n talk about the disparity between the poor and the rich and the unfairness to the middle be much ere just can't more unfair to the middle class, more devastating to the middle class, more devastating to the nation's poor than to suddenly announce you're now going to compete with five million people that are here illegally that are going to take jobs than you are willing to. not that many jobs, under a free costs the em, it market whatever it takes toe get the legal workers to come work

for a living wage. you wouldn't have to have legislation about minimum wage if you weren't bringing in millions of people illegal and ausing them to compete with people that are trying desperately to find jobs, doing everything they can to find jobs. but we also know that for the first time since president carter, over 90 million -- over 16 million people who could work, are not looking anymore. with this new five million people the president is all of a sudden with the stroke of his wand, all of a sudden taken from illegal status to legal status and here's your work papers, all

of that is illegal. but he's done it. which should ultimately drive another five million people out and either onto food stamps, onto welfare, so if the president's been upset about being tied so much of this year with jimmy carter's numbers, over 92 million people not even looking for work anymore, given up hope, he won't have to worry about that, he'll be in a league all his own once he puts an additional five million working americans out of work as they're displaced by people that are illegally here, willing to work cheaper. very, very tragic. an article from victor davis

hansen for obama, inconvenient law is irrelevant law. he says there is a humane, transparent, truthful and constitutional way to address illegal immigration. unfortunately, president obama's unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things. pothba ma has said he had to move now because of a dawdling congress. -- president obama has said he had to move now because of a dawdling congress. he's forgotten that there were democratic majorities in congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing in fear of punishment at the polls. nor did obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of hurting his own re-election chances. worries over sabotaging democratic chances in the 2014

mid-term explain his inaction from 2012 until now. he certainly wouldn't have waited until 2015 to act because republicans will then control congress. given that he has no more elections and can claim no more lasting achievements or ba ma now sees amnesty as his last desperate chance at establishing some sort of legacy. obama cited empathy for undocumented immigrants, i've got that, most of us do. but he expressed no such worry about the hundreds of thousands of applicants who wait for years in line rather than simply illegally crossing the border. any would-be immigrant would have been wiser to have broken rather than abided by federal laws. citizens who knowingly offer false information on federal

affidavits or provide false social security numbers would not receive the sort of amenities likely to be given to undocumented immigrants. obama has down played americans' worries about social costs and competition for jobs, but studies show illegal immigration has depressed the wages of entry level american workers while making social services costly for states and burdensome for u.s. citizens. obama says he is the legal authority -- he has the legal authority to rewrite immigration law without working with congress, yet on more than 20 occasions when it was politically expedient to grant amnesties or ba ma insisted he would not or that such a move was prohibited by the constitution. president obama not long ago warned us about the dangers of granting amnesties by fiat, quote, this is president obama,

the problem is i'm president of the united states. i'm not the emperor of the united states, end quote. he said. on another question he lamented, quote, believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting but that's not how our system works. that's not how our democracy fingses. that's not how our constitution is written. end quote. by setting aside settled immigration policy and ignoring statutes he finds inconvenient, president obama has set a new precedent that a president can arbitrarily declare what is valid what is not valid, immigration law. should his successors make up their own versions of any federal statutes that they choose in areas ranging from abortion and gun control to drug enforcement, environmental pr text -- environmental protection, and i would add, why not throw in income tax, just

declare that all the people that are going to vote for you don't have to pay income tax. why not? all you have to do is say, i waited and waited and congress wouldn't allow my supporters to get away with not paying income tax so i waited long enough. here's a new law. my supporters don't pay income tax. and then here's another article from "the washington times," november 25. under the president's new amnesty, businesses will have a $3,000 per employee incentive to hire illegal aliens over native born workers because of a quirk of obamacare. president obama's temporary amnesty which lasts three years, declares up to five million illegal immigrants to be lawfully in the country and eligible for work permits but it still deems them ineligible for public benefits such as buying

insurance on obamacare's health exchanges. under the affordable care act, that means businesses who hire them won't have to pay a penalty for not providing them health coverage, making them $3,000 more attractive than a similar native born worker whom the business, by law, would have to cover. the loophole was confirmed by congressional aides and drew condemnation from those who said it put illegal immigrants ahead of americans in the job market. if it's true that the president's actions give employers a $3,000 incentive to hire those who came here illegally, he has added insult to injury. that's a quote from representative lamar smith. quote, the president's actions would have just moved those who came here illegally to the front of the line, ahead of unemployed and underemployed americans, end

quote. the department of homeland security official confirmed that the newly legalized immigrants won't have access to obamacare which opens up the loophole for employers looking to avoid that penalty. and then brite bart has an article -- breitbart has an article, amnesty, to the illegal immigrants to cost taxpayers $2 trillion over their lifetime. dated 24 november. well, we do have this report from c.r.s., congressional research service, and it looks like congress should be able, pass a ny problem, to law that defunds any actions from carrying out the president's illegal fiat that he

dictated. and full language here, got a great staff, very helpful, got them to pull this language from , this was in the bill that limited the funds that kept military in vietnam. and this was on a continuing resolution. this was kind of what we're doing right here. but in 1974, the post-watergate democratic majority in both houses just decided, you know what, we're going to stop vietnam on a dime. never mind that there are people who have been our allies that will be murdered as soon as we pulled out, time to pull out, no -- no plan for a slow withdrawal, no planned out leaving a stable government. we're just pulling out all of a

sudden. two million people, it's estimated, died. this is how they do it. section 108 of this continuing resolution, in 1974, simply said notwithstanding any other provision of law on or after august 15, 1973, no funds herein or here turnover appropriated may be obligated or expended to finance directly or indirectly combat activities by the united states military forces in or over or from off the shores of north vietnam, south vietnam, laos, and cambodia. boom. that stopped vietnam. we can do the same thing with thatresident's illegal law he pronounced into being. then in 1984, democratic controlled house and senate, they just decided, they didn't want anybody providing funds to the contras fighting communists just south of the united states

in nicaragua. o here's the language, and i'm quoting, this was in the bill that was signed october 12, 1984, quote, during fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the c.i.a., department of defense, or any other agency or entity of the united states involved in intelligence activities may be only gated or expended for the purpose which would have the effect of supporting directly or indirectly military or paramilitary operations in nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual, unquote. so we just take our language directly from what the democratic house and senate did in 1974, what they did in 1985, and do that to address what the president has tone, otherwise,

things i -- fund things i wouldn't nomplely be in favor of funding, but i think this is such an important principle to saving this little experiment in democratic republic, it's worth doing. and then i couldn't help but note, kendrick ward's article, november 25, more than a year after watchdog -- more than a year after, watchdog reported the i.r.s. sent thousands of repounds to the tiny town of parksley, virginia. a woman has pleaded guilty to mail frud. linda avila admitted to obtaining more than $7.2 million in refunds by exploiting the child tax credit program. ali vee la filed more than 700 tax return with stolen identifications used by illegal immigrants, mainly from mexico. the virginia pilate reported that avila, 50, operated a landscaping and cleaning business in parksley.

investigators found copies of refund checks in amounts of more than $4,000 to $7,000. frequently cited foreign dependents which increased the amounts. she had them failed to -- mailed throughout the country. avila remains free pending sentencing on february 17 and could not be reached for comment. well, there's a good chance that's been going on more than one place. and then this article from neil monroe today, december 1, titles "obama fund my amnesty or i'll shut down the government" and basically talks about, that's indeed what the president is threatening to do. you either fund my illegal action when i spoke new law into

overrode verroad -- laws that were duly passed by the house and senate, passed by the congress, sent to the president, president signed it he, overrode it just by himself. in essence he's say, if you don't give me every dime i want, along with funding my illegal actions, i'm going to shut down the government. well, we've heard mitch mcconnel say it and john boehner say, they don't want a shutdown. we don't want a shutdown. we also don't want to fund illegal activity. so we hope that the president is not going to throw a hissy fit and shut down the government, because this is about the constitution, it's about fairness under the law, it's about fairness to people that came legally, it's about fairness to the minorities that have an unemployment rate through the roof, and now we're adding five million people that

are going to compete with people that can't find jobs or underemployed as it is. enforce this president to work with congress instead of dictating to it. and with that, i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the air will remind members to permitsfrom engaging in against the president. the chair will entertain a motion to adjourn. . the question is on the motion to adjourn. those in favor say aye. those opposed, no. the ayes have it. the motion is adopted.

