doing something strategic to the environment around them, to shrink the haystacks they have to go fine needles in, as opposed to some of the other law-enforcement techniques that were criticized earlier on the panel. those folks are interested in looking at what kind of substantive partnerships they can build to build preventative capacities in their cities. it is possible. fbiecommendation to the folks at fbi headquarters when they started looking at creating a counter-violent extremism coordination, they needed it to be not in the community relations office. they did move it out of the and putf public affairs it into the director of

intelligence, which i thought was a better place. then there was an effort -- another recommendation i had given them was the need to be interconnected with the joint terrorism task force. it is the joint terrorism task force that gives the tips and leads of people teetering on the edge of becoming violent extremists. effort to look at that. another recommendation i give them that they decided not to take was that i felt just like the just went through a public where theyy process brought a lot of local state enforcement academia and created a free-market strategy for doing counter-violent extremism.

instead of going down that approach so everyone understands their role and how it is like to get up rationalized at the local field office level -- it up rationalized at the local field that not work- out too well. that effort kind of collapsed toward the end of last year. at the moment i do not know where it is. as of a few weeks ago it had moved to the national joint terrorism task force, which is located in the national terrorism center. -- national counter terrorism center. that is where the assignment of that desk was. it prevents project presents us with an opportunity to look at the question that peter berg and asked, is it right to have that in the fbi? mission fbi has had a

for years. it gave them the assignment to preempt in terrorism plots. of capacity looks like a lot social science stuff. and they may have a ph.d. is in sociology but that is kind of rare, those resources. for folks that are joining the bureau to get bad guys and build cases -- thered, by its location is a possibility of building a partnership paradigm where the private sector can potentially have a role. local and state law-enforcement can have a role. maybe the prevention step is done with the police department. those are other aspects we can explore later. hopefully that answers it. tothe next question i want

point to, there was a common theme among all the panelists about the counter narrative, that there needs to be a counter-narrative as strong, as graphic, as the motive as the jihadists.-- as the cleric's --e of the the video face of the clerks would not necessarily work. and010 we worked together produced a video called "injustice cannot defeat injustice." virtual mosque. you have had a couple of conversations on the radicalization. how do you see the role of community and the role of government -- there have been attempts by various foreign governments who have guided into

the counter-narrative space. at the time we have the constitution and that is nothing we can get into. where dc those roles and responsibilities lying? >> that is a lot of questions. let me address a few issues. in 2004, we were studying together in egypt. we realized that -- as i had mentioned earlier the internet is becoming a mosque for the mosque-less. with a group of people as activists, scholars, renamed the virtual mosque. but be realized is looking at our community millennial is no longer defines religiosity the savvy institutional commitment.

religiosity the savvy institutional -- -- religiosity vis-a-vis institutional commitment. we decided to treat something called the virtual mosque. it would allow people the cannot belong to institutions. the majority of american muslims to not attend mosques. it allows them to engage in an open, free, and transparent environment. we had an article written by an ex-islamist. in 2009 and online form on use radicalization, before it became the school where quicken now ha -- this cool word where we can we are able to see

some young people who were affected by the jihadist message. advice to policy makers and government is to give muslim -- wes and policy makers do not need to be too close to each other. that undermines our street credit. i was involved in a radical middle way project. they lifted me as a moderate muslim leader. that undermines my ability to work at the street level with a lot of people. i think there needs to be an implicit threat -- implicit relationship that recognizes this is a dynamic problem. it may not represent the larger body of the muslim community.

it demands a response that ignores the majority of our community. in order to do that we have to be seen as free, transparent leaders who are born and bred within the community and have not been influenced by other people trying to shape how that community moves. it needs to be an implicit relationship. we need to model partnerships with the government with policymakers like yourself. at the same time we need people to trust us. i think they do a credible job -- to an incredible job. they're both given freedom to do that. >> very interesting insight. i want to come to you and talk about resources. the local communities,

they say they do not have the resources to deal with these issues. they have to worry about pastoral issues and funerals. the basic functioning of a place of worship that all communities have to do with -- i do not have the resources to sit down and study national security and all of these issues, especially since most of these institutions do not have full-time staff. about thelk resources, both the policy makers and communities and how and can come together address this issue of resources. >> i think the challenge of resources, for local communities -- itnot limited to affects a lot of different issues. you feel a lot of young people who are not attending mosques because of limited resources available --

the easiest way around this challenge is to provide information. tot does not require a lot become done electronically. it can be done between community ran the tables. provide information to parents and we say we are not going to turn on this because of , it becomesnetworks a manageable issue. telling parents that if they are not going to talk about political issues or pilot -- or violence or certain issues with their children then you have to think about who is fond have that discussion. local mom equipped to have it? no. they are glenn to go online. if they can manage these problems -- i also make the that online sexual

predators, these are part of national gangs. i the parent of a young girl feel it is my responsibility to make sure she is safe online. if you frame it like that it takes away the overwhelming to dealof being unable with the problem. it affects families, it affects the communities. 4 shall local and law- enforcement -- for local law- enforcement it becomes an issue. >> as far as the virtual mom's -- for tooloscows mosque goes,rtual it attracts people that want to work in the community. we did the prayer for syria

which attracted over 300 mosques all around the world. everyone got together and pray for the security of syria. i received a letter from pakistan. i think having transparent trust for the alternatives is where you are going to be able to redirect people towards positive influences. >> that is really interesting. two questions to you. this conversation is a lot about surveillance vs partnership. say were individuals who increased the amount of surveillance on the communities. you had the whole controversy with the nypd and what happened there. their apprehension -- there is apprehension in terms of engagement. it is engagement going to be worked or are we going to be surveiled by local law

enforcement agencies no matter what? areou surveiled a community you going to get the needle in the haystack? are you going to create more work for yourself? that is the first question. the second question is the president last week tried to put this into perspective. proportionbout the of the threat and he talked about the evolving threat. you have been around the block. can you talk about where you see this threat evolving and where is it going in the next five to 10 years? surveillanceve the question to the people on the panel. i know that adam goldman wrote the nypd story. on the question of the scale of the threat i think president obama is exactly right. threats to our

overseas diplomatic facilities and businesses. going back to the database we maintain here, i think it is factually interesting that the number of-course by right-wing press -- for right-wing extremists, we calculate 29 deaths since 9/11. statesber in the united is 21. peter newman is right to say that this has huge political consequences beyond just one murder. is thet the matter threat from right-wing extremism is the same as jihadist. it is an interesting questino answerdon't have an

for? al qaeda and groups like that cannot pilaf 9/11. off 9/11.pull it is a very hard speech to give politically because what happens even if you are of one percent wrong. -- they comes along political cost is very high for a politician making a statement that we all know is basically true. we know the threat has been much reduced. it was a very welcome speech for the president to make. there's no reason he may still be in -- there is no reason he needs to be in a stand for.

it has a lot of policy implications on all sorts of issues, whether it is the drug program, guantanamo, and the way we organize of -- organize our national security. is a serious and significant problem and is one that is probably having this discussion now. it is a problem that can largely be managed. what is almost surprising is how few attacks. that was the first attack in the next it's motivated by their in the united states motivated by their ideas. there is a whole set of reasons why these attacks are pretty infrequent.

toi will go back surveillance question. about theo ask you impact of this and a relationship with other countries. even ks to muslim communities abroad. i know you are constantly engaging them. focus of national security impacted our relationship? i heard president last week talking about our relationship with pakistan is strained. one way we can get round this is make sure we have a relationship a partnership with muslim majority companies. that playing out? >> that is the beginning of the administration. we recognize the other communities in the united states and around the world have been key contributors in many areas. our partnerships have been comprehensive in areas like

education, job creation, health, science and technology, and that is the book of work we do winning gauging of trinity's to have fun fun -- gauging what they do. the what it should have access to education, access to health care. the same time it is often muslim communities themselves, for the reasons that i mentioned, that have raised the issue of extremism. they are concerned about their family members. they are concerned about their neighbors being recruited by a terrorist networks. beingre concerned about victims. it is an important conversation. we have had a partnership to counter violent extremism for some time now. part of that strategy is to make sure that we are contributing to

the efforts of local communities, that we are sharing information that we collect at the federal level to make sure the communities know about the latest threats. we have these types of beatings he participated in with local communities that are increasing our operation and engagement so communities have opportunities to brief us on their efforts and identify threads into their communities. we also have a convening role. there are some many people working in this area. we have actors in business, internet companies, government -- so many people are concerned about this problem and we have the ability to convince people that might not know ordinarily -- convene people that might not ordinarily sit together. although we have engagement- based -- on a comprehensive set

every as, there is terrorist threat. our first and foremost responsibility is to protect the american people. there is action that have to be taken from time to time because those that we are partnering with may not have the ability to respond or in parts of the war -- parts of the world may not be willing to respond -- we have to protect our national security. inevitably there will be instances that have impact on our relationships. the basis of action is the protection of people around the world and it is not motivated by what terrorists have labeled as . war against islam we have been cleared but we have been clear that muslim communities in the united states are the greatest counter to that argument because they have been successful at such high levels.

the resilience the american people have shown to terrorist attacks also made clear to people around the world and many places we go to, they say, "how can you allow this freedom of worship and freedom of religion. if this is happening in our country all kinds of things would be going on. ". you go to a grocery store and find a muslim having one of their five pri times. this is something you will not find even in parts of the muslim world. they recognize our resilience have been strong and by staying true to who we are as americans and keeping to our bellevue's -- that is one of the best ways we can defeat the ideology terrace are putting out there. >> i want to open it up to the audience. if you do have a question please stand up, state your name, and

please ask a question and keep it as short as possible. >> you are going to have to wait for the microphone. let us start at the back and move forward. >> if you could raise your hand. go-ahead. >> hello. my name is marion. thank you to all of the panelists for their comments. i am a member of the american muslim community and i struggled with this idea of violent extremism in our midst of a bid. and itsten to you guys seems to me there is the shift in the frame in terms of how we talk about this. the connection between islamaphobes and violent extremists.

when we take responsibility as a muslim community unfortunately we feed into that narrative which can ultimately lead to more alienation among american muslims. what i am thinking is we need to think about this issue within the broader context of violence in this country. this is happening in america, not abroad. america is a country with some serious issues when it comes to violence. i have not heard any of the members talk about this but i am wondering whether or not you have any comments about addressing this issue of the broader context of violence within the united states. from my point of view it creates opportunities for cooperation and coalition building with communities impacted by violence. it allows for coalition building and can address some of the resources issue you mentioned as well. it still allows for particularized social interventions within the communities but its way from the

stereotype of race, ethnicity, and religion in terms of propensity to commit violent acts. sorry for the long question. >> in my career i stay out of the political activism in the muslim community. dismissive of the symptoms that the question to see-- i do not want stereotypes out there. there is a fundamental question that muslim community leaders have to answer for themselves, which is when you look at these kids you see them as a problem and you are given by god may be some insight on how to address this and save them. are they part of what you should or is do in your ministry it not your problem? it is a political problem

because of overseas foreign- or because of stereotyping but policymakers one sort or another. i personally made the decision a i kind ofago -- adopted a lot of these kids. i saw them as people who could contribute to the community and strengthen it. but they are going off of the rebels early in their lives instead of building a family and actually accomplishing something. that is a decision i have seen other clerics to. muslim matters were mentioned a and we have had many hours discussing these issues many years ago. he ended up saying, "i am

privileged to be in a position inre i can draw these kids their mother's basement living in there were virtual world." an example of what he did was he did a reverse sting operation. ed for fox news looking on the trone kill list. i basically chastised and turned it to muslim matters. i posted his response. thecritiquing separated at the samem the -- time he is chastising me for having bad manners, so to speak, by speaking about way.

that's true focus of their basement who would come to the comment line and be able to engage them. to me that they loved seeing that. that was something the community did on its own because community leaders to help they need it to adopt these kids. not sit there and look at the macro-international political discourse on violence and the discussions that had been going on in america for well over a century, violence throughout different parts of our society. we just went to solve the problem short term and address it. we left that political stuff forfall -- political stuff academics of inputs and to how many cases there are. perhaps we could not leave it

out there and say until it solves on the big level political discourse wise it is not our problem. >> i notice you use the word g hoddy terrorism. , know it is in the vernacular .t is inevitable even in today's paper the word was used as if it were in negative. i was wondering if there might to let people know --

couldn't he have said it is a misuse of the concept of jihad and how can we get a counter- narrative out there that for how the word is used it is being misused if being used as a negative. >> one of the reasons people use everybody except your point. we need to take it beyond an abstraction. a good example of that is the tag on twitter. muslimss a campaign of tweaking. tweeting.ims

,hat exploded, metaphorically maybe not the best word to use, and what happened was you saw every day average muslim people getting on per -- getting on board. without having to use our big legal and classical language that no one understands, that gave the community and opportunity to say what this word means to me as a 12 year old kid in georgia. people try to put in alternative messaging on there and then you have the younker muslim community reacting and galvanizing themselves on this model, saying let us define jihad according to how we live our daily life. people who are talking about jihad are not scholarly and

enable to define it. clerics across the board in america agree that in the american context violent reaction to foreign policy does not fall under that definition of "jihad." >> i wanted to ask a question uput -- if they do it and reporting to law enforcement tickets targeted. in oregon we had a 15-year-old whose father went to the fbi to give some help with his radicalization ideas. instead of helping him get some counseling they made him a target and in the last three years we had four hundred constitutions of young muslim boys from 15 to 25 year olds who

have been actually convicted. i have some numbers about the had 653in 2010 we arrests, 2011380. people from special interest countries, which is mostly middle east. i just wanted to ask about -- how can we trust the law enforcement if they go to help and they turn against us? >> by the time i finish here the fbi is going to be upset with me. that is an issue i have been working on for many years. in 2011 they gave me the top award for participating in these cases.

