something like it has to. otherwise the next election will be what every election has been. frivolous. >> i want to get a question. with didn't introduce you at the beginning. she has the campaign to fix the debt. we will be hearing from maya. you mentioned that debate in iowa. they would reject a 10-1 deal. the have some advice for the regarding candidate?

>> i think it will rest with the press. democrats are at least as good as republicans on skating on this. forecasting the moment this would get ugly is now. 2014. looks different in the next 10-15 years. if you win, you will cement a budget in 2017. over 90% without taking changes in mandatory programs. how do you fund all the things you want to find? keep our nation strong. fund it at a fair level. both infrastructure and education.

the press says, you can't do it. we're talking if this person becomes president in 2017. cap got -- they have got to have a budget. both parties whoever wins are saying, we have midterms. we don't want something controversial. those of us over 60 50. we don't have to be told. we know how important it is. we vote accordingly. we will respond to fear mongering. we will be forging in the alley

for food. we are insufficiently peach got a to do the right -- insufficiently patriotic to do the right thing. i don't think democrats are less capable of dodging the press. i emphasize this will be a critical time. it could get ugly. you don't want the american people surprised. they were able to dodge it through the presidential campaign. >> how was it you are able to get a bipartisan commission as diverse? was it difficult? >> we had people who voted. the commission was created by the president.

i asked if you would be willing to cochair with me. the staff was hired by both of us. it made it a lot easier to get an agreement. start off with no party involvement. they suggested to come out with an interim report. it would be difficult to get a consensus. identify the problem. we did. there was some pretty significant changes. it is so true. i could imagine a debate. what do do about social security? hell no. i won't go. i will not go.

i talked about the greatest generation. give me a standing ovation. i hope that doesn't happen. the american people will get shocked when they find out what has to occur. it was unsustainable. >> the interim report was the factual background. the charts. here is where we are. here is the rate of spending. that wasn't really controversial. what was controversial is where do we go from here? there were 32 members of the commission. we agreed on recommendations. we go for five people to go along. nobody else.

it is hard to get people to focus on what we are to do about this. >> they do focus on it. given this set of circumstances, the recession had a negative impact on 401(k)s. i dish no income beyond social security. -- additional income beyond social security. both parties acknowledge that. you get something comparable. we have to fix something. we do it separately. they will a sickly demagogue it -- basically demagogue it. >> we get targeted. fearmonger.

bad things will happen. sometimes we forget good things would happen. could you address that? what would be the benefit? >> i feel like i should be quoting immanuel kant. [laughter] i do think it would be easy to face either primaries. put together a proposal to grow the economy. increase retirement security. what jack said is true. the republicans allowed a list of things they say their base won't allow. figure out a way to stimulate

the economy. increase security. >> i know. >> before you go, could i ask a question? >> sure. do you think there will be more bipartisanship in the next congress? will it get worse? >> i haven't the foggiest idea. i didn't know it would rain today. [laughter] i don't know. hope springs eternal. i hope there is more. it is the only way. take the health care debate. health care is controversial and personal.

it is easy to say bill hogan wants to get rid of your medicare and demagogue the issue. on a subject like this, it has to begin with both together. it is impossible. hope they will do it. best regards. merry christmas. happy new year. you are great. [laughter] >> thank you both. both. >> two questions. how do you present this? other than the sky is falling? should the country get stronger? or weaker? it is getting weaker. the debt is weakness.

having to spend more dollars in the future of servicing the debt is nothing. you get nothing from that. that is weakness. what is making the country stronger is investing in those things that lead to growth. what are those things? research. infrastructure. education. that is what leads to growth. are we going to do more? or are we going to get weaker? that is the way to present it. on politics, whether there is hope, there was in the paper on how there's no overlap in the two political parties anymore. there used to be.

the most liberal republican is more conservative than the most conservative democrat both the house and the senate. that is what the analysis shows. that is a difficult situation. the polarization. the republican party has been pulled to the right and the democrat party's been pulled to the left. why is that? the reason is politicians want to get reelected for elected. the way to get elected is to listen carefully to the constituents. those likely to vote in primary. tell them what they want to hear.

nothing unusual about that. the customer are the activists. they show up at town hall meetings. they show up to meetings. they vote in elections. that is the base. that is what politicians are hearing. is there an alternative voice? where is the rest? where are the voices of people who say we should have a future? i think that is the big question. we need a bunch of spirited people who want to get something going. >> maya, thank you for being patient and waiting.

we wanted to get as much time as we could. what do you think? [laughter] >> ok. first, read the report. for c-span viewers -- it was something that changed my life. i read it at the time i was starting to wake up to the budget deficit and didn't know if it was that big of a problem. it caused me to change my career. the more you realize this is a serious and profound problem. i remember those charts. they were excellent. it is hard to go through the basic data and not come away

realizing we have a problem. what i think is stunning is 20 years later we still have the exact same problems except with the demographic nature of them. read the report. read the report. real work has been done. the last thing to read is a congressional budget report. the layout the trajectory is unsustainable. no question. the deficit has come down so much. all the focus is on the short term improvement. that has been the result of not smart policies focusing on cap's. what hasn't improved is the fact that our debt levels are twice the historical average.

this is twice as we were when went through the crisis. it is projected to go up starting again in an unsustainable way forever. the situation is bleak. political situation is bleak. look at what we have done. that only do put in place a comprehensive plan, but make it worse. we snuck in as much as $30 billion. we're talking about extending the expired tax breaks. 42 billion dollars. we have been laying on more

debt. barely any notice of it. i remain discouraged. these issues are tough. if people talk honestly, you need courage. leadership. bipartisanship. do this together. i don't think we are going to see real efforts. if we are not going to fix the debt, could we not make it worse? a real commitment to not adding more. i think this is what we have been talking around. the next president is going to have to make this their issue. the national campaign -- focus on the agenda. tackle fiscal issues responsibly.

i couldn't agree more. that means the media not letting up. focus on the issue. acknowledge the problem. put out a plan. only works if everyone agrees. if you have one politician that lays out and runs up against someone who says we will grow our way out, it is tempting to believe that easy storyline. only people who educate the country. educate them media. ask our candidates a deeper discussion. real choices will have to be made. one of the most important things people do is the budget. i think it is important we prepare. offer a budget that achieves real improvements.

i wish you talking about how to balance the budget. i feel that is out of reach. one thing -- we shouldn't let our debt grow faster than our economy. it is impossible to be thriving if your debt is growing faster. or interest payments. ask with upside is. cbo has run calculations and models. it is a comprehensive debt deal in place, that is one of the surest cases to growth. that is how you would grow the economy. all of that is incredibly important. it doesn't work if keep by --

borrowing. -- it does require borrowing. the drumbeat has kept up. a presidential campaign were people demand answers. >> we've all go to bill and an audience. so much has been said. nothing has happened. i think things did happen. think we did put into place a balanced budget that was successful. the difficulty is we did a lot of things that didn't help the long-term. we have restricted growth exactly in the areas that is important for our country. investment in health care.

