weren't going to use these documents as a fisher exercise. there wasn't going to be a team -- with the wikileaks documents, which are much less sensitive, much lower level, we would bring in, you know, subject specialist journalists and they could have a search and -- and country specialists. >> country specialists. this is a very different sort of thing. you don't want to be using national security material to -- you want to use it to confine to the scope of the nature of the surveillance in front of you. we have had all sorts of conversations about how to build boundaries about what we were -- we would report and then conversations about how best to do that practically. do you put a small team in for two weeks, get them to whittle down a short list of stories. >> that is what we did. and that's what we did in wikileaks too. in both cases, we worked closely with "the guardian", a very small group of editors and

reporters who worked together, not in the middle of the news room. but on a floor, remote from anybody else. exclusively went through the documents. and after that long process, then moved to the next phase which is trying to put them in some kind of context, to start reporting. in our case i thought, some of what we brought to the table, you know, were our reporters in silicon valley who had very good sources on all the companies that "the guardian" could see, this was a source of controversy within the companies themselves. they had been required to cooperate with the government but whether it was right to or not became a very live debate. we could add reporting fire

power on that type of thing as well as inside the u.s. government and in the intelligence community. >> that's a terrific, i think almost sort of textual kind of background. you almost file like it was like to be in those rooms. i want to bring in david and then caas on these legal issues and the response, if you like, with the legal minds in the overnment. david, to you first. you've been on the inside of these stories. is something changing? obviously the scales of stories have changed. what are the challenges legally and where does the first amendment fit into this? >> it is a bit of a conundrum because in this country, as was mentioned in the opening segments, we don't have an official secrets act. we don't have clear laws about -- and you can argue it's a very good thing we don't.

but on one hand, the criminal liability, what we have primarily is an espionage act that was written during world war ii. >> 1917. >> 1917. it wasn't intended to cover the kind of disclosures that we're talking about, through the press, to the public. it was to get spies. and for a long time it was thought that that's all it dealt with. that started to change. and in the 1980's, for the first time a source, not a reporter, but a source was prosecuted for leaking information to the press. it was a navy employee who was working as kind of a freelancer for a magazine in london, a defense magazine, with the

knowledge of the navy. and the condition was that he could write for them as long as he didn't disclose classified information. and then at some point, as he was negotiating full-time job to go work there, he secretly provided to the editor some highly classified spy photos that were considered very sensitive at the time because it disclosed to the soviet union the capabilities of our satellite cameras or our aerial cameras. and so he was prosecuted criminally. and there was a big debate at the time about whether the espionage act was intended to apply to this type of disclosure, not to a foreign government, but to a news organization. and he attempted to defend the claim that the law doesn't apply to this kind of disclosure. and his conviction was upheld. but in a kind of interesting opinion, he was raising a essentially a public interest, his first amendment defense, in part, he said, i did this to a journalist, not to a foreign government. there's a public interest here. that was rejected but it was tied to the facts of the case. the court said, he was being paid for. this he knew what he was doing was wrong. he took off the classification before he turned it over. he provided it to them secretly. the way they linked him up was

through fingerprints, the old-fashioned way. so they said because of the bad intent and the knowledge of the arm that it would cause, it was not a problem under the first amendment to apply the espionage act to him. but two of the judges who decided that, two out of the three, said, if you make the same arguments against the press, we think there would be real first amendment questions ere and it would raise different concerns. so on the one hand we have this very vague law and on the other hand we have this notion that the press is different, that there are first amendment rights. a long line of cases that say that you can't prosecute the press, you can't punish them for publishing true newsworthy information. that's kind of a settled principle in many areas. but it's not an absolute right, as we learned in a case a few years ago. there's a balance that has to be

done, even with truly newsworthy information. and we don't know how the court will deal with that when the balance is the public's right to know something versus a national security interest. never been decided. so we don't know what the risks are. there is a real risk. because what the espionage act says is that it is a violation, a criminal violation of the law for a person who has unauthorized access, a reporter, if you get national defense information, it's not even classified information, if you have possession of it, the mere possession, the failure to return it to the government, or the disclosure of that can lead to criminal violation, if it is reasonable to believe that the disclosure could harm the united states. so it's a very broad law. the government takes the position it doesn't require an intent to harm, it doesn't even require actual harm. if the document on its face could reasonably be understood to possibly provide harm, and in fact, a document shouldn't be classified unless it meets that standard, so you know that if

