re basically trying to clean up rather than fix. it really comes down to the half -- they are in prison or they are dead. it's a great article. that is how you fix it from the grassroots. what is the incentive to stay in the community and help these young people? host: our last caller that is going to do it for today. we will see right back here tomorrow morning at 7:00. have a great day.

>> other candidate enters the presidential race, former governor mike huckabee. he will announce from arkansas. we will have live coverage in about an hour. later today, precision medicine. that hearing begins at 2:30 p.m. eastern. we will have that life for you as well on its east end. later this afternoon hillary clinton in las vegas speaking to students at rancho high school about immigration policy. >> remarkable partnerships, iconic women. if>> she did save the portrait of

washington. it >> who ever could find that where frances was doing, who she was seeing, that was going to sell papers. >> how'd you do that? she did it. >> she exerted enormous influence because she would move a mountain to make sure her husband was protected. >> "first ladies" is now a book. based on original interviews from a c-span's series, but at the lives and visions and families. presidential historians on the lives of 45 iconic american women. they survived the scrutiny of the white house. they often changed history.

"first ladies" is an inspiring read. >> googles chief internet evangelist spoke at the press club yesterday about the future of the internet. his remarks rant about an hour. host: we are committed to our future. we fight for a free press worldwide.

for information about the club, you can visit our website. to donate to programs offered through our clubs journalism institute, visit press.org. on behalf of our members worldwide, i want to welcome people to this newsmaker luncheon. i would like to welcome c-span and public radio audiences. you can follow the action on twitter using the hashtag npclunch. applause is not evidence of a lack of journalistic objectivity. after our guests speech, we will have a q&a. i will ask as many questions as time permits. our head table includes guests of our speaker and working journalists who are club

members. but me introduce them to you now. i would ask each person to stand briefly as names are announced. pender mccarter ieee. jackie keizo, the white house fema, gsa. bill yarn off, the diplomatic career. cam harvard, chair of the feelings committee. jonathan fisher, slate. susan molinari, google. a guest in our speaker. alison fitzgerald, the center for public integrity and a member of the national press

club. skipping over our speaker for a moment, laurie russo, stanton communications. she organized today's lunch. haley sugiyama, washington post. rison, u.s. news & world report. wayne rash, washington bureau chief. joshua higgins, technology reporter for inside washington publishers. [applause] a little more than 40 years ago the first international conference on computer medications gathered in the basement of the washington hilton. attendees watch a demonstration of new technology that enabled advanced applications to run

between computers here in washington and others around the country. a network created by the advanced research projects agency was the earliest version of the internet. one of those involved is today's speaker. since then, that serve has advanced the architecture and utility of the internet. he ushered in the spread of the web. he became one of the most widely respected authorities on internet policy and governance. many call him a father of the internet. since 2005, he has served as the chief internet evangelist for google. he says he took that moniker because they would not approve the title archduke. he is well versed on the value

incapability of the internet. he voiced concern that the 21st century could become an information on blackhole unless we find ways to preserve photos, documents and other digital content, we don't know how computers of the future will function. the solution for now, if you want to make sure that some important information survives, printed out. his current project is the interplanetary internet which he is working on with nasa. it is exactly what it sounds like, a computer network for planet to planet communication. his list of awards and commendations is quite lengthy. if you want to learn more about them, you can look them up on the internet. >> google it. [applause] host: please give a warm welcome

to vint cerf. i am here. this is my favorite fair of and i'm glad we proved it again. i'm not going to use any presentation charts or anything. powerpoint corrupts absolutely. you will have to just listen instead. i did what to tell you an anecdote that is relevant. i worked on something called mci mail. we turned it on in 1983. reporters signed up. one of them was william f buckley. i maintained a luxury -- lovely

correspondence with him. i had come and gone. i helped them get into the internet business. it was clear the charging people for e-mail was not exactly a big business bottle -- model anymore. i got a bunch of angry e-mails from reporters. the honest answer is it was time for that service to go. i have two themes i would like to address this afternoon. the first is technology. i want to talk about policy. i have eight points. let me start with the technology side. i am proud of the fact that the

internet continues to evolve. this is one has adapted to new technology and swept newtek knology. it is become an important element of the smart foreign. they are all mutually reinforced in many ways. one of the things that we did not get right is the numerical address space. we did some calculations and estimated that 4.3 billion to be enough. the version of the network that most of you are using is called ip version four. it was designed around that time. we got it wrong. we ran out of the ip version four. the ceo is right over there. if you need ip addresses, he is the guy to talk to about that.