history of american policing where gang intervention, we have given offering community is as a way to disengage the track they are on. i agree with you that sting operations have been overused. in there a lot of folks fbi that have come to the realization that another tool in the tool chest is actually good for everyone. >> can i ask a question? the incentive structure, presumably it you are at the fbi field office, is to make cases. that ae a recognition case not made in the right kind of circumstance of the 15-year-

old kid in oregon, they would get some recognition or is that a pie in the sky? >> there is some recognition in -- the special agent in dallas in 2006 encouraged me to start on this track. he is retired now. he did have some clout back at headquarters to have those conversations behind the curtain, to be able to say -- you had several folks who were advocating for this to have credentials family that world. multiple field offices have to the newether outside of york and w. f. a world and push

headquarters and say we have piloted cases like the one i worked on that we should look to create. unfortunately, i was staying -- like i was saying earlier, we spent our wheels for the past two and a half years where on the national level we never got a national counter-violent extremism policy across all of the fbi's 56 field offices. therefore you did not get the training for the new agents that are coming in. you have some folks that are in the field offices that can rattle off at you who are trying to continue -- off a few who are trying to continue push that .essaging >> one very quick thing -- what you said is the biggest problem right now. in britain this led to the creation of the trial program that was mentioned before.

someone comeshen across the 16 it becomes across the security forces of britain -- when someone comes across the security forces of britain, he is not being allowed to participate in a sting operation but there is an intervention constructed of around this. it is framed very cleverly. the frame is that people say this is your last opportunity and we want to help prevent you from committing a crime. if you choose to go on then comes in and you will be charged with something. there is a last stop where people are being told to take advantage of this and maybe it gets you off. does not existol in the united states. the only choice between not doing anything at all or involving that sting operation

-- that would be an interesting thing to look at. was going to recommend -- -- in itwork document you will find three different sections where this issue is mentioned in how the government needs to coordinate the soft it french and -- soft intervention tools. the president was actually briefed on that document in the oval office. there are not a lot of people in local government aware to get this done. i am not going to go to any individual cases. people from the government are going in and provoking use. provoking youth.

then we have the cases in boston where we see that this is an actual threat. communities cannot be in the home.nt of everyone's it is important we use the tools at our disposal and important that we have predicted pressure to local communities that are the best place to identify these , to make sure local communities have all the intelligence and information we have at the federal level, to make sure where -- in some cases there is as strong and ongoing partnership and dialogue between muslim communities and the therney's office -- if community feels there is a problem they themselves can come in. this has happened on a number of occasions.

which localses in law enforcement agents speak to say theynity they noticed there's a disturbing behavior going on and members of the communities themselves can go in and identify their intervention protocol, which they are using to deal with this program -- a deal with this problem. it is a difficult situation and balance to manage between knowing when you have reached the trigger point for the law enforcement traditional enforcement action is necessary. still opportunity for the social invention -- social intervention. >> i have one question.

my observation is that i believe -- i have observed that the pakistan community has migrated to america for so ceo- economic reasons. none of them is interested in the radicalization. that is my first observation. that familyine is institution is not radicalized. what i have observed is that

there are different stances of radicalization. these are motivated because of [indiscernible] has personal grievances with the american institution. then they find refuge in finding some kind of rough -- some kind of radicalization. that radicalization is a mean to prevent -- none of our scholars have critically evaluated the boston incident from another angle. what i have learned through the -- a

even to aspire for a boxing competition on a national level one intense workout. if a person is so committed to make his career as a professional boxer and turned against america, why? the fbi and noting that he has been sitting submittinghas been his own country. that shattered his dreams. he foundthe moment

something on networking and internet thing. the impact on him, that he was not able to become a citizen and represent the country, that social impact on him becoming radicalized. >> i think that as a hypothetical. i do not think we can address that without any real means. who areeople radicalized and it has to be something outside of the sociological realm. it could be a problem at home, delinquency, there could be another set of variables that cause the person to go down that way. is usually their ignorance of sociology that allows them to act in a radical way. appears maybe he was a drug dealer prior to this. that ise areas where -- why in boston we have a big poesy intervention program.

>> we can take one last question. >> below on of these questions together. on the paneln is you mentioned the respect to civil rights. in guantanamo bay there is 130 inmates that are starving themselves and are basically doing this because civil rights are not being met. after 160 -- 130 out of 160. of them have been cleared of all wrongdoing. aree are some of them that waiting there for about five or 10 years. i know one of them has been waiting for about 11 years for

their satellites to have a day in court where he could be represented with an attorney. why is that right not given to him? >> do you want ask? >> what outreaches have you had with the boston police department and are you concerned they're going to take a more aggressive approach in the community? >> does anyone want to take the guantanamo? >> we have had multiple link the discussions of this issue. that is a good question but we cannot deal with it in 30 seconds. >> for the last 10 years we have had bridges. with actively involved interfaith leaders, moms, the fbi, the district attorney. the lieutenant is one of my congregants with boston pd and

has been very healthy. using the language of mapping, when you turn -- when you tell we aremunity to win -- pointing to a new and watching. they have been receptive in that part. >> thank you everybody. thank you for organizing this.

hos c-s[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] >> and quick reminder you can see this program anytime on our web site. president obama has been surveying the work done repairing the damage of hurricane sandy. ♪ , pleases and gentlemen welcome the governor of the state of new jersey, chris christie. [applause] >> afternoon, new jersey.

fornt to thank all of you braving the weather and been out here today. this past weekend has been incredibly important in new jersey's history. we all came together as a community over the last seven months to end the war and begin to recover from the worst storm that the state has ever seen. for all of the folks who are here, the local officials, the county officials, and the everyday citizens of new jersey, the credit goes to all of you. thank you for giving me the opportunity to lead you and welcome back to the jersey shore. [applause] this has been a community effort. everybody working together. from the minute the storm hit we were working with the local mayors all up and down the jersey shore and in bergen county. everybody came together. , republicans, democrats,

independents -- we all came together because newt jersey is more important and our citizens lives are more important than any kind of politics there are. i wish the sun was shining like it was on sunday and monday but it still a great place to be whether it is raining or sunday. sunday working -- walking along the boardwalk. the enthusiasm and spirit of all of the people of this town, you can just feel it. everybody is welcome to -- everybody is ready to welcome america back to the jersey shore the summer and so am i.. [applause] two days after sandy hit us the president of the united states came to visit new jersey and see

the damage for himself and to pledge his support and the support of the federal government to help us recover and rebuild. seven months later we know this -- we made great progress but we still have so much more to do. so many more of our families we need to get back into their homes, so many more of our businesses we need to get back up and running and employ people, so many of our citizens who just want their lives to go back to normal. i am thrilled at the progress we have made in the past seven months. we had a chance to show the president some of that earlier today at point pleasant. i also made sure that he understood there is still a lot more work to do for the people of our state. i am not going to let anything or anyone get between me and the completion of the mission to restore and recover our great state. [applause]

now, on behalf of the people of the state of new jersey, it is my privilege to introduce the president of the united states of america. [applause] ♪ >> hello, new jersey. [applause] it is good to be back in jersey. i love you back.

all state thank you to gov. christie for that introduction and the great work he has done here. , has been, ed johnson working tirelessly on your behalf. we have three great representatives in congress from .ew jersey last week my advisers and asked spend next want to tuesday in washington or would you rather spend it at the jersey shore?" [applause] somee to say i have made tough decisions as president but this was not one of them. >> [inaudible] >> i appreciate that.

gov. christie and i spent some time on the point pleasant boardwalk. thet a chance to see world's tallest capital being built. i played a little frog bog and gov. christie's kids taught me the right technique for getting -- forgetting the hammer to get those frogs into the pocket like i was supposed to. i met with folks who were still rebuilding their families. we all understand there is still a lot of work to be done. there are homes to be rebuilt, business is to reopen, landmarks and peaches and boardwalks that are not all the way back yet. work of anhe hard

awful lot of people we have wonderful shops and restaurants and arcades that are opening their doors. i saw what thousands of americans saw over memorial day weekend, you are stronger than the storm, after all you dealt with and all you have been through the jersey shore is back and it is open for business and they want all of america to know that we are ready to welcome you here. [applause] say if they ever let me have any fun i would have fun here. [applause] i was telling my staff on the ride over, "i can see being a little younger and having some fun on the jersey shore." i cannot do that anymore. maybe after i leave office.

[applause] of mine hereend down the it very well, " shore everything is alright." he is the only guide president still has to called's, other than the first lady. for generations this is what the places been about. we are people who have to work hard and do what it takes to provide for our families. when you come here, everything is alright. whether you spend a lifetime here or a weekend or a summer the shore holds a special place in your heart and a special memory. america's when i was here seven months ago hurricane sandy had just

hammered communities all across the east coast and lives were lost and homes and businesses were destroyed and folks were hurt. i remember something chris said back then, we cannot replace the resilience that all new jersey has. if it did not. you did not let it. you kept going. this town has a special character. notches in the summer but all year round. from the moment the hurricane hit first responders worked round-the-clock to save lives and property and neighbors open their homes and hearts to one another. you came together as citizens to rebuild. and we are not done yet. i want to make sure everybody understands this because as somebody who hasn't seen their home rebuilt yet or trying to get their business up and running again come after all those losses we do not want them to think we have moved on. that is part of the reason i

came back. i came back to let people know we're. keep on going until we are finished. if anybody has wondered whether the shore will be all right again -- you got your answer this weekend. faugh from del mar to seaside were hanging out on that balcony's and beaches. cream andeating ice going on right. guys were trying to win those big stuffed animals to impress the showgirls. -- to impress their special pearls. ago i promise you your country would have your back, i told you we would not quit until the job was done and i meant it. [applause]

i meant it. the head of fema could not be here today but i want to thank him and his team for their ongoing work. the landhere before fall, they are still here today. they are still working with the governor to support families that need help. we have provided billions of dollars to families and state and local governments across the region and more is on the way. even as my team is helping communities recover from the last hurricane season they are already starting to prepare for the next hurricane season, which starts this saturday. if there is one thing we learned last year is that when a storm hits we have to be ready. education, preparation, that is what makes a difference. that is what saves lives. i want everyone to visit a web site called ready.gov.

we have to remember that rebuilding efforts like these are not measured in weeks and months but measured in years. wet this past thursday announced billions of new relief pay. that is what the army corps of engineers is working to restore beaches. that is why i joined gov. christie and your representatives to send a relief package to congress. we are going to do what it takes to rebuild all the way and make it better than it was before, make it stronger than it was before, make it more resilient than it was before. [applause] jersey, you still have a long road ahead but when you look out on this beautiful beach, even in the rain it looks good. .ook out over the horizon

you can count on the fact that you will not be alone. your fellow citizens will be there with you just like we will be with you at breezy point in staten island. we are going to be there for the folks in monroe, oklahoma after the devastation of last week. [applause] part of the reason i wanted to come back here was not just to send a message to people in new jersey, but folks in oklahoma. , we we make a commitment mean it. we are not going to finish until the work is done, because that is who we are. we help americans to the bad times and we make the most of the good times. let's have some good times on the new jersey shore this summer -- [applause] and neck summer, and the summer after that and all year long. bring your family and friends, spend a little money on the jersey shore.

you will find some of the friendliest folks on earth, the best beaches on earth, and you will see that even after a tough couple of months, this place is as special as ever. thank you everybody. god bless you. god bless america.

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>> president obama earlier today. if you missed any of what he had to say, you can see it in its entirety at cspan.org.

later today he will be speaking and an event at the white house commemorating asian american and pacific islander month. a look at what is coming up later today on c-span. at 6:00 eastern, an event looking at u.s.-russia relations with former foreign service officer john brown, who resigned from the state department over the iraq war. also, cnn foreign affairs reporter jill dougherty. that will be live at 6:00 p.m. eastern right here on c-span. also tonight at eight :00, new recommendations from the national transportation safety board. members say it should reduce deaths from alcohol-impaired writing. among the rules that the ntsb wants states to adopt, lowering the legal blood-alcohol limit from .05 from the current 08. >> today we need to consider the safety report, "reaching zero."

this is critical because impaired driving remains one of the biggest killers in the united states. , our nation today saw the deadliest alcohol- impaired driving crash in u.s. history. a drunk driver drove his pickup the wrong way on interstate 71 near carrollton, kentucky. he hit a school bus and killed 24 children and three at all chap runs -- three adult chaperones, injuring 34 more. today our thoughts are with those families in carrollton, kentucky who are recognizing the 25th anniversary of the crash. that same year, impaired drivers would kill thousands more. let's look at how well we are doing as a nation to address the national epidemic of alcohol-

impaired driving. , we have madeain progress since the deadly night in kentucky, but it has been not nearly enough. in 1982, the first year of the force tracking system, 21,100 21,113 tried in crashes involving alcohol-impaired driving. this represented nearly one half of all highway deaths. today the percentage of deaths involving alcohol-impaired driving is about one third of all highway fatalities. moving the percentage from one half to one third of highway fatalities is -- has taken great from thousands of dedicated people in many organizations. >> you can see that entire

meeting on drug driving relations tonight. we will talk with the milwaukee county sheriff to get his take on the proposed rules and you -- we would hear from you via facebook and phone calls. that is tonight at a clock eastern on c-span. coming up next, remarks from supreme court justice sonia soto mayor. she took questions from students in denver, discussing racial profiling, stereotypes, her childhood, and career during this hour-long event. [applause] >> you know, it's still unreal for me when somebody calls me a rockstar. [laughter] , when iinside of me

think about me, i don't think i've gotten old. i still think of me about your age could believe it or not, my hair was curly or. [laughter] thinner, and i didn't have any grey. all those things have changed, but inside i still feel like you. what that makes me think about is the only work -- worthwhile thing of today for you is probably that you got the day off from school. [laughter] aremaybe some of you wondering, "what's she going to say to me that's going to mean anything?" i don't know if i can say anything to you that means that much to you in the here and now, because all i can do is share with you what i have learned from my life so that if you have

moments like the ones that i've had in my life, you might , andber my words someday they may give you a little bit of hope for yourself. you see, when i was in your place, and unfortunately, when you become a rockstar like people say i am, you know what you lose? you lose the ability to be in the audience come because they put me in the front of the room everywhere i go. and sometimes it is pretty horrible, because sometimes it .s just nice to look and listen i get to do too much talking now. i'm only going to talk to you for a few minutes and then we are going to talk together and have a conversation, because i hope you will ask me questions. there is a lot of seats over here, and i saw some kids over there. why don't you come and fill in the seats? don't be ashamed. come and sit.

