conflicts or crises that have the potential to turn violent. in order to be perceived, the u.s. can appeals for military intervention frequently successful because they seek to provide -- same to provide an immediate solution. is all the more reason why a foreign policy that seeks to find nonmilitary solutions should seek to find an effort to defuse crises before they get to open wall for -- warfare. the u.s. should get out of the business of regime change, arming insurgents, or encouraging popular uprisings. the u.s. should generally avoid

military action when it is not strictly necessary. that does not mean fighting a 'allies wantthe u.s. us to. the u.s. should not extend halfhearted commitments. that can be interpreted as promises of military aid. it should not ignore basic obligations. we should not enable reckless driving, which the u.s. does when a provide unconditional support. should discourage our allies from treating our security guarantees is an opportunity to take provocative actions toward their neighbors that could

trigger new conflict. panacea. is not a it is much less expensive and more sustainable politically and would contribute peace security in the decades to come. thank you. >> good morning. to the american servitor for putting this on. -- conservative for putting this on. it is a privilege to be part of this event. i was asked to address america's role in the middle east. conference being to think about ways of maintaining stability without military action, with methods other than war. in light of the reopened iraq

debate of the past week, i did not plan to have to come here and restate that one of the best ways to maintain stability is not to start dumb, destabilizing wars. apparently that needs to be repeated. be continue to be repeated. >> how do you spell destabilizing? [laughter] take an abstract approach, as i was thinking through this come looking at the way the obama administration has handled the middle east, i and others would have some criticisms. withdrawal.he iraq for thereally important administration. basing this and legitimacy.

that is something this administration is very conscious of constantly. would john kerry referred to as the global test and he was correct, even though he was widely mocked. we are stronger when we act within an international consensus. there are a whole range of questions, but i think the understanding internationally was that occupation should end and that the united states should withdraw from iraq. it was overwhelmingly supported by the american people and supported by iraq. progressive, i think the sense of legitimacy is defininga characteristic of the way that progressives understand foreign policy. i think of a quote from josh marshall back in the early days of the iraq war.

legitimacy is one of the ultimate force multipliers. we will be able to achieve our goals much better to the extent that we are able to bring allies along and be able to be seen as legitimate, fair, and appropriate fashion. another keyword is pragmatism. thrown around a lot. it is not a doctrine in an of itself. lens or tool that we use to view theories, principles, and approaches and asks the important questions about what we can realistically achieve and that what cost. as someone who believes that the united states should look for ways to support freedom, to support democracy, to support the self-actualization of people and people determining their own destinies, individually, and in communities -- i think that should be a part of american foreign-policy. i don't see a contradiction

between that and how can we realistically achieve that? i think we have seen good examples of how we don't achieve that. occupy annvade and set of new governments only people to figure it out. , would say that those lessons ,ost definitely for the iraqis i think that this skepticism toward foreign interventions on the part of the american people toward a large part of the american foreign-policy -- i think that skepticism deserves to be put into the plus column of the iraq war. there are very few benefits of

the iraq war. one of them was, we are not super crazy about military interventions anymore on a large scale. looking at iraq and turning to useful iran, their example and counter example of how american power should be used. i do want to overstate it, but i do think that obama, iraq policy has been fairly judicious and effective use of power. it is important to recognize the extent to which obama -- when he came into office and before, let's remember he started and won a vigorous debate within his about the usefulness

and appropriateness of engaging with enemies -- specifically -- he handily won that debate and i think the consensus was well on his side by the end with five former secretaries of state endorsing his side. he took office and made clear both to the american people and the iranian people that his goal was to reach out to try to find some new level of a relationship, try to overcome the tensions of the past decade. a huge challenge, no doubt. there were rounds of talks that went nowhere. there was another round of sanctions. the most important sanctions being ones that we were able to bring allies on board with us, and the partners european union and countries

like china. stepsre taking important in lessening their reliance on iranian oil. russia. i'm sure everyone can have criticisms of what russia is doing. i don't think there is any doubt that the iran issue has been -- the-- siloed negotiations of not been indexed situation.ia-ukraine i think that deserves to be seen as a victory. look at this counter example. a the one hand, you have massive military obligation, a destructive war, and expensive war. thehe other hand, you have view that it is in the united states interest to prevent an iranian nuclear weapon.

it is plausible that it would embolden them to act in destabilizing ways in the region. i think that is not an unreasonable climb. there is also the proliferation issue. the question of whether countries in the region would be compelled to obtain their own nuclear deterrent. understanding that nuclear nonproliferation is in the united states' interest. less nuclear weapons is better than more. even though we have not reached the goal, we are on track to achieve something pretty significant for american security. i think that that agreement goes something in the people have articulated this -- the idea that iran can be encouraged to be a more reasonable, responsible actor in the region.

things that give reason for skepticism. but understanding iran as a stake with interests rather than a cause which is going to act ideologically -- if you look at the behavior over the past decade, they have had lots of opportunities to commit suicide to ideology and they have not taken those opportunities. it is very clear that they act in ways to preserve its own regime. it pursues interests. this is the better obama is making. whether those interests can be brought within a barter -- --ader framework -- rather whether iran can be a responsible stakeholder in the region. the jury is still out. iraq, thatiran about is the other plus of the iraq

war -- it put the united states and iran in close proximity. again, the jury is still out on this question of whether iran can be brought into a regional that adds to regional stability rather than regional instability. in this way, obama and this administration has acted over the protests of some of its closest allies and partners. saudi arabia and israel have nervous byd are made the fact that the united states might see and treat iran as a more rational actor with legitimate goals and concerns in the region. i will finish up by noting once again how glad am to be part of this conversation.

it is one that i hope continues. of the views we share is the role the united states should play, the ways to use nonmilitary tools to advance our security -- i'm interested and hope to engage on this more -- -- what i think about democracy and freedom, these should be a part of how we approach foreign-policy. i do believe that we are in this together. community,my local my state, my country, but globally, i think that is something that progressivism does bring to the table. ,he question should always be what tools and that will cost? i will finish up there. i would also like to thank

the american conservative for organizing this. i would particularly like to thank navy allison who moved mountains to get me year and figuratively did move mountains. i came in on a redeye last night from seattle. i got about two hours of sleep. that is the reason this is incoherent, not my own way of thinking about a. -- about it. i wanted to but the asia-pacific rim in terms of the economic side. if you take a look at what has happened in the global economy security,rity -- in you see two discordant narratives since 2008. on the economic side, the institutions that were responsible for what you are supposed to do in the wake of a

financial crisis actually works surprisingly well. i'm old enough to remember when a lot of people were saying that the institutions would crack up. you cannot say that on the security side. i want to explore why. on the economic side, there were fears that we would read -- be revisiting the great depression. intos can metastasize depressions when they turn into economic openness. the great depression was not just because of the stock market crash, but when the was a credit on stalled banking crisis and no one helped anyone out and won the london economic conference collapsed due to u.s.