you have a classified document, at least in theory, the mere possession of it is a violation of the law. so it becomes sort of a tricky situation to advise a reporter or a journalist how to handle that. ut on the other hand, that's the bad news. the good news is, since 1917 there has never been, almost 100 years, there has never been a prosecution of a journalist. we have a very strong tradition in this country of protecting the press. and so there is this uncertainty that that's the little dance we do. so dealing with the situation like this of course, you want to limit the number of people who have access to this so you're not putting people at risk and the basic advice is, if you're going to publish this information, it should be so important that the american people have a right to know and

that could you convince a judge, if you had to, that this was something the public needed to know. but it's still an unresolved question whether that even is defense. the government has taken the position there's no first amendment defense to this law and no public interest defense. it's a gray area. >> i want to come back to that in a minute. first of all, let's bring cass in. in august, your approach of having to review this for one of the review panels, can you talk a little bit about how you set out to do that and what you looked at before we get into this? >> great. so, we were constituted in late august and it was a diverse group with one of the leading first amendment scholars, he's associated with the american civil liberties union, jeff stone.

a prize-winning book on free speech, of which he's one of the nation's strongest advocates. we also have one of the leading, maybe the leading privacy expert in the united states, a guy named peter swyer, who was the privacy person in the clinton administration. a long standing person in the c.i.a. who had been acting director in the c.i.a. with hree decades of experience there. he also is strongly committed to a free press and civil liberty. and richard clark, who is counterterrorism specialist, who has very strong convictions about freedom of speech and privacy as well. and then a regulatory guy with some constitutional background, yours truly. so the first thing we really decided to do was to try to learn as much as we could from people in the country.

so we did something quite unusual which is we asked for a public comment process in which we asked people, basically all over the world, made a global request for comments, and we got hundreds. and while some of them, as i recall, had to do with people wanting to sell us pencils and paper, which we already had pencils and paper, but most of them were substantive and about the issues at hand. every word was read and they were incredibly valuable. we also had meetings, extensive eetings, with people all over, including people who are specialists in privacy and civil liberties, the rights of journalists, got a lot of information from that. it made an impact on our report. we ended up endorsing four principles and i won't do them in exact order because i think the first one i'm going to mention is maybe one that's most

salient today. which is, there's a lot of talk about balancing, about balancing national security against privacy. we think in important respects that's misleading and actually harmful. there are some things that just don't count in the balance. so if there's an effort to suppress dissent, to go after people because of their religious convictions, to target people because of their political beliefs, to go after people because of their gender or ethnicity, that's not part of legitimate balance, that's just off limits. very important to identify a set of impermissible reasons for surveillance or anything like surveillance. and we say in the report that that is a foundational principle that applies inside and outside our territorial boundaries. so the first idea is the limits of the balances metaphors, a way of approaching these issues.

the second is by i think a happy coincidence of language. the word security actually has at least two meanings. two which are crucial here. and they both have a latin root which means free from danger, safe. and that entails both not being blown up or at risk of being blown up and also feeling that your persons, papers, affects, etc., are safe from government intrusion. our view is that these two forms of security, which have the same linguistic root, can both be safeguarded and it's a big mistake to think that in a free society one can be pursued at the expense of another. one thing we're fighting for when we protect the national security is the other form of security and it shouldn't be relegated to second-class citizenship. the third idea is that there are multiple risks involved that surveillance calls up. and it's a big error to think about only one. so national security risks are one. and they're very important to consider and they're part of the mix.

but risk to journalistic freedom re also one. and that has to be considered. risks to our relations with foreign countries, including those who are friendly with us or we're trying to cooperate, that's another. economic and democratic risks that cut across territorial boundaries, that's another set of risks that might cut in a different direction from the national security risk in terms of what policies to adopt. and of course risks to privacy which are a central feature of the overall calculus. the ideas we're dealing with, risk management and the risks that involve operate along a number of different dimensions. the fourth and final principle has to do with the need consistently to focus on the consequences of what government policies are. not only before the fact, but in an ongoing way. so if it's the case that you have some policies that were adopted, let's suppose, in the aftermath of 9/11, or a year or two before 9/11, to decide in a way that reflects -- the best practices of newspapers and businesses, which is to re-investigate your practices to see what actually are they doing to people? so you may have practices that at one point were thought necessary to protect national security, but it turns out they're really not doing much on that, but they are scaring people or they are chilling system of free expression.

