sustainbility economically. there's no getting away from economics. >> last question and since we haven't -- sir? >> here in cook county we had the lowest voter turnout in about 70 years. this was echoed in other places in the country especially when we're talking about a market approach. how do we know what citizens want if so few of them are prartiss pating in the process? how can we really make accurate statements about what we're going to do in the future or where we're going to go if so few people are interested in participating? >> would we know even if they did participate? anyone want to -- >> it's a great question. i think our democratic system is a way of legitimatic power which is essential. it's necessary. it's why our government is a legitimate government. it is one of the ways to figure out what everybody wants.

other ways includes markets. other ways includes everything we do in society. there are ways to pursue what we're after. obviously our political system -- well, maybe not it's not obvious but our political system would work better if more people participated. i think they want fewer people to vote, which is nuts. and shouldn't be what they want. that's not to say that if everybody wotevothed we would know what -- if everybody voted we would know what everybody wants. it is a way of answering some very important questions about what our government should look like. i think more people should be involved in offering those answers. people in public life should want that, should want more people to be involved and more people to be voting and that should be everybody's goal this democracy. >> i would just add so that. it's partly why it's critical why some of the market based

ideas are critical for people being able to express their differences. if you have no voter turnout in one party wins and they want to impose one side fits all policy option across the entire population you have a huge population that yes, maybe they did come out and vote but maybe they're being stuck with something that doesn't match their preferences. it's just another avenue for people to vote with their feet and have their preferences meet. >> obamacare is a good example that it never had support in the country. right? to the extend that the political class in general are talking about things that are of intense interest but not to the public at large, i think it becomes less of a reason for people to get interested and vote because they're not being offered

anything that makes them want to get up. >> none of the above is a crazy decision. >> it's -- our goal i think should be growing our total numbers, right? when you hear a lot about, that we need to win more women or we need to win whatever segment of the population, my response to this is always, no, we just need more. we just need more votes. it doesn't really matter where they come from and most obvious way to do that is to grow the pie. >> well, on that note, it's been a great panel. and thanks to all of you guys for talking about this for an hour and 15 minutes. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy.visit ncicap.org]

dd fund >> on this weekend's "newsmaker" steve bullock talks about issues facing governors and their states. he also talks about efforts to elect more democratic governors in 2015. >> just got done with the 2014 mid terms. a billion dollars was spent in the congressional races by outside groups. on the republican side 75% of that was undisclosed dollars. so i think we need to do significantly more for transparency. but as you suggested at the same token i don't think it makes

sense as we're doing that to make sure every individual voice matters that you can't even have that discussion if you also and it certainly wouldn't make sense because of my distaste for the overall amount of dollars in the process to say we are going to fold our cards up and watch this money flow into the states. >> does that mean it is going to be more transparent going forward? >> well, i think that weeks into this really trying to get a sense of what the overall budget is, but yeah. i think at the end of the day if we are going to be spending money in elections, we ought to know where that money is coming from. >> you can see that entire interview with governor steve bullock tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. >> new year's day on the c-span

networks. here are some of our featured programs. 10:00 a.m. eastern, the washington ideas forum energy conservation with david crain, t. boone pickens, warren brown and inventor dean kaman. at 4:00 eastern, the brooklyn historical society holds a conversation on race. then at 8:00 eastern apollo seven astronaut walt cunningham on the first manned space flight. new year's day on use, author hector tobar on the 33 men buried in a mine. and then richard norton smith on the life of nelson rock follower. and then cheryl atkinson. new year's day on "american history tv" on c-span 3, at 10:00 a.m. around, want take

and nathanny, her experiences and the role of women in the civil rights movement. then benjamin carp on the link between alcohol and politics in prerevolutionary new york city. then at 8:00 p.m., cartoon he is patrick oliphant draws 10 characters. new year's day on the c-span networks,. for our complete schedule go to c-span.org. >> now google executive chair eric schmidt talks about data collection by private companies. he is interviewed by "washington post" reporter craig timber, from the cato institute, this is 30 minutes.

>> thank you all for coming. this is an impressive group the cato institute has put together. i am honored to be here, and am happy dr. schmidt has found time in his schedule to talk about surveillance. >> thank you for having me in this important conversation. >> just so you know, i am going to ask a few questions. about half way threw i am hoping to open up the floor to questions. if there is something you have been dying to ask eric schmidt for years, this is your opportunity. for now, i will start off here. when the waupt first learned that the n.s.a. was tapping the links between data centers for google around the world, some of our reporters showed a diagram of how this worked. some of your engineers responded with a fuselage of words that we could not print in our family newspaper. i was wondering if you could

tell us exactly how you learned this was happening and what are first thoughts were at the time? >> as best we could tell, the gchg, which is the british arm of the five i's had put the equivalent of sniffers between traffic centers of google. google has a very large private data network that moves data around in a powerful way. it is a massive and amazing technical achievement from google's perspective. i read it in the waupt, and i was -- in the "washington post." i was shocked that it was possible to do this. the mechanisms are probably classified. we didn't know. but the fact that it had been done so directly and documented

in the documents that were leaked was really a shock to the company. >> so here we are. we are more than a year later from that day. we are about a year and a half from the original snowden revolutions, and the morgan stanley index is up take%. google remains one of the most massively privateable companies in the world. has there been real damage to you, or to the industry, or to us more broadly? >> well, there has been damage at many levels. let's start by saying that if you are a european right now, you are less likely to trust an american firm to retain your data. maybe you should always be less likely. but now as a result of these revelations, you are less likely. as a company what google did is we massively encrypted our internal systems.

encription that is 20-48 bit long. and for the non-technical i will describe that 2048 much longer than the original 1024. it is not twice as big. it is many times larger. it is viewed as unbreakable in our life times. we will see. i believe if you have important information, the safest place to keep it is google. the safest place to not keep it is nip else. first there was the chinese attack and then the n.s.a. attack. it has affected our relations in particular in conversations in europe where people are very sensitive to this. it has caused us to tighten every procedure woiltour -- within our system. we are just a lot saver.

>> assuming there is a financial or moral cost, who do you blame for that, the u.s. government or edward snowden? >> i would like to offer a rule for surveillance life. just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do something. the fact of the matter is that all of the technologies that we are describing are capable of massive -- in the hands of the wrong person -- violations of people's privacy. everyone has a mobile phone, it is on a data network, the phone knows exactly where it is because of the e-911 services, and all of that information could be misused. the snowden set of incidents including your coverage and all the other things have essentially caused people -- maybe non-tech people because the tech people have known this no a long time understand there is a great deal of data collected about you that is benign but could be misused in

the wrong hands. i would offer a rule for government. if you collect data in a database, you had better be sure you know what the data is going to be used for and that it doesn't get leaked. along the way technological opportunities have allowed for large bulk leaking. we look back at the pentagon paper leaks. those were done by copiers. people would copy documents. now an opponent can take the equivalent of u.s.b. sticks and download a large amount of at one time. so you want to be careful about collecting data. i was part of a whitehouse task force that looked into the technical side of this. the white house issued a policy statement unrelated to us. the question was can metta data be misused? the answer we came back is yes.

it is information about the data as opposed to the data i had receive, can be misused. that is why the industry, particularly google and all the other companies opposed the 215 stuff. our argument was that the metta data itself could be misused. i think these are learnings that the country has to know forever. >> i feel like you answered the government part of it. you hold them to account. edward snowden, hero orville an a year and a half later? how do you see it? >> it is interesting. depending on who you ask in america, you get a different answer. the same thing as julie massage, who is busy attacking google and me at the moment. it is a stereotype. if you talk to the east coasters, they tend to view these things in a very, veryness tiff contexts.

