prize was awarded today. for articles on the nsa surveillance program falls top it was revealed by edward snowden. we will have a discussion on the nsa. from the american university in washington dc, this is two hours. >> we are really privilege to have two people who know the nsa extremely well, from different perspectives. general michael hayden is a retired four-star general who served as the director of both the cia and nsa, among many other illustrious appointments in his nearly 40 year career of public service. he was appointed director of the nsa by president bill clinton

and served 1999-2005. after his tenure at the nsa, general hayden went on to serve as the country's first principle deputy director of national intelligence, the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the armed forces. may 2000 six, president george w. bush appointed him director of the cia, and he served there until 2009. he is a frequent commentator at many major news outlets, as well as having been a foreign-policy adviser to mitt romney's 2012 presidential campaign. he is currently a principal of the chertoff group, a distinguished visiting professor at george mason university. barton gelman is a two-time pulitzer prize winning journalist and lead reporter on disclosuresen's nsa at the washington post. he has actually met snowden several times. >> in person wants.

spent 20 one years on the staff of the washington post and has won numerous awards, which i will mention only a few. his first pulitzer was awarded in 2002 for reporting on the september 11 attacks. the second pullets are was awarded to him in 2008 for a series on dick cheney's vice presidency that went on to become the basis of his best-selling book. that book won the los angeles ames book rise and was named new york times best book of 2008. today he is a senior fellow at the century foundation and lecturer and author in residence at princeton's woodrow wilson school. he returned to the post temporarily in 2013 after receiving various nsa documents from edward snowden. with his colleagues he has broken stories about many of the

things that we are going to be discussing tonight. you joind like to have me in welcoming our distinguished speakers and a national audience of c-span. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] to haveoing conversation amongst ourselves for the first hour or so, and then we will open it up to questions from you all. there are two microphones, i see one in the middle and one on the side over there. it seems to me that all of the on the nsa questions and privacy rotate around balancing security and privacy. how have we done it so far? how should we do it? there is a further question of

what privacy even means in a digital age. where every time you go to the store or use your easy pass, people are keeping track of you, let alone every time you use an e-mail on massive accounts. to make an informed judgment about the nsa programs, we have to know what they are. i want to spend a lot of the our talkingour about what those particular programs are, how they work, etc. but first, since we are hosting a political theory institute, i would like to start by asking a few normative questions around which i think all the others will revolve. i will askant to do, my first question to each of you now, so you will have a few seconds to think while i'm asking the other. have tohat right do you

publish secrets determined to be such by our duly constituted political authorities? how can you justify supplanting your own judgment for that of the people's government? and for general hayden, there is a parallel question. what right does the nsa or any other governmental body have to keep secrets in the first place? democracy is based on consent them and if we the people don't know what you are doing, doesn't that necessarily undermine democracy? >> i'm going to give an answer that starts with the proposition that my history and politics grades are no longer subject to change. i will give a little bit of a theoretical or structural answer to that question. the structureith of self-government in a democracy.

if the government is working for us, it is usually thought to have two elements, authorization and accountability. you get to be in charge for a while, and then we hold them accountable for their performance, not only for purposes of reelection but , civilout a constant society, political conversation in which the people get their say through a variety of mechanisms between elections. to me, the principal conflict here may not be between security and privacy. that is an important set of questions, but to me, it is between self-government and self-defense. both of which are core values. in fact they are both touched on by the time you get through the preamble to our constitution. defense is fourth among the six principle purposes of the creation of this form of government. the first words are "we the people."

secrets that are important to keep inherently for purposes of protecting ourselves. but information is essential to govern ourselves. have in mind is that nobody gets to maximize one interest or the other. they have to be balanced. it would be cleaner and neater if you had a model in which there was some trustworthy principal balance or who could do that balance for you, but there is not. i'm not elected. i'm not accountable to the people for decisions i make about what to publish. but it is also the case that for the president and everyone working for him, they are not competent to decide what we need to know in order to hold them accountable. we cannot give them that power. we know information is power. secretly, the power to withhold

an oscar information is a very great power, especially when combined with surveillance. -- the power to withhold and obscure information. we become more transparent and they become more and more opiate with the growth of secrecy that surrounds it. so the somewhat unsatisfactory answer we are left with, and i can go into this at much greater length, once you rule out all the other possibilities, is that there has to be a process of competition in which governments try to keep secrets, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes not. is nobody who works in the intelligence field -- and mike would agree with this -- that would not accept that there is this massive overclassification. there are all kinds of things that -- things that are staying need to be. that.

we can get into examples of that if you like. the ideas the government tries to keep secrets and would try to find them out. i guess i will just put it this way. there are trade-offs. we have studied one society very closely which maximized either security or the entrenchment of the state authority against all other interests. in thewas a tourist soviet union, and moscow in 1984, i was getting lost all the time. it turned out that they deliberately drew the tourist maps incorrectly, because in case napoleon came by, he would take a wrong turn. it's not literally irrational to say were going to publish and in accurate map.

principle ison in useful to the enemy. but that is not the model we have. tomorrow we have is not -- for example, jfk in his inaugural speech saying we will pay no rice, we will bear no burden to secure the blessings of liberty. we are prepared to accept some risk in order to govern ourselves. i find something out, or i get a , and i now documents know secrets that i'm not supposed to know, according to the government. is a cooperative process in which i then go and talk to people, like mike hayden when he held that old job. every journalist covering this stuff with holes a great deal if the public

interest of the subject is outweighed by the danger of disclosure. and i agree on an awful lot of this question. the most important agreement is that this is a conflict of values. of lightot the forces versus the forces of darkness. these are the things that free peoples have to balance all the time. frankly, where that line is is dependent on the totality of the situation in which we find ourselves. that line can move back and forth, depending on realities. when my public affairs officer or someone else would be aware that someone in bart's profession would have a story we felt really problematic, they outd come to me and lay it and i would say all right, and i generally would call the editor.

the callary would make and generally speaking, the editor would take the call from the director of the cia. the editor would come on the line, i really want to thank you for taking the call, and invariably, i would then begin the conversation with look, we both have responsibilities for the welfare and safety of this republic, but how you are about to exercise your responsibility, i believe, is going to make it much harder for me to exercise mind. so we really do need to talk. and we would have that dialogue that barth suggests. this is really tricky. he's got to have freedom of the press. there is a reason that is in the first amendment. on the other hand, the government has legitimate secrets. human beings in government will make decisions that perhaps are less noble than we all want to be.

as barth also suggests, when the post or the times the classifies information on their judgment, they are performing an inherently governmental act without the system of checks and balances and responsibility that normally go over here on this side of the equation. this is getting much, much more complicated in our society. bart mentioned the old question of accountability and how do you hold a government accountable without a great deal of transparency? arcme walk you through the of american history when it comes to american espionage. the american intelligence community isn't the only one that keeps secrets. the federal reserve -- they keep secrets. there are a lot of organs of government where the general welfare is improved by the government being closed and secret.