that has to be known and subject to continuing scrutiny, not just by the intelligence community, as important as it is to the scrutiny, but by a range of actors who include people who aren't maybe principally concerned with national security ut who have privacy or civil liberties as their mission or internet freedom as their mission. that last principle, that is balancing the human consequences, keeping your eye insistently on that ball, not only when you adopt the policies, but while you reassess hem, has institutional implications. e suggest important changes in

the foreign intelligence urveillance court and also important changes in the structure of the executive branch where just to give one example we say there should be a designated official in the white house who has privacy and civil liberties as his charge. to have that person in the room, having a convening function and having a presence, can help ensure both that risk management operates along the full range of dimensions, and can also ensure the kind of continuing scrutiny that a free society needs. >> i can just ask at that point, though, the recommendations i think probably went further than some people were expecting you to go. certainly not as far as other people wanted you to go. so, for instance, on metadata storage. you said it should go to third party or private kind of companies. it shouldn't be kept by the government. one of the other review panels had a slight different review which is that it couldn't be kept full-stop. i wonder why you'd stop short on hat? >> to state our recommendation, we believe that the meta data, that is who the phone numbers

are from, and -- who's calling whom and when, the government shouldn't be holding that data. in a free society, if we're engaged in a risk management exercise, there are undue risks to privacy and civil liberty with the government holding that data. we think that the information should be held privately, which has a safeguard against the risks of abuse which in american history have not been absent. not in the recent past, not in the last years, but under president nixon and president johnson there were risks from surveillance. and before. so we don't urge that the information should suddenly be held by the phone companies.

that's not what we urge. the phone companies have that information. they hold it for consumer protection reasons, in large art. hey hold it because they don't want to be billing you for stuff that you're not responsible for. in fact, the federal communications commission, whose mission is not surveillance, requires that landlines at least, the phone records be kept for 18 months. they hold it either voluntarily or by f.c.c. mandate. like your bank has your bank accounts. we don't recommend, in fact we recommend the opposite, that the government should be holding bank account records. we are big against storage of all people's metadata. in a free society that's not what we're for. we're against that. but banks have the stuff. they just do. the government can get access to

it through a warrant. that's the system of free society designs. we don't urge that the banks should disassemble people's bank accounts because it's dangerous for them to have it. we urge that the government hould not get access to that information except in accordance with the standard legal forms. what we urge here is precisely parallel to what's always been the case in a fourth amendment-respecting situation. materials held in private hands and the government has access to it on the basis of an appropriate showing. >> there are many more recommendations. i wanted to bring back the whole panel. we're here to talk about journalism after snowden. actually, there's a very

important legal point. you touched on it, dave. which is, you know, we have the director of national intelligence yesterday saying, well, first of all, two things. he said, people with material should give it back. so, jill and janine. [laughter] do you have a response? >> now that you say that. >> the other thing that he said was, he talked about edward snowden and his accomplices. and after a couple of calls, the clarification from his office was, accomplices could potentially mean journalists. now, given what they were saying about the espionage act, do we even know what the policy is for the obama administration? the attorney general in the summer said that in the james rosen case, who is the fox eporter who was -- had his

phone calls -- sorry, his email taken, he was actually described as a co-conspirator in leaks. the attorney general stepped back from that. but there's a great deal of -- there's a lack of clarity, isn't there, here, about what the actual -- whether we even have a policy around this? i don't know whether you can respond to that. >> i can tell you a lot with the obama administration's policy with the paperwork reduction act which i was helping to oversee. i can tell you a good deal about our policies with respect to cost-benefit analysis and environmental stuff. apologies. the other i wasn't involved in so i don't have a view of the policy. >> let me maybe tie a couple of points and throw some issues out. one of the points you're raising is that if you have a system of free expression, there has to be a basis for confidential communications between reporters and sources. that's one of the things that the privacy and civil liberties oversight board underscored in their report that came out last week or the beginning of this week. and i think the concern, which is evidenced by all the interest in this, is that the snowden