,ome people are like, "come on tell your mom to bring you over ." when i was your age, i didn't know there was a supreme court. i am a dinosaur. in the days before the internet , when you heard a name like "supreme court," he let yourself up and go to to the library and research what it meant. so if i heard the word supreme court -- and i probably did in the news -- by the time i got to the library i did not remember the word or look it up. so i knew there was a court up there. but the only court i understood was the courts that i had seen on television. and my favorite show when i was a kid was "perry mason." hard for you to imagine there was a time when television was still black and white and that i got to see the first television lawyer.

perry taught me something and television taught me something. your parents will hate hearing me say that. [laughter] because a lot of them think a lot of them think televisionis this horrible thing. a little bit of anything can be pretty good. watching perry mason talk to me about something called lawyering. i had no lawyers in my family and had never met a lawyer. so it was a profession i knew nothing about. and all of a sudden television exposed me to this different career. and i started to examine it and think about it as a possibility for myself. but what was not the possibility was becoming a supreme court justice, because, if you don't

know what the supreme court is, you don't know what the supreme court justice is. and that is the point. you can't dream unless you know what the possibilities are, because dreams don't just pop up into your head. dreams are things that you learn about that give you hope about it something you can become. so how do you find those dreams? you find them the way you are right now. by taking the chance and applying for a competition and hoping that you get picked, as the 100 in this room did, that the others who tried, you did something just as important.

you tried. and that is what life is about. to learn about your possibilities, you have to try things that could be scary. how many of you have traveled and spent the night here last night? i bet if your teacher came with you instead of a parent, that it was a little frightening. when you go away from home at your age, the only people i ever stayed with was my family. but unless you are willing to do things that you are a little afraid of to learn new things, you cannot dream. you can dream, but you won't really know what your possibilities are.

and so i am very proud of all of you, proud you are taking the chance to learn something new. not everybody in the room is going to become a lawyer. not everybody should become a lawyer. [laughter] and maybe one of you one day will be on this supreme court or maybe you will be on the u.s. supreme court and i hope i'm around to see that. i'm going to make a promise i might regret, which is anybody watching this today in this room ever becomes a justice, i will come and swear you in, ok? [cheers and applause] now, i happen to like the law. if the chiefs will give me books

-- one of the purposes of my book, it was written for you, and i'm giving a secret away. you are all going to get a copy of it. [cheers and applause] it's a gift of the supreme court to the state of colorado. [applause] it is signed and dedicated to each of you. the reason i wrote the book was for you. it was for the hope that anyone who shares any part of their life that could be like mine -- and i have had a lot of challenges of life -- . you'll read about -- first of all, i have had juvenile diabetes since i was 7. i've given myself insulin shots since i was 8 years old.

my dad had a drinking problem and died when i was very young at the age of nine. i grew up in poverty. i grew up in a housing project in the bronx. i spoke english. i spoke spanish before english. and when i went to college i had to teach myself how to write english the right way, because i wrote it very poorly. and what do you get? i'm on the supreme court and you know what my job is, i write all day long. [laughter] it's a long way to come. for a kid like me who did not know what lawyers were or a supreme court justices, i did not know my possibilities. and i wrote this book so that anyone who ever feels like they are not sure about what they can do, they can look at my life and i hope safe to yourselves she's

just like me and she could make it, so can i. that's the message i want you to carry away. because it's not anything special that i have, except for one thing. i always knew how to say i don't know. you've got a lot of lawyers who come to the supreme court. they get questions from the justices, from the judges. they don't know the answer. instead of saying i don't know, they try to make believe they know. [laughter] a lot of lawyers in the room and a lot of judges.[laughter] i sit there scratching my head. not in front of them. but inside of myself and saying,

are you crazy? you've got nine judges in front of you, why are you trying to make believe you don't know something? i find a lot of people do that. you sit in the classroom, the teachers talking, you don't understand what he or she is --ying, but use a pair making you sit there making believe you do, because you are ashamed of saying, raising your hand and saying you're not being clear, i don't understand. i was never afraid of doing that. every single time i did not know something i had enough confidence to say i don't know. that takes courage. and most people don't have it. but it is something that you just need a special skill to do.

-- it is something that you don't need a special skill to do. so i encourage you, whenever you meet up with something new that's a little frightening and you don't know how to do it, that you look the fear in the face and say i will figure it out, and just ask and steady until you do figure it out. so what happened? i look that perry mason on television. as i started going to high- school and college, and eventually learned about the supreme court and more about the law. i'm going to read you a little of my book. my childhood ambitions to become a lawyer had nothing to do with middle-class respectability and comfort. some lawyers make a good living, but that was not what motivated me. i understood the lawyer's job as being to help people. i understood the law as a force for good, for protecting the

community, for upholding order against the threat of chaos, and for resolving conflicts. the law gives structure to most of our relationships, allowing us all to promote our interests at once been the most harmonious way. and overseeing this noble purpose with dispassionate wisdom was the figure of the judge. all kids have action heroes, astronauts, firemen, commandos. my idea of heroism in action was a lawyer. the judge being a kind of superlawyer. the law for me was not a career but a vocation. i found my passion. and that is what you should be looking for. because i really believe that what you do best are the things you are passionate about, the things you like.

and they don't tend to be important to anyone but you. you know, you watch television and you think the governor -- i'm sorry, and i hope he's not here -- [laughter] the president, vice-president, senators, justices, governors, those are the important people in life. well, they do important jobs, but so does everybody else. the school bus driver who picks you up in the morning and takes your home and night , the andwho and the person who helps your parents with their food with their home, anybody, any job helps and serves people. what is important is something my mom used to tell me, that you do what you are doing well and that you like doing it, because

if you like doing it, you will be giving to others. and so, i found my passion in life, but you can find it in almost anything you do. i'm a lawyer and judge. as long as it is legitimate work. i have to say this. just don't do criminal activity. [laughter] that would be a bad thing. but as long as you are doing anything that is gainful that you like doing, you are going to be giving things to other people. and so, you can walk around this building and you will see all of the art. these are people who sit in their homes usually and they create things. they are doing it for a love, because in their head and they are seeing a piece of art and they are imagining the joint others are going to take from it. it does not matter whether you

like law, medicine, teaching, accounting, driving a taxi, driving a truck. i don't care what you pick. just pick something that excites you, because that is what will make your life meaningful. that will give you a joy and it will give joy to the people around you and it will make what you do more important for the people who share it. have i done enough talking? should i now let you all ask questions? i'm grateful that you are here. the judicial learning center, i don't know if they have opened it up for you yet, but don't leave without seeing it. it is really extraordinary. i don't know of any other courthouse that have anything like this. it is an interactive center.

it is like the museum, but it teaches you about the state and federal courts in colorado. before you leave, even if you don't want to be a lawyer, go learn something about it so that you can say, with the knowledge, i don't want to be that. [laughter] who's going to be brave and asked the first question? go ahead. i saw you first. tell us your name and where you are from. >> [indiscernible] from colorado. >> again. >> i'm from colorado. i was wondering what the biggest challenge being a latina woman that the lawyer and became a supreme court justice, what was the biggest challenge for you? >> people organize their

dealings with other people often based on stereotypes. it is a way to simplify life, because human beings are very complex. to get to know somebody, you have to spend a lot of time. you have to make a lot of effort. for a lot of people, they just don't know how to do that. too much for them. and a lot of people during my career at various times that i was being nominated to do things, a lot of people looked and said it, a poor latina from new york, she cannot be smart enough. during my nomination process, there were a lot of people who wrote that. it was very, very hurtful to me. i had graduated very near the top of my class at college, did

very well at law school, had lots of real important jobs, but people were still saying i was not smart enough. and i knew that was because of stereotypes. it is something that we all have to spend time fighting. it is what makes you sometimes look at somebody else and say th' because you don't spend any time getting to know who they are in comes from the inside. it has nothing to do with what a person looks like on the outside. it is the personality they give the world. but you need to take time to do that. and so, that has been my biggest challenge, dealing with people's expectations, and having fun proving them wrong. [laughter][applause]

you guys are good. sidney.>> what did you like to do growing up besides watch perry mason? [laughter] ?> again, please >> what did you like to do growing up besides watch perry mason? >> do you know why i'm walking around? because my nickname when i was a kid was ahi. my family made up that name because that is a hot pepper, and i could not sit still. they would give me all sorts of labels, because i was constantly on the move. mom said that at 7 months old i

did not crawl, i went from the floor, stood up and ran. i never walked. i still do that. as a kid, i loved playing cowboys and indians, police man and robbers. back then, you have to use a lot of imagination. i was poor, but not starving. the point is it was a different world. we did not have as many toys or interactive toys, so we had to play games. i would spend hours playing and never standing still. i got into quite a bit of rights -- fights protecting my younger brother. he talks about it all the time. i loved reading. as important as television was for giving me a sense of

possibility about being a lawyer, the world opened for me when i read. when i found books, i found my aunt rocket ship to the universe. i say that literally, because among the books i loved were science fiction, mysteries, history, books about other cultures. i cannot travel to those places. i never imagined that i would take the trips that i take now. who would have thought i would be in colorado? [laughter] so i had to visit those places through books. so i spent hours and hours reading. my mom said i never came to the dinner table without a book. now my friends fight about whether that's good or bad and telling their kids they cannot read or play games during dinner. i don't know what the right answer is, but those were the things i liked doing.

>> my name is turner and i'm from west high school. what's the best advice you can give to high school students would like to become a successful leader some day? >> i think i gave it earlier when i said to take chances. you know, failure hurts. it's painful, embarrassing, and can be mortifying sometimes. i talk about some of my failures in my book and they really sting. the hardest thing to do is to take chances where you can fail. because most of us like the security of doing things we think we can do. but you have to take a class that you might not be doing something well it. you have to do something that it took me until i was 50 years old to do it, to take a dance class.

because my mother tells me that every time my cousin -- female cousins were learning how to dance at family parties i was outside chasing fireflies. and i cannot sit long enough to watch and listen and figure out how to dance. it took me until i was 50 to learn how to do a little dancing, because i felt awkward. and i'm not a good dancer, but try. take a course. take a course in something you don't think you can do. try a new activity after school, because it looks like fun and you might as well try it now, because when you get to college you might not have the time. so just take chances. yes?

and then i will go to that end in a second. >> i am edie from boulder, colorado. what was one of the first opportunities that you went after to get to where you are today? >> hmm -- going away to college. no one in my family and had graduated from college in new york when i was growing up. some of my cousins were just going to college. and all of them were going to local colleges. i had a friend to call aand said you have to apply to these ivy league schools. i said to him, what are ivy league schools? they are the best colleges in the united states, harvard,

princeton, yale. and i said i cannot afford to go. he said they will give you a scholarship. so how much does it cost to apply, i cannot afford that either? he said they will waive the fee, sonya, just do it, apply. and i got in. now, today, if i had known how hard it was to get in, i probably would not have tried, because i would have thought why take the risk to be rejected? but i took the risk. and then i had to decide whether i would go, because my grandmother said to me, sonya, why are you going so far away from home. all your cousins are going to local colleges. and i loved my grandmother, and it was really painful for me to

say abuelita, but i think this education will be important to me. that was the first step to the rest of my life. not that i could not have gotten a good education near home, but i met people in my college from around the world, from every place in the country, and they taught me so much about things i did not know about. and being away from home gave me a chance to learn about the different places and different ways of living and the different opportunities that i had. and it was safe, because i still got to go home at the holidays, have thanksgiving with my mother and christmas. when i got really lonely, i took a bus and came home. but that's going away really did start my life.

taking those chances. for every parent in this room who does not want you to go away, they will hate me today. [laughter] yes? >> hi, i'm from delta, colorado. i would like to ask, as humans, we profile people. what do you think about racial profiling? and why are the yankees your favorite baseball team? [laughter] >> first, i grew up in the bronx. so what other team am i going to love but the yankees? [applause] you grow up in the bronx, there's only one team. even when you leave the bronx, there's only one team, the yankees. i am a little egotistical about that. i assume you're asking about racial profiling in police work? i talked to you about the

dangers of stereotyping and then holds true in every context, whether it is in police work, in choosing people for any kind of job or for anything. it has dangers if what you are doing is using profiling without thought. by that i mean if you are thinking -- if you are a police officer or anyone else thinking that only profiling is going to prove who did something, you are probably going to be wrong most. of the time because that's not the way the world works. are their indicators of sorts that have to be listened to? absolutely. they are talking about, if you been following the news about the boston bombing and about criticisms, whether justified or not, about following up on the activities of the two young men who were involved. is that profiling? it could be.