at the beginning of the republic, and in most western still, this espionage thing is pretty much contained in the executive branch. george washington was the nation's first spymaster. president after running the spy ring for the continental army him he insisted on a secret overt action budget. with very little, if any, congressional oversight. so espionage has generally been viewed as being a province of the executive, and the way the nation changed espionage policy was changed the executive. by the mid-1970's, there was broad agreement after the church commission that having this responsibility, this knowledge, this oversight only within the executive branch was insufficient. and the great compromise of the 1970's was to create two bodies in congress and a rather unusual

court to spread this transparency and accountability over all three branches of government. so we end up with the house permanent select committee and , andenate select committee by intelligence we end up with the fisa court. the theory was that that was sufficient transparency to legitimately get consent of the representative democracy. after all, this isn't ancient athens. that consensus in the grand compromise of the 1970's was adequate, has eroded. thesure we will talk about 215 program here very soon, and people are going to say wait a minute, has been authorized by two presidents, the congress legislated it, it is the madisonian trifecta. we've got all three branches of government.

and great swing in american popular culture right now, and i'm not just talking about out here on the wings, i mean sustained among thoughtful people, is that that no longer constitutes sufficient consent of the governed. feinstein, mike rogers, dutch ruppersberger, but you didn't tell me. we are kind of at that cusp in our political culture. i was director of the cia and i had a wonderful team of outside civilians. one guy got permission to use gave her a tough job. another subcommittee was doing i.t. and another doing recruiting. tough job.y a study this problem and come out and tell me, will america be able to conduct espionage in the future inside a broader political culture that everyday demands for transparency and

more public accountability from every aspect of national life? the study of for about four months and came back and gave me a firm, hardly speaking "we are not sure." which is a very telling answer. so here we are. with the national enterprise that i'm just going to assume we all believe is legitimate and necessary, american espionage, and a broader political culture that demands more transparency of an enterprise content demand secrecy for its very nature and its very success. that is white is why did now so difficult for all of us. , generaling up, bart hayden described what you are doing or the release of this information as being inherently governmental function. into all the various

checks that exist on the nsa and whether they work or not. but when you get that information, i guess there is no checks on you as a reporter, or are there? what is the process you go this fell determining on my lap, should i make it public or not? >> are there checks and what is the process? some of the same checks on us, not -- the defective checks are not so different than they are on the government itself, which is to say that a lot of what the government does or does not do is not because it doesn't have the power according to some legal interpretation of the words on the page, but because it believes that there would be great public consequences, that public opinion would not support that. they would suffer reputational

damage or political harm. nobody wants to be responsible for some terrible thing happening if we publish story x and the next day there are 10 people strung up in the square of some foreign country because we disclose their identities. at would be a really bad thing for the washington post, in addition to being a bad thing for the country. so there are checks there. the process is as follows. checks point, for any of the nsa stories that you have run, are you aware of any that consequences -- bad consequences? >> there is a bit of a conundrum, which is to say that the secret has built and the washington post has published something. suppose you're inside the intelligence community and you

know very specifically what some consequence was. his closing that knowledge itself, there are constraints from telling you about it. there areer hand, consequences that we would know about. that jameshe case clapper, the director of national intelligence, in a closed-door briefing used language quite different from what he usually said in public, that they went back and did a study and they found that over the years, there have been breaches and secrets lots of sometimes in the context of new stories or a foreign service disclosing something, or sometimes presidents disclose really sensitive secrets because they have a political reason for doing so. for example, when ronald reagan played a recording or quoted a recording of a conversation that took place in libya in order to persuade european allies to allow american planes to fly

over their airspace so they could bomb libya. he wanted to prove that we had , and very much against the recommendations of the intelligence community, he revealed that capability. they do a study, what is the damage assessment? clapper said that the damage assessments totally overestimate damage. it is not unnatural or abnormal for the nsa to gain and lose capabilities. technology is changing all the time. the channel that is working to listen in on a target stops working tomorrow because microsoft changes their network architecture, or the other country chooses a different vendor, or the target gets tired of that and switches to a different company or whatever.

or targets are trying to practiced mutation security, so they switch some things. the other thing that clapper said is that people will change their behavior, but they will make mistakes, and we will exploit them. the nsa is not in immediate danger of losing its global preeminence in signals intelligence. possible that it is that some of the stories published by some of these organizations sooner or later will have degraded the ability to listen in on something. and prepared to accept that i believe that you should be prepared to accept that, because at the same time, we are finding out things that have been doing that are completely contrary to what the public understanding was of what their job is and how they do it. if there is a program going on and the executive branch has blessed it and a select few people in congress have blessed it and the fisa court has

blessed it, then when it becomes public american people are shocked by it, and many people are angry about it, and they start telling members of congress and they start introducing bills to stop it, and it gets brought to federal court in the first federal judge to assess its constitutionality says it is orwellian and very theny unconstitutional, there is another way to tell the story of whether we had already considered as a society to this happening. i will stop there. >> general hayden, i know you're not not in government now, but are you aware of specific negative consequences from any of the nsa stories? >> no, i'm not in government, so i don't know. >> are you being briefed on it? i do not go to get updated.

>> if i knew this was outdated information, i would have chosen someone else. [laughter] >> there are three tiers of damage. one is operational. if i were in government, let me rephrase the question you just asked me. would you give me a list of all the communications you did not intercept yesterday? that is really the question you want me to give you the answer to. well, i don't know. thatee with bart intelligence is constantly moving. have penetration, you just whatever, youext don't have penetration anymore. with encryption, you don't have that frequency anymore.

just because people who build a communication path have a smarter way to spend a buck. we have simply accelerated the rate at which we will lose our current accesses. is notind, that arguable. that is one level. will remove cover it? sure. $10 billion in order to recoup. the second level of loss is -- let me just take with that for a minute. point thata good these things have informed the necessary national debate. have done more than inform. they have also misshaped. i know are going to dwell on 215. work, hisot bart's flagship piece on this was 702.

door withhed out the an incredibly detailed coverage of the front and, which is they got all your phone records. only over a period of several weeks did the back end story again to get out there into the public domain. so what is it they do with them once they have them? people let nsa would make the evenent you may disagree after you've gotten the back end story, but you really can't make an informed judgment until you have the whole context. i saw a recent poll that said over 30% of americans, because of the way this has been portrayed, over 30% of americans inc. the 215 program allows nsa to listen to the content of your phone calls. operational loss. second losses in relation to foreign governments. the i'm not talking about

admiral being really upset. -- about angela merkel being really upset. any other intelligence service around the world to whom we would go to for help and amount -- a matter of great sensitivity and a matter that would require great discretion, in which we say this is lawful, a little politically edgy, but it is the right thing to do for both our countries. come on, let's cooperate. we can keep a secret. there isn't another intelligence service in the world i should take that last sentence to the bank. fundamentally been eroded by foreign intelligence services having no faith in our ability to keep things where they ought to be. the third level of damage has to do with american industry, who has been unfairly pilloried by

this whole thing. you have young mr. zuckerberg calling the president and complaining about how his company is being treated in the global digital domain. american companies do nothing more for the united states than other countries do for their sovereigns around the world. microsoft, at&t, etc. do the same thing that deutsche telekom does for german security services, etc., etc. but it's only american information that has been put out there, it has been put out there in a way that suggests, almost eclairs, that only the americans are doing this. you thatuggest to practically the entire continent of europe, including their elected representatives, now know more about american signals intelligence than they do about their own countries signals

intelligence. balanceds not a discussion. >> there are lots of things that america might want to be for global preeminence on, but i don't think one of them is going to be that we are the most closed government and we are the best at keeping secrets. and we don't need it, because our security, we actually have a luxurybit of room, the of allowing democrat debate over bequest in slight should the nsa be collecting all of the records of all the calls that you and i make, are taking it out of the context of section 215, court authorize telephone program, what do we think about something that is new that the nsa never did in its history on anything remotely like this scale, because the capabilities did not exist.