revelations kind of were a wake-up call. i mean, jill is right. we knew a lot of this was going on in 2005. and people have reported on it. but seeing that fisa order that said, give us everything -- >> it was the scale, that's what's different. >> and what we're realizing now is that it's not just the phone records and all the good things we can say about the recommendations on metadata, which they are very helpful and very strong and good ways, it's a piecemeal approach. because we also know they're getting not just your phone records but they're getting email in various situations, they're getting geolocation data. they're getting your contact lists and your buddy lists and all sorts of other information that they get in various ways from your cell phone from various websites. o part of the problem is, it seems to me what we need as a society, we really need to understand what we mean by privacy. we talk about protecting privacy. two years ago the president and the white house got behind an

initiative that was geared at private industry. said, we need a consumers' privacy bill of rights because all these corporations are collecting your data. well, we need a privacy bill of rights. we need to know what it is that he government can and cannot do, what corporations can and cannot do and we don't have a consensus on that. europe has a whole different view of privacy than we have here. and in many ways it's more refined and more forward-looking when it comes to data protection. and it's going to affect things like reporting. what the attorney general said

this summer in reaction, and just, if you weren't following it, what happened is the department of justice wanted to get the email of a fox reporter because they were doing a leak investigation. and because of an anomaly in the law that says you can't get -- there's two laws that were relevant. ne says that you can't get email unless you get a search warrant. they wanted a judge -- so you can't just do it with a subpoena without having a judge approve it. that is one law. there's another law that says you can't use a search warrant against a reporter because you want to give the reporter notice with a subpoena. in any event, they wanted the email so they had to get a search warrant, but they couldn't get a search warrant against the reporter, the exception of that is if the reporter is suspected of a crime. so they actually filled out an affidavit and got a search arrant where they said there

was reason to believe the fox eporter had violated the espionage act or was a co-conspirator because he was asking questions of someone who had access to classified information. the attorney general said at the time, we will not prosecute journalists for doing journalism. what does that mean? >> something that i think is an issue for journalists and citizens for the next 20 years, which is there's been a distinction in law and more generally between metadata and content, so some people have a thought that if government has access to your phone calls, that's really troubling. if they have access to metadata, meaning what numbers are calling what numbers, that's a

completely different problem. we in the review group are uneasy with that distinction. that if the government has access to knowledge about whom you are calling and when and where, meaning the numbers, and it can figure out who those people are, that's a privacy problem. and that needs to be -- that distinction between metadata and data needs to be rethought. certainly for policy purposes, the idea that government has, you know, your metadata, it can tell a ton about you. whether it's going to be used illicitly or, you know, to target people on the basis of illegitimate grounds, probably that's a risk and not a high one under current circumstances, i'd even say a very low one, but in terms of the kinds of security which people in a free society are entitled to, and certainly journalists and their sources, that's something that needs to be reassessed. >> i just wanted to now bring the conversation right back to the fact that the title of this is "journalism after

snowden. i think we can all agree that edward snowden has done us a favor. do we have general agreement on that? that edward snowden has done us a favor. can we agree on that? [laughter] >> who are you asking? >> i'm asking the panel. can we all agree? >> i have no comment on that. [laughter] we have a 300-page report and the word snowden doesn't appear in the report and -- >> just to pick up on that. this goes to the heart of the issue in a way. because you recommended lots of i think recommendations that people would generally endorse and critics of the administration would endorse them as well. but the fact is that we've had oversight and oversight as failed. and where oversight has failed, a whistleblower and journalism has succeeded and yet the system is still wanting to punish, if you like, the one thing which has led to some transparency. >> that should be unsurprising. useful backdrop to segueing into how journalism has changed after snowden is to acknowledge that during not obama administration, there have been seven criminal leak investigations. more than twice all of these investigations and all of

history before president obama took office. and this has had a profound effect on journalists who cover national security. with the snowden case being only the most recent. this seems to be, if not a stated policy, a reality where journalism about sensitive national security issues that i see as vitally in the public interest is effectively being criminalized and a real freeze is setting in in what had been to this point i think a healthy discourse between sources and journalists and i might here if i can take just a minute, because the gentleman had quite a long bit of time to speak, as