education. transportation. those of the areas we really have control of spending. but we have it done is the last time we did other mental capturing form was before this report. 1986. we haven't focused on reform. it should happen in the next congress. i'm pessimistic. one other point i would like to make is something also happened. what happened was the debt to gdp which was about 35-36 percent is not close to well

above 70%. the big issue is that back in 1994, the amount of investment from foreign investors was close to about 30%. 65% of our debt is not owned by americans, but people overseas. many have heard this before. a treaty with taiwan we would have to go to war with china protect taiwan. it is an overstatement. makes the point that we don't have the same degree of sovereign tea. it is risking the future of this. -- country. there have been things that have been accomplished. other things happen on health

care. the per capita is coming down. the capita those 85 and up will be expensive and coming. i think we have huge challenges. i want to focus on the need to focus on positive aspects of deficit reduction. positive aspect. i don't think we could grow ourselves out of this. tax ourselves out of this. what worries me more than anything a report came out yesterday. when this report was put together, the favorability

rating on the congress was something like 70%. 70%. the favorable reading of congress is below 20%. >> that is what you get for all that pandering to the public. [laughter] >> if that is true, then it adds to the dilemma of if they can do anything. they are going to be accused of not knowing what they were doing to begin with. it is going to be extremely difficult, but it does not mean we can run away from this challenge. i think it requires presidential leadership as much as it requires congressional leadership.

that presidential leadership is why i think the focus here has been to make sure that, if we go into the next election, that we put usher on the candidates that are going to be the next president of the united states. >> is it possible to get one of the slides up? like, the second one. next one. the next slide. yeah, that one. one of the interesting things when we were putting this together is that, if you look at -- what this is showing is a comparison of two 40-year projections. the darker line, the black line is the original kerrey-danforth projection from 1994 looking over the next 40 years. after 2035 is basically what they were doing. the red line is the cbo alternative baseline which looked at 40 years from today. they are almost identical.

which, to me, says a couple of things. it raises an interesting question. for one thing, it reaffirms the idea that nothing has been done or nothing substantial has been done. but the original forty-year projection turned out not to be as bad as projected. in other words, what this says to me is that, like a lot of things in the federal budget, the problem has been pushed out. it has been kicked down the road through incremental things. some of it good luck. some of it as a result of legislation. but those incremental steps have not changed the curve. they have not solved the problem.

they have pushed it off. it is in a large way emblematic of what is going on with federal budget right now. you look at the next session. and what they are going to have to deal with. a lot of the things they have just pushed off. sustainable growth rates, medicare. debt limits. they have not funded the full budget for the year. the highway trust fund. there are a number of things that have been fixed, patched, or a couple years at a time. when you look at the big picture, that is what is happening in the big picture. so one could say, all right, maybe we can keep doing this, pushing things off. i think all of us have alluded to why this is different. i want to see if i can summarize. the demographics are on a.

at 1994, you had a favorable demographic scenario in the short term. the baby boomers were in peak earning years. and it was a much smaller elderly population. now the boomers are pushing 70. a lot of them are collecting social security or medicare already. that has a couple of act. it has a big effect on the federal budget. it makes medicare much more expensive. it is a matter of a lot more beneficiaries, which means the programs on autopilot are going to be more expensive. that is beginning to happen now. it is becoming a demonstrable impact on the budget now.

secondly, it has an economic effect. as the boomers leave the workforce, it is going to be more difficult for those that remain in the workforce to produce goods and services to keep the economy growing and keep retired boomers with what we expect with our entitlements. the workers of tomorrow will have to be much more productive given that demographic. and yet, we are investing less in the federal budget in the future of the economy, which is supposed to be producing these goods and services. we looked at some of those trends in federal investment spending. kerrey and danforth word that want about it. national savings, kerrey and danforth warned about that, it has gotten worse since then. a lot of forces coming together. bill mentioned the debt. debt is twice as i now as the percentage of the economy as it was in 1900 or.

social security had many years of surplus ahead of it in 1994. senator danforth, one of the most accurate projections in this report was the social security would begin running a cash deficit in 2012 according to the kerrey-danforth report. it actually happened in 2010. that was pretty close. so some of the things that have allowed us to postpone crisis over the last 20 years cannot be counted on again. maia mentioned interest on the debt. as a point, interest rates are going to go back up. the interest rate on the 10 year treasury is not going to stay at 2% forever. it will probably go back up. at some point, we would hope it would go back out, because that would be the sign of a recovering economy. but because we have taken on

more debt, that is going to put pressure on the budget by increased interest payments. one of the charts in here shows that interest payments from the debt goes from 200 billion now to about $800 billion by the end of the decade. simply, without anything catastrophic happening, with the baseline, if you look at longer-term at any of these -- m the kerrey-danforth report, which we updated using the cbo alternative scenario numbers. you can see the net interest eventually becomes the real driving force. entitlement programs as the boomers begin to retire. health care costs continue to develop. certainly, that is programatically, the thing driving the gap between spending and revenues.

but if you keep doing that, as anyone who has tried to live off a credit card knows, that is going to be a problem for the federal budget. so that is allowing us to take on this new debt without interest going up substantially. that is kind of a one-shot deal. i do not think i appreciate the point that we got through the last 20 years without catastrophe. there are a lot of things that happened that are not going to happen again. we have kind of run out of time for us boomers. i wish i had that 20 years back. i felt better years ago. i would not say in 1994, i could do this, this, and this. i do not think we will be able to do the same stuff 20 years from now. we need to look at our country

as and aging population. and look at the things we can do as a nation if we get our fiscal house in order. for the candidates, what we have to tell them is the debt is your running mate. you are stuck with it. it is going to be there when you raise your hand and take the oath of office. it will be at your first cabinet meeting. you have to come up with a plan for dealing with it. you might as well start preparing the public during the campaign and try to get some ideas on the table. so what ever your campaign platform, if you want to cut taxes, increase defense spending, take care of medicare and social security, whatever your campaign agenda is, it will not be credible if it relies on this continuing stream of borrow cash.

as bob and jack have said, the media and the public, getting the public involved in this is really crucial. ok. so we have been talking a lot. questions from the audience? yes, sir. >> there's a microphone there. >> national economist club. one of the issues that has been raised is the automatic cuts. we cannot get it done through political measures. those that are to our today, you take it out of control. i would like to get your views on how that my work. >> anybody want to take on sequestration? >> right now, what we have is automatic fun cuts as part of

the the wrong kinds of cuts to do. there are triggers that you could put in place. the trigger we put witha sequester is let's put together a package of cuts that are so stupid members of congress will never let it hit. i went around sort of confidently saying they are never going to let it hit. it will force them to come up with a deal. for those of us who thought that, i guess we overestimated congress's ability to do the sensible thing. you learn from that unfortunate situation. sequester is doing real damage. we are cutting the wrong parts of the budget. we are not doing anything to fix the problem. at the same time, i believe politicians are showing themselves unable to make tough choices. we have not been trying to do this for so long with so little success on the real issues because we are dealing with a bunch of really courageous politicians. that is the reality. they have some very hard constraints as well.

