and people, great hooks. [laughter] so, starting right here to my immediate left, a reporter with the "wall street journal," and the chief washington correspondent of "the new york times." tom of national public radio, and in the awesome news, we have, from the u.k., james call ball from the

"guardian." let's just start with the nsa stuff, since it is the big issue right now. can we talk a little bit about how the introduction of the snowden leaks has changed the way we are doing business and how much harder were easier it has been? >> it has cut both ways. i have not been writing much on the snowden documents themselves, but i have been writing on related nsa issues in the midst of all the snowden revelations. i found as many people, less inclined to want to share information. there are probably at least as many at this point who now feel -- i do not know if it is emboldened or they just feel it is an issue that will get more attention and it is worth their while to share what they know with reporters, whether context or additional information and

detail. i think on balance it has led to a greater amount of information that reporters are learning, even beyond the snowden documents. the government is behaving somewhat differently from the way it did. the nsa is setting up a whole task force to deal with the snowden leaks. that is fairly unprecedented. one could argue they have not been as forthcoming as they should. if you are looking at what their baseline was, it was more than it was. i have also found it fascinating the government is self, the itself,the government the director of national has released documents in huge waves. especially in the beginning, and recent ones. we have seen a lot of court opinions from the surveillance court that in a lot of ways were more condemning of nsa practices

than anything noted that out. -- i do not think it cuts one than anything that snowden put out. way or the other. >> i would agree and add that i think there are three different elements of this to think about. the first is that even before the snowden leaks happened him -- happened, i think all of us would say that reporting on these topics has not been easy in washington. i could recite for you all of the statistics about the number of leak investigations underway by this administration, including against many people on this panel, based on stories they wrote. even beyond that, these topics but have all been topics on which the obama administration, i have found, has been less willing to discuss than the bush administration. the bush administration did not exactly win a reputation as a

font of openness. the immediate response to the the immediate response to the the second is that snowden revelations i think was for many of the intelligence agencies to hunker down and not answer any questions. then they discovered in the fall that that was getting them probably into more difficulty than if they actually came out explained some of these programs. what has struck me about the documents mentioned have come out in recent times, it is reasonable to ask the question, did all of these programs need to be classified to begin with? and i do not know the answer to this. had the nsa revealed the collection of metadata programs, bulk would it have truly helped any terror group that was trying to evade it? or could they have want some democratic by an -- or could

some democratic in. particularly in the years after 9/11. the third element is what we have learnt from the documents themselves. many have been very regulatory. some of them have been quite dated. you have to avoid the temptation of looking at a document and assuming that just because you are looking at it now, it represents what events are like today. we are at a point with the documents where two things are going on first, for our general reading public, it has become a blur. there are so many documents out there they cannot quite sort out what is new and what is not. we are at the point where we secondly really have to , supplement them with a form of other reporting to be able to explain them. >> i have found this to be a really difficult story to cover in many ways.

a radio reporter who needs to this applies toa radio reporter who needs to tell people stories and not just sort of write it out and give the opportunity to read the story several times before you get it. these are really complicated issues that we are learning about. from that point of view, it is extremely difficult. i think there actually has then -- has been as many errors in reporting this story as i have seen in a while. i think that is partly because of the difficulty of understanding what it is we are learning and communicating. added to that, i have been covering national security for a number of years. i'm curious how the rest of you feel about this. i do not recall a story where there has been as much polarization as there is in this story.

peter baker, david's colleague at "the times," had a piece over the weekend. saying he had a friend in silicon valley saying 90 but none of the people in his tech company were convinced edward snowden was a whistleblower and that every single person you talked to felt edward snowden was a traitor. i think we have seen this very deep polarization throughout the way we have reacted to these disclosures. it is not that we should shy away from stories where there is a polarization of opinion, but, in this case, we, as a news organization, "the guardian" and "the post," have big players in