to point out that max frankel and a very affidavit in the pentagon papers case wrote eloquently about how the public does benefit from this discourse. and i have seen both in the job as washington bureau chief of "the times" certainly then growing as managing editor and now as executive editor that these criminal leak investigations have had a very profound effect on journalism. >> come back to the accomplices point. the thing that was completely different about the story, you know, as journalists we all understand that at some point somebody might threaten you in the means of trying to get you to reveal a source and there's a sort of tenant that you learn in places like colombia, that you would go to prison to protect your source. this source never thought his identity wouldn't come out. the very nature of the story. he knew exactly how fast they would be able to track him down and identify him, as soon as the evelations appeared. and the reason that first week was so intense at first was the

idea of getting as many stories out as possible before it just became about source hunt, witch hunt, who is this guy? for a 29-year-old he had an eerie precedence about what would happen, what they would say about him, how they would try to characterize him. he wanted to be able to control his own story. what that means to the journalist is instead of the position that, you know, your journalists find themselves in, we are now being put in this position of even more chilling. journalist, instead of being

prosecuted over identifying that source, we are now into something even more chilling, being co-conspirators. this has become part of a conspiracy, possibly involving the kgb or maybe china. because the ordinary way of chilling journalism will not work in this case. we are not going to worry about naming names. t is about proving you are not a co-conspirator. >> and to say that this chilling effect of editors and lawyers, is it just not possible to comment at all for your protection or client confidentiality? knowing what we know now. >> it is very problematic. there have been stories that we ave had since snowden, a

journalist who has had a source who they have been bidding with for a number of years on relatively innocuous bits of color and detail suddenly wanted to give him something much more serious and profound. and you are looking and going, right. so there will be a gmail trail going back some years with your contact with this person. >> it is amazing to me. over the course of the past decade, journalists literally saying to a source, i will go to jail to protect your identity. those words are now uttered. >> you have a reporter who is currently fighting that fight. >> worried about that possibility.

>> i want to leave plenty of time for questions. i just want to wrap up on this point about the inevitable arms race of technology which allows us to do all sorts of things, but leaves fingerprints all over the world. these are things that can be useful for governments and journalists -- is this a legal remedy we are thinking about here? is it a technical remedy? where do we start given the technology? >> there are so many great topics here and they are diverse. one topic is getting democratic governments on a sound foundation with respect to these issues, bracketing a question which is a different question. you could think that the idea of

government storage, private stuff, metadata for content, ust not acceptable in a free society. we think essentially, that is a good thought. you could also think that the government access to such material, when the government wants it, should be qualified by what free societies insist on, which is an independent, neutral arbiter, a judge agreeing on the basis of a certain showing of need. that has served this nation quite well when it has been observed. that is also a good foundation. in a way, this is about taking forward some not new ideals in a radically different technological environment and insisting on their enduring value.

that is one set of issues. there is another set of issues raised about private ownership. that raises different challenges and the consumer bill of rights thing is about that. >> i am going to go to bob. you have been listening to this. there are so many things we have to it onto, these really deep iscussions, but i want to call on you as a reporter. what do you think? >> thank you for including me. i will try to give deep discussion in a couple of short minutes. i wanted to parse what the director of national intelligence said yesterday about accomplices and returning the documents.

and put that alongside something that happened down the block in the judiciary committee, where the attorney general said that he had hoped to release publicly the guidelines that they were using in investigations relating to reporters and sources, but that a glitch had arisen and he was not yet ready to release these guidelines. what could james mean when he said that edward snowden and his accomplices should return the stolen documents? the only other people known to have these documents are a small number of journalists. it could be just a rhetorical expression of anger, perfectly understandable for a secret agency that has had secrets for a long time. it could be a request for assistance or help. if that were the case, you would expect that the government would have come to these organizations before or after and done so. or it could be a kind of signaling, a way of saying that there is a risk here. accomplice has meaning in criminal law as a co-conspirator, aiding and abetting. besides the actual risk of