i do think we are going to have to move towards more automatic changes in the budget and then what you want to do is instead of building in stupid policy changes that happen automatically, you want to build in things that are more sensible. what if we said whenever your debt hit x percent of gdp, policymakers have to come up with a plan to bring it down so it is not growing faster than the economy. if they do not, we put in automatic changes. i would say you look at the revenue side and sending side of the budget. you look at all parts of the budget. you do not want to rely on automatic changes. you want politicians to make choices, will at priorities, pay for priorities. if they are unwilling to, your backup plan should be something you can live with. so you start looking at what kind of plan you can have as your automatic sequester that would a smarter way to get

policy changes in. >> can i just briefly add that since the offer, the bottom line is that there was a negotiated agreement on what the sequester should be which basically became the sequester of 1985. i agree with my a completely. knowing that it didn't work, let's go back and change the trigger. if you are going to have a trigger, let's go back. let's put social security into it. let's put medicare at 2%. let's put the whole spending into that. then i think you will get their attention. then the sequester will have some impact. when the threat will have some impact on actually making hard decisions. >> we have another couple of questions. senator danforth, did you need to -- >> i am going to leave pretty soon. [laughter] >> i thought that might be the case. thank you, senator. we will take one or two more questions. the stars are out here.

>> two questions. >> my name is roberta stanley. i am a former news reporter. you made several references to relying on the media to keep people honest your mike wallace's debt. -- mike wallace is dead and candy crawley is leaving cnn. the backbone of a lot of the media now just isn't there. do you have recommendations on who in the media might step up to the plate? >> wow, that is one i did not expect. >> i do think -- we were having a discussion this morning about how congress has become more polarized and political.

the institutions around it have as well. media has. you see an ongoing polarization that is unfortunate. but that is not across the media. the other keys that is difficult for the media is that these are really tough issues to understand. one of the things we had talked about doing in new hampshire and iowa, some of the states where we are doing public education efforts, is we have budget exercises that basically say let's take the budget, take your physical goal, and how will you get there? we do it with candidates, citizens. our plan is to run those with a bunch of people in the media so that when you go to new hampshire or iola or the candidates go to state where they are trying to run campaigns, the media has gone through the exercise finding out that it is not foreign aid that will fix this. if you are not going to be able to tax billionaires and fix the problem. they have gone through the exercise, reaching an overall framework that they can ask smarter questions. i think there is a part of the media that has become opinion journalism.

but that is a different area. this is very technical. it is very difficult. that is why we say read the cbo reports. but there are ways to do interesting education that can help focusing on the candidate. >> you do have to educate them. our major newspapers have gone downhill and do not have the influence. >> i would just add that if you follow the cromnibus, which everyone was reading about, you read about the whole thing, and you still do not know what was in it. you know a couple of the little interesting stories, the funny stories, but there is nowhere that you gone say the they just passed a $1.1 trillion budget. what is in this? no one who has been following the best news coverage actually knows because the sensationalist journalism does not lead to the?

-- does not lead to that. >> i'm sure that both of you had the same experience of being called by a reporter about a bill like that. you have all sorts of witty ghty things you want to say about what it means for the big picture. and the question is always, what is the worst thing you can point out? find something really absurd and tell me about that. it happens all the time. to pick up on what mile was saying, i think that what i have been trying to convince a tv network or somebody to do is film one of these budget exercises. i think it would make a fascinating tv program. because you have real people making real choices. and they do not talk about this in wonky terms. they actually talk about what it means to be a family. i have seen this happen so often. peoples around the tables at a townhall meeting or rotary club.

and they start relating to items in the budget and how it affects their family. with clever programming, you could get some of the filming something like this, and it would make the budget and those choices that we need to make much more real for people. >> for people who are interested in doing this, call the congress coalition. call the campaign to fix the debt or go on the website for the committee for a responsible federal budget. we have a simulator where you can go through the exercise. >> and contact the vice president. [laughter] >> of course. there are people that will, and run these exercises in your community with members of congress. it is a great educational tool with the media.

bob will have the network come and film. >> we are going to get one more question. if there are no more questions, we have answer them all. thank you for coming. we are out of here. >> on the next "washington weingartenndi discusses the continued push for early childhood education and then matt lewis talks about the jeb bush announcement that he is actively exploring a 2016 bid. ater that david ahrens looks the prevalence of brain tumors and brain cancer in the u.s..

plus your phone calls, they spoke comments and tweets. >> federal reserve chair janet yellen holds a news conference following and open market committee meeting. easternive at 2:30 p.m. on c-span two. the 10thonth is anniversary of our primetime program "q and a" and we are featuring one guest from each month this year. from 2005, kenneth feinberg's ,nterview and 2006 lonnie bunch 2007 robert novak on the 50 years of reporting in washington, 2008 the value of higher education in america and

from 2009, a conservative commentator. a decade of compelling conversations. the 26th.2 through a discussion on international and domestic surveillance from thomas massie. institutet the cato examining server -- surveillance, privacy and civil liberties. >> good morning. welcome to the cato institute. my name is julian sanchez. i am a senior fellow here, and it is my signal privilege to welcome you to the inaugural cato institute surveillance conference. this is been called the information age, which almost by

definition means that our era is also an age of surveillance, surveillance is how information is gathered and assembled. information is the central currency of power in our era, which means it is how we strive to protect ourselves against novel threats in a uniquely decentralized era where small groups of people propose threats to a nationstate previously reserved for other nationstates. at the same time, the architecture of monitoring and potentially the architecture of the control that we are constructing in order to make ourselves safer threatens to undermine really the

preconditions of liberal democracy and a free society. we are tracked in our daily lives as a side effect of the technologies we use to communicate every day. almost accidentally. it is a byproduct of the way technologies work, that as never before, when we talked to a friend or lover or a family member, when we read the newspaper, when we investigate topics of interest to us, whether they involve global geopolitics or our own most intimate medical conditions, a trace is left. it is hard to keep track of how tracked we are. in many ways, the entities that gather increasingly minute and vast quantities of data about our activities thanks to

sophisticated bulk data analysis may in some ways know us better than we know ourselves. these issues have come to the forefront of our national conversation recently, in significant part because of the disclosures of mr. snowden regarding the incredible scale and scope of collection by the national security agency. but the technologies used in intelligence and in the name of national security are also increasingly finding their way into domestic law enforcement efforts as has often been the case in our history. we find the cutting edge military technology is within a few years often widely deployed law enforcement technology.