we need ipv6 which has 10 to the 38 addresses. it is vital that we get all of the isps. it is in the routers. the internet service providers need to turn that on it. you can do me to favors, talk to your isps and demand answers. second do so with the megaphone that is afforded to reporters. one answer is the next wave of stuff is the internet of things. every appliance is shifting from

electromechanical controls to programmable controls. what you put the computer inside anything, there is an opportunity to put it on the net. the good thing about the internet is everything is connected. the bad thing is everything is connected. we need the address space to accommodate the explosion of devices. they may not be as crazy as it sounds. every lightbulb could have its own ip address. some already do. you can control the color and the light intensity. you need an internet address to do that. you might think -- what is this? when you are watching streaming

videos have you ever noticed that a get real jerky and think slow down and the delays are going up and used that they are for things to reload? it turns out that it is not true that having more buffer memory space is always a good thing. let me explain. you have a router home typically. maybe is supplied by a table -- cable or telephone company or you bought one and installed it or hired a geek to do that. so this thing has memory in it. imagine for moment that you are running a local network at home and it is running at media 100 megabits a second or maybe 10 megabits or even a gigabit per second, but the connection that you have out to the rest of the world is not running that fast. unless you happen to be on one of the google fiber networks which is a gigabit per second, but most of them don't get to that speed. what happens? the programs that you have running inside the house are pushing data like crazy into this buffer is is filling up an empty and slowly because of the data rate on the other hand lower than the rate at which

your pumping it in, which means that there is increasing amounts of delay from the standpoint of the sender over here, waiting to hear acknowledgments coming back from the other end. at some point, the program inside your house is saying, oh my god, they didn't get what i sent. i better send it again. you keep retransmitting and producing and creating a highly congested conditions. it is counterintuitive, but when you have to do is design the system so that it does not put too much buffer space in the path. it should put only enough to deal with the differential between the high-speed and low-speed side. this also works in the other direction. here's the code word for you. the letters that you want to refer to are called codel-fq. that is the kind of thing and technology that you want in your routers. while you are pounding on the table for ipv6, i want codel-fq in my router and i want a pony.

[laughter] next point. all of you are familiar with the fact that we are bad with picking passwords. some of us still use password for password because it is easy to remember, but everyone else does that so it is not a good thing. so you're told to make a complicated password with punctuation and other stuff and keep changing all the time. you can never member them and you a list and stick it on your computer, or you put it in your wallet. ok, so i googled, you will remember, and some of you reported that we were attacked in 2010 and penetrated. so we decided that we needed to do something about that. in addition to username password, which we still ask people to change on a regular basis, we also have a piece of hardware that is called a gnubby. don't ask me why. it is a two factor

identification device. it creates a one-time password using an algorithm system. and i log into my google accounts, and you can do this to if you are gmail, when you log into the account, if you're asking for two factor authentication, it will do one of several things. if you have this little device you will take a live because the light will come back on and it will send the data back and forth. or it sends a random number your mobile or you have an algorithm running on the mobile which generates the number for you. all those cases imply that you have to have this other thing in your mobile or gnubby or a message coming from google giving the latest password, in addition to knowing the username and password. that is why it is two factor authentication. if they have your username, they can't get in because they don't have the second factor. we would like to encourage everyone to adopt that practice because that would make it safer for you and for me.