this story. there has been a lot of -- it has been a situation where you have to almost decide what kind of posture you will take, approaching these disclosures. in approaching these disclosures. for all those reasons -- none of these are issues we should be afraid of dealing with. but it is a really complicated story to report. >> it is easy to understand it if you are one of to the the outlets with actual access to the documents. we have been doing the primary reporting. initially, there is the impression that edward snowden was turning over two or three at the time. actually, much more his approach was to trust reporters as opposed to various other places. to actually find out themselves and decide for themselves what

is of interest and how to structure it. that is an extraordinary challenge. very few of them were here with this one document. they went out in the first week or two. the verizon document now seems like an extraordinarily simple story compared to some of the ones that have more on cybersecurity we talked about, where you are trying to build up this impression. you start to see very clear signs that there were deliberate efforts not to improve security but keep it week. and the nsa having enough confidence they could take it back to other people and would keep the vulnerabilities there. that starts with you seeing a few documents touching on dozens more and dozens more. what happens is you have diplomaticho are

correspondence who are very good correspondents who are very good at the international relations aspect. you have reporters with a more technical background. trying to separate men -- separate which -- some reporters look at this -- you're not looking at a guide. it is not a tutorial. everyone else knows all the lingo. you have a entrance which means absolutely nothing to any sane human being, but perfectly normal to anyone who knows anything about national security. i think, especially on cybersecurity, on all sorts of intelligence issues, it has been a sort of decade or more where we need more security or more spending, more powers, and what id is give a chance to

get this public debate. america has seen it quite well, britain, not so much. as you may have noticed, we had a few issues over there. that is fairly commendable. whatever your stance, though debate can be quite constructive. an alarming moment, even if you are not someone who believes snowden is a whistleblower, as i do, there was a very strange moment where the head of mis and my five head of mi5 was the head of asked to assess the chances of anyone like snowden in the human

intelligence services and he dismissed it. as if it could not happen. it already had. there are a lot of documents amongst this material. the fact that he seemed to consider this a one-off event should terrify you. he evidently did not understand the question, let alone the risk. so i think whatever you think should be done, it is clear there are a lot of questions to still ask. >> it seems like a hallmark of cybersecurity reporting over the years has been the desire by government agencies and outside contractors to always heighten the risk. the sky is always about the -- is always about to fall. it is amazing how every minute of every day, the sky is always about to fall. did these documents change that at all? you talked about a high-ranking intelligence official lowballing risks.

have we finally seen the end of the uncertainty and doubt. has this changed at all? >> do you mean in terms of hyping the cyber threat itself? like the question earlier about a big meltdown or something? >> yes. >> it seems like the insider threat is higher than estimated. the outsider threat is lower than that. maybe making investment is not the wisest thing one could do. the concern, and this is really -- and this is the one i would hear particularly from government types, is not so much it was high risk but that so many of these cyber attacks could be high consequence. it was pretty high consequence.

in a way, the snowden revelations show how one individual, this is an asymmetric challenge. you don't need a lot of examples to show that it is a good deal. you only need one. the security experts i would talk to, who point to traditional threats, is not so much saying the organizations with the greatest capability like china and russia will do it, but more that there is a black market out there and are there is only a matter of time before things get out of hand and you have a reasonable risk of getting into the hands of someone who wants to do something bad.

insider threat poses higher risk. >> the only point i would make is we now know one of the recent u.s. government is so concerned about the infrastructure attacking the united states is that these documents underscore what we knew before the document came out, which is it is not all that difficult to do some of these things elsewhere. that underscores their understanding of the risk to the u.s. >> for me, a big revelation had nothing to do with the snowden disclosure. the story last week of the a merger and reading the bottom line analysis of the revenue projections and stock price projections for this company, i something thats was important for me to take into account because it has been a really important source of information to us about the threat out there. when you read about how much money they are making,

convincing companies and organizations they are under threat and then proposing ways for them to mitigate that threat, it makes us, as reporters, want to think twice about the issue about hyping the threat. there are some really big financial stakes involved in this debate. >> that touches on the core issue. as reporters in this particular sphere, almost all of the incentives are with people to hype up the threat. firstly, no one in defense wants to say this is very you do not low risk and quite safe. you do not know what will happen in the next 12 months. also, you are trying to defend a large budget and budgets often which do not have the same degree of accountability as other areas. you want to stress the dangers. there is a huge industry struggling with defense budgets