and so of course this presents difficult questions. questions that you are forced to deal with and the men which of science fiction. then of course it involves projecting forward the implications of these technologies, not just as individual novelties, but in their aggregate effect on our economy and our relationship with the state. looking back to the middle of the last century in our history, we also know the terrible price that can be exacted when secret surveillance tools are used without adequate oversight. we know that across many presidents with many parties in power, we have seen how the ability to secretly surveille not just enemies of the state

but enemies of the regime in power can be used to entrench that power. we know of course most famously, the fbi used the power to surveille as a tool of power against martin luther king and the christian leadership conference but also a whole range of antiwar, feminists, leftists, dissidents as a way of trying to ensure that democracy did not progress more quickly than the people holding the reins of power were prepared for. as we face a world in which, not just because of what intelligence agencies do but because of what the services we rely on to provide us with our calendars to arid daily minute -- provide us with everything from our calendars to our daily

minute conversations are doing, we need to think very carefully about how this unprecedented aggregation of information can be made compatible with liberal democracy and a free society. that is why it is again my extraordinary pleasure to be able to introduce someone who has been at the forefront of the fight to ensure that the imperative to gather information and protect ourselves from those who would do us harm cannot be used as an excuse or a pretext to broaden monitoring of innocent and peaceful american citizens.

congressman thomas massie, as many of you know, along with his colleagues, is responsible for an amendment that by an overwhelming partisan margin passed the house of representatives and aims to ensure that information gathered for national security purposes by targeting foreigners could not be used in routine investigations by the fbi or other law enforcement agencies to spy on americans unconnected with those foreign intelligence purposes. that amendment was, despite the

enormous margin by which it passed the house, was recently removed in conference from the intelligence authorization bill. is the pattern again, that it is a pattern again, those of us who have been watching the legislative effort to rein in the intelligence agencies find all too familiar. it's important to recognize especially in the house of representatives, defining an essential group willing to work across party lines to protect the essential liberties that lie at the foundation of our republic. we are a country come in many -- we are a country, in many ways, found it because we did not like government agents prying into our business. i can think of no one better to launch the really astonishing lineup of experts and practitioners we have assembled today than the congressman from the fourth district of kentucky who, in addition to his profound commitment to civil liberties, is an m.i.t. graduate with multiple degrees and a founder of a technology company and someone who it is my extraordinary privilege to introduce to you, congressman thomas massie.

[applause] >> well, there are a lot of experts in the room today on this legislation and what the government has been doing. what i want to share with you is the battle that we are fighting in congress. to give you a peek behind the curtain of what we do when we try to reform some of the unconstitutional spying that has gone on in this country. i will defer to the crowd on some of the -- particularly julian who is an expert -- on some of these finer points of these issues. and then i also need to give credit to zoe lofgren who is one of the cosponsors and they did probably more work on this amendment than i did but we felt like a republican had to introduce it and i was the only republican that was willing to introduce this bill, this amendment we had all worked on.

i want to give you an overview really of three different legislative efforts. that would be the amendment, the dod appropriations bill in 2013, the freedom act in the house -- i will not get into the senate version -- but what happened in the house and then that massey-lofgren amendment in the house. let me give you a bit of my background and tell you where i am ideologically. in 1993, when i was finishing my thesis at m.i.t., i looked up at the television and saw something happening in waco, texas that disturbed me. what i saw was there was a group of people that was easy to vilify. the left did not like them because they were clinging to guns and religion.

the right did not like them because they were not clinging to a religion they recognized. the individuals probably a polygamist at waco. but that did not justify what i saw. what i saw were tanks running over children's go karts and dozens of people dying in a fire. i decided there is something wrong here with the left-right paradigm and something wrong with civil liberties in this country and that's when, looking back, i decided i would be a civil libertarian. another point i want to make is that in republican primaries across the country, the districts have been so gerrymandered that most of them are either red or blue and it ends up being a race to the right or a race to the left in many of these congressional districts. in my case it's a republican district and there were seven candidates in the primary every one was trying to be more conservative than everyone else. fortunately, thanks to the efforts of some of you in this room to inform i constituents and thanks to the efforts of

rand paul who had just finished two years earlier running in kentucky, people in kentucky were in tune with the fact that our civil liberties have been violated by the patriot act and other pieces of legislation. i campaigned on that instead of trying to be more to the right than the next person. it was obviously -- it worked and i am here. i'm extremely frustrated some days at what happens like last night when the massey-lofgren amendment was stripped behind closed doors from the appropriations bill. it was an amendment to the dod appropriations bill. it was stripped from the omnibus part and parcel. there was nothing left of it. that was very frustrating to see. of course, the omnibus passed without that legislation on it but i will get into that in a little bit. let me describe my colleagues and myself as well. i include myself in this. when i came to congress, i'm an

engineer and i thought if you had all the facts on your side, you could win the day. and your case would be closed. what i discovered is that we are not voting algorithms, we are soft mammals that go there and press buttons. we possess fully all of the faults that the general population possesses. no additional intelligence to speak of and a greater degree of hubris by virtue of winning the election. some people think they have a chip that instructs them how to know everything better than their congressman. when i first got to congress,

one congressman told me that he was advised by an elder congressman when he got there that i always felt the way my constituents would have me vote. unless, of course, i know something about the legislation that they don't. which is always the case. they use that mentality to their advantage in congress. i say they. i mean the leadership which generally opposes any reform to the intelligence community's activity. they use this on congressmen. i will start with pre-snowden legislation, the cyber intelligence protection act. we were working on that in the house and it had just been debated in the house and adjust -- had just passed when the snowden revelations came out. it was helpful the timing of those revelations and disclosures. if we can see this is what we were talking about could happen, if cispa passes. when they did it come it was interesting, we had classified briefings. they bring the generals in and the computer experts from the cia and nsa. i remember one comical briefing where there was a computer geek -- i have a lot of nerd pride so i can call people geeks -- he

he was sitting there and doing a demonstration how the russians could hack into your computer. it was running two programs on the computer at the same time so he is actually hacking into the computer he was typing on. that was interesting to him, but i don't thing it made sense to any other congressmen. to him, he was running two different threads in his computer so this was a novel thing. he was typing in hexadecimal numbers into a c prompt, down at the root level but he could see what was going on in the window and his program crashed. his simulator crashed. and he was like, oh, darn it. the general is standing there shaking his head. i am standing there thinking, nobody realizes your program crashed in this room. you could just think this whole thing. -- you could just fake this whole thing. [laughter] anyway, they convinced everybody in that room that now they knew something nobody else knew. they were qualified to vote on