west coasters tend to view it in a general libertarian view. we will let the chords decide. we clearly do not want to encourage bulk data leaking. think of all the databases that exist of all, health records tax records all that other stuff. it is not good to encourage people to do that. on the other hand, his exposures were helpful in shining a lot on practices that people like myself and maybe you didn't know existed. we knew they were possible but the extent of thome was a shock. -- of them was a sherble. >> and when they start monitoring data traffic between google servers, and they are clearly monitoring traffic for people in the u.s. which is his i understand is not their mission. >> so the response of the tech industry is clear. massive new encription

initiatives, lawyers for the companies being much tougher in court about turning over data. the response from the u.s. government a little clear, a little more muddied at this point. if you were to give your industry a grade for how it has responded, and for how the u.s. government has responded? >> i am proud of my industries' response. there is a set of things we do. it is not just the 2048 bitten crippings. when e-mail systems talk toe each other. good-mail is all fully increpted all the way from your hand held into the system and out. what happens when the e-mail goes from server a to server b? there is a protocol which will maintain the encription as it goes from g-mail, to hot mail, yahoo, et cetera. it is active to protect the interests. i would say the government's response has been fairly clear. i will tell a story.

in 1995 louie free was the f.b.i. director, i believe, and we had the first of one of these. there was a meeting in diane feinstein's office of the c.e.o.s. the people there were steve indicates, bill gates, myself and other people. they tried to do the right thing, and she asked them to report on the dangers of all of this. what they wanted was they wanted the trap door. they wanted the trap door, the idea that the government could with a warrant or some other mechanism go in there and watch all the e-mail traffic. i remember distinctly sitting there listening to these presentations and saying virtually all criminals now use e-mail. what we want to do is watch the e-mail. now our industry -- and i remember the meeting.

we snuck out the back door because we were not allowed to talk to the press, and off we went. this is 20 years later exactly the same conversation. and the problem with the government request is it would be great if you are the government to have a trap door. how do we know as google that the other government is taking over the trap door from you? we are not endorsing the notion of a trap door, which is precisely what the public safety people would like. our argument, and it is true throughout the industry, is that the government has so many ways, and properly so, to go in what we call the front door. they are called warrants. they are called good police work. they are called sending the perpetrator with the guy in the front. you see this in the moves. all of that kind of stuff, just because you could put a trap door in does not mean that you

do. >> you raised an interesting point with the warrants. you were agreed that because you had a front door, that n.s.a. was aveiling itself of the back door. >> by the way, we did not intend to put a back door in. there isn't a back door left. the house only has front doors. >> right. we have seen google and a lot of other companies do the big encription initiative there. is a new wave of encription that doesn't even have a front door where if the government comes to you with a serve warrant, the company doesn't. apple has done it with end to end encription. i am curious what you think of these encription initiatives that lock out the government entirely. >> let me not pre-announce any google products here. it has been known for a long time that encription in the

hands of individuals is very empowering. it is a powerful tool for freedom fighters in oppressive regimes, but it also allows people who are evil to communicate bilaterally. the good news is they are not that easy to use, and we argue in the book, and you are probably winning when the evil person is using a cell phone. because trust me if you are trying to find them and you are a government, you can find them because cell phones emit where they are. indeed this is how osama bin laden was tracked down, ultimately through cell phone tapping according to the reports. so i am not as sensitive for the argument that this is the only way to solve this problem. but it is a fact that powerful encription has been around since 1975 when it was invented in the public system difeon

hellman. because of in my view the over reach of well-intentioned but flawed strategies, the encription capability is becoming more and more availability. >> do you like these kinds of services that are encrypted so thoroughly that the companies themselves can't get into them? do you think this is a good idea or a terrible idea for the reasons you mentioned? >> you are asking me an emotional question as opposed to a factual question. the fact is that the p.d.p. authentication has been possible for many years. the thing that has held it back has been key management, the ability to handle the keys. because of what the government did, all of the services are getting a lot easier. my opinion is that you will see more and more of these essentially proxied keselowskied and otherwise communication systems. historically if you go back to the small towns of the world 200 or 300 years ago there was

notice anonymity like that. you worry that that could be misused, and you never want it to be misused. on the other hand, i would say in every case, the person is doing this with a divides that can it -- a device that it receive can be followed. they can follow that phone. >> it sounds like you would like to see the front door, the proper court door remain open? >> i have my own issues with the patriot act because it is a secret court. one of the great strengths of america has been an independent court system proper balance of rights of individuals. i will give you an example. i am not advocating this, so please don't say this. we can end essentially all crime in this city in a very short period of time except for emotional crime or spur of the moment crime by massive surveillance.

now we should not do this. other countries may choose to do that. the fact that you can do it, the fact that you can for example put cameras on every street corner and do face detection, which is what is has in britain, is not something that you can do. you want to be careful about the tools. they can be seriously misused. let's be clear. that kind of mass surveillance is completely counter to what america is and counter to the american constitution. >> about a year ago after the snowden revelations, the "washington post" polled on how peel felt about surveillance. you will not be surprised to know that 66% of americans if he would the n.s.a. was over surveiling. 69% of americans expressed concern that google was surveiling. >> the good news is we are not. the good news is i can answer it definitively. the answer is no. >> you collect a lot of data.

>> the data shows up in the normal course of operations. >> and it is essential to your business model, fair? >> that's fine. >> so for those americans who are concerned that is in roughly similar numbers, what can you say to them about google and private sector collection work is done? >> people are very concerned about privacy, and i think that the recent illegal disclosures of personal information and photos, the sony attack, the jennifer garner i tacks heightened the sense of a thing that is out of control and dangerous. the average person,, and i occasionally encounter a normal person in the industry. the normally person says i don't understand this, why can't you get this fixed? we are working on that. a lot of these questions come back to am i safe on the

internet. am i about to be attacked by a virus? is my personal information vulnerable? google has answers to that. the people are correctly worried that incredibly important information about them to them, private information, will somehow get released. in google's case we have a whole bump of mechanisms. we have a page which will allow us to retain what we retain about you. there is a way to browse where no information of any kind is maintained about what you are doing. those are public. anyone can use them. good people or bad people, whatever. those are services, and they have been around for a long time. part of my answer to the question of google's role here is we do need to retain a certain amount of information for our systems to work. but unlike many others, we make it very easy for you to delete

that mask it or avoid it entirely. let me change the subject a little bit. >> google now makes the most popular mobile operating systems in the world. we know our government collects information about potentially useful targets. google has put some money into where those may be in its project. how do you feel about your government with your tax money potentially gathering and using those things against your own products? is there an arms race here between the companies and the government? >> i am not as worried about that. the government does a lot of thing that i don't like, and maybe everyone in the room here feels the same way. but the fact of the matter is if you care about security, which i am sure everyone in this room does you should use chrome. the reason you should use chrome is it is free. that is good. faster good.

the safest and most secure. chrome has the did he tech torres that are the best to look look at man in the middle attacks and fishing afacting. >> there is a debate over destroyed -- over android and i.o.s. i have claimed that android were saver. we will be po light and say there is a debate. we are working very hard to make them more safe. >> let me use this opportunity to allow you to potentially clarify some remarks a few years ago in a cnbc interview. you said if you have something you are doing you don't want someone to know, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it the first time. is that still how you feel? >> what is great about that is

it was actually the first moment i actually fell sorry for american politicians. that entire paragraph was about the patriot rot act. if you read it in context, you will see i was commenting on the patriot act. >> if you type in eric schmidt, privacy is dead, it immediately gets filled in by google. >> hopefully. [laughter] it is important to know that that is not driven by google but by frequency of query. google's algorithms did not produce that result. the answer is i am not a fan of the patriot act. the reason is the secret court part of it. i understand secrecy has its purpose and so forth but our country overclassifies a lot of things. a lot of things are classified, et cetera, et cetera. we would be a stronger country

in almost all matters if we were less obnoxious about some of the classifications and some of the ways in which we collect data. i am convinced of it. the greatness of america is the speed with which we address problems, and the way you do that is with noming. the answer is i was referring to the patriot act. i was not talking about the privacy act. google works hard to defend your privacy. >> google ends up in more of these debates than almost any other company in america. you were the first ones out with the glasses. google apparently identifies my desires before i have them and gives me advice on how to organize my day. >> as smart as you are, wouldn't you like the computer to help you organize your day? >> no. >> you heard that. you are in a minority. the average person would like them -- would like the computer

to help them through their day. >> is there something about google that mansion these things potentially hard to untangle. >> we set ourselves up for this a long time ago by talking about don't be evil. when you set a don't be evil strategy, that is a pretty strong line. if people feel like you are violating that rule, they have a strong fight back, and i get that. >> in the particular cases you are describing with google glass, it is interesting. for years we had the ability to do face recognition and tell you who you are going to talk to. at my advanced age, this is a very useful product. i got to the point where we had one of these products where we had a meeting. they have basically said we have built this product. i said what are we going to do. they said we are going to cancel it. i said why? let's start with it is illegal in europe. ok, i got that. in europe it is illegal to maintain a non-registered