and has takennts many steps to achieve a kind of comprehensive situational awareness of the world. it wants to be able to collect every electron and photon that passes over communications channels in case they might be needed. , althoughust metadata i think that is enormously important for privacy. it's also what they do overseas. the debate has been channeled somewhat deliberately in the current political context for the dutch torry kinds of surveillance. -- for the statutory kinds of surveillance. act,on 215 of the patriot they collect all your call records. overseas they are not bound by statute, supervised at all by

the intelligence community or court including the intelligence court. the operate solely under authority of a presidential executive order. since we had a little bit of a historical suite before about the 1970's, that me give you an additional point of view on that. 1970's, after a bunch of gross abuses that today's programs don't at all resemble, there was a deliberate misuse of surveillance for domestic, political, corrupt purposes. they created the structure of oversight in the foreign intelligence surveillance act. the idea was you can do what you like overseas, spy on the foreigners, but you cannot do it at home.

and you cannot do it from u.s. territories. so around the time that general , then became nsa director u.s. government started making the argument and executive started making the argument to congress, you need to change this because the structure of global telecommunications has --nged fundamental and he fundamentally. it's not american phone calls or e-mails, is just the nature of the distributed networks that you could be in germany and calling brazil and the call passes and transits through the united states, for example. so we need you to take the leash off. we need to have a lot more freedom to spy from u.s. territories. what they didn't say, and congress change that law. what congress did not address is that lots of u.s. communications foreignfloating across services.

if you're sitting here in washington and you send an e-mail to cleveland, it is literally quite possible unlikely that your e-mail is or a dataross ireland center in hong kong. the global internet balances its load by distributing in microseconds the communications flow and the path of everywhere.ns where it is allowed to resume people it is intercepting our foreign, it does things like this. the nsa with its british counterpart is breaking into the privately owned links that google has between its many data centers around the world. so a data center in hong kong, one in latin america, they have private it is intercepting our foreign, it does things like this. the fiber that links them directly. nsa was breaking into that and intercepting the traffic that

went through them, which is to say ultimately is able to reassemble the entire contents of the data center if it wants to. googling yahoo! won't say what percentage of their users are americans. let's say it is half or one third. you are talking about ultimately not only the metadata but also the content of hundreds of millions of people that are crossing into these flows that the u.s. feels free to dip into. is legal term for that incidental flexion. happens, incidentally, foreseeably, but not your actual purpose, is getting a lot of americans with it. once you have them in your , as wastank acknowledged in writing, the nsa feels free to search through it in its own data repositories. if i say to you collectively in

this room that i have a foreign target, i'm just going to collect everybody smart phone and download everything from it, all your appointments, all your the littlees, all confidence as you have exchanged with one another, your bank records, and i promise not to look at it unless i have a really good reason, and it turns out that two thirds or one third of you are americans, turns out that was incidental. it's perfectly legal, and you should be fine. it is not surveillance unless we're doing something with it. don't try that argument if you want to download movies. i have three terabytes of pirated movies and music on my hard drive, but i haven't listened to them yet, so it doesn't count. that's not our ordinary understanding either of the law or of what it means to be understood violence.

what snowden allowed us to do is say are we ok with that? in the clapper letter that reveal this, he pointed out that the committee actually debated whether or not they want to reauthorize the mystic approach, and they agreed that it had. so we are not putting the cart on the bottom of the deck here. it was known and consciously, specifically debated in committee whether or not that should continue. what we used to call reverse targeting. , but don't think this was a renegade nsa.

i'll try to be really efficient about this. an awful lot of these snowden regulations are pretty things out there, i frankly think some of them are mischaracterized or in accurately characterized. this is really complicated stuff. >> i would be over polite about sitting up there on the stage. --think a lot of the story >> you cannot entirely blame him because he only knows what he has been given. [laughter] >> all right, then it is your fault. >> i'm given a piece of paper. i don't assume that it is authentic or that the facts

contained therein are accurate. it turns out there are authentic documents in the world that are wrong. >> i used to get some of those pubic >> i and my colleagues do a lot of reporting around the material. a lot of the reporting, certainly a big part of it is to talk to the peoples who are the stakeholders in government who are running the program. mystic is the story the washington post wrote a couple of weeks ago and said the u.s. is intercepting and recording all of the telephone calls of an entire foreign country. they goillions of calls into this 30 day holding tank, millions get sent back to fort process inast gordon their repositories. >> it's got to be a little country, right?

>> we did not name the country and we did not give any hints about the country. we had already decided before we went to the u.s. government that -- i've gotgoing to to sort of hold things back from you. i've always done that from time to time in stories over the years. i could give some examples of that, but here it happens all the time. even dow yetaded talking to the u.s. government, that there were specific, concrete, foreseeable harms that would come from naming the country or saying what kind of country it was what kind of intelligence targets required this approach. raises can say is, this a big public policy question. if you live in that country or work in that country or you have relatives or friends in that thei y and you make calls

re, that your call is recorded. so now they are not just collecting metadata, they are collecting content. let's say they are recording your words and they feel free to keep whichever ones they want and search whichever ones they want because it was incidentally collected in the course of surveilling a foreign country. that is not something the nsa could ever have done before in recent years. it is a capability that the nsa did without and kept us safe throughout the cold war, and it is as the general says quite energy and worthy of debate. edgy and worthy of debate. there is one last point to be made about oversight. of the fisadge court, the foreign intelligence

surveillance court, said in his first ever interview with any news organization that the court nsa orothing unless the the u.s. government tells it. it doesn't have any independent fact-finding ability, that it cannot go out and invest gate. it doesn't have a former nsa that. like when the court found in 2009 at the nsa had been unlawfully running wannabes big row graham and had been consistently misrepresenting the facts of what it was doing to the court, the nsa response to the justice department was, you could make fun of it as these computers are so darn complicated. the upshot of it was there was no one at the nsa fully understood the workings of the program and therefore was inadvertent that they were describing it incorrectly to the

judge. so when you're saying a judge is is -- supervising it or that congress is overseeing in, the nsa is classifying almost all of the top-secret codeword level. there are fewer than 10% of members of congress who have a staff member cleared to read anything at that level. members of congress do not go into a 10,000 page intelligence studied danceand hearings and reports. they just don't. them don't get to talk to a staff member who is cleared to read what they are talking about. inthe level of supervision some cases is pretty theoretical. >> i am falling way behind on my accusation countering count, so my turn.

