the compelling issue is the one of government collection of data and the impact to your relationship to the government and the company. it is the bleeding and blurring of lines, the potential lack of clarity or boundaries between private sector data sets that were collected mostly with your knowledge. that would be a big theme in your direct to company advocacy. minimization, is it relevant to your relationship to the company, and the blurring of the lines that erodes trust in the government and the companies as well. that issue of government data collection erodes the whole ecosystem of the government and trust in my ability to transact with companies and speak my mind. ms. durkan: i'm going to moderate and jump in a little bit. when i was chief federal law enforcement officer the government used its powers to collect information in the criminal setting.

i really believe that the generation coming up is different, as racquel says, from my generation in a number of ways and for a number of reasons. i think they are being conditioned from every angle to not care about privacy and think that privacy doesn't matter. i think that that is due mostly to the monetization of the lack of privacy. that's where i think that maybe it is not the actual collection of privacy, though we will talk about that later as i think there are a lot of dangers, but it is the constant mantra of -- privacy doesn't matter. we are going to talk about this in a little bit, but everyone sitting in this panel knows that people do not read privacy policies before they click on i agree. people do not know how their information is being used, it's not transparent. it is from the days of the 19th when there were contracts of adhesion and they changed it to not have the small print.

i think that they will change that as well. government needs to be circumscribed. we always have to fight that battle. but we always have to keep an eye on for private industry is doing. what can they do and what should they do? we have talked a lot about interconnectedness. you drive up to a toll and you have your automatic pass. you drive across the bridge and it automatically sends something to your bank. everyone is connected. it is more difficult to do things today and not leave a digital trace. do consumers really understand what information is being collected about them? ms. o'connor: no. i don't want to say that the consumer is not knowledgeable, but it is so hard to top with the level of technological advancement, but i am more hopeful, despite what i have seen in government and private sector, i think the most hopeful

voice on this panel for a number of reasons. i think there are people in the government and private sector both trying to get this right. good companies where simply sparking the dialogue about customer expectation and trust, they are doing the right thing and trying to get this right. i read with your point about privacy policies completely, having written more than than anyone in this room. iron the mark twain, the fault her, the author privacy policies no one has ever read, but this is not to say that the fair practice of information principles and tenants espouse in this country are dead, but that they need to be reworked and reimagined for the digital age, for the internet of everything and everywhere. i will go back to my amazon echo example, because i am so proud of it having worked on it. [laughter] can you tell? the only choices are alexa and amazon, but nevertheless i want

to call it something inappropriate for this audience. i want it to have a name, like my personal assistant. but that device has privacy protection not only built into the hardware and software of the programming, but literally in the device. it lights up when it's listening. it circles when it is actively collecting data. there are other ways to signify those nonverbal cues. look at the airport signs that say baggage. i was pointing this out to my five-year-old. he cannot quite read yet, but he can read the sign that says airplane or luggage or whatever. the theme that applies to the embedded world, we can no longer rely on 14 page privacy policies stuck in the bottom of website or those papers that you get from your bank at the end of the year. i have written those two, by the way, early in my career. no one reads them.

having this technology embedded in the device -- these are exciting opportunities. we need to stop and talk about that age thing. i don't agree with the conventional wisdom that young people today do not care about privacy. ms. russell: i'm going to jump on that and say that i completely agree with your last statement. i think that people and consumers do know about the data that they are giving up. how can you not when you are on gmail? you get targeted advertising based on an e-mail that you sent four hours ago. you know that it is being consumed. maybe we don't know the extent as the average consumer, but i think that we know that for younger generations, including myself, we weigh the pros and cons and the ease that technology brings to my life outweighs the fact that you are collecting data on me. that is a fact for myself and for many of my friends and peers. the ease that those technologies bring completely outweighs the fact -- turbo tax is a great example.