non-governmental private database. what about the u.s.? we think it is legal in the u.s., but it is a mistake. why is it a mistake? start thinking about the bad uses stalking all those kinds of things, and we there decided not to release this product. so when google glass comes along, what did we do? normally we have an open approach. with google glass we banned those types of products for precisely those type of reasons. i hear this perception that we are somehow we are not playing by the rules of modern society. i think that is wrong. the evidence is google has been incredibly sensitive for privacy issues over these kinds of things. compared to everyone else in the industry, i will stand on our record. it is because we are so heavily criticized and scrutinized, if we were to make a mistake and release such a product, it

would be a disaster to the company. >> let me take a couple of questions from the audience because we are running out of time. back in the blue shirt. can we get a microphone on him? please be brief. we don't have a lot of time. >> i am paul. my question is does google receive information from the chrome browser that it would not receive from the user if they used some other browser. same question with the android phone. is there a danger that google would have a detailed profile on users that would be available to federer authorities? >> at the level of the question you are asking the answer is no. browsers themselves, the aps do communicate information, but we don't sit there and track things beyond the u.r.l. and where you went. that information you can delete. if you are using the incognito mode, we don't have any information at all.

if you do not wish to be tracked by federal and state authorities, my recommendation is use incognito mode. that is what people do. you then lose the thuntcation services and other data retention services where we retain the information long enough to ma the algorithm better. but if your position i want zero retention, you use incognito mode. >> one more question? >> my name is chris. i work for the aclu. before i ask the question, i want to quibble and say that incognito will do nothing to protect you from surveillance by the government. my question is this -- >> hang on. let me respond to that. i am referring to google's part of that. using torr is another conversation which may or may not be appropriate.

>> in 2009 you were interviewed by n.d.r. and asked by the host of the show why google collected and retained data about users. you gave two reasons. the first one being that google needs a certain amount of data no order to provide the services that it does to customers, to mine data and figure out what they want to do. but the second reason you gave in that interview was to hand it over to law enforcement agencies in response to a subpoena or a search warrant. that was a very surprising response, and i wanted to give you the opportunity to correct the record. >> again, i may have miss spoken, or you may have misheard my request. there are plenty of situations where the law effective wants or requires tracking. there is something called the european data privacy initiative which started this. the way to understand this is there is a balance of interest between civil liberties and short-term police action. if you look at police action,

most of the time when police need information they need relatively recent information. so we negotiated for a long time over all of we negotiated for a long time over all of these issues and came down with a 12-point number -- 12-month number, which is essentially from public safety standpoint, that sort of retention was 12-ish months. that is roughly where the standards have been set. that is what i meant to say if it's helpful. this was not our choice. this is essentially forced on us by governments. the thing about it is governments, the police want to have something they can subpoena in most of these countries especially for a legitimate police case and so forth and so on and that was ultimately how. that is true across the industry. >> we have time for one or two more questions. can we get a microphone for this gentleman here? three rows back? fire away. >> you mentioned key management, you reminded me i had written a

piece a couple years back suggesting google is in a unique position as a defacto identity provider to solve some of the key management problems to make strong encryption something that was not just for geeks but kind of a useable mass phenomenon. the response i got from a lot of people was you got to be kidding me. their business model is collect a bunch of data and use it to serve ads and further purposes. why would they make data less accessible? they don't have any economic incentive. some months ago it was announced i think there was some a sort of test phase of trying to make that, do encryption as a feature compatible with gmail. i wonder how you balance those things. >> the people making these claims don't understand how google works. google's job is to build stuff that delights customers. when governments illegally invade their privacy that's like a negative. right? so it is easy to understand why we would try to make these systems stronger. we don't make decisions based on

revenue but on really delightful products. security and privacy are a key part of them. that's literally how the decisions are made. >> can we get the mike up here again? do you already have one? >> just wanted to check, in europe i understand the united states requests to have features like the right to be forgotten on the internet. i'd like to know what google has done and also in conjunction with the industry to be able to effectively enforce that right. >> thank you for asking. in may we lost a court judgment at the european central court of justice and what they found, which in the european system is like the supreme court, forces the following.

the order says, google shall, as opposed to anyone else determine if information is from a nonpublic person and of nonpublic interest. if it's from a nonpublic person and nonpublic interest, we are required to remove it. even if that information is retained on, for example newspaper sites, the particular court had to do with a fellow who had a tax problem in spain 20 years ago. he wanted the result removed. even though the newspaper is protected by the spanish civil laws. so we have been forced to do that. there are more than 150,000 requests. roughly speaking we grant slightly less than 50% based on the criteria. if people are rejected, they complain about google's choice. they have in theory a right to appeal to their governments although it was unclear to me. we had to spent a great deal of

money to implement this system. it is by force of law and covers the 28 countries and european citizens. in the u.s. there is no such law. >> we'll take one last question right there if we get a microphone for this gentleman in the fourth row. >> yeah. thank you. do you worry that all of the data you collect will be misused somehow some day by your successor, by an employee of yours who was paid or essentially becomes a spy of one kind or another? if you live long enough, you sort of see how things work. >> we do. here's how we think about it. if there were a data breach that was by an internal person at google or something, it would be terrible, obviously for the person breached but also for the reputation of the company. so we have many, many checks and

balances on where information is kept, how it can be misused, and so forth. we pride ourselves on having the best such systems in the world. so while i understand the concern just because of our scale, the combination of the retention rules that we have which is the amount of time we keep this information by query logs, i think we'll be okay. it's important that these breaches not occur. they are against our policy and almost certainly illegal. my successor is larry paige who implemented all these policies so i think we're fine with larry and he is going to be around for a long time. 30 or 40 years from now when perhaps larry and sergei will be older, the same circus and same clowns, right? the same people, all of us who built google have the same view. i'm sure our successors will have the same view. >> thank you, dr. schmidt. [applause] thank you for joining us here today. >> thank you. [captions copyright national

cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> on the next washington journal, stephen moore will talk about the priorities of the 114th congress. then john foubert. jack ohman will join us. we will also take your calls and look for comments on facebook and twitter. washington journal is live every day at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> sunday on q&a, the washington

post fast checker, the biggest pinocchios of 2014. >> democrats in particular get upset by this. i think that they think the media is on their side whereas republicans kind of expect oh, it is important to the washington post not to be fair to me. i kind of hope over the last four years, i have done enough back and forth -- i have the did both parties with equal fervor that people have come to grudgingly say ok, you are someone we can do business with. the senate majority pact, which is affiliated with harry reid

stopped answering my questions midway through campaign season goes they felt they were not getting a fair shake from me. >> sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> next, has representative mike rogers discusses security issues. then a program on security fence post by isis. and then we will look at constitutional powers and how they compare to actions taken by the president. when the new congress convenes in january, republicans will hold their largest majority in the house since the 1928 election with 240 seven members compared to 180 eight democrats. the senate, also under republican control will have 54 republicans in contrast to 44 democrats and 10 independents.

one member who will not be returning is republican representative mike rogers of michigan. he spoke earlier this month about national security issues. this is an hour. >> ok, we'll get started. some folks will join us in progress, as they say. thank you for coming. our guests is representative mike rogers. this is his second visit. he was here in june. we thank him for coming back. our guest grew up in michigan and graduated from adrian college there. after serving in the army, he became an fbi special agent, specializing in corruption cases in chicago. he returned to michigan in 1994 and was elected to the state senate. rising to become majority floor leader. in 2000, he won a hotly contested race. he was reelected six times.

he became chair of the house intelligence committee in 2010. in march, he announced he would leave at the end of the current term to host a radio show for cumulus media. so much for biography. now on to the process of our progress. we are on the record. no live tweeting or filing while the breakfast is underway, to give us time to listen to what our guest says. there is no embargo when the session ends. if you would like to ask a question, please do the traditional thing as is a subtle signal and i will call one and all. we will start off by allowing our guest the opportunity to make some opening comments. then we will go around the table. we will start with chris straw and aaron and julie, guy taylor, and mark thompson. thanks for doing this, sir. >> thank you for having me back. thanks for the opportunity.

i know the breakfast is pretty good. i thought i would not say to offer much. as the chairman of the intelligence committee, it has been a rough couple of years in the intelligence business for those who choose to serving in that capacity, and hopefully we can get through this and get this behind us so we can continue to get out and do what they need to do. i thought it was unprecedented to have the cia director have a press conference at the cia to defend the cia. i'm still trying to figure out what all that means as we move forward. with that, i thought i would give more time for questions than hearing from me. i do have a very riveting 4000-word two-hour presentation on the u.s. tax code. i brought the slides if you need to see them.