is it something you just cannot ignore? maybe sometimes not. it's a fine line the sidewalks in trying to be fair -- a fine line that society walks. as long as you understand everything you do in life, don't do it without thought. really understand the purpose of what you are doing. and that will give you better answers. >> thank you. >> you're welcome. back here. yes? >> hi, i'm kathleen. my question is kind of complicated. i was watching one of your interviews with pbs and you were talking about how supreme court justice john paul stevens said that no one is born a supreme court justice, they simply become one. during the interview you said that you have not become one one yet.

throughout all the challenges in your life and your obvious position now, why did you say [laughter] i was confused. >> no, it is a fair question, because what i meant is that you grow in every position that you are in. every day of your life you should spend trying to learn something new. i walked into a job as a justice on day one and i had been a judge 17 years. but being the justice was something new. in some ways a different sort of judging. the same on a lot of issues, but the questions are much bigger. and they are questions that don't have clear answers. when cases come to the supreme court, it is because generally there's a conflict in the courts below. different judges are looking at

the same question and they are coming to different dancers. and so, by definition, if it comes to the supreme court, it's unclear. if it's unclear antecedents are not so clear, then we have to do something else -- and the proc and -- precedents are not clear, then we have to do something else. each day that i am a justice now, i'm learning how to do that better. how to think more broadly, to think more precisely, to understand better the consequences of the decisions we make, and the why and how to avoid the bad ones in the future. because no court is perfect, no justice is perfect. we grow.

and what i meant in that interview is that i was not born a justice. john paul stevens was saying it he grew saying it after 30 years on the court, into a legend of a justice. and he was saying to me, sonia, to become a legend, you have to work at it. that gave me a lot of confidence in knowing that i was growing as a justice. my decisions today will not be as good as the ones 10 years from now or the ones tomorrow. thank you. let me go to the other side, ok? i cannot get stuck on one side only. young man with the blonde hair back there. if you were my age there would be asking if that was really your color. i know it is. [laughter]

>> hi, i'm joshua from colorado springs, homer high school. very calm cute outfit, by the way. i love it.[laughter] >> thank you. >> you have a lot of problems in your life with diabetes and that's really hard to get past. what's your inspiration? these little things add up. >> they can be overwhelming at times. there was one gift i got from my diabetes. it was the gift of understanding how precious life is. when i was first diagnosed -- and this was over 50 years ago taking care of the disease was very different than it is today. and the statistics back them -- and this is not true now, for any diabetic in this room, today diabetics can live a full life

span with many, many less complications, but when i was first diagnosed they were at the very beginning of taking care of diabetes, most people with my kind of diabetes were predicted to die young. and i expected not to live past the age of 40. when i turned 50, i had my closest friends with me and i told them the story, that i saw an age i thought i would never reach. but that taught me the preciousness of life and it taught me that if i wasted any minute of my life that it would be in criminal. that's what has kept me going. every time i have wanted to give up or walk away i think to myself, you've got a gift of living, why in my throwing it away?

you know, i can take joy from having you tell me my outfit is nice, i can smile. and that's all it takes in life is to look at a sad moment and at the same time remember a good time, because they exist, too. in the greatest of despairs, and i have had some of them, i go deep within my memory to find a moment of joy to keep me going. that's all i can ever say to people in hard times. it will pass. you almost have to ride it out and seek out that next moment. >> thank you. [applause]

>> i wonder what it was like growing up without your father, because i lost my mom when i was in fifth grade? >> you will read in my book, but it was complex, because my dad's drinking problem had made our house very unhappy. my childhood was filled with fighting. when he died there was a mixture of sadness but relief, because the fighting ended. i talk about in my book the first christmas without my dad. one of the things my dad and i had done every year was put up a christmas tree. and he knew how to put up the perfect tree.

he would spend hours of hiding the wires of every single light. try it. i have tried and i cannot do it. but he did it perfectly. i remember standing back after i had finished the tree and i had picked a tree with a crooked trunk so it looked like charlie brown and the peanuts' tree. i remember realizing that life is complex. there's no really good or bad in any situation. so it is a mixture. you don't have your mom and that is something you will miss probably for the rest of your life. but you have a relationship with a dad that a lot of other people will never experience. so it is always a mixture of good and bad. i don't forget the people i have

lost in my life. i try to remember the moment of joy with them, to hold me through the next day. i talk about at the end of my book when i was being sworn in as a justice. my mind raced all the people who had played a part in my life, including my grandmother who i loved. i could almost see them there. obviously, there were not there, but their spirits stayed with me. you know, you'll read in the book that my mom is a great, great lady, but she had to learn how to be a mom, too. she was not a perfect mom. there are no perfect moms, dads, there's no perfect anything. there are no perfect daughters. what you learn is to look for good luck.f a human.

you'll hold on. yes? >> my name is alex. >> we should put a map up here so i could know where everyone's from.[laughter] >> how many hours of research in active duty as a justice per week for each case? [laughter] >> too many. it's very complicated to explain, because i can tell you what process is, but i don't count the hours. it also depends on the case. about six weeks before cases are heard in court -- anywhere from six weeks to afford more weeks

before that, we get all of the briefs. with the brief comes the record below. that can usually be a thin volume or multiple volumes. the briefs are only generally about 50 pages, but we tell people how to pack those pages, so it's usually 50 pages of words we have told them. sometimes it also you can have more than one brief on the same side. and you can have friends of court briefs. in some cases we have had the ones where those have been over 100. if you do 100 times 25 to 35 pages, that's a lot of reading. then we have to read the supreme court cases on the issue, because we have to study them.

we have to read any articles that we think are important that the parties have asked us to read. they could be hours and hours of reading. i call that research. i do the reading through the brief. and then my law clerks give me a law memo with all the supreme court cases and all the materials. and i will have more reading then. and then we have argument. if you are talking about hours, it is days on each case. afterwards, when you are writing the opinion, if it's your opinion, weeks. because every opinion goes through draft after draft after draft. my law clerks tend to give me an opinion first and then i'd turn it around and then we go back and forth and back and forth until i'm satisfied.

and that is a lengthy process. even when the opinions come from my colleagues, if i am doing a dissent, that's a lot of work. if even if i'm saying i agree with you, i'm reading it and looking at what they are saying to make sure i'm happy with what they are saying. if i am not, then i negotiate with them. you cannot have my vote unless you changed the sentence. all the judges here know what that is like. [laughter] drafting anything is very time- consuming. ok. >> i am mary and i go to st. mary's. i was wondering how you think as a nation we can overcome our differences in order to prevent conflict and violence?

>> the hardest civilization issue around -- conflict between people over so many different issues has been with us since the beginning of man. i don't have the answer. i do think that talking and trying to understand the needs of other people is a good starting point. a lot of times we think we know what the other person is feeling. we don't really listen to them trying to explain what they are feeling and the why. and then we don't spend the time checking our own behavior to figure out if there are things that we can do to alter the dynamic. it is a complicated process. it is what i describe in my book as putting yourself in the shoes

of the other person. it is only if you start there can you really start to think how everybody working together might be able to satisfy their different needs. conflict is unavoidable. what is not is the ability to listen and talk. in the end, we have to continue trying to do that. thank you. yes? >> hello. my name is jasmine. i'm from russell middle school. i was wondering if you ever feel you have too much power? [laughter] >> yeah. one of the reasons i wrote my book is because when i got catapulted into this new life, and when i say catapulted i mean i went from the back of the room to the front of the room like overnight.

i had no idea that i would be on the world stage. i got worried. i am worried every day. how does it change you? power can corrupt. if you don't notice it, it will take you over. and so, i work really hard at trying to remain true to me, to still have fun, to still be with people as people and not because of my position. it's not so easy. one of the reasons i wrote my book is i wanted my friends if they saw me getting too egotistical -- and i wrote a big book for that -- to take the book and hit me over the head. [laughter] because the book is a thank you and in recognizing how much i got from others in becoming who

i am. that i keep trying to remember every day. there is something that can be you know, i'mr. just doing this randomly. >> i'm leslie aguilar. everybody has their own issues and something that blocks us from where we want to be in life. my parents have always told me that despite your problems, never let that take away your education, because your education is something powerful in your life and if you ever do that, then you have nothing in the world. i was wondering what is your motivation as a child growing up to become a as successful as you are today? >> that lesson from my mother. that lesson is the one that i got from my mother, too.

and your parents are right. education buys your future. you cannot do anything you want to do well, unless you become educated. i'm not criticizing them, but i will say there's a lot of sports athletes who don't bother going to college. every time i see that, i think, what limited thinking. don't they know that in every sports game there are complicated strategies about how you play the game? game theory is applied in college to certain studies. if they went to college, they would play their game better. and that is true about almost anything, including being a

singer, an author, an artist. some of the best in the world. think of the people who won numerous oscars, like meryl streep. meryl streep is brilliant. she loves reading, she loves writing. this is a woman who has been educated to do her craft well. think of richard burton, who played shakespeare like he had lived in the age of shakespeare. my point being that education is the key. that is the key, because even if you cannot do one job, education permits you to do a lot of others. if you train for only one limited little thing, you can get stuck. but if you open your mind to learn more, you always -- there will always be opportunities. the day you hit a wall, if you

have knowledge about the alternatives, you can think about how do i go around the wall. i cannot do this. what is related to its that i might be able to do and still have fun with it? here they are going to love me. listen to your parents. [laughter] [applause] >> may it please the court. did she hit a home run or what? [cheers and applause] and all of you did in your questions. very thoughtful. you're wonderful. you deserve a round of applause, too. [applause]

so now, justice sotomayor, we will transition to the learning center. you and i and two students. so let's go. >> thank you, sir. wow. pretty. >> thank you. >> can you hold that and give it to me? you guys ready? ok. 1, 2, 3. [applause] the learning center is open for everyone to see, have fun, and experience and you first have to start out

and see it on video. i want to thank all those folks, all those troops throughout the state who are watching this on the internet. you will now get to see our rule of law video directly. and then you will have to sign off. so let's go. justice sotomayor, if you would be our guest. [cheers and applause] >> here is what we have coming out for you later today here on c-span. at 6:00 p.m., a look at russian and u.s. relations with former service department john brown. joining him, a cnn reporter. the offer of fellowship alumni association is the host. ad coming up tonight at 8:00,

look at new recommendations from the ntsb that says -- that members say should reduce deaths from alcohol impaired driving. here is a preview from a recent ntsb meeting. >> today, we need to consider the safety report, reaching 0: actions to eliminate alcohol impaired driving. critical, because of impaired driving remains one of the biggest killers in driving in the united states. 25 years ago today, our nation saw the deadliest of all impaired driving crashed in u.s. history. a drunk driver drove his pickup the wrong way on interstate 71 near to carrollton, ky. he hit a school bus and killed 24 children and three adult

chaperons, injuring 34 more. today, our thoughts are with those families in carrollton, ky, who are recognizing this 25th anniversary of that crash. that same year, impaired drivers would kill thousands more. let's look at how well we are doing as a nation to address the national epidemic of alcohol impaired driving. as i will explain, we have made progress since that that the night in kentucky. but it has been not nearly enough. of the, the first year tracking system, 21,113 people died in u.s. crashes involving alcohol impaired driving. this represented nearly one-half

of all highway deaths. percentage of deaths due to alcohol and impaired driving is about one-third of all highway fatalities. moving the percentage from one- half to one-third of highway fatalities has taken great effort by thousands of dedicated people in many organizations. ofthat is just a portion that discussion. we will have the entire meeting on drunk driving regulations for you tonight. and we have also talked to a sheriff, david clark, on his take on the proposed rules. that is at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. begin with a question of who and what you ultimately become. many of you have a career path in mind. many of you have no idea where

you will end up. and a few of you may be surprised by where life takes you. i certainly was. and in the end, it is not only what we do but how we do it. >> you know i have to start by tweeting this. give me one second. i am a professional, so this will only take a second. when i woke up this morning and started writing my speech, i was thinking about -- [laughter] campus int month on september when i was a freshman and the football team was ranked no. 1 in the preseason. i remember when i got here and there was all of this excitement on campus and our first game was at wisconsin. and we went up there and we lost our first game 21-14 and there was this crushing disappointment afterward. i would like you to think of

that, soaring expectations followed by crushing disappointment for the next 20 minutes with me. speeches -- commencement speeches by various leaders. find more commencement speeches on line at c-span.org. privacyup of online organizers recently spoke out against government surveillance and a -- an event hosted in denver. a group called free press hosted the event. it included the aclu. have a very pleased to very distinguished group of panelists who have flown in from different parts of the country. it is a particularly interesting group today, because we have technologists, researchers, an

activist, and a lawyer. we have what i think of as the perfect spectrum of digital rights defenders sitting in one room today willing to talk to you frankly about their thoughts on government surveillance, what the problems are, and what you and i should be doing about it. and whether or not there's anything we can do about it. i would hope to move back and forth free flow style between government surveillance issues and privacy issues and corporate collection of data. as we move along, but feel free to write your questions down. i will introduce people and we will just jump into it. i promise you that this long introductory remark has been the only long introductory remark that you have to suffer through. , raise yournelist

hand a little. she is a senior research fellow at the new america foundation's open technology institute. her research focuses on data inclusion, including the ofentially harmful aspects data mining and other online server wegmans -- online surveillance. peter misek is policy council for access, where he advances the dialogue toward a more rights respecting and telecommunications worldwide. he works on issues from peru to iraq. jonathan is a graduate student and law at science

stanford university. he is a junior affiliate scholar at the summit for internet and society. and kate is the director of technology and -- for the technology and liberty program for the aclu. defend corps first and fourth amendments. i wanted to kick off this discretion by addressing -- this discussion by addressing one of the major battles in recent years. it is particularly close to my heart and it is the story of mark clyne. he was a 64-year-old retired at&t technician, who came out publicly, including with my organization, with schematics and details and prints from

int's folsom st. facilities san francisco. these plants showcase a secret room based in at&t facilities that was locked from the inside. and inside this room was a fiber optic splitter that created a copy of the internet communications of americans and sent it to the national security agency. i want you to kick off this this by talking about what' kind of servants means for everyday users. >> thanks to everyone for getting up early to talk about this is scary subject. eyal but does not give you nine years later tonight. organization that is extremely secretive. we do not know how much money we spend on the nsa. there are about 30,000 employees. it is larger than the cia. there's a huge rock receive,

actually -- huge bureaucracy, actually. in the years since 9/11, we have learned a substantial amount about what the nsa has been doing, only because the people who have blown the whistle on some of the abuses. brief give you a very chronology of what has happened since 9/11. after 9/11, we now know the nsa took the gloves off, it's how people have described it. nsa, for asay, the long time its mandate was to surveil overseas communications, to look for information in foreign countries. the nsa could this and to people in england having conversations with people in pakistan, or in sweden without warrants. this has been the case for a long time. has saidirst amendment'

that the agency has never spied on americans without a warrant. that change with 9/11. the gloves came off and the nsc -- the nsa has been sucking up quantities of our resources ofinclude the communications people in this country without specific warrant. inlearned that much too late 2005 as a result of a "the new york times" story. the "the new york times", by the that story forn a full year. they knew and had received information about what was going on before the 2004 election.