i am not 100% convinced nor have i ever done any kind of due diligence to make sure that all of that information given to turbotax is going to be safe, but i would rather do that and fill it out by paper and pen, so i do. ms. durkan: ryan, what you think? prof calo: i get beat up a lot on whether privacy disclosure notices work. i wrote a paper a few years ago that was against skepticism and say no to everything. ms. durkan: that is the short version. [laughter] prof calo: i argue that we should be doing more of what nuala said. where it is built into the product, like it is in so. there is a lot of opportunity for that. i also think that there is a lot of opportunity to have a privacy disclosure for the most -- the more sophisticated entity that is very full.

so, for the cdt, the ftc, the journalist, and then have more visceral notice. i think we should be tracking a two track notice. i will say that at the end of the day, and i hope we talk about this more, it is really about asymmetry. the fact that the company knows an unbelievable amount about you and you don't know hardly anything about them. in fact not only is there information asymmetry, but there is asymmetry about the asymmetry. they know that they know more about you and you cannot even begin to scope how much they know about you. that asymmetry matters and i want to talk more about that. i am similarly sort of hopeful about the potential of smart of -- smart design to convey information. ms. durkan: how much do we leave to market and how much we leave to the laws? that is always a balance tension, but at what point should consumers have some

absolute right to know, for example, what has been collected, aggregated, to be able to look at it and edit it? what do you think, ryan? prof calo: i think that i agree with commissioner brill at the federal trade commission. consumers should have much more access to the information in the hands of data brokers. i commend you to her speeches about the reclaim your name initiative. she is using a mixture in her position as a regulator with a megaphone but also sort of hinting at the idea that if we do not get this ability to access your data, at some point the federal trade commission

will come along and do something about it. a lot of competition on privacy happens against the backdrop of the threat of regulation. it is very difficult to say precisely the effect, it is the actual act of regulation and the possibility of that. and the people who have regulatory authority who in turn have soft power because of that regulatory authority. that did not at all answer your question, but i'm glad i said it. [laughter] ms. durkan: we are here to talk, not answer questions. ms. russell: i do think that there needs to be a checks and balance system, but i don't think we can rely entirely on government. government does not move as fast as technology. if we rely on government to create policies to protect our policies -- privacy, especially in the technology space, i don't

see how that works and jives. the technology is constantly changing. i just don't see how policies will be able to keep up with that to the full degree. i don't think that we can rely wholly on policy and government in order to protect our policies. maybe this is the idealist in me, but i am a believer that education is key in this. we may educate consumers on the privacy of the data being collected on them. and what we would maybe consider the privacy infringements. they might choose to be like -- that's ok. i think that to some degree the market will play a role in that. there is going to be a checks and balances there. i don't think that all consumers are going to be as concerned with the conversation and issues we are talking about today, but i do think that education to the consumer will be really important. prof calo: just to understand you correctly, education can

keep up with technology, but the law cannot? ms. russell: i'm not sure that anything can keep up with technology. i'm only six months into working in the technology sector, but saying the things move at lightning speed compared to the tech -- compared to the government is an understatement. i don't know how government alone and houses alone can up with the pace of technology. ms. o'connor: i think that education of the consumer by the companies deploying these technologies, corporate social responsibility in the digital world means the responsible use of data, the responsible use of information as part of the transaction with the customer. i saw this first in the dark ages before any of you were born, apparently, in the early, before the first.com bust at doubleclick. ms. russell: it was single click. [laughter] ms. o'connor: exactly. dial-up modems when i started. senior leadership had gotten themselves into hot water over

cookies and the potential merger of off-line and online data spaces. again, it didn't matter because the off-line data was on punch cards and there was no way to match them. i know that you all get what a cookie is and what tracking looks like and that that is fairly benign because you are trying to serve people. about like tennis shoes when they were on the sports illustrated site, which is not that different from a contextual ad in a magazine, but it freaks me out. might opinion is that there is fear and loathing of the technology and if you want to be the promoter and promulgate or of a new technology, think not only about how to use it responsibly but also educate the consumer so they can make informed choices about what they are doing. this is not to argue only for self-regulation. i could make those arguments all day long. but there is absolutely a need

for the ftc in general. i have come full circle on this, on federal privacy laws in this country, because the market is not just this country, the lark -- the market is global. we need to be thoughtful about where we are in the ecosystem of privacy and we are not even on the playing field. right? we are consider the great unwashed in the rest of the world on how we treat individual customers with data. i was just telling this story recently when last i gave the speech at the international commissioners conference 15 years ago. there are a lot of u.s. privacy laws. the children's online protection act, the video protection act, and if you go through each one it takes you a longtime, especially speaking slowly for a multi-national audience, it did not go over well for europeans who have just one law that is easier to explain.