accordingly the house adjourns until 10:00 a. >> tonight we discuss emergency preparedness. later ahead of the december 6

runoff, the louisiana senate race, mary landrieu and republican congressman bill cassidy talk. >> now a look at u.s. preparedness for public health emergencies in the wake of ebola. senate health committee members bob casey of pennsylvania and richard barr of north carolina, spoke about an issue at an event hosted by politico. from the museum, this is 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you both. we had scheduling problems and your staff worked hard to get you here and we know lame duck will be rather busy so we're really glad to have you. >> looks like it's going to be ame. we're talking ourselves and one is we questions we had

look back 10 or 15 years ago we had a sort of complacency in the country that we thought public health was old and didn't have to deal with it anymore and the infrastructure hadn't kept up and we had 9/11 and the bioterror legislation which was dual use and for new and emerging diseases as well as attacks. then you can along and filled in some gaps with the legislation. it has a very long name which i wrote down, the pandemic all hazards preparation act, was that -- and it has two different acronyms so i thought one was the democrat acronym and the other -- you call it topper, right? and then you re-authorized it. i'd like you to talk a little -- it's been bipartisan from the beginning, you worked together and there are funding issues going forward.

we just had something that was a crisis that the public fear was disproportionate to what actually happened but things cannot -- things did not go perfectly. there's things that we did right, some we did wrong, some luck. it could have been better, it could have been worse. as you watch things unfold, what do you think has to be done next? >> well, let me just back up to something that you said and that's the public health change. it did change. we wrote a new definition for public health. i would tell you post katrina. and you had a lot of events that went out but katrina was the thing that i think acknowledged for everybody, somebody has to be in charge. you can't have a bunch of people pointing fingers. you can't have folks sitting around waiting for folks they thought was going to do something to actually do it. we resolved that as it related to at least those threats that

were material threats listed by the department of homeland security relative to the blueprint bob and i were working off of. i think that when you look at the current threat of ebola and you ask what shook the trust of the american people, it is a total lack of communication. and i think when you look back at every event that we've had in the past now 12 years, communication breakdown has been the number one contributor to i think the lack of confidence of the american eople that we had a successful agenda to try to work through this. and i think that the administration, to their credit, though sometimes into this, realized they had to revamp totally and we've seen a totally different approach to the communications side. >> can congress fix communication? communication was one of those -- those of us who were in washington during 911 and the

aftermath and later the anthrax, communication on that day was disastrous, right? you were here. and there was all these efforts to identify what you just said, you know, communication, people have to -- various police forces have to be able to talk, public health has to talk to public security. so we've had legislation and we've had conversations, communication, and it was, as senator burgess said, it didn't work very well in september. what can congress do to fix that, or to address that at least? >> i'm not sure there's a legislative remedy there. richard was here in 2006 when the first pandemic all hazards bill was passed and then we worked together in 2013 to re-authorize it. the evolution of the policy or the improvements of the policy is mostly what our job is. and i certainly would be open to ideas about how we can

legislate better communication. but part of it is for any administration, there has to be , not simply in the context of an ebola outbreak but any kind of crisis. even if we think that the crisis was accelerated by the -- maybe by the election or by the attention to the issue, i believe that that rests with this administration or the next administration to figure out a better way to have one person speaking for the administration , and i think it has to be someone with a deep understanding. and this is a difficult combination to achieve, deep public health experience as well as someone who can actually communicate well. having said all that, even if we achieved a measure of perfection on communication, a lot of this is going to have to be a communication strategy at

the local level and that's a whole other -- that's a longer conversation. but i'm afraid that unless you have -- because most of the response is at the local level just like it is often in homeland security. so unless you have respected figures in hundreds and hundreds of communities standing up saying these are the facts, ladies and gentlemen, this is what we're going to do about what's happening, it's very difficult. and lastly, i say that about local communication because whether we like it or not, washington isn't all that popular today, and that's -- i think it goes back to several administrations where people don't have a lot of confidence, or several congresses. so the best we can do, i think, is get the policy right and figure out a way to make sure that at the local level you have what some people are calling validaters to give people some assurance that their community knows what it's

doing and their community is responding and can articulate that. >> does the c.d.c. have too much faith in local hospitals? >> well, i would say no but in some ways we were tested substantially but in some ways, the testing didn't go to all the different communities in the sense that there are only a handful of communities that really had to wrestle with this. but i'll tell you, i'm sure richard saw it in north carolina and pennsylvania, wow did the hospitals start drilling and practicing and really focusing because they figured if we're next, we have to be ready. so in that sense they're probably at a heightened state of alert and probably in a better preparedness posture than they were three or four months ago. >> which in large measure is the reason we did papa. and we thought we handled the communications problem when we designated who was in charge statutorily, it's the assistant secretary of emergency preparedness at h.h.s.

now, she -- that person has not been the point person of the ebola, so i think the administration has got to do after action review as to did they re-create the wheel or did they take the blueprint that was there? and i think on any given news cycle you saw a different person in the administration out as the spokesperson. that's not the way you get through a crisis like this. and in some cases two people said two different things. but concentrated in that, the assistant secretary of emergency preparedness are the responsibilities for the actual training that goes on continually at hospitals. and i think what we've got to do, we've got to look back and say what was the training we were taking them through? we know that c.d.c. had at least bad regs as it related to personal protective equipment and that was transitioned very quickly. but did we communicate to the states and to the hospitals here is the degree of training

we want you to go through, here's the threshold we want you to hit depending on the size of the hospital, the capabilities are going to be different. but we would have thought major hospitals across the board would have gotten to a level, and i think we did have a breakdown. >> and you wonder what would have happen fed mr. duncan had walked into a different hospital, you could have had one that was even worse prepared or you could have had one that was a lot better prepared. there were false alarm cases, it was not the first -- there were about a dozen cases that turned out not to be ebola but the hospital recognized the warning signs and got the person in isolation. i mean, what we sort of -- when they got on tv and said how we weren't expecting ebola, we all looked at each other and well, we were, that the c.d.c. had done a lot of drilling or had talked people through it. >> you might remember early in the days of the ebola outbreak, we actually had officials that

said on tv that it's not going to come here. i mean, we actually brought it here from a standpoint of the doctors that were inteched that we chose. but the officials said you don't have to worry, it's not going to come here. >> they said there's not going to be an outbreak here. >> an outbreak, threat to our health care infrastructure, we don't have to prepare. and i think once you had one case that all of a sudden showed up, you had a totally different tempo at every major medical facility in the country, as well as the public directions that were coming out of c.d.c. and h.h.s. >> the mistakes get amplified and people pay attention when things go wrong and when things go right, people don't pay as much -- it's human nature and we don't write about it as much, you don't legislate, that was good, let's move on. because sars could have been way worse than it was, the public health protections did kick in. there is always some luck,

things could be worse or better, things are beyond your control because it's a disease. but the sars epidemic was a test, an international test. it didn't get out of control. and then the flu in 2009, the luck there was it turned out to not be quite as -- >> virulent. >> it didn't kill as many people. but still they were able to mix up vaccinations or wasn't as fatal a disease or as potent as a virus but also did a lot of good public health to control it. so when you sort of make policy, can you say what are the lessons learned that worked that we need to go back to and are there steps congress needs to take to sort of say how do we do it right again? >> well, first thing i'd say is we've got to -- we don't have a lot of time for an after action report right now but i think we're going to need one going forward. short term, i'd say short term, long term, short term is let's

use a supplemental as a way to make greater investment. i think, for example, the preparedness, the hospital preparedness program, there's a gap of $128 million up to the authorized level. i think we at least ought to bring up the funding to the authorized level. >> that's something that can happen in the next week or two? >> no, that would be intermediate term. but short term, i think we should have a good debate about and then legislate or try to pass legislation as quickly as we can on the supplemental. but richard's point is well taken because we -- this isn't just going to be, well, we need more dollars here or there. we've got to take a step back and see what went right, what went wrong and then possibly do more legislating. but there may not be a lot of legislating that's necessary. it may be what richard pointed to which is to -- >> actually the blueprint.