which are not going up like they used to and security budgets not going up like they used to. cyber is a nice little area which is still a growth area and still has potential. if you read the report of big defense companies, this is where they are hoping to keep growth or stall shrinking. so, look at the lobbying money spent in this town on cyber in the last five years. it has gone up spectacularly. you are talking far-off. -- you're talking four or five fold. the rate of growth is huge. not much money in saying -- hang there is on and let's calm down for a bit. there is not money in that. few people will push on the civil liberties front. not many people are going, hang on, you know, we are looking to try to fix deficit. should we really be spending this much money on cyber?

how do we judge what a win is like? how much responsibility should the federal government be taking? should we leave it more to banks and try to speculate tried to spread the light internationally? there is not a boring common sense floppy in the middle of this going, hang on, you know, maybe it is not that bad. my position is, maybe we have to be more skeptical in the cyber fields than in the rest of it. that is always if you say, i going to be difficult for journalists. have got a great story about terrible threats, you're much more likely than if you go, you should tell people to chill out. it does not get on the front quite so often. >> on the inversion of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is that you have the nsa and other operations saying, the core cryptographic algorithms are actually totally secure. we did not really undermine them, do not worry.

the use documents do not say what they mean. in a way that usually, these are the guys saying the sky is about to fall, and now they are saying it is totally fine. i found that interesting. i will ask one semi-related question and then i want to open it up to the audience. this is like, are these documents, are they actually just a shiny object we are chasing and being distracted from real, bigger issues in this space, or, is the big issue itself the nsa, how vast its spying network is? >> to me, i feel like there has been a story that has gotten less attention. i referenced it earlier when i talked about the documents released by the director of national intelligence that i actually think there is quite a lot of questions to be asked about the nsa's overall competency. they seem to mismanage all of the programs.

so it is a weird hubble story -- double story that it is omnipotent, but also incompetent. i do not know what makes a civil libertarian feel better. i think it is more of a nuanced story than that they are taking everything. they are not exactly doing that. what we have seen is when they were attempting to do the phone call records, they claimed to have all of these records and they did not understand their own program well enough to enforce the rules they promised the court they would. we saw that with the internet metadata collection. even in tapping the internet backbone. all of a sudden, they are scooping up tens of thousands of domestic communications that this war to the court that they wouldn't. -- that they swore to the court

that they wouldn't. to me, it has raised a lot of questions of considering that so many of these programs perpetuated themselves for a decade, as these technologies change, how much more coloring outside the lines does the nsa find itself doing just by accident and the fact it does not necessarily understand the implications of changes in technology, and what sort of bearing does that have on all of the other programs we do not know about? >> i am struck by two elements of this, to go to the question of how effective the programs are. if you look at one of the programs they abandoned in 2011, which was the e-mail metadata program, they were looking at roughly one percent of all of the e-mails in the united states, a lot of e-mails. ultimately, they dropped the program in part because of critiques set up internally but in part because they were not getting much out of it. then you go to the presidential advisory committee report that came out a week before christmas, and they were a lot less convinced about what the metadata program had actually

yielded in the way of preventing terrorist attacks that you would get if you were just listening to the congressional testimony of the generals. so even if you consider them to be highly competent and highly good at what they do, and i think, for some of these programs, probably better than any other intelligence agency we have seen around the world, there is still a reasonable question, is the amount of time, effort, money, and, in this case, diplomatic and business cost of this, worth what you're getting out of it? >> i can say the amount of time i have spent chasing nsa surveillance stories over the last six months has been vastly in excess of what i would've preferred to spend my time reporting on. does that mean it is a shiny object that does not warrant the attention we're getting, i am not sure.

i think what the review group said about the effectiveness of these programs is extremely important given that michael, 's the former deputy director of the cia, was on that. there is real reason to question some of the more extreme claims made by the generals in this regard. i do think however that these disclosures raised a couple of issues that are hugely important and really warrants all of the attention they have gotten. it is not just the trade-off between national security and civil liberties, a debate we have been having for many years. it is the trade-off between the advantages of protecting the good guys versus going after bad guys.