and they did not tell the public until after the election. they did that on purpose. they said they did it because the journalists needed more time to research the story at the request of the bush administration. it is pretty clear that they did it to wait until after the election. in 2005, this is what we learned. a massivere was outcry in this country. what does congress do but to enshrine it in july 2008 with the fisa amendment? the warrantless program. not only that, but it immunized companies like at&t to provide our communications without warrants from any lawsuits. no one can sue at&t because they violate our rights because congress protected them from those lawsuits.

>> [inaudible] fisa amendment act of 2008. just recently in december -- i should back up and say that the day that the fisa amendment act passed and was signed into law, the aclu sought -- filed a lawsuit opposing it. there have been recent developments in the last few months that are extremely important. one of them is that in december of 2012, just days after christmas when everybody in this country was paying no attention to what was going on in the news, congress rushed through a reauthorization of the fisa amendment act with hardly any debate. it is shameful when our congress has done in this respect. done inour congress has this respect. very minimal privacy and valiantency that some senators had proposed. we are now stuck with the fisa

amendment act through 2017. there will be no debate about this law. there is no opportunity to challenge it now because just this past february, the supreme court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the aclu's lawsuit challenging the fisa amendment act could not even be heard on its merits because our clients, a group of human rights lawyers, activists, journalists, who essentially said to the government, look, we believe that because you are spying on american communications with foreigners without warrants that our private communications that are very, very sensitive having to do with people who have been abused by the government, lawyers that are handling cases at gitmo, they said, we think your spine on our communications and we want to sue. the supreme court said you do not have an opportunity to sue because you cannot prove that you have been spied on. it is a catch-22. it is garrison and nightmarish

with the legal nightmare we have found ourselves in -- its garish and nightmarish with the legal nightmare we have found ourselves in. that is part of what we will talk about on this panel today. congress, if they have done anything in the surveillance and privacy space, it is to make things worse. we have a separate set of issues that i think peter will talk about, about the electronic communications privacy act and the historic communications act, which are so obsolete that they essentially do not protect our e-mail -- our e-mails for morant less government searches. progress has enacted privacy laws to bring it into the 21st century. and on the iran, it has set us way back from doing things like -- and on the other hand, it has set as buyback from doing things like passing the eyes and then act for another several years. and the people the device some

of the data mining programs that the nsa still uses, the whistle blowers at the agency has said that he believes they are going beyond what even fisa allows. which is to say that he believes that nsa is sucking up all of our to medications, even domestic to domestic. every e-mail, every phone call ever made, every text message. what he has described as a totalitarian society, it could be turned on with the flip of a switch. the systems are all in place. the nsa is building a data center in the middle of the desert in utah, which will be essentially all of the digital information produced in the world for 100 years. now that i have dampen your spirit, i will pass the microphone back. >> thank you, kade. [laughter] the fourth read

amendment of the constitution, which is supposed to protect people from unreasonable search and seizure. it says the right of the people to be secured in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath and affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. peter, you are a lawyer. doingn the government be all of those things that kade described, and engage in this kind of mass surveillance without running afoul of the u.s. constitution? is a good one. i want to take a step back and look at the fourth amendment. which i think is pretty good.

it talks about unreasonable searches and seizures and it talks a lot about what it covers. procedural aspects as well. all told, this was a pretty good principle to put in place. i will talk a little bit about the limitations, but i want to read knowledge that it set up a pretty good system whereby is one principle could be reinterpreted -- this one principle could be reinterpreted for years to come. a couple of things i want to highlight. the bill of rights was designed to protect us against corporations -- was not designed to protect us against corporations, perhaps because they did not exist. and structurally, i could talk about losing data to a corporation. in the summer of 2001, i had some computer problems.

my machine into a computer manufacturer in texas and then i went and stayed abroad. while i was over there, 9/11 occurred and a couple of months later, my mom got a message back while i was abroad at suspicious literature had been found on my machine. the computer came back without the hard drive. if you're a pretty crafty postman took my hard drive -- either a pretty crafty bozeman took my hard drive, or -- i'm privilege that i was able to buy a new machine, but the fourth amendment was not able to protect me of that unreasonable search and seizure of my hard drive because that applies to the government. the second limitation was the language, and reasonable. what does that mean? it is up to a judge to decide. it talks about your house, your papers, your fax. it does not talk about the things in a cloud, as you all

know. what i wanted to lead to was one of the interpretations of unreasonable searches. that is known as the consent doctrine. the courts in the 1960's were starting to get hip to wiretapping and starting to draw the boundaries. the fourth amendment talks about our houses. what happens when we leave our houses? what happens when data moves? and we talk about public and private. one of the decisions, the miller case, but that bank records, the information you share with institutions like a bank. you consented to to share that and theyon with them decided that the consent would carry over in many ways if that institution wants to share your information either with the government or a third party. that became known as the third-

party consents doctrine. it has some corollaries with wiretapping, the hoffa case. of implications these days. we share so much. we are transmitting information right now that we are sharing with our telecommunications perhaps equipment makers. we do not know the extent. and the government is able to use this doctrine to have that the because of the with fourth amendment has been interpreted. more specifically, about 10 years later, the star communications act became part of the electronic communications privacy act. this was dealing largely with e- mail. it was at the forefront. its author saw that the meal was being downloaded from servers onto people's machines and try

to come up with a threshold for when that e-mailed, that store data, the content information that is possibly sensitive business information on hours, when that was no longer so sensitive. and they came up with a 180 day limit. because if you did not download something and you left it on some server, you obviously did not want it, right? >> the goal of that bill was actually to protect privacy. that was in 1986 to protect privacy. >> yes, and things have changed, but congress has not caught up. the law is still in place. the government with the sibley subpoena, which can be issued by an attorney, and it does not go before a judge, can get that kind of information. there are a number of other laws, a patchwork, that have been stretched and rankled and destroyed in order to adapt to

the age of mass electronic communication. these laws were not designed for today's day. congress has that thus far failed to update that, but it might change soon. if you are not already, you should join the e-mail list theeff and access and -- the e- access andf eff and aclu. it seems like we might actually get a warrant for all e-mailed within the next couple of years. this had been a long-running battle. i think we might actually win. please come and get involved, call your legislators, tell you want yourr privacy protected. >> i second got.

.- that i wanted to talk about the role their rolest -- of in government surveillance. if there is nothing else you walk away with from this panel, i want you to know there's a very important role that corporations play in allowing this surveillance to take place. in december of 2011, the wizard -- the whistle blower website wikileaks began releasing very interesting document about the service industry. and to date, they have released 287 files on their web sites. detail theents surveillance companies, the companies that make the backbone that are used by government in egypt, the villa, china, and another places. i want to review a portion of the release. they said that the industry

practice is unregulated. police authorities are able to silently and in mass and secretly intercept calls and takeover computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunications providers. user's physical locations can be tracked if they're carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on standby. jonathan, you're a technologist. can you talk about how this is actually happening? how are these companies able to take over computers to physically track the locations of phones? how does this work? >> in short, it is not that hard. surveillance is internet wast the not built to withstand. the internet was built to be resilient against parts of its

stopping functioning. it is very good at connecting networks of different types, but there are not really privacy or security guarantees built in. if some entity, whether internet service providers or a government that sits between you and whoever you are talking decided to interceptor traffic, modify your traffic, the internet is not going to do much to help you. the way scientists think about these problems tend to be in layers. there is a layer that represents the physical connection between your device and a network. and there is a layer that represents the internet protocol that all devices on the internet speak. there are applications that you may be running that are talking to each other. at each of those players, there's a possibility of compromise by building in various back doors and there is

also the ability to build in various privacy and security guarantees. while it is easy to build interest of technologies, it also turns out it is not too hard to build technologies that provide protection for users in ways that, perhaps, legislature in this country and other countries, and the courts have been somewhat reluctant to do. i want to briefly touch on that protection that may exist at any of those layers to help you think through this, and very roughly the way computer scientist would. there are three properties that tend to get caught up a lot. confidentiality and authenticity. the idea of confidentiality is that someone else cannot read your communication. and integrity being that someone has not tampered with your communication. and authenticity being that you are talking to you think you're talking to. there are good ways of guaranteeing these properties

for a number of years. these are very well said the problems in computer science. that voluntaryt these properties are fairly well conceptualize, -- that while in theory these properties are fairly well conceptualize, arab fairly hard to -- they are fairly hard to bring to reality. it is really easy to get this stuff wrong. the best way to ensure that a technology that you are using to protect yourself against some sort of surveillance is having it vetted. there are plenty of experts who spent all of their time making sure these technologies are implemented correctly. and there are some technologies that have been thoroughly vetted. there are many that have not, though. you have made -- you have may be seen in the news in the past couple of days whether the

government can intercept imessage communications with apple's message protocol. it is not entirely clear. the conventional wisdom among computer security experts tends to be that you should hold off on making bold claims until we have a better idea of what is going on. we have research done in milak at stanford looking at the -- in mind last at stanford looking at communications between mobile apps. in theory, confidentiality and authenticity are fairly well solved within the web. if you have used a web -- a browser, some have a prefix of "https" instead of just four that your that means

web browser is making an attempt at authenticity. of there are bugs in many these programs. as long as a server responded with some valid https response, not necessarily identifying the talkingpp that it was to, then they would get ahead and share information. of secure inample theory, but not necessarily in practice. the last thing i want to share theset the design of technologies could protect users in ways that the courts have not. the first component of that being, whether it is a security property has between users or devices. providing guarantees between the users and devices using the system.

in corrected,on authenticated, -- and corrected, authenticated from iphone, to whoever i'm talking to? or is it authenticated from the cloud to this messaging service? but once it is in the cloud, this message might not any longer be interested. the government was listening in to my phone, they could not get anything. but they could order disclosure by the cloud provider. let me give you an example of a time that this has come into play. the david patraeus gmail debacle involved the communications service gmail. it is secure from a user to the clout. the nsa presumably -- not that they would have, but they presumably could have

intercepted the e-mail's growing from david patraeus's computer to google. but of course, law enforcement could show up at google with no warrant and who could produce those e-mails. this is the ambiguity that is playing out right now in the imessage question -- news coverage. there is an open question over when abel says that it is an end to end secure. are they talking about user to user orrick the user to the cloud? -- or the user to the cloud? we do not have a good answer right now. the very last statement i want to make on design considerations touches on user experience. increasingly, many security researchers are recognizing this is the whole enchilada. no matter how well you design a system in theory or practice, if it is not very usable, then you have not really accomplish much.