the blueprint -- there was a tremendous amount of thought that went into it. and here we are, what, 12 years -- eight years since papa, we didn't have a vaccine or countermesh four ebola and we go through the litany of the 14 material threats that we have. and i think when we wrote the legislation, we envisioned that that would be just a constant focus of research and development. and, you know, this isn't a breakdown of any structural thing, it's really a breakdown of whether there was a will to stay focused on that or whether we got distracted by sars or whether we got distracted by h 1 n 1 or h 7 n 9 and the need for vaccines and we didn't leaf

rinl the tools you found in papa as successfully as we should have. >> bartha, let me explain in case people don't know, it was a government tool to propel development of vaccines and therapy. >> it was a public capital venture. it was there to be a financial partner to promising discoveries to get them through what i call the valley of death, the period where they needed external funding. so you would have basic research that went to a certain level at n.i.h. and when it got to the certain level, then it was the responsibility of barta to come in and say we think it shows promise and we're going to invest in it and get it through the goal line and at the end of the process the f.d.a. gets involved with its approval. we did not have an ebola vaccine or countermeasure that was to the point of a handoff to barda. a thing k h5n1 was

where it became a jurisdiction of n.i.h. instead of barda and keep that distinction today. but the truth is, for the current threat, bob is right, we have to stay folked how we get a vaccine or countermeasure because i don't think we will successfully be able to do this through a traditional burnout zone in africa. and it's absolutely crucial we learn from this, that we've got to stay on the research side because this could be something the year after and the private sector could never invest the amount of money it takes to bring something to market. we have to be a partner in it. and i ask tart out senator byrd what his initial reaction and looking at what was unfolding and he said communication. do you share that? that the first thing that went into your mind, senator casey? >> certainly one of them. i also thought that at that

time when we were hearing from hospitals where they didn't have the resources they need, the so-called p.p., the personal protective equipment, but there's no question, this is a communications challenge on a scale that you rarely encounter. now, part of that i think was because of when it happened. when the just posed what happened with ebola, with an election which was pretty heated and people are just reacting to everything, as well as some other -- frankly some governmental failures throughout the year, the website and concerns about the v.a. you go down the list of issues, and by the time people arrived at the point where in to august and september, and they hear about ebola and the media attention was i think unprecedented, that was all -- the predicate for that in some

ways is set by what had happened over the past year. frankly, you could go back further and say what happened over the last, you know, 25 or 30 years. there's been a government has taken some hits over the last generation, starting with watergate and moving forward. so to be able to say for any government, democrat or republican, to stand up and say we have this under control, don't worry, not that they said that but if that's where you start from, i think you're going to run into -- >> and anybody that's been -- i'm sure bob has gone through it. bash yeah mikulski and i have gone through many tabletop exercises where you're presented with either radioactive contamination or you're affected by one of the 4 natural or intentional infectious diseases, as soon as you lose the trust of the population, you're in a spiral. and i think we got to a point in ebola it was not a massive

spiral but we got to where we lost the trust and i think we'll have to go back and pinpoint exactly when that was and exactly what was said. but then it becomes a struggle. in this case, thank goodness we've been able to contain outbreak in the united states. >> and there could be another case that comes, but i think the public, we would hope, now knows it's not -- there were movies about it and -- >> you had no administration official out saying we're not going to have anymore. you actually have them out saying, you can expect that there will be some. that is a totally different point that they've now set for the american people. >> let me add something that goes back to an earlier question. i think if you look at the supplemental request, whether it's for a hospital program or whether it's for c.d.c. at large or n.i.h., there's a lot reflects posal that

ebola and lessons, an treatment center in every state if that's achievable with new funding. what richard talked about, trying to move this process forward so when barda is in the midst of trying to get a countermeasure to commercialization, that that is stimulated or kicked forward. so i think there's a list of things in the supplemental which indicates the administration learned a lot, they're trying to identify how they can do better. and i also think something that i wasn't as aware of without having seen it play out publicly was the interconnectedness or the relationship between c.d.c., state health departments, local public health infrastructures, i think a lot of that was tested. and i think just learning from that. i think a lot of americans were surprised to learn c.d.c. can't -- doesn't rule by edict and can't say hospitals you can do the following.

they can provide guidance and resources and provide obviously a lot of science but a lot of this gets down to what happens at the state level and the local level. and that's why i get back to this, you know, they have to be able to communicate very well even as we're trying to help washington communicate better. >> and you agree more money needs to go -- you have an authorization law that hasn't been appropriated, do you support the -- was it $120 million you wanted? is that something that there will be bipartisan -- >> i think there will be bipartisan support but if you look at the $6 million, $600 some billion to go to their global health initiative which is a buildout of public health in countries, i would suggest strongly and bob would agree with me, considered under the regular appropriations, that's a good thing. to stick it in an emergency appropriation has members of the house and senate going wait a minute, what else is in here. now there's a requirement for a level of specificity on what

they're asking for and how it's going to be used. that didn't exist. >> they didn't have to be that greedy. >> they should have defined "emergency" more narrowly? >> an emergency is something that actually has to be used now to end the threat. and you know, on the back side of it, $1.5 billion contingency fund. that's for what we guess wrong, when you all of a sudden needle this thing down, it's probably a 20% contingency fund. so these are things we'll be able to work out with the administration. they shouldn't have gone there, number one. and -- >> are you talking to them? >> i think we're in conversations and i think that this can be worked out, trying to sort through what should be in the regular appropriations versus an emergency bill is going to be crucial, more so on the house side than the senate side. let me go back. i think there are two things in addition to what bob said we learned, one is that we got a better diagnostic. the fact we're waiting 48 hours

to have a confirmation of whether somebody has ebola and we're testing it at one place and going to the c.d.c. and testing it again. this is ridiculous. the fact we're having to build labs in western africa and by canoe they're taking blood work upper river to get to a lab. technology is such that we can, f we want to, we can develop a -- test capabilities that can be done on site, i'm convinced of that. and if you look at the request for emergency money, we have $2 million for diagnostic. this is just crazy. and i think that's where we've got to leverage the private sector. then it gets back to what bob id about a hospital in every state that has the capabilities. what we did was we looked at the number of beds we had in the country, the number of beds was sufficient but when you apply what the capabilities are

to discard the waste, you find where we had 10 beds, we only had the capability to discard the waste of two patients. we've got to redesign this whole thing based upon what the treatment course is for these patients, which is not the number of beds, it's what we're able to handle physically. >> and we didn't know what that was like in a developed high-tech country, the personal gear and the treatment that had been done in very much rudimentary -- >> let's say we weren't creative enough in our thinking to say what would be encompassed if this happened? >> and as you mentioned, there are 14 other -- or 13 other identified, are those all diseases or that's including the nuclear and bioterror -- is that just smallpox and -- >> that's the whole basket. >> of intentional -- whether it's natural or -- >> man made or intentional. >> and ebola -- i don't want for minimize ebola, it's killing thousands and thousands

of people in africa but is not as contagious in a developed country as the public initially feared, and we treat it better when we have a handful of cases a modern u.s. hospital or spanish or german hospital. so in terms of how many people have died outside of africa, it was not the worst case scenario people feared? i'm not making light of it, i'm just saying it could have been way worse if -- >> it's the dumbest infectious disease in the basket because it's the most difficult to transmit. >> but there are some other ones out there that could have been way worse that are airborne or are airborne, it's not just table tv telling us it's going to be mutate and be something else tomorrow that is more communicable. how worried are you ebola was the best case scenario? we didn't have a good test and don't have a good treatment and don't have a vaccine. we don't have -- we didn't know how to treat it -- we didn't know how to take care of the waste.