cispa would not have them vote for this. then we had the snowden revelations. then congressman amash who is the person people go to in the house when i want to know what the legislation really does. he has an excellent staff. he himself just pours through these bills -- pores through these bills. he introduced an amendment to the dod appropriations bill to try to stop the all collection of your metadata. as he points out, the metadata is probably more dangerous than the actual content. when they can realize how you are interacting socially with. he sought to rein that in. that is the first of the three

bills i will discuss. let me tell you why this was an amendment to an appropriations bill. the leadership and all the chairmen of the committee's of respective jurisdictions do not want to reform the intelligence community's activities. they just don't want to do it. in the house of representatives, because the committee structure and leadership structure, they have so much power. we can introduce all the wonderful bills we want. we're up to like hr 5600 in this congress. the leadership and the chairman decide which bills go to the floor. those of us who are trying to get legislation to the floor, we have to look for opportunities. they are few and far between. in fact, it reminds me as an engineer of the first invention where they tried to do movies and this thing rotated. it was called a daedulum but it had slits in it and a slit goes by and you can see a picture on

the other side of the drum. that's -- occasionally photons pass through that draw him, and that is the way i look at our legislative opportunities. occasionally, there is a slit in the drum and you can get a few photons in there. one of those opportunities is in the form of a limitation amendment to an appropriations bill. congress has the power of the

purse and the democratic thing the leadership has agreed to do merely to keep their leadership because there would be a revolt if they didn't is to allow anybody in the house, it's a rare democrat aspect of the house, anybody can offer any amendment they want. you can write it down and your handwriting is submitted to the clerk and any appropriations bill. it's very constrained because there are all of these rules around it. you cannot legislate. you cannot affect existing code. all you can do is limit how the money is spent. that was how justin amash's amendment was drafted and it's hard to achieve what we want to achieve. it would be better if we could write a bill that change of the u.s. code. that's not what these limitation amendments do. boy, he caught the attention of the world. he caught the attention of the leadership.

he had the world bearing down on him for his efforts, no good deed goes unpunished. one of our colleagues called him -- in the media -- al qaeda's best friend. that that used against him in a campaign in a primary. this is what you run up against when you try to introduce legislation. that bill failed by only seven votes. but it was heroic that we got within seven votes. let me tell you who voted no. nancy pelosi and steny hoyer, the minority leader and the minority with full -- the minority with. john boehner who was the speaker and rarely ever votes on legislation decided to vote on this piece of legislation. he voted no. eric cantor voted now and the majority whip kevin mccarthy voted no. the entire leadership voted against it. all of the committee chairman -- chairmen that had any jurisdiction over this voted against it. yet we almost got half of the house of representatives to go against all of the leadership on both parties and all of the committee chairmen and ranking members. that gets us to an interesting point -- these folks who voted against that bill, it was like watching them put their hands in a wood chipper because i knew they were voting against the will of their constituents and they went home and did town halls, the ones that would still do them.

i watched town halls from other congressmen on youtube for the same reason most people watch nascar. [laughter] it's for the pileups. if you try to convince your constituents you are pro-liberty and you're not and have a voting record that shows you're not, you will have a car wreck. the folks on the wrong side of this vote, they went through the wood chipper back home. this presented an opportunity. it came back. they thought, might -- my gosh, we have got to do something. they said, what do we do? justin amosh was the leader. we got jim sensenbrenner, who was the original -- actually this was his bill -- but he was the original author of the patriot act, and he feels like he was more or less misled when he passed the patriot act.

they told him they would not do things with him -- with it that they actually went and did. he wanted to write that wrong, so he introduced the free -- the freedom act area we got 151 cosponsors on this thing, which is tremendous. it had great reforms in their. closed backdoor loopholes, stop the bulk collection of metadata without tying the hands of the intelligence community. did not tie their hands at all. this gives me to another point. another while the slits in the drum. a great bill on its own. it is not going to make it to the floor of the house. another great opportunity is to attach it to something that must pass. the patriot act, provisions of it will expire. some of it is permanent. some is temporary. provisions will expire. this was attached -- reluctantly, it was attached to

the reauthorization of this retreat act revisions that we're going to expire -- that were going to expire. here is what is going to happen. the bill goes into committee and it got eviscerated. it was gutted. to add insult to injury when it came out of committee -- some of us were asking, is it worth passing? should we take some now and get more later? we waited on the sidelines. we did not condemn yet. when it came out of committee, they took it to six different intelligence organizations in this government and it got rewritten again, and then they brought it to the floor of the house and there was no opportunity to offer amendments to it. at this point it had been got it

-- gutted so much that 75 of the original 151 cosponsors would not vote for the bill. you know it has changed a lot if a cosponsor will not vote for the bill. the primary sponsor bills, they give this zeal for the deal, and they want to see their bill passed. they will tolerate more tinkering than any other cosponsors. sensenbrenner stuck with it, but to tell you how bad it was, all of the people who voted against the amendment -- the chair of the intelligence committee, the majority leader, the minority leader -- they all voted for the freedom act, the modified freedom act, even though they were not cosponsors. it passed the house and recently there is activity in these tenet. that's in the senate. someone else will have to talk about that.

i did not track the changes. i am not sure if i would or would not have voted with these and it will. it was a tough call. that gets us to my bill or amendment, which was an amendment to the dod appropriations bill in 2014. we are a full year after the snowden revelations and nothing has been done. to describe the mountain that you face when you try to reform the nsa or any of the intelligence activities from the congress, i need to tell you a story or a joke, if you will, and it comes from the 80's, so it is a little bit dated, but it still applies. you remember in the 1980's when you bought a computer? there was no internet. you did not go on to tell's website. -- dell's website. you went into the ibm store. the salesman would tell you all

of the wonderful things the computer could do for your business. at the time there was a joke that said what is the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman? anyone know the difference? a car salesman knows when he is lying to you. [laughter] we had no shortage off car salesman or computer salesman on the whip team in congress. they are the ones to explain to you what the bill does. some know that they are lying to you. probably the majority do not even know. at it is their job to get you to vote for or against that. this is my view from the majority whip.

this is an e-mail sent to every congressional office from the majority whip. legislative amendment alert. massie amendment. dear colleague -- and this is sent on behalf of the house judiciary committee in the house appropriations subcommittee on defense. dear colleagues, the leader of isil has threatened to attack america. syria has become a vortex of jihad. the director of the national security has one of the growing threat. state control has collapsed in syria and meanwhile in afghanistan and pakistan, the taliban and al qaeda continue to fight. moreover the administration has released a tell event fighter from guantanamo in bolting the terrorists. the terrorists threat is not

contained overseas. this amendment would create a blind spot for the intelligence community, tracking the terrorists with direct contacts to the homeland. last month, the congress overwhelmingly passed the freedom act which expressly forbids communications --. the house voted are overwhelming bipartisan basis to provide the intelligence community with the tools it needs to keep americans safe while restoring american confidence that appropriate safeguards are in place. now is not the time to stop intercepting the communications of known terrorists. vote no on this amendment. so, that is the leadership --

that is the memo that my leadership sent to every member of congress. that went to the legislative team. the ones responsible for reading the bill and letting congressman know. congressman do not have time to read all of that. they get one sentence when they show up to the floor of the house. here is the sentence. it is like speed round. two minutes per amendment. one sentence here. massie, republican, kentucky, prohibits funds from being used to exploit lawfully collected intelligence under section seven 702 under the foreign intelligence surveillance act. basically prohibits us from catching terrorists. all our amendment did was require them to have probable cause and a search warrant or that is all it did. they could do everything they were previously doing.