let me give some concrete examples of where a user experience has gone a long way in security and privacy. there is a feature that is intended to limit data collection and use by third party website, websites you do not interact with. in fire fox for, but do not track button was under the advanced preferences menu. in earlier versions of fire fox, it was under the privacy preferences menu. a seemingly mignonettes user interface change. it is just a tab. moving the check box from advanced to privacy doubled the uptick of this feature. user interface matters of law. another concrete example, there is a feature in a safari web browser that blocks certain third-party web cookies,

information that might be used to track your movement around the web, by default. and there are other features, but they are not enabled by default. roughly 80% to 90% of safari users have third-party cookie block enabled. have enabled.ers i am an awful user. i do not think that makes -- an user and i do not think that makes me smarter than other people. that apple users just care more about their web presence, oh, c'mon. theto 90% of the time it is user interface. the last example that i want to give is this update to fire? that just moved into kabul yesterday. that just moved

into apple yesterday. it moves could be blockers from the low single digits into the higher double digits. unsurprisingly, companies are negatively -- the companies that are negatively impacted our very hostile. it the nuclearg first strike. and that is all about user interface. firefox has had a cookie blocking option for a decade. but because this will be used by default and users to not got to go hunting for it, the game is changed. -- and users do not have to go hunting for it, the game is changed. you have to make sure that users can take advantage of one of these systems. >> can i answer that question in

a slightly different way? >> yes. >> you should check out the wiki-leaks files because there is some crazy stuff in there. essentially, what they are is a series of promotional material produced by these companies that make highly advanced surveillance equipment for our government. power.re are presentations in there that these companies have produced for the nsa and the fbi and the cia when they want to sell this stuff. and you can clearly see that there are programs that enable law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor your phone in a way that not only allows the government to see what your doing and read your e-mails and intercept valuable communications, but also turn the microphone of your phone on when you are not using it to eavesdrop on you when you're not

using it, just talking to and to takeame room over the photographs and video and take pictures. all sorts of crazy stuff. sometimes the government goes sources tond other get information. there is also malware that they can put on your own machine. they can turn your computer against you. and all of these promotional materials, if you look through them, they all say we provide lawful intersection capability to governments. what does unlawful interception mean in the u.s. in the 21st century? it is not pretty. to saye change the laws that unless the government has probable cause that we are involved in a crime and shows that to a judge to get a

warrant, they should not be in our business. we do not have assurances that is what is happening right now. any time you hear the words " unlawful interception" be wary. even realizeser their computer was bugged this way? would someone talking on a cellphone be able to tell at a glance? does the every day user see or is there any way that they would know? >> it makes your phone literally hot. that is one thing. if you're not using your phone and you touch it and it is warm, that is a warning that somebody is using your phone while you are not using it. the same is true with computers. if you find there's a program running somewhere on your computer that is taking up all kinds of disk space and you do not know what it is, that is also a warning that something

tricky is going on. >> i would say, if that is the case, then whoever wrote the malware was not very good. [laughter] has gotten a lot more sophisticated in the past decade or more. if an entity really wanted to go out of its way to compromise and end users device in a way that was barely surreptitious -- fairly surreptitious and have to exploit that are not generally known or had not been patched yet, or if a user happens to be running old software and their old exploit that can be used, is very possible to take over a device. and i'm really glad if kade araisa this, because i want to be sure to caveat everything i said. ,ecurity in theory and practice not the point at which your

computer or your phone or your tabloid has been compromised, the technical term for the security properties are that you have gotten a host. your -- you have gotten hosed. you are out of luck. i want to piggyback on something here. am i not talking into the microphone? onto whatjump jonathon was saying about security in theory and in practice. that touches upon some of the work i do. i also want to simultaneously tried to ground the conversation potentially in a different way than has been discussed thus far. i am a researcher focusing on inclusion an online surveillance and privacy issues at the new america foundation's open technology institute. for the past year i have been

looking at, if you want to call them, a user community. i would not necessarily use those words, but a specific portion of the population that does not have access to the internet, or is thinking about using the internet's enabled devices for the first time. within the world of new year's of the internet, issues of privacy -- new users of the internet, issues of privacy and surveillance, been a different way. a lot of privacy advocates -- not serving its advocates, but you know what i mean they have been around thinking about right, and individual rights. and the relationship, for example, between having a andate communications having choice as an individual.

in the field as i go out to talk to people, i'm seeing that first of all, it is not just about right. it is about power. which those technical features of surveillance are unable by corporations and the practices that are put into place -- are enabled by corporations and the practices that are put into place to do the data mining and tracking and so forth, that affects the existing social quality. and related to that, it means that these issues around surveillance and privacy are not just about individuals, but communities. the committees that i am interested in arctic communities that do not have -- the communities that i am interested in are those that arhave no accs to the internet, or just coming on line for the first time.

they exist in communities with high incarceration rate. schools around them are closing. they have low literacy rates. there are a number of problems that they confront on a day-to- day basis. the you were talking about security and practice concept, most of the security solutions or the privacy protection solutions that are in place right now are a complete failure for the end users that i'm looking at. both thely do not have time and the know-how to and use it.ur >> you want to talk about what that is? >> i do not want to get into that just yet. [laughter] types of tools that are out

there for people to use to attack -- to protect themselves are really out of reach. through classroom observation of people taking these losses to use the internet for the first time. i have talked to people in public libraries and senior centers and anti-poverty organizations. this is not what people are thinking of, first and foremost. they come to the internet and the type of surveillance that is in place is the invisible to them. perhaps even more invisible to -- than the average internet user. and they are long way away from being able to understand how these practices of surveillance and corporate tracking take place. if you are learning how to use the computer for the first time, you spend a lot of time literally trying to figure out

where the cursor is on the screen and how to drag it to the other side of the screen. i have sat in losses were instructors are trying to get people registered into e-mail accounts. and they're all sorts of problems involved. people on a heart attack on the keyboard. there are spelling mistakes. they need to ask the instructor how to design a passport. the password is then recorded on a piece of paper that the instructor has. the instructor may, for example, helped people to run andugh the privacy policies consistent with other research, how infrequently people pay attention to privacy policies, they just click through it. it does not mean anything to them. i'm trying to say that for this portion of the population, learning is very slow.

that is not to say that people cannot or will not learn. it is that the expectations that i think a lot of people have around learning how to be the perfect privacy protecting end user is simply out of reach. it is something that we have to think about as we are pushing these conversations forward, thinking of with the most vulnerable populations are, and also think he about and users. and also, in the research i'm doing, a lot of the communities i have seen, for them, privacy is a luxury. people do not think about their fourth amendment rights. public access a center, let's say, for example, a library. they are under pressure to fill out their benefits form. they will ask the library group frieder to help them register for any mail -- the library provider to of the murders to

for an e-mail account. and then on top of that, they are divulging even more information to the benefits providers, whether it is for benefits assistance or family or otherwise. it reveals the depth and pieces of their lives in the way that the average internet user is not normally subjected to. when the conditions of your entryet use -- when your into the internet is of a condition of chronic surveillance, we need to think about how to solve that problem collectively. >> i want to remind everybody that you want to participate in the twitter of discussion going mcpriz -- theis mcpriz.is

is there something you wanted to add? >> there are issues with the level of knowledge, access to knowledge, language that may be different. so, too, the rule of law may be very different in foreign countries, and the legitimacy of the government may be very different. is iner the american law this space, i promised i would wear my technology had today, some are trying to apply any of that. but all of these practices are concerned. china, and what we learned after the fact in tunisia. the intent ofven the federal government around users surveillance. andexample, tour,

analyzing the -- if anonymizing tool was funded in part by the department of defense. and the state department has given tens of billions of dollars to promote privacy and security tools for use overseas. meanwhile we hear from the department of justice that there is a need to revise federal law, in particular, a law that deals with the communications assistance to the law enforcement act that would require certain forms of back for authorized surveillance. >> what do you mean by back doors? spell it out. >> intentionally designed loopholes in the guarantees i talked about earlier. if you have a system that is designed to provide

confidentiality and integrity and authenticity, you build in from the get go some ways of undermining those very properties so that, for example, if the government were to show up with a warrant, the provider of the service would be in a position to provide government what and permit it -- whenever information it requested. a good example is that skype for a long time is generally understood to have that very good security practices. and following its acquisition by microsoft, fairly widespread speculation that the back doors were built in at law enforcement request. and the jargon that gets kicked around the department of justice for inability to surveil individuals because of

their use of technologies that have privacy and security properties built in is "going dark." and there is law enforcement concern around going dark and that we should have legislation addressing that. the very last thing i wanted to know is that the imf -- the imessage issue, the inability to intercept those messages, you have parts of the state department say they want to facilitate that. and then you have other departments and they are concerned about this tool that apple has put into the hands of countless people and that it provides security concerns that they would like to be able to work around, if for example, they had a warrant to intercept those messages.

>> if you have a question, raise your hand and someone will come around and pick those up. right on a piece of paper. peter, you have worked on these things all over the world. can you respond a little bit? >> yes, sure. take what happened here and make it much more egregious. you can imagine this situation is in syria and iran. luckily, we've had some opportunities to look at the files. once the government offices were raided, and the same in egypt, we saw the transcripts, the calls, the text messages that were being recorded through surveillance byipment often provided providers in the u.s. and canada perhapsand that are

still being maintained in these authoritarian, abusive countries. it is sometimes sold through third parties, just sometimes operating illegally under u.s. laws and our sanctions regimes. to it has the capabilities monitor everything. there is some backlash. actually, in libya, some of those who were arrested and tortured for their communications were able to see those records and they filed lawsuits against the foot and maker -- against the equipment maker. very couple of lawsuits like that. this is all coming to light after the fact, unfortunately. one thing we do is work with the companies and the telecom in situations where there are violations of the rule of law.

there is little that civil society can do. we talk about multistate colder whereti-stakeholderism these companies lack protection, lack lovelock. and they make a huge bug and find out five years later that the contract was gotten through bribery and that the users for arbitrarily arrested and tortured. one country, one act from every country in europe, a musical act or what not, is put forward and you have to vote for some other countries act. azerbaijan and one -- loved this one song. he was arrested and brought in for interrogation by his police fore asking why he voted

azerbaijan's sworn enemy, armenia. that only shows you what is possible, but also how breeze in these new security forces can be. these new pieces security forces can be. >> i see it one more and then another question. but of you go. >> just to kind of draw the connection between what the problems are here domestic and what is happening abroad is -- and jonathon alluded to it -- is a terrible asymmetry in the type of power that the government have. i do not know what the mobile phone penetrations are in iran or china and other authoritarian

regimes across the world, but as these areas increase their usage of mobile phones and other web enabled devices, we can only expect that this type of surveillance will increase. moment to think about how as jonathan referred to earlier, how we think about privacy by default and privacy by design so we can avoid these problems from the get go. >> i want to take issue with what i think is often a false dichotomy created between this country and so-called authoritarian regimes elsewhere. i think someone, if he were thee to talk about it, is 16-year-old u.s. citizen from denver who was blown up by a

missile from a drum while he was eating lunch with his .ousin in a cafe in yemen the u.s. operates secret prisons all over the world at so-called black sites where torture occurs to this day. a somali journalist is currently being imprisoned right now at the direct request of barack obama himself for reporting things about cia black sites and secret prisons in somalia. the notion that the u.s. government is democracy and other governments are authoritarian nightmares is something that should be contested because i do not believe it is true, actually. [applause] incumbent ont is people in this country to focus on what our government is doing. i believe it is important to look at what happens in places

like tunisia and using equipment produced by u.s. companies. those products are used by the cia as well, which killed a man groaned strikes even when it does not know what their names are -- which kills them in drone strikes even when it does not know what their names are. the u.s. is involved in extensive operations that violate all sorts of basic human rights all over the world. cia and fbi are using these technologies to pursue them. i want to challenge the notion, the dichotomy that people draw between the u.s. and places like china and others. of greattting a lot questions. a lot of them have to do with what we're supposed to do about this. half of the questions are what we are supposed to do about

this. i want you to know that we will have at least half an hour. i believe this is an hour and a half panel. if not, someone should tell me soon. akaka my days. i'm planning to dedicate at of thishalf an hour talk to what we do about it. and maybe now is the time to get started. i thought this was a very interesting -- actually, there's one more question before we get to that. i think this is a particular issue. are there particular groups that suffer more as a result of surveillance that other groups? anybody on the panel want to speak to that or have insight into it? seeta? historically, there are certain types of communities that are targeted more than others. in the works that i have done

around data profiling, i have looked at historical cases of non digital profiling damaso thinking about redlining, racial profiling, medical research, and bio profiling that happened across the time in the u.s. in thinking about the tuskegee case, for example, were african- american men were targeted as research subjects and used , orhically to discover basically exploit them for a long history of surveillance and targeting and that falls upon the most marginalized communities, mostly african-american, increasingly that tino, increasingly image

litcrit populations. for me, it is not just take question of government surveillance, although that is important. it relates to corporate surveillance. we see these technologies use to categorize different communities in different ways, so there has been research out of harvard by ms. sweeney, who has looked at people who do searches for african-american sounding names and the advertisements they are getting. some of the advertisements they are getting are related to insta-checkmate, so it looks at pegsarrest records, and and african-american sounding name to incarceration history. there is a way we are categories by these new technology eyes -- we are

categorized i these new technologies can that affects how we are perceived on and see online. the repercussions are dangerous. sometimes as dangerous as the targeted one on one by the government, because it means you are being welcomed into a world where you are systematically excluded or tagged in a particular way. >> i would add, as far as government surveillance is concerned, it is clear that who the targets are, able of color, poor people, immigrants, immigrant populations, which are profiled in programs like secure communities and multiple other programs. there are muslims, especially right now. and dissenters, anyone who

raises their voice against the government and says i do not like what you are doing. documents showed that dhs is involved in extensive surveillance of the occupy movements, e-mails going back and forth from people who are supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. hardly anything has changed, and that is another reason why when we want to talk about how government surveillance impacts people in the world, we need to look at home as well. >> we have a bunch of interesting questions. --wef them was about referenced the electronic medications privacy act, passed in 1996, but which has now has dangerously allowed courts to argue that they can have access to e-mail after six months old,.