do you wake up in the middle of the night very worried about the other 13? >> just as worried as i was the day after the anthrax attack when we started writing the legislation. we funded, i don't know how much, since then and i think at some point we have to go back and look to see what did it buy us? what level of protection did it get us? how many partnerships have we had with the private sector? how have we leveraged federal provide a solution to those threats. i don't think the solution will that be good. but it's important we realize at least the barda piece, we don't partner with somebody until it reaches the threshold of what we need. we don't -- we don't do a partnership just to have one. so when you look at infectious disease, right now what we'd like is a platform that we're le to handle more than one

strain of ebola versus a countermeasure that only handles one strain of ebola. and the question is, where is the level of research for that? and have we put enough time and effort into that? >> and of these 14 dangers that have been identified, were some of them back burnered and they said we're most worried about these three for whatever scientific or national security reasons, and we're not going to worry about six or seven of them? >> i'm not sure it's been that stark. fortunately. but look, when you look at where we are now after this , when you get to these other challenges, i think because of what happened, we're probably in some ways better prepared. we got a real scare and the system was shaken very badly, or i should say very substantially, so in terms of

if were cing, if faced with another challenge that was more -- that could be carried in an airborne sense and would be more contagious, absent this ebola chapter, we would have been in worse shape. in some ways being tested on ebola has prepared us to be ahead of the game in the others. the question is, though, will the response by the administration and by congress, or i should say the lessons learned solely be focused on what did we do wrong with ebola -- >> as opposed to what do we need to be agile? >> as opposed to have a broad-based response system. >> what about -- it's a question from twitter. were you part of -- i'm not sure if you were here yet for sars in washington. was there -- how much

conversation among lawmakers about lessons learned and the role of the federal government do you recall after sars? >> i can't remember what year it was or if you were in the senate. i think you were. >> i was there. >> or was it the flu? >> i don't remember many conversations that took place. there were some with the agency but i think it was -- >> because it went right. >> i think when you looked at it, everyone performed pretty well and there we were really lucky. >> and what about the other question we have from twitter is that one of the tools that we're spending a huge amount of money and and you're both talking about are vaccines and we have this whole movement in the country that people are. terrorized of the anti-vaccine movement. is that something you're seeing as an impediment to the flu which is something the population is to be vaccinated

for or these new diseases? >> i think science has debunked some of the concerns. there certainly is always going to be a population that doesn't want to be vaccinated and every vaccine is going to have unintended consequences based upon the genetic makeup of an individual. that's to be expected. i will say this as it relates to the early testing for an ebola vaccine, thus far, the testing couldn't be more positive. but we've got a lot of hurdles to overcome over the next several months to be to a point probably mid 2015 or maybe slightly sooner that you could mass produce and begin to inoculate. >> are you worried and how much on a policy level are lawmakers talking about we've had -- you have to save someone's life or attempt to save someone's life with whatever tool you have. so they've done blood

transfusions and used this drug or the zmap they only had a few doses of and there's another one the doctor in nebraska got, you know, and we don't have -- because it's been an emergency, let's throw something at them, see if we can save them, the science is very murky, we don't really know anything about which of these drugs may have worked or what happened. are there policy issues there that have to be thought through for making sure you have clean science when you also have -- >> we're probably the wrong people to ask but i can assure you those same questions have been asked of the individuals that will make that decision. >> the f.d.a.? >> if they thought it through and understand exactly what their policy is going to be, the statement that they're going to make, because every decision like that has been -- has a precedent with it. and understand why it's difficult for the united states is because every day in this country, somebody guys of cancer because -- somebody dies

of cancer because the f.d.a. has not approved an experimental treatment that they're denied that they might not have had a choice of anything else. they basically have a choice between nothing and nothing. a system that really puts a lot of stock and you have to get to this bar before we let you take the public and make them guiney pigs. a little different when it comes to an outbreak like this. and i don't know what the fresh hold is going to be, but i'm sure that our normal process will be cut short as long as the test results show something positive at the end. >> we've had this lack of public awareness of what was going on in africa. people didn't pay attention. then we had complete mania where the public perception and the cable coverage was way more scared than the actual risk in

the u.s., and now people have sort of moved on. -- how o you maintain do you get lawmakers to keep a sense of urgency when the public has moved on? because particularly when money not flowing freely in all directions on capitol hill? >> i leave that up to bob. >> no, it's very difficult. you know, washington is -- the issue of the moment on tuesday afternoon on a big vote and everyone was talking about one vote or one issue, by wednesday afternoon it seems like it was weeks ago instead of just 24 hours ago. that's a challenge just because of the culture of this town and the way things work. i do think the senate, like any institution, have folks that spend more time on particular issues so those folks, even when it's not the issue of the

day will continue to work on it. i'd also say that as much as there's -- and you raised a couple questions, to say what are you worried about, the next outbreak or the next challenge or do we know enough about countermeasures beyond what we learned with zmap or some other approaches? ? that the most damage often is done is washington. can a washington dysfunction create the measure of uncertainty which slows down research sometimes, which where opportunities are lost because we're not working the way we should? so the best thing we could do in some way is make sure we're working better together because that uncertainty, you talk to richard, i know has talked to folks for years about this, researchers need certainty,

institutions need certainty, you know things are bad when even the national institutes of health have a measure not just on certainty but had some damage inflicted by sequestering a few other problems. so our dysfunction is one thing where i'm certain that that uncertainty creates a terrible problem for addressing all these worries that you outline in a couple questions. >> we're going to turn to the audience, and before they get their questions organized, we have a mike for those of you who want to ask a question. and i'm going to ask -- there's somebody over here with a question. when you speak, please identify yourself. the magic wand of the moment. looking -- you all know intelligent classified stuff you know about that the rest of us don't know about that we should be worried about. >> he knows more. if you could just, you know, if

you could just create one policy to fix something without worrying about 60 votes or the sequester, what would each of you -- what is the one measure, if you had a legislative magic wand, what would you do? >> from the standpoint of any threat? >> of the 14 things you identified. or watching ebola and saying thank god it wasn't worse, we could learn some lessons and come out of this with knowledge, what would you like to see the senate do? >> i would make sure that our policies in this country were such that they encourage innovation because it is innovation that's going to help us to overcome those 14 threats, the next 14 that arise, it's innovation that's going to give the next rrorist or the next man made threat to us. we have to continue to be the

country that ino rates and innovation means one, you've t to make sure that the math works. two, you've got to make sure that intellectual property is protected. and three, you have to make sure there is a marketplace for them to sell to. >> senator casey? >> i agree with a lot of that. but i also would add -- i know we're only supposed to pick one, but a constant vigilance or focus on this question of preparation, and that means from what the world health organization and other international institutions are going to do in places far away like liberia or sierra leone as well as what happens to a county in pennsylvania. that whole section of communication. but this innovation will drive the breakthroughs that will give us the tools we need. >> a question over here? >> yes.

thank you, senators for coming today. what was the effect, if any -- fred griffey, i'm sorry to identify myself. what was the effect, if any, of d.o.d. and the c.d.c. having different quarantine policies? thank you again. >> i would just say that sort of tops my list on communication right there. >> not to mention new jersey, new york and connecticut, right? >> and the number of hours i spent on the phone with the administration trying to convince them that they had to fix this. and the lack of ability on their part to understand that there was a problem there. and i think anybody that had been through any type of tabletop demonstration on any threat and how the public responds would have seen that one as just probably the worst thing that could have happened. still our policy today. we're still taking the military that come out of region, have

no contact with patients, we're quarantining them for 21 days, anybody else doesn't get kurt warner teend, it continues to be a problem that's maybe not as high on the public's list of concerns that they have but is one of those things that breaks down the trust for people that we have a system that really understands and can apply ommon sense. >> this is a free shot and i'll take it. >> mike miller, i'm a health politician, do public affairs, communication, consulting. maybe you can clarify something because my undergo of the term "quarantine" is that somebody is in a medical isolation type of situation whereas what the hit is doing -- military is

doing is taking people out of west africa and putting them in spain or germany and limiting their movement or access but not actually in quarantine. >> more in isolation. >> again, your point maybe that that's the problem of communication because the c.d.c.'s policy on quarantine is really isn't applicable to what d.o.d. is doing to their limited movement, isolation, restricted whatever. so there really are two different policies for two different situations. >> nor is the nancy snyderman, i can go to the grocery store and do this as long as i feel ok. >> because she already made plans for her walk. >> hold that for an issue, right. >> this just gets back to the need for somebody in charge. and you know, i can't stress this point enough, and i think we all drilled it and drilled it in the administration and then all of a sudden it became the debate about a czar. well, this isn't about a czar. this was about somebody in charge p. this was about -- in

charge. this was about a person that made the pieces move and communicated what everything -- . at was going to happen and i can only tell that you the faces have changed that do the weekly brief. but the process of consultation on what they're going to do remains the same. and that's why you can have two policies that are so inconsistent on isolation and quarantine, one that the military adopts, one that the c.d.c. adopts. and i think if there's one person who is -- whose responsibility is to communicate and to administrate the whole organizational basket, you don't have those inconsistencies. >> does the person who is coordinating it within h.h.s. have to be the person who is the public spokesman?