prosecution, which i think still is remote for the reasons that ave has described, there is an investigative issue that very much relates to the ability to do national security. journalists now, almost everything you want to write about, everything but the press release or the news conference is crossfire. that it may be -- that is just how it works. there is a good article that a harvard professor wrote saying that that is the case. if you have an intelligence service that is capable of aspiring, living in the golden age of signals intelligence that is described internally in which the president said that surveillance is collecting as much as possible, to say that

bulk collection is not surveillance, bulk collection is not spying until they look at it or make use of it. it is all there, the tapes and the phone records. ots of the review groups did not have the scope to consider. think about the situations for reporters under these national security frameworks. you have all the information in these big buckets. the laws that interpret to mean that, talking to a reporter is espionage. counterintelligence, counterespionage is a valid foreign intelligence purpose as far as the nsa is concerned. so now the investigation is potentially over before it starts.

they have all the records of lmost every reporter communication to almost every source. extraordinary precautions to limit that that are very hard to ake and hardly anyone tries to take. they can be a reasonable or articulable suspicion standard when it comes to whether the records of a reporter are going o be relevant to a counterintelligence investigation. so this sort of legal tangle is what we have to address if we are going to seriously talk about national security investigative journalism in the ost-snowden era.

>> can i pick up on that? >> yes. can people put your hands up for questions and we will go there. >> i want to underscore the point in a different term. the technology that we have today, when you knowledge what the government has and what it can do, you do not need to subpoena a reporter anymore. there is the ability to find out any information. we should all be very concerned about that. e need whistleblowers.

ou can look at the number of stories in recent years, secret cia prisons, waterboarding, on and on, important stories that only come from classified information. if we do not have a mechanism that allows whistleblowers, our whole society is going to suffer. we cannot count on oversight by congress and the courts to adequately perform certain types of tasks. if we do not acknowledge that and have some safeguard, and hopefully one thing that will be picked up by the review proposals, are things like national security letters and court orders should be subject to the same attorney general guidelines. you do not go after reporters with those. right now, there is just a gray area. none of those national security things need to go through the normal checklist. >> i am going to take questions. somebody has a microphone over ere and then over there.

let's start here. ok. and then the back. if anyone has a microphone, can you ask a question? >> hi. my name is daniel. i am from germany as a journalism student. the document in the wiki case and the snowden case were both activist. the documents are not in hold at the guardian. at least that is what i heard. what does it mean for this whole insecurity about investigations into leaks? how much did you have control over the situation? >> that is a great question. it is one of the things that we were having conversations about in the u.k. for quite a lot of last year. we were holding some of the documents in the guardian u.k. office. and the documents are held in other places, which i am not going to go into on this panel. including very securely in the new york times office. one of the problems with the u.k. government approach, and this is bitterly ironic to me when we have a conversation about the context in the u.k. saying that we could not report a story without america. we would not have gotten this

story if we were the guardian u.s. edition and we could not continue reporting it unless we were the guardian u.s. edition. and then to suddenly realize that we are driven out -- but to address your point, once the u.k. government tried to remove the guardian from the equation, we spent some time saying to them, do you not member what happened to wikileaks? once you remove the news organization with the 200-year tradition, history, values, concerned about public interest, the fine-grained judgment, if you remove them, the information will find its way out in a way that you cannot engage with, that we have talked to administrations and agencies into confidence on every single story we have done. we have engaged with them and ask them questions, talk about material we intend to publish and listened to their concerns.

we do not do everything they say, of course, and we know earnestly together, in partnership, the idea that by restraining us, we could be the subject of a legal order and they could somehow contain the problem. you only make it worse. at one point, we were saying -- we were best friends in this endeavor. >> in the back and then down ere. >> i have two questions and i guess mostly for jill and anine. the first one for janine is could you talk about how the discussion in britain has been versus the discussion in the u.s.? it seems to have been a very different discussion in the u.k. and the kind of collaboration

that you have with other media organizations on the story, certainly that collaboration has not taken place in the u.k.? >> it is impossible to describe all of the rest of the british media. the u.s. media, from the beginning, has been brilliant. >> some of them thought you were traders though. >> momentarily on fox news, but they have come around. i am talking about ap, reuters, washington journal, i cannot think of most news organizations that have not used the release of these documents to break stories and do amazing investigative reporting on these topics and really push ahead. no news organization in the u.k. has even followed up the stories. >> not the bbc? >> no. it has been quite extraordinary. i suppose the regulatory

