down or sugar it down. school wellness policies, these are going to be good. we just got keep on them. just got to keep on the local school districts on their three-year evaluations. so the problems that i see are cash-strapped schools. schools will want to raise money for mcdonald's and corporate interests and thing like that. other thing i worry about is social meeta. one thing i thought a lot about is, you know, when you see an ad on television for junk food, we can't go out and buy an ad countering that. we don't have enough money. we can't do that. but if kids are moving things around and social media, for kids as you saw here earlier, well, you can get involved in that. i'm proposing that we start to

organize a lot of youth in america with some music stars. and others. that they look up to. and when social media starts promoting different junk foods and things like that, we get right in the center of that and we have a counter group of youth doing the same thing. connecting with other youth and get involved in that whole scheme. doesn't cost anything. so we aught to be starting to organize young people along the social media lines too. and so, again, there are some things looming on the horizon. i think there will continue to be problems but i think we've come a long way and i think that we can really continue to push the frontiers on the advertising end and also on the type of food, kind of food, that our kid

are eating in the school breakfast and school lunch programs in america. i remain hopeful. thank you very much. [ applause ] now, michael, did you want me to respond to anything? >> yes. let's take five to seven minutes, if you don't mind, senator, and have questions from the audience. make sure you speak into the microphone when you ask the question. i'm a little hard of hearing where i sit. i was covering for you. >> thank you. >> and then that way we can hear the question properly. we've got microphones coming around. wait until you have the microphone, then can you ask your question. do we have the microphones? >> yeah, just no questions. >> there we go. thank you. rudy, can you -- i think there's a second microphone. come on up. there's a couple of hands that

were up. there we go. up here to the second table. >> good afternoon, senator. you are proposing or proposed a soda tax. >> mm-hm. >> where will the proceeds of the soda tax go? will it fund some kind of a behavioral kind of thing with schools or allowed back to the state government which uses it for something else? >> well, yes. i mean, the fact is the places that are doing the soda tax like philadelphia it is a general revenue type tax. it doesn't go into school health or anything like that. just a general revenue type of thing. but hey, i'll take what i can get. if it increases the cost and price and that tends to reduce

some of the purchasing of it, that's okay with me. that's fine. obviously, i would prefer to see it be a dedicated source of revenue for children's health. for better food policy in our schools, but that's not where it's going. oh, excuse me, city council or someone could decide that. >> right. that's what is happening in berkeley. it is a general revenue tax in berkeley but there is a committee that was appointed to say where those funds are going. it's raised so far in the first six months i think it raised $1.5 million. for school gardens and other programs dedicated to children's health. >> that's good. yeah. that's good. well, don't want it tato take a more time. one more? >> what would you think about or

is it a viable strategy to try to remove some of the subsidies of commodity crops, sugar et cetera, is there any viable path there or are we just -- shall we just move on to taxing on the other end? >> the answer's yes. well, again, maybe i'm a -- obviously i represented for years corn and beans and hogs and cattle, so i had to be careful about that. understand, i can be brave but not a fool. anyway, so what i did in the 2008 farm bill, i told you i took that fresh fruit and vegetable, and the other thing i did was made eligible for farm support programs for the first

time ever, fruit, nut crops, vegetables for the first time ever. so they are eligible for a lot of programs. like conservation programs and things like that they they had not been eligible for before. there is no support price mechanisms in there. and there's no national kind of a -- what am i trying to think of. support for corn and beans and rice, sugar, that type of thing. but at least now they are part of the program and i'm hopeful and i've been hopeful ever since that the fruit and vegetable and tree nut people would begin to really organize and organize more strongly to be a part, a bigger part, of what we might call production agriculture in

america. we need fresh fruit farmers in america and more greenhouses in places around the country. and that type of thing. and but now, least now they've got their foot in the door. but can you reduce some of the other things? yeah. maybe. it's not as much as it used to be, i'll tell you that. not as much support as there used to be. for peanuts, cotton, rice. of course, tobacco went out some years ago. corn, beans, that kind of thing. so it's not so much direct payments and stuff as it is just support mechanisms out there. >> thank you, senator. >> okay. c-span's washington journal.

live everyday. with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up tuesday morning, subcommittee on health ranking member and budget committee member congressman jim mcdermott on the future of affordable care act under president-elect trump as well as opinions on trump administration apointments so far. then president for americans tax reform norquist talks about president-elect trump's fiscal and economic proposals and discuss fiscal policy in the upcoming gop-controlled congress. watch c-span's journal live tuesday morning. join the discussion. the u.s. capitol is getting ready for the holiday season. today the capitol christmas tree arrived after traveling more than 3700 miles from national fornest idaho. this year's tree is an 80-foot ing elman spruce decorated with over 18,000 handmade ornaments

and displayed on the west lawn of the u.s. capitol. the tree-lighting ceremony will take place on december 6th. sunday, on book tv's in-depth, we're hosting a discussion on the december 1941 attack on pearl harbor on the eve of the 75th anniversary. on the program, steve toomey, author of countdown 12 days to the atake. eri hotta and craig nelson. followed by an interview with donald stratton, pearl harbor survivor and author. we're taking your phone calls, tweets and e-mail questions live from noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern. go to book tv.org for the

complete weekend schedule. next, national security experts discuss how the news media is shaping public reaction to terrorist attacks. they use of social media and its role during the boston marathon bombing and the orlando nightclub shooting. hosted by new america, this is two hours. welcome. i'm pleased to introduce this event on terrorism in america in the digital age. my name is tom glaisyer.

i'm a program director at democracy fund voice, and two organizations hosted by ebay founder to ensure that the public comes first in our democracy. democracy fund voice is a new, nonpartisan organization dedicated to helping america build a stronger, healthier democracy. like our sister organization, the democracy fund, we are working to ensure that our political system is responsive to the public and able to meet the challenges facing our nation. basically, we seek to do things that make democracy work better. i focus on work around strengthening media with priorities on reducing misinformation, sustaining local news, and exploring innovative engagement practices. however, as the political fear amongering and demagoguery in this election cycle heated up this past winter, we found ourselves asking not what role we could play to respond to try to make things a little bit better but also what dangerous scenarios could take place that could actually make things even

worse. quite frankly, we were concerned that the unprecedented attention in the current election cycle on recurring incidents could speed the democratic institutions and while emergency managers spent significant time thinking about public responses to major disasters, little attention is focused on how major shocks and disruptions can damage our political institutions and processes. the paper launched today on the event provided tremendous opportunity to explore strategies for developing greater civic resiliency in the face of events. it is our hope that expert reports like this one on this topic will prompt conversations among journalists, technology companies, and others about the practices that are employed to respond to the unthinkable and how these responses can strengthen rather than threaten the health of our democracy. i'm very much looking forward to the discussions this afternoon, and so without further comment, on behalf of my colleagues at democracy fund voice, i would

like to pass the mike to sharon. thank you. >> great, thank you very much, tom, and welcome to everyone joining us. i'm sharon burke, a senior adviser at new america where i run a program on resource security and i'm an adviser to the international security program and the future of war and a co-author of this report which is war and tweets, terrorism in the -- in america in the digital age. i'm going to introduce my colleague peter singer in just a moment but i want to thank tom glaisyer and democracy fund voice. when we started this project some time ago i thought their vision was great. it was about revitalizing democracy and strengthening civil society. what he talked about in terms of erosion and those long-term concerns and i was with him on that but i didn't think it was an urgent immediate problem and now, of course, i -- mea culpa, you were right, this is for right now. not a concern about what happens next year or ten years from now.

so i'm glad to be a part, to be a part, supporting their mission and supported by them. i want to thank the people who worked on this project, lisa sims was the project coordinator, david stuhrman was a co-author on the report and peter burgin advised us sh eped us all throughout. peter is in iraq and can't be with us today. but we very much appreciate his work and all of the communities here in new america that put on these events. so i'll start by summarizing our report briefly and get into a conversation with dr. singer because he came out with a new article in the "the atlantic" that i commend everyone here about war going viral and war in the age of social media and we're going to talk a little bit about our report and his work and what are some of the similarities and differences there. then we'll have a wonderful panel come up and i will introduce you at that time and we will have a discussion and have audience q&a and i want to

preset with you, with the audience and the audience we have online, including the university of central florida is joining us online today, i just want to warn you that i may look nice and friendly but please keep your questions to a question or, as peter says, something with a question mark at the end. if you monologue i will probably cut you off so i'm not that friendly. so first, peter singer is here at new america, he's a strategist and senior fellow and i'm looking at his bio to make sure i get the key points but i don't need it. he's one of the top national security experts in this country and he has an interesting focus on technologists. he's a trend spotter, he's always ahead of the game and he's operating in just about every sector you can. he's advising governments, hollywood, technologists. so i'm delighted you could join me to open this up and have a conversation. first, our report. when we started this report, we wanted to look at terrorism in america and how people react to