we have seen the trade-off come out really clearly in these documents. the way the nsa has undermined cybersecurity and we have learned a lot about the vulnerability market in the last few months and the way nsa has actually held onto vulnerabilities for work purposes, versus helplessness of the homeland security, which you get completely in the dark all the time about what kinds of capabilities the country has, it really does seem to correct something peter and alan mentioned earlier, all of the priority in this government has in on offense of cyber securities to the expense of -- has been on offenses

cybersecurity's to the expense of cyber defense capabilities. it is a hugely important issue. that has really been revealed as a result of some of these disclosures. >> maybe the most extraordinary competence issue, foreign policy, a brilliant tale from an anonymous cia official internally promoting the next data program and bring them in a vast, printed out network diagram talking about how you could use it to find keynotes and people keeping different suspects in contact. he punched out a couple of things where hundreds of people had been contacting this number and saying, look, we would like to identify these. the cia understates, after he goes -- we just decided back here to take a look at that number. it was a pizza parlor. [laughter] which a lot of people call. this is, the alexander, one of the more technologically nerd-

ish, because he knows what he is talking about, relatively speaking, intelligence officials, and his big case completely failed. it is just one of those concerning fragments you get. it makes you wonder the extent to which these large scale trolls that we really felt a struggle to see much evidence in terms of resolve to justify, how to -- distracted from other missions. the obvious threat to cybersecurity, a more subtle one, may be worth -- to do a combination of intelligence and security coming together and being run by the same agency and the same people. sometimes i can if you are have some good things. if you are fitting in bits of

the backbone of the internet, you can see traffic sometimes. it can help you get an early warning on denial of service attacks. that kind of stuff. but if you are trying to persuade companies to let you in to their systems to help defend them, if you're trying to encourage foreign governments to cooperate with you on security and so on, while also using cybersecurity as a front for intelligence operations, you are undermining trust in your companies, in your agencies, in all of the defensive steps you could take. that kind of overreach is not easily fixed. that is all about your relationships with the tech sector, with your allies, with everyone. so, when will the u.k. government, german government, other people who should be working and cooperating, foreign banks, the world bank, the u.n.,

the eu, when will they take advice from the u.s. security intelligence agency on cybersecurity again? it will not happen soon. that leaves us all in a bit of a mess. the issues where there are not even just the technical side, it is the political mess that has been made of combining intelligence and security. >> that is a really good point. people do not quite understand, because i think the way the internet moves because of a series of handshake agreements, there is not a lot of formal documents and contracts that guarantee my traffic could make its way to japan or what have you. it is just a series of trust arrangements. if you undermined those, you undermine the core of the internet itself. >> which is why this may be the first scandal in modern history that has a bigger business the

fact that it does a diplomatic affect. -- that has a bigger business affect than it does a diplomatic affect >> right. i will open questions up to the audience. since this is peter and allen's book coming out party, i want to give them the privilege of asking the first question. >> thanks. hi. i am co-author of a new book, which you can find more about. what i love about the structure of it is the first panel tom a we tried to wrestle with what everyone needs to know. you have been exploring how we report it and talk about it. i wanted to first thank all of you for coming. i really deeply appreciated. i want to pull that thread a little further. how do you see news organizations? you are from different types, newspaper and radio and etc. how do you see them organizing around the topic of reporting on cybersecurity questions in the future? do you see that evolving? second, the training for journalists themselves. you talked about the technical

side of reporting on these stories. one of the interesting things to me is that news outlets have been among the most notable targets of cyber security threats, from state organizations, certain large power that shall not be named, to recently syrian electronic army, which is having a lot of not an army, but which has been fun with different news outlets from noteworthy ones to the onion. how do you see the training for journalism evolving on this as well as the organization? >> i tend to find especially with british journalists, journalists do not like computers and math. to involve both. it is a bit of a team effort. journalists have to start taking