that was the main part of the amendment. there was a second part of the amendment which would prohibit the u.s. government forcing our companies to put backdoors, security backdoors, in their products. whether it is encryption technology that you trust -- it would keep the government presumably can make companies brain damage their products so it is easier for the government to get to your data. they can do that with hardware and software. our bill would prevent the government from forcing companies to do that. -- with of this effort effort -- whip effort to keep everybody off of this bill, it passed. i think the reason it passed with such a large margin is people are becoming more and

more confirm -- and firms about this and congressmen go home and get tore up about this. it is like an electric fence. the cows put their nose to it too many times and they want no part of that sent -- fence anymore. i would concede that most of them probably did not read my bill. but they voted for it because they are intuitive creatures and they felt it was the right thing to do. i appreciate that. sensenbrenner was the cosponsor. we had a lot of good cosponsors of the republican side and on the democrat side. rush holt really worked on the provision to keep the government from forcing companies to put actors in their products. so, that passed. that was a limitation amendment, which by all rights should have been in the omnibus that passed last night. but it got stripped the had closed doors and never showed up in the final bill, which is very unfortunate.

i will have good news for you at some point in the speech i guess. so, that brings us, i guess, to where we are right now. what are we going to do in the next congress? we have all of these caucuses. the diabetes caucus, the tea party caucus, the ready mix caucus for concrete. there is a caucus for everything. your constituents are always calling me saying, why argue on this caucus? don't you care about my issue? i want to tell them, you're caucus never meets. i do not. i do what they tell me to. there is one that meets, the liberty caucus. it was started by congressman ron paul and it was taken off. it is invitation only.

you cannot join it to burnish your potential. that is the problem with caucuses. of the tea party caucus to appeal to the tea party community. this is invitation only. we have about 36 people who are invited and we regularly have 24 who show up and this is every other week while we are in session. this is our opportunity to inform at least 24 members and debate what should be in the legislation or in the amendment, and it is a great group for us, and the good news is -- we invite democrats, too. it is not just a republican thing. depending on the situation, like don -- on cispa, we invited democrats to those things.

these primaries that happened that nobody pays attention to. everybody is watching senate primaries and races. no one is paying attention to house races. i think we picked up a lot of civil libertarians or at least people who are informed about civil liberties in this last election. i'm excited. we will probably grow that caucus-people at least on the republican side. i am not sure. i have not met with the democrat freshman yet. i think we will gain members there. if you break this down -- it does not break down republican or democrat. there is an island the middle of congress. left and right side of the. it does not break down that way. more often it breaks down, how long of you been in congress? how recently did you get there?

the ones to be more in tune with this issue and representative of the will of the people. more good news, cispa is stalled. support for it -- i am sure there are a lot of people who voted for it in the house that after the snowden revelations came out wished they had not voted for cispa. it will be hard to get that thing moving again, hopefully, given all of the new information we have. finally, the patriot act is going to expire. that is good news. or provisions of it. what it means is, there is an opportunity, one of those slits that passes right where you can get if you photons in -- or you can get a few photons in. that's the good news. those of the opportunities. i will close in and tell a quick story about my daughter. i have four children.

18, 16, 14, and 10. the youngest, i think, is the biggest civil libertarian of the grip. she was nine when i had a tree on my farm as a staff retreat on my farm. my wife said, where in the heck are they all point to leap -- going to sleep? i said we will kick the kids out of their bedrooms. and my daughter, my nine-year-old daughter, i have been surveilled ever since she has been born, so i'm used to this. she comes out of the shadows and says, dad, are you really going to make me sleep on the floor just so those people from washington, d.c. can visit you? i said, honey, it will be just like camping. she put her hand on her head and said, dad, what you are really ellie mae is -- telling me is

you are letting government get in my bedroom. [laughter] that is not even a talking point i use on the campaign. she is listening to some other news outlet. i do not know if i have a minute or two that you take questions. do i have time? >> there are audience questions. we have time before the first panel. please identify yourself and speak into the microphone. >> my name is ed and i'm from north carolina. thank you for your comments. congressman, if i had a party at my house i would ask, edward snowden -- euro or traitor? what do you think your colleagues on the hill with say -- would say?

>> when i am asked that question, i think it is sort of a distraction. i will tell you what i think, but i think it is a distraction. they use him, or they tried to create animosity toward him to downplay the issue. regardless about what you think about what he did or how he did it, it does not ameliorate the fact that we are all being spied on and something needs to be done. it is a little bit of a distraction. i can tell you, they think he is a traitor. i can tell you, they would love to try him for treason. they are infuriated. my own personal opinion -- i think he did a tremendous service to this country by getting this information out. and i will also tell you -- it isn't part of the good news --

but there is more to know. it wasn't a complete release of everything that i think is being done that is wrong. as congressman, we are privy to things. i know about things that disturbed me just as much as the revelations we heard from him. so, i think he has done a great service to the country. >> one more question. >> your bill would have -- your amendment would have required a warrant. by the way i am david isenberg from connecticut. your bill would have required warrants and stuff like that before certain surveillance ask took place -- acts took place. but we also know there is a parallel construction activity

that is going on in the more civilian oriented law enforcement organizations. would your amendment have stopped parallel construction? and more generally, could you speak to the issue of parallel construction? >> absolutely. let me tell you more about the amendment. the u.s. government collects tons of data, terabytes of data, under the presumption it might have foreign communications and it -- in it. we're not stopping them from doing that. this would not stop them from collecting the haystack of data. what we do not want them to do for civilian purposes, like the fbi or irs, to go into that data and dart -- start mining it for u.s. persons.