terrorism. of course, in the middle of our study the attack in orlando at pulse nightclub happened and that changed what we were looking at a little bit but to put it in a broader context, peter burgin and his team have done work on what happened in america since 9/11 and there have been 147 americans killed in terrorist attacks, 94 at the hand of jihadists. so more recently the places that will ring a bell are san bernardino, orlando, of course, which is a case study in this report, minnesota, the stabbing in minnesota, new york city, new jersey, and maybe even north carolina recently, too soon to tell what the details of that attack were but it's possible that was also a terrorist attack. political violence in this country, we had a history of it for a long time, it's not all jihadi violence, of course. this is everything from the weather underground to possibly this new attack in north carolina as i said, hard to say

at this time. it's not possible to stop all attacks for all time no matter how good our intelligence operations are, no matter how good our military is and they're very good, we know that. we've had a couple army officers here which is terrific. we can't stop everything for all time. so what do terrorists want? more than 30 years ago prime minister margaret thatcher said that publicity is the oxygen of terrorism. what they want is to affect how you feel, how you act, howe your government acts and they have their own goals and that is the definition of terrorism is a group that uses violence for a political or ideological cause. so that's what they want. so in other words, how you act is part of their strategy. and resilience to such an attack should be and is part of any nation's counterterrorism strategy and it's certainly part of this nation's

counterterrorism strategy. so when you look back at the recent attacks that have happened in places like san bernardino, i think when you look at polling, a lot of americans feel like they're at personal risk of a terrorist attack. now the risk of any individual american being attacked isn't that high. but, you know, why was san bernardino a target? because the perpetrators lived there. so, in other words, even though any given individual is not at high risk of attack, any city could get attacked at any time. so every city in this country needs to be prepared for this kind of crisis and what they would do, this is what our report is looking at. so dhs, the department of homeland security defines resilience as "the ability to resist, absorb, recover from or successfully adapt to a change -- to adversity or a change in conditions." we looked at what determines resilience, what shapes resilience. and a a big part of resilience is who tells the story and what kind of story they tell.

how did they choose to shape the narrative? this is something that's changing dramatically in the air -- era of social media. so that's what we looked at. how is the way the story's told changing? we have a historical section in our report that starts with the world trade center bombing in 1993. and the reason we started with that bombing is that's when you start to see live television coverage coming into play in a big way. it's also when cell phones started making an appearance. they're so ubiquitous today that it's hard to believe there was a time so recently when they weren't but that's the first time you started to have people with cell phones calling news organizations, calling government and first responders with information. so we started and tracked how media and this personal ability to communicate from eyewitnesses, victims and perpetrators starts to shape the story. we went from there and we looked at also the oklahoma city

bombing and you know pretty much every attack that's happened since then. starting in '93 and, of course, before that, news media was largely the gatekeeper. they were the narrator and the ones that told you what the story was but how they covered it, what images they showed you and what they told you. that starts to change in the 2000s when camera phones arrive, which happens in the early 2000s, again, i know it's hard to believe. probably everyone in here has a camera phone on them right now, but that was just starting in the 2000s and you saw that particularly in the 2005 london metro bombing that phones, pictures people took from their phones were making it on the nightly news and making it into newspapers for the first time. 2009, ft. hood, that was one of the first jihadist attacks in the united states that was really using social media, where social media picked up the story and began to shape it. the boston bombing -- and we will hear from one of our panelists later firsthand about what that felt like.

we also saw big changes with social media coverage and in two ways -- officials were using it, sometimes to really good effect and sometimes to spread misinformation such as there was a story that there had been a bomb at the jfk library and the boston police repeated the story. and then it becomes an article of faith. also a social media platform red -- reddit, the users really kind of ran away with the story and start started speculating on who the perpetrators might be, and when a -- when law enforcement tried to get ahead of the story by putting out some early photos, and the reddit users really tried to guess who they might be, they guessed wrong, and they identified a picture and matched it with a student who was missing. was not the perpetrator but the pain and suffering it caused his family was awful so this is when we first saw social media playing that kind of role for better and worse. in 2013 the west gate mall shooting in kenya, you had for

the first time terrorist group al shabab live tweeting their own attack. again, this is a big change, right, from when news media decides what the story is is to the perpetrator decides, directly communicating with the public what the story is and all the way to today where not only do you have that you have live streaming. as i said, we spent a lot of time on orlando in our study because it was the case study we looked at, it happened in the middle of our research. i'm not going to go into too much detail about what we saw and what we found because we're fortunate enough to have the mayor of orlando here today and i think he can best tell you what that looked like. but what i do want to say is as we're firmly in this era now, where news media is not the only gate keeper and public officials don't necessarily control the story, what did we learn from orlando and all the other cases we looked at in a time when

eye-witnesses and victims and perpetrators and even observers thousands of miles away are going to shape the story and decide how the public reacts. what did we find? we found leadership matters. even though you have so many people telling the story, first responders and public officials still have an authoritative voice in telling the story. so how they shape it, what they say, when they say it, to whom they say it really matters. and what you'll hear from dyer is that he thought very carefully about that and what he wanted his city to feel and think and that matters, also a part of that is that leadership matters, you also have to be prepared. not only prepared exercised for a crisis but prepared for the communications aspect and the pace of it. in the case of orlando, this happened at 2:00 in the morning and the city had time to think about how it was going to respond. if it happened in 2:00 in the afternoon, they would have had

to know right away and the fact that they were prepared and knew how to use social media for this crisis would have made a huge difference. it did even though they had time to craft their response so social media and the pace of information has to be built into exercises. second, i think we found it's important to give the public a constructive role. to give them agency. so one of the things we found that was very interesting is after the paris attacks, the recent paris attacks, there was a police operation in brussels where they were hunting for some of the suspects and the brussels police communicated to the city, "please do not post pictures or tweet where we're conducting operations. you'll tip off the people we'll looking for." and the city and the wider twitter community responded and began tweeting cat pictures. i don't know if people remember this, to the hashtag brussels

lockdown. what that did is effectively buried anything people were posting that might have helped find where they were doing these operations and then the brussels police posted after that a picture of cat food and said, thank you, help yourself. so, again, i think not just by being sophisticated with social media but by also giving the victims a way to not feel like victims, it helps with resilience. include communications in social media use and exercises in planning and real life. you do as public officials and first responders need to know, need to have practiced and incorporated social media into your operations even for a small city. finally, what we found is it's important to empower your local press. of all the press that tells the story, they're part of your community so they have a vested interest in the community being resilient because they live there, their families live there but they also have the most local knowledge so local press,

even though they're around lot of pressure from all kinds of competition still has an important role to play and as they change and become a different kind of press that will continue to be true and finally social media companies, we think, need to embrace their responsibility. they are the mass media of choice for many, many people now, whether they see themselves in that light or not, it's the truth and some companies such as facebook have been forward leaning trying to understand what that means. they have community rules, they're experimenting with how to improve them, they're experimenting with how transparent to be and collaboration with government but facebook is by far the most used media -- social media company and they've tried to embrace this rule, they have people who look at counterterrorism on their staff so that's a good thing but there's a lot of companies that will say things -- like twitter has in its community rules "we speak truth to power." that's great, but that tension between dangerous speech and

free speech is very real and it's not something you can easily dismiss, a place like reddit where they can say we don't get into that but that really rings hollow when something like what happened with the boston bombing happens where you ruin somebody's life. so social media companies, we think, need to embrace their role and the fact that they are mass media companies at this point. so with that i'd like to turn to peter. peter's article in the "atlantic" is called "war goes viral." and he focused on another side of the same equation which is partly how this is a weapon and how isis and others use it. i have my notes about the things i want to talk to you about but the first thing i want to ask you is can you define homophily for us? >> dig down into the details. homophily is one of the things we're seeing play out on the

internet, and it should be familiar to you. it's the definition of "love of self." and what it's -- what's happening is the idea, there's a seeming kind of contradiction where this technology is supposed to be bringing us together, but it's -- we're searching out and finding validation in people who think like us already. so -- and you can see this in everything from sports. you connect to people who like the same team or hate the same team, to the election where, you know, look, all the information is online, but if you watch the facebook feed of a trump supporter versus a hillary supporter, they're fundamentally different worlds and so you create these kind of echo chambers and it's the same thing happening on the violence side as well. and that's really what the -- to pull back on all this, what we were wrestling with in the

project, this is with emerson brooke, is how the internet itself is changing and how that affects all of us. so the internet has gone from being used merely to transfer information back and forth, me e-mailing you, to also collecting information about the world around us. so, it's your -- your average smartphone has over 20 sensors on it. the camera to geolocation, you name it. so, actually, when you crunch the numbers, you know, we have roughly 6 billion things online right now. we're with the internet of things as you get smart cars, et cetera, you get up to 50 billion. actually, that leads to a trillion sensors out there, things collecting information. and the other shift is what you're talking about, the rise of social media. where we're not just collecting information, we're sharing it. we become distributors of information and the way that media used to be, and so the

result is that every single actor in violence is online, be it isis, be it the u.s. military, be it the russian military, and every single act of violence is being talked about online, usually in realtime now, often first. again, that's true whether you're looking at the case of the attack in orlando where, you know, it's the -- literally the clubs, if i recall correctly, the club's facebook account, seven minutes, and it's telling people inside the club to run. and yet you and i can track it from afar to right now, you can track the battle of mosul via, you know, everything from a youtube channel to instagram. this is something new. this is something different.