it seriously. we have talked about source protection since the dawn of everything. it is the most tedious truth among the procession -- the profession that you would go to prison rather than reveal a source and so on. now, you could very easily reveal a source just because you are rubbish at computers or your gmail password is 123456. we have to get better at that and take it seriously. there is a consensus. part of what else we have to do, start making encryption technology, secure technology, and source protection technology usable by regular humans. a lot of the systems are very complicated, even if you think, personally, that they are important. what you tend to find, however

brilliant someone is at computer security, if you look at what goes wrong, with most things, it is not often that someone did not have the right system. it is that, at three clock in the morning, when you have been awake for 24 hours, the servers that are meant to hold are not working, you give up and send it e-mail, or you cannot face the barrier, every time you have to get in touch with someone doing what you have to do, the technology has to get easier and has to start to be made with regular, normal, fallible human beings in mind. we also have to learn to prioritize. if you get on my twitter account, you will embarrass me. but you will not do much more. if you get my e-mail account, you might find a couple of low level gossip. you will not completely screw me if you get in either. i have got all of the things you

should do. but i do not lose sleep about the idea of people getting in there. we learn what to protect and what not to. it is all about team approaches. if you have a cybersecurity reporter, i can see why in the last few years, to get people to understand broader things and get them to work together. to understand politics. journalists are much better when we work in teams. >> we just learned today we will factor in our own system, which i would say is a direct result of the lessons we learned over the last two months. until recently, almost all of my collaboration as a reporter was with the foreign and washington desk. since i have been covering the

-- covering this story with the technology reporters, i have become dependent on them to help me figure stuff out and working on, we are working on a series now about the arms race, the digital arms race between the nsa and the tech companies. i am completely dependent when it comes time to talking about encryption security measures. i really depend on technology people at npr to help me with this. for us, just in our own case, it has really opened up a whole new area of collaboration. really not there before. >> peter was right that "the times" has been the target of at

least two different big groups. a chinese group came in and lived in our computer systems for several months back in 2012. we think searching for the sources of stories about how the prime minister of china passes family got so wealthy while he was prime minister. they did a remarkable job finding their way around a of computer system that has stymied me for decades. [laughter] i was impressed. and then we have the syrian electronic army, less sophisticated, come in and attack. one day last summer, they actually managed to close down the website for a good part of the day. the paper came up with an innovative response to take all the stores we wrote that they and and printed them on paper and then drove around different parts of the country and drop them. remarkable technological approach. that was gutenberg's best day. in decades. but, within the paper itself, we are pretty accustomed to having

collaborations that move the -- that move between the technology and foreign policy. and domestic policy side. i worked for years with no in our science department and we did the nuclear proliferation stories together and worked for years with one of our best silicon valley reporters, and we did much of the early games reporting that way. but it is always a challenge internally because you have to cross your craddick barriers -- and you have to cross bureau craddick -- bureaucratic barriers within a news organization. i think more and more news organizations have discovered the necessity of that. it is no longer really a choice. if you tried to do an analogy to a previous era, it would not have made sense in the 1940's and 1950's to just have a summary and reporter or just have a reporter covering nuclear weapons when they were coming out.

ultimately, while you wrote a lot about those, that had to get integrated into a broader national strategy. the argument all of us have been making internally, i suspect, is that this reporting more than anything needs to be put into a broader national strategy. i think snowden has helped with that. you made the point that in britain it has helped -- been , hard to get in much of the debate. i thought after many of the revelations about the u.s. participation in developing cyber weapons, there would be a kind of debate in the u.s. about cyber weapons that there was about drones. but that has taken longer to generate. these things are hard to predict. >> in terms of how the journal >> handles cybersecurity, i witnessed that evolution because have sort of i came to the journal in 2007 and had been

covering nsa quite a bit when i was at the baltimore sun. i had just done a larger story on this effort we later learned was the comprehensive national cyber security initiative. i spent a year trying to get our editors to care at all saying, who is being hurt and does it involve people? find me the company. bring me examples and the this company that admits to being hacked and is 2008. so, somehow in 2009, we were able to shake loose a few stories that got our editors attention. they were one over. we did too good of a job. all of a sudden, and i cover intelligence it is not the whole , thing. i have an internal lobbying campaign thinking this is a cool set of stories to do.