the fourth point -- security and safety of privacy are really important. one way to achieve that, in part, is to use what is called ht tps. hypertext transport protocol was invented in late 1989 and released in part of the world wide web. there is a secure version of this called https. and the purpose behind it is to increase the traffic between you and your laptop and desktop and mobile or tablet and the server on the other hand -- google in my case. the ideas that everyone should be making use of this cartographic means of the transmitting data back and forth. while you're using web-based applications, the information is kept in encrypted form and only decrypted on it reaches the other end. this is called encryption for transmission. which leads me to the fifth point, which is that google and others believe that all transmissions, regardless of whether it is from your edge device to our services, or between our data centers or any

other place, and ought to be encrypted in order to protect confidentiality. we see crypto as a very important technology, which should be incorporated into normal use on the net. no, i don't have a much time, so i won't tell you stories about how i work with nsa back in 1975 to design and build a secured internet. the only problem was that the details were classified at the time and i cannot share it with my colleagues. so i felt schisms rent for a long time, but now we have the technology available to make it so much more confidential and environment. we think also that it is important to encrypt data once it lands in place. your laptops should be encrypted. it describes should be acquitted. your mobile should be encrypted. we will encrypt data as it lands into our data centers as we move it back and forth between the data centers. we keep getting credit so if the data center were penetrated or you lost your laptop or your tablet, the information would be very hard for someone to extract.

crypto is important. the seventh point is another geek thing. it is called dns sect. use domain names all the time. it is the security extension. how do i do this in a couple of seconds? when you do a lookup of a domain name, you may not see that happening, but when you type www. google.com, your computer says, where the hell is that on the net? it will look it up on a big database. what it gets back is an ip numerical address. these two pieces of information, then the main and ip address are very important. what happens if someone can go in and change the numeric address associated with the domain name. you may think you are long into bank of america.com, but if someone has hacked the system, you're off to some bad site, which is distracting -- extracting your username and password in every thing else. the solution to use is the digital signature.

some have heard public cryptography. digital signatures arise out of that technology. we can digitally signed a binding of the domain name and ip address. when you get that pair back from doing a query, you can check if anyone change the binding or alter the numerical part. i checking the digital signature, you can verify it has not been modified. this protects against all kinds of attacks that would otherwise be harmed. we think it should be a fomented. it is being an fomented -- implemented throughout the domain name system, but we need more of the mentation as a goes down into the hierarchy. the a thing on the geek side -- you're going to love this. it is bcp 38. what the hell is that deco it is basking indications practices number 38. -- what the hell is that? it is best indication practices number 38. if you are operating a network and accepting traffic from

people that will eventually be set out to the rest of the internet, the first thing that you should do is check to see whether the source internet address -- the miracle internet address --is coming from a legitimate source. is it coming from a network that owns that address space? bcp 38 basically says don't let traffic into the net that has fake source addresses. it is possible to fake the source address by stating that this is coming from that place over there even though it is common from here. we don't want people to do that. we think the isps should be executing this bcp 38 thing. you can tell that i have a very strong message, which i ask you to amplify, to tell the icp's to get on the stick. improve the safety, security and confidentiality of the net. now we switch over the policy. they told me they were going to tell me when this thing was going to die. it says i have 19 minutes left? >> it is 19 after, seo got -- --

so you have got vint cerf: seven minutes. eight things and seven mins. [laughter] some of you may be reading and writing about this idea that the ntia has to transfer whatever response ability it still retains to the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. this is called the iana transition. the multi-stakeholder bodies of the internet, all of us, become part of the operation and policy development for the internet rather than having a specific agency of the u.s. government taking place of that. when it was created in 1998, that was the intent. it was supposed to be a two or three year period and then it would settle down in the ntia

would relinquish response ability. it has been some years since 1998. it is now time. the ntia has proposed to do that. it would show how to operate without the benefit of this oversight. although there is controversy over this, i am a strong believer that we should -- the government should step away from the special responsibility or authority and return this to the community which has created and operated the internet since its inception. that is point number one. second -- i cannot imagine that you would disagree that freedom of expression and access to information is absolutely fundamental to our democratic societies and we need to make sure that the internet continues to support that. i would like to add one more freedom to this and that is freedom from harm. we don't often speak about that but unless people feel that they are safe in using the internet and they will not use it. if they don't, and some comedies business models including mine may very well be undermined. it is very important in addition

to freedom of extortion and assembly and access to information that we do everything we can to protect people from harm, which is why i was talking about all those other geek things that little while ago. point number three has to do with nine discrimination. -- and on dissemination. in particular, none of the isps or broadband providers should have a say on where the traffic is coming from or going. everyone should have equal access to the net. you should have the ability to go anywhere you want to on the net, and in principle, do whatever it is you want to do. if it turns out to be a legal, that is a different problem. none of the providers who have access to the system should be telling you what you can and can't do. that is a nondescript nation element and trolling up in the net and trolley borders -- net neutrality borders from the fcc. user choice is fundamental to the internet's utility. the fourth item on the policy list is equal access to performance features. if you have the need for low