>> that makes it different, right? so people are deciding which pieces of that they want to hear. >> and yeah. the way i frame it is, there's arguably no more secrets, but the truth is being buried beneath a sea of lies. and again, we can see that playing out in everything from electoral politics today and then how that links to russian information warfare campaigns, to the discourse over terrorism, you name it. and the homophily side comes in because one of the things that's sort of strange, it's the way we think, and we're more likely to believe information that connects and links to the way we already view the world, so when they did a study of what goes viral, it's not the truth -- what you are most likely to share online, what you are most likely to share online is not defined by its truth, whether it's true or not. it's by whether it validated

what you thought before and how many of your friends already shared it. so, there's a little bit of a peer pressure side. one of the other things that's disturbing is when you confront someone with a counterargument, even if it's true, they're actually more likely to dig in and hold to their old belief rather than change their mind. so, if i say you're wrong, and i present facts to show you're wrong, you're actually less likely to be persuaded. that's kind of scary. >> you don't mean me, personally. >> yeah, but again, we call kind of feel that playing out in the election right now. >> so in your article, you talked about isis and that's the sort of general backdrop against which they're operating. a lot of people call them social media geniuses. i think you called them talented

plagiarists. >> strategic plagiarists. >> we talked about that a little bit, how they're using it as a weapon. >> so, they are, in some ways, new. there is -- they're the first group to own digital territory. you see what they're doing to the classical story of terrorism itself. as you put it, terror doesn't take place in alleyways. you go back to the attacks in judea back when the zealots are attacking roman soldiers or sympathizers. they're making sure to do it in the square where everyone can see it. to more recently, terrorism was defined as the theater of violence. so they're trying to do it in public, per said, itsuade, it'st the emotion, the publicity.

on the one hand, they're an advancement, it's amazing to compare all al qaeda communicated back in using vcrs and cable tv to now the social media side, but much of what they're doing, you can see parallels in what are just simply best practices online. so, you know, they were going, oh my goodness, they haunched their mosul offensive with a hashtag, which is what any video game or movie would do. they're highly visual. again, they try and work the system to their advantage. so, to go back to that mosul operation, they created an app for it that then spun out 40,000 retweets so that then, their message started to trend. they had twitter's algorithm sort of work for them, the same way, again, you know, a political campaign would do it. they try and hijack conversations. so they jump into conversations on everything from the world cup to interviews with minor youtube

celebrities so that they can get attention. another example would be the buzz feed style. they don't just have one message. they push out multiple messages and then, you know, sort of like throwing -- you know, buzz feed puts out roughly 200 stories a day. one of them takes off and the others don't. same thing in isis messaging. the other part, which is a tactic used by, you know, everything from the real strategists of social media, katy perry, and taylor swift, is it's the combination of being very strategic and tailored but also simultaneously authentic. so, you know, katy perry has, you know, arguably has the most twitter followers. she mixes promotion with very personal kind of messages that are dashed off quickly in a style that's sort of connects to her followers. the same things if you look at what isis is doing. it's a mix of messaging and then

very kind of personal, so you see everything from battle footage to, you know, a guy complaining about everything from having potato peeling duty to putting up instagrams of his cats to musing on the death of robin williams and what the isis fighter thought about jumanji. and then what's happening is, they're connecting to people who are, again, like-minded, and then they're taking the message into kind of a different space where the cultivation begins, the same thing that happens in online dating. you meet someone who sounds like you, and then you take the message to the side and you connect further. that's where we're seeing kind of the recruiting. it's partly in the open, but then it's also moving to a more personal level. >> so it's not just a nonstate group that's trying to look bigger than it is that's using this technique to great advantage. it's also the russians, both with rt, their news media source

that's online, and their use of social media, their hacks, all of that. but it's also you talked about, in your article, the cyber nationalists of china. and you talked about rt's role in the book. a quote that really caught me was you said it's a world without facts. so my question bundling all of that together is, so, what do we do in this world? how do you counter or how do you fight or how do you deal with the fact that you've got everything from isis to rt to cyber nationalists who are trying to influence your public and tell the story? what are -- have you seen good strategies? what do you think a good strategy is? >> actually, i love the message that you have in your report in discussions of everything from terrorism to cyber security.

we are constantly using the two d's, defense and deterrence. keep the bad guys out and/or scare the bad guys away. and in terrorism and cyber security, and in this information warfare side, that is a losing game. as you put it, it's never -- it's never going to give you a hundred percent security because it's, one, there's some actors that aren't deterrable. there's other actors that are already on the inside, so you can do whatever you want on the immigration, on the wall side, but there's inside, the same thing in cyber security. instead, the magic word should be, resilience. how do i power through the attack? how do i, to go back to use the taylor swift reference, shake it off? how do i recover quickly when i've been knocked down? and it's the same thing when you're thinking about information warfare. the best way to respond is to be

resilient. the best way to keep from being manipulated is to know that someone's trying to manipulate you. and again, shrug it off, power through it, push out alternative messages that are just as adept, bury the lie in a sea of truths. that -- the challenge, and i think your next panel is going to get to this -- is the same thing, again, in all of these spaces, cyber security, terrorism, this information warfare side is, is our current political system and media one that incentivizes resilience or rewards hysteria? is it one where the, you know, gate keepers, so to speak, whether it's a gate keeper who is an editor on a cable tv show, a gate keeper in terms of a

media company, a social media company, a gate keeper in terms of a politician, are they incentivized to ramp up the anger, ramp up the fear factor, ramp up the uncertainty, or are they incentivized to say, no, we're going to power through this? i worry about that right now. and then of course you get the kind of the partisanship side where, again to, go back to where we were before, is it even worse where they're existing in two different worlds. so it's hard to be resilient if you and i have a different set of facts of what happened. to me, that's one of the major challenges of our democracy right now is how does it become more resilient to these forces? . >> that's great. it's a terrific opening conversation for us to bring up the next panel, but tell us before you go, and peter's going to stick around for the q&a as well. you have a book that you're working on.

>> there's a next pronject thats going to try to and pull back and look at this and what's going on overall in terms of politics. >> that's great. we'll look forward to that book. can't wait. get busy. and if i could invite the panel to come up right now, and as they are taking their places, i will introduce them to you and i'm going to use my notes to make sure because there is a very distinguished panel and we want to make sure we get them all absolutely correct. so, at the far end here, we have katie wheelbarger who acts as senator mccain's staff lead. previously, ms. wheelbarger served as the deputy director on the house committee. before coming to capitol hill, katie was a council to vice president deck cheney and also a counselor to the department of homeland security in its very early days. she's a graduate of ucla and

harvard law school. next to her we have juliet juliette kayyem, having served as a state official in massachusetts and also in the department of homeland security. as if that were not enough, she's also, today, an entrepreneur who's running her own company that gives strategic advice and risk management planning. it's called kayyem solutions. she's an on-air security analyst for cnn, so she may look familiar. she should look familiar if you watch tv. she's also a podcaster and author of a new booked called security mom, an unclassified guide to protecting our homeland and your home, which came out in april 2016. and then immediately to my left is mayor buddy dyer. he has served as orlando's mayor since 2003. he's a really important leader for central florida, and you think about orlando, orlando is not -- not your average city of its size. it is one of the most visited

cities in the world, certainly in this country, something like 49 million visitors a year. >> 66. >> i'm off by a lot. 66 million visitors a year for a city that's, i think, 250,000 in the city proper and 1.4 million in the area. so, when you're mayor of that city, you have a really interesting set of challenges. i think i have a list of his accomplishments. he opened three community venues, the amway center, the dr. phillips center for the performing arts, the camping world stadium, forbes has named orlando the number two nationally best place to buy real estate and anybody who's looking for an investment. number three in job growth and this is my favorite. number four in the happiest place to work. so, that has a familiar ring to work. happiest place to work. before he became mayor, he served in the florida senate, including as the senate leader, so he's a very experienced politician and, again, i come back to, he's been mayor since 2003, and i remember right, in