>> in terms of figuring things out, we will go around the table. at director brennan's press conference yesterday, do you agree with his assertion that a cause-and-effect relationship between eit's and useful information is unknowable? >> unknowable? >> that's what he said. >> i think it is better than that. i was trained in the report building, interrogation technique, which i think works. however, given the circumstances of which they found themselves in the time in which they found themselves in, with the great unknown of another attack at the time, and remember, we did not have -- we did not really understand all of the way that al qaeda operated.

we had pretty good intelligence, but not great intelligence. after that event had happened, there was a time-sensitive era and one thing about time to make it work. to say it is unknowable, we know there was certainly the events that happened and information that was gleaned that was later used in everything from fully understanding and being able to put pressure on al qaeda to -- when you talk to the people who were in the program, and they adamantly and passionately believed that the information was helpful and useful from enhanced interrogation techniques. >> let me ask another. you said before the release of the senate report that its release will cause violence and death. the initial response seems to have been not overly strong.

do you still think there is going to be violence and death as result? >> yes, and i base that on the fact that foreign leaders said they it would incite violence, foreign intelligence leaders said it would incite violence, and our intelligence people said it would incite violence. we believe it will be used as a propaganda tool for those who will seek to do violence against westerners. just knowing the change in posture in certain operations on behalf of the cia and other organizations, the state department trying to figure out better security for its embassies to deal specifically with this new threat, it is hard to argue that it will not have that impact. >> chris strong from bloomberg? >> thanks, mr. chairman. in response to the question about when director brennan talks about, that the -- is unknowable, that could be a much more nuanced position than

previously stated by the director himself -- [indiscernible] was critical. your comments now seem to be a little more nuanced as well. could you clarify about what you think the eit's were in terms of the value and what was gleaned from them? >> i believe information that was gleaned through those inherent enhanced interrogation techniques served to stabilize and provided intelligence on al qaeda we had not previously had before. i believe that because everybody i talk to at the agency, when you follow pieces of information that came out of those interviews that were used in the near term and sometimes in the long term had inherent value in ways they did not have before. i do not know how you say -- you

may have said if we had taken 90 days and talked to them, maybe we would have gotten the same information, but that is not what happened. they went through this process they have got information that clearly can be executed to saving lives in the united states. i'm not sure how much more unnuanced i can become, and that is from talking to people. one of the things that we are reacting to the report, they did not interview one person that was involved in the interrogation program or the information that came out of the interrogation program that was used in other investigations in order to put the pieces together. and i think many people have the notion that in one event somebody was going to say i am in, osama bin laden is at 123 main street, and that there is the whole network.

no one was going to believe that because it was an organization based on compartmentalization. if you get a piece of information that is, verifiable -- very valuable, the name of the courier, the description of a courier, all those things, you can use that information that to put together the conclusion, but if you do not have it, you cannot get to the conclusion. to say that it is unknowable, i am not sure -- i would disagree with that. i think it is knowable. america has made the decision, we did not want to do it this way, which is what we had legislation and all of that. that part to me we have settled. i do not know why we would debate the value of it. that to me was clear by all of the people we talked to who participated. >> i am going to go back further in time to benghazi and the benghazi report. one of the conclusions you reached in it was that there was

no intelligence failing, and yet the report describes a number of instances that i do not know what they are, and i would like to hear what you are characterizing them as, the cia apparently was unaware that their route to the diplomatic compound had been blocked. it took them 42 minutes to travel a mile. they did not know the libyan general who set up transportation from the airport was untrustworthy and turned off his phone. they allowed the analysts here in washington reading bad news accounts to dictate what had actually taken place there instead of asking the station chief and other witnesses, which is why we had the talking points problem for so long. failing, what is it? >> and this is the broader question of what is an

intelligence failure. if every time there is a successful attack in afghanistan, iraq, or syria, that is an intelligence failure, we ought not to get out of the bed in the morning. the strategic intelligence saying we had a higher threat environment and here is why, was actually done. and it was done for months. what we did was we reviewed, i think it was 4000 cables leading up to the 9/11 event and it clearly outlined a deteriorating security posture in benghazi and libya in general. you could see it when you started at one end and got to the other, you could see the deterioration happening over time. they had referenced that the other nations, the brits who had pulled out, and the others who pulled out because of the security posture was not great. we had testimony from some of the security, cia security officials at one time in august when they wanted to merge that two facilities, who said we are

not coming, this is an unsafe facility, and you need to fix it, talking to the state department regional security office personnel on the ground. none of that happened. to say every time there is a specific event is an intelligence failure, i would disagree with that. they have the context right. the event on that night we did not know, or they do not know, i should say, to clarify, but to say it was an intelligence -- there was a notice on the cia wall that night that you should be in a heightened posture because of the deterioration of the security footprint and the likelihood that something was going to happen on 9/11. with that memo, that memo was posted at the cia that something bad was going to happen. the problem was they were not prepared for it.

it was a different question indeed. clearly, the state department was not in a configuration for the security environment in which they were in. that was very clear to me. that was out of the lane of the investigation for us other than it was the cia who loaded up their cars and headed over there. in any changing situation on the ground, it would be crazy to think that in a changing battle environment, which it was, that the roads were blocked were not blocked. they were blocked because people moved in because there was clearly an event that had been at least some level of preplanning going into that particular night. >> they moved very quickly. let me follow up real quickly on this. are you saying the cia was not prepared for 9/11? >> the cia annex was never breached. they took casualties, and that was a tragic loss of life, but they were never breached. their facility was never breached, and they had a fairly significant assault on the facility. the temporary mission facility maybe i misspoke, the temporary mission facility was willfully

-- woefully unprepared. not only were agent assigned for the security -- they were not prepared, and probably not the right experienced agents to be there, but they were not even configuring the compound in a way that would be safe. the cia had told them that in august before the september attack. matter of fact, one of the striking quotes to me was that one of the security officers told one of the agents, the state department agents, that if you do not change what you are doing here and get some help you are going to die here. i do not know how much clearer you get, that you got a problem. their problem was they told the cia we had asked for it and we had asked for it and we are getting no response. >> another quick follow-up. isn't chris stevens, who was in office, key? he would have been responsible for making sure the security was

ultimately ok at that temporary facility. ultimately that was his responsibility -- >> that was out of the lane of my investigation, so my investigation -- >> i mean, he is the ultimate security officer. >> it is our understanding, and this was out of my lane in the investigation, that they had requested, including the ambassador, that they get more help from the state department. i think that is a huge question that needs to be answered. we do not want this to happen again, and you want to completely understand what happened at the temporary mission facility, than those questions have to be answered. there has been no investigation into that thread, which is where the select committee is going to -- appears to be focusing. my report was very narrow, it was only on the intelligence activities, and i think we

answered those questions. we have never put one piece of information in if i could not corroborate it. and it is hard, because people do change in a very high-adrenaline combat environment. two people can see the same things in two different ways. it does not mean one is wrong or misleading. it means that in that crazy environment, the high-adrenaline environment, you might recollect things differently. that is why we use all of the levels of corroboration that we did for each of the findings in the report. >> i want to ask a question on -- do you think that congress will or should bring up the nsa report again, or do you think the threat of isis or other groups will put a damper on that -- efforts to do that? >> they had to do something. the 215 portion of the bill and the 702 portion expire, and not having 702 and 215 or some shape or variation of it would