if you want to be on the playing field with international consumers, when confronted with this ridiculous byzantine attorneys general, there is just one place to go in the country to complain? you see the elegance and that. i'm not here to say that the europeans have it right, because i think that there are lots and lots of flaws, but americans have this phrase -- haiti is data -- habeas data. my data, myself. i choose to engage with this company and they have some right. i used to use this before i worked to their at amazon, you have to give them the address so that they can deliver the books. that's part of the deal. it's profoundly impossible to do that unless i tell you where i live so that you can deliver the book. some data has to be transacted.

but it is still my address. still part of where i live, my data. i like that construct far better than property. something i sell or barter. structure around the european rights, which gets to left -- less enforcement, but this is mine and part of me. ms. russell: i think you are right. if you look at the areas where we have tried to legislate around technology, by the time that we get it enacted, it is obsolete. are there not fundamental principles? my first entree into the privacy realm was 19 years ago when i ordered a pizza and they asked for my phone number and i said you don't need to call me, just give me the pizza. they refused to give me the pizza unless i gave them my number. i was complaining to one of my friends at the state attorney general and i said great, you

are in charge of my new consumer privacy task force. we had meetings over the course of a year. the tech industry was versioning. there were two parts of it. one was consumer privacy. it was us tricked opt in. you cannot collect information unless they agree to it. you can only collect the information that they need for that transaction and only use it for that transaction. then you have to be done with it. the second part was the first identity theft legislation in the country. we dropped the bill, which is what they call when they introduce it in olympia. that day 85 new business lobbyists registered. it was amazing and they killed the consumer privacy part of it. quite happily i can say that we got the first identity theft bill passed and it became a national model, but everyone

understood that there was a way to monetize this data. to take from it and aggregate it in that people do not understand. are there fundamental principles where people should not be able to say -- i give you my address but i only want you to use that to send me the book? you cannot use it for anything else. what do you think, ryan? prof calo: i have had this argument all the time. the law cannot keep up with technology. by the time the federal aviation administration approved a drone for testing delivery by amazon, right? i the time they got the application, read it and said yes, amazon had moved on to a new technology. they used it to apply again. it was this sisyphus in task. -- sisyphusian task. but when you look at what the federal trade commission enforces, that mattered in 82 or

in 2015 and it is what we call a standard instead of a rule. i guess i don't totally understand why the government could not be more responsive. i think that one issue that i will immediately concede is that the government by and large is not having adequate technical expertise. something that i think you get, speaking of violent agreement all around, the federal trade commission for example is trying to address that by hiring. good technologists. they just hired someone from my lab to work in the technology shop there. that is a big problem. i am sure that you have encountered that. right? but i don't know that the law cannot intrinsically keep up

in some deep sense. we have some way -- will the fourth amendment keep up? you know? ms. russell: there is an intricacy to keeping those privacy policies and those are the things that i'm not sure the government can keep up with. keeping a general standard where the same thing should be fair and just, but what does that mean? the devil is in the details. that is where the concern is. that is not to say that there should not be policies and government should not have a role to play, but i don't think we can rely wholly on the government given the fact that the government works so slowly. prof calo: fair enough. ms. durkan: you wanted to jump in on this? ms. o'connor: i despair of this glacial congress. you are right, we are thinking about this a lot. a clean sheet of paper of what a privacy law looks like in this

