documents that months earlier intelligence officials have been telling me it was difficult to much of theuse so classified material was intertwined with legal analysis full top -- legal analysis. transparency, a permanent change in behavior or as some suspect, a shift in response to disclosures? i want to say one quick thing. i heard an observation that came from a former inspector general at the nsa, joel brenner. that by withholding the existence of this metadata program, the government may have avoided or obtained a short-term tactical benefit in terms of not tipping off terrorists.

it missed an opportunity to secure a longer-term strategic goal of winning public support. that is important to the intelligence community and their activities. >> did you want to say more? >> you are a technology expert. you were brought on to help decode some of the slides. some of them are cryptic to say the least. some were amateurish. it will be interesting to see some of the slides. those thought bubbles, are they really part of an nsa slide? i want to pull up one slide. muscular. we should have that ready. >> it is the drying of the cloud. there is a smiley face in the middle.

>> i want to say one quick thing. i have seen a lot of government powerpoint. most of them are not classified. one of the things that convinced me that these might be authentic is the crowded, weird graphic design. [laughter] >> here we go. decodingalk us through some of the slides? this one in particular. how does a slide like this lead to a story on october 30, 2013 infiltrates links to yahoo!, google data sites." readjust going to quickly the first few graphs. the nsa has secretly broken into the main communication links that connect yahoo! and google data centers. this is according to documents

obtained by edward snowden. by tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect that will any of them belonging to americans. two engineers with close ties to google exploded with profanity when they saw the drying. i hope you publish this, one of them said. talk about how you got from this , to the story. >> it was an incredibly fun adventure. on one hand, it has been very difficult. the nsa internally was extremely cryptic. there were code words for code words. there were secret program names. they are sealed under multiple levels of security. they go to great lengths to classify or high their operations. it is noter hand,

obvious, but somewhat apparent. these are network engineers. they are tapping into technology that we all use. if you know network architecture or cell phone architecture and some of these underlying technologies, they focus on the same issues. they draw them out. the other thing that is interesting is working on a number of the stories, i got the sense that i know these guys. brass, upper the management guys. these are the ready geeks -- rdd eddit geeks. they hang out online forms. they make inside jokes and funny drawings. tastelessrandom, computer jokes.

this is one of the first documents that we reviewed. we thought there was something there. we were not sure. again, from a network engineering perspective, this is essentially how the cloud works. this is a cloud system for many of the major cloud providers. there's a point at which the data from a user and the cloud provider is encrypted. .here is internal traffic it is behind the door. they handle it. that is not encrypted. the assumption is that it is private. there is no reason to encrypt it. we called her head around and we tried a bunch of theories. we look at architecture diagrams and documentation. both in terms of what was in the slides and what is publicly available. it clicked. we tried a bunch of theories and it made sense. cablesre tapping the

between data centers in the cloud. that was interesting and surprising. you would have to think from a hacker network perspective. they are giving a set of constraints. legal and technical constraints. they are given a mission to collect data on target they find interesting. of theploited a property cloud architecture, which is if you are here in d.c., and you are connecting to a google data center in north carolina or mountain view, your communication will stay in the u.s. stop because of the way google architects their networks , your data is replicated to all those locations in the world stop in the event of a power outage on the west coast, they will collect the same data that would be illegal or not available to them domestically,

they will connect and access that data overseas. they are essentially finding ways to explore the architecture of the cloud. it is insecure and it is on the backend. it is redundant and immediately replicated. that became the fun angle. the thing that was most surprising to me in all of this was not the geek terms, but the definitions for words you and i use everyday. words like collectives. under these mechanisms, the data has not been collected. it is recorded and saved to a desk. it is collected when it is in process by human rights system that analyzes it. again, based on the legal definition and these vulnerabilities. they are able to perform these tasks that would otherwise seem illegal to us. >> i just want to say couple

words. found this isi right around the time that i us to hire him to figure this stuff out. many of you are not involved in this world. if you come across that cartoon, you have to say, there's a story here. there is a little smiley face and it says encryption. it is added and removed here. there's definitely something going on. the reason why the engineers , theed into profanity family newspaper version of the conversation, is because of the smiley face. that was the declaration of victory. it was the football in the face of the company cost engineers. we found a way around her security.

we talk -- it was either five or six weeks, to figure what that cartoon and. it was an illustration taken from a document called google cloud exploitation. we had illustration, but not the document stop there were lots of times when there be a powerpoint that was taken from some other thing and it will clearly answer all the questions. but we do not have that other thing. you are trying to put together. say that they to are removing encryption. are they ceiling -- stealing certificates from the companies? have they figured out a way to break encryption? -- are they spoofing them, pretending to be google when you connect to them. we discarded a bunch of theories. we were not going to get the answer within the corners of that one document or even any combination of documents. we had to get out into the world butreport not only on this,

all sources. it was not until the interviewed people who are intimately familiar with the architecture of the system's and run it through our computers that we figure out what was happening. >> this is a real moment for the tech industry. this,sponse of a had to can you talk a little about the evolution of the tech industry response to all of these stories? in the beginning, they said they did not know what we were talking about. it has been a real roller coaster. in this isole different. i did some surveillance for and. wasain responsibility keeping an eye on google and facebook. recipient of some

phone calls after the first story ran. that was the story that made it clear that the government had access to private data. the company's format. companieshile -- the were mad. it took a while to figure out what the disc -- this juncture was. theyndustry realized that had been havd. it is clear that a lot of it was happening through core procedures that were super to us, but not to them. i can remember the story that they were talking about. the google and that -- google and yahoo! datalinks. industry in the tech did not know that intelligence

services have wired into their brains. they were really mad at us. eventually they were really mad at the u.s. government because they felt as though their place in the world had been jeopardized stop you use google e-mail service. you imagine that it is private. it hurt them economically from an industry point of view. conduit toeen as a the u.s. intelligence services. there was a visceral quality. they felt betrayed on a personal level. they had built the systems that were supposed to resist hackers and yet you had these uber it was breaking into a. in ways that were imaginative. they are good at this.

by the time we got to the end of the year, the companies were thinking us. we are glad that we know this. they put in new encryption measures. we may never know if they are sufficient, but it is clear that the defenses are stronger on the corporate level now. let's think about how extraordinary this is. he is talking about some of the biggest american companies there are. they are spending a lot of money and engineering talent in a deliberate effort to thwart the efforts of their own government to spy on them. you can say that their philosophy is nobody can spy on our users. us, but this is a big moment. they are not trying to stop the government from doing any kind of targeted surveillance. even if what they are doing is perfectly effective by increasing their internal links,

the government can still go to them and get information about any individual target. will still be able to spy on anyone, but it cannot spy on everyone. differencese big between the prism story and the datalinks between googling yahoo! with prism, the company's new -- they did not know the codename prism, but they were aware that the national security people were aware of the program. they had a court order to comply. this has been debated on the hill. an amendment in act. with this story, they were completely taken by surprise. they felt betrayed. this was not the result of public debate. fisa was no fire the --

over whether nsa should gain access to the links between these data centers. that was taking place outside of the domestic surveillance law that we have under presidential authority exclusively. that deserves a lot more exploration. -- one of theying big benefits of the snowden disclosures over the last year is a heightened awareness of the nature of government surveillance. result of, and as a advances in technology, we have seen a fundamental shift in approach moving from individualized protections a different sense to vast collection with limits on use at the backend. time, because of the