certainly hinder the national security of the united states. i hope they can work it out between now and next year. i think there are still some hurdles to remain. i think they will come to a conclusion before june. i think the adults in the room will understand that we have got to have these provisions and push back on what i believe is the wrong narrative on what is actually happening or not happening in that space. and i think -- the whole notion of that program, which i find ironic now facing the threat that we have, was to make sure that if somebody overseas, a terrorist identified overseas, was coming into the united states, we had a way to figure out who that was and who they were talking to. when you think there are 20,000 western passport holders

fighting and becoming more radicalized in eastern syria under the isil banner, that is a significant told that we better have in our toolbox or we are going to be in trouble, because those people are going to come home and you're are going to have known identified terrorists calling somebody saying saying operation is a go, get at it. if we do not have the ability to figure that out, we are going to have some problems here. i think we are going to get to a place where people understand the threat versus what we are actually doing and what protections are on that information, and i think americans, if they have the facts and we all agreed on the same set of data facts, will be with in support of these programs, because they are well overseen. >> back to a question -- [indiscernible] and more broadly, the couple years -- what can congress do,

the administration, or intelligence community do to - -- to move beyond this? >> yeah, well, the intelligence community needs to get up every morning to get information to protect the united states. thankfully, they are incredibly dedicated people who believe in their mission or would not do it, and it is a difficult one on its best day. as far as the european union and all of them talking of the u.n. about prosecuting and all of that, obviously, that is incredibly disappointing. this is not the definitive report. the department of justice it a -- did a criminal investigation and found no wrongdoing. they said a statement that when

the report came out there was nothing in here that was new to them that would change their outcome for that. and so unfortunately, one of the -- the collateral damage of releasing a report that is partisan in nature, the methodology is certainly in question. they interviewed zero people. i do not know how you come to a conclusion on anything without interviewing anybody. that does make no sense to me. this is that collateral damage where these countries will take full advantage of it and find one more reason to kick around the united states. i think it's unfortunate. we ought to push back on every opportunity on any efforts that would make to go after u.s. citizens who are working on behalf of the u.s. government to protect the united states and stand up for our national security. >> hi, i had a question about the reports. have you read it? >> the summary. >> [indiscernible] >> hmm. they took raw -- pardon?

>> did you know everything? >> i never claimed to know everything even though i am a member of congress and they will tell you that know everything. the graphic in nature of the description and what surprised me was the strong conclusion that each room in the report without corroboration of evidence or testimony. that not only surprised me that shocked me they would draw those conclusions without corroboration besides a cable. two people can see the same event and have a different recollection. that is why you do eyewitness testimony and put it together. i was surprised -- there was no -- >> to follow-up. about the press conference yesterday with the cia. it was very strange. it was weird. you said you tried to figure out

what it meant. one possibility is the idea of -- i was wondering looking back, what areas of secrecy could be improved upon? what do you think that does not need to be secret? >> we promise to pay the electricity bill and the light keeps going on and off. exactly. >> you said it did not provide context or interview the people who were there. you had the information that could have been provided -- not the report itself but what extent of the american people -- >> we went through this already which is why we ended up with a army field manual. we went through this

self-loathing where we kicked ourselves for doing something wrong. i am not saying there are things they do not -- but, we went through this process. and we corrected it and we legislated on it. and the department of justice reviewed it. i do not know what we gained. i know what the consequences were. i do not know what we gained. we already had this discussion. as the chairman, my job was oversight of the 16 agencies and budget authorization and policy review and making sure we were successful. it gets left off the table often. we need to be sure they have the tools and resources and the classification to get their job done. it means sometimes disclosure if it hurts your friends and allies trying to help you, you do not do it.

it is like your family. you don't tell everything that happens to your family in public at every occasion. it would be interesting to read. when you think about what we have done, yeah, there were some issues. we corrected them. again, no criminal wrongdoing in the context a right after 9/11. one of the people interrogated said, he answered the question are there any other imminent attacks planned? he said, you will soon find out. it is right after 9/11 and we just lost 3000 people and those folks are told, stop another attack, how would we sit back in the comfort of our non-attack country for 10 years and say, i wouldn't have made that decision. it seems a little bit hypocritical. and now, we have erred things that were not partisan and

showed sometimes the dysfunction of our congress more than the dysfunction of what happened at the agency. they went through the process of cleaning up and making sure it doesn't happen again. what we have done is hurt our friends overseas. now why have to deal with this notion of what we do when the eu and united nations tried to find out the identities and goes after our intelligence overseas. it makes it tough on our embassies to do their jobs. there's only one force left for good in the world and that is the united states of america which it does not ask for much. it has been a pretty good role for us. now we find ourselves, will be less able to provide information to our european allies. i don't know why that help anybody. that's my frustration.

somehow, it was new information. at some point, you have to stop talking about the things we corrected and move on. my argument was we didn't, stop talking about it. now people who had nothing to do with this program will pay the price. it hardly seems a good decision. >> "the washington times." >> you sound pretty frustrated actually by this. i want to take it in another direction for a moment and give you a unique opportunity given you have had this position presiding over dozens of classified -- from the intelligence community, cia. the threat posed to the united states by al qaeda and isis. now that you are moving on from

the spotlight -- [laughter] >> enhanced interrogation. [laughter] >> i'm really good at timing. >> i wonder on your personal view of if the united states is winning the war on terrorism that the bush administration created and the week the months after 9/11 and has been the background of so much of this back and forth the heated debate. and can you give us -- say why? not given your unique position and what we could or should be doing differently as new threats of the islamic state appear. >> i will disagree about the premise that the war of terror was created by george bush. america was at war with radical

islam long before 9/11. we just didn't know it. we just yawned it off. the bombings in east africa that took -- these were terrorist acts that took innocent lives. the 1993 bombing at the twin towers. the -- my memory fails me at three or 4 others i could tuck in. after the 9/11 commission took the review of this, they said one of the things that struck felt was every time the united states didn't really react. al qaeda got more emboldened. america is not going to do anything, matter-of-fact and some of the interrogations, they thought america was weak and soft and presented a good target for them.

within the same understanding that the 9/11 commission found leading up to 9/11, they had been attacking us. they had been trying to kill us. they are trying to engage us. we didn't do anything about it. that's how we got to 9/11. i think i forgot. and so this notion that it was new, the approach to handling once they slaughtered 3000 people, we thought we'd better do something about it. that changed the fundamental approach. and isis was not created by us being engaged or us being there, it was an organization that had pledged allegiance to al qaeda and about 2006 and they have relationships in 2005. they wanted to credibility of al qaeda that brought to the terrorists fight in their minds.

with it came resources and recruiting and other things beyond the region which is why we have some 21 al qaeda affiliates we track. and so, what happened in the change with isis or isil was the fact that many people argued it was about brutality. they decided that back then it was too brutal and they wanted no part. it's nonsense. what it was, he wanted to start doing attacks outside syria. the leader of al qaeda said, no, i wanted to stay in syria and attack assad. he knew he had something interesting happening. because they were holding ground, people were being recruited like crazy. in the early days, they had a couple of thousand people with western passports.

if you think about 9/11, they didn't have the ability to easily get into the united states. they had to have an elaborate plan. they raise money. they did have a lot of that is they raised enough and put the plan together to get people not western passport holders into the united states. he looked at it like i have a lot of money and lots of people and i am winning the fight on the ground and i have the ability to get these people back into the west and in the early days, it was europe. that's how they split. he decided he wanted to go into the holding of ground and as when he decided to go into western iraq. he thought he could count on the western sunni tribal leaders to be with him and they were.

because of the al-maliki issue. it is about confluence of events that led us to where we are today. when we disengage from the world, we didn't answer the sunni arab leaders' call of trouble rising in eastern syria, al qaeda that we know as isis that was there. we made conscious decisions to disengage. when we did that, they took full advantage to run rampant in the eastern syria and western iraq. and so, the direct i never saw as bad as i see today. i have been on the committee for a decade credit i have never seen it so bad. you have more individuals who are associated with radical islam, or are saying they have either an aspiration or capability to do attacks in the west. europe, the united states. we don't think they will have the capabilities to pull it off

but others we believe are. here is the dangerous change. half of the affiliates have expressed overtly or covertly support for the goals and aims of isil. you say, what does it mean? they connect to their logistics framework and that gives them the ability if they need something to pull off an attack, money or were searching -- or a certain capability, now my reach has expanded pretty significantly.