2004, he started his tenure off with three hurricanes and a tropical storm all in a row. >> right-. >> so he got trial by fire with what it means to have crisis communications. as i was going through your background, i was also very intrigued to see that you have a degree in civil engineering from brown university and a jd from the university of florida in some other florida city and he started off as an environmental engineer, which is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. so, delighted that you could all join us today. so, katie, i would like to start with you, because the question i have for you, you look a lot at the threat. so, tell us about the threat. is terrorism something americans still need to worry about? and specifically at home. is this a threat that's growing, that's getting worse, give us a sense of the state of play. >> first, appreciate you having me here today. i think peter explained in your discussion with him, sort of gave a little bit of a backdrop of what we worry about on capitol hill, the morphing and

changing behavior of the terrorist organizations, the extent to which they are harnessing new media and new communications techniques to really, you know, bring new members into their fold and also inspire others around the world to, even if they're not directly members. i will say, though, in some ways, looking at the threat now, and partaking in the public dialogue, the post-isil era, if there's a silver lining to it, it's that i believe people are paying the attention -- attention to it as they deserve to pay attention to it, whereas those of us that were advocating to continue to worry about the terrorist threat and sort of the metastasizing threat around the world as different barrages of al qaeda were opening and we were continuing to partake in different military actions in more and more countries, that there was a sense in america that it was sort of not something we wanted to think about anymore. or it was something that we thought we had sort soft solved, we could deal with it overseas by military action, but we had defended ourselves and, you

know, made ourselves so secure in our homeland defense that it wasn't as much of a problem here. i think the events, not only the rise of isil, but also the attacks in europe and america over the course of the last couple years, have actually brought the attention to it that it deserves. i think the numbers that we cite and are little sometimes, don't necessarily reflect the true extent of the threat. yes, you're unlikely, statistically, to be a victim of terrorism, but in many ways, the number of terrorist attacks we have or have not had is somewhat a sign of the success of our post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts. also, we've been lucky a couple of times. and so, i think the numbers are not necessarily what we should be looking at, but we should be looking at the fact that there are growing organizations metastasizing organizations that right now continue to have, you know, people that are completely absorbed every day in doing external plotting against the united states, whether they be -- i just came back from

afghanistan. i was there two days ago. met with general nicholson for a long time and he likes to remind visitors that 20 of 90 foreign terrorist organizations designated foreign terrorist organizations operate within the af-pac area, many of them attempting to attack the u.s. personnel in those countries. it's a hot bed. goes back to where we were pre-9/11, so these are issues that we are still confronting. i think the organizations are resilient. i think they are emboldened. i think they can absorb a lot of our military efforts, the coalition against isil is doing great things. i think some of us on capitol hill wish they could go a little bit faster. the slower the military efforts overseas take, i think the easier it is for the organizations to absorb the efforts and to adapt to them.

these are very resilient, adaptable organizations. but i'll end with one thought, which is i'm really heartened to see the report because we do spend so much time, when we're looking at the threat, focused on how is the enemy using social media for their advantage, and i think it's really important for us to get a better sense of how we can better use it to avoid the fear and the terror that the terrorists actually want us to absorb. >> one more question for katie. which is, so, what do you think -- if you had to characterize the view from congress and how congress is looking at terrorism and specifically at counterterrorism in the united states, is there a -- you know, how would you describe the level of interest and what members of congress want right now. >> i think, obviously, they want us to be secure. if i was being perfectly honest, i'd say the perspective i have is a little schizophrenic at times. right after an attack or even a thwarted attack, the talk for the first few weeks after it is, you know, how can we, again,

harden our defenses, how could the fbi have let this happen, what could we be collecting more of, how could we not have known what that person was thinking and that's something else i want to kind of boost on what you said earlier. we can't expect ourselves to be perfect, especially in defense. we're an open civil society. i believe we need to do everything we can overseas to stop the organizations from existing to avoid, you know, them inspiring others to do so, to do acts in the united states, but we can't expect a level of perfection from our intelligence and defense agencies -- they can't read people's minds and in some ways, you would be expecting -- perfection would require that. so, skits africanchizophrenic i that immediately after an attack or a thwarted attack, they want to know what happened and how we could do everything to stop it. then there might be civil liberties issues that come up at a later time, why are these agencies doing xyz or collecting xyz information, so they're

trying to find the balance that the american constituency is trying to find and to get back to something i think peter said is sometimes we can find ourselves in the media loop of, we get more attention if we're hysterical, whichever direction it goes, whether it's the hyper-libertarian side or the hyper-security side so we do see that a little bit of capitol hill. a little bit of the loudest voices sometimes get the attention. i think most folks up there are pretty strong on security and balanced in how to achieve it but we do see the same things you're trying to address in your report, we see up on capitol hill. >> so take that view, juliette, and you have a really interesting perspective on this. not just because you're you but as a federal official, a state official and then at the time that the boston marathon bombing happened, you were a cnn analyst and pretty fresh off of government service, i believe, and not only that, it was your town and what a mile from your house. so, all of a sudden, you're living a terrorist attack as a

journalist, a public official, a parent, a resident, a victim, you know, it was your city, you were right there, so can you give us your perspective, your multilayered perspective. >> and i write about it in the book. i mean, the reference. first of all, thank you all for coming and thank you and mayor, it's an honor to meet you and katie was a -- my husband's student, so i'm sure she did well, it looks like. i'll tell him you did good in one regard. but it's a -- the boston marathon bombing both because it sort of, i think, in some ways set the stage for what worked and what didn't work for what happened in orlando, but also just my various roles, i've had, i say, my life, i've had one career but many jobs, and in state and federal government as a state homeland security adviser in massachusetts, i actually was in charge of the planning for the boston marathon many, many years before the attack, so it was very intimate with a lot of the preparedness

and planning that had gone on. but as some people in the audience know, the brothers went to my kids' school. they lived two blocks away from us. the father's office was -- or mechanical auto shop was on one of the kids' school's corners so that was cordoned off when he went back to school a week later and yet, i had this media role in which i was trying to describe things and you talk about the local and national -- here i am on cnn and all the anchors are saying well, in newtown and i was saying, it's newton. and trying to give a sense of what was going so part of my role was just describing how the apparatus worked. why does it look like the cops are just standing there? what are they doing? and also, it was an interesting use of social media, both good and bad. i think there was the reddit example. obviously, cnn had a major reporting error on wednesday

when one of the reporters announced that there had been an arrest when there wasn't. but also think about thursday -- thursday night, yes, when, for the first time, the fbi and those of you who work with the fbi know how historic this was, essentially crowd sourcing identification. we did not have any record of who the brothers were, so there were all these pictures out there and you saw over the course of the week, the fbi and the boston police becoming much more comfortable saying to the public, look, there are millions of cameras at the finish line of the boston marathon. the irony was, given all those cameras, right, there was not good positioning of public cameras to figure out who they were, public safety cameras. and so you saw the good and bad of sort of this crowd sourcing social media over the course of a week. for me, personally, sort of confirmed what i had been thinking about since i left dhs and there was a number of dhs people in the office and back to your point, you know, we can

tend to try to rationalize away the threat of terrorism, particularly in the homeland by saying, oh, the statistics are so low, whatever. and what i remind people, as a mother of three, having been in this space, you know, yeah, you can say that, but if my kid is that 0.0001%, your statistics be damned, right? so we have to accept as public officials the intimacy that people feel and fear that they feel and so that does get to what i thought was so interesting about the report, if i could just comment on a few things that, in homeland security, we actually don't talk about the department as being homeland security any more than you would say the education department is education. we talk -- another pivot, essentially, after 2005, hurricane katrina, department of

homeland security came out of 2001 and the terror attacks, 2005 was what i call a course correction after hurricane ka trith tree that which we -- katrina, those try to invest the communities with a sense of trying to minimize all risks to the community so you train, you're training your public officials for all sorts of hazards, you try to maximize a national defenses, not just federal, because the department is very small, people here from fema, less than 3,000 people that work in fema. the muscle of public safety is on the state and local level, but you also try to maintain our openness as a society, and so those shifts really do complement what's going on in social media, and i -- so i want to just talk about the -- after the boom side of this and something to think about in response to the report. it is true that i think that social media has a capacity to

engage communities after any disaster, but we can talk about terrorism specifically. in my field, you know, in 2001, we had a tendency to talk about -- to the public in a way that either made them tune out or freak out. we probably still do that, right? so that you're, oh god, the world is going to hell in a hand basket, i can't pay attention or, you know, i can't go outside my house and my kids have to wear helmets in the basement. those are how we talk to people. and trying to use social media to engage people to actually do something rather than read about it, be scared about it or whatever, and so that's where i think social media actually has this power to engage people in, you know, what we call the enterprise, which is the public, state and local first responders, ngos, the churches and the faith-based community. and certainly the network, right? and so, one thing that is worth noting is the extent to which we have become very reliant on --

on social media -- and i sort of put crowd sourcing and shared economy, i put all those things sort of together, so using, you know, the web or whatever to engage people who aren't physically in the same room. a lot of you are familiar with facebook's sort of disaster ping, so if something happens in paris, i advise airbnb to give them full credit, airbnb, after orlando, but certainly after paris and then in the build-up to the hurricane, you know, airbnb renters or -- they're not even called renters. i just exposed the fact that i don't use them. airbnb people who put up their homes, you know, we notify them and say, look, there's going to be people who may need homes. it's an incredible community that that's something you can do, whether it's a hurricane or it's a terrorist attack, you can actually engage and use the platform.

