instead of harnessing it, finding a way to say "i am just as angry as you and we're going too something about it" because the people who brought the country to the knees should not be profiting. basically, timothy geithner said there's nothing we can do about it. larry summers said, these are contracts. the house was up in arms. there were bills about 90% taxation. it would of been unconstitutional in his way, obama decided i would rather do the unpopular but right thing and notouch those bonuses and not say anything and not be a demagogue. he lost some of the public's confidence at that moment. there are other things that happened around the same time. the stimulus bill never was explained to the country and what it would do and how it was going to work. start, he was so

consumed with all the things coming at him, more than any human could possibly deal with, that he began to lose its hold on the public from the first day. quite the that the clarification that -- >> could i get a clarification? when you say high-minded, deeming that as a criticism? >> no. when you have someone who can write a speech accepting the nobel peace prize that invokes and write a speech about race that invokes james baldwin. it is a merkel we have a president like this. it is not the only thing he needs.

there to kind of politicians, one who practices the ethical response ability and one who practices the ethics of [unintelligible] that is the key word of his presidency. it becomes an end in itself to become responsible. the republicans practiced the ethics of all end. we will go with our convictions. obama has one but not the other. neither can present the full personality. >> we will turn to the audience. why don't you get are questions ready? more to come. wallace are circulating, i do not want to do some version of a lightning round. what is the sgle best accomplishment of this of penetration so far? -- administration so far?

>> passing the health care bill. 40 million people who did not have insurance before have it now. >> i would say the health care bill. >> moscow to some of your questions. where is a microphone? >> let me start in the back. >> i think he was wrong when he said that the severity was not severe enough to make a difference. there were three economic crises at the same time. >> the first as the middle class. this is 75 trillion dollars. it is impossible number to look at. in 2001, the private sector stop creating jobs.

yet no way to create jobs. he paid no attention to these issues. maybe he did not know what to do about it. thank you. >> i cannot agree more. i think he does care about these issues. he talked about them constantly during the campaign. he may not know what to do with them. with the stimulus, and thegot what they thght they could not get. maybe they did not push hard enough to get more. it was too weak given the long-term erosion that you're talking about. i do not kw that politicians know how to solve these problems any longer. this is all about restoring the middle class.

they can solve these big problems. you are right. the people he picked not only were some of the purveyors of policies that led to the financial crisis, but also were the type who when it came to things like aig bonuses advise the president to ignore the public into the high-minded thing. in that case, i think the wrongdoing. his advisers to not have a feel for the pulse of the country. inevitably, a presence becomes isolated in the white house. we do not hear from him for long. of time. -- for long amount of time. he gave one speech on the war what he was in very serious meetings planning an ealation. he is great at those meetings. for some reason, he fadeout in the public imagination. it is a weird thing given the

gigantic figure he was in 2008. >> he is the great conciliator. if you look at american history, the biggest steps forward occur when a president separates the sheep from the goats, when he singled out those bad people and is able to isolate them and reduce their numbers so they cannot resist. those roosevelts were brilliant of this during.

obama was a cool personality. i do not think he is the kind of guy who can get mad. i think he did the opposite of what the roosevelts did. rather than drawing a line, he said let's all be adults. >> they say why is he not shake them? why does he yelled? >> this is probably something you cannot take. >> you have to wonder how much

you all are talking about is because he is afraid of looking like an angry black man. i do not know the answer. >> that is a critical point. another question? >> what eric kanter got so mad about this may -- what do know about this >? >> there in the white house on monday. >> good question. the president tried to downplay

it. i assume we have to wait for both their memoirs to find out what happened. do we have another question-can you stand up and wait for the microphone, please? >> i want to continue with the personality issue. it seems much greater than not getting that in public. and not being afraid to appear at an angry black man. by the fed great leaders like alexander the great, cleopatra, certainly robert moses and lyndon johnson, and these people were very comfortable with their aggression. it seems to me that barack obama is very tied up in his own identify as a nice guy. he was a nice cushion blais, a health-care is a nice thing to

give all of these programs. -- he was a nice christian boy, and health care is a nice thing to give all of these programs. there seems to be 11 to what one can accomplish. to do that, one has to be comfortable saying i had a nasty side. i have a values i want to of hold. -- uphold. >> she is pushing "nice guy." >> there is no question that the ones we consider to be the great presidents had in very many cases had a kind of ability to channel which you labeled their at aggression. i would give you the example of the person who is considered by

historians to be the greatest president ofll. abraham lincoln did not have an aggressive bone in his body. he was ambitious but he was exceedingly thoughtful, reflective, and he put the greatest priority onrying to bring the country back together. there is no single model for presidential success. >> it is odd that "nice" is the word. people i know obama it describes them as the most unsentimental and a ruthss man they have ever met. that this is a man who will, once you are no longer going to be able to help him, you are gone. his counsel he was an early supporter of obama had been a clinton guy into the risk of

becoming an obama guide and was cut loose with apparently not a second thought to the horror of a lot of people in the white house. this is not a softie. he has a lot of steel in his skeleton. howlse could a black man get to perhaps no better it scene and then with osama n laden. >> hocan you in truly be funny e night before at the white house correspondents' dinner? his timing was amazing. all the while knowing that the next day -- >> a very steely moment indeed. >> i am the national director of the roosevelt campus network.

i am graated in 2008. thousands of young people in our network work hard to select obama. i think a lot of us believed we were working for a movement. your referenced movements earlier. it was a new kind of government. organizing for america with a great example of that. tons of young people believed that organizing for america represented a new way o governance. people across the country could get a sense of the public's entries. -- interest. since that did not work out the way we thought it would, -- we are thrilled that health care task. a lot of the things he has accomplished in the past year, i think a lot of young people are waiting that. while i think that young people will come out for barack in

2012, what do you think you can do to ensure the youth vote in the same numbers? >> let me ask you a question -- it the young people who organize for obama in 2008 are disappointed, who will they te for? >> a lot of people will make the decision on whether or not to come back and work for the campaign. a lot of people are. i believe they still believe in barack obama, but we are not sure of the same numbers. >> that may not turn out in the same numbers, which were critical at the time. >> altman, especially in these economic circumstances, it is harder to run as an incumbent then it is as someone with a blank slate. but to govern is to disillusion people that is just the way it goes. the case people have to make is "better meet then someone else." i will continue to fight the

good fight. you have to stick with me. it may be the kind of campaign he runs will be the campaign of the president in the middle of a war where you have to stay the course. victory has not been achied. maybe this is abraham lincoln in884 -- 1864 where george bush in 1984 -- 2004. if you throw me out now, we will lose all the progress that we -- then we made that things will be worse. >> can we go over here? the gentleman ithe white shirt? yes. you? please stand up when you get the microphone. >> one of the major responsibilities of a president is the stewardship of foreign policy. how would you assess his handling of the palestinian- israeli negotiations?

secondly, the arab spring? >> thank you but the question. who was to start with that? >> i think foreign policy has been his strgest point. he handled two wars, a third that was laid out on his table, d the most vexing relationship the united states has ever had with any ally in it history, pakistan, about as well as i can imagine any president doing. the palestini-israeli conflict will make every president look bad. it mayill clinton look bad and he voted every day of the last 1.5 years of this present see to it. obama made eight you rookie mistakes in 2009, but i will not lay that on him. that is a situation that no american president can possibly

work his will on. as for the air spring, he was always a step behind. i do not think he quite grasped what a historical moment this was. there was an audience in the arab world paying very close attention to what he was saying, but i think his country by country choices -- do you push mubarak out in egypt? basically, he handled them very well. i think he is a very shrewd tactician in foreign policy, which, again, is not what if we ought he was going to be when he ran. we thought he was a visionary transformer. i do not think his foreign policy is particularly transformation, i just think he was very short-handed. >> go back to what i said at the very beginning -- if you look at the historical process that --

context and say how big with the arabs spring appear years from now -- if you take it in a historical concept, when he came to office, the united states was the subject of anger and contempt due out the world. somehow he brought the united states back into a position where everyone is cooperating. i think that, in a broad sense, maybe the most significant. >> ok. another question. down here, please? >> as i look or round, i may be the only african-american male here. let me just say this -- barack obama is a tight. he has been trained by his parents and his grandparents as

i was trained by my grandparents and parentsot to get youngry with white folks. [laughter] that is the opposite effect of what we want to do. we want to be a participant in american life. if i were angry, bitter, and walked around frowning all day i would not he many friends in life or business partners. we are trained in a largely, professional white world to behave a certain way. i learned that from my mother. she learned it -- he learned from his mother and his grandparents. we did not get angry. -- we can get angry. my wife can attest to that. [laughter] our behavior is to be up right, but not up tight. to be real, not a phony, but also to listen spanish and t

to convey that we are not going to -- to listen and try to convey that we are not going to [inaudible] i am 1000 percent -- 1000% supporter of the president. he can learn. by all learn of the job. andrew johnson could not read. he had to be taught how to read by his wife. let's get real. not every president wants in and as a bed of roses. lincoln did not have a bed of roses. george washington, they wanted to make him a king. he said, nope. he could have been king george iv. in america, there is a debt ceiling and a ll ceiling. we were we going to get past the dallas ceiling about this man? [applause]

>> do you think his upbringing has handicapped him in any way? >> his uringing was different. quite the question was, do you think it has said it kept him in any way? >> handicap in a sense that his grandparents schooled him on how to behave, unlike my own grandparents. my own grandparents were african-american. his mother had him in indonesia. his grandparents also had him in hawaii. i think it has and it can -- handicapped him in a behavioral way. he became the editor of the law review at harvard. if he had angered those guys at harvard law school, do you think they would have made an editor

of the law review? come on. let's get real. he had to be diplomatic. if he had to be smart about it and he had to be influential. he was all that. i think it is a handicap. it was a handicap for me in business. i could not show my true feelings to a client, a colleague, or a competitor because i always had that thing. lincoln -- how would lincoln have handled fox news? how would run a reagan handle fox news? it is a whole cabinet in this country -- cacophony in this country. who has the noise of the day? the daily noise of the daily news. we have to, in this society, sit back, deliberate, and be more honest and honorable. he is an honorable man.

the is an honest man. i think america would do itself an injustice to not reelect m. [applause] >> i like the image of how with lincoln and built fox news. hallett lbj have handled fox news? >> if he would have had a fourth screen in the office. >> in the back. the gentleman who has not had a chance yet. >> it was touched on briefly, but you have mostly been talking about how barack obama has been finding himself. i feel that, historically, barack obama is unique in that he has been almost defined by the opposition as he has been defined -- as he has defined himself. he has been trying to present himself as a diplomatic figure, but at the same time, he is a

secret muslim, he is a secret communist to hangs out with anarchists. while that really angers conservatives, there have been a lot of people, especially in afghanistan. obama was always, throughout his campaign, saying we get out of iraq and go into afghanistan. i think people boughtnto the opposition rhetoric, thinking he is a total of them will get us out of all the wars. they are disappointed when obama actually does what he says he was going to do. how do you feel that the opposition narrative has affected barack obama's presidency? >> thank you for the question. to what extent has the mitch mcconnell position -- i will do anything to not give him reelected again -- has that been

either good or bad for him? >> i wld like to draw a pallel with what happened to truman after the 1948 election. truman inherited the president of what franklin roosevelt was thdeath in 1945. he won by a very narrow margin in 1948. republicans were so embittered in large part because they had taken the high road on foreign policy. they were so sure they were going to win that they did not want to spoil the realm of foreign policy they were going tread themselves. truman squeaked st. the morning after, republicans made the collective decision that they would destroy the presidency. they went into opposition right across the board. when china went communist in 1949 and when the korean war began,hey essentially destroyed truman's presidency. there was no constitutional ban

on truman running for election again in 1952, but he was so unpopular that he could not have gotten the nomination even within his own party. he packed up and went back to independence, missouri. this unrelenting competition, unfortunately, sometimes it works. it has worked pretty well against obama. i say this despite the fact that he has done about as well as anybody could have. given what george called the "a head wind" he has been facing into, he has still done remarkably well, but that is not going to go away. >> another question? let's go down here. please? please stand up. thank you. >> i listened to mr. bnds discussion about having large majorities in both -- both

houses and immediately went to dr. caro saying johnson needed 12 votes, but he ly needed one to filibusteat the time. i heard george talked about how shrewd and ruthless obama is what i want to raise the prospect of is that obama needs to raise $1 billion. obama needs to make the aig bonuses look like they are high- minded even though they are legal, but unethical. citizens united should change the playing field. with 59 votes you do not even feel like you have all the democrats because they can go get money. lyndon johnson did not have to argue quite as hard against money. is it not the context straping this presidency rather than the

feelings and personality of the president? >> lyndon johnson did not have to worry about running against money quite so hard, probably because he always had the texas oil money behind him, but he had something just as a tough, which was the southern conservative, a midwestern conservative domination of congress. when johnson came into office, this conservative coalition was formed in 1937 in response to the supreme court. stay in power for 26 years. roosevelt never got a single major domestic bill through congress after 1937. no major legislation passed until johnson came into office. every president has huge problems facing them. just to give back, i have to say one of thing -- we talk

about being comfortable in your personality and not being a great debate riklis. i will tell you what being reflected for lyndon johnson. i was listening to a tape or something for something i am writing now. everyone knew that if you denied him a vote, he would never stop trying to pay you back. he is now president. there is a crucial moment in the finance committee. it is 9-8 against him. he has to change the vote. he gets a call for a vote within the finance committee. he has five minutes. because the democrat from ohio. he says, i cannot do that. my company needs this tax break. i will lose face. lyndon johnson says -- and yet to hear his voice on the tape -- you saved my face today and i will save your face tomorrow. [applause]