i do think we have huge challenges. we have spent the past few years -- i have had significant disagreements with the administration about how hard we make it on the people in intelligence, special operators to do the work they need to do to disrupt. and so, it's a combination of pulling back, deciding were not going to disengage through muscular -- and we weren't going to rally around breaking sunni nations into the fight early on against this. those mistakes had huge consequences just like i argued would not do anything prior to 9/11. we just let it fester. we are in the process of letting it fester. the longer it goes, the more likely there will be a successful attack in the united states or europe. that's my frustration. we have certain capabilities we leave on the table a causal we debate among ourselves and not of making sure every little detail is perfect. you can't fight a conflict if every single detail is perfect. some would say, maybe we need to take the risk at home. that's great if you are someplace that isn't the highlight of one of the suggested attacks. it will eventually cause you harm and pain economically if there is another attack. i saw some estimates of $1 trillion in lost economy after 9/11. that impacted us all.

i argue we still -- [indiscernible] >> were not configured today to win the fight. if were still having this conversation five or six or seven years from now, we're going to be in worse trouble. the longer that the world sees them as winning, the more recruits that will get and they will be western recruits and that's what we see happening. that's just the fact. more people showing up still. the plan is, let's not let them

take kobani. let's not let them do that or take village a or b. that's not a plan for victory. work also removing their strategy and logistics. they're functioning like an organization that wants to be there for a long time. we're functioning like a country that is tired of it. the problem is, they're not tired of it. they're still in the fight. >> we'll go to mark thompson and david, robert, elena, paul, and david. it's a logistical note. >> [indiscernible] your career has an interesting arc. you rap in one of the most interesting and valuable seats to pay attention to what is going on. i wonder what you have seen and what you have learned. after 9/11, we had bad guys that hit us with our airplanes.

-- i wonder what you have seen and what you have learned. after 9/11, we had bad guys that hit us with our airplanes. [indiscernible] maybe there were lucky the first time and they couldn't get lucky again. we now have isis and see thugs with social media skills scaring us to death. my question is the military said we cannot do it alone in iraq or syria. you might've heard that in 10 years ago we didn't. hillary clinton says -- [indiscernible] but given the current state of the global war of terror, do you believe in tone, we are on the right course to deal with this?

>> no, currently. and remember, some notion you will sit down and drink tea with people who cut of people heads and use of rape, it is -- we are fooling ourselves. they are fully committed to using violence to subjugate populations. they have killed more muslims than christians or jews. i think -- which is why we have lost an opportunity about a year and a half ago to pull our sunni nation leaders, this was the opportunity to stand together with our sunni nation leaders. it risked more muslims than christians or jews or americans or europeans.

and so, we risk that but cause we thought we were going to disengage from the world. what is so striking to me, i have to political policy to really watch it from the inside with all of the access from the classified information to watch that unravel. just absolutely reconfirmed why i believe engagement in the world is so absolutely important. i watched it happen. and we didn't gain respect in the world. i would argue we lost respect in the world. when i have foreign leaders --

let me tell you one anecdotal story. i befriended a middle eastern official and we were working through cooperative issues we wanted to trying to help our intelligence community builder the relationships as well. after one meeting, this intelligence official grabbed my arm and said, when you do me a favor? tell americans not to give up on themselves. who else would help somebody like us in a place like this and ask for nothing and risk your lives to do it? the russians? the chinese? he said it can only be americans. unfortunately, he was killed maybe six months later by a suicide bomb attack, but to me that was a great way to sum up what they saw happening. america pulling away saying it is too hard and too difficult and we don't want to be sympathetic. we just want out. the problem is in the world we live in, that is an unconscionable decision. i see the same happening in afghanistan.

with asked half of the population to come out, women, we have more women in school and their lifespan has gone from something like 41 to 63. that is what america is. we spent most of our times talked about how bad we are and how terrible we are and we never get it right. i think that's dangerous and dangerous for the world and the russians love it and the chinese love it and the iranians love it. they can't wait to continue this narrative about how bad the united states is. we are making a serious mistake. it is that change. >> [indiscernible] you seem to be saying the obama administration. >> they kicked it off but a wing of my party is isolation. very much pushing this notion we should disengage from the world. wing is probably the wrong description of but a group of individuals in my party joining

with a marginal group and the democrats who decided isolation is the problem -- is the answer and nobody has explained why. it kicked off under president obama. his rhetoric has not been great. i do not hear any rhetorical speeches about the greatness of america. i hear a speech about every two weeks about how we're doing something wrong. think about it. if you turn on the tv and you don't live in the united states, you'd think we have massive raise problems across america. we are locking people up and throwing them in the basement and torturing them on a daily basis and we can't get our engagement overseas rights. we should just leave. that's what the world is seeing. that's what i've seen over time. i have a great distinction to see not just from a 30,000 foot level but from the folks who are in the gritty side of international engagement.

i think it has cost more lives than it was ever safe. >> mr. sanger? >> thanks for doing this. let me turn you to two subjects you have not talked about today. one is cyber and one is iran. would you look back as you have been doing over the course of your time, one of the issues in trying to develop a cyber determinant has been our troubles contributing attacks. think about the sony attack underway now. a week or two trying to figure out if it's the north koreans or someone else. sending out e-mails about angelina jolie.

we have had the same problem with the attacks on the white house and state department. in the same problem with jpmorgan chase. i'm going back to the summer. if you go back further, a longer list. i'm wondering, first on that one, what you can tell us about why this problem has been so difficult for the united states to solve and how it fits into the overall strategy your been pushing? >> americans have a healthy distrust of their government and i say that in a good way. it is a healthy distrust of their government. the narrative on cyber, we got on the solution, the wrong side of the narrative of what it meant and what we're trying to accomplish as a government.

but i can tell you why sony is a game changer when it comes to cyber in the united states. i do believe is getting much much better. it went relatively unnoticed. i saw some reporting on it. if you take at face value according to public reports as a nationstate that did this in retaliation for some wrongdoing they believed or perceived, they didn't go and steal, we have been getting ripped off at breathtaking pace as many countries get in on it because there's no consequence. they destroy data on the machines. they try to take pieces of the company down. if you take it at face value reports, the nationstate decided

retribution act could result in us to storing data and breaking down a company. we have seen it before with iran which is why the nationstate may have better capabilities that people assumed they had. you have the iranian government attacking and almost taking you down. 30,000 computers. not one computer works and you are not getting the data and not getting data back off of it. that's a huge, disruptive problem. they took a lot of it of releasing the information and the chaos and damage. >> you still believe it's a nationstate? >> public reports -- >> you believe it is a nationstate? >> i'm not in a position to answer that question. our attribution is getting much better.

it's getting much better. >> even though would've not been able to publicly attribute? >> there are security companies that have attributed. as former fbi, when a nationstate says this group and does not know who it is indeed on behalf of the north korean people because of the leader and we appreciate it, i would say, that's a clue. [laughter] >> to iraq question. we have these negotiations going on and could argue we are in a better place than we were a year ago. iran. a good deal of material they were producing could be used for bomb materials. what is your assessment with the actual weapons side? to work on the design?

do you have a sense we have not been [indiscernible] what is your sense? how does that match will what the administration has been saying? >> i have had concerns from the very beginning. the very first was when the iranians came after this first secret deal which was the first problem and said, we have the right to enrich, as secretary kerry said we never agreed to enrich. and were talking about how the right to enrich looks. the whole point of sanctions was to get them to not have the ability. how we don't look at as a major setback and we rarely talk about the consequences of a nuclear iran. we are already seeing it.

uae under the agreement which was the gold standard on how to move forward, a nuclear enrichment program, they agree would happen separately and the removal of the material. why we would do this to our friends and engaged and allow enrichment for people known adversaries into our friends, i don't know how we say this is successful. we have no view into the research. without that trigger, you can do it. -- you can't do it. were any of the weaponization modeling. all of that happens at a facility which they told us we can't get at. we've given them the right -- [indiscernible] i think there's a reason. i'm not that bright. it seems when the iranians saying you can see everything but what we are doing here. by the way, they continue to do ballistic research. that has gone unabated, which tells you that they are maneuvering to the table to get to a very short period of time.