country would be very short of high-level principles. once you create a particular standard around technology or security standard, you create a chilling effect and a target for hackers to shoot at, right? suddenly you have chilled innovation. but i think that the high-level standards, the ftc is the right place the point. fairness, fair dealing, with some more granularity around the best practices. companies are largely already doing this in springdale. it would be a short bill. we have a all the challenges that you experience -- we had all the challenges that you experienced when dealing with constituencies that clearly care about data. prof calo: very quickly, right now as it happens the federal communications commission is trying to decide how it is going to regulate privacy. there is a long history of having these technologies

specific lumbering kinds of rules that are exceedingly slow. they need to decide that as they drag -- i don't want to get too technical, but there is now an opportunity that they have to write the privacy rules, essentially, for internet service providers. one of these options will be this technically specific thing that becomes outdated and the other will be this specific approach of looking to broader standards. sometimes government makes the wrong choice. ms. durkan: i was struck by something that ira said during the introduction about the freedom of thought and technology. where does the person who is -- whether you are the teenager curious about sexually transmitted diseases or a person struggling with alcohol or drug abuse, where do they go without being tracked or leaving a

record? maybe it goes back to that intersection between government and private companies, but trying -- try to research something anonymously right now? ms. o'connor: go to mozilla, firefox. [laughter] ms. durkan: seriously, what do we do for those who go online now, even with mozilla there will be tracking of searches. on the one hand it was very transparent of facebook and google to say -- do you want to see all your searches? on the other hand people have been using it a lot like a library. i want to find out about tax, think about ask. in a search they never know that someone was maintaining that forever. what should we do about the ability to have that anonymity and provide to make sure that there is that ability for freedom of thought? they have no thoughts on freedom of thought. [laughter]

ms. russell: this is not a perfect answer, is barely an answer at all, but i do think that the level of expectation is changing. i expect to be tracked. i expect someone to track that data. but what i also expect is that they will not use it against me. that they will not use that power. i expect them to monetize it -- let's say that there is an app that comes up in something i googled, the next time it comes up in my laptop and i opened up chrome, what i use, but whatever you use, i expect that. i just expect it not to be used against me and be abused. i do think that that level of expectation is changing and i think that to some degree it is generational but i do not think it is completely generational. i have friends that will not get on gmail for the example i used earlier. i have a friend who only --

other grocery store they give you those cards where you can save some money and they swipe at each time, she forbids to get one because they are tracking what she is buying. she has made that choice and i have made a different choice, right? i don't know how you had that kind of anonymity in the information age. i don't know how you do that. ms. durkan: does that not hurt us as a society? i can tell you that i had one case where someone came to me and they were worried about government misconduct, they wanted to report it to remain a whistleblower and they with -- literally could not find a route to do it. does that hurt us as a society? ms. o'connor: there are tools, many tools, and i have spoken to folks in the privacy enhancing and security spaces and they despair of the fact that they are not widely accepted. i told them -- those interfaces are clunky and hard to use. so, they have not taken off and it does reflect somewhat their

own lack of good ui, but also that there is not as widespread desire. these are percentages on either extreme. i don't care about anybody knowing or not wanting anyone to know, the vast majority of consumers are somewhere in the middle, but i thought that raquel's answer was beautiful. i don't want it to be used against me. that is a beautiful and incredibly important sentiment, but it is not just the data, decision. our digital decision project is looking at the unintended disparate impacts in data collection in a variety of mill you -- mileau and sections. engineers and designers should be stress testing new devices, new technologies for the unintended or hidden impacts that may simply not be something

that they were thinking about when they were designing, may not be a value proposition that they were considering, but having those values of equality, democracy, of equal impact embedded in the design stage as the ways to get this right. i -- i get to quote the great jeff bezos -- we are still at day one of the internet. many people say that it is too late, there is still -- there is too much data out there. no, we are in the early days of getting this right, but the decisions that we make now will last for decades, for centuries. we need to do the hard work around fairness, equality, and embedding these values in those interests. ms. durkan: i think that that's great. earlier we were talking about the very concrete ways. so much information has been aggregated.