unilateral's. what happened after 2000 it was very different. -- 2008 was very different. provided -- markets for distressed goods was provided. the one thing that even skeptics of global governments agree upon is that there was significant injections of liquidity in the international system. surprising degree of macroeconomic policy coordination. there was provision of exchange rate stability as well. international institutions functioned reasonably well. the case of the wto or the imf or the g 20 or other informal mechanisms or blunting domestic pressures for protectionism. it should be pointed out that

the u.s. also acted like a surprisingly confident leader. whether the federal reserve and engaging in a variety of domestic actions and international actions with or the-currency swaps u.s. taking a lead in terms of reforming thel bosnian banking supervision roles. you are operating in a world where the global economy has been surprisingly resilient to the point where people in the fed and elsewhere are concerned not about market volatility, but that the fark it's -- markets seem surprisingly calm. it does suggest that there has been more resiliency built into the system post 2008.

it is almost like the system worked. [laughter] i'm sorry. i'm shameless. on security, it is a more disturbing message when you take a look at the pacific rim. if you look at the global peace index or security report, you do not see a major spike in instability. there has been an undeniable ratcheting up of tensions in east asia and the pacific rim. east china sea, north korea. you get the point. international institutions have been spectacularly unhelpful. served as aa summit nice venue where the chinese and the americans can accuse each other of various hegemonic acts. china was able to use cambodia as a way to promote dissent says in that group.

interpretation it is at variance with international law. the u.s. response seems less sure of itself. there was the pivot in the fall of 2010 that was embraced by countries in the region. embraced to warmly by some countries. you could argue that it embolden the philippines to take a more bellicose position which led to the situation where the united states said, we are not necessarily going to go to war. the u.s. has committed to going , even thoughslands

they do not recognize japanese sovereignty, but they recognize worth going to war should china challenge it. you can look at two different narratives. when you start asking about china, eyes start to light up. that is really where the next big conflict is going to come from. why is there such a discordant relationship between what has happened on the global economy side and in the security sphere? there is a good realist answer. when you take a look at the distribution of power, you realize very important facts. despite a lot of perception in this town, the u.s. still retains significant amount of post-2008.power

there was a great article about waning u.s. hegemony in the 1980's, pointing out the ways the u.s. still has structural .ower ,ilitary power, financial power ownership of production, and production of ideas. -- ther of these metrics united states still retains an overwhelming preponderance of power. the united states is still the military superpower. in terms of finance, the u.s. is still more central than before 2008. that is really extraordinary. ownership of production, that is true and production of ideas also. what is striking is the absence of any counter ideas on that. would did happened is that the traditional u.s. supporters, namely the european union and

japan, were devastated as a result of the financial crisis. they really did suffer serious dramatic declines. there is no need to go into details. the important thing is that most theories of hegemonic stability or leadership tend to it knowledge that you want to leader, but leaders need supporters. leaders need followers. it is not enough to just have one big stake. europeanke of waning and japanese power, you now have the rise of china as a great power and they have done something interesting. ,ith respect to the economy they have act like a responsible stakeholder. ranging from provision of liquidity to eventually letting their currency appreciate to not engaging in new bouts of protectionism. iny certainly engaged

economic espionage, but that was a constant. they have been perfectly willing to act as a supporter of the u.s. created liberal economic order for quite some time. on the other hand, when it comes to the security sphere, china is perfectly willing to act in a newly assertive manner on a overriding of things. whole variety of things. is this because they actually care about chinese sovereign territory and that is that? of trying to get influence over the inner island chain when they want to expand to the outer island chain? do they view this as a border issue or a first step of what they see as regional hegemony? we come to an important point here.

aboutis a lot of debate military intervention with the idea that if you use military power, that applies to the use of force. in the pacific rim it does not work quite as well there. deterrence,xtended pledging to commit to use force in case there is a conflict, has the potential to reduce conflict or reduce the actual use of force, if it successfully -- detersother actor another actor. it is worth noting that china has responded to this by focusing their energies a little more on the south china sea then the east china sea. do those actions potentially add to tamp down great power war even if it ratchets up tensions in the short term? i do think the more interesting question to ask is that despite the rising tension in the east china sea and the south china

sea, there is not a lot of evidence that those tensions are affecting patterns of economic exchange. when you go back to the pre-world war i era, one of the myths is that world war i broke out despite large amounts of economic interdependence and that shows the futility of economic interdependence is a constraint on military action. from 1890 on, states started to take significant experts to wean themselves off international economic dependence. interdependentt states that launched the great war. post-2008, there has been no shift in trade or finance suggesting that china or the united states or any other act her is trying to divorce themselves from what they see as other security rivals. despite the ratcheting up of tensions, there have not been significant removes in economic

responses. it is also true in europe. edward snowden has been for more within theon ttip annexation of crimea has been an accelerant. -- then the annexation of crimea has been an accelerant. when are we actually shifting to a world where there are great power tensions that could lead to a great power war? you could also suggest that maybe great power rivalry ain't what it used to be. yes, there are disputes over islands, but it is also possible that the great powers recognize

that it is not worth going to war over these things and it is not worth destroying the global prosperity to claim a bunch of in the east china sea or south china sea. i will even at that -- leave it at that. >> our thanks to all of our sponsors. is thatge this morning too often foreign-policy debates particularly between interventionism and i shall a -- isham -- isolationism this debate too often occurs in a vacuum. it occurs without reference to war. foreign-policy and war are intimately related.

leadgn policies often intentionally or unintentionally to war. is that of the matter the choice between interventionism and a policy of grand strategy is not just a matter of which one is nice? it is a matter of which one is consistent with where war is going? war is undergoing the biggest since the rise of fourth generation war. with the piece of west folly a did was give the state monopoly on more. many different kinds of entities fought wars, not just states.

the state was rather a new thing at this point. wars, races,ght tribes, business enterprises, dynasties. ,hey used many different means not just formal armies and navies. thatourth-generation means the state is now losing the monopoly on war it established falia.est phill going to affect foreign-policy. what changes with the fourth-generation is not how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for. these are larger changes than changes in how war is fought. at the root of this change in war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state itself, a crisis which

.s present virtually everywhere all over the world, a growing number of people are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to a wide variety of other entities. tribes, ethnic groups, races, religions, set, causes like animal-rights, business enterprises, legal and illegal, gangs are one of the principal the same young men who have no interest in fighting for the state are often very enthusiastic about fighting for .heir new primary loyalties military whiches proclaims itself the greatest in

the world has come up against fourth-generation nonstate forces in lebanon, somalia, afghanistan, and in iraq. those forces that no fighter armor, no tanks, no body they were armed primarily with ak-47s. four times they have defeated us. the measure of success in the fourth-generation situation is whether when we leave, we leave behind a real state. in none of those cases were we able to do that. the pretense that we left behind a real state in iraq is just resolved in the past week -- dissolved in the past week. ,s we have seen historically the government and hireling army

disintegrates when faced with any opposition. this is a very profound change. to try to carry out the debate on foreign-policy without regard to the fact that our military can no longer win against forces which by any measure of physical power are incredibly weak , they graft their resources on the same resources as around, they would not be visible -- the fact that our military and the militaries of other states, which are divine to fight other state militaries, cannot win against these nonstate forces -- this is a revolution. this is an enormous change and the changes were truly everything else. -- virtually everything else. ,hen we look at foreign-policy

it says an interventionist foreign-policy guarantees failure. you find yourself in a war with nonstate forces and the nonstate forces beat you. foreign-policy is you don't want to start wars you know you're going to lose. many foreign ministries have done this but it does not mean the conservative test of prudence. you don't want to fight wars with other states. why? the losing state's legitimacy will disintegrate and that state will disintegrate. we saw this with libya. i warned before we started bombing libya that the outcome would be the destruction of the libyan state and another big victory for the fourth-generation.