it is kind of interesting. in 2009, i was supposed to do every hacking thing ever. over time, i think it started over time, i think it started in addition to my regular job. more with the banking and financial reporters, that they realized this was a story -- that their companies really cared about. little by little over the last few years, different reporters responsible for different sectors, energy and what have you, have taken their own interest in it and will work together when it is relevant or not. but the journal was a little late to the party in that it was only last year that we actually started a dedicated cybersecurity reporter, which is not necessarily just to make sure that cyber is this person's problem, but almost to make sure they could traffic copy issues -- traffic cop those issues and this is someone who is in d.c. and is now based out in san francisco. especially from the corporate side, recognizing this is at

least as much a corporate story as it is a national security story. the way we break it down at this point, i handle some but not all the national security stuff. we all work with our colleagues. in terms of cybersecurity, the journal was also hacked. reporting that story was quite an interesting phenomenon, probably different from what david probably experienced. when his story went up i heard from my editor, it is 10:00 at night, you do not need to do anything with it yet and this may be our own problem to report. i was waiting for someone to call me and explain it. nothing. the next morning, i showed up in the office and said, ok, what are we doing? and they said you could report the story like any other hack. the journal was not quite so forthcoming. it took until 4:00 in the afternoon the next day to get

this in penetrable statement from our own company that admitted we had been hacked. th claim they need to wait until all of the new security procedures were put in place before they spoke about it. it was the kind of thing where but even after that, we have to call our own or print -- we have to call our own corporate communications people and have them give us the assurance that nobody is moving around our systems. what i learned from my experience reporting that particular story, my company was not necessarily going to tell me who had been hacked. reporters in our beijing bureau only heard on the down low that they had been hacked. obviously, it can happen to us. we take precautions but operate under the assumption it could certainly happen to you. >> that is an amazing story. from an editor's point of view,

other technical issues have as cybersecurity and become more important to general reporting, there has been a training of reporters and reporters that maybe came up in clinical, that -- they came up in a political mill you that were ok with he said,- with he said she and there were no real right answers, it is like, actually, there are right and wrong answers when it comes to technology. there are things that technology cannot do. i think of one reporter in particular that took a year and a half for me to eat that out of him. that out of him. it was a process. now he knows. we are all better for it. >> spoken like a true editor. >> management well. [laughter] >> all of his successes are of course attributable to meet.

-- to me. let's start in the back there. >> retired ceo of publishing and physics. you talked a little bit about the controversy, the trade-off between intelligence and civil liberties. there is also another one that has not been mentioned as much. that is trade-off for intelligence and democracy. there such a thing as a black budget that not many of us know set,ig it is, how it is who makes decisions, and what is democracy if a large fraction of our national budget is made without public debate and public knowledge? doesn't that issue come to the fore with all of the funding for doinga and what they are and congress has decided? , who has decided whether to fund this? what happened to the appropriations process? >> that is a good question. who wants to take it? >> i will take a first shot. even before snowden happened,

there was the beginning of some revelations about the size of the intelligence budget. the snowden regulations and then -- the snowden revelations themselves budget included a lot more budget numbers during it turned out a lot of the budget numbers were wrong. that actually tells you something about why you have got to be careful about some of these documents. there was one budget document we looked at that i think the post had written about fairly extensively. it indicated 231 offenses cyber -- 230 one offenses cyber attacks in 2011, was that it? >> the approaching -- to appropriation of 2013 >> right. came from. it turned out later on the document had been put together by a budget here who did not know much about what a cyber attack is like. we discovered most of those were not what people on this stage would call offenses cyber