,lobal nature of the network the communications of people like you and me are mixed in with the communications of terrorists and legitimate target. as the former director of the nsa said, today there is no home game were away game. there's just one game. that raises questions of whether those backend protections sufficiently protect our privacy. >> the companies have much to lose in terms of reputation. >> that is a key point. thing that the disclosures helped motivate is investment in security on the backend and front-end. security experts have been warning about the ability to collect data that is not corrected for years. there is a personal vendetta to get yahoo! to encrypt their

e-mail communications for a number of years. did, priorstory we to the other story, about how the nsa was collecting address books awful public internet havections, one company statistics on the number of collections. it was like 500,000 a day. moreompany had 10 times accurate books collected than the other. they wanted to comment on the record. why are we being targeted out? you guysus answer is, do not provide security tools. you do not build security into your product. this closures have made a very clear. that has become salient. response,n give us a

their statement was, we will begin to encrypt our yahoo! mail starting with this year. >> in one line? a the front row here, he led large campaign of activism in technology to get yahoo! to scramble its connections from their computers to yours. for years. this was to protect against ordinary hackers. when you do not encrypt, your credit card data, your e-mail, it goes in clear text over the web and anybody can read it. years, yahoo! said no. on the day that the story ran, yahoo! announced that it would encrypt all connections. >> that is correct. >> a question clearly that we hear the most and that we got

through messages ahead of this event was, how did you and the , how did you weigh national security concerns with the public service of uncovering these government surveillance programs? what is the post be right to post stories about classified government material stop the new the times was asked about pulitzer the guardian received. he said, i have complicated views. i am a little nervous by the fact that they really did benefit from what i think is [inaudible] . a question submitted to the coast, can you please explain why this important work of journalism does not negatively impact national security? what is your response?

>> there are a lot of pieces to that. i think anyone who wants to ask that should ask it again. but politely. we will try to get different pieces at different times. a lot of people have a visceral reaction, it is classified as stop that at the end of the discussion. do not put in the paper. you have to understand what that would mean. there are is now more classified information, classified by the u.s. government, then the entire contents of the library of congress and all other open libraries in the world stop there is more classified data than unclassified data in the world. i have a classified laundry manual. i am not making this up. even the strongest defenders of national security discipline -- i have never met anyone who would not say that there is massive overclassification stop

that is one thing. the second is that having covered diplomacy and military affairs and intelligence matters for a long time, i can tell you that it is only a little bit exaggerated to say that almost everything i want to know, every story, could be classified somewhere. i have seen documents that have my story published. i have not making that up. -- allblem is bureaucracy wants control of information. when you are working in the secret world, you have this mechanism. almost everything that has to do with our relations with the world or military threats were intelligence matters, even policy, that is not testified in congress are in a press release or news conference, is classified. we said we could not cover some

of the biggest expenditures that the country makes, the hardest decisions, the ones that involve the greatest risk and allow us to hold accountable our leaders for the way that they use their power. you have to cut out -- they're a big blank spot. there's never been anything like it. stories, thousands of stories in the time i have worked at the washington post, that touched on something like that stop we cannot let the stamp itself be the decider. we have to try to way, what are the stakes? their stories we have killed over the years. there is an archive we did not consider publishing. that was my first conversation with the director of national intelligence. just so you know, everything between these pages will not be considered. it is specific and operational. it reveals targets and specific

techniques. the publication of this would end it. it would no longer be useful at all. we want to read about the stories that describe a public policy decisions. like the ones we have talked about before. is it ok? do we as a society think that is a good idea to allow u.s. intelligence services to collect overseas were no statutory laws apply? there's no fisa court to oversee it. them to break into data centers? americansot targeting for specific pieces of legislation, they are not targeting us, but incidentally, there collecting substantially

all of -- they are passing through their collection systems all of the content of our internet. what we were trying to explain before is that google, yahoo!, some of the other companies, they have these giant facilities all over the world. they have biometric locks and guards. they look like giant factories filled with computer servers. there's one in ireland and hong kong and singapore. they are across the north american continent. if you sit on the cable that synchronizes the data centers, it is the same thing as if you reached into the data center. it is ok with us to say that the nsa will collect that will from all of our communications in the service of its foreign intelligence mission. that is a big public policy question that needs to be debated.

that is what we are looking to do. >> just to touch on public policy. there's also this disconnect between definition. tot the public would believe be implied music collect, and with the government means when they say collect are two different things. we did a story on collection of entire countries phone calls. it was recording of the entire country's own calls. one of the core attribute of that story was that it is not collecting until it is actually processed. conversation. our >> it is not surveillance. you listen to it. >> is the public realizes the , i think a lot of

people would push back and say no, that is not what we thought we were approving. we saw this with a number of comments from senators and policymakers. a lot of the comments were that we did not realize. it was about definitions are technical capabilities. people were not aware of it. that is the value in reporting it. >> the store you are referring to was published last month. it is called nsa surveillance program reaches into the past. that was last month. why are we still seeing stories today? the reason why i ask is that there is the impression, the question, of how documents were received.

the one big dump. is snowden still involved? is he still releasing information? many people are wondering if he is calling the shots on some of the releases. >> i should be the one to address that will stop snowden gave me the document last spring. he has not handed over any documents to anyone since approximately that time the word. he did not even carry them with him when he left hong kong. it has been a long transit. ,e does not try to direct suggest, hints at what should be -- therebout and when was a general agreement that i made with him. he did not require an agreement, because it is what i would have done anyway. i must look through the material and way carefully.

i must not dump high volumes of it out there. i have to consider with the balance must be. post, we aregton not sitting in our armchairs making up thoughts of what would harmful to security. we are usually pretty good at anticipating what the government will be worried about. we consult with the government on every story and every fact. this might look innocuous to you, but it is not. they will tell us why. they tell us things that we do not know. it will help explain to us why they believe we should not publish something that we do know. those conversations are very successful. there is a good enough outcome on both sides where they will say that the whole thing -- you should not mention it at all.