[laughter] >> you are absolutely right. the context is different. it is hard to compare. money makes a difference. media makes a difference. one thing is permanent -- how to use power. one aspect of using power is to instill fear. i think he is used it with the wrong people. it is more the people who work for m or who are his allies at one time or another who can tell you he will cut you off if you stop. do you think john boehner is afraid of obama? do you think mitch mcconnell is afraid of the obama? do you think joe lieberman is afraid of obama? >> should they be? >> yes. absolutely. i asked david axelrod about this when i was writing a piece about obama's per year. one thing i thought was missing was fear -- his inability to let

potential friends and enemies know that there will be a reward for being a friend and would be a penalty for being an enemy. if you cannot do that, there is no price to be paid for opposing view. democrats opposed them all the heth care bill in ways that were terribly damaging. republicans have done nothing but oppose him. maybe it is just kp in him that he does not want to be seen as punishing people. you have to be willing to punish people. it is a missing weapon in his arsenal. it sells crude to talk about politics in this way, but it is part of what it is about. i guess the number o senators, "is obama feared on capitol hill?" they said absolutely not. >> as opposed to the former

speakeof the house, nancy pelosi? >> she was feared. she got more done than obama did. lyndon johnson was feared. >> we are going to wrap it up. if you want to include a final thought, go ahead. or not. >> obama faces a challenge lyndon johnson did not fe and franklin roosevelt did not have to deal with. that is we have gone be on the dais where bipartisanship was possible. until the 1960's, both political parties included both liberals and conservatives. it was possible, for example to find a coalition that included people from both parties because the democratic party had all of the democratic, southern conservatives, but it also had liberal democrats. the republican party had northeastern liberals and it had

midwestern conservatism. with the passage of civil rights, more precisely, when lyndon johnson nailed the flag of the democratic party to civil rightseform, he gave the southern conseatives permission to leave the democratic party. and they did with the result that they all became republicans. the south became the center of gravity for the republican party. we have achieved the point now where you are a conservative in the country, you are a republican. if you are a liberal, you are a democrat. there is respectively no overlap with the result that the party system fizzlesut. gerrymandering with computers said every seat in the house of representatives is safe for the incumbent. republicans in congress do not have to worry about a challenge from the left. they are all looking over the right shoulder. democrats are looking over their left shoulder.

the day when you could reach across the aisle to form some kind of consensus is gone, at least for the time being. some of the states are appointing independent commissions to draw congressional districts. that will dilute of 42 a certain extent. right now, you cannot expect the other party to go along with you. >> that is a subject for a whole another panel. gentlemen, this has been wonderful. i know that bob caro will not be writing and -- a biography of obama. i do not know about bill because you are moving through a lot of different presidents. >> my boss already did it. i cannot show him up. >> are there any circumstances -- i think the biographication of our presints are in good hands. state james for what happens

next. -- state to or what happens next. >> thank you for coming. there is a coffee break out in the garden if you would like to join us. at 4:30, we have a panel on the media. >> coming up, the co-founders of twitter talk about the future of the internet. syrian dissidents talk about how the u.s. can assist their country's pro-democracy movement. later, the effect of social media on courtroom proceedings. >> president obama tomorrow will be in michigan, high lead technology's role in the economy. he will be speaking at a battery plant. >> as an aspiring journalist, i

am preparing myself for the small salary i will be starting out with. >> you have to be disciplined enough to put aside your bias and report the facts, the truth. >> the reason people love fox news and movies so much is because it is of experience, it is emotional, love and hate. >> from the media and journalist conference at george mason university, aspiring high school journalists on commentary and where they get their information today. that is sunday. up next, the creators of the website twitter talk to the former editor of "time magazine" about the internet. the relaunch the obvious corporation, which developed twitter. this is just over an hour.

>> i am going to introduce during murdoch so jerry murdoch can introduce me. >> i am the code-founder of venture partners, and a trustee at the aspen institute. this session is what is next for the internet. [unintelligible] steve jobs once said that if you want to predict the future, be best way to predict the future is to invent it. these three gentlemen have all had something to do with the creation of the internet and post-internet. walter isaacson, that when he was at a time as editor, released when the very first internet portals in 1984 called pathfinder. it is still out there today. biz stone and evan williams are co-founders ankle creators of

blogger and twitter. both of those inventions will be feeling the repercussions of that for another generation. without further ado, walter isaacson, biz stone, and evan williams. [applause] >> can you put your name tags back on so i can remember them? it does not matter. >> we are going to start with a piece of news about the future of the internet. these are the co-founders of twitter. they are happy to announce today -- >> evan and i and jason, our longtime collaborator, -- he knows he is ball.

the three of us have been longtime collaborators and really good friends. our dream was always to build our own company where we get to make what ever we want, whenever we think is going to be helpful to the world and make the world a better place. we put up a web site today and we are calling our company "the obvious corp.." we do not have anything specific to say about exactly what we are working on just yet, but i am ready to reveal that. we are excited to announce that we have started a new company. >> it actually is the loss of the new company, the obvious company. >> it is actually a relaunch. it incubated twitter before spending -- spinning it off into its own company. the original idea was that we

were going to create multiple things and see where they went. we did not end up doing that many things. this is a relaunch of that company. we are very excited. or mission is that we do not have specifics about what we are going to build. we are excited about building systems that help people work together to improve the world in various ways. we think that is so much of what the actor that promises -- the internet promises. the bright side is people working together to become greater than they could individually or greater than institutions can be. >> without going further than you are ready to go, you're

talking about what -- launching a new product that would help people collaborate. >> yes. collaborate in the various things. twitter-like quality can mean various things. our goal is to have an impact. if we get as likely as we did with twitter, that would be great. -- if we get as lucky as we did with twitter, that would be great. there is a whole wave of new companies that are about helping people work together to do things. it touches on things that twitter actually does. it will enable people who would not necessarily act on their own to find light-minded people. it is one thing to find light- minded people, it is another thing to find light-minded people and do things. that is what we see in the

middle east. we have seen smaller examples throughout the history of twitter. it is christmas time and there are a bunch of homeless people on the street, let's go get them blankets. who is with me? we heard stories like this. we are convinced that this would not have happened if people did not have this communication channel. they do not get out there unless you get the mechanisms to connect with other people. that scratch the surface of what is possible >> i was going to use that phrase. it seems what we are just beginning to scratch the surface on the and internet and on specific applications like kick -starter and donor's choose where people can collaborate to affect positive change. twitter has helped to do that. it is not entirely what it is

about, but it has done that in certain cases. there is a proliferation of start ups and apps that are doing that now. as we get into our discussion about the future of the internet, hopefully, this is the lead topic. >> in some ways, this is the history of the internet. it started as a collaborative media and became something different for a while. >> its original goal was to help scientists collaborate. then it took on this very where thel loamode default mode -- the fall paradigm of commerce is one way. people will consume our media and our advertisement. then there is the next wave where we realize this is a two- weight media. people do not just consent, they participate.

there are great examples of people collaborating on the internet to create great software, to create information on wikipedia. to bring that collaboration back to the real world is the next phase we are pushing. what's there was this pure collaborative d.c. seed in the very beginning -- collaborative seat in the very beginning. -- seed in the very beginning. blogging came along and a seedling started to sprout to the crack. we lowered the barriers to self publishing. now we are entering the third

phase where it is not just an overwhelming amount of information, there are people working on things and to give you information as quick as possible. it also includes taking the virtual and making it true, real, positive to global changes in the world. >> why you call it the obvious corporation? >> originally we called it obvious for a couple of reasons. one is we want to create products that are obviously easy to use and straightforward, not tricky. not try to be too clever. we are not that clever. probably a bigger reason was the biggest ideas or obvious in retrospect. only in retrospect. >> for the first nine months of twitter, people thought it was totally useless.

they said it to our face every day. finally one day, evan said, "what is -- so is ice-cream." do you want us to ban ice cream and all julie? -- and all joy. >> you will be the ceo, correct? >> i am on the board at twitter. differ -- we all have different relationships. >> all of us are deeply invested personally and financially in twitter predic. evan is an active participant on the board. i worked through this with dick, our ceo. i said i would get out of the way.

if you need me, just ask me to do something. i will be working a lot with bouncing ideas of a product. that is pretty much it. jason is kind of a guidance counselor. all the employees at twitter are constantly asking jason for a private meeting. he is involved. we are all involved. we want to see it succeeds tremendously. we want to help as much as possible. >> before we get into the future of the internet, let's talk about the arab spring. we talked about that many times and twitter and how it affected it. someone said "the revolution will not be tweeted." >> first of all, it was weird. no one was arguing that -- his argument was "these revolutions

are not twitter revolutions per "no one said they were. that was weird. that is what he was arguing against. basically i wrote eight rebel that said, look, -- basically i wrote a rebuttal that said, look, the telephone did not bring down the bill -- berlin wall. i think it is a straw man thing. i think he was angry that people kept writing twitter into the headlines. he said, twitter had nothing to do with this, but, in fact, it had a sideline part because these people were ready to speak up. twitter was a tool that help them realize that others felt like them. it emboldened them and allow

them to feel they could do this. it has eight roles as a simple tool, -- it has a role as a simple tool, but it must remain a neutral technology, not taking sides, not getting involved, not celebrating any part of helping in any success. >> you call it a neutral technology. the be ask you a question -- do you think from gutenberg to twitter, the technologies that enable a fleer trove of information and communication inevitably -- enable 8 free ya freer flow of information -- >> i want to know what you think. >> the answer is, yes.

it empowers and enables people. it does not compel an author jerry of regime. -- and all third tyrian -- authoritarian regime. quite the thing we are facing now -- the state department is suddenly very cozy with twitter. "we would try to get ak-47s and you die did it with tweets." "can we be friends? i maintain that it has to be a neutral technology because there are different forms of democracy. you do not want york technology -- your technology to be a tool

to spread the united states version of technology around the world. -- democracy around the world. you want it to help for good, but you do not want to look like you are in the pocket of the u.s. government. we tried to do that as much as we can. speaking of the future, as people have been starting internet companies, one thing that has changed a lot is the global nature of the internet. now if you create a consumer web service, most of your users will be outside of the united states. it does not matter if you are in the heart of silicon valley and lodged only in english, there

are other people outside the u.s. that changes have you think about things from the get go. it comes up in all kinds of policy decisions when you get big. the state department stores calling and a weird things start happening. -- the state department starts calling and weird things start happening. you can make something truly global. it is more global than it was even five or 10 years ago. i went to korea to lot twitter in korean in january. twitter and maybe facebook now are the first two services to grow substantially in korea that are not from korea. even though they are very advanced -- they have high-speed

internet, they have lots of homegrown and internet services -- there is something culturally that get those people on the homegrown side. now with things like twitter and facebook they have local competitors, but people want to be connected to the global network. they want to follow what is happening with bill gates. you cannot separate this stuff anymore. it has to be part of one massive system, which also these two things like the internet becoming more closed at less decentralized. that is another topic. >> let's get to the topic -- is there a problem with the future of the internet? the you think it will become more closed? >> absolutely. there are a lot of trends that push it toward being more closed. specifically, the economics of the centralized system and the

user experience is very powerful. >> are you talking about apple, for example? >> apple is a good example as is facebook and youtube. let's take youtube as a lesson taught about example. youtube is not closed, but it is very centralized. 10 years ago if you had talked to any technologist, they would say obviously viet was coming to the actor that as bandwidth increases. at the time, no one i know would have said that 80% of the videos would be run through one service. that would have been a strange thought because the actor that model was decentralization. every website, every newspaper as an island on the internet, what would that not be the same way? if you want to publish a video, you probably publish it on youtube whether you are a -- unless you are a major media

outlet. people published on youtube because it is a lot easier and because that is where the viewers are. it has the big network effect. that will keep it more and more powerful. same thing with facebook and with apple. if you want to write a mobile phone application, you can publish it to the apple store because that is the only way to get it on the telephone. that is great for users. it is the same thing over and over again. the user experience is superior if it is centralized and the rich is better in the economics are better. what we are getting into our platform wars where there are a few major players that are getting bigger and bigger and there are opportunities for little guys to be on these major players platforms, but i think we are more dependent on these

platforms. >> can you put twitter on that list? >> yes. "elite. [applause] [laughter] -- yes. hopefully. [applause] >> most of us grew up thinking of the internet as http web pages. we have had 20 years of a web based internet. now you are saying that we are moving towards a social network based internet, but there will be certain platforms like facebook or whatever that will be more centrally controlled? >> if you can go on your i applied touch -- ipod touch and still get almost everything you need. there is an app for that.