or if they want to do it, they have got to have a warrant and probable cause. you can go our fishing expeditions. if we could stop them from doing that, then it would somewhat obviate the need to reform the parallel construction. they are doing parallel construction because they found out about something in an unconstitutional way, and then they are trying to construct a constitutional way, like a traffic stop or in -- for instance. just to be honest with you, i think some congressmen -- maybe not a lot of them -- are afraid of this issue because they may end up in a parallel construction situation where the intelligence community knows something about that and then retribution, they we get to the fbi, who pulls over the congressman for one reason or another area i am very troubled

about parallel comes action. and -- i am very troubled about parallel construction. i think it is wrong. i think the best way i could stop it is from them having access to that information that is unconstitutional. they are trying to reconstruct a constitutional way to come up with that information. that is what my amendment would do. to require the constitution to be followed for them to get the data in the first place. >> thank you. >> thank you so much, congressman. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> on the next "washington weingartenndi discusses the white house's continued push for early

childhood education. then matt lewis talks about jeb bush actively exploring a 2016 campaign bid. after that david errands looks at the prevalence of ring cancer in the u.s.. plus your phone calls, facebook comments and tweets. here are some of the programs you will find this weekend. saturday night at 9:30, seth rogen discussing politics and humor with liz winstead at the harvard institute of politics. sunday evening at 8:00, author and townhall.com editor on what as the hypocrisy of liberals on their war on women rhetoric. 10:00, onight at

"afterwards" william d eresiewicz. sunday morning before 11:00, book tv visits lafayette, literaryo two or the sites -- to tour the literary sites. damien shields talks about the life of patrick clayburgh and his role in the confederate army during the battle of franklin, tennessee. find our complete schedule on c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you are watching.

>> in november, the environmental protection agency announced a proposal to strengthen air-quality centered's -- standards. today the senate environment and -- see itks committee live on c-span. >> federal reserve chairman janet yellen holds a news conference today following an open market committee meeting. this month is the 10th anniversary of our sunday "q&a".me

from 2005, kenneth feinberg on the september 11 compensation fund. from 2006, lonnie bunch. from 2007, robert novak. --m 2008, renew could tour renou couture. a decade of compelling conversations. next, a discussion on countering violent extremism and ideology in the u.s. and around the world. the washington institute for -- this is 90cy minutes.

can ask you to join with me by turning off your cell phone. we are pleased today for this policy forum on the battle of isis at home and abroad. an exciting to have program and we are starting with from his royal highness will join us a video. let us start with remarks by his royal highness and i will introduce our other two speakers

with prepared remarks and take questions and answers. that you highness is and commissioner for human rights and previously served as jordan's permanent ambassador to the united nations and united states. much, goodu so afternoon to all of you. i apologize for not being able to make it down for the discussion and of course our thoughts are with rob and jenny and there watching this online stream so i hope to connect soon. years been a couple of since i spoke and i have always enjoyed the interaction and its changes. i hope you're getting this feed without an interruption because i hear the sound coming and going -- have someone call my

assistant and she will inform me if this is an streaming clearly. at the beginning i thought -- my remarks to you, calling -- recalling the appalling events that took place in push our -- pashar this morning. we have been shaken by these horrific attacks, not just against civilians but this time against a school with a large number of casualties being twodren, even as young as years old. i find myself in a state of continuousutrage, so seems to be the stream of horrific events we see on a daily basis around the world.

to first say and i've said this before in the un security council that it is almost irrelevant, distinguishing one group from another. about haram or jihadi nostra you can continue to name one group after another -- including al qaeda. they're all the same ideology and in this place -- in this taliban attack by the but it shows the same callousness and disregard for complete distortion and understanding of what islam u.n.d it pains me as the human rights chief and a muslim

to have to receive this time and again -- not least because what spoken me and i've publicly about this both in arabic and english -- what pains me is the relative silence of the arab muslim street in reaction to these events. we see condemnations streaming in from different arab and islamic capitals but not as much as the way up popular demonstrations in popular russians of discussed in disapproval. think it requires a much deeper sort of analysis than what we often see coming through to us via the media outlets. -- in thelear to us that rights community tackling these groups

humanitarian or through counterterrorism beliefs -- relief by choking off the funding -- it is not enough. had and listgo we discussions about criminal then nine years on we find ourselves in iraq with a different group and different name -- but us the same ideology. only the situation is much worse. the concerns both in iraq and syria are quite announced. we listen to the remarks made by the foreign minister of the syrian government and he was dismissive of the efficacy of the airstrikes.

this is something that i think has to be studied because we have learned from other sources that this may well be the case -- if they are not supplemented by a concerted discussion within the islamic world to confront line by line the thinking of the groups that the results may not be what we hope they will be and fall short of where we want them to be. letter that i have eluded to to and wasalluded the subject. 126 muslimby scholars in september as a sermone to the july issued and what i found

this letteris that which was remarkable in the sense that it was scholarly and backed by muslim scholars from goes by eachworld point in the sermon, rebuttal by received fart this less in the way of media attention than the decision to launch airstrikes and take a very active military operation. this letter needs to be supported and alluded to and spoken about and referred to by politicians in the islamic world and beyond. not least because if it isn't

shown that the islamic world is responding from a scholarly then we will continue to see the phenomena we see in europe and germany of this demonstration basically targeting islam and the religion as opposed to the ideology or the denunciations should be properly direct and. so we watch with horror day by day at these developments and all of us in occupylar, those who senior positions in government or the international community, must speak out and speak out forcefully. particularly in the islamic world we need to encourage ordinary people to understand the gravity of this and to speak

out and force them to satisfaction if not complete discussed with what it is they see. continue to make these points whenever i can, and i hope others will join me in doing so. it is a complicated world and we find from a human rights perspective that there is still toh to be done and much left be desired in terms of the combat of a many -- large number in respect of the human rights obligation. insofar as this discussion is concerned and what measures can be taken and how we confront it ideal all the -- ideologically, this is a very appropriate discussion. i thank you for inviting me to take part and i would be happy to answer any questions that any

of you have and i hope we can conduct a question and answer session during this short presentation and i look forward at some stage to come and visit our colleagues and friends.

able to translate some of your comments for american policy -- what would you like to see an american or western european policies dealing with these problems of the five lines of e,fort -- one of them is cv what are some of the things you would like to see from western governments as part of their policies to deal with these issues in tandem with seeing greater muslim and arab statements dealing with the ideology and in tandem with greater media coverage of statements. question, i good think the starting point is recognizing that there is a tissue that binds all these groups together. in the past it was referred to as a jihadist philosophy but it does not quite convey who these people are and i think if you this as theate

ideology which is a pernicious way of thinking -- very narrow and extreme in the way they view the world i think we can begin to create the right framework for discussion because if it is it says if big and every group has its own ideology it is not the same. the ideology is uniform but they call themselves different things. think it is an approach that would yield better results. not least because it will prevent at least the more populist inclined politician -- particularly in europe of stirring and whipping up anti-islamic sentiment against migrants or immigrants living in europe and elsewhere. i think the danger of

feeds theon only cause they see from the part. i have spoken about this clearly in the security council, they have cleverly sees upon this aspiration that many -- bytarian muslims an extreme way of thinking they have created a little bit of a juggernaut. it is interesting to note that isis a was occupied by year ago now. and it is still under the control of isis. it has resilience. the other thing that we have begun to notice is that they are learning how to govern in certain places, they are being

responsive to certain parts of the community so it is not terror terror -- it is in many respects and certainly if you are there you live in fear for your life every minute but they are learning the art of governance which will add to their resilience. a multipronged complex response leavingred and not just that through bomb and gun and the bank you can solve this particular set of problems. >> i wanted to touch on the point you mentioned about the paper you wrote with the hundred