there is a huge public policy question in that. i do not need to do this or that. that is not relevant to the point that the public needs to know about. the point is, we do not just get what would give security harm. we hear from the u.s. government directly and what they think would be a security harm. the number of times when we have published something after getting those kinds of arguments is tiny. to finish your question, snowden does not continue to dribble out documents. he does not attempt to control the coverage. the reason stories are still coming out is that there is a lot of material and we are not casual about putting it on the public record. we could go through this material a lot faster if i said, let's just dump the whole thing on the internet stop we will crowd source it. faster if i said,

let's take the 50 people in the newsroom who know the most about this stuff, let's give them reacts as to the whole archive. stories would come up faster. because there's so much sensitive material, we have much more control than that. >> is their life? >> there is more. >> this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the revelations affect government. there is also a discovery of more consumer surveillance efforts. that is something you have worked on. can you talk about how this has expanded our thinking about private sector surveillance efforts? >> is a good question. i covered surveillance a lot for a year or so when all of this broke loose. i used to debate with other people, should we care more about what google and yahoo! are doing? should we care more about the nsa?

all this stuffer came to light, it dawns on me that the distinction is not meaningful. everything that google and yahoo! and facebook are collecting, the nsa is eventually getting their hands on it. certainly they can get their hands on it. the consumer stuff and the government stop lens together to a degree. none of us fully appreciated it until these documents came out. it is interesting what we have seen. there's been a focus over the past 11 months on nsa collection because of these amazing stories. there has been less focused on consumer connection. gmail, they have ads based on what is in your stock. there is a whole host of issues. should you post pictures of your kids on facebook? these are a more prominent part of the conversation and what i was doing. it has been shifted over to try

to make sense of what we have learned. i do think that the time is approaching where we will have to wrestle with these questions. up to thesel giving companies to get free services? how much data is on our smartphones. every once in a while, i have to sit down and think about what is on my iphone stop it is scary. i do not have a huge number of secrets, but the precision about me and my life and my family and my friends that is encoded in the location data and facebook postings, it is stunning. i like to think that there's a moment coming when that conversation will come back to life. we will be reengaged on the question of how much is too much to be out there and in the cloud that anybody has access to.

>> ellen, how about your thoughts on surveillance beyond the nsa? what are you exploring? what are the areas of government surveillance? >> there is always the debate and disclosures of the past year. we have heard of all collection extends beyond the nsa. the cia also has engaged about election of money transfers. unfortunately, we do not have a disclosure about the protections and rules for that. it is under section 215. you asked earlier about what has changed. i want to say that it is not just all talk. when the telephone metadata program was first revealed in june of last year, president

obama, you may recall, came out and defended the program. itsaid he was relieved -- was legal, affected, subject to rigorous oversight. toelligence insiders i spoke said that they felt fairly confident he would continue to back them in the program. the debate took off. we started to see opinions move in july of last year. shy ofse fell 12 votes ending the program. a federal judge ruled that the program was probably unconstitutional. in december, the president class own surveillance review board included -- concluded that the program was not essential to preventing terrorism. by january of this year, obama was ordering his subordinates to come up with a way to end the

program as it currently exists. concrete result of the debate leading to policy change. there have been others. >> can each of you briefly talk a little bit about how every person, every consumer, everyone in this room, how does it affect you? how do these revelations affect you? i have been reading the stories in the focus should be on outrage or cynicism. what should they be thinking about? not want to tell people what to think. some of the things that we put aware table are -- we are as a society that there is a lot of information about us out there.

we just leave the digital exhaust. often onof ourselves the one hand as normal and uninteresting. why would they bother with me? or we are basically good people with nothing to hide. or, so what if somebody sees my kid's birthday party picture? the more you learn about how much is known about us and how we are tracked, the more most people start to feel a little squeamish. i will give you a quick example. i live and work primarily in new york. thought hee office did not care about this kind of stuff. he was not worried about digital privacy. he uses twitter a lot. turned on hisns

twitter account. there is a tool online that you can download called creepy. i downloaded it and i directed it at his twitter account. date three months worth of and timestamp locations. . uploaded to google maps i made it a private matter. you cannot look at it. i spent about one hour playing around with it and i went to him and said, here's three months of your life. we know you were here. here's where you live, here's where your kid goes to school. here's where you go once a week on mondays. i am not asking. here are your in-laws. they call you late at night. straight to his twitter account and deleted all the locations. i said, that is great. but twitter still knows. twitter can monetize that data. that is one percent of one percent of what all these companies do every day and what

.hey know about you sto >> that is a great case for being much more discreet online. i will speak a little to me institution. i cover the nsa. it has taken a beating over the last year. morale has dropped tremendously. there is a temptation to demonize them. i was struck by a post written by jeff stone, who is a card-carrying member of the aclu . he is on their guys report. he is one of the members of the white house advisory surveillance panel. it is the same one that said that a program is not preventing terrorism. he said that over the months that he had -- he and other

members of the panel had spent interviewing members of the intelligence community and getting to know the nsa, he came to the conclusion that the nsa wereys and officials well-intentioned and did not come to work every day wondering , whose privacy can i violate? but i have made mistakes and corrected them. he felt that they deserved americans' respect, but not their trust. he said, we should never ever trust the nsa. to thetrust is essential foundation of democracy and holding people accountable. i thought that was a very interesting observation. from this member of the panel. i think it is worth thinking about in terms of the public.

really allows us to understand the issues that are at stake. we should not try to personalize or demonize the intense. we should understand where it is coming from and what the issues are at stake and hold them accountable. as accountable as we can stop that is our job. those are true. things tothree consider that we are experiencing. we leave data exhaust everywhere. there's no practical way to use technology today and not leave a digital trail of some sort. there are security tools you can try.

e-mail,teraction by sharing a cell phone, driving a car, or walking in the street leave some sort of digital trail. result of these trails, collection of this data becomes incredibly cheap. alien, ied to serve would have to allocate men or people to follow you around or to take notes and photographs of you. it has become incredibly cheap because of these digital trails that exist. when you search on google, when you use twitter, when you use their services, you create a trail that the nsa or some other government can monitor and collect. with regards to the nsa, the mandate they have been given is not to reduce terrorist attacks

or to keep 9/11 attacks to one in every 10 years. at all cost, they have to prevent attacks on u.s. soil. your data is now everywhere. it is incredibly cheap to connect -- collect. except for when is legally prohibited, do your best to prevent all attacks. those three things in tandem create an environment where even if you are not that interesting, the likelihood that you might get swept up into the system because of the mandate and the cheapness i which you can be data,ted, because of your it has gone up. that is something we have to contend with. the only thing restricting that is legal forces. that is the world we are in now. >> that strikes me is dead on. i will say that it struck me throughout this has surprised

lots of people were. i was surprised by the detail. google was really surprised. u.s. senators were surprised. even senators on the intelligence committee were some rise. it makes you wonder, how is it possible in a democracy, not just ours, but what we imagine a democracy to be, that something like a surveillance system so sweeping and powerful could grow to become as robust as it clearly has become. all sorts of important people know it and have some say whether that is a good thing why bad thing. if we had had his panel a year ago, think about what we knew about what our government was collecting about people all over the world and whether or not we were targeted unintentionally. i have to say, i find that