latency because you are playing some kind of videogame or you need high bandwidth because your streaming video, you should have access to that. it's a not be possible for the broadband provider to pick and choose who gets access to that and who doesn't. it should be openly available to everyone. i do not say free. but what i said is that everyone should have equal access to those capabilities. and finally, i think it is very important that we encourage not only here in the u.s., but everywhere around the world, the adoption of policies that would encourage the creation of more internet. of course, i say that, but look, here's my problem. i google, my job is to get more internet built all around the world. and talking to eric schmidt the other day, he said, you cannot

retire. i said, why not? he said, you're only half done. we have 3 billion people, but we have 4 billion people to go. i could use some help in case any of you are interested. we really need to help countries recognize the importance of investment in internet structure for the benefit of their citizens. that is the fifth and last point of my internet policy. since i am out of time, i will stop there. i will turn the floor over to you to ask willing questions. thank you. [[applause] >> thank you, very much -- thank you very much. they internet was created by darpa but no one really owns the internet. is it possible that a multi-stakeholder governance can work? vint cerf: that was a nice you've me. he is right. darpa did sponsor this initially. the answer is yes. how can i possibly prove this? we turn the internet on in 1983. do the math. how long ago was 1983?

32 years. who do you suppose was actually running it at that point? it was not the defense department. i was sitting ducks of -- i was sitting -- i was doing nci handling of the time. my colleagues were parts of universities and they were in the private sector, running, building, and operating pieces of internet and it has been that way ever since. it has always been the private sector's role to build and operate these pieces. of course, the defense department has pieces of its own. so does the national science foundation and the nsf. it does not run it anymore, but they actually started in 1986 and shut it down in 1995 because they didn't need anymore because they were other services available.

the private sector and the civil society and the technical community and the academic community and governments all have a responsibility am including you, to be a part of the policymaking apparatus for they were other services the internet. the things that you do to protect your own safety and privacy affect me, too. because if you don't do a good job, you become an avenue through which attacks can be made and phishing attacks occurred and access to think that shouldn't be accessible happened. we all have the shared responsibility to make policy decisions about the internet. the enforcement of policy could be a responsibility for specific organizations and individuals and the like, but the paul mason best policymaking should be the stakeholders. as far as i can tell, that has been working for the last 32 years and can continue to work if you just let it. next question. >> several questions about hacking. the white house, the state department have had networks hacked. will there come a day when such hacks are not possible? and someone else wonders who is responsible for cyber security?

who can ultimately stop the hacks from happening? vint cerf: the answer lies in the previous response as well because we are all responsible for improving the safety and security of the internet. your own choices, your practices, the practices of internet service providers are all part of this fabric. that we have to maintain. there is a visual model i have in my head. imagine you have a set of homes whose backyards are all shared. there's this big kind of park. the front doors go out this way. imagine there's some nincompoop who insist on leaving his house unlocked. even if everyone else lost the house, there is one guy who lets people into the interior. that is a risk potentially for you. i see the internet as having this character that we all have a role to play to make it more secure and safe. there are different places in the internet's architecture

where attacks can be launched. it is a very laid system. still, the mechanisms that might work at one layer may have no effect in another. i will give you an example. suppose some of the says, the solution to e-mail problem is that we should encrypt everything. as long as we encrypt the e-mail as it goes through the net, as a ghost through the net, everything will be ok. well, let's analyze this a little bit. the source of the e-mails using a laptop which has become infected somehow. maybe you plugged in a usb that was infected stuck in a dvd or maybe they went to a website that had malware on board. this computer which you don't know and the user doesn't know is infected composes a piece of e-mail that has malware e-mail. we encrypt it. great. no one can see anything because it's an. it gets to the other end. it is decrypted in the malware does its damage. crypto at one level does not necessarily solve all the problems.