surprise. guess what happened? if you go to war with another state, regardless of which state wins the war, we will lose. . distinction that will drive international relations for the remainder of this century is not some kindergarten level of distinction between democracies or places that are free and dictatorships. it is between places that will be centers and sources of order and centers and sources of disorder. when we go to war with another state, almost certainly, the outcome will include the creation of another center and

source of spreading disorder. intervenee, when we in these places, we will import disorder here. fail tot just that we bring order to those places. what chance do we have when we go in and create a government? beyond that, we will import the disorder here. , in theorm of refugees form of veterans coming back who have learned how to build things like ied's and some of whom will be, among other things, gang members. the effects on the legitimacy of our own government of another policy failure.

you see at high cost in money and lives. the first rule of foreign-policy is don't go to roll with other with other states and with nonstate entities. together and two it suggests that going to war is not a terribly good idea. intoorst war we could get is a war with china. we desperately need china to be a center and source of order. it is naturally inclined that way because confucian culture is naturally ordered. a defeated china could very well seriesgrate into another of warring states. what a catastrophe.

a billion people, nuclear weapons, a lot of high-technology, and it becomes an enormous source of disorder. we could not imagine a worse outcome. the pentagon likes to puff the dragon because it is desperate for a symmetrical opponent. what is the consequence if we do beat them? that is not asked. need is a change in grand strategy. war in 350 change in years cannot be accommodated with changes in tactics or weaponry or various other small things. it requires a large change of a high-level and that is a change in grand strategy. specifically, we need to abandon the offensive grand strategy we have been following, particularly since the end of the cold war. were we attempt to dictate to the rest of the world what their internal arrangements shall be and threaten them in a variety

of ways. russell kirk rightly wrote that there is no sure way to make them in your enemy than to tell him you're going to remake him in your own image for his own good. return to the grand strategy that we followed successfully through almost all of our history. a defensive strategy. we don't go to war with other people unless they attack us. their internal arrangements other on business. we relate to the rest of the world very actively. through trade and by serving as an example, not through playing the great power game with diplomacy and military force. it was said unfairly of kaiser wilhelm that it is this

nightmare, that there is a core him somewhere in the world that we are not involved. [laughter] the defense of grand strategy says that those are other people's problems. we have wonderful oceans east and west. we are going to use that distance and we are going to do everything in our power to isolate ourselves from disorder. disorder means the disintegration of the state. that can happen here, too. the -- thatle if the american state will not survive the strategy, particularly if he keeps engaging in wars. the defensive strategy made us popular worldwide. it gave the united states potential he -- great moral power. level of war is the

least powerful. it is the policy, the grand strategy that is in accord with the realities of the 21st century. the tragedy is that the washington establishment will not see this because it is made up primarily of people whose most important thing is the personal career and if you are a member of the establishment and you suggest any change, you instantly cease to be a member of the establishment. the question i will he with you is which falls first? the foreign-policy establishment or the country? we will start with a few questions that i will post to the panelists. if we have a little bit of time at the end, i will turn over some time for questions from you all here in the audience. iraq warll touched on most of us have -- or most of us have as a recent development.

asking, will start with is there anything that the u.s. could constructively do in response to the latest events in iraq? case of itre the being time to cut our losses in iraq and that we have never known what we are doing and that get into aot try to situation we don't know how to fix? a good question and a tough one. what we have seen over the past couple of days, this idea of normalizing, this idea that we are going to try to formally discuss the situation with iran -- iran literally walked in there behind the tracks of the u.s. tanks. they have a much broader and deeper understanding of iraq.

they're foreign-policy and national security policy was iraqed toward preventing as a threat after the iran-iraq war. --t we're doing right now the question is, what tools do we have to make the current government do it? donedea that we could have it with 5000 troops is kind of fantastical. do is more of what we have been trying to do with syria. work with the surrounding countries to see how we contain it. work to try to do with the refugee flows. -- deal with the refugee flows. at the end of the day, if the wet problem is political,

have very few tools to change that reality. who would be in the best position to coordinate with bad?s neighbors are quite >> there working at cross purposes. it has been stated and let state it again. it is a cold war between the saudi's and the gulf states and iran and within the sunni community, with much more extreme islamist elements and less extreme islamist elements. you have the muslim brotherhood crowd. you have the saudi's working against the muslim brotherhood crowd. given all of these crosscutting is, what, the question tools, what influence does the united states have? i think continuing to stay engaged.

the united states is pulling out of the region is wildly overstated. ofo see it as a kind righitng of american interest in the region. we do have an interest in preventing global jihadist organizations from creating small states to plan whatever they would. i'm at a loss for what real steps we can take right now to change the reality. there was an article in "politico" that made the argument, the case for doing nothing in iraq. is that something that is possible for the u.s. to do? is it possible for the u.s. to reframe -- plausible for the u.s. to reframe -- refrain from

some sort of response? >> i was told that matt was going to answer all of the math questions. [laughter] i would say that with respect to the middle east what you probably want to do is eliminate the moral hazard problem for u.s. foreign-policy come of the notion that if in fact there is a deteriorating situation in terms of security that is unfolding, that the u.s. will be the actor of first resort. i would say in that sense, there is incentive to not necessarily take immediate action. in some ways, this has a much more profound effect on iran than on the united states. there is not a bad argument. this is also a question of where do you rank order of threats to the united states? do you think that isis having an actual state zone or territory is a bigger problem than the iranian state expanding its influence? that is a debate that needs to

take place. or whether or he -- not you think these things are either a threat to the united states? i do think there is something to be said for not doing nothing, but making it clear that we are not doing anything unless we are acting in concert with others. any is not going to be unilateral action by the united states. in the end, if something bad happens in the region, you guys are going to be affected worse than we are. everything having to do with diplomacy, relations between states, etc. is completely irrelevant to what is happening in iraq in syria and in the gulf. areforces behind these wars far more powerful than the states of the region. we are looking at a war of religion. we are looking at a middle eastern 30 years war. the long-standing war between

shimmies in such -- sunnis and shia's has rekindled. they're going to fight it out. it is going to be just like the 30 years war in europe and that is to our advantage. if you look at the demographics of this region, you see that it is filled with young men with no prospects, no jobs, and nothing to do. what the young men do under the circumstances? they fight. this is a supply-side war. you are going to have wars when you have those demographics. what we want to ensure is that we are isolated from the disorder that causes. us is tor policy for stand on the sidelines and say fight fiercely, fellows, and let them absorb their energies with each other instead of directing

them against us, which is what they do when we intervene in their region. . we cannot stop it. would benefit from it. policygle most important action we need to take is to make sure we admit not one single refugee that will be fleeting from these conflicts. once they come here or to europe , they will bring the same conflict with them wherever they go. >> a couple of points. on the moral hazard point, i think it is a good one. a few months ago, saudi arabia was flowing its temper tantrum over the u.s.-iran relations. ,ho was it that wrote an op-ed one of the saudi princes? they had withdrawn from the un's human rights council. the op-ed said that if the united states continues to

behave in this way, saudi arabia i'd have to take action to deal with security in its own region and own way. this was intended as a threat. i found the kind of interesting. the fact that they might have to act. perhapsaudi military is the most worthless in the region of worthless militaries. >> my first thought was, that will be the day. i don't perceive that as a threat. that is what would you would -- we would like you to start doing. i take your point about the middle east 30 years war. clearly, the key concern of the united states government is the security of the united states. i'm not willing to say that we should just stand back and left this region consume itself. -- let this region consume itself. what we're talking about his massive instability, suffering, displacement.