i mean, we're all so used to tony fauchy of 30 years of having him explain things. >> we're used to tony fauchy and all of a sudden we had tom friedman and i love them to death, are they necessarily the ones you want out on tv? >> as richard said before, you do have a designated person, a assistant secretary for preparedness response. >> i can't name that person and i do this for a living. >> well -- >> no can the administration. >> she had a military background, too. and what fred and the doctor pointed out was part of communicating is not just having the right terminology that everyone agrees to in defining terms but another part of this is just standardizing how we approach these things. this can't be -- the 50 states

can't have 50 ebola responses or 50 epidemic -- >> sometimes the states themselves had -- >> there has to be some standardization. >> and how -- you talked about d.o.d. versus c.d.c. but also, i mean, the governors. and that wasn't purely -- it wasn't republicans or democrats, it was both. it was a cacophony of state policy. is that h.h.s.'s job to say sit down and don't do that, or you can't -- do they try ->> -- i think it was difficult when there was a vacuum people were filling it, it might have been right or wrong but they were filling it based upon folks -- ie local level saying think it was happening to governors and mayors or other municipal saying what is going i keep hearing different

thing from washington or the news is saying one thing and this person on television is saying the other -- >> this never happened until the trust began to break down. pointng was fine to let when the trust of the public toward the messenger or the message or both changed then governors said my public is outraged so i will have to take over and we will do this or that there if younot be had a consistent approach from the beginning. let me just say this, if you can have a consistent approach here and an approach in west africa based upon how the disease is there. you that the public reaction -- this history -- there are complex reasons for distrust of the va in people's

minds but the gap between what a large segment of the public thought versus the science that is not in dispute that you both understand, it was a very big gap -- how do you get over something like that when if there is something that is more contagious and more frightening -- maybe not more frightening because people were frightened that a biological threat with the inability to attempt down fears and not create chaos -- how do you as public officials look at that gap and worry about a bigger emergency? i did not articulate that very well. >> i know what you mean. member congress it is not simply about legislation you have to communicate. yet to communicate what you have worked on and what the facts are. i do think any administration

has to figure out away to constantly repeat what the science is telling us, not just in rebuttal and not just when people are doubting it has to be constant repetition of the science is telling us about the facts that say if you don't do that others will fill in the void with some science and other times stuff that doesn't make sense. heard a lot of it on tv. thank you to everyone who attended today. wasank you to cbs health partnered with that for the whole series. have a great day and we look forward to seeing you at the next political event which may be 2015. [applause]

>> on the next "washington

journal." congressman steve king talks about his plans to stop the president's executive order on immigration. then we hear from jim dermot automate this essence to fund the federal government. he can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. on november 20, president obama announced his immigration executive order, homeland security secretary jeh johnson testified tuesday on president obama actions on immigration policy and border security, live coverage of the security on 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span three. >> the c-span city to her takes

you on the road. this weekend we partnered with cable for a visit to waco, texas. >> as we began to receive the vinyl to be digitized and saved we began turning over the besides. des.-sio gospel music was not widely heard in this community but the flipside would be heard even less and what we discovered quickly was how many of the b-sdies songs were directly related to the civil rights movement. we didn't know that. we didn't know the sheer number of songs like there ain't no segregation and heaven. when producing one of the songs much the singing it was dangerous in the deep south

singing that song out loud was a risk. hall of fameranger was set up in 1976 for the 175th anniversary of the rangers and at this .30 rangers who made major contributions to the service or gave their lives under heroic circumstances. we painted portraits of all of those rangers and they would begin with stephen f austin. austan was very successful with his rangers who fought and not only managed to make the area reasonably safe for settlement but when the texas war for independence broke out the rangers played a major role in texas getting independence by staving off the mexican army long enough to allow colonists to build their own army. as a result texas became its own independent nation for 10 years. >> watch all of our events for

saturday. >> remarks by national intelligence council chair gregory. mondaye of the council about intelligence and national security issues. this is an hour. >> good evening everybody and welcome to the atlanta council and our online audience as well. you could joind us to look at an issue of critical importance that i think we are understanding that is world in an even

more compelling fashion than a couple years ago and that is how the intelligence community response to escalating and evolving threats. the relationship between intelligence and strategy is an area that the council has focused on with our sustained analysis of global trends in our strategic foresight initiative and matt burrows formally of the national intelligence council, appropriate for this evening. at the council we pride ourselves on building a network of experts dedicated to understanding what the future thinkand then to creatively about solutions and strategy about the future. then oftenasy work, argues that strategy during the

cold war was easy because you had containment of the soviet union and contain in -- containment of communism and the tactics were different. now he complains that we are all tactics and not enough strategy and he tells us it is a lot about informing what our strategy that to be. one of the best experts i talked to over the years on any number of issues -- as you know i am a recovering journalist for "the wall street journal." to the mosturn important people to import your own ideas and steel there's whenever you could i always enjoyed stealing his ideas from his various incarnations in europeent -- we met in even more often than the united states. events in the middle east and europe have radically changed the foreign policy conversation in washington and reinforced the importance of timely accurate and

appropriately disseminated intelligence analysis. the rolen it may seem of intelligence is different from the policy realm but as any strategist knows the strategy is only as good as the intelligence it is based on an looking from andcase of wmd's in iraq you can list a lot of positive cases. the next landmark double trends reports the forecast were living in the world of nonstate actors and revisionist powers and technological change we're all sing that accelerating raster and we thought it would in fact that is probably one of the most interesting findings is if they have underestimated anything it has been a case of change. with that as prelude we have a pleasure of welcoming the thought letter -- thought leader

tackling these issues the newly appointed chairman of the national intelligence council. he previously served as director of the iran center for global risk and security as well as the professor of the party rant graduate school. prior to joining rand he was vice-chairman where he oversaw the production of the governments from your assessment of international problems. 1996.3 to >> i may start their the director of national intelligence james klapper called you to do this job for your combination of world-class analytical skills and substantive expertise and passion for the intelligence profession and a deep understanding -- we will talk a little bit and i will and you a few initial questions and we will move on to q&a.

clearly he called you the right man at the right time. thank you for joining us. one last note we have a hashtag for this event, that is probably some thing new. we encourage you to tweet away #acdisrupt.shtag let's get started. one of the tart with your time when you were vice chair and you back intoow so coming the building and coming back in this capacity how is it different? in terms of how the place .perates and substantively

>> the biggest change coming back as you can see i am slow to rise and it took me 58 years to go from vice-chairman to chairman but it is great being back and interestingly enough i still have the same phone number that i had all those years ago the big change is the operating environment. before we basically only did strategic work, not just national intelligence but more strategic in terms of putting the pieces together and putting issues in context and taking a longer look at particular issues. of a role have much at all in current intelligence and that is a dramatic change. you can is responsible for doing the deputies committee, when did that begin to shift? >> it all began with klapper i think. i'm working out the arrangements

--ween the cia and the dni director of national intelligence. the cia still does most of the work on the president daily brief but the dni delivers it. in an inter-agency when an intelligence community wide view is wanted. that is the big change it on the good side it makes us relevant it means we are in the thick of things and it means critically we know what is going on which is always a great problem in intelligence knowing what policymakers have some idea what they want to accomplish over the next two years and often have no idea at all what they will do next tuesday.

last year we did like in the range of 15 national intelligence estimates and about 900 pieces of paper. more than half of those 900 were memos to susan rice or tony blanken abouttony particular issues. changedg that hasn't including my phone number is the people and still a terrific collection of national intelligence officers and their deputies. go everyke i get to day to a world-class

intellectual salad bar. substantiveu to the think youit where you want to adjust that eagle -- needle between real-time and long-term? number one on my agenda is where to calibrate that bond balance. it means finding ways to let people have time and energy to do longer or broader thinking i had a really good deputy national intelligence officer in russia who said i liked doing to do the strategy but unfortunately i we had six hours thoughts andeep six hours is probably not a great idea so finding ways to let that more strategic not always longer-term but putting

things in context is really the big challenge. happily not all the questions that come out of the d.c.'s are pretty straightforward -- but many of them are quite interesting we will get a what if -- >> d.c.'s for the uninitiated? >> deputy commissions. the practical matter it is d.c.'s that do most of the work. and he up decisions for the principle. they ask interesting questions just the sort that i would like to engage in policies. if we do this how will putin respond. it's also ideal at the first half and i to begin to develop a better count. all those memos are only information and only the dni's are more strategic. that is the first half.