everything is on there. >> the distinction that is important is not http. that confuses the story a little bit. what is important is the paradigm shift from a completely decentralized internet to a centralized internet. you have to give to the apple store to get an application for your phone. that is different than anyone can put up a website. it the website uses facebook connect or twitter accounts to log into the websites because people automatically have accounts, that is very different for the days you created everything from scratch. i liken it to in the early days where people were on an island and try to attract tourists to the island. tourists which show up and it would issue them a passport and

feed them whatever coconuts they grew on that island. over time and lot of islanders said we cannot be completely self sustained, so we will import things. we will import modernization. we will import surge. -- search. your cmf.mport now you can import your identity. now people are saying, screw it. we do not even need to own the land. we are going to read it. -- rent it at all the services will be provided for us. that makes a lot of sense from a money standpoint. but that means you are dependent on that land owner. >> what is the downside? >> maybe the landowners to get

too much control. they changed the rules. when we started odio with a -- which was a podcasting service, apple said we had that with itunes. that was probably a good place for it. it was probably better than our website. once they made that decision, we had to give it. -- we had to pivot. -> if you're doing get app nkable as is not as likab much. >> they are not connectable.

it is a step backwards. >> the lighting just got different. [laughter] it has gotten more gloomy. >> what else are you worried about the future of the internet? >> you should ask goldman. he is the more cynical one. we are hallucinogenic lee optimistic. jason is always a light, "these are the 10 ways we can get screwed. about quality of content. for the last 15 years we have worked on lowering the barriers to content creation. it seems like there is -- that

no one has been working on how to improve the quality of content on the internet. i think this is highly possible, but if you look at what reading an article on the web looks like today, it is basically the same as if you read it in a magazine. once it is published, it really changes. the collected intelligence available in the world does not collaborate to improve it. the process of creation is not much different than traditional media, the distribution is the only thing that changes. all these things could potentially change. the consumption, the production process could be weighed more efficient and (that is an opportunity and a way that things could improve. in the publishing industry there is a lot of turmoil and disparity.

they think the internet screwed their business model, which is true, but is optimistic that there are more fundamental things to change about publishing dan distribution. >> i think there has not been nearly enough. -- i'd think there has not been nearly enough experimentation between user generated content and professional content. they are pretty much different worlds of the internet today. the best you get is an article and then a bunch of comments that can be from anybody. no one ever read them. i want to read my new york times after walter has read it, highlighted it, and written in the margins.

depending on what the article is, i do not know exactly what that looks like, but there are all kinds of ideas. with wikipedia, there is a collective intelligence the collaborates to provide information. just to your point about collaboration, there are much more ways of thinking about collaboration on the web than specific applications created for collaborating. apps like twitter that are wide open, where you can follow anyone. whether you tweak or not is up to you, but you can follow your mom, you can follow cnn, you can follow anything -- nike. i think there is a lot of

potential for collaboration because people meet others they would have never met at the door on a social network because you connect with people you already know there. you're just confirming your relationship. that you are on a system we were falling people you wish you knew rather than people you used to know, it is more of an aspirational thing. we've seen it over and over. people say, "we have all started falling each other on this -- following each other on this twitter. why do we not get together and meet in real life?" it has wonderful repercussions. one of the early 20's was "let's get together and raise money for charity. pub, get together at this

pay a $20 ticket, and that money will go to people who do not have clean water in developing nations." they raised millions of dollars on one tuesday night. >> that is a good example, but there are not that many of them, of how you make the virtual world connect with the physical world. in other words, a virtual friends or virtual ball worse -- -- virtual followers. >> you no longer have to be sitting at your desk to experience the entire net. it is more interspersed in our daily lives. this simple idea of -- this

simple idea is kind of integrating. you do not have to tell the taxi where you are, you just press a button and it shows up to your house. >> what i am excited about is more people -- have you heard of carrotmob? it is the opposite of the boycott. the idea is people should vote with their dollars, but the only organized way to do that is to boycott this business. that is negative and does not seem like there is necessarily an effect most of the time. this guy got the idea that we could use the carrot instead of the state in which to go to the business and say we want you to do this and, if you do, we will

all spend our money. for example, this guy from san francisco went to all of these liquor stores in the mission and got them to bid for how much they would contribute to improving efficiency in their store out of all the people who organize and bought stuff. the highest bid was 22%. they rallied the troops and got all these people to show up. they bought everything in the store. bigeye normally makes $1,000 a day. he made $10,000 that day. . $2,002 into replacing the lights. it was not a discount. they presumably bought things they would any way and then date referred or invested in the store emotionally and, actually come out financially. >> the picture he showed us of

the first of that shows all these people talking to each other. since then there have been others in germany and around the world. it is taken on the life of its own. >> with the future of the internet be better if there was less anonymity, or at least the option where you can be secure in who people are? >> i think so. there are a lot of benefits to anonymity, but not most of the everyday use cases. i think in more dangerous situations you need to be able to protect your anonymity. other times when you want to open up and get ahead in life because you want a better job or whatever, you want to use your real name. you want to open up ensure your interest. if you are more of a

whistleblower in a dangerous area, you want to be able to protect your privacy. >> the reason i ask is it seems to me a collaborative web is being able to trust the ut i am collaborating with. >> we need to replicate that to some degree on line. behind the scenes, it is the way to combat abuse. abuse is a huge problem if you are running what the services -- spam and what not. it is not even necessarily anonymity. you do not necessarily have to use her real name. you can participate under a pseudonym or something, but there needs to be longevity and a history of your actions. there has to be cost to going

away and identity and creating a new one. if there is nothing, there are no consequences. >> bugle to date lost bugle -- google today launched google +. the ec the possibility that facebook could be displaced as myspace was? >> the general answer to that is -- when you get this place, it is because she displaced yourself. myspace took their eye of the user and focused on junky advertisements. it is the same thing citi did.

they got involved in credit defaults swaps and all that stuff predicted their eyes of their customers. by almost lost their $200 -- to one year old institution. their new metrics are let's keep 1 million people from foreclosing. of the 4 million people we know we are going to foreclose on, let's preserve their credit and get them at 28 rental. those are actual measures they are trying to achieve. the key is execute, keep your eye on the future, do what you need to do. facebook seems to have a firm grasp of its users, but they also seem to have a "we are going to do it whether you like it or not" attitude. >> suppose you were building a new service or product that needed to be based on the

platform of a social network with the identity or whatever. would you be comfortable basing it on facebook? >> we did that early on and did not have all lot of success. >> i would use facebook if it were useful. it is useful for users and science to bring in people you know. but i do not think facebook will be displaced. however, what they do is to fundamental. connecting with people you know. sharing photos is a very fundamental to most of the world. but what is going to be hard for them is the same thing but it's hard for every big company which is extending that to everything.

what i hear from people who use facebook a lot is that it gets to appoint word is too big for certain things. you form a network on facebook based on what you do on facebook. google has been public about their theory the to do not want to share all things with everybody. they can give people who create the circles, whatever they are calling them, that they will more naturally maps to what people want to do. that can be successful. people will use facebook for the steps to use facebook for today. that will be hard to displace. something else might be better for a specific other use which is what happened with twitter. >> i think being so obstinate as

to say, what can she say everything in one place? water you hiding? that is silly. everyone has different aspects of their personality. >> facebook house all the functionality the new group will circle dollars. people are not used to using it that way. greeting these services is, the norms of the culture of the system define what people do with it much more than the functionality. if that makes sense. people, people can hook their twitter to their facebook and publish their tweets. for a lot of people who use facebook, this does not make sense. the house tax and user names do not have the meaning of facebook. it is the type of things up

people share on facebook. it is a different thing for what people do want twitter. even though the functionality is a ouse subset of quarter. >> never used twitter, never use facebook, and never reason why he would do it. do you have a response? >> i would have a -- challenge on him if he has used twittered. have you ever watched cnn or red and york times? rk read tehe new yo9 times. chances are he has read a tweeted. >> are there people who can get by with essential that working? -- without social networking? >> on the web?

>> on the internet? >> yes. [laughter] >> let me open it up. run to a microphone. yes. >> the other side of the internet is connecting to the massive computing power that has a lot of knowledge. the latest example is ibm's watson. it seems to me that maybe we should be thinking about those kinds of uses where a physician wants to get a best practices or something like that. he is not going to get in on facebook or you get a whole bunch of ideas from lucky people. you want to get it from something that has distilled all of this knowledge and really gives you something to go. there has to be a place for that side of computing.

>> that is a great question. >> i agree. that is a great example of the collaboration we're talking about. it does not mean with everyone in the world. most of the systems developed has not allowed for, it is like user generated content first is professional. -- vs professional. ford is a closed system. there has to be new ones in between that and to allow people to our credibility or to be able to connect with only those to a certain level of trust. >> one of the things we're excited about with twittered is that maybe one day down the line since was designed to orkhon all mobile phones because they all have sms and it is 140 characters, we always thought we

might be able to have an impact in our rural areas. can i get a better price on the screen or a pregnant woman western travel 50 miles task -- who has to travel tuesday miles? tests have been done in new gun and other places with simple sms or lives have been saved because they have been able to report medical diagnoses over sms. some guys in berkeley invented the microscope you can put over and iphone and you can take a microscopic picture of the virus and send that picture in an e- mail from a ramshackle clinic to fancy clinic and get back with

any minute and a diagnosis of that virus. . you have where somebody takes a cat scan of somebody's something and says the seven collaboration around mad? could you create a high-end product? >> definitely. >> probably somebody already has. every time we have this genius idea we look it up and there are already tenderize working on it. [laughter] >> he started off talking about the separation of the internet with companies but there's also the separation of the global medium with countries. i'm wondering if you have any concern about that, iran or china, in terms of the global common medium of the internet. and if you have any interest in

pushing for a single to joe market. >> i mean, you know, our philosophy is and has always been the open exchange of information can have a positive impact on the world. we also often get blocked by countries that cannot agree with that philosophy. we are blocked in china. the funny thing is people find ways to continue to use quarter. we have found that in order to completely shut down people from the twittering, yet to shut down the entire communication service. when you do that, you cripple the entire state. who was it that did that and they had to turn this thing back on?

even now that we are blocked in china, we still see traffic coming from china. people are figuring out ways around the block to continue to collaborate to treat and to share information. does that answer the question? >> what i worry about is the separate world within the u.s. and people a only paying attention with people who agree with them. that is one of the more ironic things about one of all the -- what all of these technologies have created. more separation rather than connection. there is less of a common marketplace of ideas and to some degree because people are filtering out everything that is from a different viewpoint. the technology encourages you to block the sings out. you have to shuffle the deck. >> some of what would was doing

was tweets from people they are not following. one of our dreams has always been to say, ok, we know you live in berkeley in you drive over the bay bridge every day. it is like 4:45 and maybe would like to know the bay bridge fell down. you would be like, ok, yes, i do like to know that. thank you. you would not say screw you, why are you treating me? -- tweeting me. there is information for everyone that is relevant. we have to work hard on delivering those relevant tweets to people who need them so their lives can be made a smarter, richer, better for it.

>> yes, ma'am. >> um, could you speak to the conversation about the singularity and the role that you have adopted that this is coming and a lot of them have accepted that this merging is going to happen? >> the singularity. that is a book i read in the sixth grade. >> this is different. go-ahead. [laughter] >> it seems crazy but i am not that well versed in a singularity. [laughter] think we have to worry about it yet. i have read of wired magazine's

and other counts but i do not think we're going to lose control. next year we will put it on the agenda and find out whether we are right turn not. >> i will save four systems and involves thousands of computers, it is hard to keep them working let alone working on the run. >> similarity is when they do not need us anymore and they to work on the run. i almost think the opposite is that we keep seeing the limitations of machines every day as opposed to the facts to the they could run amok with irs. -- without us. we do not have before sir face recognition. >> we need to learn to work together before we can teach machines to work together. one of the things, when twitter first broke out, it was because

we went to a conference called south by southwest in austin, texas. we went to the inner portion. it was early on in the twitter's history where it is basically nerds. there was a huge overlap. a few things happen. there was a guy at a pub who wanted to talk more freely with his colleagues at the pub but was really loud. so he used twitter to say it is too loud, let's go over to this other pub. in the eight minutes it took him to walk, it was filled to capacity. there was a line around the block. his plan backfired. what had happened was in eight minutes, a 800 people had converged from one tweet. the metaphor that came to my mind was a flock of birds moving

around an object in flight like a tree or a telephone pole. when you look at it, it looks like it is choreographed and complicated and yet it is not. the mechanics of flocking are rudimentary. it is simple communication in real time allows many to behave as if they are one organism. for the first time ever, we were seeing people behaving almost as if they were one organism like this. we had never heard of a tool or seen anything like this before. that sent chills down our spine because we thought, this is a party but what of it had been more serious? a disaster or political situation. we'd form to twitter incorporated because that is when -- that was the first big realization that we were on to a new form of communication among

humans that could potentially change the world. >> hello my name is jason pollack. i'm a filmmaker and twitter attic. have 92,000 followers on twitter. it has changed my life. thank you so much for creating yet. we read about people like me who use of all the time but we are a minority of the user base. a lot of people know what water is but not a lot of them are active users. i am wondering how you guys are tackling that issue. >> it depends on how you described an active user. we like to say you can give value without creating a web page. 6 billion and tweeds every six days, there is a lot of info out there. there's a lot in there to find.

but what were you going to say. ? >> most of the reports about what the percentage of active users are only looking at tweet creation. there is a misunderstanding that people have. i talk to people who do not use twittered. i have nothing to say to the world. it turns out they read tweets all the time and it turns out we can create a twitter stream that they love and go back to all the time. two out of three to recessions result in no tweets being used. twitter cares about the people who are getting information just as much as the people creating information. that percentage is increasing

because early adopters were more likely to create. so there are a lot of active users. two, because of that misunderstanding that we have been trying to correct for a long time, people are getting more and more of an understanding. the osama bin laden thing was a great milestone for a lot of people. disinformation came out on twittered. twitter is a new source. i get now. it is not about the cliche here is what i had for lunch today. it is about information happening in the world. i may not even have to have a twitter account but this stuff is year ended israel time and relevant to me matter where i am. >> just me, i'd probably checked twitter 20 time today.