-- would call offenses cyber attacks. you have two layers of problems. one is the secrecy around the budgets themselves. the second is a definitional one that would enable us to understand how much is being spent in a lot of areas where even in the u.s. government, there is argument about how you would define it. >> i think it epitomizes a broad problem. i worked on the state department cables, wiki leaks released those. there were some quite serious and quite interesting public interest stories and those. a lot of what you read in those cables, you would think these are pretty good public servants. one or two of them could write more nicely than i can. a lot of privacy policy gulls were more or less in public. you think, about two thirds of the president's job is probably

foreign policy and military policy. the vast majority is kept secret. the thing that struck me when we were going through these cables was what is going on with the reflexive secrecy. this is the bulk of what the administration is doing and a lot of it is fairly innocuous. the same is with these intelligence budgets. you read the black budget, which was a budget appropriation document and a fairly significant chunk of it was released. if you read that, it is very top line. quite broad. there is a lot of stuff in that that could be made public. it is not particularly useful information. it might also make you think, should we be spending $500 million on this ticket listing? if nothing else, the democratic issue, are we not also possibly wasting a lot of money that we

could do something better with? when you have that degree of secrecy, you do get massive democratic issues that touch into a lot. you are right. >> let's go here in the second row. >> thank you. can any of you envision a scenario in which the united states government gets custody of snowden on american soil? that could be an embassy in another country. >> anything is possible. we have not -- i do not know a lot about snowden since i do not know we know a lot of the administration's calculations except for the fact they have not been amenable to the notion.

of clemency. one interesting thing we will see in the coming years, is whether or not that issue gains political momentum and becomes a real subject of public discourse, or whether that has played itself out. i think that is where he ends up. maybe as much of -- as a legal decision as apolitical one. >> also when president putin decides it is no longer in his interest to have snowden as a guest of the state, you could imagine him being placed on their plane someplace and landing somewhere he does not want to land there it >> he has only got permission to be there for one year. it is not necessarily an issue that will be up to snowden and his lawyers. >> i wonder whether the likelihood of people fleeing the country when they make these kinds of things rather than sort of doing what happened with the pentagon papers with daniel ellsberg and all that. you wonder if perhaps the pretrial treatment of money has manning has made

it more difficult to convince people to stay in the country and trust that the justice system will give them a hearing to decide if they are a whistleblower or a traitor. one view is that a really quite long sentence, given that everyone acknowledges there are no proven harm coming to anyone as a result. i am wondering whether it makes it likely in the future whether the justice system will be able to make these decisions and maybe that was a mistake. >> over here. >> thank you. you have talked a lot about the nsa. getting to your point about the difference between intelligence and whatnot. this morning, i heard only about 10 minutes. i was driving.

but richard clarke described the fact that what they are doing with the nsa review panel was, number one, we had been asked to take a look at what intelligence we actually need. do second, we had been asked to look at how transparent we can be in getting the intelligence in a way that matches our democratic values in a democratic society. i did not hear much more. i really wonder given all we have talked about here, with the nsa review panel, are we on the right track? or is this going to deviate? maybe i would have found out if i heard the rest of the show. i look forward to hearing your views. >> i actually think that that review panel -- it is a fascinating report. one of the things we talk about. it is somebody called in and

said the report was very glib. i responded, you appreciate one written in clear language. and easy to understand. that was a really important report. i think dick clark and mike and the others, i think they really did make an effort to be nuanced about this and to be sympathetic to all of the concerns raised, but also to a national security establishment from which they themselves come. i think that was a very interesting report that really set the stage quite properly for precisely the kind of legislative and executive branch action that is probably forthcoming now. >> one of the most interesting things about the report is that thegroup was and so much in beginning as being a hand-picked panel by the administration and everyone looked at the membership and said they are allies of the administration.