>> as i was saying, bart does this have to well and half of the time. even the best of folks are going to get some of this wrong. said, the nsa is so complicated it is hard to explain. not everyone is as conscientious on reporting these stories. a lot of people take the stories and run as quickly as they can to the darkest corner of the room. let's put that aside. let's just say that we can reduce all the stories that are out there to hard-core facts, that we have pulled a hyperbole and the misrepresentation out, and we can get it done. i'm not even going to argue about that's not what we're are doing. let's assume we can all get it there. you realize you're coming in late in the third real of a complex movie and you are looking at the third reel. i'm assuming we have all the

chaff out of the way. you're looking at the third reel and making the decision, i know the butler did it. and you really cannot make that decision until you walk back to the first real, and where did these things come from? our they developed? -- why were they developed? i'll try to be very efficient about this. i became director of nsa in 1999. we were being overwhelmed by the volume of modern communications. we were approaching communications away we had approached all of our previous life going after communications, which was burrowed down, get the right frequency and listen to the very specifically targeted call. now there we were with a tsunami of global data flying at us in a way that was beyond our ability to control. you are all pretty young, you don't know what it was like communicating in 1999.

before 9/11 that the only way we could deal with light pushing back a tsunami wave and saying let's try harder to keep the way from engulfing us. and swimd turn around with the wave and make the power of the wave your tool. collection and metadata. that is why we did it, it was in response to very specific challenge that if we had not dealt with, we would have gone deaf. two,ology change number the nsa spent most of his time watching the soviet union. there was not anyone regardless of your political or suasion that was going to raise that much of a finger in civil liberty concerns, with communications coming out of , in soviet siberia while

we are looking for interesting words to pop up on the net like "launch." of 21st century equivalent that isolated signal on a dedicated network being run by an oligarchic superpower, the 21st century movement of that signal are proliferator, terrorist, money laundering, child trafficker, narcotraffickers, etc. e-mails coexisting with your single, unified, global communication structure. there is no way nsa continues to do what it used to do for you if it cannot go out there and be in the flow where your communications and mine are cold legitimately targeted communications.

that is just the reality. the third change, and bart mentioned this already, that is the fact that the global communications grid changed in such a way that most global communication either resided or transited the united states just because of american dominance in global telecommunications. yet without the fisa amendment and you go from a bad man in pakistan to another batman in yemen, -- another bad man in , i don't think it was the intent of the founders and that is why the change in the fisa act. the fact that the enemy was inside the gate, and that legitimate foreign intelligence targets were here in america. there was the

joint inquiry commission that was made up of both the house and senate intelligence committees. one of their findings was that nsa, that would be my nsa, the one i was running before 9/11, was entirely too cautious in dealing with the al qaeda communications, and that would be al qaeda communications, one end of which was in this country. and the metadata program was , frankly, the lightest possible touch we could devise to know which of those communications entering or leaving this land would be the ones we want to go down -- drill down on for content collection. after having seen the whole movie now, you may still be pretty confident the butler did it. you may still have kept any or all of those four things i just suggested, but they did not develop out of an nsa director

like me or keith alexander, acting like mr. burns on the simpsons going "excellent." i've been waiting to do this for decades. they were logical responses to technological and operational challenges. >> picture life as a triangle for the subject. there are three sides of a triangle. a happy triangle is an equilateral triangle. it is in harmony. and the three sides are threat, technology, law, and policy. you got it? what you want is that if is responsive to the threat and used within the confines of agreed law and policy. those three things never changed at the same rate. but they are changing at amazingly different rates today. and the problem that bart points

out in his writing, and one that i will freely admit is that the other two sides change must faster than law and policy that -- the equilateral tribal turns into a violent looking isosceles thing because these things have areged while law and policy still struggling to catch up. that is kind of where we are in the debate. got a little bit lost with the triangles. >> i could do it again. i actually want to come back to the question and the point he has not yet actually supported, areh is the idea that we getting it wrong a lot are we are getting out of context. that is certainly possible. it is possible there are things we don't know or that we are mischaracterizing something. there was one quite good story,

i thought, that we were getting ready to publish and i was persuaded that it was wrong. i'm talking to sources and i'm talking to the government and i have very specific reasons -- i received very specific reasons to believe that i had the context entirely wrong and we simply killed the story. but what we are actually doing is trying to said light on the subject. we are trying to get it all the way that is not the case when it comes to the public debate on the part of the government. the government wants to keep the secrets and in a few outlying cases, people come out and say flatly false things to the public. ofryone knows about example director clapper and the question about whether the nsa collects any kind of data at all about tens of millions of americans, and he said no. but much more often, there is

this radically is leading information. information is provided that if a friend or family member did that to you, you would consider them to have betrayed you. to have deliberately lead you down the wrong path. here is an example. the collection of all the call records, it does keep coming back to that and not the overseas collection. for a long time, the government said we won't tell you at all hammy times we have used this power to collect business records. it would do great harm to the security of the united states if we told you the number of times we used it. then congress passed a law requiring them to disclose how many times they used it. so they came out one year and said it turns out there's nothing to worry about.

was 2009. they said we have only used it 24 times last year. don't worry about it. it turned was 2009. they needed for quarterly applications of this power to get trillions of records. large be that it is a fraction monopoly entirety of it. 24, it turns out it is trillions of records. they needed they say we only take it when it is relevant to a terrorist investigation. it turns out their meaning of the word relevant is all of them. everyone of them could possibly be relevant. if they had been straight with the american people and said we would like to be able to collect all the call records and we will regulate our use of them as follows, if they had done that around the time they actually started collecting them, soon

if they hador even done it in 2007, they might well have won public support for it. that they are doing it behind our back, and the highly misleading statements about it have led to a considerable degree of shock when people find out what they are doing. >> i would like to go systematically through a few things that we both referred to a few times. or five just take three minutes on each of the three things. first the fisa courts and how that works, second the 215 program, and third am the 702. starting with the fisa courts. my understanding that they were created in the 1970's, coming out of a recommendation which uncovered all sorts of abuses in the american intelligence program before that. the spying on martin luther king and all of that. to prevent that, they said they're going to create this work -- the special fisa court.