uber, a lot of you have noticed, uber is helping out with flu shots because public health is part of homeland security in the sense that you want a strong, resilient nation so uber is starting to do a lot with trying to get people to get their flu shots so there are really creative ways in which we can use people's enthusiasm but also the way that people communicate now, which is no longer, i pick up a phone and call you, but we're in, you know, we follow the same people, so we may get to know each other. so those are some really optimistic and hopeful ways given, as we will all agree, that you're just not going to get the vulnerabilities to zero. not in this nation. >> that's a terrific overview and i'm going to come back to you because i have some other questions i want to ask you and i'll just put you on notice that -- so you can think about it. but one of the things that's happened too in the way that disasters and attacks are being communicated right now is it's immediate and the echo is profound. and again, sometimes how that story gets told and spread,

there -- it's not always right information and it's not always helpful information. and one of the things that's been a ongoing concern, and we'll talk to you about that in just a second, mayor, is communities that get targeted for secondary violence, and in particular, arab-americans and muslim americans. your family is originally from lebanon, and i wonder -- that's the other layer of juliette kayyem kayyem is you've got the official, the journalist, the parent, you know, but also an arab. >> arab-american. and i wonder, especially right now, because political rhetoric is part of this picture too. you know, how do you feel about that, and do people look to you to -- as i am, right now, to be an expert on that as well, and how do you think that community reacts relative to any other community to what's happening

the way information is moving. >> you want me to answer that? or go to the mayor? >> think about it. >> okay. >> let's go to the mayor. >> you looked at me. the mayor's like, it's not that easy. >> the mayor did think about it. so, when we looked at the case study and we spoke to you and a number of other people, reporters, your police wouldn't talk to us but we did a lot of research about them and all the police reports during the shooting. we spoke to people on your staff. you know, people who live in orlando about what happened and how they felt about it. and we're down there looking around. we came away with the conclusion that orlando was pretty resilient in how it dealt with the aftermath of this attack, and what we heard, and you don't have to agree with this, but we heard from a lot of people in the city that they saw you as the hero of the story. and that they looked to you to

tell them how to feel. and you did. so, what i think would be great, rather than me walking through the case study, is to have you talk about that day and tell us the sort of chain of events and when you made decisions about -- specifically about how to communicate with people and what to communicate, and so, i mean, just starting with, how did you first find out that this had happened? >> can i tell you two things just to start out so i can set the stage just a little bit. everybody knows orlando, right? there's not anybody, i don't think, in the whole world that doesn't know orlando, but what they know is disney is there, and universal is there, and actually, 66 million visitors came to orlando last year, not 49. which is the most visited place, at least in america. not the world. so, everybody knows orlando, but they don't really know orlando and its residents, and you saw orlando and its residents during the course of pulse and the

aftermath of pulse, but we are very young city. we're a very open city. you don't have to be third generation to do whatever you want to do there. people come for opportunity, but we embrace diversity, equality, fairness. we are very multicultural city, and that's who we were on that day. it wasn't something that we needed to form and tell people. it's who we were. so we had that advantage going in that day, and then the second thing is, after 9/11, and then the three hurricanes that you referenced, and we had an -- a workplace shooting that -- in downtown that had one fatality and three injured, we do a lot of emergency training and a lot of it's -- a lot of it is weather-related, as you might speculate, but we also do a lot of active shooter training, and we do it not just as the city of

orlando but we do it on a regional basis. so, all our law enforcement people know each other. so, when they showed up that night, it's not like they're meeting each other for the first time. they're all together. they know how they talk. they know how they act. they know what to expect. and then interestingly, we had been following the national trends, like everybody else, and we usually do hurricanes, we do active shooter, but we actually did a tabletop on civil disobedience after ferguson, after baltimore, and it was a wild scenario that i don't think ever could happen, but it was an african-american being shot by a police officer in one of our troubled neighborhoods with the naacp convention convened in town and then a rapper that was going to perform that night. so you can imagine -- >> that's your scenario. >> that was an interesting scenario to deal with. but through that, we understood how important communication was

all throughout this, and we actually now had a esf function that was simply social media. we actually had that broken up. esf. >> emergency support. >> i usually don't bust into acronyms. >> i spent a lot of my life in the pentagon so i'm going to call you out on acronyms. >> but anyway, we had plans on how to communicate. for instance, in a civil disobedience, it would be through police twitter. through hurricane, it would be through our twitter. so, we have some stuff in place. >> the roles and missions were defined. >> right. but you can never anticipate. we never anticipated what was going to occur, and it would be hard to ever imagine that that could occur. so, the first shots were fired at 2:02 or 2:03, somewhere in that range, and i got a call at home. i was asleep, about 3:00 in the morning. and the call was, mayor, this is deputy chief bobby enzuedo.

i have to inform you there has been a shooting at the pulse nightclub. there's an active shooter. there's multiple casualties, and it's now an active -- or it's now a hostage situation. the command center will be set up at a certain location on orange avenue, which i guess you saw at some point. so my first thought, i'm a dad, i immediately -- the next thing i did was call my 26-year-old son, trey, to see where he was, and i don't know that he's ever been to pulse or whether he frequents there or not, but i just wanted to make sure because it makes your job a little bit easier to do what you need to do if you know that your family members are all safe. my wife is in bed. he was, turns out, in bed as well. my next call was to my deputy chief, heather phafagan, who's communications guru or queen. >> everyone we talked to said, make sure you tell heather that we talked to you and that we

were helpful, so obviously, heather has a lot of sway over these situations. >> so, my police liaison was already on the way to pick me up and we agreed that we'd pick heather up second so she'd have an extra five seconds to do her hair or brush her teeth. >> probably the last time she did for three days. >> and we went on down to the command center, got to the command center, and it's a big giant rv trailer type of thing with basically two rooms, a command room, and then one that has a lot of technical equipment that's being manned by the others. we come in and it's the chief, two or three of the deputy chiefs, the fbi, the fdle, and three sheriffs from either orange or surrounding counties. and we had discussed on the way there, what's my role? when i get there, and we'd done all these types of scenarios and everything, but i never envisioned being in the middle of the night in that type of tich situation. and we -- heather and i determined that i, number one, needed to stay out of the way of

the law enforcement. and let them do their jobs because they're trained to do that. number two, we needed to make sure that i supported and did not undermine the chief's authority, even though i'm his boss. and make sure that everybody saw that i understood the chief was going to make the final call on any decisions that were made. and the fbi and the fdle and the sheriffs were acting in that same fashion, which i just took as very professional. and then, third was to gather as much possible information as we could, because we knew we were going to have to communicate in some fashion at some point. >> and you told me that that was really important to you, that you mean toed to -- that you wad to be able to communicate as much information as you possibly could as early as you possibly did, and why did you think that was so important? >> even back to charlie, and i've seen this time and time again, if you don't provide as much information in a concise, accurate way, then somebody else is going to fill in those gaps

and probably with not accurate information. so the more information we could get out in an accurate manner and not in a manner that people stopped listening but they want that information, i think it helps you serve the purpose that you're going to serve. so, when we got there, the chief updated us on what had occurred, and i could go through that if you would like or move on to communication. >> well, what -- at what point, then, were you ready -- was it not until about 7:30 in the morning that you -- that you had your first press conference, right? >> so i'll shorten the five-hour time period or three-hour time period. so, the incident occurred, the opd and the s.w.a.t. team had the shooter confined to a bathroom. all of the living victims were evacuated. they evacuated a couple dressing rooms that had not gotten out early on. so, really, early on, everybody

that was in the main part were on the way to the hospital and then by 4:30, everybody else except those that were in the two bathrooms where the shooter was. >> we know that some of these people were sending texts and phone calls and videos. what we found was -- and i'm wondering if you can confirm this -- that it was mostly point to point. meaning they were calling or sending videos to family members or to first responders. they were not broadcasting. they were spending it to someone. >> no, they were not broadcasting. they were either texting or in some cases actually calling family members who were then calling 911 or directly to 911 in some cases, and some of those calls have been released. and they gave us a depiction. that's actually how we found the people in the dressing rooms and were able to get them out. we knew roughly how many people were in one of the bathrooms and we knew where the shooter was, in which bathroom and how many people were roughly in there. the -- what happened, though,

from those, you also got some inaccurate information. >> right. >> so, the shooter was in contact with 911 and then hostage negotiators three different times, and indicated that he had explosive vest and that he was going to detonate had explosives in his vehicle that was parked outside. that was confirmed by some of the people in the bathroom, so they must have overheard him tell the hostage negotiators that, and then they confirmed it to 911, the guy has an explosive vest on. so we have to assume at this point since it's been verified that that's the case. and that he is getting ready to act. the chief gave an indication that at that time it was time to breach the building. s.w.a.t. had gotten into place, placed explosives between two bathrooms. they were hoping to break into the bathroom where the shooter was not so they could get them out. they put explosive charges and it did not break through the wall.

we had a piece of equipment called a bearcat that was then employed. just as a side, i took a lot of heat when we bought that because we were having discussion about the militarization of the police forces. >> a little satisfaction. >> i was very happy we had that bearcat. and they breached the wall in several different place, and we evacuated 15 people out of the bathroom that did not have the shooter. oh, and he had thrown diversionary devices in there. so he was probably a little disoriented. our guys returned fire and killed him. and that was 5:15ish at some point. >> so at this point you have -- and by the way, all throughout this, the shooter -- and you've never named him. you've told me that, that you've never said his name and you just don't consider him a relevant person. >> once he was dead, i didn't need to think about him. i didn't need to act upon him.