unnerving, how little we knew before now. whether you think we were right or wrong to publish these like is the feel inherent function of unimpressive democracy to place these issues in the public sphere so that us citizens, we can wrestle with that. we can become more enlightened and make decisions on what the limits are. maybe people do not want more limits? i get the sense that people do. there is no possibility of that if we do not know enough to imagine what is going on. >> it was not an accident that we did not know. motives, butevil there were very deliberate efforts to mislead us when anybody got near the trail. allprogram which collects records of all the phone calls what ismake, that is

referred to here. it is a provision of the act. it had been controversial. not because anyone had any idea about this, but people were worried that the f b i would use it to get library records on what books people were taking out. even the number of times we use this provision of the law is classified and would do great harm to national security if we told you how many times we used it. eventually they were mandated by congress to disclose the number of times. they said, there's nothing to worry about. that 29d, we only use times. what is the big deal? we use the 29 times. get athose times were to trillion phone records. that is not an accident. that is a deliberate effort to distort public debate. they think what they are doing is important. they are worried about you and they do not tell you.

self-promotion thing. it was never a surprise to our security geeks. this technology makes it possible any systems are vulnerable. essentially get people off phone records by hacking into a telco remotely. they weren't of these things. given that snowden was a security guy and he's a way that of this and he decided to highlight it, i think that indicates not just a deliberate misleading, but a technical misleading. the technical community can abuse their prowess in understanding technology and loopholes in the way systems work to skirt around public perceptions that people do not know. that is another cap that needs to be informed. i just want to add that there

were people who knew. committeeslligence and the judiciary, the five the court, the problem is that these committees were all sworn to secrecy. they could not disclose anything publicly. their oversight is conducted entirely in secret. how does that aid public toerstanding and enable us hold government accountable? that is the crops. it is one that we do not have a good answer to. do you treat another independent oversight board? what is the point? >> there's so much debate. we can talk about so many other areas. this is your chance now to please raise your hands and we have two people here on each

side. you and youme to can stand please. stand when you ask a question. if you have when directed straight to one of the panelist, please ask by name. we cannot hear you. one second. >> can you hear me now? ok. i actually have three questions. i guess they are all for mr. doman. manages read them all? do you worry about your personal ,afety because of what you know either some terrorists, because they know you have all this information, or the nsa?

is, what doestion you think should happen to mr. snowden? at theand reporters guardian consult with one another on what you have elected to divulge? >> i do not fear for my personal safety. -- i have good evidence that there are actors, unknown, who are trying to get into my materials digitally stop i cannot feel my entire life off of the internet. if you put something online, people can get into it. i do not put secret stuff there. google thating from a hacker was attempting to compromise my peter and account. google helpfully will not tell you who. they will not tell you what you

can do about it. i have had a number of other fairly specific indicators that people are coming after my stop. that is different from physical security. you can say you told me so. i am not worried about that. --t should happen to snowden i am the last person you should ask. i have a relationship with them as my reporter's source. there are a lot more people with interesting things to say and what i have to say about that. no, we do not consult with any of the news organizations of what to publish and when. they make those decisions independently. that includes not through any third parties. there is no secret counsel. essentially, we are competitors with them. >> next.

>> we hear you. >> i find that the average ages whatot of times side of the debate they are on depending on whether they were supporting bush or obama. who do you trust? what are they going to do with your information? whether you trust among the deciders or usb deciders of what is going to be divulge. instance, the whole debate over torture. it was finally disclosed that it was not an active over the keyword. i am wondering whether ultimately this gathering of

information is effective in protecting this country? have they really thwarted an attack or plans for the? how does that weigh into the decisions that are being made? >> what has been the practical benefit of the nsa program from the nsa perspective? >> we can both talk about it. there's been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of the two major surveillance programs that have been discussed. telephone records and programs. part of it is called prism. the head of nsa last year on the hill initially came out and said, the programs contributed

to thwarting over 50 attacks. terrorist attacks. senators, including ron eventually hek, and other intelligence officials clarified. prism was responsible for thwarting most of those. a lot of them are overseas. 215, the telephone metadata program which obama ands to and was responsible would have had a role in may be only 12 of those domestically. one actuallyy yielded some information that was useful to a terrorist investigation. that one case involved a san diego cap driver convicted of

material support to terrorism presenting $6,500 to someone in somalia, al-shabaab. that did not involve an attack on the u.s. at all. to not only to the surveillance review board to conclude that the program was not essential to preventing terrorist attacks, but also the privacy board said that it had not contributed in one case to preventing any kind of terrorist attack. >> a few words. from time to time, the government is going to exaggerate the importance of the program it is trying to defend. time andent lots of done lots of interviews, how sad would it be if they were spending $10 million a year and

hiring some of the greatest talent in the world, mathematical and computer science, and enlisted, and accounting nothing? that is not the case. they find that a lot of information that is essential for security. there are a lot of things in the files that i would guess almost all of you if you knew it, you would say, wow, i did not know they could do that. that seems a legitimate operation. it, you would say, i wish he did not do that. there are definitely success stories. is, they are exactly the kind of things that the government leaks. they could not be replicated afterwards. the point you made about bush and obama, that is an issue of trust. mentalnowden's on the point. -- fundamental point.

if you're prepared to accept that the people who have enormous power right now are responsible, you are also accepting that the people after that will have the same or more power. we have plenty of examples in this country of very serious abuses of this power from jagger hoover -- j edgar hoover. documents that have been declassified. they are decades old. experiment, drug experiments on human subjects. the liver exposure of americans -- the liver exposure of american service people to radiation. this would create big problems for us if people found out that we are purposely exposing our soldiers to radiation st. you do not want to give sole power to anyone.

>> you do not want to give them an impression. you may have heard that there is one less wiretapping. under subsequently put statutes by congress. consideredm, it has quite successful and useful. it was reported in one of your documents from snowden that contribute to the ball of the president -- well of the president possibility brave. more than any other single source. there is some utility. , or ishis issue of trust correct. and trustinistrations of other nationstate or other actors.