i'm not willing to support a policy that just says let's stand back and let it burn out. >> the problem is that nothing we can do will change it. >> that is a separate point i just not am sure i can completely agree on. that stateshe idea as we know it are completely dissolving is a crock. i and a standard with respect to certain states. but telling me that the iranian state is disintegrating or the israeli state is disintegrating or a variety of other states, even in the gulf region, i don't quite buy. i am worried that your overgeneralizing in some parts arelobe were state orders created in an artificial way and they are not necessarily going to adore. i'm not necessarily buying this as a more general argument. >> as i said, the intensity of the problem, i would say switzerland and japan are an intensity varies

greatly. the examples you give, first of all, iran could very well break aret because the iranians only a relatively small portion of the population in iran. there are separatist movements going on. they are concerned about those movements. they are subject to the fourth-generation threat. israel, one of the things i learned when i went there without incredibly bitter israeli internal politics are. to the point where i have a secular israeli say to me, speaking of the orthodox, we should put them in the kind of camp's were they only come out of smokestacks. that is is really domestic politics. i would not be too quick as to say that fourth-generation war is just a problem in a few

places where the state is particularly weak. it is cropping up everywhere, including here, where we have seen in recent years the interesting fact of the united states trying to bring order to afghanistan, somewhere where nobody has ever been able to bring order, while being unable to maintain in 1000 yards from the u.s. capitol building after nightfall. i think we have time for one question from the audience. we are about out of time. there should be microphones in the aisle careered yes or -- i'll. -- in the aisle. yes, sir. >> when i saw the title of this conference, i was hopeful that we would talk in terms of internationalism. instead i hear us talking in terms of the 400-year-old framework of competing

nationstates, the same framework that lies behind the united nations. for so many problems that the world faces that seem to require a global response, shouldn't we be talking in terms of an internationalism that emphasizes globalism versus this old provincial national interest sort of discussion? >> i will take that. to have that kind of initiative you are talking about requires init requires a shift identity. it requires that people think of themselves not as citizens of the united states, but as a global citizen. you would need shifts in public opinion that would require people to think of this as a situation where cooperation would be required. you are not necessarily seeing that. in fact, you are seeing the reverse. the european union is the most ambitious project that has

existed to try to remake national identities into something larger. european identity. the notion that there are notches greeks, italians, or spaniards, but this european identity. if you look at the most recent euro parliamentary elections, you essentially have got actors on the far left and the far right, both of which are incredibly xenophobic, within europe's borders and outside. doing relatively well. the only place for that did not happen is germany. because germany's mild insane policies have served them well and no one else. you are still operating in a world where national identities or subnational identities trump any sort of sense of cosmopolitanism. >> very briefly, i very much

appreciate the question. from a political perspective, we recognize that the american people are in a place of being very skeptical of foreign interventions. i like that as a baseline. but that can change. worth thinking about, if not simply trying to altivate at some level certain sense of global citizenship, rather than saying, what happens out there does not affect us. in the event of another crisis, , i can veryck easily imagine americans being support, within a decade, being induced again to support something really stupid. i think it is worth thinking globally and to come up with a competing set of arguments for

how u.s. security can be advanced through nonmilitary, global engagement. would just add the globalism and internationalism are zombies. they are the walking dead. assumed thatve they transferred their allegiance away from the state to the international superstate that the rest of the group would do the same. their are transferring loyalties away from the state, but it is too smaller, more concrete entities that actually have some content and that are worth fighting for, not just brave new world, which is what globalism represents. let's cheer that development. >> thank you all for your attention. thank you to all the panelists.

we will be moving onto the next part of our program. thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> now, a conversation on u.s. foreign-policy, national security, and the leak of classified documents. ♪ >> good morning. welcome back. , and anel goldman assistant professor of political science here at george washington, university.

i'm a senior contributor to "the american conservative." i'm delighted to be able to moderate this panel on national security state overreach and reform, reclaiming civil liberties and the aftermath of the war on terror. we have three distinguished an interesting panelists. the panel will follow the model of the first session with statements of about 10 minutes from each panelist followed by a few questions for me and, i hope, questions from the audience. before turning to the panelists, i would like to exercise the moderator's prerogative of offering a brief introductory remark. i'm her professor, so when i say

a brief remark, i mean a long and pedantic remark. [laughter] i would like to begin the panel by observing that in american politics, the freedom of religion is sometimes described as the first freedom and that is because it appears first in the first amendment, which itself introduces the bill of rights. but i think there is a case to be made that our real first freedom is found a bit later in the fourth amendment. which holds that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and events against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and the war it shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized. what a think is important about the fourth amendment is not

subjects searches, seizures, and terry gave in, and surveillance to the test of do process./ a moral to introduce principle, searches must be reasonable. i interpret this to mean that following the appropriate legal procedures is not enough. according to our legal and constitutional traditions, the people have a right to live their lives free from intrusive scrutiny. even if it is authorized by legislation. well, of course, there are real threats to national security and to the lives of citizens. want to minimize those. it seems that a question that we might use to begin or posed as an overarching concern is what

the fourth amendment means in an age of terror and modern communication. how we can discover the spirit or moral principle while protecting ourselves against these threats. to help answer and raise new questions, we will turn first to marcy wheeler, followed by adam will haved then conor the last word before we turn to discussions. marcy? cator a piece for published yesterday, i argued that the administration's responds to the snowden leaks was to double down on hard power. at a moment where what the government had been doing with the internet, which has been an important part of our soft power , and tech companies, which have been a part of our

economy, a bright spot, for years. they doubled down on hard power. the internet as a tool of security rather than as a tool of reaching out as americans. lipservice to not spying on europeans as much. to not leaking encryption standards, those are unenforceable. there is no means to ensure they are doing that. and they are weak. that speaks to a model of knowledge that the u.s. has adopted of late, which is this notion that we can and should know everything. that the approach to terrorism is to be all seeing. it does not work that way. one of the things we learned in the ig report from the boston

marathon attack is that the nsa had collections on the tsarnaev brothers that they had never accessed. we do not know exactly what they have, but it is that plus the warnings from russia that ought to have had more discussion. nevertheless, the nsa was all knowing about thes tsarnaevs and it did no good. that has come bureaucratically and by choice with this increasing commitment to sig int. america's place increasingly through this technical this technical omnipresence. that has led to the atrophy of humans. there are great human spies out there, but we have human people right now unless unless people collecting themselves.