you can do a lot at testing through computer models. the hardest part is getting the materials and configuration of which can function on the head of a missile. that's one of the most difficult things to do. you don't necessarily have to have that test in order to get there. trigger research, modeling weaponization home and ballistic missile research continues. we have given them extensions which is one of the reasons they needed to continue their bad acting. we've told our allies in the region, we do not trust our allies enough that we will give you information which i will use a technical term -- hawk them off. it was a sign of disrespect in their minds and we didn't trust

them. and their suffering under the weight of iranian actions through the region. if you saw saudi arabia, certainly concerning, what the iranians were doing with hamas at a time when they were engaged in exchange of gunfire with israel. you see where they're at in the bad acting in baghdad. think about it from their perspective, they are sitting there saying we're getting killed over there by those guys in their engage in activities that are dangerous. and you're marching them down the path of [indiscernible] that's why the saudis are going to nuclear and turkey will do this. if were under some naïve notion it isn't going to cause a nuclear arms race, we're fooling

ourselves. they are setting the table. that is why i am so opposed. we have given a lot and we have gotten very little other than that they keep talking. that's to their advantage. >> a two-part question about the question of could we have gotten the information that came from these techniques. could we have gotten it some other way. as a philosophical matter, in the abstract, is it ok to torture if it provides actual intelligence that we deem useful? and the second part is, do you think that things like waterboarding, rectal beating

and things like this, doesn't qualify as torture? >> to me, with answered all of those questions. we did after all of this happened. we have changed it. none of those techniques exist today or will be used. to me, you don't have to be hypothetical. it's gone. we've answered it. it is gone. we haven't done it for decades. the cia hasn't done it for a decade. so i think with answered the question. i think americans have answered that question. i think where americans are -- i think where americans are upset, there looking back and the government told them they would protect them, gave them authority and information from individuals who are hardens, brutal, mass murderers. they did it and now we want to ruin their lives and careers and put them in jail. i think that is what most americans are upset. they get we did not want to go that way. that is why it just shocked me

-- why, why now? we had all these reasons for no, very few reasons for yes, why we released this report. again, knowing we had answered all of these questions in the past. >> i have a couple of security related questions. as you are leaving congress -- who do you plan to pass on your cyber mantle to? [indiscernible] information sharing that should be a focal point in congress or other things? >> no, so our bill collapsed last weekend, on friday. it hit an impasse in the senate and what it allow the information sharing a bill which was unfortunate.

sony showed that now there is a disruptive part of the cyberattacks which is very dangerous and imagine you are a financial institution. that has economic consequences. it should keep us all up at night. [indiscernible] >> it has to come that the next year. we are in discussion with folks with what it might look at. cause for cyber sharing. it's the one quick, easy way you can get at a big part of the problem. the narrative has been so distorted. most americans, i went back to my district and talked about cyber sharing what they believed the nsa was doing. they believed the nsa monitors private networks. that's against the law for them to do it. the rhetoric was so overwhelming the other way, it was very difficult to get to that conclusion.

what we were trying to do and why it's so important, nsa goes overseas and sees really nasty source code very always tried to do was say that if you can do this in real time, and only share them -- the malicious source code, you could stop a lot of problems to witness have them all. so a lot of them. that collapsed around misguided notions of what they believed to the nsa is going to monitor private networks. >> what changes next year?

>> i got associated with that, go figure. i think the level of the attacks will only get worse. i fear that they will be able to pull off a significant attack that has real financial consequences. if you just take the public information by private security companies, we know that nationstates have been on our critical infrastructure and they are waiting to cost-effective capabilities in case of a conflict. we know they have penetrated it. we know they were successful. we know they were successful on getting into our financial networks, large financial institutions, not once, but twice. the problem is somebody at some point is going to decide to flip the switch.

when they do, we will have a significant economic catastrophic event. my fear is we are just actually waiting for the benevolence of the bad guys. that is a losing equation from always. i fear it would take something like that to get most members of congress to understand the real threat. it's easy to say that i will stop the nsa spying on you. because they don't spy on you. i thought target would kind of do it. we are finally seeing how sophisticated these gosar. it was an international state

capability. it went to others. now it's medical records, financial records. sony, maybe because it's the entertainment business, but the result is on the public psyche is i want to be a movie producer . those guys like a lot of money. my fear is that if we don't fit that bill, i think you are here, i'm not sure what it was a good idea. again, i fear if we don't start getting on the defend ourselves side of the trouble. parts we're out of time. thank you for doing this. -- >> we are out of time. i want to thank you for doing this. when does it start? >> in january.

>> daunting. thank you. thank you everybody. >> new year's day on the c-span network, here are some of our featured programs. the washington ideas forum. at 4:00 p.m. eastern, the historical society holds a conversation on race and 8:00 from the explorers club, apollo seven astronauts on the first manned flight. new year's day on c-span 2 author hector tobar on the 30 men buried in a mind. richard norton smith on the life of nelson rockefeller. former investigative

correspondent for cbs news, cheryl atkinson on her experiences reporting on the obama administration. new year's day on history tv at 10:00 a.m. eastern, juanita abernathy on her experiences and the role of women in the civil rights movement. at 4:00, brooklyn college reverser on the link between alcohol and politics. hidden in 5:00 p.m., hard to list draws guest cartoonist draws characters. new year's day on the c-span networks. for our complete schedule, go to c-span.org. >> monday night on the communicators, amy mitchell, on political polymerization and where people get their news. >> they are still really the

largest and the outlet that has the greatest percentage of the american public use and. about half of respondents said they got critical news from facebook in the past week. social media, facebook in particular, about on par with local television and some the other top outlets. so we clearly plays a role in how people are learning and who they are communicating with. what we found we broke down the differences i don't logically is the consistent conservatives were much more likely to have friends and see political posts that are more in-line line with their own political thinking. more so than those that are mixed and then consistent liberals. consistent liberals are much more likely to defend somebody to drop somebody because of their political views. >> monday night on the

communicators on c-span 2. >> more on threats posed by isis. he testified on capitol hill about the obama administration's against isis. he spoke about the humanitarian situation in the region. this was before the house foreign affairs committee, it is two hours. >> this hearing will come to order, i will ask those in the audience to take their seats at this time. this morning we welcome back ambassador mcgirk who was one of

the few sounding the isis alarm as early as you did. we were having hearings last february to discuss the need to use airpower to turn back isis. after four months of the u.s.-led air campaign in iraq and in syria, isis still controls essentially the same amount of territory than it did in the summer. and one of the reasons for this in my opinion is the limited nature of this effort. we have conducted only about 1,000 air strikes to date, to date. now if you -- if you compared that to when saddam hussein invaded kuwait, and the response on the part of the united states, back then, we had 1,000 sortes per day. so you get an idea in terms of the response and how minimal it is compared to what we have seen in the past to deter an entity like this.

moreover, the committee is concerned by reports that targeting has been micromanaged from the white house. this clearly has been an issue within the pentagon. but even with this flawed air campaign, kurdish and iraqi security forces have pushed isis out of specific key infrastructure areas, such as mosul and the haditha dams. they have shed more of their blood and more air attacks would mean more isis defeats. another parallel to the administration's effort to pair -- but when we look at that program in syria, u.s.backed groups have seen no increase in

support in the past several months. in fact, the syrian groups have suffered from dire ammunition shortages in the last several weeks. we had meetings with a representative recently. they're out of ammunition. in addition to not being supplied with the heavy weapons they need to fight isis, and at the same time as they're fighting isis, for example on the border there, aleppo has isis on one side and 30, 40 air strikes a day, barrel bombs being dropped from the assad regime on their forces while they're trying to fight isis. in iraq, the kurdish peshmerga remain the most effective fighting force against isis, but the administration and baghdad have refused thus far to supply them with anything more than light weapons as they go up against isis's tanks and tar tillry and of these and other heavy weapons.