we have to prevent various layers in the system using various technologies. this is an oddball answer here. it is everybody's responsibility to do this. each layer and each provider of service at those layers has responsibility just as we do a giggle. -- just as we do at google. we are in the application space and we are doing everything we can to prevent against the types of attacks that could be launched that are level of architecture. there are other layers that need to contribute to the safety of the system. >> right now, we use social and credit history to verify our legal identity. if social security numbers didn't exist, what when identity verification look like and is there a better way to do identity verification? vint cerf: the short answer is yes.

social security numbers don't have any check digits in them or anything. there is no way to tell of its invalid or valid social security numbers. it's just nine digits. we could do a lot better especially with today's technology. one possibility would be to issue a certificate, which identifies a public key that belongs to you and you alone. what you would want is to have the private key that goes with it, this is public-key crypto stuff. this is a weird thing that my friends came up with a 1977. it's kind of like a door with two locks. you have to tease, one key locks the door but does not lock it. the other key unlocks it doesn't unlock it. you have two different cryptographic keys that work

together to create security. you can imagine having an identifier that has been digitally signed by an authority that would issue those identifiers, that could be a state government because that's where the ssn comes from. i guess it's a federal government, but the states issue these things -- does anyone know the answer to that? the states were federal government -- or federal government? the federal government could issue these certificates, and as long as the signature works, it's a way of validating yourself remotely. someone can send you a challenge saying are you really vint cert, only i can decrypted. -- decrypt it. and i can resend a response.

we can verify that each of us has a credential issued by the it. and i can resend a response. we can verify that each of us has a credential issued by the federal government that has a public and private key associated with it. it is more complex than that. we don't have time to go into all the details. here is another opportunity for policy. if we could agree on an international basis about the bona fides that have to be shown before you get one of these credentials, we might be able to make a digital signature as significant and authoritative as a wet signature is today. but we have to agree on a global scale what bona fides have to be presented to get this authorized certificate. i think that would be a good thing to do. it would encourage e-commerce and would also give us protection against the abuse of the social security numbers. so that is the long answer. host: in addition to printing

out our photos, well should we as society be doing to preserve information or preserve our culture for future generations? vint: great question. i didn't say print everything but some people decided that's what i said. [laughter] vint: you can't blame them. printed photography has gotten different from the stuff that you see on flickr and everything else. everything will day when you use software and your laptops or desktops, you create complex files. if you are using a text document editor, microsoft word or something else, the file you create is actually pretty complex. in order to correctly render it or allow the document to be edited, you need a piece of software to help you. that is the application program. i want you to imagine that it is

the year 2150, you are doris kearns goodman's great, great granddaughter. and you want to write about the beginnings of the 21st century. she wrote that wonderful story about lincoln and his team of rivals. if you read it, i hope you have the same reaction i did. the dialogue seemed very artful, the opinions being stated in the words that were being used made it seem like she must've been a fly on the wall 150 years ago. of course, she wasn't. she went through 100 different libraries and collected the physical correspondence of the principles and use that to reproduce the dialogue of the time it. imagine it's 2150, you were her great, great, granddaughter. you are trying to write about the beginning of the 21st century and you can't find a damn saying because all of the e-mail has evaporated or worse you have these giant discs, full of bits that represents the e-mails, but the application program and the operating system they ran on, and the hardware of the operating system animated don't work anymore.

they are gone, nobody supported them. you have a pile of rotten bits in your hand. i want to prevent that from happening. there are only a few ways to do it that i know of. the best one i have seen so far, and i lectured about this with my partners at carnegie mellon just last week at stanford university -- this guy, has developed a virtual machine capability that will allow him to emulate hardware of free much any kind and then run the operating systems on that emulated machine and run the applications on the emulated operating system and it works. where. he showed 20 different operating systems and machines, and he was showing 1997 turbo tax running

on a mac. including the crappy graphics. it was really a phenomenal performance. so the ability to preserve software applications and operating systems and emulate the hardware is the best answer so far. imagine running those emulations in the clouds of those machines are available to anyone. this is not a trivial technical problem in that also there is intellectual-property issues. how i get a hold of the software, what rights can i get? if someone says you can't do that because they didn't pay, you said it's 150 years since you did anything without software, give me a break. you are never what happened when the xerox machines were created in the library and said people should have the right to copy