that leads us to rely on like saudi arabia, yemen, or pakistan, who might not have the same interests we do. there is a system of knowledge and is hubristic dangerous and is not serving american interests very well. it comes with an enemy, the notion behind it that there are terrorists among us and we have to identify those terrorists. the only way to do that is through omissions. -- through omniscience. that notion of the enemy is beginning to leech to other areas. certainly if you look at anonymous or wikileaks, that is the model of searching for terrorists that has been used to some degree with those targets as well. there is a dangerous prospect that it can be used more broadly

and they can be turned on genuine dissidents and people who are genuinely criminals within the u.s. after i published the thing for cato, i was like the reason i think the government did this, they doubled down, is the second security threat. -- is the cyber security threat. in the hearing where james clapper, now we remember that he lied on collecting on millions of americans. i called him on that, said that is a lie that will come back to hot him. the headline that came out of that hearing in march 2013 was that cyber security, for the first time, the intelligence community regarded that as the biggest threat to the u.s. not terrorism anymore. during the response to snowden, the government downplayed that.

wanty because they did not to talk about -- there are different threats to privacy if you are using this dragnet for cyber security purposes then a them forre using terrorism. terrorists make a nice bogeyman, the cyber security threat is a lot moree amorphous. snowdene still documents that describe the way they are using these tools for cyber security that have not been discussed as we discussed ."eform that is important because congress has refused to give the nsa the lead on cyber security in this country. nevertheless, the president's review group alluded to it strongly. they said the nsa should not be a domestic security force. when asked about that, the explanation was they are a

security force in cyber security. that remains very opaque but it is a real threat. i think to follow the fourth amendment issue, it is not the you have toing follow, you have to follow the cyber security thing. it is a real threat. i do not want to minimize the degree to which -- we talked about state versus nonstate .ctors cyber security is something where both of those adversaries can strike at the heart of the u.s. we need to recognize that. one of the things that has happened in our discussion of cyber security is that we have completed many things -- is that inhave conflated many things what counts as cyber security. a threat the government has gone after is anonymous. some of what they do is legal, some is illegal, some is in embarrassing.

it is not an x essential threat to the u.s., it is curious that that was the lead approach from the government to combat cyber threats. then there is china robbing us blind. line. sheldon whitehouse, keith alexander, and others used. cyber theft has been the biggest transfer of wealth in history. ignoring slavery and other things. it is a remarkable statement to make. is robbing us blind. you can argue about economic espionage all you want, that is still traditional spying. blueprints isar spying. when russia was taking us out to lunch in the cold war, spying cry and say oht

my gosh they are breaking the rules and spying. our primary responses to china is to say they are breaking the rules and spying. no they are not. theer than addressing urgent need to bring security to especially are defense contractors, we are trying to pretend there are rules about spying. which -- wes crime, can talk about this. there are some interesting fourth amendment issues being played out now. one of the things doj wants to do is to get a nationwide war go to ahat they can judge in d.c. and be able to vers all over the country to target threats. at will be an interesting debate. at least we are having the debate publicly.

which is important. if we can have a debate publicly about how to combat cyber fast. talking about gangs, breaking and stealing credit card information, that is the kind of cyber threat most americans will care about. and losing their credit card. that is the scenario where we are having a legitimate debate. which i think is useful. the last threat, which gets ourlated in, are threats to critical infrastructure. this is the big fear mongering of late. mike rogers last week said google is unpatriotic for not being willing to give up its european markets because they are opposing the reform bill before congress. but we have to take these measures to protect these banks 7 trillion a day.

he did not notice that microsoft is going to be asked to sacrifice for the banks. the problem of critical infrastructure, i think both nonstategets and actors could legitimately strike us, we dostrike at not talk about america's resilience. pg&e corp. in california has to be one of the most critical players in cyber defense, they are one of the biggest utilities. , through neglect, was able in sane an explosion bruno. itsthings that hurt infrastructure there are the things that leader to be less than adequate for cyber security. but we will not address the infrastructure problem. the big threat is wall street.

oh my gosh, people can break wall street. in 2008, wall street managed to break itself without a single hacker's involvement. yet we do not ask wall street, we are perfectly tolerant of wall street being non-resilient even still. dan can argue against me. we have not hardened wall street. wall street is still incredibly rickety. until we do those things and ask these private entities to harden themselves against cyber security, the notion that this should be the fearmonger thing, to let the nsa into our back pocket, is problematic. will have an interesting discussion about cyber security going for. i think the reform bill serves some cyber security purpo ses, it brings back the dragnet mnd expands upstrea

collection. with guards to the debate, we need to be careful about not conflating threats before us. we need to point to the fbi's success at combating crime and use that as a model rather than putting the nsa in our back pocket. we need to talk about resiliency as a country generally. climate change-- is as big a threat as cyber security. resiliency is going to solve both of those problems, or at least mitigate both of those. >> thank you, rc. adam? >> ok. about a year, a little more than a year since the snowden disclosures. it has been almost a year since the house came within a handful of those of defunding the patriot act,f the cited as the authority for the nsa dragnet program.

we have seen very little in the way of legislative reform. certainly nothing has passed. there is a bill in congress. despite the fact that two government panels in the executive branch have concluded that the program was not very effective at preventing terrorism. despite some consistently brutal press in terms of the scope of the program and how effective it was and how dishonest intelligence officials were about describing its scope. that is also despite some fairly big hitters on both sides of the aisle trying their very best to get something passed. i am speaking of sensenbrenner and leahy. like to make a few observations about why that is the way it is. partisanship is not enough. there is a theory that partisan

self-interest can serve as a vehicle for legislative reform. when one party controls the white house and the other controls congress, whatever -- they are going to be selfish and want to nail the other guy. so they are going to go all-out in order to change things so they can really stick it to them. that is not what has happened. no matter what party is in party , the the white house intelligence community usually gets what it wants. russall this in 2009 with feingold trying to pass reforms that were very similar to what ensign brenner and leahy came up .ith in october last year congress was controlled by democrats, democrats in the house and senate. did not evenforms survive the judiciary committee. he joked and called it the prosecutors committee. he said he was scratching his head as to how a committee

controlled by a democratic margin could support the bill. i do not think there should be much of a mystery anymore. party,tors, whichever are very solicitous of the intelligence community. for a number of reasons. if the intelligence community says something is really bad or something to do x, legislators are going to listen. it does not matter how much they hate the guy in the white house. you can hear republican legislators talk about obama as a dictator and then they will hand the keys to everyone's personal information to him in a second just like that. there is a big status quo bias in the system. i think that can be overstated but at the same time it is underappreciated. the system is set up not to allow abrupt changes. whether that is a virtue, it is true. it is very difficult.

you look at something like gun control, whichever side of that debate you are on. we had a series of emotional incidents involving mass shootings and congress did not do anything. in part because of the composition of congress. in part because even with public outrage over an issue, that is not necessarily going to spur legislators to act. -- the intelligence community always has influence on congress. you can see them getting hammered in the press and you can see legislators grandstanding and committee hearings trying to show they are independent. shove, theymes to are quietly going to do what they say. one of my favorite examples of this was in 2009, al franken made a big show of explaining

the fourth amendment to david chris, then the head of the justice department's national security division. chris was in disbelief. he could not believe he was being humiliated by franken, who turned around and voted for the bill russell feingold said had been produced by the prosecutors committee. there is showmanship for the cameras. and the cameras are off, the sausage making happens, legislators acted very differently. congress would often -- to the extent that congress is going to do something, they would rather be seen as to something that necessarily do something. not actually a joke. it is funny and it is a sad hashtag #lol way. when gettinges something is better than nothing, half-full is better than none.