-- 20 times a day. i think for a long time allotted internet companies have defined engagement the wrong way. if you define a engagement as hours spent staring at a computer screen, our users spend eight hours looking at our site. i think that is an unhealthy way to measure engagement. if your users are checking your service 20, 30 times a day for 10 seconds at a time to make a quick decision or figure out what you're going to do next, that is a way better type of engagement that shows that our services helping them make choices everyday efficiently and smarter and saving time, etc.

i prefer that level of engagement over the slump over a computer screen for eight hours playing a game. >> questions? johnnie in the light blue shirt. >> i have a question which applies to twitter and also the internet in general. when is misrepresenting yourself or sort of creating a new identity good and ok and part of fair play and when does it change to manipulation that is not ok? for example, people who are protesting should be allowed to crates of falsehoods about who they are. i am a comedian; personality is not a real person by any measure. i also misrepresent companies on twitter. i have a fake relationship with

them that implies they perform ceremonies on twitter. when does it change when companies are doing or if they misrepresent support. light yesterday and professor was talking about a site. obviously a company cannot create shell accounts to make a trending topic. i'm sure you guys would see it. could you got on a mechanical -- mechanical turk and a people can sense to make a trendy topic and would that be ok? or if people are representing themselves as citizens when they're working for corporations. >> just recap the question. [laughter] >> i got a. the answer is pretty clear.

you're creating comedy versus trying to manipulate the world for profit. one is ok and what is less ok. -- one is less ok. this is happening ala. these type of campaigns is probably a lot greater because a lot of it is a very hard to detect. so, that is a problem. it is a problem that relates to walter's question about reputation and authority. that is something that all of these questions are just getting started. they are pretty primitive. eventually i do not think an account that is created overnight for 10 cents is going to have very much influence. influence has to be turned over

time. there's a little bit of that in twitter today. i think that is inevitable. it is not going to have the authority it is capable of. >> parity accounts are allowed on twitter. impersonation accounts are not. during the bp oil spill, someone created bp global pr. they started saying all of this sad but funny things. as if it bp could not care less. bp did not call us to take it down. i actually thought i was a brilliant move because it was letting off some steam. if they had gone to shut down

the account, it would have been like they were completely and utter the evil beyond all means. >> but it was funny and clear that was somebody doing a parody. >> it have the logo but it was stripping. [laughter] >> would you have shut it down if there was somebody pretending to be bp pr? >> if it said we are official and here it is, we would have said that is impersonation. >> to letters just down impersonation accounts every day. -- twitter shuts down impersonation accounts every day. >> alexander graham bell -- i was going to ask you. alexander graham bell thought it would be a great way to listen to conserves.

i'm curious what has surprised you about what winter has become? i am assuming the scale and the diversity of it is beyond what you might have anticipated? what has been a surprise to you as twitter has become in the emerging phenomenon and change your time? what you think might become in the future? >> can i answer the first question? so, there is an element of "holy crap." but we had worked on blotter so long and allowing people to create a web page for free that spoke about injustice or was the only way they could get their information out, it was important. we supported that.

we designed our rules to keep it free and open because we knew that it was important in the world. we had a feeling when we were working even though it was fun in the beginning that there was the potential of it also having that same kind of impact in the world. what was not expected was, we lowered the bar so much more down. with blogger you had to have an internet connection. you had to know how to use ftp and stuff like that. with twitter you just have to know how to use a text message. what really surprised me was the speed that twitter grew at and the speed at which all of this

stuff was adopted and the way it's better of democracy and business and all the other things. >> was a wholly shift moment when people said hello i am jared from the state department and don't do maintenance because -- >> there was some energy in the office when we did that. [laughter] but again my primary thing was, oh boy, i do not want people to think we're doing this because they asked us to. i said we get hundreds of e- mails. we had a lot of phone calls. one of those phone calls was from the state department. we decided to change the maintenance window because all these users thought it was a good idea and because we should be up anyways.

becausee not doing this the state department asked us. we wanted to have the global, neutral lied to us. there was a lot of energy that day. >> another thing that surprised me is the casualness with which a large number of well-known people use a twitter. all lot of accounts are handled by pr people or interns but there are people like lady gaga who is on twitter all the time. >> and the people on congress. >> we have gotten to the and without saying that dreaded name. >> that is part of what i meant by the casualness of usage. people are out there saying stuff. >> at the beginning i had an argument with ev and said

celebrities are not going to use twitter. they're celebrities because we do not have access to them. they are special. we look forward to seeing them in movies. we do not want to see their regular lives. but then they all started to go on twitter like crazy. it was great for us because celebrities have built in the people who love them and follow them. >> i have been ignoring this side of the room. >> hello my name is peter. i have a 13 followers on a tour. >> it is about quality, not quantity of. >> of our company has a mere 200. how do small businesses get more recognition and get followed aside from being bigger ?

>> the beauty of small business on twitter has not escaped us from the very beginning. you do not have to have a lot of followers. early on i walked by a bakery that did cookies. they had a cardboard box with a magic marker that said follow us on twitter. when the cookies combat of the oven warm we will tweet. even if only 98 people in the neighborhood followed that account, when those guys say chocolate chip cookies are coming out of the oven at three in the afternoon, everyone runs down there and baez cookies. even if it is only 90 people they just sold all of their cookies. they can go home for the day or make another batch.

and all they needed was a sharp be and a piece of a box. -- sharpie and a piece of a box. they could save follow me and i will tell you if i get a special grain next week. there is a huge group of small businesses that are not going to build a web site and by and advertise and do all that sort of stuff when they can get a twitter account for free and get a chalkboard and go for it. >> the last question there. standing up. >> my name is eric and i'm a talent agent at eta focusing on social media. my question to you is there is a lot of talk about the attack bauble. is it going to burst?

i'm not going to ask whether you filing for an ipo but i would love to know your thoughts about where you are in the bubble. >> that is a good question. >> i am not a speculator about the stock-market but i think there is a lot of excitement because a lot of stop -- stuff is getting real. the people for sought and the internet from the first company. now the user base that you can reach a billion people on a service and make a lot of money is very clear to people. as usual, investor inside me -- excitement is outpacing the development of the businesses. long-term, i do not think it is a problem.

twitter stalker for the long term. i think if there is a correction, these things go in cycles. that will be fine. there are fundamental businesses that are here for the long term. >> jury murdoch's, where are you? first of all i want to thank jerry murdoch. [applause] going to come up and talk about the yoga that we can do. but first let me think our people here. we really appreciate it. [applause] what is the hash tag for this?

aspenideas is the hash tag. >> pal a canvasses be movements. been a discussion about the effect on social media all courtroom proceedings. then john pistol on the future of transportation security. >> postmaster general. stephen moore will discuss tax policy. we will speak to michael about federal job-training programs. it begins live at 7:00 a.m. eastern. >> this weekend, we will visit the house the day are convinced

of the united states pai. leon panetta speaks about his switch to the democratic party. u.s./cuband at relations in the 1950's and the 1960's. could the complete we can schedule at c-span.org/history. >> the u.s. announced a new round of sanctions against syria in response to the violent crackdown on protesters. here is the spokes person. >> no, i have nothing. >> ok. >> should president assad step down?

>> the focus of our activity, as you know, based upon the secretary phone calls is to continue to strengthen the international it current of condemnation regarding the current activities of the assad regime, and this community of countries willing to call them out, call syria out for what it is doing is growing, and over the past week, based on their actions, but also because of the strong diplomacy that we have been conducting with the number of countries.

the arab league, the gulf cooperation council, and as i mentioned, the saudi king abdullah, bahrain, other countries taking stands to make sure that what is going on at syria is unacceptable. we got the statement last week, and that speaks to the fact that countries are no longer willing to sit by. i think the question now is what message it is the assad regime going to take from this? are they going to stop the violence? are they going to allow a real democratic transition to take place? we have done some sanctions

today. >> speaking of sanctions, where are we internationally? do you feel that the countries that have come forward are back in that effort, sufficient, concrete steps with other sanctions? >> this is very much the focus of the diplomacy that we are engaged with the europeans, with the neighbors of syria, to encourage, as we said yesterday, as many countries as possible to take national action, to tighten the noose, to make sure that we do as much as possible to create pressure on assad, and our own sanctions are used to help stop him from having the ability to do that. >> calling for regime change.

an announcement could come as early as tomorrow. this discussion is 1.5 hours. >> good morning, everybody. i am with the middle east institute. we are still checking with people. there we go. that is better. let me start again. thank you all so much for your patience today. we have had quite a turnout, and we are still checking people in. thank you for joining us with this very important issue. we have a series of panelists who are going to be lending their insight into the developments in syria and a potential solution to the spiraling crisis.

these last 10 days have been quite horrifying in syria, with those of ramadan crackdown on hamas and others. it is continuing as we speak. hundreds have reportedly been killed. the bloodbath has finally prompted a more robust international response as to what is happening in syria. third, the state department issued a statement. it was rather anemic, but it got other powers meeting. the saudis, who have been concerned beasley -- who have been conspicuously silent, they took action. there was a six-hour meeting between the turkish foreign minister and assad. supposedly, they laid down an ultimatum. the results of that have yet to be seen. and now, the obama

administration is set to issue a stronger statement, asking him to step down, and that will likely come out in the next day or two. clearly, the pressure is building, but the syrians are notoriously immune to outside pressure. this is bound to be making them nervous the syrian defense minister was asked to step down due to health reasons the other day, and it was reported that he died from his health reasons, while others say that he was assassinated because he was critical of reactions of the regime. i am sure that will be addressed. the major cities remain mainly quiet, especially in one city,

where there have been very few of arrests, and how the change will come about and who will help lead the change, of course, that is the million- dollar question. our speakers to they are going to bring their unique insight. for the sake of time, i am going to introduce them very briefly. their full bios are on the handout we gave you. there is radwan ziadeh, the founder and director of the damascus center in syria and the co-founder and director of the syrian center for political and strategic studies here in d.c., and i should note that he is one of the key voices of the syrian opposition in exile. there is also the executive director of the london-based

strategic research center which provides research and commentary on syria to the media and government. he has also been very involved in the protest by using social media to coordinate throughout europe, and we have the ambassador of a leading non- profit organization that works for the middle east, a former foreign service officer. he has served twice in syria, first as the deputy chief of mission and then as ambassador from 2001 to 2003. last but not least, one has very kindly agreed to fill in for someone who could not make it today. he has to leave early, but we are very appreciative of him being there. working for the washington institute on near east policy, he is the author of a forthcoming book, "in the lion's den, an eyewitness account of the battle with syria." please do look for that. it is a great privilege and honor to that everybody with us. i want to thank them for joining us, and also i would like to thank others for their outstanding help.

this room clearly is not large enough. i apologize. they have also provided today's lunch, so many thanks to them. i also want to go to a journal we are selling. there are several articles on the muslim brotherhood in syria and one on the regime itself, so take a look at this and do by one on the way out and become a member of the same time. thank you. i would now like to invite our guest to the podium.

>> good afternoon, everyone. i thank you for the nice introduction and for this nice opportunity. let's begin actually with the impact of ramadan, as a part of the uprising. since march, the protests are getting more momentum regarding the size of the protests while at the same time asking for steps of reform, but as there is the response of the regime that has more killings, this is deeper in change and calling for this. at the same time, it has been for five months. at the same time, the process cannot get the momentum at the same time the core of the regime is still solid. we do not see any defections

among the seniors in the government or among the ministers or the parliament. this is why the protestors prepare themselves for ramadan. friday, that became the day of prayer in the muslim society, but that does not mean or reflect that is the main call or the main purpose of the uprising is religion or something like that, because under 47 years of dictatorship and state of emergency, but people cannot get together, only in the mosques or the churches, because otherwise, you have to get permission to even get that much.

and this is why they use the opportunity on friday to start the protests. their number is much bigger than the number of the security officers, the security persons, and this is why the mosque became the main point crystal star the protest, and this is why the regime reacted on that, just one day before ramadan with a huge military operation in the largest three cities which actually became the flash point, and in one area in itself, in the last few weeks, they have a least half a million. in hama, the syrian propaganda, they are beating that. "the new york times" rogan very interesting pieces, and he claimed himself that he never sought any guns in hama itself, and this is why we give the explanation about the harsh response before ramadan, because they need to send it to the cities that if they do protest, the response will be exactly like in april.

they cut their electricity, water. of course, all means of communication, cell phones, and not allowing even that for food or medical supplies. there is a story that we need may be more confirmation about the babies born in the hospital in hama, where they cut the electricity, and all of the babies born had died. and this is why the collective punishment became actually for the residents of the city, because the regime, they are seeing if they start to protest, they will punish the whole city. but at the same time, it will affect the number of the people who are protesting, a huge number of people in critical situations. the people who have been killed x c 2000. it is not the will of the syrians to protest, and it is ramadan in every night in every

city. there are youtube videos every day, in the north, in the south, and all over the country, and what is important is that there are leading voices who start talking about why the regime is taking the community as a hostage.