how exactly does the fisa court work? can someone who is an intern or relatively young person like edward snowden or one of the american university students who are interning at nsa or cia, can they send an e-mail to the fisa court and say hey, i would like some data on this person? what is the process to have a fisa request? how is the request made and what is the process? said aboutt thing the fisa court is incredibly odd. it exists. only western democracy that takes these questions to the third branch of government. other countries, last time i checked that were democratic, like the united kingdom, issued these warrants within the ministries. it is a grand american experiment to involve the third branch of government and what is ofentially -- an exercise

executive prerogative in terms of conducting espionage. what is unusual is that we do it this way. in order to do it this way, we put certain restrictions on this court because it cannot nearly be as open as other courts in our system. first of all it is not adversarial. on the other hand, tony soprano doesn't get a longer when the fbi comes up with a warrant on him. unfortunately, when we set up the fisa court, we used the useuage of law which we warrants in criminal proceedings inorder to go up on wiretaps fbi and other investigations. there is a sharp distinction often made in the public discourse about this. there's an incredibly sharp distinction between doing surveillance for law enforcement and for foreign intelligence purposes. i read commentary very often of

suspicionless surveillance. that word has absolutely no meaning to me as a foreign intelligence officer. onon't collect information foreign nationals because they are bad. on foreignnformation nationals because they are interesting. i collect information on foreign nationals because their thatnications contain data will keep americans more free and more safe. they do not have to be bad people. do not confuse the two. so now the court is designed to warn collection against protected persons. believe thatn to c is now the agent of a foreign power. >> by protected persons you mean americans? >> no, american citizens anywhere in the world and anyone

in the united states, including diplomats. themder to collect against from foreign intelligence purposes requires a warrant. in addition, because the two-year cheese of the way the iw was written -- remember told you it echoed the law enforcement statute? it put specific restrictions on collecting on a wire in the united states that do not exist for collecting on the air in the united states. >> when you want a warrant on a protected person, what do you have to give to the fisa court? >> the fisa court gets a request for warrant that looks like about the size of a phone book the city the size of cincinnati. it's about that take. it is heavily laden with a lot of legal jargon. it is not all boilerplate. it requires a great deal of .pecifics

you're trying to prove to the judge that the individual you want to target is the agent of a foreign power. --ecall in one instance that's what it was. >> it changed under the patriot act, which is a lot older. >> and the protect america act which came between the two. describing this old model that is irrelevant to every single story that has been written request that is not true, bart. you also need the courts permission because of the peculiarities of the way the law was written. >> the big packet of information you were talking about, is that submitted by anybody at nsa or cia or department of justice? >> it will be crafted at the agency that wants the coverage.

it will go through a whole series of your craddick stops. it ends up that the department of justice. >> one of the things that we hear about the courts is that they have approved almost every request that they have had. this gives the impression that it is a rubberstamp. it is an irrelevant process. not happyjudge is with the fisa application, it is withdrawn and redone. all right? no one who has been through the process would describe it as a rubberstamp. >> is this your understanding of > fisa process? >> everything that mike is

talking about still happens. that is not the stuff that people are writing stories about and what the public is debating. the old model for specific targets. we have something short of probable cause. we have reason to think that this person is not -- it used to be that they have to be an agent of a foreign power. now, it has to be relevant to the investigation of a foreign power and they have to demonstrate relevance. they want your records and my 2s.rds in 1s and theet's make that shift to 215 program. >> ok. there are four kinds of data. george bush ordered michael

hayden to start collecting these after 9/11 without the benefit of a statute or court supervision for several years. until the justice department rebelled and people were about to resign because they deemed parts of the government to be illegal. this is the famous "warrantless surveillance. " of 2005. there is metadata. it is who talks to who when and what equipment they are using. there is content. they were collecting metadata and content for telephone and internet communications. chats, documents you have stored in a cloud, video, the entire universe of content that travels the

internet and the telephony is your phone calls. what happened after the justice department rebellion and some public knowledge began to lead the debate, the fisa court was asked to switch gears and did switch gears. they were issuing warrants for individuals and asked to authorize on a quarterly or annual basis huge programs of surveillance. the court would now say, once a year, that you may collect anything that you like from google, yahoo!, microsoft, provided that you certify that it fits targeting rules and it is treated and handled to minimization procedures that are intended to protect the privacy of u.s. persons, consistent with the operational needs.

there is some protection. i will not deny that. is as airtight as one may be led to believe. in any case, the court has a authority.h standing you do not have to tell me the names. you do not tell the court the names of any of the people that they are collecting. to know, there is not going be an individual work for that person. it used to be that, in the intelligence world, it was not wrongdoing necessarily. there had to be a specific showing that the individual is likely to be a valid foreign surveillance target. that is gone now. andfisa court has accepted nobodyeted the law that in the public and, frankly, anyone in the unclassified world who studied this closely, and i

count myself among them. several chapters of my last book was about this. i never suspected that the executive branch had told the court and the court had agreed that electing every single person's call records was a definition of relevant to a investigation. >> the description of what went on under the terrorist surveillance program when i was director of nsa is not accurate. that is about all i can say about that. ands right about the court the executive branch going to the court from lawrence that were brought, generalized towards, rather than specific targeted warrant against individuals. the fisa act put restrictions on who you can target and the techniques of targeting inside the united states.

most, if not all, of the generalized warrant's that are rants described -- wara that are being described are in the united states. we approach the court for approval. ss was createde geography. the nsa has procedures to minimize -- protect u.s. privacy. your question was, why metadata? so, the first warrant is in 2002 . the chief judge of the fisa court. it allows us to resume things that were the subject of heated

previousns only the march. we did it by not relying on the presidential power to conduct foreign intelligence but, by involving an additional branch of government, the digital branch.-- the judicial it met the reasonableness standard of the fourth amendment. you and i are not protected against all searches. you and i are protected against unreasonable searches. the best way to do this within the constitutional structure was to go to a court that is familiar with surveillance and ask that question of a judge. in this case, the judge did issue a warrant. >> basically, the collection of metadata is the collection of all the phone call records. the nsa would store this in

their warehouses. all of these records. they would not access or read them, except when they had process from a fisa judge. but no. under section 215, the one we are talking about, after snowden but before the president's changes, these it nsa, under the fisa court, get metadata. those records that you have shared with the phone company. they do not belong to you. the nsa get these records. you are not identified. this number call that number at that time for that long. and, you know, how many phone calls do 350 million people make in a day. you get the idea of how much

data is coming in. actually, what was happening was, this program was set up one most people are making phone calls through land lines. it is much more difficult and .egally complex people want to wireless communication. it was difficult to get the same information in. as time went by, the percentage of american phone calls it showed up on a daily basis in the database was shrinking to about 25%. -- database is sailed off sealed off. they can only be approached by 200 people in the nsa. the machines that they use are keystroke-monitor. take almost always, foreign number that shows up

in yemen. we find literature on an individual that shows that he has affiliations with our qaeda and has a cell phone. we go and ask if the phone number shows up in their full -- in there. says, ine in the bronx talked to that guy once a week, the nsa asks that phone number in the bronx who they talk to. that is it. the change that is made is that they used to do three hops. next one. go to the the president made it to hops -- two hops. he said the nsa has to go to the court every time they make the query was up this -- query.

this is unusual. keep in mind what the court is judging. not are judging whether or nsa has a reasonable suspicion that the four number collected through foreign intelligence is affiliated with al qaeda. it is not you that the court is checking on or you're right that it is double-booking. shoulderking over the of the intelligence professional to see if their judgment was correct. full yearowl year -- the nsa had records, and happened to hundred 88 times. 288 times.ned >> people's eyes start to glaze over. let's take it down to fundamentals.