environment, they have been refusing to rule out prosecuting guardian journalists for some months now. obviously, we know of the etention of david maranda. the guardian has been funding he legal actions to rule outside the bounds of the legal legislation. frankly, u.k. law is so widely drawn, it is almost impossible to overstep the oversight regime. the u.k. security agency and the nsa partner is where you have not proved any wrongdoing. it would be impossible to prove wrongdoing against the u.k. laws. there is very little oversight. guardian staff, as far as we

know, still being investigated. >> conrad martin with the fund for constitutional government. i want to go to the term you used, edward snowden's eerie prescience. i would say it was more an informed and healthy paranoia. in the thomas case, where they went after him under the espionage act, he had taken documents to the house of intelligence committee. those documents were turned ver. diane rourke got the documents. the fbi waited at the house of intelligence committees office in going after that data. the healthy paranoia that is there -- my question goes to and you mentioned the whistleblowers, where are the reforms? the espionage act does not work and has not worked. it has been overly broad. any whistleblower protection act that should have been extended

to contractors was not extended to contractors. the recommendations coming forward are coming forward about the metadata. third-party people handling them. the underlying systems of how we are going to approach this in the future, and it will happen again, is not being addressed. when these things have come out before, what happened was you had a frank church that came forward with a new regulatory structure on how these things are going to be handled. congress has been completely silent. >> well, not completely silent. you saw senator wyden in the interchange with mr. clapper this week being vocal. i think that -- i agree with much of what you just said, but what is tremendously unhelpful, i think, is to have statements, as in the hearing the other day, aying that snowden's disclosures have done great harm to the national security without any kind of specific information

that helps the public, let alone journalists, evaluate the truth of that statement. it is just, to me, troubling. it reminds me -- you know, istory is often a guide in these situations. during the pentagon papers case, the solicitor general erwin griswold made the passionate argument that the disclosure of the pentagon papers was very harmful to the national ecurity. a few years later, after he left office, he was asked what harm to the national security did the publication of the pentagon papers caused? he admitted none. in this case, none of us know how to evaluate the truth of what mr. clapper said the other

day. but the lack of specific information, i think, is harmful to the public ability to figure ut where the truth in this situation lies. >> we have a question at the back. i know we are a little over time. we are going to wrap up in a bit. >> years ago, nathaniel blumberg and carl bernstein pointed out the ways in which the media collaborate with the government. and cooperate in the suppression of stories. if the government -- this is the two editors. if the government asks you to suppress a story because of national security, do you ask them for proof? what does it take to make you toe the line, which happens so often. for instance, in the lead up to the iraq war, the coverage of 9/11, the way that robert

kennedy junior said that his family did not necessarily endorsed the warren commission. that was not necessarily covered. >> i think what janine was saying a few minutes ago about her efforts to make the case to the british government, we are your best friends. we are a responsible filter for evaluating the importance of the information which should be disclosed, perhaps even which should not be disclosed. i think that the new york times and other news organizations play a very important role in trying. it is difficult. as an editor, there is no set rentals or formula that i can follow in terms of when the government says, if you publish this, it is going to harm the

national security. but when the government does make that case -- >> which it did with the original -- >> of course. we take those request very seriously. we, in general, hit the brakes a bit in order to give consideration and give the government ample opportunity to persuade us that such is the case. >> to play devil's advocate, a fact that everybody was so shocked at what edward snowden revealed, wasn't that kind of a failure of the press in the same way that holding the government to account over iraq was a failure of the press? the fact that a whistleblower has to come forward with what has been available to so many people. has american media really been sleep?