that was somebody else's job. that was the fbi's job. and certainly everybody else could commentate about who he was, why he did it. i'm not sure today why he did it. there is a lot of speculation about that. by the way, the instant he was dead, the fbi said we're in charge. it's a terrorist event. it went from opd being in charge to the fbi being in charge, so we needed to follow their direction because it was an active investigation, but they had even then determined it was a lone shooter at that point. so we had that knowledge. they had a lot of information already about who he was and where he'd come from. >> all throughout the attack, by the way, he was using facebook and he was posting to facebook. he was googling himself and seeing if he was trending. now facebook was taking them down. i don't know how fast, but they were taking his posts down so they didn't necessarily get wide

play but he was all throughout the attack broadcasting and trying to shape his own story. >> so we didn't know that at the time. fbi assumes control of the investigation. we start the discussion about how do we inform the public. >> that's about 5:30, 6:00 in the morning. >> 5:30, 6:00 in the morning. and we actually had a little discussion about whether the fbi or police were going to leave lead out, and we pushed back and said no, i have to lead out because i'm the person that they know. ron hopper is the best fbi agent i know. but when he goes out there, that's going to scare people. nobody is going to know who he is, whether to trust him or not. if opd leads out, that sends a whole different tone than if your elected mayor comes out. we got them to agree to that. i'm going to tell you quite honestly we were fortunate in that regard because the fbi's federal spokespeople weren't

there yet until the next day. and we might not have been able to convince them, but we were able to convince the local agent in charge. that that's the way it ought to be. >> so note to any fbi headquarters officials that are listening, it's really good to have your local official be known by the community in charge of setting the tone in the communications. >> so we were able to i don't want to say dictate, but kind of lead throughout the course of the first day in setting the tone. heather and i had a substantial discussion about what do we want to do when we go out to that first press conference. let me divert just for a second. we delayed a couple of hours until 7:15, 7:30 in that range because there was still the possibility that there was some explosives in either the building or the vehicle. >> i remember you telling me you thought this was going to end with an explosion, a suicide. >> i did think that because we believed he had those explosive vests and i was prepared for the building blowing up with

everybody in it. fortunately that was not the outcome, but we still thought that there might be explosives in the vehicle and we did not think that we would instill confidence in the public if we came out and had a press conference and his car blew up in the background while we were having a press conference. so we delayed having the press conference. and what we wanted to do was convey accurate information. we wanted to -- and we talked specifically about this. we wanted to calm everybody down and instill confidence that we had this. we were in control. and we wanted everybody to know we were safe. so those were the words and types of things that we crafted, but i also from the very start and i guess this might intuitive. i don't even know why we said this, but we came out and what became our guiding principle was we're not going to be defined by

the hate-filled act of a commented killer. we're going to be defined by response, which is going to be love, compassion, and unity. and that kind of rallied, i think, our community behind that. >> and then there was another press conference a few hours later, and you added some players to the stage for that one directly germain to what you just said. so tell us a little bit about that. because you also were thinking about the potential for secondary violence. >> while we didn't mention the killer or know for sure what his rationale was, we did know who he was and his religious or ethnic background. >> and you see what he said on the calls, that he had claimed allegiance. >> yes. >> to isis. so he was a little vague on the details and he used some arabic phrases. you knew that from the very beginning. >> we have certainly seen in the past there can be hostility toward muslims and americans in

a circumstance like that. and we wanted to do everything that we could to diffuse that. i had an imam who i know and i trust and i knew what he would say come to the very second press conference that we had. a obviously it would have been hard to get in there for the first one. he was right there for the second one and he set the right tone by saying this isn't what the religion is all about. this is an isolated person. we do not support anything like that, so that message was out there straightaway. >> so you didn't have to guess on who you could call on. these were relationships you had? >> i do have the benefit of having represented orlando in the senate for ten years and as mayor for roughly 14 years, so i've been pretty much everywhere. if this would have happened in the hispanic community -- well, it did more or less. or let's say the african-american community, it would have been the same in terms of having connections, and

we work really hard at doing that, which is another part of the making sure we don't have the civil unrest that other cities have experienced, making everybody feel like they have a seat at the table and then knowing people. >> you thought about all this and you called upon the community to be part of the response, and you gave them a role. then there were open mikes. talk to us about the danger of an open mike. >> so were you there the very first day? so the way we had this set up -- usually, you have your press area a little more controlled than we did. once all the main press got set up, we did, but the press area got set up on a side road and it wasn't monitored that well. we came out and did our first press conference. we went back into the command center to figure out what we were going, second press conference, get more news. every politician in central florida that could reach the area had reached the area and it was open mike.

a people were taking to the microphone, and most if all of them didn't actually have any information other than what had been shared by cnn or the news stations, which may or may not have been accurate at that point as well. and then we were -- one of the more difficult things is trying to follow the fbi's suggestions. they were generally a little more than suggestions on what information that we could convey. they didn't want us, even though they knew who the shooter was, they didn't want to us to verify who they was. of cnn and msnbc and everybody else is doing a profile on the guy. and we're going out and they're asking do you know who the shooter -- no, we don't know. we have not verified who the shooter is. that's after the first press conference. the hardest part of anything i did that whole time at the end of the first press conference one of the reporters asked the

chief in q&a, we understand there are 20 dead. is that right? and the chief said yes, but it there are 20 dead or at least 20 dead. we're not sure. we already knew there were more than that. we turned to walk away and i said, chief, we've got to get an accurate count the next time we come out here. we have to be able to tell them exactly what has happened. and heather was walking towards us with this -- i don't even know how to describe the expression, but let us know there were 50 people deceased, not 20. so the second press conference i had to come back out and that was the very first thing. and to your other point, one of our congressman -- i come walking out. he's got the mike, giving a lot of disinformation and a lot of heated political rhetoric. it is like remove him from there so we can get down to business. >> i want to point out voters removed him recently.

i'm not saying there's causality there, but how he chose to talk about the attack didn't help him in his re-election bid. just an observation. >> it wasn't helpful to us. or anybody else. >> right. >> so i had to come out and tell everybody that it wasn't 20. it was 50. at that point, i knew that i had to keep my calm and keep my cool because if i broke down that was not going to be good for anybody, so that was one of those really deep breathing exercises where you take a really deep breath and say everything you have to say before you take the second breath. i can tell you looking out at -- say this was the press corps. there was a lot of seasoned people there. there was an audible reaction. >> we heard that from a number

of reporters who were in the room, that they were shocked and that there was a gasp around the room. >> it was shocking. >> let me ask you, you know, one thing we heard from everyone we talked to was this feeling of being overwhelmed. just overwhelmed by what had happened, but also overwhelmed by the amount of information that was coming in, especially once the rest of the country woke up and woke up to the news and the social media spiral began, that the amount of questions, the amount of speculation, all of it was overwhelming. we heard this from everyone. we heard this from orlando sentinel reporters, from everyone we spoke to. it would be interesting to hear you talk about that, but also we were very impressed with how the police in the city used social media to sort of manage that onslaught and influx, but also how much worse this would have

been if it had happened in the middle of the day. that feeling of being overwhelmed would have happened immediately. >> there's no doubt we were able to handle the communication aspect of it far easier -- i don't know if easier is the right word, but in a more effective manner, let's say, because we had three or four hours to get prepared before the onslaught came. we totally activated our emergency operations center. we had our communications people there. we had our social media people there. so we were able to -- we had somebody monitoring all the social media coming out of any of our different areas, and we had a protocol in terms of press, in terms of press requests. oh, my gosh. i have no idea how many of those there actually were, but we had a team that everything filtered through. and that was on the city side. the police side of stuff came

through my staff, the communications staff. then i told you we had the protocol in place that since it was this type of incident the outgoing feed would be through the opd twitter feed and everybody else would take from that feed as well as our regional partners. everybody else, whether it was orange county or osceola county were also letting opd disseminate the message and then retweeting or reemphasizing that message. >> so if reporters called, they got a message that said go to our twitter and our facebook? >> right. >> and that's how they got information. >> and we tried not to have press conferences just to have press conferences. we only had three main press conferences that first day. the second one was to convey the numbers. but also to start taking care of the victims and their families. so we had established a hotline for anybody that had information about anybody that might be a victim where they could call and then we set up a website that

was going to have names of victims on there. that became a very tough thing to manage as well because we set up a victims' assistance center where the families could go to people asked me mistakes we made. that open mike was one. second was not having a secure location that the press could not get to the family and victims because they were there tracking people from the car to the building and back. so day two we went over to camping world stadium where we could park people in a secure place and they could walk in without the press being able to get at them. but late in the day, we were able to evacuate the victims from pulse to the medical examiner's office. that's a county position. the guy had been on the job a