we have fought that effectively. also to your data in the cloud. given the willingness of intermediaries, the buddies like google and facebook', to turn over information to the government --anybody want to take that? a stab at it, which is to say i think part of what we have talked about on this panel is real solutions are not the only solutions that are in place or in the toolkit to do something about problems we face with the ever shifting sands of surveillance h online. from where i sit, i see little hope in reform were not just -- but other existing privacy

legislation because it is such a couple dated issue and it is so entrenched, and lobbying is powerful. as the questioner implied, that corporations will do what they want given a set of circumstances. they may turn over data if that is in their best interest. if that does not interfere with their bottom line, for example. for me, and we can talk about this later, because i want to hear what peter says, he have to think about how we engage in this issue and where we engage in this issue and what kind of long-term struggle we want to commit to to make things better. peter? >> i will not speak against the power of some interested congress persons to force change by the corporations. representative markey just sent

letters to the major telecommunication providers asking them to about their assistance to law enforcement, and he got back revealing responses from every major telecom showing their 1.3 million requests for user data in 2011. that was two years ago. think about what it is like now. these were followed terry given, but this was an effective action by congressmen, and it made the transparency report. it suggests you look at these from google, microsoft, twitter, what do they show we are working out the formula. the basic data is number of requests for user data, different types of data from your basic subscriber information to your content,

your location -- >> he is talked about reports reduce by companies voluntarily that tells them how many times the government has asked them for user data. >> their policy is for complying with those requests or processing the requests, who it goes to, how it is translated > -- these are from foreign governments, how many they complied with, how many they rejected, and on what basis. this is the start, and google has shown this information for the coppery rite as well -- copyright as well. we want more transparency, if the government is not going to reveal it, the uk government reveals it. they have a whole office that issues a report every year issuing this kind of transparency data.

it would be great if the u.s. government released their own that that we can match against what corporations say, but 11 area where they have been responsive, and we are pushing telecom to publish their own reports voluntarily. >> what i will ask jonathan to do is talk about what should we be doing. you can respond to what he said earlier, but what is the take away for people in this room? terrifying examples of the government surveillance by corporations and how those work together. what do we do about this, and i am afraid that some of these orient questions i will not be able to get to. i want to go down the line and hear from the panelists. is right, we get it, it terrible, what do we do about it? >> i will talk about the question and then transition -- >> you got to talk into the

microphone. >> ok. first i wanted -- and i was uld work,here -- it won' a substantive change in the law, a change that law enforcement agencies requesting information would have to make a greater showing and they do under the current statute. clearly it provides her protection. i want to be clear about that. the second point i wanted to make was why reform i finally pass. one reason is companies want their users to feel comfortable reviving their data. that is why they have put together these transparency reports. it can be a good thing. tech companies are starting to get their asked together on lobbying or active in washington.

they do sometimes fight for their users. i also want to make sure to find that there is a downside to that. to the extent companies are willing to fight when it comes to making sure their users have information and control about information that gets shared with the government, they are a little less pro-user when it comes to giving information control about sharing data with the companies themselves. there areright now, proposals for toughing up consumer privacy legislation and u.s. tech committees have taken positions that would undermine the law as it stands. these proposals would have strengthened the law, proposals out of companies would actually wind up diminishing the legal protections from where they are now. to emphasize that organized tech company lobbying, good on some issues, not good on some others, late stu security and privacy, and the other reasons

it might pass is the courts are doing it anyway. courts are saying the statute is so out of date it has gotten trumped by the constitution. if law enforcement agencies think they will lose in the courts anyway, it becomes easier to agree to a deal on capitol hill. that is all i wanted to say. >> you have one minute to say what you think we should do about it. >> one minute ago. the low hanging fruit on the policy and politics side is pushing for transparency. getting consumer control in the law is tough. in need to have a coalition many cases regulated entities to agree, getting data brokers or consumer data aggregators or advertising companies or companies that are in business to provide data processing services to the government -- to give easy encumbrance of user information control -- that is a

long-term project. it is a easier to say ok, at minimum could you tell people what sorts of stuff you're collecting, how long you keep it, what your processes apply, even with some level of general liability. -- generality. i encourage looking at legislation pending in california that would require some transparency about consumer data collection practices. >> what is the name of that bill? -- the name escapes me. the right to know act in california. i think there are a whole lot of things we can do. , giveed to join the aclu us lots of money, and you should know that the fbi has 40,000 employees or something and we have two. if we are going to fight back against the government, it is

our four, we need more money. join the acluou and we e-mail you saying please ,lick this, could it, ok really, because it makes a difference. please click the button, and, third, for much more involved things you can do, you can get involved at the local level because we talked about the big brother issues, but we have not talked about little brother. little brother is also real. the police are acting more like intelligence agencies, collecting their surveillance information from all of us. they do this through s advanced surveillance technologies, like license plate readers. thise trying to drive issue home. we have a bill in massachusetts that would limit data retention of license plate information. what i am getting at is you can

go to your chief of police in your city or town where you live and say, what kind of surveillance equipment do you have questions do you have license late readers? write letters to your local newspapers, die vaulting what you have learned from your local police department, good to your city council meetings and tell them you are worried about this stuff. and thein a democracy citizens should control what the police do, and we should exert that power and tried to take control from the federal government of police departments, which is been showering and police departments with billions of dollars with all sorts of surveillance equipment that has been sucked up by the federal government. take actions, please click the button, and then get involved at the local level. if you want to learn more about how you can do that, go to the

website and a whole lot of information about how you can get involved. these contact me, if you want to do. , agitate,ot least agitate, organize, get involved. it does not matter if it is about union stuff, fighting the banks, because what we saw with wall street and any social movement is when you provoke the surveillance beat, it rears its ugly head. we often do not know what is going on. when things like occupy wall street happened, you see giant surveillance towers everywhere on the corner in new york, right? for most it will elucidate a lot of information about what is going on behind the scenes, agitate the system. [applause] i will say, yes to all the

things that have been shared already, but i want to focus on a few things that i think are particularly pertinent to the world that i live in. yes, agitation is important, but also it is important to invest in some long-term education and immunity building, whereby the communities that are most likely to be affected to be targeted are empowered to know more and do more. what i mean by that specifically youhere are ways in which can teach people about privacy and countersurveillance, we will and it is reasonable for them to engage in that kind of learning. what i am talking about is empowering realizations that are on the front lines of speaking for and serving poorer communities, communities of

color, immigrant communities, immigrant rights, and so forth, and what needs to happen is those organizations themselves .eed to become privacy aware there's is currently a huge deficit and how any of our activist organizations and social movement groups use and share information readily and advise their communities to use and share information. that is an important area that we can improve upon. i think five or six years ago, there was an incredible push in to philanthropy community really support social media and social networking without questioning some of the privacy and surveillance problems that might arise and be part of the networked communications system. we need to think about that now, and i think the community groups that are closest to the most affected individuals are a great place to start. second to that, and this is my

personal saying that i like to get across, is for people that are using public access internet points, public computer ftc, federale, communications commissions, please stop advising that these tors buy subscriptions better protect their activities. it is simply ineffective and unreasonable to expect that the person that is unemployed and desperate to find a job or has been kicked out of housing will be able to do this. we need to think about specifically for the poor committees, better solutions that are the least burdensome on them. , what, what -- again

jonathan alluded to, technology by default, including technology in public computer centers that are already ready, come to you as a user able to filter out some of the problems that we are seeing, from the types of surveillance we are seeing, that is one step towards having a more equitable situation. >> and, peter, what do we do about this? seconding what has been said, we have had some success with the freedom of information act, a muscle that we need to flex constantly. there is great leather generators online. there are reporters committee for a free press has a great dieguide. on this data protection regulation, it is not u.s. cover these, but the u.s. government is very heavily lobbying.

will be releasing soon, preliminary e-mails and documents we have gotten that revealedts the extent of the u.s. lobbying -- because they realize the interconnectedness of privacy laws in europe, points of member states which are copied by latin american countries, and they understand that could change the conversation in the u.s., and the government is lobbying hard there. online campaigns, we the people, white house, and most of our groups, we have done great work in collaboration.

as far as the telecoms, i would say one major step for security is getting them to update the operating systems more often to push these updates rather than forcing you to buy a new phone, so that is one thing you can push for on the consumer side. also, watching get the regulation process in the u.s. -- also, watching the deregulation process in the u.s.. that is something that is hurting rural communities right now. keep a close eye on that and there are great groups that are working on those issues. also talk to your legislators about privacy and get more letters to the telecoms and the tech companies. this afternoon a discussion on u.s. relations with russia. one of the issues between the two countries, russia is an ally of syria, and the president

has called on syrian president assad to leave power. we will hear from a former foreign service officer. it starts live at 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. all this week on c-span two, book tv in prime time. three books on american foreign- policy. then " foreign- policy begins at home," and "the dispensable nation. g" tonight we will look at recommendations from the national transportation safety there should be reduced deaths from drunk

driving. >> today we meet to consider the safety report reaching zero, action to eliminate out all- -impaired-- alcohol driving. 25 years ago today, our nation saw the deadliest alcohol impaired driving crash in u.s. history. a drunk driver drove his pickup the wrong way on interstate 71 near carrollton, kentucky. he had a school bus and killed 24 children and three adults chap earns. this injured 34 more. today our thoughts are with those families in careful in -- in carrollton, kentucky, who

are recognizing the 25th anniversary. that same year impaired drivers would kill thousands more. let's look at how well we are doing as a nation to address the national epidemic of alcohol- impaired driving. as i will explain, we have made progress since that deadly night in kentucky. but it has been not nearly enough. in 1982, the first year of the --cking system, 21,000 113 21,113 people died in crashes involving alcohol-impaired driving. this represented almost one half of all highway deaths. today the percentage of deaths due to alcohol impaired driving is about one/three of all highway fatalities. of all highway

fatalities. bys has taken great effort thousands of dedicated people in many organizations. tonight at 8:00, more of the ntsb may 14 meeting where they approve the recommendations, 's appearanceman u ." " washington journal >> i begin with integrity because it is so essential to who and what you ultimately will become. many of you have a career path in mind. many of you have no idea where you will end up. a few of you may be surprised by where life takes you. i certainly was. and in the and, it is not only what we do, but how we do it.

>> i have to start by tweeting this, so give me one second. i am a professional does this and will only take a second. when i woke up this morning and started writing my speech, i was thinking about my first month on campus in september when i was a freshman, and the football team went into that season ranked number one in the nation preseason. there is all this -- ira member there was all this excitement gamempus, and our first was at wisconsin, and we went up there and we lost our first game, and there was this crushing disappointment afterwards. i would like you to think of that soaring expectations followed by crushing disappointment as a metaphor for your next 20 minutes with me. let's next weekend -- morext weekend,

commencement speeches. saturday at 8:30, business and find more speeches online at www.c-span.org. we returned to the conference on media reform held by the free press with a look at the importance of journalists doing their job without ias. this panel runs an hour and a half. >> i want to welcome you all to the session on independent journalism on war conflict and human rights. i will introduce our extraordinary panel shortly. i am the founder of the media watch group fair and the center of the park group for independent media at ithaca college.

each spring at ithaca we give out an annual award for outstanding achievement. named after izzy stone, the izzy award. in 12 days we will do so the izzy award on the fifth annual winner, the nonprofit news outlet mother jones. it broke story after story last year, including the now infamous mitt romney, 47% of american voters are moochers undercover video. [applause] some of you know, i spent years as a political pundit on mainstream television, cnn, fox, msnbc. i was outnumbered, out shouted and finally terminated. now i am free. since we are not constrained within the mainstream media, we can freely discuss the elephant in the room. the issue that explains why other countries can have free college education, universal health care, but our country can't afford it.

it's the problem that may be bigger than all other problems in our country because it so exacerbates all those other problems. it is a problem that martin luther king focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago this week. it has only gotten worse since. that was the height of the vietnam war. i'm talking about the problem of militarism and perpetual war. king called the united states the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. he said, a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. we are gathered here today to discuss the unmentionable. the elephant in the room. msnbc hosts can yell at fox news host and vice versa, but when the obama administration expanded the hopeless war in

afghanistan, the shouting heads on both channels went virtually silent. as obama's drone more expanded, there was little shouting on either of those channels or cnn or cbs or abc or so-called public broadcasting, npr and pbs. we can have raging debates in the mainstream media on all sorts of issues like gun control, minimum wage, gay marriage. when the elites of both major parties agree on a military intervention as they so often do, then anyone in the mainstream media who goes out on the limb to question or knowledge that in the middle of the room there is an oversized creature known of militarism or interventionism, they are likely to disappear faster than you can say phil donahue. i worked with phil donahue. i know a little bit about journalists being silenced for questioning bipartisan military

adventures. i was with phil at msnbc in 2002 to 2003 thousand three when bush was revving up the invasion of iraq with the support of joe biden, john kerry, hillary clinton, harry reid. msnbc terminated us for the crime of jwi. that is journalism during wartime while independent. jwi may be a crime in mainstream media, but it is the kind of unauthorized, unembedded coverage that you get from the authors and journalists that we have assembled on this panel. it is the kind of coverage you get from the jeremy skahills, and the independent media outlets that are so featured at this conference this weekend. many liberal journalists who were vocal about war and human rights and civil liberties during the bush area seem to

have lost or muted their voices during the obama era. it says something about the lack of serious national debate about so-called national security, that last month, one of the loudest mainstream tv news questioners of the president's right to assassinate americans was sean hannity at fox. that is obscene. it says something about mainstream tv that the toughest and most consistent questioners are not on a news channel. they are on the comedy channel. a few weeks ago, i watched a passionate john steward taking on u.s. military spending. he said, we already spend more on defense than the next 12 countries combined, including china, including russia. we are like the lady on jerry springer who can't stop getting breast implants. and of course, he put up a photo of the jerry springer guest. what our media obediently calls

the war on terror is experienced in other countries as a u.s. war of terror. kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes. the killing and maiming of innocent civilians that just creates more enemies for our country. you can get that reality in some of the mainstream media of our allied countries in europe. you cannot get it in the mainstream media in our country. it is our country that is waging this global perpetual war. in a democracy, this should be the subject of a raging debate. we have assembled this panel because all of our panelists have rigorously subjected u.s. war policies to questioning and debate, no matter who is in the white house. they have worked hard to describe the elephants in the

room. i will introduce them now. each will make a short opening statement. then we will have some brief panel discussion here and open it up to the whole room, elephants included. you can send your questions or comments up cards. those will be passed out shortly. our first presenter, many of you know her as the host and executive producer out of kpsk los angeles, the uprising radio show. she has been doing solidarity work with afghan women since 2000, before the 9/11 attacks and the u.s. invasion and occupation. she has visited afghanistan and it led to a book called