>> i do not think it has been asleep anymore that -- again, i keep invoking the pentagon papers. basically, until ellsberg, who was the principal whistleblower of the same ilk as some of the more recent cases, basically, it took him to expose that the johnson administration had given a complete false history of the vietnam war. >> i think your question is about the duty on the press to respond to a whistleblower. somebody who is brave enough to leak information and bring it to a news organization, then our absolute duty is to publish it and to do the best job we can. i think that was what edward snowden had mine. that was his absolute primary consideration. he wanted it out with responsibly and carefully.

he did not want it all over the internet, but he wanted it published. we take that very seriously. >> i am going to step a little outside of the review group here and try to complicate things a bit. john stuart mill min, a great essay, said been somewhat like a one eyed man who was blind in one eye and could see further, but he did not have the perspective. some elements of the intelligence committee have been like that. they can see great on one imension, but they do not have the perspective. i think there is a risk in thinking about leakers that we are blinding ourselves in one eye.

think we should just say that there is no one on the review group who would describe edward snowden as a whistleblower. from the civil liberties focus. we did not discuss him, but that is just a fact. whatever you think of that particular person or any particular person, the topic is after snowden. to leak classified material, that is very complicated from a government standpoint, how to handle that. prosecution is a very severe act. if it is formally classified, that is presumptively grave. that might not be the right view. jill suggesting that the classification is not sufficient, it would have to also be a great thing to do. we call on our report for declassification, a lot more transparency, and we are committed to that. thinking about particular issues, i think it is quite important to have -- not to be like bensom. it is, gated on both sides.

lex very quickly, a question and then we will really have to finish. >> thanks for a great panel. a question that i have -- it seems here that we will have a big controversy over the next months and years. the counterpoint to the government looking at all of our data is the public opinion, well, i am not doing anything wrong, so what does it matter if the government is gathering data if they are going to do something good with it? do you think the debate will play out in legal ways or within an elite public policy circle or does public opinion matter? journalists have done a good job explaining to the public what are some of the obligations of privacy and metadata and things like this in collected for members of the general public over the next months and years as the debate plays out? >> that is a great question. > well, i hope so.

i do think that the fact that we are having a national debate about these issues and i do think it is very important for that debate, to call out the rights and contributions of journalists as a report does, that is indispensable to a free society. the fact that there are surprising coalitions encouraging, we do not have the simple splits between republicans and democrats. the does give an opportunity, aybe a window for reforms that will have more stable foundations. >> i would just say it is a great question and i am humble enough to believe that probably journalism could indeed, very, gated issues, do a better job of

explaining all of this to the public. >> i would say eight months n. we are still trying to explain in better ways to the public what this means, what potential abuses are. the opinion polls show that the public has gone from a position of, i do not care, into a position of, i probably really do care. >> the latest poll said something like 71% of people said they are concerned about the collection of data just by private corporations, let alone governments. the percentage of people on irefox saying don't track meet s more than double in the last six months.

i think people are concerned. one of the problems is that people do not understand fully the implications of it. i was talking about the need for confidential communications in a lot of ways. you, but it will affect the information you learn, what you know about your government. and i think one of the things -- the question raised earlier about the church commission, one of the things that is unfortunate right now is that we have not had anyone willing to take up the cudgel and say, before we decide to go, we needed know what is going on. we only know little bits and pieces. it is never going to come out unless someone says we need to come clean. and we can in ways that are not going to damage our security in a comprehensive way so that we can assess this. no one is calling for this right now. > i am going to have to call time. i just want to ask one single question, which is, one thing that happens after snowden for journalism. if you could wave a magic wand and make it happen, what would it be? cass, i will let you go

first. >> an international norm or agreement that safeguards internet freedom, number one. >> i would follow that thought, but an international norm or convention that defines privacy rights and empowers people to control what they want to control. >> more great stories to cover. >> i was really worried they were all going to say world peace. i do not want any journalists to prosecute. journalists will not be prosecuted for doing their obs. >> amnesty for snowden. and world peace. >> i am sorry i failed in my job as chair, but it was such a great discussion. can i thank all of the panelists? cable satellite corp. 2014] national captioning institute] ? night on c-span q&a with

former capitol hill staffer on the party is over. followed by bob corker of tennessee and democratic senator of minnesota. ♪ >> this week on q&a," retired congressional staff member ike lofgren discusses his recent review of former defense secretary bob gates' memoir along with his own book, titled "the party is over." >> mike lofgren, author of "the party is over" and bob gates' book, he writes congress is best viewed from a distance. the farther, the better. up close, it is truly ugly. how many years in your life d