. what is important is there are more the invoices for talking about taking the community as a hostage. the overall security officers are part of the community. all of the stories about torture and about the killings have been blamed on officers during that period even if there are other officers during that period because the regime insists on the sectarian, this is between all other communities. what is good in the last three weeks, there's a lot of leading forces from the community asking

why the regime is taking a hostage. we discovered with other communities -- we have no such kind of a struggle or fight with others. this is why we can see that the voice of the well-known novelist and others, the former minister of information when he announced what is called the national democratic initiative. of course the ceiling of this initiative is not acceptable by the syrian people. he is calling for someone to lead a transition and calling for a national conference. this could send a message, ali duba, one of the icons of the

military service. we believe that such initiatives gives the sense that there's more and frustration among the community. what is good that this time this is a different [unintelligible] this is in the message we're trying to send to the community. it is not like that. there is no role of the muslim brotherhood in organizing the protests. they have a much more -- the young generation is very young. most syrians are under 30. this is why the high number of the people being killed with

documented 1152. this is why the young is a leading the protest mainly by indigenous ideas about the local court in asian communities and other types of organizations. of course the initiative also reflects the replacement of the minister of defense. the minister of defense -- he is no connection to the security. we know from the beginning he is not satisfied by involvement of the army in attacking the

civilians by himself. with all the history of hama, he says this will make more sense among the people. the syrian army is a professional one did is not like egypt or libya. it is something in between. from day one of the army trying to enforce it, there's a lot of stories about the security in syria. and have civilian clothing but they change them and give them military clothing to confuse the protesters that there is no institution they can rely on even though they have been attacked by the army. people feel they are fighting along with no international

support other than condemnation. we are hearing more voices from the arab league and from the security council. this helped the protesters on the ground to gomorrah rental -- to get more momentum. then the replacement of ali habib, the army is not on the same page with the syrian regime and attacking civilians. there is no indication -- what we have in the army, and the

rebels. there interview where the officers started operating to encourage more army generals to defect. it is not a significant number from the senior army general to defect or break with the regime. but how that will affect at the end. what is more important is the army. having them can -- condemned the violence and having king abdallah direct to the syrian people and talk to them directly, this is had a great impact on the people on the ground. with all of the important role of saudi in the region, they have been leading the community

in libya from behind but right now it is silent on syria. this is why the speech may get some more arab countries to stop the violence and syria. basically along with the international community, with some security council, this is non-binding and has no influence. we're hoping for resolution by the security council which condemns the violence against the protesters but also puts sanctions on security officers in a criminal court. this international effort should be coordinated.

the turkish have been seen as much more acceptable. turkey after the visit yesterday london to do some action. they said this is a time for action. this is a time of war. the turkish minister visited damascus -- damascus 60 times. this is why he keeps hearing the same promises but nothing on the ground. yesterday he tried to reach in this three hours meeting to send a clear message that this is a time of action. we will not wait for the turkish prime minister. we think this is too long, two weeks. since the killing is going to continue.

hopefully with the visit by obama tomorrow, he has to step down. more countries will have joined forces to stop the killings or the end will have started transitioning. thank you very much. [applause] >> good afternoon, everyone. thank you to the middle east institute. with the clock ticking, i seem to be set on a position as a post-assad era.

the ability to work together on into a civil,syria modern state. historically, the opposition in syria was composed of the damascus fractions, the kurdish parties, and a wide spectrum of islamists. but there have been new factions and parties. opposition groups traveled all over syria, neighborhoods, towns, and the cities formed their own committees to protect their neighborhoods and coordinate their work. each city has its own local committee and media group but they have formed coalition committees to act together. as a result, we are coordinated together. 70% of the protests are expressions of

many of those opposition groups evolve and emerge over time, springing fourth bigger committees, the biggest grass- roots groups in syria, the local coordinating committees, llc and srcu. most gained media exposure as groups, but that does not mean that the syrian streets zero their mobilization to them. srcu and llc have an imperative presence, as they maintain the unbiased nature of the revolution. people were demonstrating long before those groups were formed.

this is largely owed to funerals. people of certain localities in of never been to mosques their entire lives, such as atheists, christians, , and otherwise, started frequenting the sunni mosques to take part of, or sometimes inside to demonstrations. whatever transpires from such congregations, it represents a will of the substantial portion of the population in that particular area. it is important for the aforementioned points. the expectations of one unifying governing body of the syrian -- what syria is currently experiencing is a democracy. millions of syrians are expressing their desire to persecute the regime. dozens of grass-roots formations and complete political parties have been formed and are being formed to competitively lead syrian society through the transitional period.

many of those parties were formed by prominent intellectuals. they have written manifestoes and are nowadays starting to think about party memberships and representation as well as which constituency each would appeal to. they already have started discussing the future constitution and the restructuring of security and armed forces, for instance. most cruise realize they need a government that serves the benefit of all syrians. more movements and political parties will certainly sprout, and counting only on the current ones is premature. it would be better to start thinking about the actual leadership after all of the syrian factions have a chance to develop into parties. what could be done but is the provision of more support to the inside factions by connecting them with the oxide -- outside opposition groups. there are many grassroots movements at the moment that

will help the great drive the transition forward by may be forming a transitional advisory council. the u.s. and the eu could help coalesce groups and individuals from the outside and inside under the same risk. the opposition groups based outside have more understanding of foreign policies and are on the same page of expectations of most inside grass-roots opposition groups, so they are the best candidates to act as buffer between syria and the outside world. however, they should not be minimized to court nation and should be invested in dow futures key figures go. this is what the syrian opposition is missing, and they could rally inside and outside support. they have been extensively

demonstrated inside syria and have participated in conferences abroad. they have suffered the most due to the regime. they would more likely run into a regime member. the regina might be made of one group mostly, but that is only because of the family alliances. they may try to make the revolution seem sectarian, but that is not true.

they are more influential than they are otherwise. they accumulated this. they put it on the corruption. they control most of the investments. the regime will certainly collapse. there are constraints there. that will get right into the interesting to see what turkey there is no way the regime is surviving. their control is faltering though. the past 10 days, since the beginning of ramadan, with the demonstrations, the city and the suburbs in these two areas have

unilaterally expressed their dissatisfaction. no longer special considerations. they are now getting shot at, and the regime no longer tries to hide its brutality from the europeans. most demonstrators around syria have to face live bullets, even write in the heart of the capital. the clock is ticking for the regime in syria, and the assad era is over soon, except in court. thank you.

>> things. it is very nice to be here today. as she mentioned, i am pinch hitting, so i have to think a little bit on my feet. i did not have that much time to prepare, but given the pace of events, our current focus on syria, i will bring up a couple of important points and probably stand on those of the others. maybe some of you know, but some of you do not, i came to washington about two years ago. i spent about 14 years in the region, and seven of those were in and out of lebanon, and during that time, when i was in damascus, i worked for a period of time for a charity's gripped by, and the reason why i bring this up is not just to prove to you that i am not a neocon, as i have been branded in the press, or a liberal hawk, or whatever they want to throw at you.

this was before the syrian economy was cool. they used to tell me, "you just do not get it. they do not care anything about economics. it only cares about politics." well, i can tell you i am not exactly sure about that, but when i worked for the charities, the cherokees were organized and obsessed with one thing, that during the last time we had this kind of repression in syria, everybody stayed home for about 15 years, more or less, and what do men and women do when they stay home for long periods of time? they have a lot of children.

there is an intermediate step that we will not talk about, but they have a lot of children. during that time, syria was among the 20 fastest-growing populations on the planet. syria. and all of those people are now hitting the job market. a lot of people who have worked in the syrian reform, and i think we can put quotes around it, were seeing this come for a long time. they knew that economics was key to their grip on power, and nowadays, even more than before, and i will get into a discussion about very briefly u.s. policy options at the end. after five months of killing, there is now convergence with arab countries and even turkey. they do not have a concerted plan to get out of this.

the last straw really was everybody questioning the wisdom, why would a minority dominated regime launched a massive attack on the eve of ramadan, that they had carried out in 1980 to one of the worst massacres in the history of the middle east? this does not really smacks of a great leadership. steadfastness and flexibility, which is what one used to call it, it just does not seem like a confident pass out of the current crisis. i was just recently in europe and in turkey, and i can tell you a little bit. i think there is convergence that assad does not know how to get out of this. his credibility has been undermined in terms of any type of political solution, but i think there is not yet complete convergence on what to do about it.

i think you'll see president obama, i do not know if you knew this, but syria was desperate -- designated by the treasury department as well as another for proliferation issues. this is as concerns oil payments, and i think as some of you see in the press, and i will talk about this later, the introduction of an energy sanctions bill on syria last week. there have been considerable constraints in the position since this has broken out. ted is going to go more into this. i will just rattle off a couple. i think it is fair to say that the opposition has come a long way, but it is very difficult to coordinate when in opposition and then such a robust movement on the ground. it is difficult to quarter and

eight these two positions. also, the protests are being primarily driven by young people and some of these folks i described earlier, and how they communicate does not necessarily lead itself to coherent leadership. this is natural for these kinds of organizations. again, if they did form a linear structure, the assad regime would probably try to decapitate it, so its strength is also its weakness. the europeans. someone who tells you that the regime never moves and response to pressure, they were obviously not at the airbase on april 27, 2005. i was there, when the syrians pulled out of lebanon, ok? the syrian regime does move in the face of conservative, multilateral pressure.

it does not happen very often. so in this particular case, we are moving towards that. and in net to give their case, it will be interesting to see how that pressure works, vis a vis the syrian domestic policies. again, we do not see a plan for the assad regime to get out of it, but multilateral actions along with others -- for the last two years, in discussions with the united states and the europeans, in exchange for a peace treaty with israel, we're going to drop our sanctions on syria. it would be a quid pro quo, part of a long process, but this is the beginning of a process, so why would the hardest bargainers in the world put sanctions on the table first that did not matter to them? that is because it does matter. the economy does matter to the syrians. it is a trading culture. contact with the outside world matters, and that is a matter of beverage.

we talk about the regime. we talk about the opposition. i do not think anyone is interested in gauging the regime the way it is. you are not going to make very much headway. on the other hand, we do not just have the opposition and everyone sang it is a fragmented and whatever. no. there is a third option. a coup. this could lead to some sort of transition process and a democratic process. now, we do not know where that is, but the resignation indicates there is a division around the regime about what to do. i think the community knows that in order for there to be a soft landing for this, or that there does not have to be a hard landing for this. there could be a soft landing. that is not yet clear. very important was the saudi announcement a few days back. why? it allows the other arab countries, bahrain, qatar -- saudi arabia is very influential in eastern syria.

i spent a lot of time when i was there. they often have saudi passports. there are family ties that go down into saudi arabia. they use syria as the primary route for truck traffic. there are constraints there. that will get right into the interest -- it will be very interesting to see what turkey chooses going forward. the position is much more subtle and i think we will see that. last but not least, opportunities for leverage. i think you will see president

obama come out and make statements combined with today's announcement on sanctions. i think too much has been placed on whether he has to go. there is convergence on that. there is a more idealistic conscious faction that realizes that all of these protesters are getting mowed down. turkey is a suny power. a lot of people are concerned about what is going on in syria. one of the major supporters is

the middle tier it industry. there are the ones who have benefited the most from the zero neighbor policy. the major industries export primarily to europe. these metal industries export to there. they use syria as their primary referred truck traffic. there are constraints there. that will get right into the interest -- it will be very interesting to see what turkey chooses going forward. the position is much more subtle and i think we will see that. last but not least, opportunities for leverage. i think you will see president obama come out and make statements combined with today's announcement on sanctions. i think too much has been placed on whether he has to go. there is convergence on that. i would suspect that president

obama will say that at a certain point. i do not know if it will be tomorrow or the next day. the primary area of leverage is energy sanctions. not throw the book at them like iran. but oil exports. they account for a third of revenue. in syria, it is only a quarter or a third. it will cripple the regime, but it will not decimate society. will it affect society? yes, it will. in the face of this kind of brutal crackdown, western leaders both in the united states and europe do not know what else to do.

it is a primary area of leverage and i think you'll see it deployed over the coming days and weeks. there has been a bill introduced in the senate that will be accompanied by one in the house. that would be in september. that would give the obama administration additional legal authorities. the designation will allow the -- that will affect this policy. that is about it. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> i have been asked to speak a little bit about u.s. policy. obviously, i do not represent the administration. i have been out of the state department for a years. i am certainly not speaking for

my organization. my daddy won a panel like this, it is perhaps -- my value on a panel like this, i first arrived there as a young political officer. i have served their subsequently as an ambassador. my career it tended to intercept a lot with this regime. it is the only regime that has been around since i was young. [laughter] ever since talks broke down in geneva, when clinton met in april of 2000 in geneva. the united states has really not known how to approach syria. what policies -- a lot of policy fights and a lot of just gridlock.

the bush administration tangled with foreign policy professionals, they still did not really prevail. syria was not next after iraq. he was proudly shaken after the assassination and the demands of march 14 movement with the backing of the international community that syrian troops get out of lebanon. in the end, he became quite confident because he outlasted the u.s., turkey, and saudi arabia helped to break him out of this isolation. he saw the bush administration come and go and he was still there.