break. you are never what happened when the xerox machines were created in the library and said people should have the right to copy unlimited amount of material this way and the publishers are saying no, i will publish one book and people makes iraq's copies of it and i will never make any money. that didn't happen, and this ability to employ fair use was very important. we need a preservation use like that associated with copyright so that preservation is an act is not only sanctioned but encouraged so that our digital content will survive over long periods of time. that is my long answer that question. host: in 1979, bob kahn urged you to create a brain trust in case you got hit by a bus and couldn't continue your work. who do you view as the brain trust today? part two is do you feel there's enough technical expertise or consultation with technology experts among those who craft technology policy? who is the brain trust, and is the brain trust being consulted like it should in technology policy? vint: the answer to the last

part is no. the answer to the first part is the original group that i created called the internet configuration control board. we made it as boring as possible so that no one wants a be a the board. and then i appoint to the people who were the lead researchers on the development of the internet and multiple universities around the u.s.. the iccb became the internet architecture board in 1992 when it became part of the internet society. and now the internet architecture board and the internet engineering task force and the internet research task force, all of which are house and the internet society or the brain trust for the technical revolution of the internet. it's where the bulk of the new protocols are coming from. it's not to disenfranchise various corporate entities that are trying to develop new protocols and new applications for the net. but the core of the internet's evolution still comes from the brain trust. i've lived here in washington since 1976. i have considered it to be both a privilege and responsibility

to try and help policymakers understand enough about the internet so that the policies they make make some sense. i'm not looking through technical depth here. i'm looking for simple cartoon models of how the network works that are accurate enough so that if you reason with those simple models, you will reach the right kind of conclusions about what policies are implementable and which ones are not. the last thing you want is a policy that requires you to double the speed of light for example or abandon the law of gravity. our job is to try and be helpful, to provide clear enough expirations for how this stuff works so that when policy gets developed, it actually is implementable and make sense. the worst thing in the world is to pass laws that can't be enforced or implemented because it encourages disrespect for the law, that's not a good thing. host: looking over the past two decades or so, what are the one or two development and the

internet that you are most pleased with, and most disappointed with? vint: starting with the last one, spam is a disappointment. i have to say, i'm very proud of my company, google. we have done a good job of filtering out an awful lot of spam. if you happen to be using gmail and you look at your spam folder, it's amazing how much stuff you didn't have to look at. especially how the large body parts and all that stuff. it is an annoying side effects that e-mail is essentially free. so it means the spammers don't have to pay for what they do. and their crazy ideas like charge point 00 two cents for every e-mail. spam is annoying, but there are ways of filtering out. the thing of which i was most astonished by how proud is a funny word to use here. in fact, let it down an alley for a moment.

some of you have kids. you might have learned what i learned, which is don't take too much credit for when your kids do well, so when they screw up you don't have to take too much blame. i think that -- proud is the wrong word to use about the internet. i'm grateful to have been a part of the story. however, with regard to surprises, when the world wide web showed up in 1989, nobody really noticed except some of the colleagues at sarin -- cern. in the mosaic browser showed up, people noticed. it had images in color and formatted text. it was quite eye-opening. on top of that, browsers had this feature that if you wanted to see how the webpage was

built, you could ask the browser to show you the html, the hypertext markup language. it was open, everybody could copy everyone's web languages and they did admit the more interesting. the webmaster was a kind of role which didn't exist before the world wide web. it was sort of enhanced by the fact that everyone can share each other's webpages and how they were built. the thing that astonished me was the amount of content that poured into the net once web browsers and html were available. it was just astonishing how much information people wanted to share, not because they want to be paid, but they wanted to know their information was useful to some alleles. you hear the story about information is power. nonsense. it information sharing that is power. we have seen it over the past 20 decades or 20 years. we are going to see it over the next 20 years, maybe the next 20 decades too. the thing i like the most about the internet is it is a vulnerable -- evolveable, is scalable, and invited innovation. you don't have to get permission

from every isp in the world to invent a new product or service and put it up on the net. it should stay that way. host: this questioner says you are said to a candidate for the office of u.s. chief technology officer. he wants to know if you would have taken that job, but the big question is which you consider moving to the government side in a senior role of offered -- if offered? vint: this is a hypothetical. there were news reports that i might have been on the list, i don't actually know. i consulted with some of my