asked government guys and i remember hearing rumblings in october or so that these guys were taking a broad look at an essay structure and i am thinking, is that really their mandate? i started to hear some suggesting they might actually little rumblings along the way suggesting they might actually make recommendations that would get noticed. i do not know whether or not that played a role, but it seems like they took it quite seriously. my understanding was the individual members of that panel were spending multiple days of the week of their own time on the panel during that time. it does seem to have produced something that will really drive a debate and a policy discussion. >> one of the things said this morning is that we are in a time of peace right now. this is really an important opportunity for us to think about what we do not want to happen in this future, the schema kind of fiasco we have seen with the nsa. is the time to come up with

this roadblocks to make sure we some do not have these kinds of abuses in the future. >> i think the word, abuses, is a central one here. the group was not really asked to come up with the answer to the question of what is legal. the courts in the past couple of weeks, we have seen court decisions on all sides of this. eventually, you suspect somebody will end up in the hands of the supreme court. instead, the question the president asked them to answer was, do we have programs here we are doing just because we can, instead of because we really need them, because we should do them. that is a very different question. then you get into a cost-benefit analysis, which is if the amount of intelligence you are gleaning from this useful and worth it given the diplomatic cost to confidence in american

companies, whether it is apple or google or server manufacturers. thirdly, is it useful to us diplomatically? it has done this kind of damage to our relationships with germany and mexico and brazil, and who knows who else is on the list, with things that may be disclosed in the future, you have to then ask yourself a question, is what you are learning about the internal workings of the mexican government or the brazilian government, or the german government, actually worth it for the cost of revelation? the most remarkable thing i learned in the course of this is that while the cia asked that question very often about covert programs, if it got revealed, would the damage done be worth it, in the case of the nsa, because they did not believe their programs would be revealed, i do not think they asked the question very often. >> we have time for one last question. >> speaking about wiki leaks, the counterpoint was zuckerberg, facebook, social media.

is there a counterpoint? it is polarized, but is there a technological trend that might say the internet and cybersecurity has a positive future, and we do not have to worry about vulnerabilities, state all the way down to the individual, is there a counterpoint to this discussion? something that says a positive there is future for technology on the internet? >> twitter's ipo? [laughter] >> it will all align a response. the governance issue is a big one for the next year. almost any development on it would be negative for internet freedom in areas where it is really important. one of the important --

unfortunate things is the u.s. government has funded some very good programs, but there is no trust for them now andfor them, and it will not be taken seriously outside. i think, speaking as someone who is not american, as well, there is a perception that it is a serious international institution and it leads and it leans american. the actual architecture of the internet -- 90% of traffic tends to jurors the country. the attitude the government and intelligence acs have taken to -- intelligence agencies have taken to that is essentially, that is the advantage of it. it is no longer a given. u.s. dominance of the internet is no longer a given. something will have to give

there. try to work out how to concede that there is something that protects it is good about the internet. i think it is all about the response of it very difficult go in a bad direction. i think it would be a shame if the results of the exposure of the u.s. abusing its position of influence over the internet allows other states to start abusing newfound powers over the internet. that is the exact opposite to what you want very but it is not a given yet. and that is to a large degree of ont happens next depending the u.s. response. >> think we're out of time. let's give a hand to our panelists. [applause] alan and peter will be signing books in the next room over here. thank you everybody for coming.

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [indiscernible] >> a couple of live events to tell you about this morning. on c-span two, the council on foreign relations hosted a discussion about potential global crises in 2014 at 830 eastern. republican senator lisa murkowski speaks at the brookings institution about the

implications of energy trade and the economy and national security. >> in a few moments, today's headlines and your calls. this morningma will be joined by people whose unemployment benefits have ended as he urges congress to extend long-term unemployment benefits. that is at 11:40 am eastern. at one, army chief of staff speaks at the national press club about the future of the army. the senate committee -- the senate judiciary subcommittee speaks about the civil war in syria. and in about 45 minutes the president of the american principles project, francis cannon, looks at the congressional priorities for social conservatives. they discussion of federal investment in green technology companies with danny weiss of

the center for american progress. and later, a discussion of gains by al qaeda and government groups in iraq and the u.s. agreement to assist without sending troops. we are joined by seth jones of the rand corporation. host: good morning. if the senate meets at 10 a clock a.m. this morning. they are set to vote on whether to end the initiative that .xtends emergency unemployment at the house returns today at 2:00 p.m. and will mark the second session of the 113th congress. discussing the supreme court move on monday to halt same-sex marriages in utah. we want to hear your opinion on the ofci