those with malicious intent. in addition to collection, we that they have deliberately weaken standards for computer security. they do not disclose when they're vulnerable. the nsa can exploit data center links in google and overseas. other countries can also do that. the fact that the government has chosen not to disclose, but instead takes advantage of collecting the data, one of the questions to ask is, is it effective? at what cost? our infrastructure and safety. i will take another question re.r their ful you have a card reading and writing question and we will answer later online. -- wequestion involves

learned that the general has issued a new directive. --makes it unacceptable to for any member of the intelligence establishment to talk to a reporter about anything that is classified or unclassified. it is under pain of being fired or possibly prosecuted. my question is, how they learned anything? although want to do is make it harder. does this have a chilling effect on your ability to cover the news? to cover national security? >> anyone? ellen? >> when i saw that order, i thought, really? we see these periodically. after there is a big story or

they do a leak investigation, there is a crackdown, more polygraphs. you hear they will be doing spot polygraphs unannounced on people. i have had sources tell me they have to report any time they get a call from the press, things like that. i think these things go in waves. it does have somewhat of a chilling effect. it reminds people they are being watched, they should not talk to the press. ultimately, it is futile. >> maybe. i am more concerned than you are. i take your point. here is what the order says. if you work in any of the 15 intelligence agencies, you may not speak to a member of the press or anyone whose job involves disclosure to the involvethat would

lawyers and so on, about anything related to intelligence, whether or not it is classified. you will probably lose your job and security clearance. organizations, i bet even the "washington post," would frown on its employees speaking for the company or disclosing the internals of the company. i suppose you could do it so egregiously you get yourself fired. what they cannot do is a death penalty to your career. there are 4.4 million jobs that require clearance across the government. if you run into me at the promotion ceremony of some general and there is a cocktail what isnd we talk about

happening in crimea these days, purely unclassified conversation, and you don't report it, you could lose your ability to work anywhere in your chosen field. i think that could be a significant deterrent. it is a real shame because a lot richness ofxt and the stories you get from the , supposingou admire there are any you like reading, a lot will tell you the story relies on informal, nonclassified background conversations about the way things work in the world. >> the savvy officials understand that. rather than futile, it is self-defeating because the smart officials know the better informed we are as reporters, the better informed our coverage will be.

the rebounds to their favor, to their benefit, to give us as much of their understanding and perspective on the issues. informals through context, relationships of trust of both -- built up over years. you can't get through that -- you can't hit that going through the front door through the public affairs office. that is well-meaning people they cycle through. not know how me conversations are behind even a paragraph, not even a quote. >another question? >> i would like the panel to comment. isn't our security system fundamentally flawed that someone this young at this low level in the government could release this amount of materials?

doesn't that mean our security system is fundamentally flawed? i would like the panel to comment on that. >> i will be brief so we can get more questions. for sure, it did not work the way they wanted it to work. want to see an open sale on every secret in the government. we don't think everything should be published. trade-offs. if you batten down the hatches so securely there is next to no possibility of a breach like this, it means lots of people around the government are not going to know information exists that is vital to their job and the damage to security could be greater. that was the conclusion of the 9/11 commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of 2001, that the data was so protected there was shown

little sharing -- so little sharing among people who could have put the big picture together if they had only known it, that it made us less secure. there are trade-offs in all of life, and you should not be surprised there are trade-offs here. >> this story won the award for public service. at what point did you realize or start to believe this was a story you needed to tell? at any point did you doubt that belief? >> i have lots of doubts. these are hard questions. anybody who tells you it is obvious where to draw the line and what should be published or not i would strongly disagree with. i worry all the time about where to draw the line. i don't worry i have made a mistake by deciding to the resources and attention and time and space into the subject. i don't worry we should not have touched the story at all. i thought from the beginning, it

would be significant and important and really hard. >> yes. i commend you for your work in dealing with the - difficult someone hasre provided you with unauthorized information. you have done a marvelous job responding to that. my concern is with a different situation where citizens who have lawfully attempted to call attention to major issues are not getting attention by the press. i refer specifically to the fact that in 1992 congress unanimously passed a law requiring the disclosure of jfk assassination records. thousands of pages of jfk assassination records still remain withheld by the national

archives at the behest of the cia. edward require an snowden to get public attention focused on the release of those records? in 2013, i on behalf of a number of prominent citizens, including the former chief counsel of the house select committee on assassinations, wrote a letter to the "washington post" about this. the letter was not even a knowledge. >> we are going to try to keep this focused on the nsa project our panel works on. do you have a questions specifically related to this? >> [indiscernible] >> i am sorry. it is not a subject i have expertise on. >> let's take questions from the middle. right here.

mic into the a center aisle? >> we have somebody that stood up. >> if you could expand on your publisher, not published decisions, particularly focusing revealingue of sources and methods. i look at that cartoon. it seemed it drove to the focus of revealing sources and methods. i am curious about your decision process. >> it is a plausible surmise to make from looking at the drawing for a layperson. no one involved in intelligence gathering or telecommunications networking would think that drawing itself,

idea there are places on the internet encrypted and places it is not, no one would think that is revealing anything to an enemy the enemy does not know -- that the enemy does not know. anyone working in the field, that is elementary. the clue is on what they were doing. there are lots of things i thought were highly sensitive because i am a layperson, too. i would look at that and say i have no idea -- i had no idea that was possible. in consultation with the i found it was not sensitive at all. there would be things where it did not strike me at all they would be worried about something, and then they would explain to me why. withheld ane elementary fact from our last ability and nsa's

practice of recording every single call in an entire country alertingst to avoid the country as a target. it had to do with specific operational surmises that might be but -- made by others if they knew what country it was. i cannot get into most of the reasons. we were concerned to avoid blowing a capability. we are trying to not cause a result. there are certain disclosures that are self-executing. that is not what we are trying to do. i would strongly defend the claim we never have done it, and the government does not claim we have. >> to add to the google data center coverage, the prism program still exists. it still can under 702 get information about individualized google legally

through prism. google's andty on for structure still exists to collect data from google. we described a program where it seemed that they were going after the same piece of data through multiple means, some more legal and some less. >> a question right there. a lot of things that would have been revealed in this discussion as well as through the revelations of snowden have shown these programs have been defended by the executive office all the way down. at the same time, it was brought up that nixon was impeached for an infraction which was minor in

comparison. yet at the same time, there has been no discussion within the mass media, within the political establishment, to even hint at which al of criminality former was removed from office for yet is currently going on in our society. it is asserted we have a democracy, democratic process occurring. i want to know if any of you wanted to comment on that. >> since i am the one that mentioned nixon, i wanted to clarify i do not believe what nixon did was trivial in comparison to what is happening now. what nixon did, the articles of impeachment said he used national security surveillance tools to spy on an attempt to crush his political enemies. there is no evidence anything like that is happening now. if i saw any evidence of that,

that is the first story i would be interested in getting at. unless maybe it was about spying on journalists. the issue here is not that we have big brother in the abusive sense. it is not trying to control the press dissent. is a set of powers that exceed anything orwell could have imagined. you have to worry about what might become of that. onill not be commenting whether so-and-so broke the law and not to be prosecuted. that is not our job. >> we have a question right here. >> thank you for the work you have done. i am daily amazed. my wife and i are so pleased that your letting us know. i am a retired radio journalist from maryland. i interviewed six district -- six district congressman roscoe