week, i think, at most. he had not even been confirmed by county commission at that point. but we emphasized to him how important his job was because if we went a day or two without identifying who the victims were, we'd have a different narrative going. he identified 48 of the 49 victims overnight. i came back in at 7:00 and that was the next press conference we did was letting everybody know that we had identifications. he was able to identify the last one, i think, by about noon, but that was critically important. he also had the presence of mind to take the killer into a different building and do the examination totally away from where the victims were. >> i think, juliette, to turn to you now, what you're hearing is that the mayor focused on victims. he focused on telling his city to show the world that they were -- this didn't define them

and specifically they were lgbtq friendly, but also he focused on the imam and the message that this was not the community's fault. it was not the islamic community's fault that this happened. this gunman did not speak for them. now, i think in orlando you saw the city respond to all of this. however, in ft. pierce, there was an arson event at the mosque that the shooter used to worship at. also a mosque in tampa was attacked. so i think this generates a lot of fear in the muslim american and arab american community in a lot of different communities. i wonder if you could talk a little about that. also, there's been a lot of rhetoric in this campaign that's given people -- that set the stage for this to be an echo chamber. and i wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. >> i can and i talk about it not

just because i'm arab-american or christian, my family. but i actually want to talk about it as a homeland security policy and some of the challenges or how we think about it in terms of homeland security and counterterrorism. i do want to thank the mayor. as you're sitting there, i think gosh, i hope you memorialized this because i know it's hard to do. you don't know for generations people will want to hear your story to learn from it, including the mistakes. >> i have these little handwritten notes from each press conferences and i kept a journal the first four weeks. >> to peter's point, when he said what makes a resilient society, i teach on resiliency. one attribute is that rigorous lessons learned. i know you will look back and know did you things right and wrong and there are questions about the police waiting and whether that was right or wrong. just thinking about the obligation to unfortunately the next mayor.

and i had been -- this idea of orlando, i had actually been in orlando two months before doing a speech to your police department on counterterrorism and how to think about it, because they are so serious about it. was the first time i got a flavor for the non-disney orlando. i have three kids. the disney orlando. there's better than the disney orlando if you have three kids. it's an amazing city. if you just go in, fly, go to disney and back, that vibrancy was really captured. i think that's what really helped the city in terms of that sort of sense of sort of we're in this together, we're all victims, we're all unified in the response. in some ways in this lessons learned, your immediate reaction in terms of who you're reaching out to in the community so they could be not the first spokesperson but the second,

third or fourth spokesperson, i think the challenge for mayors that might not be as sophisticated as you are who are those spokespeople. you will find people on the other side. we certainly know that. a lot of times it's not the imam. the muslim community is as diverse as any other. you ask me who represents the jewish community. it's not necessarily the rabbi. figuring out who is the leading muslim doctor in the community who can come out, who is the leading big business owner and stuff, having multiple voices as well that aren't just through the religious lane. because in some ways the muslim community is as diverse as the christian and the jewish and other communities. i will say, and we were talking about this before, to the extent this islamophobia and this muslim bashing in this campaign is so outside the mainstream of a bipartisan sense of what is homeland security cannot be underestimated or underscored enough.

i mean, there is -- for good or for bad, there is an established national homeland security community. it has from the moment george bush went to a mosque a few days after 9/11 to a very rigorous outreach by your former boss and predecessor to my boss, department of homeland security to what mayors have learned, which is community outreach through your diverse community is important. mayors have taken on the department because they don't like what we do with immigration, some of our immigration policies because they know that outreach and getting communities to come out is the most important thing rather than enforcement. so it's just a complete outlier. what i want to remind people it's an outlier not because we're a diverse nation and we need to be respectful of other religions. if you ask people in homeland

security what makes america safer. i never say safe, i always say safer because we try to minimize risks. our oceans really help. let me tell you. you cannot drive from door chester to damascus. so what is going on in europe is very, very different. but the other attribute is our capacity to integrate the other. so you look at los angeles with the mexican community and you look at my city, boston, the irish, who basically -- and they'll be proud i'm saying this. they run the city, or dearborn with the muslim community, that that capacity to create generations of immigrants that are invested in america's safety and security is really probably our most successful and in some ways accidental homeland security strategy that has reduced the risks.

if we do things to alienate those communities or radicalize those who are not or, as you were saying, the complicated nature of some of these cases, it looks like a couple of them have behind the isis some sexual orientation aspects to it, they are questioning their sexual orientation. certainly that's the case in orlando. just thinking about our outreach to communities as being an important part of our efforts and the extent to which this bashing of certainty communities or profiling you're hearing from i'm just going to say it, from giuliani who certainly should know better is really so outside of a bipartisan acceptance of how we go forward after a crisis like this. >> katie, do you agree with that? >> i actually do.

i was going to say one of the unique things i have in my role being in congress is when i do international travel the embassy can allow me to speak to foreign officials with a partisan voice. the embassy doesn't like to do that themselves. they try very hard not to. over the course of the last year i go to the middle east probably every month or so, meeting with foreign officials. they want to talk to me most of all about the rise of donald trump and what that means for america, what that means for them, the likelihood of his success, what his sort of anti-muslim rhetoric means. i take that opportunity to actually dispel some myths that it is somehow either a majority of america or the majority of republican party that believe the extreme views, the interpretation of what he is saying, to put a nuance on it. some people i know can be very conservative on the immigration front and therefore even out there in america aligned with trump don't necessarily agree with his rhetoric of anti-muslim rhetoric.

i definitely agree it's not helpful from a security standpoint to be so divisive with that world, with the arab world in particular. we thought about that a lot on the hill, at least among the staff that it's made it harder. i would agree the national security, i think, general view of the last year has not been particularly helpful to our safety. >> does it hurt resilience, too, is the question, here at home? >> i study a little bit less. there's a community of resiliency. i would to assume so. if the voices are divisive and you're putting neighbor against neighbor, that's not going to be helpful to a community rising up out of potentially bad situations. >> how much do you think -- one thing going back to the nature of the threat, a lot of the recent attacks have been self-radicalizing american citizens.

it's not necessarily a foreign threat in that sense. it's a self-radicalizing group of americans. >> absolutely, and i think that's one of the most -- >> is that what we are going to see in the future? >> hopefully not. hopefully we can figure out a way to solve the problem before it gets to a point where we can't stop the threats out there. i think that is -- anybody that is particularly disillusioned or doesn't feel a strong community, you don't have to be an american citizen or not an american citizen. i think you're susceptible to the kind of messages that these violent organizations can put out. and i think the difference with the terrorist organizations we have right now is they're just exceptionally good at it, and particularly with isil have taken their media campaign to a whole new level. anybody susceptible -- when we are getting briefed and that's one of the benefits we have on the hill is the agencies come and will explain to us what they are seeing, it is

self-radicalization. it knows no citizenship. >> juliette, now that you've sort of changed sides here, at least in terms of whether you're a public official or press, how much responsibility should the press have to people like mayor dyer when something happens? is it their job to calm the public? do they have a civic responsibility? do they take it seriously? are there guidelines? >> i can only speak from where i work which had mistakes. certainly people -- they're election focused right now and that's cnn. i used to write columns for my local paper, the "boston globe." so i know sort of both extremes. i'm surprised how they do want to get it right. in other words, the reporters -- they want to get it fast, but also want to get it right. part of the obligation, and i

think you heard in the mayor, you need to get -- you can't get your numbers wrong. that's what i see killed -- i was on the government end during the bp oil spill. we got our numbers wrong, how much oil was spilling. we never recovered from that. get your numbers right. take the time to figure out the bad news about 50. i probably see it less. it was the first time i had been down to an event. cnn asked me to go down. you do see the vulture aspects of it. i'm more an analyst. i'm essentially watching tv and then going on air, which i think just has to be managed by a real -- something i saw orlando do which is a helpful lesson learned. there are so many rumors going around. i will tell you there was a rumor that the body might have been a second shooter. remember, they couldn't identify the body. that was one rumor. the other one was whether the s.w.a.t. team had taken too long to go in.