i am not advocating a policy position and i do not know where the line should be drawn. i know that there are questions that belong in the public domain that we ought to collectively decide. transparency enables the checking power of civil society, lobbying, of, of voting, and of market power. people get to decide why they do business with a company as it is not say. companies respond by competing on privacy. let's look at the big picture. a wallet goes missing. what is the most efficient way to search for it? everybody gets surged on the way out the door. lots of societies do that. the british did that in the 18th century. that, generically, is the idea of a general warrant and that

was a principal cause of the american revolution and one of grievances. communications are enormous. they have never been able to do that before until recent years. most of these programs could not have happened before the year 2000 or so. the amount of data that exists in the world that has been produced and transmitted in the world since 2000 ghastly eclipses all the data that was ever produced in the world. there is a lot of it. all of it.ccess to they are not just collecting metadata. the programs that no one ever wants to talk about, overseas, they are collecting content. lots and lots of contact -- content was up there is an access point called "muscular."

-- content. there is an access point called "muscular." 14 strand of cable transmits times the print in the library of congress. anything that looks like an e-mail address book, and inbox, or a buddy list, they say "we want that." that is considered content under law. all the transmissions between google and yahoo! is content. k.at is being collected in bul the question is, are we comfortable with that? >> it is being collected and sent to a server? >> humans cannot lay eyes on all of it. they collected. -- collect it.

there is assumed to be billions of communications that are incidentally american. they feel free to store as much of it as they rationally believe they can use. they don't want all address books. they want address books of people where the formatting that gets transmitted lets them know what it is. useless forms of data, they throw out. they keep it and they circuit. -- search it. >> we should open up to questions. we have 40 minutes left. we will let people line up at the microphones. finish your answer. >> i'm glad we have an hour for this. >> ok. all right. carriet i will last -- --

>> sounds good to me. >> i will ask you to identify yourself and ask a brief question. save speeches for the dorm. >> my name is ari. i am a graduating senior. my question is for both of you. at what point do you want to start collecting on a terror subject inside of the united states who is an american citizen? >> i will go first. >> that is the him my confidence. >> you mean like the boston -- beyond my confidence. rnaevu mean like the tsa kids. we did not collect on them. y were not monitored.

>> that is not why the fbi and others did not monitor them. they got the tip from the russian government. have been up could to no good and they did a preliminary investigation. they said, we do not see anything here and they stopped. they had a tip from the foreign government. 42 doave them lots of surveillance. of opportunity to do surveillance. >> given the coverage of the snowden revelation, there is a presumption that the nsa is sucking everything up. they are not. barton is exactly right. they would have to have had a certain level of suspicion and go through the processes that

allow them to be targeted. after boston, i get questions like, how did you not know they were going to those websites? -- >> wen routinely do not routinely look at these. sure. >> ok. here is the google data center. two different countries. here is the line between them. nsa goes between them and take in anything and everything it wants from that. even though hundreds of billions of those communications will be u.s. communications. >> let me make sure i understand the premise you are suggesting. you believe that gmail should be a safe haven for legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the united states. >> is that my question? >> that is how i translate your question. wire, i am on that

not collecting gmail users. barton said, and this hurts your head, we have spent the whole evening here and have not gotten off of section 215. >> we are now. >> the approach you use in collecting foreign intelligence looks like a funnel. you have access. p isnext stwe collect. the new process. you process. the funnel get smaller. often, people use the number out here that describes moveotential access and that number up the chain to the more sophisticated and narrowly focused activities.

i go back to my premise that gmail is not a safe haven. google is an international company. google is a u.s. person in certain circumstances. by the way, that is not their cable. it is a virtual cable that they use. i asked you the question, hotmail, gmail, safe havens? these are global e-mail providers that are used by everyone. is your theory that, you cannot touch it because eric schmidt will be very mad? line, there is a long distance to go from saying that gmail should be a safe haven for terrorists and saying, on the other hand, that you should be, as the u.s. government, siphoning in all of the content

that goes across that table. gradation.room for >> i gave you the gradation. not everything you collect is processed. not everything you process is reviewed. not everything you report is disseminated. >> the prison program, the first , gave theote about nsa more power than it ever has to get gmail, all of the cool content -- the google content, with authorization from the court. it had latitude. it was not allowed to sit through everything in the server to see if there was anything that interested us. >> barton is right.

binary is too strong of a word. there is a view of the world when it comes to american intelligence. there is protected communications and everything else. nsa has a lot more freedom of action going after communications. some europeans do not attach privacy to a particular sovereign. it is a more general human rights. i have that. that is a subject of discussion. the american approach to this and that it is a binary world. protected persons and persons who are not protected. -- nsa it is quite powerful. >> let's take a question over here. >> this is something i worry about when i read newspapers.

china is trying to segregate their internet and germany is thinking about doing this. what effect would this have on the nsa possibility to collect information or, is such a thing even possible? >> this is beyond my expertise. i have a few thoughts. first, there are a lot more people in countries talking hyperbolically about their desire to cut off the global internet and keep all their data at home than are actually taking steps to do it or will possibly do so. you are cutting yourself off from the world and it is damaging. it is not practical. there are countries that say google, yahoo!, all of the data reduced by germans have to stay in german data storage and you cannot go anywhere else in the world.

certainly not the u.s.. the fundamental structure of the internet does not allow that. there are countries like china or iran. orthat the extreme end, n korea. they want to cut themselves off from free debate and free information and are using the nsa as an excuse to strengthen that argument. it was possible, it would be cleaner. it would take us back to world war ii-era. you could break the german or japanese military code and it was a no-brain or. -- no-brainer. this is a code being used by the enemy. in a war. now, if you try to break encryption, everybody -- almost everybody, uses the same stuff.

the nsa knows about this or that entity. we are writing about stuff that has general public interest. if you are breaking the encryption standard that run the internet because we want to get the bad guys, you are breaking everybody's else -- everybody else's encryption. >> thank you for coming. . am edmund sweeney i may need of a pittsburgh. >> philadelphia. -- >> i am a native of pittsburgh. >> philadelphia. >> i have one question in two parts. one for mr. gelman and one for general hayden. we talked about current and past. i want to talk about the future theup we know -- we

future. the increasing demand for transparency and this general sentiment and people like julian assange and edward , what implications does this have for the future of organizations like the nsa and cia and how they will deal with those problems. grniture gelman -- for mr. ellman, how will the media respond and interact with this information? >> i will go first and go quick. we have to recruit for the generation that produced bradley manning and edward snowden. that is a rowdy.