he became quite smug about it. i think the overconfident attitude was very apparent and the january wall street journal that he gave after we saw initial uprisings in tunisia and egypt were he basically said, as far as syria goes, it cannot happen here. democracies need a lot of dialogue and we are in the early stages of that. it was a very patronizing, a very smug interview. one that i hope he regrets. meanwhile, when the obama administration came in, they came in with the idea that we're going to talk to our adversaries.

that included syria. while they sent on a voice there, -- envoys there, they never quite got around to naming an ambassador. there were always looking for syria to give us something tangible that would justify sending an ambassador. it was not and the cards at all. in the end, we did send an ambassador, in december of last year. the good news, we got the appointment right. we sent a very good man to do a tough job and he has been doing it in admirable fashion. we also have been fortunate in having others who know syria well over the years to have been involved in advising senior levels of the administration.

i believe that the obama administration has been right to be cautious in how it has approached all this. maybe they were misguided and the beginning in thinking that he would be chastened by the offensive dialogue and would leave the movement and help syria to a soft landing. i do not think regimes go around killing their own citizens if they are ready to reform. that was never really in the cards.

at the same time, the administration really was hoping, too, that there would be a more coherent leadership that would emerge from the opposition. maybe a leadership with which elements of the regime could engage in some dialogue, etc. andrew referred to the possibility of a coup. since the backbone of the security services and the noncommissioned officer of the syrian military is composed of a minority that has experienced discrimination and impoverishment, there was the reason they were living up in those coastal mountains of syria. they are going to need some encouragement to move against this family.

i think the administration recognized that we did not have the leverage. with libya, we did not have the arab league. we did not have the u.n. security council that was ready to pass any kind of a meaningful resolution with the sanctions. turkey, one of the most important country in this equation other than iran, was not yet ready to abandon the regime, and you may have invested so much.

timing is everything and the timing was not right. for the administration to take bold action. after all, we just lost 30 brave men in afghanistan. we are still involved in iraq. no sooner had the administration answered calls to get involved in libya, they were on the receiving end of a lot of complaints. why isn't gaddafi gone yet? the administration did not want to take ownership of syria and its problems. indeed, the syrian opposition has not ever called for foreign intervention. certainly, they would like to see the regime of much more isolated and brought under far more economic pressure than it has to date. there are ways that that could be done. i think there is an

understandable reluctance on the part of the administration, not knowing a lot about the opposition. obviously, those are people that any u.s. administration would be happy to deal with. there was a hesitant because they were not sure if the liberals, if the democrats were the one you could truly speak for what was going on in syria. as brave as the opposition has been and as peaceful as it has been, there is always that fear that one day, somebody is going to say, who allow them to rule in libya? it was the obama administration. they have been cautious. the administration is ready to call for the president to step down. not that he is going to heed

that call. he and his family are fighting for their political lives. i am sure he watched a former ally of the united states, mubarak, on a hospital bed in a cage in a courtroom. i think the administration now is in a position with the secretary general reporting back to the security council and with south africa, india, brazilians just met with the syrian foreign minister.

meanwhile, it could be expected that turkey will be much willing to take visible actions to further isolate the regime as well as the european union without waiting for security council resolutions. having said all that, i would hope the administration would recognize that barring the crew -- the coup, that this is a regime that does command the loyalty thus far of extensive and overlapping security services, certain elite units in the military. while i do not have precise numbers, a couple of weeks ago, a state department officials said they did not believe at that time that more than a

thousand syrian soldiers had defected. again, the military would need to be stretched much further and we may see that in damascus. the army cannot be everywhere all the time. at some point, they may reach a breaking point. meanwhile, there is a question how we is gone to pay all these people if the economy collapses. >> thank you very much. [applause] thank you.

i think we can expect more protests and bloodshed. not that it is seen as legitimate -- there is fear of a power vacuum. there is the obligation that it might entail. i would like to know if the obama administration does go as far as to call on him to step down, i would be curious to know what you think domestic and regional effect of this kind of pressure might be, how might that might affect the opposition.

what could be the impact of such a bold statement? thank you. >> thank you. this will encourage more people to go underground. from the leader of the united states, it will encourage more arabic countries and muslim countries to do the same. this is why when you have such international pressure, it will encourage more armies and officers to defect. most of the syrians [unintelligible] this is why not hearing from president obama -- no remarks on syria. that is why they believe there is a bargain or a deal underground.

there is a long history of that and the region. this is why it is important. what is more important for the community -- they start with the history in the 1980's. they are always making the comparison between nowadays and the 1980's. in the 1980's, the united states did not take any position at that time. there is the statement condemning what has happened to. more than 17,000 disappeared in the 1980's.

until now, nobody knows. this is why the this community hears from the united states, they understand this is quite different. we have the original context, then we have different wars. yesterday, the foreign minister of information said exactly this country cannot be owned by one sect. this is quite different than what we had in the 1980's. this is important for president obama to say something like that. >> thank you. >> the response is always that those people invested and there is too much for them to lose and risk unless they see a clear sign that they are serious about taking a certain stand. we have seen a top army general

started to consider sending money abroad to the gulf countries. the u.s. was serious about the imposing regime. moving forward, the intelligence security forces, the top army generals, the business elite.

there is no point in sending messages or trying to address the security forces. what we would propose is to start to articulate certain messages by president obama, secretary clinton. you do not want to be associated with the regime. you did not want to be targetted afterward. you want to play a role in a prosperous syria. it is a message to the army. you have to do your own job protecting the borders. you do not want to be associated

with thugs. it is giving a sweet and sour talk at the same time. a third message, there is a huge potential for business and syria after words. given its geographic location. you need to play a role in the economic development. disassociate yourself from the regime. once these messages are articulated and we start to hear them eckardt and the major capitals, i think we will start

to see some type of move. the circles around the regime will pull them to look inward. >> i will be very brief. i agree that conspiracy theories abound in close societies. they abound in our society as well. that is another subject for another day. maybe another organization. it is important that the president of the united states himself, out and say the words. this man should no longer be president of syria. he has betrayed his people. having said that, there is not a magic incantation that will cause the regime to collapse.

i would caution that we should not expect to match the day after. maybe the ambassador was allowed back as ambassador for the very reason that you suggest. having a u.s. ambassador may give a mixed message. do not get me wrong, i was for having an ambassador there. i still think it is good if he can stay there. there'll be no false message sent. again, there is got to be a way to throw a lifeline to a lot of the people who have been keeping the regime in power. if they feel that they are going down with the regime, they're

going to fight and fight very hard. >> we are going to open the floor to questions. we have about 30 minutes. we're going to take three questions at a time. the panel can take the questions that they are most interested in. i will start over here. state your name and affiliation. >> thank you. we heard a lot from the panel about their role -- the importance of the international community to create a distance. i am interesting in hearing about the role that iran is playing. whether in terms of arms or social economics. what about the chances of the community [inaudible] decide to create its own area of influence in northern syria?

very quickly, i will stick to one question. >> cnn. thank you very much. i just want to follow up. about what happens the day after if the regime -- it is not enough to get the regime to step down. does that do anything? does that limits the u.s. influence related to the arab spring? the u.s. really is not calling the shots on the grounds. i do not know what influence we

have at this point. >> we have a gentleman way in the back here. >> two of you [inaudible] what has happened? is that the punishment? >> ok, why don't we began with the iran question?

>> when we initiated in late april, we suggested that the chiefs' staff of the army -- to send a message to the minorities in syria -- in this area. basically, after what happened in egypt, the army is playing an important role. it was not about -- you do not expect after 47 years for it to happen in a few days or a few months. the question about the institution can control the country to be stable, then we suggested the role of the army. the army is professional.

it is one of the largest. the army still has some respect among the syrians. if he is able to do that or not. this is why i am not surprised but the replacement. he is a military man and has no connection to the security before. i am surprised that he cannot find any senior officers to support his initiative. for the third question

regarding the obama speech and debate about the influence, we do believe that when the president of the united states says something like that, it should not be empty. there should be some translation in legal and political actions. basically, with the role of the united states as the security council with other powers, this is why we do believe that something will help to do more actions on syria. we should understand that -- they are not conservative. much more important to understand that otherwise is not about security and the army general.

the allies have huge contributions to the syrian society. a lot of big names in the syrian culture. they have much respect to their contribution to the syrian culture, to syrian society. this is why we do not see them as only security. this is the huge difference. when i mentioned some names -- this is why i do not believe that they are stuck with iran at the end. they have different points of view. he said exactly that he had to leave.

the last question about the opposition. the opposition, it is clear that they are fragmented. we have to understand that both regimes could last without having a united a position. it is not easy to bring all of the figures united in a few months. libya is a different case.

they appointed themselves and it goes from there. they know exactly what they want. they know exactly what they want from the regime. this is why the regime and i did some opposition figures -- none of the opposition attended. they said it is an important strategy. there are certain conditions that should bring the army back to its place. before that, none of us would accept. >> i want to answer the question on iran's involvement.

saudi arabia is quite concerned and most of the recent shifts in is due to the concerns of the influence in the country. yes, there is a iranian support. we also have reports on the planning of the guerrilla wars and fighting.

they are quite heavily involved. iran and syria, they have a joint committee. irrigation, transportation, communication. it is a joint committee on x and y. they are quite involved. does the u.s. have a dog in this fight? it certainly does. >> [inaudible] >> by articulating certain messages. engaging with the regional powers, having the same agenda. this is already taking place. pressuring china and russia and the security council to pass a

resolution, referring back to icc. you need a champion to lead that effort and we hope the u.s. will continue leading the effort internationally. in a strong establishment to keep the country together the day after. that is why you were calling upon the military. one of the feasible scenarios being articulated, regardless of the probability, when things reach a cliff, top army generals will not fall off the cliff. they will arrested the chiefof intelligence. some of the tribal leaders on the eastern side of the country.

bring on board some of the civil society and respected figures in syria. to form some kind of a transitional council or a national council that will lead to a second stage until we have a referendum or a constitution. that is one of the most probable scenario is when things reach a tipping point, which we hope will be soon. >> i will try to be brief. as i indicated, i think the administration is right to be cautious. continue to be a bit cautious. you know, a regime like this one, has wiped out civil society. they have always wanted to set

up this dichotomy, it is the only place the people could meet were in mosques or churches. other places, it was illegal to have gatherings. that is a game that a lot of regimes in the region have played. it has left syria in a difficult situation where when the regime goes, i am not saying there will be a vacuum, but there are many strains within the opposition as to what should be done.

it is concerning. i think it would be good for the u.s. that the regime falls. after all, the regime has done has no favors over the years. it would deal a blow to iran. it could conceivably give lebanon some more breathing room. but not guaranteed. if we sell a democratic syria, still demanding the return, it would be harder for israel to say they did not have a credible negotiating partner. i do not think this country can afford to allow public opinion to believe that we are going to do whatever it takes to get him out. if you have been watching the

stock market lately, and our treasury bonds, you may see that we have some other problems right now. this idea -- i do not see that happening. i agree there would be great irony for the lebanese. they would try to set up their own state. how are you going to keep them down on the farm after they have been down in the big cities? they are not going back to those mountains. >> thank you. >> the gentleman in the corner. gentleman over here, second. >> today, the ap ran a story about hezbollah and its shrinking image. it alleged collusion with the syrian regime and a crackdown. can you comment on that? is hezbollah actually involved in this in some way? is it just speculation?

>> [inaudible] >> [inaudible] i was wondering what the utility of a non-violent movement in syria is. what the beginnings and endings are. >> [inaudible] would you care to comment if there is a regime change in syria? did he misread the political climate? >> thank you. do you want to start?

>> regarding hezbollah, from april, the people started to believe that has below was

going back into the regime in different ways. this is why [unintelligible] later on, we started hearing from witnesses on the ground, specifically the snipers. the high number of casualties of the syrian people were killed by snipers yesterday, yesterday, they killed one of my friends. there are only 50. it is not a large number. this is why we start talking about a quota. there is such ordination all of the overt -- there is such coordination all over the country. they know exactly the only tactic by cracking down. when they stop the killings, they have five or 6 million on

the ground. i have been in all the security offices. i do not expect such a high level of killings every day. the snipers are mainly from hezbollah. they have a longer lease, but the lease is abandoned in the syrian army. there are some credible stories by some on the ground that most people are not security.

the syrians choose non-violence not because they have been trained by the great books. the only way to tackle the regime is by nonviolence. they know that if they start violence, the response by the regime will be so harsh. they know exactly the story where 25,000 have been killed. by the way, after 50 years, we are still talking about the numbers. nobody knows exactly how many people have been killed in hama. some experts say 25,000. this is why the syrian people choose nonviolence. they know if they turned to be

violent, this is when they lose. day by day, the activist start learning the tactics of nonviolence and adopt this by using different ways. the balloons reach the army. flowers. water. there are many ways. singing the syrian national anthem by in front of the security. different ways, but still keep itself non-violent. at the same time, there are some

incidents by activist using guns. but when you see activists accused of raiding your house -- this is being confirmed. the washington post says for women had been raped. you cannot actually convince those activists to give in to nonviolence. right now we are facing this challenge. we are receiving calls and messages. they know it will be much more difficult. >> thank you.