youe are times when i think want to say you're getting half a loaf we are trying to look like you are working. most recent reform bill, which almost every civil liberties group has said it is inadequate and has withdrawn their endorsement of, which you saw on the debate in the house floor. legislators have worked hard to try to rein in the nsa, defending a bill that does not do that at all. nadler was on the floor and has been a stalwart civil libertarian on these issues. he said a no vote would mean no reform at all. the rhetoric from civil liberties groups is no matter how you vote, this bill means no reform at all. in general, people were genuinely angered by the snowden disclosures. congress did want to be seen as doing something. well for the passage

of the bill but it does not actually mean that government surveillance powers are going to change in a way that y curtailsely t what they are able to do in terms of getting private information without having to go through a rigorous oversight process. another reason why things have gone the way they have gone is that these issues are really hard. the policy details are difficult. an age talking about group in terms of legislators very usedople, often, to communicating on paper. let alone e-mail and text messages and everything else. the technology -- even for someone who is young, technology issues are difficult to grasp. there are very few members of congress who get it. i wroteg you might say,

a piece last year about why this happens. legislators vote on intelligence bills they do not understand. some of them said the classic response is legislators vote on stuff they do not understand most of the time. maybe that is true. but most of the time there is something on the legislator's staff who understands it. that is not necessarily the case with the intelligence bill. on the senate side, you have at least one staffer who can talk to their boss about these things. on the house side, they are dependent on the committee staff. for example, sensenbrenner's staffer who were at the freedom act bill was cut out of the negotiations with the administration over what to include in the final bill. this was in "cq." he did not have the security clearance. you have legislators who might not be the best prepared to do nothese issues, who

have the necessary staff to help them grasp it. there is another aspect to this. it is a little harder for the public and for the media to grasp it as well. it is not like health insurance. policy is very complicated but almost everybody has to pay health insurance bill. student loans are complicated but a lot of people have to pay student loans. with government surveillance, there is not the same direct impact on your life or you're dealing with it every month. for aa lot more abstract lot of people, not just legislators. to getasier for people lost in the details and not necessarily follow what was happening. and the lie and what politicians are saying when they are saying , makingixing this thing sure civil liberties are being protected. that brings us full circle.

when the snowden disclosures happened, there was a strong argument that however you felt about these powers, secret is going to- this sound like a complete oxymoron. , the americanon national security state has to transparency. of when we cannot see what they are doing, they lose legitimacy. what they were doing was so far beyond what they were saying they were doing. they could not really be said to have a democratic legitimacy to it. you have legislators voting on it who did not understand. they were voting not to disclose the kind of information that would allow people to understand that. now that those details have come out, we are on the verge of something for civil libertarians that should worry them a lot more. we are on the verge of granting

the democratic legitimacy to the system. now that the disclosures have been made and congress is going to ratify that system, one of the administration's defenses of the nsa program is that it was passed in congress and validated by the court. after this will passes and not much changes, that is going to be true. this will have been passed with everybody's knowledge, at least to some extent, of what was happening. they will be able to use that to justify it in a way that they could not justify it when students disclosures were initially made. i think i will stop there. >> think you, adam. conor? withwish i was here today one big idea for reforming the national security state, a silver bullet. i have a lot of small ideas, instead. i will start with the one most likely to fail. to elect an illinois senator who makes a lot of big promises and says all the right things about

executive power and the national security state. then wait for him to fulfill his promises. i am beginning to think that is not going to happen with barack obama. [laughter] i would not be shocked if he retires in a few years and goes to texas and starts painting dogs in watercolor. [laughter] america has always gone a little crazy in times of war. we can look back and see what in hindsight was clearly extraneous. the alien and sedition act, suspending habeas corpus, the internment of japanese americans during world war ii. we see a pattern where the work ends and there is a course correction. i hope that when obama was elected we were seeing the course correction. we actually saw him continue a lot of policies of his predecessor. a civil libertarian like rand paul ever makes it to the white

house, i hope he would fill those promises. i have resigned myself to the fact that no republican or democrat in the white house will ever voluntarily give up power. this point, focusing on the presidency as a vehicle for hopes is aor our distraction from a more achievable goal, achieving congress -- electing a congress that takes civil liberties more seriously than the congress we have now. i think that is a realistic goal. --official lost the sheet here in official washington, d.c., military interventionism and a security state are much more popular than anyplace else in america. most places do not get better at restaurants because of the largess of the national security state. consensus is sustained for people like eric cantor. his constituents were happy to ofrepresented by a patron

the national security state. his constituents were also happy to be represented by a staunch critic of the nsa. it is not because public opinion has shifted on that issue. i'm not saying that that house race or any house race in america turns on the issues that are dear to me or the aclu. i am saying that voters are perfectly happy to be represented by civil libertarians. the only as kind of an afterthought. for most people, these are peripheral issue. that explains how the same kentuckians who sent rand paul to the senate also decided to keep mitch mcconnell around. i think it is a shame voters have not placed a priority on staying out of wars, and nsa spying, and civil liberties. i think they are important issues. is that it ising not as if voters have carefully weighed all sides of these things and decided that national status is correct.

there is no reason congress has to be as hostile as it is to national security state. i live in california. voters would be comfortable with a senator who is as good as ron wyden of oregon on the nsa stuff. instead, we are represented i dianne feinstein. she is terrible on nsa stuff. no reason her replacement could not be better if civil libertarians went about a sustained campaign and were able to persuade a little bit of the public to care a little bit more about these issues. i think replacing diane feinstein with russ feingold or goal.is an achievable i think replacing national security state leading republicans with politicians like rand paul or just an amash is achievable. republicans and democrats can work on these goals within their parties.

often, i will talk to people who do care about staying out of or civilet about iraq liberties. they want to vote for a candidate who is better on these things. but they say i just had mitt romney and barack obama, they are not really going to be different on these issues. i'm just going to vote for my partisan affiliation. in this way, focusing on the presidency causes people to overestimate how difficult and effecting meaningful change can be. it makes people hopeless and apathetic. very few voters who care about the nsa and the spying and the snowden things, even among them, they do not know how their congressman is behaving on those issues. that can change. civil liberties factions in the two parties are going to be nudged in the right directions, there are other changes that will be helpful. on the right, republicans with libertarian impulses are going

to have to think carefully about what it means to defend liberty and to uphold the spirit of the constitution. what should their priorities be if those are their big picture goals go? a small increase in the marginal tax rate may be prudent. it is a less urgent affront to liberty event these assaults on the fourth amendment and fifth amendment. folks on the right often do not realize the importance of civil liberties, even to the issues they care about. talk to someone from the nra and mentioned the idea of a national gun database, they are horrified that the government would know everyone who owns guns. well, the government can track all of our phone calls and and financial records, is effectively the same thing. and you get a roomful of 30 or 40 nra members and explain how

you could have the actual equivalent. the thing they are scared about, it is happening in the surveillance realm instead of the gun-control realm. maybe you win converts. these battles, getting at these issues and orthogonal ways can be effective. that amongue democrats there has to be a greater recognition that when culturally blue cosmopolitans michaelarack obama or bloomberg trample on the rights of minorities or foreigners, they are just as contemptible criticism as red figures like george w. bush who that do similar things. democrats should reflect on the feelings on political figures. the iraq war will cost $6 trillion in the end. it killed about 5000 americans. to go back to eric cantor, he