-- reality. that generation has a different compass to transparency than my generation. that is a reality. my committee will have to deal with that. one of the major muscle movements in my community has been to generalized sharing. it used to be need to know. now it is need to share. this is hard. the other impact of this is that, when you undertake an espionage activity, you put what you can gain over here and what you can lose over there. let's talk about signal intelligence. welcome again? -- what can i gain? i could hear the head of state. what could i lose? you could be embarrassed if that is public. you make that judgment.

this hand is not a moral hand. it is a political and public-relations hand. this is what i would lose if it was made public. a gets multiplied. by the likelihood it gets made public -- it gets multiplied by the likelihood it gets made public. particularly when it comes to grabbing a signal out of the air, it is zero. it is undetectable. what we gain over here may not be massive. the potential loss is not measurable because you cannot figure out a way in which it becomes public. with edward snowden, that number over here will never be zero again. you have to factor in insider threat that makes operations known that the target nations are never going to detect.

that might be the strongest brake on aggressive signals intelligence collection against some countries. not american guilt or friendship. it is that calculus. that rall national interest "national- raw interest" calculus. keith alexander was the director of the nsa and he gave a talk. he said that he wished he could bring every american into his huddle and tell them the place iscalling -- plays he calling. if he did, the bad guys would know. there is no encapsulated walled

off communication and global affairs. when we didrue that find out what was happening inside of the huddle, a lot of americans do not like the place being called. that is among the reasons why the existence of a classified stamp does not end the inquiry when i am deciding that something should be public. there are all kinds of stuff that should be classified that are self-evidently triple -- trivial. i have a laundry manual that is stamped secret. i also have noticed that there are interesting variations on how classification works, depending on the forum. there is an internal nsa report. i talked about the number of

compliance incidences, the nsa calls it, errors or violations of law. there are statistics. how many times do we have this compliance problem or that compliance problem. it is classified as secret. it means that it would do harm to national security if we knew the number of times they screwed up. that is hard to defend. when they report to congress, it is classified, top secret, special intelligence. 91% of all congressional staffers could not read it and a greatly restricted the oversight possibilities. reacts american public when there is something that the u.s. government is doing and something they did not know they were doing. something they might have

accepted if they had known in advance. >> thank you. >> i want to return to the question of call-chaining. the multiplication in the program. 88 inquiries. 2 each of those, which until , aently was three hops thousand is the first top. the second would be a million. there is some overlap. i am extrapolating. not by orders of magnitude. if i'm correct, if you are talking about three hops, you are talking about 288 things. that is close to the totality of medications. >> i'm relying on statistics that the former deputy director put out.

words, and those inquiries, 600,000 numbers. i agree with you that that is not the right number of hops out. this is an investigation. it is just numbers. no other identifying data is there. they are looking for patterns that -- so, you have a spider chart. you have a number in buffalo. it is interesting when the --ond hop out of buffalo that is why it is done. it is done as an investigative process. you are looking for linkages that might merit further investigation. chris inglis did not explain what he meant. in thes a saying

newsroom that there is a danger when a reporter does arithmetic. go and touch only means that each number called an average of less than one percent a year. year.son a we have all heard of six degrees of separation. six degrees of separation on average. it is not just a play on a novel. computer science theoretical work that was done. the average number of hops that you have to do to reach every single person in the world to another is six. let's suppose, more conservatively, the 300 people call 100 people a year and you multiply that by a hundred and -- multiply that by

100 and that by 100. i don't do math. i count on my fingers. >> more than 6000. said that it was fewer than 300 numbers in one year and the numbers have varied from year to year. you can be confident that the numbers have not very downward. that is consistent with the possibility that, some other seats.hey had 5000 that is the kind of massaging of data in public statements that they have done and in other demonstrable ways. >> my name is harry. my question is less technical. it is for both of you were neither of you.

it seems obvious to the casual observer that, every time there is a national tragedy, there is a reaction within the populace where wenment for a -- give up liberty for security. the patriot act, the internment of japanese americans. obvious examples. it takes some time and society skills this back. is it concerning to both or could -- you that, we that we could end up giving up a lot of liberty for security. whether or not you agree with the programs. >> thank you. right behind you question mark -- behind you? >> i am an aspiring journalist.

my question has to do with journalism in light of edward snowden. we have seen glenn greenwald and james rosen accused of conspiring with whistleblowers. i was wondering what your thoughts were on investigative journalism. and, do you think that press freedoms are under attack by the obama administration? >> i would jump in on 9/11. here is where i do my moral calculus. my professional role, we are all responsible for our actions as human beings. my great fear is that we did not use the authorities available to us right now. , this the metaphor that

is the box you want us to play in legally. there is a national debate. the nsa will say that they have two houses of congress, a president, a court that says it is good to go. otherwise, they will play section 215 out to the edges. the background ethical argument for this is that, if we do not play with in this box and we another we have catastrophic attack on the homeland, the box you will demand, not the one you will accept, the one you will demand will be out here. in a reverse psychology way, playing this aggressively with in the law of now is actually protection against dangers to civil liberties in the future. do you she that --

are that? perversely lead to demands for crater surveillance -- greater surveillance? >> everybody wants to talk about terrorism. that is not -- that does not account for nearly anything close to the majority of intelligence gathering. there are a lot of purposes. it is an emotional trigger. some of it is and some of it is not. our society has always had and one swings. it is a cliché. the difference is, what happens under the regime of extreme secrecy? the internment camps of the japanese. it was announced and they were

behind barbed wire and you can take pictures of them and look at your history books and there are the pictures. andnow when we overreached come to a decision after a certain span of time. we say, i do not like that picture and that was not the right thing to do. the supreme court reverses. when you are doing everything in secret or large parts of it in secret, it is hard to decide if you have gone too far. -- years year later, later, we are trying to resolve the torture debate. the senate has voted to recommend for the classification the executive summary of a 6000 page report. publish their report under the current understandings of the way these things work and there is no law that says that only the president is the five

-- gets to decide what is classified. in any case, we still do not know what happened. there are 6000 more pages of conversation that they want to have. they are notte, allowed to publish. like, let's steps collect all the content that flows across this cable or all of this data about the phone calls that you make or, allowing us to put communications in our repository. we will decide what we can look at and when. we do not get to debate those things. we would not be having these conversations it not -- if not for edward snowden. >> i have one minor thought. those americans in the room, you

are citizens of the nation with the most intelligence -- transparent intelligence community. there is no one near us. it does not make barton's argument that there needs to be more transparency. you need to understand the baseline that you are working at. you have more information about your country's espionage than any other citizenry on the planet. >> let's take to questions over here and close that microphone. >> my question piggybacks off of that well. we have heard about an overclassification of data and a shock reaction about sources and methods. goquestion is, how do we about having that debate without compromising intelligence undertakings with the methods being used while avoiding shocks ?