>> hezbollah -- snipers, tactics, strategies, also videos documenting people who were captured and speaking in a lebanese accent. it is a confirmed fact. a question of the non-violence -- you cannot expect any wonder% non-violent. it is "largely nonviolent. there is a conviction that we should not fall into any of these traps. people have seen libya, egypt, and tunisia. they do not want the liberalization of the syrian dates.

it will cause more casualties and cause international boots on the ground. nobody wants that. the shortest route despite all of the atrocities in the killings is still cheaper than the life cost rather than going into an armed conflict. it is part of not being able to control the institutions. the only position the control is the military. it is a public uprising. there are leaders who are eager to do something in terms of weapons.

the minute you use arms, the regime will respond in a completely different way. they know the regime is pushing for that. they want to oppose it. many videos.is in with a mobile camera they say, "shoot. i do not care." >> a question of the politics of lebanon. everyone knows that lebanon is largely different. syria is next door. in an interview in the wall street journal, i do not think bashar realizes that something will be prepared and launched on march 15.

not even any of the syrian experts will come close to a vote. they say it is a dead case brigit when i studied the eastern european experiences, i applied the model to syria. i remember my professor asking me why i was wasting my time. apparently i was not wasting my time. >> i would agree with ausama. it is amazing that the syrian demonstrators have been as peaceful as they have. obviously, as pointed out, there have been some who did revenge killings. there have certainly been some credible reports of officers

having been killed in ambushes. but it is not widespread. the regime would probably like nothing better than for a significant minority of the demonstrators to take up arms because that would give them a license to really go crazy. they would be inviting in the foreign press and saying, "see? we told you that this was going on." it is in nobody's interest -- lebanon, iraq, even israel -- that this turns into a sectarian war. one has the sense that the family that rules syria is definitely trying to implicate a lot of people in the army of crimes and make them composite so that they will -- composite so that they will -- complicit

so that they will be against any change of power. it would not be good for lebanon if this turns into an air essentially al qaeda identified sectarian clashes and civil war in syria. yet already seen so many clashes in tripoli. it would be bad. >> thank you. i want to remind everybody that are syrian issue is on sale in the lobby. please join me in thanking our wonderful palace. -- panelists. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011]

. .

>> using wireless or -- communication. it could be punished up to six months in jail. governor arnold said schwarzenegger said he thought to judicial admonition -- >> he is talking about his own upcoming trial. [laughter] >> and jerry brown signed it. to you think there is such a thing -- there was one notorious case were a juror did some research. there were talking about a 15 inches sought to deny. he went out and looked it up, found a picture of it, showed it to the other jurors. this was a problem.

do you think that type of approach would be effective? >> what i say in the article is , i'm very much against of punishing terrorists, particularly the conscientious under who is a little too conscientious. but there comes a point at which you need to take action. i don't know if you saw this but in england recently there was a tender who contacted the defendant on the facebook page during the trial. it was a drug trial and it was a multi defendant a drug trial. i think in the british press, you cannot trust the british

press, but they were saying it took like $5 million to do this trial. or something like that. some incredible number. mrs. juror -- t thehis ju -- this juror was kicked out of the trial and he was sentenced to six months in corporate -- incarceration for doing that. i think i have seen that -- finds that have been imposed in these types of cases. general to reaming out of the jurors. embarrassing them. everything. i am of the school, i was a judge. i have been a judge for about 20

years. i have never sent a juror to jail. but i can see how being a very serious with a juror about such thing, particularly were it is flagrant and or the juror is acting with ill will, or that would be inappropriate -- and inappropriate sanction. one of the things -- you have to be careful here. talking up jurors we're about before, we never got into a full hearing on this because the case resolved with the mayor of resigning and excepting the one count and not going to jail. at that -- that all, resolved.

when you talk to the facebook and jurors, they make a convincing case that they did not violate my order. they became facebook friends. in their from of mind, they never discussed the case. they discussed things other than the case like water you wearing tomorrow. you know things like that. they never discussed the case. what i can see that was arguably true. >> we have gone over our time. i think these are great resources. you be asked to give guidance on what they can do when they are running for election. you have a request for guidance of what they can do when they run into these problems. we do not want to react to the extreme. that is what we have had many times. it is going to be the 90% in between were you or the court can do something about it.

>> of course we have probably about 47 seconds in this room. that is supposed to be a joke. [laughter] metro east, the hub, metro west, and lawyers. i see probably 15 or 20 lawyers. we only have a third of that sign up. please signup if you want to get reciprocity. we are adjourned for now. we will see you in a moment. [indistinct conversation]

>> one quick announcement and then i'm going to turn things over to chris davies. you have to fill out the evaluation form. make sure you grab it and fill it out before you exit. at any rate, i wanted to introduce a chris davey public

information officer. he is going to be the moderator for the open court pilot project. it is fascinating stuff. i have known chris for a couple of years. i see new material about the work he is doing and his committee is doing. i look forward to a fascinating discussion. chris. >> thank you, ben. good morning, everyone. we have party had a full morning and we have quite a bit of head of us yet. we're going to jump into our discussion about this program that is connecting a trial court in massachusetts with the public with the hope " supporting confidence in the judicial branch. it has been mentioned a couple of times that there was a conference similar to what we have been discussing this week in atlanta with the chief justices and the state court administrators. i thought i would open with some

remarks that were given by richard griffiths, the vice president of cnn, who closed last week's program with a speech about the importance of connecting what course to do being open and transparent for supporting trust and confidence in the system. what richard was discussing was something that has come up several times this week at the -- which is a real market decline in the traditional, sometimes they say legacy, news media in covering the courts. i know judges who viewed reporters as somewhat of a nuisance, who now look around and say, where are they? their understanding since they disappeared that we need them.

we need them to have a vehicles for communicating to the public what we do. richard griffiths after outlining this problem for our chief justice's in this speech, he closed by saying, this brings me to my radical final proposal. if the public does not have the opportunity to learn about what happens in court through traditional reporting, why not leapfrog the media and open up all court proceedings to be published by streaming over the internet? the technology is here and getting less expensive by the day. while some remain nervous about cameras in the court, others are comfortable with the presence of a couple of cameras and keeping an archive. there are some folks who are already doing that. we will hear from them this

morning. our panelists are all from the state of massachusetts. the u.s. richard has suggested. re-export connecting the court with the public. we have the jonah from the massachusetts supreme court. she is the public information officer at that court. she is a former public-relations executive and has spoken in eastern europe and russia about matters related to the administration and justice. what this also is judge mark s. coven. he has been a judge for over 20 years and has been on the quincy district court since 2000 and has been an extensive author on a number of a different topics. finally we have the john and

david -- john davidow. he is the 2010 recipient of the news challenge grant to do this very program. we're going to start with john who will give us an outline of what they have done in quincy and then we will hear from our panelists and open it up to discussion. >> thank you her. the best thing to do is show rather than tell. let me see if we are live right now. naturally, we are offline right now. [laughter] but i have a backup. let me get that up. this is from our archive from

august 2. you'll notice say familiar face on the bench. we can always come back and check it later. these are our archives. hopefully the internet stream will be fast enough. [inaudible] [inaudible] so you get the idea. i don't know how much i want to

expose you to it. you have all seen court action. that is what open court does every day whenever the court is in session whenever there is a judge on the bench. can you hear me in the back of the room? ok. as chris was talking about, the reason for open court was exactly that, to address the fact that there were less and less court reporters covering the course. there also be these things called reporters and they work for newspapers. there is just less and less a bus out there. at the same time, those reporters that brought what was going on into the courts, the individuals are now equipped with smartphone technology that can do pretty much what we in

the electronics media have been able to do for a long time, and alive stream. right off of a smartphone. i did not have a chance to go but obviously they can do blogs and facebook anywhere at anytime. when the founders initially thought about how the judicial system was going to be, the idea was it would be open. cairo is think about that movie ticket to kill a mockingbird" or the entire community is piled into that court. it was built in the center of town. now that life has become more complicated, less of us have any reason to be in touch with the course. we'll understand them less. there seems to be a need to bring the courts to the people.

that is exactly what open court does. fortunately, we were able to convince a lot of people that this was a pretty good idea. i am on a committee called the supreme judicial court media judiciary committee. you can tell that title was picked by a jurist as opposed to a member of the media. we would never get that many words. it is made up of members of the bar and press and members of the court who sit there in off the record discussions. it is presided over by a member of the media and a member of the states tradition accord. it is a place where we can discuss issues off the record and to talk about cameras in the core rooms, all of the kinds of things that come up between the media and the courts.

i'm sure there are similar organizations around the country. that is where i took this idea. the knight foundation has an international competition that all they really want -- they want innovative ways to cover the news, to use digital technology and to make sure it is local. we entered this competition and got a quarter million dollar grant to set up this technology. for those of you wondering where the money's coming from, it is not coming from the state, it is something that is funded by the knight foundation. as we were formulating this idea, there are about 25 members on this organization, we had to

prevent and prepare for this organization and get their. there was a formal vote made up of members of that organization. they blasted 100%. at the time it was suggested that we need to define a quorum to do this. the courtroom that was picked by the committee was the quincy district court for the judge is the chief justice. the reason for that is that they wanted a busy and active courts. when that was approximately to boston. the quincy district court has had in the history of innovation going back at least four -- two or three decades. the judge can talk about that. at the same time that we got the

blessing from the judiciary committee, and once we got our funding, we set up a board of advisers. there was no fiduciary responsibility but i have no legal background at all. we needed to bring in lots of disparate voices to help us figure out. the president of the state bar association, a representative from the district attorneys association, the head of the -- a woman who oversees 6000 local news sites across the country, someone who specializes in first amendment issues and the chief

counsel for the state district court. it is a very representative group that is willing to keep us listening as well -- and not to cram what we're doing down anybody's throat. we set up the quincy district court. this was under the impetus of the judge coven. he insisted we get the stake holders involved. that is the clerks, the court officers, the district publicy's " here in the defenders. the victim advocates. citizens, the press who covered the course. all those people are on the working group. after our first meeting in december when we started rolling this out, we met a number -- many times to go over

the issues that are obvious when you bring something so different toy courtroom that has been doing something so much the same over the years. so lot of communication and a lot of lives -- listening at the same time. hopefully a few answers along the way. when of the more interesting things we were able to setup is that we like to refer to ourselves -- all we are is the way to get the signal out of the courts. we do not bring our editorial side to what goes in that pike. the judges still control the courts. that is what i am demonstrating to you. we have a producer in the court that is because we are a pilot. the judges -- the judge controls

the stream. very often we have to laptops, one by the bench and one by where we sit. he will control the bench. excuse me he controls the camera foreign the bench. our microphone is plugged into the court system. that is so we do not have to continue to lay out wire every day and the audio is terrific coming out of the court. if you're in the court you cannot hear is well if you're listening to the recording system. these signs are by the defense attorneys, by the district attorneys, at the witness box, where ever anybody would be speaking. we also demonstrated where there

were dead zones. where the attorney-client privilege would not be compromised. before we even started we brought all the stakeholders into empty courtroom ended microphone checks and walk them through. this was part of the preparatory process that needed to be done. we also, with our board of advisers and with our stakeholders, which started feeling out some of the obvious points where not everything was going to be immediately live in streams. in massachusetts there is room 119 and there are requirements. that is the cameras in the courtroom law. there are clearly defined things that are not shot by any members of the media. juvenile, joan who manages that

will be happy to describe what those are. then we started talking about judicial discretion. what we agree on. that is the judge's discretion. also the people who were stakeholders were worried about witness protection. would this keep people from going before the court, do to legal status, and domestic violence, what were those cases that the camera should go up and what would be the procedure to do that? all of these kinds of things were anticipated with the idea we did not want to keep people from going forward. one thing we decided to do before, this was at the

suggestion of the justice from the supreme judicial court, not to do domestic violence cases unless there is a criminal complaint associated with that. we did not want to run before we walked and learn what the issues are. we also set up a wireless network. we are psittacine journalists so the entire court has wireless. there is a an area where there is prior the city. where journalists can sit and the blog without disturbing what is going on in the court. we have not done much of that. i want to talk to you briefly about the future of wear open court is going to go. we went on line may 2. this is a spanking new. we started getting this up and going right when we got our

finding on november 1. i hired two accomplished journalists who have incredible digital skills to work with me. i have been fortunate. the future of that will be, once we have the mechanics out of the way, and there was a lot of sowing the seeds of this, we're going to take those people who are hired to start recovering what is going on in the court, creating the place where a citizen journalists can engage. moderate that kind of coverage. train citizen journalists. i think more and more we're asking that question of who is a journalist? joan can talk about the new cameras in the courtroom conversation going on in massachusetts. that is up for public comment. there is room for psittacine journalists in addition to

professional journalists. we also want to create more of an educational opportunity. there is an organization that teaches civics in court to elementary and middle school students. we want to be engaged in the school curriculum, bring kids in. i know this is something that is important to justice coven. is there real benefit to what we are doing or are we just putting out data for a data's sake? what will be the way to quantify this project? how is the public being served him? all of those kinds of things. we are looking for a way to quantify this experience which is a challenge. finally we want to do a better job chronicling journalism and

working with the bergman center, hopefully ben's organization to start publishing our experiences and sharing what we have learned with other people through the case study law. and create some sort of judiciary resources center where we can take what we have learned in help propagate it around the country. with the end of those remarks, i wanted to check one more time to see if we are live just to prove that i am not making this up. [laughter] let's just see. ah, you know what? i'm going to click it for kicks. we will see if we can find something going on. that is the end of my prepared remarks. >> any questions for john?