when they log on they can tell how much you bought, what kind of car, and the reverse is the reverse marketing. trying to get you to buy stuff, give you a cheaper mortgage. built into those algorithms could basically be digital redlining. what kind of steps do you think that we can take to prevent against that? prof calo: speaking of a million dollar question, that is so hard. it is not intentional in the way that we think of intentional. i cannot imagine that folks are out to redline on purpose. the way that we once did. ms. durkan: it's happening. [laughter] prof calo: let me say at a slightly different way. can you imagine that the folks at google or facebook would be sitting there thinking that they would want to deny opportunities

to people based on their color or race? i don't think that they are intentionally doing that. [inaudible] and maybe some people do it intentionally, yes. it is something that i think about and write about all the time. but i guess what i am trying to say is that so much of the mischief is going to be unintentional. it is interesting, you guys have a different intuition. i would like to sell it that way, but i don't think it can. ms. russell: i go back to the housing crisis and the predatory lending that was happening. i don't know how much data was happening around community of color in this country -- communities of color in this country. but i can say that if they had that, they would use it, and th would not do it unintentionally. prof calo: fair enough. that's further than i would go.

ms. russell: but i don't know that they were using that technology, or they were doing it intentionally, but if they had technology to do it intentionally anyways, why wouldn't they? prof calo: i take it back, honestly. from my perspective it's like companies do crappy things in order to make money. for example, why is it that any major business that if you call, you don't talk to a person anymore, you talk to an automation. they know you don't like that. it saves them money. why do banks have a class action against them with people making purchases on debit cards where links were holding back purchases to trigger as many possible overdraft fees as they could, putting them in the correct order. why does someone have 999, do you know what i mean? companies are always trying to extract as much as they can, to use that economic terminology.

when they are armed with an immense amount of information about you, they are going to leverage it.

at the same time make sure there is a level playing field there. what do you think about that? >> we look at issues like access to the internet. we look at that is the critical don't -- critical juncture. people do not have access to computers. you see a lot of advocacy in the space that is somewhat frankly, condescending to the rest of the world. the reality is, there are kids in schools in this country that cannot do their hallmark because they do not have internet access. privacy seems like it is nice to have for those who do not have the actual physical, or software

tools, to get to the devices and information they need. i think, that is the threshold question. the tub about net neutrality and other principles within the internet, but, as a mom, i am concerned about the fairness at the earliest possible ages. and reinforcing discrimination by increasing that divide over time. digital literacy must start at the earliest ages. i would love to see, not only thought about computer science and encoding, and access to hardware, at the early stages across the country, but literacy, both in how to behave online, and how to be echoed in consumer information. i love the initiatives around coding and consumer -- and computer sciences in the curriculum in this country. there is still a hierarchy of sciences that are considered

adequate to be included in secondary and elementary education. knowing and understanding the code, and being able to discern for ourselves, if there is impact, or if we do not like the look of an algorithm, those are skills that kids 30 years from now will need. >> i heard something very interesting. we all took a biology. we took it in school. i dissected a frog and new all along i was never going to be a doctor. kids nowadays need to learn computer science. it is too much a part of our day to day. to the issue of the quality of what it comes to internet access. there is a lot of inequality in this country and we all know it. it is hard to get by in this country without being connected

somehow. many of us who are better off are extremely connected to the internet. i do not know what i would do if i left my phone at home. i would literally he lost. i just moved to seattle. i would he lost. it is not that they cannot afford internet access. it is that their homes are not hardwired. information is key in this age. >> the other thing we can say with good confidence is technologies are that it -- are vetted against the mainstream population. it is rare that technologies will be vetted against a non mainstream

population. we have actually created panels of people that are non-mainstream in order to do analyses of the technologies we look at. for instance, we will look at gender and disability. there will be people who are disabled and studying disability. we studied people who have contact with the prison system. the definition of technology is futility. some contours changed dramatically. i can give you a quick example of that. the idea that there is a layer of reality over what you see, we think of it as being, i thought of it as being augmented. i never thought of it being a problem. if you were to shut off augmented reality, when you were in a bathroom, or in a boardroom. only talk to people with disabilities, they were using