friends, including eric. eric said why don't you just be the chief technology officer's best friend? and so i made good friends with the niche and his successor, and megan who is now there is cdo. i thought that was pretty good advice. i have served in the government, i served six years of data, i really enjoyed that time the. -- at darpa. i worked with incredible he smart people. but my whole career has been that way. i'm a google, surrounded by incredibly smart people. most of them smarter than i am at. i learned that every single day, especially when there are 25-year-olds that run over and say let's do ask and i say we did that 25 years ago didn't work. an environment were 25 years ago there was a reason it didn't work, and that reasoning a longer be valid. it could be that computers are cheaper, faster, more memory some thing else is economically feasible that wasn't before. i have been forced to rethink my own views on these things over and over and over again.

nothing keeps you younger than having to rethink your own positions instead of falling into a rest. i feel the need -- i don't feel the need to become a part of the government. but i want very much to have an opportunity to provide support and help if i can read and i will do that if i'm allowed. host: do you want to see congress passed the usa freedom act? congress had a hearing on encryption on privacy rights versus the desire for a backdoor into cell phones. what do you think congress should do? vint: first of all, this backdoor idea is indicative of a real tension here. this global system is used and abused, like a lot of technology. there is an anything about the technology that determines whether or not it is constructive or deconstructive

-- constructive or destructive use. it is a neutral tool. we have to do something. we wish to protect the citizens of our country and others from harm in this network. you have to ask yourself how can i do that? attention pretty obviously is that if you use things like cryptography to protect privacy, there is a question about law enforcement people, what can they do? the proposal to put backdoors and things is reminiscent of something else some of you will have reported on, the clipper chip back in the 90's. i was adamantly against the clipper chip idea. the idea was very simple. if you have a backdoor, someone will find it. and that somebody may be a bad guy. or bad guys. and they will intentionally

guy. or bad guys. and they will intentionally abuse their access. so creating this kind of technology is super risky. i don't think that's the right answer. at the same time, i except the answer. at the same time, i except the government is there in part to protect their citizens from harm. the question is how do you do that? there is a spectrum. on one end we live in a society where there is no privacy at all. everything is known, everything you are planning to do is known. it might be a very safe society to live in. but it might not be one you want to live in. on the other hand, what about a society where there is absolute privacy, no one knows what you are planning to do it all, and that stuff happens? if you'll do your safety has now been diminished. there must be some place in between, and it isn't the same place for everyone. it isn't the same place for every culture or nation. our job is to figure out where is that balance for us? i think the congress is forced now to struggle with that. they're going to have to listen to these various arguments about

protection and safety on one hand and preservation of privacy and confidentiality on the other. i'm not persuaded the building backdoors is the right way forward. host: the way the fcc's title ii net neutrality rules are written, do you think they offer equal opportunity download speeds while forbearing enough title ii rules to avoid government overreach like new fees or content regulation? vint: this is interesting. i think that tom wheeler didn't have a whole lot of choice. the sec had asserted a set of neutrality rules which were intended to protect user choice. they were essentially told by the supreme court, you don't have a legal basis to enforce your network neutrality preferences. and so i think wheeler had three possibilities. one, do nothing. in which case the net neutrality

notions, to the extent that people agree that they are helpful and useful and preserve user choice would simply not succeed because of the lack of legal basis for fcc's enforcement. the second possibility would be to get to the congress to create a new title in the telecommunications act specific internet. some of you remember there was a brand x decision. the cable companies and the telephone companies were saying we are not regulated the same way. this is correct, there are two different titles and the telecom act for dealing with these two entities. and yet they were both providing an in-service rid the complaint was we are providing internet service under different ground rules. this is unfair. so the question is what to do? one possibility might have been

to get the congress to adopt an internet title that was appropriate to the internet technology. the choice that was made instead was to treat internet as if it is just an information service that had no layered structure, no telecommuting nation's components. it was just an information service, and of story. while that led -- that's an unregulated title. so the sec's rule -- role was completely removed. tom trolls -- tom shows a third path, which was to invoke title ii. they have the authority to decide it was title i, they have equal authority to decide no it's really title ii. but constrained. significantly. so what's the issue? now under the current role he have a basis for taking action if they think they neutrality rules have been violated. however, there's the potential forward-looking risk -- what happens if some new fcc in some future game decides to invoke all of the messy complexities of title two, which were designed for system for voice communication which is a far cry