and that started to be a little bit of a narrative. what you guys did on twitter was really important, which is you acknowledged that you understood that there was that rumor mill so you didn't look like you were stupid and didn't know everyone else is talking about this. like the paint you made. we are aware there is one more body to be identified or we're investigating this. in some ways by acknowledging it you sort of protect yourself even though you're not buying into that narrative. i think that's something because public safety tends to be slower than social media, and twitter trends is something public safety has to get better about, which is you see it coming. you can't act like it's not happening. right? and so just acknowledging it even i think is key. >> were you watching the twitter trends? were you keeping track of what was popping up? >> yeah. he wasn't, but she was. >> somebody was. they would not say i'm on the

social media guru of the city of orlando. can i respond to one thing on the press though? >> sure, yes. >> we as the city wanted to get out a lot more information than we ultimately did in the early time frame because the fbi had an active investigation. their thought process was if we're trying to figure out if there are other people that are involved here, if they know intimate details of what happened in the club during the night and we can interview them and they have information that has not been yet conveyed to the public, that's part of our case. so the fact that they went in and we had most of the victims cleared by 2:30 or what was going on in bathrooms and all of that type of stuff we would have loved to have put more of that information out there, but our hands were kind of tied by the fbi. and even the explosive devices part of that, they didn't want

us to do that, and i ended up at a press conference by myself a couple days later and just told that to get it out there. because without that part of the narrative, if you don't know that we think there's explosives in there, again, you're left to speculate why did you wait so long. >> and in the way things move today that story could be set before you have a chance to set it straight. >> exactly right. at this point, i'd like to invite the audience to have ask questions. peter, if you come back up, i'll give you my chair and i'll come over to the podium so i can field questions. so if you have a question or comment, if you would please identify yourself, what you do or who you're with and pose your question. again if you're going on a monologue, i may cut you off. lisa, please. lisa simms? >> hi, i'm lisa simms. i'm actually here with new

america. >> and the co-author of this report. >> thank you. i'm going to ask a question on behalf of dr. vazquez at ucf, actually. he says i wonder to what degree the approach of mayor dyer and his staff in managing information might have been under different challenges. for example, had a recent terrorist attack in orlando more closely resembled the dynamics of the boston marathon bombing where there were spchts on the run for three or four days before they were caught, it would have made it hard to stress the community was safe and we have this under control in the first press conference. >> we had the same situation the gateway shooting which was a shooting in an engineering company by a disgruntled former employee who came back, killed one person, shot three, and then escaped. and we had no idea where he was, that there was lockdowns. i-4 was shut down so there was no way to come out and tell the community they were safe. fortunately we apprehended the

guy within probably a couple hours and were able to come back out and actually the interesting thing about that is i was walking out to do the first press conference and they ran up and said we got the guy in his apartment. so the first press conference i was able to go out and say that we had the guy versus having to go out and say we think it's one person but we don't know that for sure. but it would have made it much more difficult for sure and i think in your study there's talk about the shootings that occurred over a period of time in this general area. >> in this city, which the beltway sniper case was not actually considered a terrorist attack because there was not a political or ideological motive involved. however, it is instructive as to how something that takes place over a long time with a lot of uncertainties, there's been a lot of studies, social science studies that say it's much more traumatizing for the affected population when you have

something that takes place that has so many unknowns where people don't know who the shooter is, why the victims are being chosen. so i think something like 50% of the people in one study were showing signs of ptsd, even if they didn't live in the immediate affected areas so it's a much more difficult challenge i think. juliette, did you have something to add to that? >> no, i think that is absolutely true because i think the fact that they didn't find the brothers, the tsarnaev brothers for four days added to the stress. but just back to the point that you were going to, i wrote down your great line "defined by the response" that resiliency and i i think that was true also for boston. i mean the story, we say boston strong, which i really don't like because it makes it think it was a good mood, a strong irish stock that got us through it. really what it was, there were three people that died in the boston marathon. close to 300 people were sent to area hospitals. no one died.

so for a city looking at those numbers, that's -- i mean in my world those are incredible numbers and you can't say it's good news. but when you look at the alternatives, it was incredible news. so in many ways thinking about the response writes the narrative. the rest of it can be stressful but i think the narrative of boston was also written by the response. >> i would add one thing on the challenge of those incidents that drag out is you can't do what we talked about earlier which is put out truth to control the narrative. instead, what you have we could see this moving out of the realm of terrorism, when the malaysian airliner crashed. instead the narrative becomes the hunt for the narrative. it becomes speculation, competing theories, and that's the feeding frenzy, and then in turn, that's what boasts social media, to be blunt, what cable news specializes in.

they bring on the different competing narratives and try to have the contention around it, and we're going to have to -- i think we see from the orlando case, a case study in many ways, in best practices on how to respond to a particular kind of terrorism. we don't have the best practices i believe in these other kinds. >> that's true. we'll take the next question, please. >> thank you. i'm jeff stein from "newsweek" magazine. this has been a fabulous panel. i want to salute the mayor for telling his very instructive and poignant story. i found it very moving myself, but i'd like to go back to something peter said earlier in the subject of info wars, particularly with russia. i think you said, peter, that the answer is to bury the lie in a sea of truth.

did you say that? >> well, actually -- well, yes. that's also a tactic that we may be seeing arguably with some of the massive data dumps, too. >> and yet someone else cited a study or observations that when you're confronting someone in an argument, and the more facts you lay out, the more they dig in, and resist, so how can -- can you, peter, or anyone, untangle this sort of contradiction here in terms of dealing with let's say the russian info war? and it applies to china as well. >> i think that what we're getting at is not just a sea of truths but a sea of voices, what you were speaking about in the orlando case was there was multiple different challenges. channels. i don't mean tv channels, but

channels of information coming from the government and yet they were fairly consistent in their messaging. what is both the skill of the russian information warfare campaign targeting elections. and look, it feels new to americans right now, but it's happened. it's a playbook that has been used in ukraine and hungary, arguably targeting brexit. by the very nature of these elections, there isn't unity. there is sides. so this may be something to hear from the others about. i've been disappointed but in some ways maybe not surprised by the reaction, which is instead of looking at this operation and the hacks that accompany it as sort of an attack on america as a whole. it quickly was moved into a partisan lens, even down to the

fact of whether you think the russians did it or not, we've got, you know, on one side a political candidate. on the other side we've got basically the entire cybersecurity community, the fbi, the intelligence community, but still it's flown into partisanship. that makes this i think tougher if you don't have that to be, if you're already divided. it's just very hard to be resilient. just goes back to the success of that toolset. >> i'll just add from the perspective this feeds back into something we were talking about earlier in the extent to which something became partisan and was not seen as a problem for america and something we should push back against as an american security threat. you sort of lost a lot of the security officials on the republican side i would say from that argument. i know a lot of people that that was sort of the moment when we can't stand for this anymore. i will add to it from my perspective we have a particular problem with the russians. they obviously are perfectly

willing to deal in falsities and america doesn't want to. that's not how we behave. and yet we have multiple problem sets on the ioc. you have the russian and the nation state propaganda machines that are very complex and have been around for 50 to 100 years and they know what they're doing. >> americans, we find it sort of distasteful to think of american government doing something to counter that, and the other side of that is the way isil and other terrorist groups can use propaganda through sort of their network and delegate that ability to tweet and send out messages to the field level whereas we still have this knee-jerk reaction. because every tweet, every tactical tweet, can be a strategic problem for decision makers in america. we have to pull up the counter messaging to the highest levels of governance. you have a white house decision on how to counter the message of an isil tweet. we're never going to get inside their decision cycle.

and they're always going to be inside of ours. that is something from the congressional side we're trying to think of what do we do to help the executive branch sort of deal with these various information operation problems. >> just not on the substance of the podesta, if you're russia this is the time you manipulate the data, right? because everyone is sort of lulled into these aren't that interesting. they like the gossip. but this is the moment where you might manipulate it. i want to remind people there's a second wave which i find real rigging which is the attacks on the state and local apparatuses that do the voting. i think the story line is getting lost in the sexiness of the politics. as a structural aspect of the u.s. governance, we have about 9,000 electoral systems in america between local, county, state. they're not, you know, what your locals -- how much money you're

investing in your local cio and those apparatuses, and that to me is just this vulnerability that -- no reason to believe it's happening now, but just that manipulation is happening now, but even the sense that we can't control the networks, that we are dependent on for voting, you know talk about the narrative, that's a bad narrative to be out there. >> is this also as far as how we as a country defend ourselves something of a jurisdictional problem? >> i always say homeland security is not a technological problem. it's a governance problem. if you wanted to set up a nation that from the beginning -- you have divided government. you have state, local, you have counties. you have a tenth amendment reserves public safety to the states. you have federal immigration laws. you're not going to solve it. you can try to make it work better, but you're never going

get the result. but on elections, it's true of almost everything in homeland security, having been on the stateside. the governance tends to be the largest challenge. you sort of alluded to it a little bit. you can't tell a senator who is running or a congressman running for senate to get off the stage. it's a hard thing to do. >> you can only tell them if you're coming up to do a press conference that you need the stage. no, it's hard to tell them they can't command the mike. even after press conferences, how people come stand behind you, then it appears that they're part of the press conference, and they step up to the mike, even if you walked away. so that's exactly right. >> and i think that just on the voting thing, the problem is on the local and state side. there's really no federal authority over it. we just -- we don't have a system like that, so the feds, the dhs, can provide best practices, give money to support it, but you're not completely

completely dependent on miami-dade county investing in some cybersecurity effort, which we -- >> in florida we never have a problem with counting our votes, you can be sure of that. >> sorry, i forgot who i was sitting next to. let me choose another example. >> so we may have to reconvene in a week or a couple of weeks and talk about this in light of the election. do we have another comment or a question? sure. >> thank you so much for this panel. it's really very engaging. my question is about counter narratives, which was alluded to i think just now by katie. given that those who carry out these types of attacks appear to be desiring to become heroes of their own story, how do we help promote counter narratives in which they could become heroes of a better story? >> at least the counter narrative that i've seen talked about don't necessarily have them try to be heroes of a