"bleeding afghanistan," she has a masters of science degree from the university of hawaii in astrophysics. she also has a two-month-old baby. let us welcome her. [applause] >> thank you. a two-month-old and a five-year- old. i want to address a few of the major issues that journalists struggle with when covering the afghanistan war. the first of the wars on terror and the longest war that the u.s. has ever fought and the war i am most familiar with. much of the coverage of the afghanistan war is not totally unique. it is similar to the coverage that other u.s. wars have gotten. it does not question very much the government's rhetoric or motives. it does not pay much attention to those most affected by our policies think and feel about

the war. we are familiar with the case made initially for invading and occupying afghanistan in 2001. we were told it was a moral imperative to free them the tyranny of the taliban while exacting revenge for the 9/11 attack. at that time, mainstream media did a stellar job of echoing the bush administration's line about the invasion and occupation. i remember the jingoism was so thick at the time, an essay published by the university of texas professor critical of the war was met with such a mob of angry responses, it threatened to derail his academic career. his piece was quite the exception in the mainstream media. independent media, they were criticizing the rush to war.

in the mainstream media, he was one of the exceptions. after the taliban fell, they were rarely questioning what the u.s. did in afghanistan. if anyone question the wisdom of empowering these criminal warlords, they were countered with the notion of we want peace before justice. "the new york times" had a great piece about the northern alliance and quest for women's right and painted them as feminists compared to the taliban. we know how feminist they are today. there was no coverage about the northern alliance, these men that the u.s. was proud to put into power. desperate appeals to not give them government positions. there was a statement put out, by the oldest women's rights organization in afghanistan.

they put out a statement saying, the people of afghanistan do not accept domination of the northern alliance. he did not get quoted in "the new york times." the the end of the bush era, a lot of talk about increasing troops to afghanistan before we can decrease them. the troops surge got a lot of news coverage. it was pretty well discussed in terms of the amount of coverage that it got. most of the coverage centered on things like how effective it would be, whether there were enough troops in place. many examples, but one that comes to mind is the publishing of an editorial that made a moral argument i why there should be more troops.

one saying that 40,000 extra troops was not enough. the guardian newspaper in britain, the mainstream outlets of our allies had much more critical coverage. the guardian dared to publish the piece by the afghan women's rights activist who i have worked with, her op-ed titled a troop surge can only magnify the crime against afghanistan. the u.s. government, significantly marked the afghan war on the ground have been these deadly night raids. american soldiers have gone in and raided afghan villages, arrested and detained men and boys and women. there was a lot of coverage of the deadly shooting, mass shooting by staff sergeant robert bales that seemed to open the eyes of the mainstream media

that these night raids or even happening. aside from that one incident, no critical coverage of the majority of night raids in the protest against these on the ground. there were exceptions like one independent journalist who has been based in afghanistan who wrote extensively about the chilling effect of the night raids. he wrote that on dispatch.com. he has been one of the few independent journalists covering what the regular afghan reactions are to the war. and we have the drone strikes. they were once common in the border region between afghanistan and pakistan. today they are becoming increasingly more

inside afghanistan as we draw down troops. there has been coverage of the drone program, extensive coverage, most of it has been focused on how effective it is or whether it is legal or not, not whether it is moral or not or what the actual effect on those who have these bombs rained upon them has been. one exception in mainstream media that i do want to call out, a writer for the associated press. she was one of the few mainstream journalists that has done good work on afghanistan. she has been covering it for decades and living there. she wrote a piece that was the exception, titled "afghan villagers flee homes, blame u.s. drones." just for a moment on when afghans are quoted, even when they do interview afghans, they do so with very little regard for who they are.

i have had first-hand experience into this myself. i get calls from journalists all the time requesting interviews about what is happening inside afghanistan. they often mistake me for being afghan. when i told him i am not, i am indian. sometimes the interview get canceled. they want authentic afghan voices, but any afghan will do. i had to correct broadcasters on live interviews when i have referred to me as afghan. they don't care who they interview. it does not matter if it is a u.s. educated afghan-american who has worked in the karzai administration versus an afghan activist on the ground living in the community of and experiencing firsthand the effects of the u.s. policies. it does not matter. any afghan will do. that is similar to the u.s. approach to installing afghans in power. any afghan will do. that just put them in power. no distinguishing between afghans of different economic classes, different perspectives. it leads to a lot of misunderstanding.

it is a form of racism. if someone came cover the occupy wall street movement and grabbed the first american they could find, it might be a very skewed view of what is happening. one of the most difficult questions i think journalists grapple with here is over what the consequences of the impending u.s. withdrawal. many familiar with the time magazine cover of august 2010, the woman whose nose had been cut off by the taliban. and the headline said, what happens if we leave afghan? should have said, what is happening while we are occupying afghanistan?

it is true. the misogynists will be emboldened once the u.s. forces leave areas the context of that message is greatly oversimplified. it has not taken into account how the u.s. has empowered exogenous warlords as a deliberate war strategy on the ground. also a anti-fundamentalist activists would like to see and do in their own country. many of the women i work with would rather achieve women's rights on their own, knowing full well the destruction that western emancipation in afghanistan of women has been like. unless there is deep journalism, an investigation of who is supporting whom, what the effects of our policies are, we are not going to know what is happening in afghanistan and what will happen in the future. there needs to be the

distinguishing of those who want freedom for women, men, children, freedom of the press, freedom from foreign occupation and invasion. real democracy. those are two different sets of people. that said, the challenge of facing afghan journalists inside afghanistan outweigh any concerns that american journalists face. it is difficult today to be a journalist inside afghanistan. doubly if you are a woman. afghan journalists who do distinguish between activists and those in power, they see reality firsthand, who are the perpetrators. they report on it. they face a dizzying array of decrees that make it difficult for them to do their work and are often imprisoned and tortured by the government or hunted down and murdered by the taliban. a woman who started radio peace in afghanistan was shot in bed in the middle of the night with her toddler a few years ago.

it is not clear who assassinated her, because she was critical of the taliban and the u.s.-backed government. if afghan journalists can courageously cover what is really happening with very real risk to their lives, then american journalists can do far better than what i have been doing so far. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. our next speaker is marjorie, columnist, author, longtime criminal defense attorney. a professor at the thomas jefferson school of law in san diego. she testified before congress in 2008 about the bush administration's torture policy. she testified as an expert witness at military hearings about war, illegality, and the

duty to disobey unlawful orders. her latest book is "the united states and torture." her upcoming book is about drones and targeted killings. marjorie cohen. [applause] >> thank you, jeff, and my fellow panelists. i am delighted to be here with you today. with so many places to get information, all claiming to have the truth, there is no objective truth. during the vietnam war there were three networks. no cable, no internet. every city had a democratic newspaper and a republican newspaper. even if they disagreed, there was a general court belief in perception. until 1968, the media dutifully

served the government's narrative of the war until the tet offensive in 1968. status is when the national liberation front attacked all the major cities and 44 venture capitals and took over control of two thirds of the country of vietnam. right after that was reported, no serious person could believe that the war could be won. walter cronkite went to vietnam and said, this war is a stalemate. he was the most trusted man in news. the antiwar movement led to questioning of the entire society, culture, music, free love, drugs and distribution of power. today, the wars in iraq and afghanistan have been monumental failures by any objective standard. it took years to get a consensus against the iraq war. we have expanded coverage, we have diversified coverage, but so has the other side. with the proliferation of cable tv, the left got more channels and so did the right.

they have become corporate, news has become opinion. analysis analysis has become a cover for opinion. there are big rewards for pundits who are paid by the cable channels. hard reporting, journalism, suffers because it is not as dramatic as taking extreme positions. a reporter covering the war has a harder time creating consensus because society is so polarized. there is such a diversity of opinions on public issues, there is no truth. the political polarization prevents a national consensus on issues of war and peace. we don't have a draft, which made a huge difference in turning public opinion against the vietnam war. the problem is reaching people who don't go on websites or tv or radio. we are preaching to the choir. many on the left don't like to hear criticism of obama, and that is another challenge that we face. [applause]

lawrence o'donnell pointed out that all of the cable news stations combined are watched by only 1% of the viewers. the fraction of viewers watching fox, msnbc and cnn, it is a meaningless number in terms of the politics of the country. rachel maddow can't have the impact of a walter cronkite, because that is 1/3 of 1%. msnbc being roughly 1/3. cronkite would raise issues and congress would hold hearings. that is both positive and negative. pushing a story to get those who care about it and pick it up also galvanizes the opposition. an issue resonates with millions of people who see it on the tv news. now it is gone unless it is covered by everyone. the alternative media has some effect on the corporate media.

torture led to some hearings, but it never became central on the public agenda. drones are becoming a big issue. not because we are illegally killing people in other countries off the battlefield, but because a paper was leaked that indicates the government may kill u.s. citizens on u.s. soil. because the bush administration and now the obama administration, through the corporate media, have been so successful in terrorizing the american public about the so- called threat of terrorism, most people don't care about foreigners being killed. much of the terrorism propaganda is fueled by racism. of the 366 u.s. drone attacks that have killed 3581 people in pakistan since 2002, 316 were launched by the obama administration.

less than 2% of those killed were high-profile taliban militants. most of them were civilians. since 9/11, there have been no official figures on how many people have been killed by drone strikes and other kinds of targeted killing, because of the extreme secrecy. lindsey graham's figure is 4700 people killed by drone strikes. only four of whom were u.s. citizens. for a long time, independent media and antiwar activists criticize the drone war. the bureau of investigative journalism documents civilian casualties. generals like mcchrystal, former diplomats, foreign policy experts are talking about blowback from drones. the inadvisability, the political fallout. the leak of the white paper and rand paul's filibuster focused attention on the killing of u.s.

citizens, not on the killing of other people. the house judiciary committee held hearings, but again, just focused on u.s. citizens, although targeted killings, not just drones. a gallup poll released about two weeks ago showed that 65% of americans think we should use drone strikes in other countries against suspected terrorists. that goes down to 41% of people who favor tags in other countries against u.s. citizens living abroad and down to 25% who favor strikes against suspected terrorists living in the united states. only 13% of the people surveyed believe that we should use drone strikes against u.s. citizens in the united states. when americans think of u.s. citizens, they think of white people. we all know about the hype of

weapons of mass destruction. many of us were covering it at the time. we should not rush to war, there is no reason to. we are seeing a similar kind of hype with the chemical weapons narrative by the syrian government. this may well lead to an attack on syria when we saw obama in israel recently, his big signature victory was getting israel to apologize to turkey for the killing of nine turks in the flotilla. i am wrapping up. in conclusion, two pieces of advice for independent journalists, keep your head down and don't believe what government officials tell you. thank you. [laughter] [applause] >> that is also the advice we

got from the izzy stone. our next panel is is is the award winner and host and executive producer of democracy now, amy goodman. she has built up one of the most important daily newscast in the history of our country. few other sources cover issues of war and peace, human rights, civil liberties, as doggedly as democracy now. she also has a weekly syndicated column. her fifth and latest book, this one with dennis monahan, is "the silenced majority," and will be signing books after this panel out in the exhibit hall. [applause] amy goodman. >> thank you. it is an honor to be here with all of my colleagues.

45 years ago, martin luther king was gunned down. a year to the day before he was killed, april 4, 1967, he spoke at riverside church in new york city. he uttered those words about the united states, that it is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. he was speaking out against the vietnam war. something even his closest inner circle warned him against. he said, you have got the voting rights, the most powerful person on earth on your side, the civil

rights act. you got him to agree with you. why would you alienate him now? dr. king said, this was all a web, his concern about human rights at home and abroad. for the next year, he was increasingly outspoken about war. --e response of the media come from "the new york times" to "time" magazine. calling it propaganda and that him is doing a disservice to his people, to his cause. i think we have to look back 45 years ago and assess where we are today. where is the media today?

when the iraq war began, march 19, 2003, a few weeks before, the organization that jeff cohen co-founded, fair, did a study. of the two weeks around: how will giving his push for the war at the un, february 5 2003. a speech that general powell would later call a stain on his career, that speech was the final nail in the coffin for so many. he had been hesitant about the war. he had a great deal of credibility. he said, yes, the evidence was in, there were weapons of mass destruction. fair did a study of the two weeks around that address and

looked at the four major nightly newscasts. in that two-week time, six weeks before the invasion, these were the agenda setters. this was extremely significant. this was the time when americans are making up their minds about half the population was for the war, half opposed. there were 393 interviews done about more. guess how many were with the antiwar leaders ? maybe 200, 150. three. three of almost 400. that is no longer a mainstream media. that is an extreme media beating that is a for war. disservice to a democratic

society. i really do think that those who are deeply concerned about war, those concerned about the growing inequality in this country, those concerned about climate change, the fate of the planet, are not a fringe minority. not even a silent majority. the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media. we have to take it back. the democracy now team and my colleagues are here filming and interviewing people. it is wonderful to be part of a team of people, and my colleagues in the broader pacifica family. we came into denver a few days ago. we came in to the airport. there were some soldiers there from buckley kicking up a general.-- picking up a general. were waving and the general behind me. i came back and they were in uniform and said to them, you know democracy now? yes, ma'am, they said. they watch eve d