[inaudible] >> it is that angle. i will go back and show it to you. it is a fixed camera. your question really is, let's say there is a disruption in the court. we did not give up our journalistic credibility and agree to not move the camera if necessary. with two journalists in the court wants, our job is to see what the public sees. if there's somebody seated in court, we are not considered locked down to that position. for the most part, that is the practical shot. we want to shoot arraignments that are in a stairway because of a identity issues or down stairs.

so it is not fixed. that is the answer. there is a pool camera as well in room 119 which joan can talk about. that would provide -- >> have you made any provisions for accessibility for the hearing impaired? >> we have not. speaking of that, i cannot see you. [laughter] we should. that is not as big a priority as in california where it is mandated. but in this something we should consider. it is probably one of those cases where we are walking before we run. that would impact our funding. >> it is a very big question. it is not only people who are

physically challenged but we have probably 20 different dialects. to the extent that like the other day we had hearing impaired interpreters, they are all covered life. the same thing with our language interpreters. you get the sense of what is happening in court. >> i am wondering how closely you watch your analytics? what to do know about your audience? >> if we were in it for the hits, we would be in another business.

surprisingly, at any given time, there is up to 100 people watching that stream. that is actually surprising. when there is a newsworthy event, you can see a lot of it is pretty monday. when there is a newsworthy event, our stats co-op. we're not posting much on facebook " we used twitter throughout the day explaining what is going on. there is a case that has gotten a lot of interest out of the quincy district court. i have had a number of journalists tell me they're not going to court, they are watching our stream. that is part of what we figured, it would add to the efficiency and access. that is helping access for the journalists to be there. i would not say it is the best way to do that but it is practical.

we are on the quincy website. we're among the boston globe's website. we are on the abc affiliate website. that was part -- they are all members of that judiciary committee. they have agreed to do that. i will answer the obvious question, what you do about comments? they can be toxic. we do not allow comments on our live stream. we did not want to do mystery science theater. we do not want people talking about hairdo's, clothing, any of that. that kind of conversation can matter of the working group. they were worried about that. we had anticipated those kinds of things. you cannot put a stirring up and

not think about those things? >> what is the projected model? is a commercial? is a core finance coverage assuming that it spreads? that is viable. you want to see it in all quorums in massachusetts? >> it is a good question. what we imagined was that we asked for two years of funding to demonstrate a practice. to show how this was done, create almost a toolbox for other jurisdictions that would want to do this. that was the goal. we never thought there was a sustainability model. on the other hand, this is where

things are going. we feel we can be a resource for that. in my imagination of where this would be going, 20-30 years ago there was no such thing as a victim advocate in a courtroom. those were funded by federal grants. now they are a fixture. i can imagine a time where there will be a media access advocate will play a role within state government that would inevitably come out of a project similar to this one, not necessarily this one but i see that the need is only going to grow as opposed to diminish. >> i have an two questions. what would you estimate the cost was for a single court room

setup? what do do about injuries? >> we do not show injuries. i'm not sure where the jury box is. >> we do not do trials in that session. we do trials upstairs. the camera is only in the main courtroom where we do not do tryouts. >> is a single court room. we would like to be in all five quorums. that way the court cannot take cases and move them around to avoid the camera which can happen. but your first question? the cost. short money would be the best way to describe it. the cost of the video " meant -- we had to pay for the camera. we bought computers. the wireless cost was not a

basic cable service. i will tell you why. quincy is a major city in a major metropolitan area. it had no digital access. there is no broad band. we had to pull off a stunt to get our signal out of there was something that the shooting off the roof. we did not anticipate that. under normal circumstances we would have plugged into a service. we could not get the band without of verizon. little thing like that ad costs. the biggest and only serious expense right now are the journalists. believe me they are not considered very expensive. i wish i could give them more. >> unpleasant turn to john from

the massachusetts supreme court. tellus some of the challenges you face. >> this program has been an amazing program for us. one of my roles is to help inform the various courts throughout the system what is going on. everyone has heard about this project in quincy but there's a lot curiosity. they want to know who is coming to my court and what is happening in quincy? part of my role is to communicate internally with the various court leaders and staff to representative a system to explain what is going on. i have to say john's staff that he hired are top-notch, highly

trained journalists. i think that has made all the difference to this program. the staff and the judges who have been involved in this program have been outstanding. there have been cooperative and supportive. having that working group that john talked about and getting all of the stakeholders together early on was essentials. if you were to ever start this kind of a program, that is the model you would want to follow. quincy district court was the perfect chores for this project. on a parallel track, there is a dish erie committee. live from court.

[laughter] [inaudible] >> there you go. sorry about that. >> i think that is great. we're digging wife proceedings from the court. what i was about to say, on a parallel track, the committee was looking at our existing rule of cameras in the court. we were asked to see what changes could be made to it to update those rules which have

been in existence since the late '80s. those rules started out as an experiment, too. the judiciary media committee established a subset of that group. the committee has made some proposals stickleback to the full course. the full court has sent them out for comment. the comment period is over now. it went back to the committee where it is to review those comments to see what adjustments should be made. let me tell you what the proposals are. to step back, you need to know what our current rule is. is presumptively open. all of our judicial proceedings are open.

the judge does have the discretion. john mentioned the threshold is substantial likelihood of heart. if the judge finds there is a likelihood of harm, he can either suspended or limit what the coverage would be. currently, one tv camera and one still camera are allowed in the courtroom. they stay stationary in one spot. some of you have a similar rules. it has worked very well over the years. there are only a few conflicts with it. obviously now with the changing media landscape, and judges were asking for guidance. they were getting requests from non-traditional media people asking whether they could bring in a camera.

judges and clerks were calling my office and saying, what should we do? this did not follow our rules. can i do it? there was a lot of people looking for advice. that is an agenda to our community. what we have come up with now, and this is still in a discussion stage, we're going to renovate meeting in a few weeks to discuss it more, we have had several already. the news media, we had a lot of discussion about who is a journalist, what is a journalist. this is not the exact language but the media is defined as those who are regularly engaged in the recording and publishing of news and information about matters of public interest. this would definitely include

psittacine journalists and bloggers to meet this standard. -- who meet this standard. should we register them or should they be credentialed? we came up with the idea that there should be a registration process. one of the reasons for that is that non-traditional citizen journalists may not understand the rules. my office is not going to give credentials to anyone but the people will have to register and fill out a form that can be downloaded from our website that have said i have read these rules and will abide by those terms. then they will be registered. i am not checking to see whether they are a blog service or eight journalists. they are certifying they are.

the judge will still have discretion to decide whether that journalists or blogger can come into the courtroom. even if they are not registered, the judge would have discretion. there's a lot of room there. we are also anticipating there would be a third camera allowed in the courtroom. that camera would be for what casting store or live streaming of a video. and then the third camera. we have also changed, we're not calling it cameras in the courts. it would be called electronic access to the courts. it goes beyond cameras. we're talking about having laptops and a mobile devices in

the courtroom as well. those would be allowed under this new proposed rule. those are some of the highlights. there are many other things. we get to questions, i'm happy to answer them. >> i am sure there will be more questions but i would like to suggest we have put justice coven in an unusual position, to speak last. we have heard from the media perspective and the supreme court's perspective. justice, what can you tell us about this program? >> if i could back up a second time provide historical context. in massachusetts, our proceedings were not audiotaped until 1975. prior to that time, there was no record of the proceedings in the

court. virtually everything you did -- there was no record of what you're doing in the courtroom. judges consider their courtrooms and the courthouse is their sole domain, not the public's demand. e judges could act unfairly without any protection if it chose to do so. fast-forward 35 years later, as everyone of you know, and the public knows, we are in a time of the deep cynicism toward all institutions of government. one of which being the judiciary. i have total confidence, and it

has been my position, that the more people who know about what the courts to, the more trust and confidence there is in the judiciary as an independent branch of government. i will give you to review zero examples. probably every public information officer has had to deal with issues of bail and when dale has gone down. something terrible has happened. a person has been released. i have written about bills before. have had op-ed pieces in the boston globe. other judges have as well. i remember the first day we went online, there was a wonderful

argument. a very professional argument between the prosecutor seeking the bell and the defense attorney explaining what purposes were. that is to ensure that the person returns to court. i leaned back and said, i could not write 10 articles that better explain what you have just seen in terms of the practical application. the second example is that we have had a recent controversy with our probation department. there has been investigations now, the director has resigned. there was a spotlight report on

probation, hiring practices. the public was left with this impression. it was a very demoralizing to the staff obviously but the public was left probation staff was full of people who have their jobs because of the relationship with legislators or other things. each week in this courtroom, and i did it all day yesterday. we had an entire day of probation violation hearings were the office would come in for and they secret views of people who violated probation. you see the probation staff who are filling their professional obligations who know their probationers who can present a case and evidence who are looking out for the interests of

the community as well as the people there supervising. and so you representing their obligations. a totally different trail of what probation does in very real terms. then you would get from this whatever. perspective, we think we can show what actually happens and if the public understands what we do in courts and how hard people work and how seriously they take their responsibilities, there is a different impression of the court system and of government as a whole. we all know the world is changing. we have gone from a time where proceedings were not recorded to where it is live video streams.

that is the wave of the future. the future is the public has the right to full access as to what goes on in the court. they cannot see it for themselves, why should they be prohibitive from seeing it on their computer? is the same thing. no one would prevent them. this experiment to, it is an experiment. it gives us the opportunity to get ahead of the way. there are real issues. i went to one of the earlier sessions with judge leibovitz from the district of columbia. she friend the issue as tensions between the first amendment and the right to know and a criminal defendant's right to a fair trial. we could either examine those questions in a responsible and

thoughtful way as part of this experiment, which will be reacting, we'll always react on public policy. >> questions? right at your table. >> you talked about judges retain discretion even if an individual registered to exclude the person, does that mean the judges have discretion to exclude a person or is in inches you close to a proceeding? >> those are separate things. the existing rule allows judicial discretion in suspending or limiting camera coverage. they can do that now.

in the proposed new rule, that remains the same. the registering is a separate issue. what i was trying to convey is that even if a person does not register with my office, it is possible the judge would allow that person in. the judge still has discretion over who comes into the courtroom. >> i just want to touch on that. another important part of this experiment, that is one where a district court, we call ourselves the people's court. people come in with a host of problems. so predominantly we do they'll

arguments but some days we do not have housing so i do landlord tenant matters in there. if you really want to see what happens with foreclosures, homeowners where being evicted by banks, you see it in the summary process. before we came out, the judge was hearing motions, civil trials. we do a lot of collection cases, credit-card cases. if you want to learn about what his financial reform means or you see people coming in with credit-card debts that started $7,000 with late fees that they do not understand why there adjudicated judgment is $20,000. we have a tremendous substance abuse problem in our jurisdiction.

we have a large heroin problem. we do substance abuse commitments in the courtroom. so you will see a hearing where a family member is talking about why her son just spiked his arm and she found him lying with a needle hanging out of his arm in his bedroom and why he needs to be committed for 30 days to a treatment center. all of those things are done in the courtroom. my point is, not only are we talking about the core system but the social problems that exist in our communities. having people begin to understand what a drug problem is, what a foreclosure problem is, when a credit card problem is and to get a realistic opinion about what the types of social issues that our courts really do address. >> to do parties know in advance

they're going to be broadcast? do they have the opportunity to express concern about being broadcast? >> we put a sign on the door to the courtroom saying that everything is broadcast. as john indicated, we put signs all around the microphones. one of the things that he did not indicate is that we put signs in the prisoner's dock. as you come up the stairs, the prisoners are told anything you say will be captured on the microphone. you do not want them confessing on the microphone. do people have the right to say i do not want to go in? no. what the supreme judicial court decided is that we do not do domestic violence restraining

orders in the session because there is a question as to, we did not want to inhibit a victim from seeking the protection of the court. that is the one category we do not do. >> i am not quite clear in your answer. in a civil case, there is no mechanism for one of the parties to present a case for why he or she does not want to be on camera. there's no mechanism for that on the system. >> on the criminal and civil side, people could always make a motion for not being on camera. there is a much less likelihood they will prevail in a civil case as opposed to a criminal case. >> a question over here from

iran. -- ron. >> are you going to be permitting the registrants to take a cellphone picture? or is this still going to have to be that arrangement? what if there is no professional photographer who wants to video a proceeding? are you going to allow somebody to stand there? >> no, we are not. under the proposed new rule, covert photography recording or transmission is prohibited. we would not be able to bring in a camera and it just take pictures from your device at your seat. >> i am a member of that committee. my understanding is that if there is no mainstream media in

the courtroom, that a citizen journalistic who is -- who has agreed to those rules could stick their iphone and, in the designated area set aside, could be the designated community or civic journalist reported. is that your understanding? >> that would be with the judge's decision. it would not be doing it on iran. you have to have permission. >> where resources are you providing to people to help us see what is going on? a glossary of legal terms? >> maybe i could go to the website and show you that a bit. hang on. >> it is opencourt.us. >> it is opencourt.us.