52 scholars -- in the united states we've always asked that the ideological part be left to what doim community, so you think muslims can do to help these voices of mainstream scholars who try to speak out against isis but don't have a large platform? they have asked for the united states and other governments to doy out of these issues -- you have suggestions for how those voices can be heard? >> i think it is incumbent on the media to do this. it is shocking the way many of the media outlets would prefer to show rockets raining down on a particular location rather than focusing on this other front which is needed. again when the letter was issued i saw two or three newspapers

in the western world noticed that the debt had been issued and i felt there should have an much more coverage and that those analysts who work for these networks should also think about this and should understand what is required. they were decapitating people nine years ago in iraq and after the measures taken by the u.s. and others, of course they were rolled back but they come back with a vengeance and so the point has to be made that it is not simply through the criminal justice system or military means that this can be done.

you're absolutely right, perhaps it is not the road for the u.s. government or other governments in the west to take up the battle-- the ideological but at least the major international media output can shed some light on this and i think this is the point to be made. odd -- when i spoke at the u.n. security council i started speaking in arabic because i wanted to convey the contents of the letter in arabic and it was carried live by the arab satellite channels but what was interesting was that after that i had a press conference and the western press were largely not that interested in the content of what i had to say when i left the security council. subsequently there was some reporting of it but i think this

tendency -- i would not want to be that critical by calling it simplistic but the tendency to focus on the action so to speak rather than what may seem to be a dryer method is perhaps where the problem lies. all the interviews i had insequent to that discussion the security council -- i have raise the point time and again to -- again. discuss how we talk about the path of ideas between isolated individuals in the west who seem to be attracted by the ideas and some of these people seem not to boost able such as table,ntleman -- not too s such as a gentleman in sydney,

but what about the idea of the people being radicalized on their own through their contact and the internet rather than through their contact of other individuals. >> that's a very interesting problem. we do need to think about this very deeply. when i had a conversation recently with the high commissioner for refugees my colleague and counterparts and friends -- he was saying that it is clear that many who go to the conflict areas in iraq know very little about the ideology but they see it as a vehicle for violent road test and they find it is a traditional vehicle in europe that is no longer there and they are angry young men and they perhaps happen brought up

in a culture of violent video gaming and for them this is an outlet. when you put all this together it looks very grim indeed. world which still stumbles around when it comes to accountability for the worst of crimes and we will denounce these crimes and we call them disgusting and distressing and we don't see very much in a way of a concerted effort to amend community that exist for representing my on , there is a sense and one way that we are overexposed -- whetherd killing

it be on youtube or in the press and you become deadened. sitn tell you that when you and youthese briefings are told what isis is doing or how we are doing in syria or the other groups. after a while it is like being a your year medical student second by the smell of from aldehyde in the second or third day you get used to it and the dangerous thing is that our public is getting used to it. publicreme now -- a capitation on youtube evokes a killing ofd the scores of children evokes a reaction but the odd killing here or there -- the odd bombing here or there -- we have become so used to it, so the public does not really react.

we have become too scattered and we have been bombarded by thismation, reflecting scattered way that information reaches us. thoughtfulnessr if we are going to confront all that we see. anecdotally and in the number of times that my office had to brief the security council on gross human rights violations, it is troubling. we feel we are hurtling towards something -- the contours of which we don't quite recognize in terms of a global emergency. feel we are behind the curve and we are trying to catch up and we need to be far more nimble and far more decisive and understanding what the issue is and how to deal with it yet

other day i was talking to a colleague representing our office in afghanistan and notwithstanding the attempts by , the problems are still breathtakingly huge. that can be said for other countries where the international community has made concerted attempts to try to stabilize the situation. become very good at ending conflict in many parts of the world. how to end a conflict in a certain dimension of what we are not good at is ending conflict permanently and here -- because we don't understand what this requires, what the employhm is that we must when you try to and conflict, that it is not throwing cement

at the problem or treading the military or police or training local officials. you need much more than that, we need to understand the collective psychology of the people, the history and the disparate narratives and only when you carefully consider these items, can you then develop an out the rhythm whereby you have -- and can have whereby you an effect otherwise you move from one crisis to another and are seemingly scratching our heads wondering where did we go wrong and how did we get it right. i think the complex response is required. >> questions from the audience? please identify yourself or in -- yourself. >> you were talking about the

internet stopping conflict -- i look at what we have done with libya and iraq and a lot of people want to do a series which i think will end up being another basket case and then you mention training the military -- for over 10 years i've heard we have been trying to train their military and it is going nowhere because i don't think they want to betray and and we are wasting all this money -- they had a military before in the 80's when they are fighting against iraq and using chemical weapons -- >> can i urge your question? >> i really have a question i guess, more of a statement. >> thank you for your remarks. please.stion >> bill, from the university of maryland, i think everybody in this room would agree that we

need to focus and understand the ideology as a huge source of ongoing conflict in multiple regions throughout the muslim world. one looks at the rise of isil in the last few years and it seems it is not just in response to that ideology but sectarian tension that rose after the arab spring at a geopolitical level and that they are simply just utilizing that tension effectively some wondering where would you rank sectarian conflict compared to -- threat of talked theory the threat of ideology. >> that is an excellent question, i had a meeting about nine months ago with the world bank and we were discussing

various conflicts around the world and they said to me, in syria it looks as though you won't have any winners at the end and i said, no there is always a winner in conflict -- , the winner ised the war profiteers. money generated in many of these conflict areas is a norm us. through the smuggling of weapons and fuel and what have you very in -- what have you. lawf there had been rule of institutions that collapsed -- by definition that space is to be occupied by the criminal with ar the extremist clear set -- narrow worldview of the world and the two can often be conjoined which is happening

in the case of syria and could be happening in the case of iraq as well. you have this confluence of extremistce and thought. again at the foot soldier level what we have seen -- it has been a fluid situation so we have that willighting cross over and fight for isis than they switch back because the terms of employment are better with them. it is also a fluid market like doubting there is no that the instability is exploited i one group or another and that they are better organized and more simplistic yet it is woven cleverly and with general aspirations that most muslims are many muslims -- it is very clever.

not to be underestimated. i know we promised we would let you go by 1:00 but i'm hoping i can sneak in one last question. appear in front. in front. >> my question to you, a lot of these people particularly the andh are sold on this idea feel they're calling is to head up and be part of this process -- but once reaching their they realized us is not what they signed up for and went to go back but now going back means they will be facing prosecution. my question is, what can governments do to focus on the and whation programs happened to these individuals who returned dissatisfied with what they