>> before going present tense into the future on substance, since you've raised russia, let's go back a little bit to when you were there before. everyone argues, should we have known where things were going, could we have altered things, what is our role in the outcome we're experiencing today. with my knowledge, and your knowledge in these areas, what is your take on when you were last at the nic, in terms of how we were looking at that? one reason i'm asking this is this interesting mixture of long-term trends and short-term action. if you're trying to look at russia out ten, even five, certainly 20 years, it's hard. but five, ten years, you may make smarter decisions about today. so take us back a little bit right now, and then how do you play that out right now?

what sort of intellectual process did we go through then, and what sort of intellectual process ought we be going through right now? >> one thing that strikes me is this seems to me an interesting inflection point in global politics. maybe the third in the last generation or so. one was obviously the fall of the soviet union, and communism. the second was 9/11. and 9/11 was easier because it seemed to come with instructions attached. so here's what you do. you go after these bad people. so this feels to me a lot more like the fall of the soviet union, the end of communism, where one geopolitical framework for thinking about the world is gone, but it hasn't quite yet replaced with another. it seems to me the first time when the soviet union fell, we very quickly said, that's over. and while i think that as a policy person at the time, i thought that the expanding of nato and all those things was a good thing to do. but we probably were in

retrospect pretty dismissive. and part of putin's attitude plainly is, it feels like he and russia were dissed by the west for a couple decades. and that obviously does have some effect. it doesn't explain him. but i think it happened because we sort of quickly went to, well, now that's over. the cold war's over. and now russia's no longer a threat, no longer a major power, and we sort of jumped quickly to a different attitude toward russia that is in some sense part of the sweep of what we're confronting now. >> it's interesting to think about. >> sometimes we think that change takes a long time. if you look backward, the distance between the evil empire, and the fall of

the soviet union, which is slightly over a decade, so it does mean that things can go very quickly from time to time. >> my staff here, i'm so glad you raised the point of inflection point. we're kind of living by that argument right now at the atlantic council in a way, drawing it out of the global trends 2030 report, where the inflection points listed there were 1919, 1945, 1989. and the argument being that at these points in history, decisions of leaders had outsized importance, because you were at a plastic moment in history where things could be molded and shaped, et cetera. you used different inflection points here. and this gets to my point of how is your job different than it was then. how big is this inflection point? is it of this historical dimension, end of world war i, end of world war ii and the cold war?

>> i think obviously, i don't know whether it's as big as those other ones. it seems a very significant one in the sense that we are sort of scrambling around for a view, a lens with which to apprehend this world, to mix a metaphor, and that i think means a real challenge for intelligence, trying to help people build that lens, or that story. i've come to think that intelligence is about helping people create and adjust stories in their head, and we know when the story gets too firm, we call that mind-set and often results in what gets called in intelligence failure. but if there's not a story, then new information just kind of bounces around. it's a factoid. it's hard in policy to have a conversation. so one of the true churchill lines he was supposed to have

said after a particularly undistinguished meal, asked what he thought of it, he said the pudding, that's dessert for the english, lacked a theme. well, i think our world lacks a theme. so trying to provide a story or a lens, that seems to be a job -- a formidable job for us to do working with policy people. as i said, whether this ranks with 1989 or 1992 in importance, don't know. but it does seem like we're again in a pretty shapeless world, where it's easy to get dominated by tactics. >> how about regionally, as you're coming in, and how the world is different than it was then. what were your regional priorities -- you know, in this world of challenges, the middle east, ukraine, you know, the far east, south china sea, ebola, global financial stability, what are your -- how do you set your priorities in the job you're doing right now? and where would you set them both in regional sense and in a subject sense?

>> we set our priorities by what's in front of us. the big crises that are going on that need to be handled, the challenge with those is trying to help people step a little bit up and say, here are the tactics, what are we trying to get out of this? what's a realistic end game, offer at least end point to this particular set of crises? not very easy. hard to do. so those we'll define. i think for the remainder of the administration, of course, the middle east and russia are going to be dominant themes. i think we need to keep trying to raise people's sights a little bit to beyond the immediate tactical to, what are we trying to do here, what's our ultimate point here given realistic possibilities. i don't get to have too many priorities in my current job, though as i said, somebody the other day, i spent my whole career avoiding the middle east. that's over. as the kids would say, that's so

over. right? so i've learned a lot. >> #acdisrupt. >> otherwise, on my personal list, i think china and east asia has to be at the top of the list of so much going on there, so much chance of multiple issues at play, connecting in ways, people making miscalculations. we know there are going to be bumps ahead in the road for china. we don't know how bad they're going to be, but there are going to be some bumps. and there may be good ones as well. i think that whole combination of issues there, in a region that doesn't have strong security agreements, mostly bilateral with us and allies, so that's going to be at the top of my list. my own personal list is certainly cyber. from where i sit, we still haven't calibrated the threat. it's very hard to calibrate the threat. it's very dynamic.

we're divided in ways that make it hard to have a complete view. we have, you know, the military part of the government, the private sector that has all the infrastructure and does all the stuff. we have the government. and we have offense and defense. and working across all those divides, i think it's no surprise that we haven't really calibrated the threat. so that's high on my list. and then -- >> and globally offense is stronger than defense at the moment. >> i think we don't know. it's part of calibrating the threat. and then i -- as you said earlier, fred, i was really happy when the cold war ended, because it had become boring. it had become a sort of a managerial problem. and we knew that if we kept our alliance together and kept ourselves strong, we would win in the end. we didn't expect to win in 1992, or in our lifetimes, but we did end. so in that sense it was kind of

boring, because it meant all these great ideas, you had to sort of swat down because they were bad for the alliance. it was really kind of a management problem. i wasn't really interested in europe for a long time, but now i am. europe two seems to be going through a difficult set of passages. it's on my list as well. >> in what sense? europe unfinished experiment? europe as an -- >> europe was -- first, europe was a partner. we know for all the countries around, europe was still our main partner. but its capacity is diminishing, particularly in the military sphere. then there's europe as an ongoing venture. in the short run, there's the euro crisis, which is not over, by all means. and then there's the longer term question that seems to be about the european construction. in a funny way, europe has succeeded well enough so that cat loan yeah and scotland don't need countries, they can just have europe.

then there's the looming question of europe's neighborhood, both northern, of which we're very aware now, but slow to come to grips with i think in europe, and also its southern border as well. again, i put it on the list. because so much is in motion there, in flux, both inside europe and with respect to it and its neighbors. >> let me stay there for one question, given we're the atlantic council and we talk a lot about this here. clear to us the role of the transatlantic relationship during the cold wear and centrality. how do you apply it to today's world and uncertain world that we're facing in terms of importance, neutrality, relevance? >> i think it's changed. we always used to say in the

cold war, if we don't hang together, we'll hang separately, that wasn't quite right, but it was evocative. but we did manage, i think an impressive degree of both continuity toward the alliance over a lot of different administrations and of unity inside the alliance. that's changed significantly it seems to me with the end of the cold war. but as i said earlier, europe is still our main set of partners, our main set of companies in the world. so we continue to have a stake in them. i just made my first trip as chairman a couple weeks ago, i was in europe for a week, and i kept bumping into people saying, raising questions about values. do we really have the same set of shared values across the atlantic that we used to. and there are also divisions on both sides, so the europeans will talk a lot about the -- you know, the disconnect between their peoples and their governing arrangements, just as seems to be the case in this

country. there are a lot of similarities. but that really part of stickum of values, and many people thought the cold war, grew up assuming we would be allies. and folks, you know, have come of age since the early 1990s, just don't have that same experience. so there are interesting, i think -- i found on this trip for the first time echoes of -- i'll see what you think, fred -- i was used to anti-americanism on the right in britain. this is the first time i'd seen it on the right in germany. and it was the same -- of the same ilk. cultural. these people are crass, kind of bumbling. and by the way, they're trying to sell us a form of capitalism that is inferior to the one we have. that was new to me. >> curious romance with putin.