>> yeah. the two speakers before me cover the questions i would ask. as someone else -- if someone else -- >> you did not answer my question. >> i would be happy to answer. i got distracted. there are alarming sides. there have been more probes from prosecutions under obama. everyone has read this. more than all previous presidencies combined. the have used aggressive means of surveillance against the associated press and fox news. wiggle construct is that a leak of classified information is a counterintelligence problem. that makes reporters doing

egitimate l targets. i spent a lot of my time trying to protect the security of my communications. not only from the u.s. government. from the foreign governments that want documents that i have that should not be public. all of that being said, i am sitting on a stage, a free person and not in handcuffs having a civil conversation with general hayden. you can read the espionage act or various other statutes. there are ways to read them. things that ious could be charged under. it is not because we do not have laws to prosecute journalists. it is because we have a legal and political more in this

country that says that this is a line that we do not want to cross. way, when youe ask about sanctions or controls on me, i am well aware that if i published a story that clearly securityusly led to a disaster, that could change the legal more. -- norm. cnn.com.e to i thought that the prosecution the nsa collapse under its own weight because of overreached. some things deserved response from the government. not that. i was troubled by the scattershot subpoena on the associated press and the dedication of rosen as a co-conspirator. that is someone of my

background. transparency, how do you make that work? the intelligence community has to be more transparent than it ever has before. if not, you are not going to let us do this. care is one copy out -- veat, it is inevitable that we will make usa. that is the deal -- less safe. that is the deal. >> thank you for coming. both the president and the congress in the usa freedom act and several other bills have introduced the special advocate. a privacy and civil liberties advocate that we placed within the fisa court. of this, youosals

would be granted powers to appeal to the federal courts. potentially, ending up in the supreme court. i was open to get your general thoughts and comments on this position, in general. the potential effectiveness and, also, whether you think the granting of standing was going too far. >> hi. thank you for coming. my name is out arrest. -- alverez. dick cheney spoke at our campus. he said that he believed that 9/11 could have been prevented if the nsa had capabilities back then that it currently has. do you agree with this statement? >> there has been enormous amounts of scholarship on whether 9/11 could have been

prevented with the technology of today. it has been fairly well established and is the view of the 9/11 commission that 9/11 could have been prevented with what they had been if they had used it as designed and had the anddination between the fbi cia had gone as it should have. c advocateof the fis is beyond my confidence. i follow and have read a lot of opinions now. i have read some fisa requests in the past. any preceding before a mutual armored or is going to be, in the long run, working better and better if there is a checking power and an advocate. hasnow that the fisa court

a number of the decisions for the first time in their history. they said that certain programs were lawful. before, it was only individual warrants. we know that the first time that a judge consider that program in proceeding, ital was found to be unconstitutional. another one considered it shortly after and said that it was constitutional. that is the whole point. a contested perceiving tends to bring out the best evidence. in principle, i would before that. -- anm not in advocate advocate for individualized warrants. we do that and the criminalized system -- in the criminal system. number one, and happens less frequently. -- it happens less frequently.

it has implications. you want the benefit of the avid serial process. -- adversarial process. what vice president cheney was referring to was two guys in san diego. intercepted seven or eight phone calls from san diego to a safe house. house.get was a safe .e detected the call there was nothing in the physics or in the content of the call that told us that these guys were making the call from san diego. we have people speaking arabic calling to a safe house in yemen. his wife was pregnant and he was asking about her welfare.

we intercepted seven calls and pushed up reports on intelligence. again, the content of the call in san diego. with the program, when you go , the phone transom number in san diego races is hand. that is what the vice president was referring to. barton is right. there are other ways. saying that we could have done is like saying, all i want to do is when things close. no coach has that as a game plan. i would like to have the additional capacity. > that number was -- >> the metadata would have recorded the connection between the u.s. number and the yemen number.

>> we have two last questions. ayres.ame is chris gellman.on is for mr. you mentioned the data that you have to protect because you are a target for the u.s. and outside countries. would you do with the data that you consider to be too important to publish? you delete the data? -- do you delete the data? question, thank you very much for getting into the details of this program. return to where we started talking about, we talked about how radically data collection has expanded in the last decade. someone pointed to the intercepts between google centers and the bolt data collection.

since data collection has changed so much, should our concept of surveillance and what it means to be surveilled change? were talking about data --ng from a public company private company. we, as americans, have enough our data to private companies will stop should that mean the same thing -- private companies. should that mean the same thing? , for reasons that are obvious, i'm not going into all of the details. proposition, what i have done, with the benefit of the expertise of some of the best people in the world on this because they have been available , i have kept the material .hysically secure

there are physical barriers as to where it is stop it is on encrypted computers with the best modern encryption. it is now, when you get to if frontal attack on encryption, the encryption stance against any country in the world and it never touches a network. it is on a computer that never touches a network. there are other things. i'm not going to go any further than that. , actually, the ironic thing is, i have been asking since the first day of last year , for the more secure way to communicate with the government when i tell them what i have each time i write a story. i say, i would like to tell you about this story. i'm telling you every single fact that i am contemplating publishing. said, it is crazy to have

this conversation on an open phone line or e-mail. and, not months later, they have not provided me with a secure means of having those conversations. it is as simple as a key that is it is not bureaucratically or legally simple for them. shape in the bottom left and words that rhyme with each other. that- literally, words rhyme with each other on the page. there are ways that this could be better approached. let the record show that barton retains the data. just like nsa. >> if you think that is the same, we have more to talk about.

>> on the meaning of privacy in the digital age, in an age where every time anyone uses easy pass , giving allping sorts of information to companies voluntarily. we are comfortable giving away tons of metadata and content of data as everyone who has ever gotten a pop-up ad after they have made an inquiry. knows. >> we continue to negotiate with ourselves as unique riches of god and as social animals. changes. it is changing with the digital

age. it is a nightmare for security services in a democracy who are sworn to protect reasonable when theons of privacy definition of reasonable is a movable feast within a broader culture. onthere are two things going legally and conceptually, in terms of privacy. there is a third-party doctrine will stop i voluntarily told verizon -- third-party doctrine. i voluntarily told verizon, who was transmitting my voice over vacations that cross all sorts therefore, ianies, have no lawful or moral reason to believe that that is confidential. relational. i may be happy to tell you

something and not all these other guys. -- way itt the work works. the third-party doctrine began as an analog, pencil and paper, thanks. thing.untarily -- you voluntarily told the bank something and you waved your privacy. offgoing to cut myself entirely from civilization. there is no way for us to function in the city or society or be employed or students without these mitigation methods. methods.ication if we allow google to know that we are sending a love letter to our love interest, we are happy to let anyone read it. that is preposterous. the other is the reasonable expectation of privacy. that has been interpreted that,

,hen you know the means exist then you have no reasonable expectation to believe it is not happening to you. if i tell you that we have "through the wall" thermal imaging, you now know that your sex life is not immune. that technology does exist. you are all warned. beenoncepts have stretched. there is a lot of work being done to try to bring that back -- into reason. --thank you for an unlimited illuminating conversation. coming up tonight on c-span, former reagan advisor suzanne the history of

u.s.-russia relations. then remarks by comedian lewis black on his path to becoming a socialist. a discussion of nsa surveillance programs. on the next "washington journal," a politico tax reporter looks at efforts to fix the tax code. rebecca wilkins and william mcbride discuss the fairness and equity of the u.s. tax system. what needs to be done to reform it? your phone calls, facebook comments, and we. live at 7:00 a.m. eastern. the politics of food and dietary choice. you can see her remarks