supported it. his opponent is portrayed as the crazy tea party. of anything his opponent has supported that is worse than the iraq war, that is more demonstrably damaging. that was al think good idea. we need to start to see the craziness, the relative craziness, of establishment washington for what it is. if you have people coming from the left or the right you are challengers, they often say or think certain things. how important are those things in the grand scheme of things? and democrats continue to underestimate the importance of war as an issue. this is evident in talking to democrats, who have always opposed the iraq war but still want hillary clinton to be the party standardbearer in 2016. they agree with her on domestic issues and believe she is best if either to

helped him. if you look at the damage done by an ill-conceived war of choice, iraq or vietnam, it is the most damaging policy you could have in a country. if you really take that seriously, avoiding future wars and putting a reflexive hawk and the white house should be a huge priority. i do not see that as a priority, even among antiwar democrats right now. mya journalist, a lot of time is spent trying to inform my readers about the national security state and to persuade them to look at it differently. there is an endless amount of work to be done on that front. it is shocking, the amount of time federal officials willfully mislead the public, tell outright lies sometimes. often, they will offer technically accurate statements that are misleading. away with itt because -- first, because

broadcast media is very aferential to anyone with u.s. official by their name. the subject matter is very complicated. i tried to expose this dishonesty in all its forms. droneample, i read about strikes a lot. the obama administration characterized rent strikes as surgical. it makes them sound very sterile. i don't know about you, if a surgery was about to go down in the building next door, i would not worry about my safety. surgeons make mistakes, it is rare that their right hand slips and takes out someone index building. [laughter] strikes.ens with drone surgical drones trikes. it is easy to think about rhetoric and the way it is used. hopefully change the way people .espond to drone strikes

it is much easier to call out the way that someone like keith alexander, who just stepped down as the head of the nsa, the way he misleads an audience. at it.ery good very good at saying things that are technically accurate but are actually very misleading. figuring out what exactly it is and how he has misled you often, for me, it takes reading his statement three or four times and then having 16 tabs open on my firefox and having a crashed three times and pulling it back up. finally, i get at it. that is the tricky thing you slipped in there. job, i do notime write about the nsa all the time. i read about a lot of things. gor doing the job of diggin these, i amg in to indebted to people like marcy, whose blog is great. to the freedombt

of the press foundation, jason, who does foia requests. it is hard and thankless work to unearth these facts that are deep in the weeds but unknown to the general public. journalists who are trying to get mass audience is the most accurate, overall impression possible. job at "theo my atlantic" nearly as well without them. other generalists, like adam, who see things i do not see. doing their own reporting and drawing on other sources. these things really matter and a filter through the media ecosystem and get down to the the important business of persuading people all over the place that things are not as they are being told by u.s. officials. in addition to the other things we talked about, if you want to

do something about these issues, support those people who are doing that thankless work. i guess i will leave it there. >> thank you, conor. expertspirit of asking to articulate issues that are beyond the understanding and the knowledge of lemon and even non-laymen. we might spend a little while talking about the usa freedom act and what does and does not do. rand paul, ron wyden, and mark udall published an op-ed in "the los angeles times" today criticizing the bill in its current form for its shortcomings. what are those shortcomings? how serious are they for people who care about these issues? necessity of the working with congress we have rather than the one we might wish to have. and you guysdown

can explain what i just said. >> the bill purports to and able collection. the way the intelligence community to find bulk is anything without a discriminator or selection term. the phone dragnet is bulk collection, they can ostensibly get all the phone records in the u.s. as soon as they use any kind of discriminator, however broad, they no longer consider that bulk collection. what we call upstream collection, 702 upstream collection where they sniff the that crossed the telecom switches and pull certain e-mails and phone numbers, stuffe signatures, that collects in a year at least 56,000 communications of americans that are related -- that are unrelated and innocent.

domestic communications. they do not consider that bulk collection. the internet drive program was targeted at certain switches they served the middle east. that was not considered bulk collection because they used discriminators. the switches where more potential terrorist traffic will cross. the current will -- the current bulk collection by requiring a specific collection you be used before collect anything. 5, thelies to section 214 phone judgment, and internet dragnet. ist is not unaware -- that not going to work. the way they define specific collection terms includes things like entity. al qaeda is an entity. you can say i am targeting al inda and say what they said

2004, all of these switches are switches where al qaeda's traffic crosses. so we need to collect all of the data off the switches. in addition, they use a term. the specific selection term includes blah, blah, blah, "such as." they are using the such as term to hide the more privacy invasive, upstream collection selectors. the such as is so broad and they are hiding the most troubling aspects that they plan to use. that should be thrown out. also, there is a basis for. if i am doing a pen register, i will use a selection term as a basis for picking which to collect again. these involve interpretations. the bill does not relate end

what you and i would think of as whatcollection, it ends the intelligence community with think of as bulk collection. what the attorney general would say, the attorney general says you do not want bulk collection, it is kosher. on the house side, i don't think people figured out they were using the intelligence community's definition of bulk collection. people figure it out as the bill was passing the house floor. people like bill lofgren were saying you can use this to collect -- people are saying you could use this to collect all the phone records from a zip code. this is keith alexander's latest trick. they say no, it would not be used to collect all the phone records from isn't con. what they will not say is no, it would not be used to collect all the phone records from an area code.

there would be no reason to collect them from a zip code. zip codes are generally more narrow than area codes. that is an example of the game. they deny the think they are willing to deny but not the thing they might get in trouble for. is currently doj ignoring what is clearly the congressional intent on fisa going back to 1978. on whether defendants get review and whether doj is required to inform defendants that section 702 has been used to collect on them. it is an act of bad faith to say that the legislative records, the first 38 years, has not bound them under fisa, is all of a sudden going to start binding them. it is not what happened. there are other ways where the bill -- the bill at least gets a judicial review before you can do a phone dragnet. a good thing. the judge is not reviewing isther -- the judge

reviewing whether the target is an agent of a foreign power. or associated with a foreign power. not whether the target is a terrorist. theact, the bill expands use of this dragnet function beyond the use of counterterrorism. it does so in different ways. what theyrts back to were doing until 2009 and it was considered a violation at that point. now, they are going to have a legislatively approved. there are a couple other ways that it is qualitatively worse. the one other way it is important for you to know is qualitatively worse, right now, when keith alexander testified he has always said on were all al-walaki call people in the u.s., they called people. three degrees of separation, all these people got sucked up into

the nsa, the full might of the nsa is thrown at these people. fisa approved the contract training on connections. -- the contact chaining on connections. it is behind a redact. presumably it means they are using burner phones. out my phone, they will figure out my new phone by my call patterns. it will presumably include geolocation. all four of us are chained, not because we have called each other, but because we are sitting next to each other with our cell phones. overseas, the nsa is using things like address books and i am missing a few, to do the same type of contact chaining.

assume they might try to do that. that should alarm everyone, that we are approving it blind and not understanding what connection contact chaining is. >> this raises a big picture question. what kind of surveillance policy ought we to have? one feature of it ought to be that you could sit down with a rim of educated people and explain to them what the government can do and what the limits are that the government can do. have it become principal to them. i do not -- have to be comprehensible to them. >> are you saying i was not comprehensible? [laughter] >> one of the reasons marcy's haveis indispensable, i covered this extensively. she lays something out as clearly as anybody can lay it

out. it will take me three times reading it to understand all the nuances. this is not a coincidence. -- complication is a good thing for the national security state and its lawyers. you can find a national security letter if you are the president, almost anything is legal. the idea we are going to have a reform with this degree of convocations that the nsa will not wriggle out of some years from now seems highly implausible. i would go a lot further restricting them and demanding transparency than anything that will ever get through congress. >> adam? >> march he mentioned this program. that is what governs what everybody colloquially knows as prism. one of the interesting thing about the freedom act is that it does not touch section 702.