tragic event a couple of weeks ago, when you had a small squadron of peshmerga try to take on ten tanks or ten armored personnel carriers, ten pieces of armor that were put into play by isis against them. they only had small arms, and as a consequence, they called in for air strikes, but after 2 1/2 hours, it took quite a considerable time for these air strike to come in. they had been wiped out on the ground. this is why we have heard from the foreign minister, that the situation for the peshmerga, with their need for armor and for artillery, for long range mortars, for anti-tank missiles,

that unmet need has had very real consequences for them. i am hopeful that the recent accord announced between baghdad and irbill which i appreciate the administration has helped engineer, will speed support for the kurds. if not, the ranking member and i have an intention to do just that. 60 plus countries have joined the anti-isis campaign, some key partners continue to perceive the administration's strategy as misguided. turkey for one has with held use of its air base, ground forces and other resources and the saudis and other arabs don't see how allowing assad to pummel those on the ground from the air in aleppo makes any sense. instead, they push of course for a no fly area along the kurdish border where they suggest they and jordan can patrol that long-term to keep from having

the presyrian forces hit from the air by assad if it's very time they're trying to fight against isis. meanwhile, there are grave security -- allowing isis to control an area of that size. there were 15,000 foreign fighters within isis and recordedly isis has been recruiting 1,000 new fighters per month. this is part of the problem of not turning back isis is that on social media, they use the argument that they're on the advance, they're carrying out their jihad and of course this resonates with certain young men who enlist in their cause. this is why we would argue that a more effective strategy that

would roll them back would hurt their recruiting effort. and these fighters, particularly with western passports, have the potential to attack us at home. as members may remember, when secretary kerry testified here in september, he said it's time for the defensive strategy we and our international partners have pursued thus far to transition to an offensive strategy. ambassador mcgirk, with a lack lurser air campaign, severely under supplied partners on the ground and key allies with deep concern about the president's strategy, i just don't see how this is a credible offense. and we would like to talk to -- i would like to ask you about that. and of course next congress, this committee expects to consider a new authorization for use of military force to support this effort and that is something we will do under a time frame that is befitting of the gravity of the issue. and the committee also expects that the commander in chief will come to congress with his request and work in a bipartisan

way to garner maximum support. before turning to the ranking member, i would like to note that this is last full committee hearing of the 113th congress and we have accomplished a lot during the last 13 years of which i would like to recognize all the members for their contribution and for those members who will not be return we wish you well and i was going to turn to mr. angle at this time whose long held observations on syria have proven prophetic. he has seen thing as they really were on the ground, frankly before many and suggested a strategy to engage isis before this committee some two years ago. while we wait for the ranking member, my suggestion then would be that we go, ambassador to your testimony and after you conclude, he will make his opening statement. ambassador mcgirk.

>> the ambassador recently served as the dep -- isil, working alongside general howell, he currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for iraq and iran, he was previously senior advisors to ambassadors ryon rocker, christopher hill, and james jeffrey in baghdad. without objection, the witness's full statement will be made part of the record, members will have five calendar days to submit statements and questions and ex traneous materials for the record. >> it is an honor to appear again before this committee to provide an upgrade on the global campaign to degrade and defeat

isil. i would like to reflect briefly in how far we have come in the six months since the city of mosul in iraq fell. i was in northern iraq on june 10, six months ago today when mosul collapsed. during the next 72 hours, other cities fell, isil's -- to the west, a lesser noted but equally devastating offensive took place from across the syrian border with isil capturing the strategic border city, isis then poured down the euphrates valley. in baghdad during this period, just six months ago this week, there was a growing panic within the population, the government security services and the diplomatic community. at the embassy we prepared for the worst-case scenario and evacuated 1,500 people moving them to amman, kuwait -- the president ordered four initiatives to hold the line and

set the condition force a possible counter offensive. first we served intelligence over the skies of iraq, we went from flying one platform per month to 60. second, we established joint operations centers in baghdad and irbill restoring critical relationships with iraqi and kurdish commanders. third, we deployed special forces team with a focus on the defense of baghdad. and finally and perhaps most importantly, we supported the iraqis as they work to stachbtd up to a new and more inclusive government. throughout the summer months we work these four tracks simultaneously -- while supporting the iraqi political

leaders as they set up a new government. for all of these reasons on august 8, when the president first ordered u.s. military forces to conduct air strikes in iraq, we were able to act with precision and efficacy. one month later, the iraqi parliament -- new and different leaders across every cabinet position. including oil, finance and defense. this new government led by prime minister abbadi. first it's governing philosophy is decentralization or a functioning federalism within the constitutional structure of iraq. last week's historic oil accord with the kurdistan region is an outgrowth of this new policy. second the new government has committed to significant security reforms including a smaller more agile army, strengthening security forces at the local level, including tribal forces and ultimately provincial based national guard.

third, the government is submitted to a policy of restoring -- maintaining iraqi's independence. even in its first 100 days, the government has made agreement -- nonetheless, despite this progress, the challenge of this new government are truly enormous. isil has thousands of fighters controlling three major cities in iraq. the iraqi economy which had been growing at 4% per year is now predicted to contract due to falling oil prices. this new government despite the promise simply cannot defeat isil and stabilize iraq on its own. it will need the support of the united states and the world. that is why we will need a global campaign to prosecute an effort against isil, last week in brussels, kerry held a -- common and shared commitment across five lines of effort.

this conference for the first time formalized a global coalition to defeat and degrade isil. the lines of effort include military support to our -- humanitarian support and deal with -- we're now seeing progress along each of these lines of effort. on the military side, there are now seven countries flying combat air missions over iraq. as a result of these strikes isil's offensive has been halted, it's ability to mass and maneuver forces degraded, it's leadership cells eliminated. in the past 60 days alone, iraqi forces have retaken ground at mosul dam, and down baghdad. they have also held the line. efforts to generate additional forces, specifically 12 new

brigades, will soon begin at multiple sites across iraq in cooperation from our coalition partners. in syria, coalition air -- massive isil assault leading to significant attrition of isil fighters. they are now losing 100 fighters per week including top commanders and p top foreign fighters. on combating foreign fighters, we now have in place a chapter 7 security council resolution calling on all major states to send -- criminalizing foreign fighter related activities and in the past month alone, foreign fighter networks have been broken up in austria, malaysia and foreign fighters prosecuted in germany and the usa. we're cutting the avenues of revenues and destroys isil's refining capacity.

these efforts are now having an impact. on a humanitarian front, much has been done but far more is noted and this was a key focus of our conference in brussels last week. we have begun a campaign, fatwas issued from top religious leaders declaring isil a direct threat to islam, and other coalition partners are working to establish operations rooms to combat social media programs and messaging campaigns in real time. as president obama's envoys to the anti-isil coalition, we have visited 16 capitals. we have found the coalition strongly and firmly united. particularly when it comes to the way we interact. the situation in syria is more complex and our tools for the moment more limited. general allen and i have a common set of questions about the best way forward in syria and also a divergence in how to proceed.

many of our coalition partners have not envisioned themselves as signing up to bring a transition. ensuring such a transition potentially even more destabilizing than the situation we face now. at the same time, other coalition partners are urging strikes against the assad regime, considering the regime a central source of instability in the region. our message to all these partners has been clear. we believe there must be a political transition in syria through a negotiated political process. any future government cannot include bashar al assad which remains a magnet for terrorism in the region. a political transition will also require a strong counter weight to extremists like isil. that is why the department is leading an effort to modernize forces subject to funding from congress. this process of course will take time and throughout we will constantly assess how we can ensure the moderate forces in

the field are able to protect themselves against moderate threats cloug isil and the syrian regime. in conclusion looking back six months ago at this very hour, we have begun to make progress against isil, but i want to emphasize this will be a long-term, multiarea campaign. we are now in the earliest faces of phase one. as we move into a new phase, we will require ongoing support from congress. >> i think i will start with my questions and then when elliott arrives, he can give his opening statement and i'll ask his and we'll go down the line. ambassador, as you know, the syrian city of aleppo is the last major city, the last refuge of the syrian middle class, it's under the partial control of the moderate syrian opposition as it's pushed by isis. this is an absolutely critical

city for the opposition, for both symbolic and strategic reasons. it is through this city that most foreign humanitarian and military assistance to the people of northern syria and the moderate opposition flows. yet over the past year, as the moderate opposition has struggled to maintain its defense of this city, as better resourced fighters from isis as, you know, as many as 40 air strikes a day from the assad regime hit them, they have had to contend with assad's use of hezbollah fighters against them. and so you see a situation where isis has gradually captured more parts of city as have those who want to extinguish this last representation of the syrian middle class efforts to hold on. and they're encircled. and they're defending it from within. and most observers agree that if aleppo follows out of moderate