>> all the sea change in germany. >> let me suggest a theme to your pudding and then move on to another thing. could the theme be sustaining, defending the liberal international world order? is that at question right now if that's going to happen in the coming generation? and then a new task for the transatlantic community? >> yeah, i think -- again, all those words are so loaded, that i'm not sure i'd subscribe to them immediately. but building -- maybe it's building rather than sustaining, an order that is both tolerably acceptable to us and the chinese, for example, that is a formidable task. that's what the future order's got to look like. we've seen movement on china's part in the right direction, but a long way to go, but i think

that is the task before us. and with respect to that, the europeans are important. if i think about the future of governance arrangements for the global web, it seems to me there's sort of a big apartheid contingent going on. we say like we say, let it rip. we're not quite sure if we can and how to do it. the chinese attitude is, of course, this is just like any other, and we're going to control it. we were doing work before i left rand on internet and web futures, and what struck us is while the technology is, you know, moving fast, it's sort of predictable. it was harder to predict were the governing regimes around the mobile web in particular. >> i think you're underscoring the word building makes sense. kissinger's new book on world

order said hasn't existed, because there was a liberal order that was imposed, but not one that's been embraced totally. the president has said that ic developed -- failed to detect the speed with which isis would sweep across iraq. what were the reasons for the ic understanding of the isis threat? and are there any changes under way that could improve that sort of performance? >> i think as i look back, this was before my time, so i take no credit or no blame for this -- >> that's why i -- >> right, right. as i read back, they did a good job of understanding isil, isis, whatever we call it. we knew about it. it was there. what was surprising, as jim clapper said, is how -- not so much how good it was, but how quickly the iraqi forces melted at the first sign of trouble. and as jim clapper put it, he said, the hardest thing to get right is people's will to fight. because you can see their

weapons, but you can't see the quality of their souls. and so in that sense -- and he talked about the litany of how we got it wrong in vietnam and in iraq the first time around, and about our allies again this time. i suppose what was more of a surprise is how quickly the iraqi security forces melted away. i guess i was surprised myself, as an outsider, by the successful brutality of isil or isis. and as i think forward, the question for me is, at what point does that become more of a liability than it seems so far. to be fair, they're careful about it. so even in these latest

beheading videos, they don't show the grisly stuff. they understood that's bad. but still, it's a question for me whether the liability is there generating as they move so quickly, will catch up with them over what time period. >> one can only hope. >> yeah. >> the hybrid warfare of russia, to what extent was that something we saw coming and to what extent are we learning on that one? >> i think we're plernglearning as we go. most of what russia did is pretty -- on the warfare front, it's special units and things they can disavow. that we knew about. we hadn't seen it as much in place, being used as we have since. on the propaganda, or information front, most of what they've done is pretty straightforward, control of papers, and typical, you know, autocratic stuff. though they have done some social media. what's interesting about social media is it sort of plays on both sides. who gets the net advantage on it. we use it a lot in intelligence. and it's valuable there.

it's also valuable for the practitioners like putin and his colleagues. there i'm not quite sure i've netted out the balance of who gains more from that increasing ubiquity of social media. >> let me ask one last question on that and then i'll go to the audience. you completed a book recently, which i think is just coming out now? >> i just got the first copies over the weekend. >> title? >> bridging the divide, way too complicated. i didn't ever want my titles to have colons in them, but this one i didn't succeed. it's looking at science and intelligence side by side, as both have become more important in major public policy decisions, and as both operating in circumstances that are more transparent with more possible stakeholders. >> fascinating.

so why don't you give us a couple of main things of the book before we go to the audience. but one of the things is this slowness with which intelligence is coming to grips with what you were just talking about, explosion of open source information. in what ways do you think ic needs to be open to the growth of information? >> naes a good question. there's still a powerful current in the intelligence that says, you know, the thing we had was

secrets. that's what we distinctly bring to the table. that's never been my view. i always thought secrets were part of it, but also information and analysis, and that means that in a world in which information is increasingly ubiquitous, we still have a process from my perspective is pretty linear, starts with the requirements, what would we like to know about, then we collect the requirements, then we analyze what we've collected. but it's very linear. in the world in front of us, the information is just there. and by definition, you're only going to collect a teeny fraction of it no matter what you do. >> right. >> and therefore, having the process be driven by collection, every time we do a piece, we'll talk about collection. i think we need to move away from that as one of my predecessors, john gannon, said, open source is not a hint, it's the air we breathe. it's just out there. and so trying to find ways to take advantage of it. i would put, if i'm looking at the major challenges, facing all of intelligence, i'd identify two paramount. one is operating in a world that is much more transparent. and getting more so all the time. one of my colleagues reminds me, my car has 12 different unique omiters, telling people information about me and where i

am and where i'm going. so it is a much more transparent world. and the other that opposes that on intelligence, the task of dealing with big data. traditionally intelligence has prized its exquisite data, particular sources, and those can still be important. but increasingly there's just so much data out there, finding ways to exploit it. social media is a perfect example where you've got huge amounts of stuff. very unreliable, very hard to validate, hard to use. but we're getting better at it, i think. but it is a big task. it also kind of runs against the grain that says, you know, we're in the business of applying exquisite information to hard problems. >> and are you going to introduce new efforts at the nic in terms of that sort of open source inclusion? and if so, what would be most valuable? >> we have an internal market

already. it's been interesting. so that's a -- this is not huge data, but it's aggregating in interesting ways, views of people on particular problems. there the good news is, it turns out they're super predictors. some people are just better at this than others. that's probably no surprise. even better news is a little training helps. several hours of training actually makes people quite a lot better. it helps them basically avoid coming quickly to a conclusion. that's the key. keeping an open mind for a little longer. it turns out to be a real key to doing well there. that's an example, the kind of thing i'd like us to do.

i was active before i came to this job, looking at activity based intelligence so-called. it was successful in identifying bad guys in iraq and afghanistan. and it did so by taking data from different sources and laying it together to develop what they called a pattern of life that would distinguish with the insurgent from an ordinary pius muslim going about his or her day. and it's about -- i like it, because it ditz rupts this linear cycle in linear ways. cycle ints this linear linear ways. it says, we may find the answer before we know the question, or the piece of something that we've collected today may be irrelevant today, but tomorrow we'll find a question that makes it very important. we'll get interested in the particular would-be insurgent, for example. and it also tends to be data neutral. data is data. if it's useful, it is, if it's not, it's not. it basically says let's aggregate this data for current purposes around locations. make it discoverable, make it searchable, and people can get in the data and see if there's anything of interest about a particular location. >> interesting.

please identify yourself and ask your question. please wait for the microphone. >> my name is belinda. and you were talking about social media. obviously it's my generation with social media. everybody is on it, twitter, instagram, facebook, you name it. now, over the years collecting and going through like data points, intelligence, is social media making it easier or harder for the intelligence community to keep up with the different facets facets? and also, with social media, everyone prides themselves it's freedom of speech and this is what i believe, this is what i think. how do you counteract those individuals who are on the extreme side, who are recruiting here in the united states, and throughout the international community, to come and join

their ideology and join their fight for extremism? how do you counteract that? >> those are great questions. i think on balance, i mean, it's a huge amount of information. so, therefore, it's a difficult challenge. but i think on balance, social media does offer lots of advantages for intelligence. i did, when i was still at the rand corporation, i was looking at the various agencies, how they were exploiting media like facebook and twitter. i found a lot more than i expected. it was very interesting. interesting experiments going on. the challenge there is dealing with huge volumes and unreliability. to validate, you know, the open source center does a really good job of trying to validate particular tweeters by how many times they get retweeted, by their track record. all still pretty labor intensive. trying to make it less so is the

challenge. i would like social media to be more useful, not in warning, but in sort of tipping. here's a place where analysts might look, or a correlation they might look at that they haven't before. i'm hopeful on that score. what to do about the bad guys using it, you know, they're sometimes -- actions get taken. interestingly, isil is not -- they don't have chat rooms with passwords. they do it all quite openly, right? as far as one can tell, relatively successfully. that's hard to do much about. what you have to do then is do better yourself at counternarrative, getting a narrative out there. and i think we're getting better at it, but that's not just -- that's not a primary role for intelligence, but it's a role for policy, and ngos and citizens as well.