it is unlawful -- it is a law that is an acronym that contains an acronym. >> nothing to do with complexity. does, it authorizes collection of communication. it is supposed to be targeted at people abroad. functionally, it means that, as marcy said, domestic communications of americans get swept up in it. we are talking content here. nobody isma says listening, but sometimes it does sweep up content and american content. they are not supposed to target it, if they get it, they can listen to it. this is what is called a backdoor search. anything to do with that is completely eliminated from the bill. much to the anger of ron wyden, who says he is going to fight to get it back in. that was one thing that i think marcie mentioned.

it deserves to be emphasized. there are a lot of things that were meant originally to be in this bill that are not there anymore. the way the aclu, which is tentatively supporting the bill, i think they might eventually withdraw their support. they refer to the bill as authorizing "bulky collection" instead of bulk collection. that should show you what it does. before snowden, they were doing ps" when they were collecting people's records. three degrees of separation from a target. this allows two hops and allows them to keep those records. two hops is potentially the records of hundreds of thousands of people. everywe are not getting single verizon customer anymore. you are still getting a lot of people. , by anycy saidm

colloquial use of the term, that is "bulk." if legislators would prefer you not to refer to it that way. >> in the spirit of conversation, i would like to open for questions. we have time for just one or two. and speake microphone into it so that c-span can record your question. >> adam, what are your thoughts about the danger of the national security state using all this information to blackmail their opponents? ok, american history has a lot of pretty prominent examples of this event -- examples of dissidents having personal information used against them. martin luther king being one example. the fbi under j edgar hoover behaved practically like the mob

in terms of the use of private information to coerce people. we have not seen that yet in the u.s. the risk is always there. it is not even controversial for not evens -- is controversial for legislators to bring this up, they talk about this when they talk about the need for reform. that peoplethe more become used to the idea of the government washing them -- watching them all the time and the more it shapes their behavior and becomes part of the is thate more likely it the government is going to feel more comfortable doing things that would have before seemed inconceivable. >> there is a degree to which, if the government has a sufficient amount of information , they do not necessarily have to go so far as to actually say i am going to blackmail you with this. you just know that they know

everything. and so you are a little bit more dos file and less likely to make waves. that is not true of everyone, there are going to be dissidents who will object no matter what. not everyone is that courageous or that willing to give up their life. the so-called chilling effect is a very real thing that changes the way that people relate to the government in a surveillance society. just with theot nsa, but for example, if you think about facial recognition technology. the ability to take a picture with a digital camera of a crowd and now identify everyone in that crowd. can you imagine a future war, an might be aotest you little less likely to go to if you knew you could be identified by name just as easily as an fbi agent taking one picture and mapping the crowd.

i think that would dissuade some people from going to an antiwar protest. i think we are going to see technology outside the surveillance we have been talking about raise those issues more in the near future. >> they are doing it anyway with collecting your cell phone. they will go to protests and collect all the cell phone numbers that are present at the protest will stop is the same kind of thing. you are seeing a collection, selectors at a localized level. and then data sharing back and forth. the threat is very real. >> another thing off the radar, license plate scanners. all over the u.s. are installing these license plate scanners that just take a little photograph of every car that goes by. and then they are generating mounds and mounds of data. they are not all connected yet. towould not be so difficult transition this into a system that basically tracks all car

trips. if you are carrying a cell phone, there is a redundant tracking of all car trips. >> except in florida. we have time for one more question. >> thank you for coming in and speaking here. my name is john, i am with consistent life. i have a question. all of the attention that surveillance has gotten is very gratifying and it is good that people are paying attention. i am wondering, it seems to me that of the things that national security state does, surveillance is one of the lesser things. i am more concerned about torture, assassination, keeping people locked up without trial for years on end. yet, the snowden relations surveillance seems to have gotten more attention, more people around that some of the other issues. do you have any thoughts on why that is? because they actually affect people in this country. [laughter]

it, it seems like indefinite detention at gitmo torture, strikes and those things happen to someone else. when the snowden information came out and the fisa rolling it cannot that they were taking people's information. we had a conversation about executive use of lethal force against american citizens with drones. there was this whole rand paul and eric holder thing going on. that animated people even though there is the possibility of a drone incinerating you at a starbucks in the lofty, not high at all. [laughter] whereas that kind of thing happens at weddings and pakistan often enough to where it seriously affects people's lives. to others happening

people, particularly during a time of economic hardship, it is hard for people to care about. >> even within the u.s., you have seen the nypd put together not digital surveillance but putting undercover officers in student groups of muslims. not because they were suspicious of the particular student group but just because they were muslim. they had this whole program that ultimately generated zero counterterrorism leads. which gives you an idea of how much reason for them to be suspicious and display of these particular people. undercovertting some in a group full of college students, who went river rafting. one of the agents went on a river rafting trip and befriended them. this is arguably surveillance that is much more intrusive the nsa is doing.

it cost less of an uproar -- it becauseess of an uproar they were muslims. there is a double standard that .as gone on since 9/11 the snowden revelations were different. it was not a foreign people or indefinite minority in the u.s. where people could say well, i am not them. it was everybody. >> is important to understand that they are all connected. brennan, in his confirmation hearing, actually admitted he had used stuff that came out of the cia's interrogation program. in declarations to the fisa court, they had to go and claim bad, bad threat. if that came from torture, the john mack is all derived from all-- the dragnet is

derived from the fear mongering. it is all interlocking. it is true that average white people see themselves as targets of surveillance in a way that they do not see themselves as targets of indefinite detention or having our faith communities infiltrated were what have you. again exercise the moderator's prerogative and take the last word. it seems to me that a final reason is that torture, war, drone strikes, although abusive, do not cut at the heart of our possibility for self-government. of fullthe prospect surveillance does. i think that may be one reason, has attracted so much resistance. we have to conclude. i would like to ask you to join me in taking the panelists. [applause] and i hope you will remain where you are or tuned in for the next

panel on political realities, prospects for realism and reform in the republican and democratic parties. thanks again very much. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> for over 35 years, c-span brings public affairs offense from washington directly to you. putting you in the room at congressional hearings, white house events, briefings, and conferences. complete, gavel to gavel coverage of the u.s. house. a public service of private industry. c-span, created 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook, and follow us on twitter. >> the house is in this morning for member speeches. this afternoon, they work on a veterans health care measure and begin debate on defense spending. live house coverage on c-span.

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about changes at the healthcare.gov website. we look at this morning's headlines. join us on facebook, twitter, or by phone. ♪ host: good morning, everyone. the wall street journal says president obama has ruled out air strikes iraq for now, favoring the plonk special forces and seeking a broader strategy to address the political divisions. times says the president is considering limited airstrikes on sunni militants. president obama meets with congressional leaders 3:00 this afternoon. we want to get your thoughts on a potential presidential bid by hillary