bartlett about his repeated votes against the patriot act. he said the thing that trumped it for him was once you let the government into your house, you'll never get them out. is there any hope we could turn the clock back and have them not spying on us? i don't know what the outcome is going to be. it is not that there will be some embarrassing newspaper stories and they will change their mind. that is not the way our setup works. we are a society that believes in checks and balances in terms of market capitalism and self-governing. what transparency has done is enabled people not just to yap about it but to do something. silicon valley makes a lot of political contributions and has

a fair amount of sway in the executive branch and congress and has the ability to make changes that thwart some programs if they think they are illegitimate. transparency has caused many of change policies and technologies. it has created an environment where there are these privacy startups so that you might be able to buy e-mail and not pay for it by having them sell your data. it has enabled lawsuits to proceed that were getting thrown out of court before because the plaintiffs lacked standing, could not prove they were affected. now they can prove they were affected. now that all courts can decide what the constitutional lines are. proof congressional oversight was dysfunctional before consists of the fact that the same congress is now proposing and voting for completely different measures in the light

of the public disclosures than it was proposing and passing before we knew what was happening. down the list. we have lots of checks and balances. they are all operating now because of the information. >> somebody has been patiently waiting back there. >> thank you. december, it was reported the nsa intercepts amazon packages and installs spyware on laptops. do you think the story is too close to the line of revealing nsa techniques? did you hold back on the story or would you have? >> i don't think i am the right person to comment on someone else's journalism. i will distinguish that story from the things we have been focusing on. if you're intercepting a particular package, it is not that they are intercepting all of the shipments every time you

order an upgrade. those are by definition targeted operations. generally speaking, we have not been writing about targeted operations. we don't want to reveal the method they are using or the identity of the targets. in other cases, this is not our story, others have written about ways the nsa has undermined encryption standards. i think those are harder calls. but i think a strong public case could be made for publishing those. go back to world war ii. the japanese had a secret code they used. the germans had one. they were homegrown. they were used exclusively by the military command of those in the countries with whom the united states government was at war. now almost everybody uses the same encryption, good guys, bad

guys, my health records, my bank account, terrorists, foreign governments use the same thing. if they make their jobs easier to listen in on targets by undermining the encryption all of us use, that raises big public policy questions even if you can legitimately say you are revealing a technique they are using. you are revealing it in order to say, is that a good idea? revealing it does not stop them from doing it again. it is just a matter of technical competence. >> a question on the other side of the room. right here. know whata now snowden took? >> i can't know that for sure. it appears from the variety of interviews they have done that they are not sure. have a strong picture by now of what he had access to, what he could have

touched or did touch. i don't think they know with any confidence what he took. at some pointmed he took 1.7 million documents. if that is the case, that is a much larger number than he gave any combination of journalists. >> we have a question in the front. for taking my question. you have talked a lot about how much you self-centered -- censure. >> we call it editing. >> you are going to write a story about this aspect of what you know, what you are not going to reveal every aspect of that story. you have sense documents from snowden you are not going to touch at all. you're not going to write a story about that at all. it is commendable you have self

edited. he did not, obviously. he may not have sent you 1.7 million documents. but i get the sense he sent you a lot, certainly more than you will publish. het is your view of the fact did that? not just because legally he should have sent you nothing. but he felt there was a public interest in you covering some of that stuff. he sent you clearly more than he should have. he was trusting you and your at other news outlets were all going to be careful, have good judgment, not put this on the network, not get hacked, talk to their girlfriend, etc. i'm not his lawyer, advisor, or spokesman.

i will speak to the facts. he did give me and others, two others, a lot more than he believed should be published. if he wanted it to be public, he could put it on the web. he could put it up in ways that cannot be taken down. he does not want that. it is not uncommon, what is unique that i think has never happened before is that someone were turnovers this many secrets of this sensitivity. but it has been routine in my career for people to tell me things they did not want me to publish and knew i would not publish for the purpose of enabling me to understand the stuff i was going to publish. suppose this prison document -- prism document, the program under which the government gets information from big technology , he knew i would have

to read the whole thing in context, that examples would help me understand what was and was not happening. sometimes people tell me things off the record for the purpose of making sure i do not write something that is wrong rather than letting me put something in that is right. he also knew i would be deeply suspicious if he gave me a document with blacked out parts. what is he not telling me? it does that undermine the story? there are lots of reasons people tell you more than you are going to publish. there.estion back >> a question about the journalistic approach to this and philosophy you have. criticized in some places. there was a piece in the "new republic" saying this was not deserved and you are a pastor --

pass through for a source with an agenda, as though there are other kinds of sources. if you could say a word about that. i also want you to know i have an understanding that is not because when you discussed the slide and the work that went into it, the five to six weeks of trying to figure out what is this, that is reporting that had to occur. as opposed to the wikileaks don't, you had to bring expertise to bear to analyze what was going on. if you could also say a word about the traditional journalistic approach you have adopted to not advocate for a result, to say i am a reporter with this voice from nowhere as it is sometimes called. i'm here to start the debate not advocate on behalf of edward snowden. are you limited by that in some ways? thank you. >> ok.

you guys should pitch in any way you want to. i don't care what my sources' motive is. i care about knowing what their motive is. i want to find context. telling meomeone is something because they hate their boss and are trying to i want to get, the truth of it. i want to talk to the boss and people who know why he hates the boss. he may have his hand in the cookie jar. i want to know what motive he or she has in terms of understanding the full context of the story. many great, important stories that you would think should have been published have come from scurrilous people with scurrilous motives. as far as whether withholding my own advocacy or point of view

where ie journalism, don't have a view from nowhere, this is the idea that reporters in the traditional way do not try to referee the he said/c she said. that is not what is happening when it comes to fact. we are trying to find out and say what it is. i'm not trying to say what you should think of it. >> i would add to the point on reporting and dumping documents. i have had a number of journalist friends approach me and tell me they are desperately trying to contact snowden and get copies of the documents. they say this is a huge thing they want a piece of. it is true there are a lot of insights in the documents. you would be mistaken to think

with the exception of one or two of the early stories, like the verizon order where the order itself was in plain english, readable, and clearly a story. reporting is much more like wheel of fortune where you have three letters and a clue. it is about the nsa and you have to guess the word or phrase. a lot of it involves piecing together little bits and pieces. you get a thread of a program name you suspect is somewhere near the u.s. and you want to link it. it involves weeks of work. you notice the time it takes. , thesubsequent story deeper, harder stories are harder to piece together. stem did collect a lot of -- snowden did collect a lot of documents. it is not a conference of map

with a syllabus and dictionary. it takes a lot of reporting. this is where the other journalists have provided context and then sourcing -- done sourcing and gotten sources on the record to help fill in the missing letters. >> we have time for about two more questions. right here. >> thank you. i have a question. i have read virtually every article "the post" wrote on nsa. what i found out is it was all one-sided against nsa. my question is, why did you do it fair and say let's look at the other side? namely, the threat. how bad is the threat? how hard did nsa work to prevent the threat? >> we do have an nsa reporter here who covered the nsa quite a bit.

terms of the stories i did which tried to get at the policy debates, i think i and honest fair about what we were hearing and reporting. there has been a legitimate about whether having this discussion about prism, section 215 program, encryption methods, cyber offense, whether that harms national security. ie extent to which it does think is difficult to discern. is a next ordinary volume of reporting -- extraordinary volume of

reporting on threats. north korea missile launches, terrorist plots. that is a huge volume of and has been at an xl rated pay since 9/11 -- accelerated rate since 9/11. from the cold war, it has dominated national security matters. the biggest part of news is new. what is new is inside material about the u.s. response and surveillance we did not know before. what i am doing is focusing on that. if you look at the whole package of reporting in the "washington post" and don't think you are seeing threat information about dangerous things in the world, i would be happy to direct you to several articles of there's -- theirs. we have time for one more question. >> thank you.