from today's internet and probably very much a far cry from tomorrow's internet. at some point, this tactic probably has to be readdressed. if we're going to do anything at all in the regulatory space, needs to be tailored to a network which i want to emphasize again, must still be vulnerable -- evolveable. we must not constrain the network simply in order to regulate it. we need to find a way to make sure the network treats you fairly, gives you adequate opportunity, insights competition. but the same time, allows the fcc to protect your interests. that is where my head is, i hope is a former congress woman, you think i managed to straddle this reasonably well. host: i mentioned at the national press club, we fight

for press freedom worldwide. part of your job is evangelizing the internet worldwide. what do you say to governments and regimes who consider the internet a threat, and what can you do to try and shake that loose? vint: i wish i could just say get over it, but that doesn't work. everybody picks on china, i guess i will do that too. but they are good example of attention -- a tension. i have some sympathy for their government. did you realize there are 650 million chinese on the internet now? that's close to half the population. that means the private sector and government have been investing in building the upper structure -- the infrastructure. this is even better. they have made this big investment. at the same time, they come from a long history of very

authoritarian practices. they are scared, frankly, about this large population of people coming unhappy. if you study chinese history which i have not, i am told that the last seven times there was a major regime change in china it's because it was preceded by a peasant rebellion. looking at all the conditions throughout china especially in the west, you can appreciate that things are really scary for the administration, even if they are trying to do the right thing, which is make sure that people are fed and housed in every thing else. my story is that the countries that are seeking authoritarian control over the internet will discover at some point that if they do that, they are shooting themselves in the foot. first of all, they are potentially inhibiting creativity of the population which is what they need in order to improve gdp. second, they may be inhibiting

their ability to explore world markets. i don't care what country you are, the global economy is bigger than you are. don't cut yourself off from access to it, the same message needs to get to the europeans were struggling with the digital single market. at the same time, may be axially promoting themselves from participating in a global market and letting the global market participate in the european one. my message has always been economic. it is in your interest, mr. president, to invest in the internet, to keep it as open as possible, and to allow your creative population to make use of it. no country has a corner on creativity. it is uniformly distributed throughout the population of the world. it's just that the people with these ideas don't always have the wherewithal and the support in order to explore those ideas. i will give you as a concrete example of that, how many folks come from india to silicon valley or seattle or here and do

spectacularly well? their ideas with the same, but they didn't have the investment infrastructure, the willingness to take risk that we have in the united states. and so we know there are smart people out there with the possibility to improve their own gdp if the rules could be made similar to what they are here in the united states. host: we are almost out of time. before i asked the last question, i would like to remind everyone about some upcoming speakers. the tenant general michelle johnson, the first woman to lead the air force academy, will address a luncheon on friday. the ceos of american, delta, and united airlines will appear together at a luncheon on may 15. vint: what an opportunity. host: and garrison keillor author and host of "very home companion," will address the press club. i would like to present our guest with the greatest gift of

all, the national press club mug, which you can treasure for decades. [laughter] [applause] vint: that is a mug shot. host: the final question, but we have time for two -- it sounds it could have come in over the internet. i'm not sure whether he did. his questioner says you have fewer than 5000 followers on twitter and you are not verified -- what is up with that? vint: i don't tweet all that much. just everyone's a while. i have better things to do. and besides, i get more than enough visibility as it is. i don't need anymore. i get stopped by to autograph guys as soon as i walked into

they. i don't know, verification, what do to get verified? send your blood type? i remember asking the guy who founded twitter is your title chief twit? twitter, it's your title chief twit deck of it is inc. -- twit? john hughes: is there a nobel prize in computing and to the be what? vint cerf: the story, which may not be true, is that his wife ran away with a really good mathematician. and in consequence, mr. nobel told his committee, under no circumstance will any branch of mathematics be recognized by the nobel prize. unfortunately, computer science tends to be associated to mathematics. so, we in that field, are not eligible. we might be eligible for the peace prize, but that is a real