to counter those particular narratives that are dangerous. >> please? >> thanks. my name is andre. i'm a russian reporter here in washington, d.c. i have a couple of questions. and thank you to the atlantic council for this fascinating meeting. i have a couple of questions one on nuclear, and one on russia. we've noticed that when government spokesmen talk about events, very rarely cite american government sources. they mostly say, we know this from nato, or we know it from some other sources. rarely reference their own intelligence. let's take, for example, the case of the -- just throw it, my question obviously is -- and that obviously creates an impression that they are not straight with the public. my question is about your response to that, whether you are fully sure that you know

what happened with that plane, and whether we have any chance of ever finding out with the public? >> the malaysian plane. and the russian part, i mean, one final observation that i have is, as someone who -- because of my job, i read all the major texts from your president and from my president. and i often see president putin directly describing his motives, his actions in his lengthy speeches. and then i find out that nobody reads them here. that's like your all the mat -- ultimate source. how do you deal with that?

he gives you the answers, but you won't take them. thank you. >> in retrospect, we should have all read the 2007 speech more closely. >> i couldn't agree more. i've long sung a song, you might actually listen to what people say. we did that -- we made that mistake before the indian nuclear test, right? the indian leaders were clear about what they were going to do, and we didn't believe them. we thought this was domestic consumption or something else. i'm very much with you. i think as a good starting point is to listen to what people say, because they may actually think what they say, right? i couldn't agree with you more on that score. on the malaysian plane, i'm confident -- i'm confident we do know, and i think we've laid out that case pretty clearly in public, not on intelligence, but our policy colleagues. so i find that pretty compelling. >> [ inaudible ]. >> as far as i can tell, yeah. >> please, yes? >> thank you. my name is steve hersh. i'm a journalist.

it's been a while. my question is, with the emergence of -- i'm trying not to use nonstate actors, but i'm having trouble finding the words -- the nonstate actors, entities that are not governments, i'm wondering if there is emerging need and if it's being met in american intelligence to work with nonintelligence sorts of organizations, by which i mean law enforcement in that context, sort of broader -- maybe a broader description of intelligence than we used to have before because we're now dealing with entities that are not traditional adversaries. thanks. >> you're exactly right. it's a big challenge. i think we're doing better. there are lots of difficulties, mostly self-em posed, for imposed, for

intelligence to do that kind of thing. but i think it's gotten better since i've been here before. we're going to do what i hope to be on the humanitarian emergencies around the world, and we basically went to all the humanitarian ngos and said would you come to a conference in washington and maybe bring a two-page paper with you. they didn't much like the idea of dealing with government and intelligence. but they were -- that was sort factutweighed by the that we cared. we cared about their issue. so they all came. and effectively wrote the first draft of this paper. this is now nearly 20 years ago. so it opened me then to the possibilities of intelligence reaching out. as you say, with lots of nonstate actors, or if you're looking at places like -- i did rand work on sudan. you know, sudan is just crawling with ngos. and they've got a lot more understanding of what's going on in sudan than the u.s. intelligence is ever going to have, i would expect. so to tap that in ways that is acceptable to them, i think

that's a very much doable challenge. a lot of the troubles we cause to ourselves, for understandable reasons, but it does -- one of the things i want the nic to be is the piece of intelligence that's the most out there, that's the most engaged, that reaches out to experts the most. because the more we look into the future, the less those secrets help. and the more talking to experts outside the government, as well as inside, is necessary. >> please? >> mike masenek. good to see you again. how much does the kind of analysis you do rely on history? we know that frequently, particularly among journalists and politicians, there are bad historical analogies made. there was this recent biography

of stalin. he said there is a pattern going back to the czars through stalin of the russians being a distinctive society, feeling aggrieved by their treatment by the west, and one of their responses was to lash out and go conquer somebody. maybe other people have different views of that. but how does the role of history and historians play into developing judgments about how other countries and governments are going to do things? >> great question. i think probably too little is the easy answer. we certainly try and be historically aware when we do things, but you know, the historical memories of most americans don't go back very far. they think the world was created a couple days ago, right? and so it is a challenge. all the pieces i like, i see

once in a while are done by the cia and others, is they'll take an issue and look at how it's played out in other cases, in other similar cases through -- but mostly recent history. you know, probably not going back very far. i find that very useful, too. but we don't do enough of that. but then try to get a longer historical sweep, i think that is a real challenge. take the middle east now, it's easy not to go much further back than, yeah, maliki was a really bad guy, and there are sunnis and shias. well, that's a start. but there's also a lot of history behind that, that is relevant as well. isil/isis didn't come out of nowhere, and it didn't just come out of those two things. i think the more we can do better history, the better. but as you can imagine, it's a little bit swimming against the tide. >> let me ask one question about one of your most important products.

every year the director of national intelligence briefs the congress on annual threat assessment. and then it produces a forum. what i've been told by people who have watched the history of this assessment is that it keeps getting longer and longer. and i don't know that's because they want to make sure that they haven't missed the threat that actually happened. if you're looking at threats, in this world of threats, one, two, three, the ones that concern you the most, what are they, and how do you prioritize more in this assessment? >> it's a good question. it's an interesting hybrid exercise. there's a classified version that goes to the committees, and the unclassified version of it that gets some attention. it's hard in an unclassified version to be as clear about priorities as you would like, even if you had them yourself. because the more you give priority to something, you're not giving priority to something else. and that has all sorts of

consequences inside, not just the government, but the society. so i gave you my personal list of the top of my threat list. but it's bound to reflect, obviously, the things that we're currently preoccupied with. those would be at the top of the list. and i think they deserve it, because they're something we're having to >> at the top. >> the gentleman here with the glasses and then i will go to the back. how do you factor into your judgments the distresses from

demographic oldies and climate volatility. it in my bookut as well they factor in all the time and it is often said that demographics is destiny and the more you look out, more important becomes. i hope we do a good job and we certainly try hard. we have a strategic futures group and they have a lot of work on the application of climate change. also good work on demographics and their governments interesting selves around the government, i see some representatives here who are doing thinking about state --tability and youth bulges there is a lot of good work in the challenges always -- it is easy to say about a particular

state, the state is vulnerable but policy people understandably wonder when is something going to happen? what is the trigger? and that is very hard, who would've thought that a salesman in tunisia would have had the kind of effect that it had. athink we do a good job understanding the basic dynamics. and when those dynamics will produce thing change or events, that is a real challenge. >> roger cliff of the atlantic council. i just wanted to actually leverage off of that last point. in your earlier talk about using much more open source, there's lots of academics and people in think tanks who are looking at

the same issues you are. what's the comparative advantage of looking at the intelligence community when it comes to doing this kind of analysis? >> by this kind, you mean thinking about the future? >> yeah, thinking about the future. obviously, when it comes to, you know, tell me what frequencies the, you know, that unit is operating on, the intelligence community is going to have an advantage there. but looking at broader global trends and how they're going to affect events that affect in the near or far future, what's the comparative advantage of the intelligence community in that sort of analysis. >> i hope it's bringing together the best minds out there and trying to synthesizing adding nuggets where we have them from unusual sources it certainly comes back to what point a particular piece of relevance is. the reason for doing that in my perspective was kind of a foundational one.

we can sort of set the terms of the discussion. have a common vocabulary for working on a particular problem. that seems to be the more important function of what two particular pieces can do. that seems to me the particular concentration on that piece that the frame and language would be useful to policies of that particular issue. >> i have two questions. first one, can you please expand on how you say? let's say the performance of the intelligence community on the prognosis of happening in the ukraine?

second one, you were saying about not being dominated by tactics. what i see is more of a campaign style. so how do you translate the message to the white house. you're doing really good on that. thank you. >> one of the good things about this for me, it's really very intense.