>> i think the key is whether or not you have warrants. i don't see any reason or benefit for having a priority gathering of data. i understand and believe you can get information by analyzing data, but i don't see why you have to do it without a warrant. that is one question. the other question is, who in the government has been held accountable? one of your panelists made a comment about keeping people accountable. i want to know who has been held accountable. >> to your question about bigants, that is one of the points of contention. it has been the focus of lawsuits, about the constitutionality of some of these programs. the government believes when you are collecting so-called calleda, phone numbers,

duration and call times, but not the actual content of conversations, collecting that does not require a warrant because it is not seen as sensitive as hearing the words of a conversation. howave been reporting about collecting that sort of metadata in large quantities can have the potential to disclose all sorts of things about who we are as people, our habits, where we our, what our religion is, preferences, and we might visit at night when our spouse is out. that is one reason why some --ple feel metadata is deserves more protection than -- should not just be collected on a vast scale the way the government had been doing without a warrant.

, theng accountable administration has said repeatedly it has not found any willful abuse of the authorities by the intelligence community, by the nsa. and they made mistakes there have been compliance violations, those have been reported and corrected. that is one level of accountability. i guess the question is how accountable they are to the balancing the overall of the intrusiveness versus the benefits to national security. ist level of transparency key to accountability. we have not had that. we are only starting to see a little bit now, which has led to

efforts by the administration to rein in a little. besides obama saying he wants to and bill collections, he has also ordered there be public advocates before the surveillance court which traditionally only hears from the government on surveillance issues. towants to have advocates give the public interest side of surveillance. he has ordered they be stronger privacy protections for foreigners whose data is incidentally collected. by collection on dublin -- dozens of heads of states be halted. measure ofe accountability. it does not go as far as some would like to want to see not

nsa an end to the election of phone metadata, but the end of all collection. they would like to see a warrant requirement for searches on americans'to mutations -- communications in a program m.lled resume -- pris they would like to see greater disclosure of the other book collections and greater transparency around the overseas collection, which we are only now starting to learn more about. >> clearly, we could continue talking for a long time. there still seems to be many questions. you can fill out those cards with a question. we will answer those online after this event. i would hope you all continue to talk about this issue. please join me in thanking bart gellman, ellen nakashima, ashkan .oltani, and craig timberg

[applause] also to marty baron who introduced the panel and was a huge supporter of how difficult the reporting was over the last for letting us walk through and get a sense of what their journey has been like. thank you again. [applause] look at our primetime schedule on the c-span networks. starting at 8:00 eastern, we will bring you supreme court oral arguments and attorney remarks in the case to decide whether the aereo company has the right to retransmit programming without copyright fees. , american history tv

with a conference held by american historians. some independent scientists anded at monsanto's corn found the gene normally silent was switched on. that produces an allergen. you may have an allergic reaction. someone you know may die from eating the corn genetically engineered and not labeled as containing in allergen. the process created a switch on of the dormant gene and the change of 43 others, as well as changes in the shape of proteins. soy has a -- monsanto sevenfold increase in allergens. this was not intended. this was a side effect of genetic engineering used to create the soy and corn we eat. the organizations. no problem with gmo's.

are all of these part of the conspiracy that someone has just uncovered? if that is not enough for you, here are a bunch of other organizations. these are not organizations with scientific sounding names. these are real medical particular organizations. europe is very anti-gmo. epa, which we pay attention to when it comes to global warming or something like that. would not pose unreasonable risk to human health and the environment. i could come up with dozens of these. >> this weekend, how safe is genetically modified food? saturday morning at 10:00 eastern. this weekend, the festival of books with authors and panels on the realities of war, feminism, journalism, world politics, and finance.

tv, thecan history georgetown university professor on title ix, discrimination against women in sports, saturday at 8:00 and midnight on c-span3. >> the export-import bank held a conference in washington this week. earlier today, we heard great work -- remarks from larry summers on the economy, u.s. deficit, and education issues. he also served as treasury secretary during the clinton administration. this is 45 minutes. >> larry needs no introduction. sincek it is worth saying

he left the administration, he has given his brain to the public as a public intellectual. i think whether you agree with larry or not, nobody finds him nterestingting -- uni or ungermane. i don't think today will be an exception. let me start off with a question about globalization. we are at years -- the 100 year anniversary of the great war. then as now a. of great global integration and rapid growth. we have been seeing in the last few years something new, which is trade growing at a slower rate than economic growth. nationalism rearing up in all corners of the world.

we have not had a tariff backlash yet, but we have people nibbling at the edges of globalization -- the globalization agenda. my question to you is, is globalization safe? >> globalization is going to keep happening. there are going to be more adults with smartphones. more smartphones than there are dolts on planet earth by the end of by the end of this decade. no matter where you are, you are going to have all of the information in the library congress at your disposal. you are going to have more ability to communicate with people than a president with the white house to mitigation system did 40 years ago -- communication system did 40 years ago. in a world like that, globalization is going to keep happening.

yes, it is true the manufactured goods that are a large part of trade keep going down in price thative to services so makes the trade share of gdp go down. but there is more integration. storms that exist in some countries because of carbon emissions from other countries. risks to the entire financial system. the cap the way markets hinge -- look at the way markets hinge on what is happening on the russia-ukraine border. there is plenty of integration. isstion -- the question whether it is going to be successful integration. there were three wars that ended in the 20th century. there wasi ended, and

an attempt to establish a new global system. it failed dismally. that is why people sometimes, some of the most sophisticated historians treat world war i and world war ii as one big conflict with a long truce. , and withii ended american leadership we had the most successful 60 years humanity has ever known. we won the cold war. the threat, we thought, of communism, that kind of totalitarianism was seen off. the cold war ended and it was the third war. i would have said a few years ago that it was clear the world had met that postwar challenge in a way that was much more like

the way it met the challenge after the second world war than the way it met the challenge after the first world war. i still think that is right. but it is in much more question. if you look at the expansion is coming fromionism russia, if you look at the chilling peace in northeast asia, if you look at the cauldron that is the middle what and if you look at the country that failed to be a guarantor of the global system by not joining the league of nations after versailles, by unreasonable reparations to be exacted against germany, a country that succeeded in being the guarantor of the global system after the second world war, underwriting

the imf, the world bank hum of the united nations, and systems of global integration, if you , distressing signs of fatigue with the world. most demonstrated by a reluctance to support international organizations. a distressing difficulty mobilizing political consensus for trade agreements that promote integration. a failure to do what is self-evidently in the interest of american workers and support the ex-im bank. i am there for you. -- a concern and

desire to ramp back military spending in a world where our clinical adversaries' military spending is growing rapidly. a reluctance to become embroiled in foreign challenges because they are too hard. whether we will be judged by history to have won as peace after the cold war we did after the second world war is in more dow today -- doubt today than would have seemed likely 10 or 15 years ago. in part, it is the security challenges, the integration challenges i have talked about. it is also the challenge of global public goods and bads.

moving onis not global climate change. i don't know how to describe it, but it is profoundly wrong that at a moment when the science becomes evermore clear year-by-year that climate change is a critical problem that the fraction of american people who believe climate change is a critical problem has gone down over the last five years. you have to look at what was 1994 with regards to andear proliferation ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons and see what is happening now and think the world's nuclear proliferation

regime is threatened to a substantial extent. i think we are at a critical juncture. not as to whether global integration will continue. there is no question about that. what matters in one country will matter for others more than ever before. but whether that global integration is going to be and whether managed it is going to be successfully managed by the only country that can plausibly aspire to leadership on a global scale, the only country that maintains a serious presence with respect to europe, latin america, the middle east, asia. that is the united states. very much atis issue over the next several years. if i might say, i think the

reaction and behavior of people in the business community like the people in this room is going to have a great hill to do with where we -- are a great deal to do with where we come down as a country. theou recognize and insist united states has a great steak in our success in maintaining leadership of the global system, that is one thing. abdicate that responsibility and focus only on the issues of specific and immediate concern to your commercial interests, that is a different thing. united states investment in the imf has paid off hundreds to one in financial stability and in crises averted. we are going to spend hundreds

in orderns of dollars to guarantee $1 billion of loans to ukraine. at this pointnnot get the u.s. house of representatives to approve agislation that would enable smaller measured out late -- out lay to support hundreds of billions of dollars, mostly of other people's money leveraged to support financial stability around the world at a time when there is plenty of incipient volatility. yes, globalization and global integration will continue. whether it will continue successfully depends on the and the broad commitment to international leadership.

is that aportant wish period of economic distress and certain fatigue, the most dangerous possibility is that will cause the united states to turn inwards at a moment when the world has needed the united states to be engaged more than ever before. >> is this a crisis of leadership as well? >> it is a potential crisis of american leadership. if this were a different kind of conversation and i were a different kind of person, we could discuss how much should be attributed to this part of the white house or congress. i am not going to go there. in ahis has its roots broader set of attitudes. this has its roots in what

public opinion polls say about the united states international engagement. this has its roots in what issues bring c.e.o.'s to washington, how much is it their company's parochial issue and how much are national issues of broader international concern. this has its roots in our willingness as a country to be ourtegic about where national interests are. we cannot do everything. we cannot respond to every outrage. we cannot respond to everything morally problematic. lines inbility to draw ourort of a system on which prosperity and security depends,

nothing is more important to our ultimate national interests. view, oure a 20 year economic success. >> let me suggest one possible explanation for why there is this crisis of world leadership. there is a book that looks at growing inequality, that talks about a return to the pre-second world war era, the return to inherited wealth and capital are greater than economic growth. capitalism is in the ascendance. clearly that has a political impact. do you agree with his diagnosis of where we are, worsening in equality? if you do agree, what are the impacts on america's growth

prospects and the political climate? >> ed wrote a great book. it is a hugely important book. it is a monumental piece of scholarship. of an economic book that has been as galvanizing of the debate in a long time. certainly not one full of tables, figures, and mathematical models. that theproposition share of income and wealth going to a small fraction of the population has risen precipitously over the last andation -- generation those trends appear to be continuing is completely compelling. i am not sure i buy his whole hypothesis about patrimonial capitalism and an iron law of

the market system. because capital earns a return greater than the growth rate, capitalists will ultimately take it all over, to oversimplify. i think it is a more dynamic process. looked int back and 1982. only 46 were still on the forbes 400 and 2012. i think it is a more dynamic process. the way to understand increased inequality is to think about how much easier it is to be a mark zuckerberg than to make that kind of fortune quickly in the economy of 30 years ago. i think the way to understand is to ask yourself about the greater opportunities that have in the growing

financialization of the economy. his focus is on capital accumulation. if you look at what has happened it is much more about their labor incomes than capital incomes. i think he does not have a primary mechanism driving u.s. inequality. therefore, i am less fatalistic than he is. he argues unless we can have some kind of global wealth tax, we are doomed to this kind of inexorable change. i think if we can rebuild labor bargaining arrangements, if we can find ways of giving workers firms'er share in their we can strengthen

the systems of education and human capital that prepare people for the kinds of jobs that are going to exist, if we hashave a tax system that holes inse and less the swiss cheese, that we can do a great deal to address inequality. i have much more a view that these are problems that our address about -- addressable with the right kinds of actions. i don't think he has quite the right theory, even though the data he has presented and the debate he has given new energy huge and positive accomplishment.

to go to the second part of your question, i am struck by the change in the tone of our politics. politicaldy, first speech i ever listen to and remembered when i was six years americans not what they -- not what their country can do for them, but what they could do for their country. today, we compete to talk about different kinds of middle-class bills of rights. they are all about what our country can do for people. why that change? some of it goes to broad social forces economists like me cannot understand. that some of it goes to the fact that when john kennedy said that, we had delivered for the middle class over the previous 15 years in a spectacular way. better schools for their kids.

support for homeownership for the first time in their lives. near universalization of employer-based health insurance. wages andsing real median family incomes. so we could ask them what they were going to do for their country. when that is not being delivered for them, it is much harder to ask what they can do for their country. bill, all ofg.i. that was part and parcel of what and the marshall plan bretton woods possible. the agenda of international leadership and support for the middle class are not opposing political priorities. they are necessary complements

that have to come in tandem with each other. as i have said many times, i think the frustration asfixation with the deficit the central economic issue facing the country over the last four years has been so dangerous and misguided. i am worried about deficits. bequeathing we are our children a deferred maintenance deficit when we massively underinvested in our infrastructure. i am worried about deficits. i am worried about an education deficit when the paint is chipping off the walls in 25,000 american schools, and kids are getting the signal about how much we do not care about their education from that. deficitsied about the in the time of

unprecedented promise in science. . the 21st century will be a century of the life sciences just like the 20th century was the century of the physical sciences. .