augmented reality as a substitute for a since they did not have. it was deeply problematic to turn it off automatically in a boardroom or bathroom. we simply would not have realized had we not done that. can we really that our technology that way -- can we really vet our technology that way? >> we are having a lot of conversations about diversity on panels and diversity in the development stage. you see devices when they are created by perhaps, a non-diver segment not working. this is not a profound moment. marketing realized that consumers are large the women and they started putting women on the team because they could speak better to the customer. this is the same thing. we did not invent these issues. we might be better at creating them are solving them. i think, i hate to call it a particular device. i think of -- i think it was

populous that did not work. >> according to dana boyd, it made women nauseated. >> the viewfinder with set at a what that did not work for women's eyes. it was not tested on women. it reflects the fact that there are no women on the design team. harvard business review did the study over and over again. women on design teams for the technology were better served for the results. that is just one example of the kind of diversity. diversity in the pipeline in creating the device will end up with better devices and hardware and software in the future. >> we're getting close to question and answer time. you are lightning rounds at the end and then we will take questions from the audience. lightning run questions. do europeans, the eu has a very different approach to privacy. it is much more privacy centric.

there was a recent case from the court over there that found the people have the right to be forgotten. they can write to google and say, i want to take me off of the search. there has recently been a follow-up search that says, that does not apply to europeans. it applies to anywhere you have a search. not just europeans. they cannot appear in the u.s. results, european results, african results. anywhere at all. a good thing, or a bad thing? a realistic thing or a "forget about it" thing? i will start off in the middle. i opened by big mouth, and there's goes. >> it goes back to the point about the digital self.

it if it is about me choosing, or the life that is known out there. that makes sense from a consumer perspective. i think that make sense or men individual perspective. realistic in the united states? to me, it does not seem so realistic in the u.s.. you know, there are a lot of policies that european countries have that we do not. this is one of those where, i think in the right circumstances, with the right stars aligned, it is something we could do here. it would take some serious stars aligned, in my opinion. >> what do you think? >> i think it is interesting in principle. in practice, it is almost impossible. for two reasons. number one. it would go back to the first amendment a lot.

it is a free speech problem. the ability to withdraw from the internet is also my inability to talk about you in a certain way. in europe, they did not think about that quite as much. and number two. we have an attorney here in the audience that works for the internet archives. there is something called the "way back machine." you can look at the site from five years ago or six months ago. guess what will be there? the same thing that was taken down. >> that same picture? >> that same picture that you wanted taken down. i don't know how you would do it. have to agree with you. >> i don't know a lot about eu politics, but they know about american politics. i do not know how you surmount that. all of those lobbyists registering as you drop the bill in olympia, that just seems --

my idealism has left me. this is the cynicism in may. i don't know her you would surpass that. >> they are all about privacy and we are all about free speech. it is not that simple. i'm going to surprise you with my answer. we have a right to be forgotten in the united states. the fair credit reporting act allows for the deletion of your records after seven years, 10 years, we have decided as a society you have the right to be forgiven. your sins, in the financial context. you also have the fundamental right to be known accurately and correctly that was premised on very good social policy foundations of equal access to credit, regardless of race gender, etc. your arrest records. if you were arrested as a minor, you were -- you had your records expunged. you have the right to be erased. in specific cases, special public records, we have not even

gone to that yet. it is essential to the social -- the essential goods. in some cases, it is ok to be erased and on bearing to the forgiveness thing. that is spiritual. in europe -- >> are you iris? -- are you irish? >> i am going to bless you all. how it is being it cemented his people with access to resources and money and lawyers are asking to have embarrassing stuff pulled down. i would argue that if it is true about you, and if it is some limit happened to a public figure or in the public sphere, -- it comes from a accuracy

standpoint. i worry, we have some control over the digital self. there's actually connect them now in the policy world about nonconsensual sexually explicit materials. it is a bad acronym. i will not argue with it. it is about control of one's image. it is very important. you will do say, i will take that down because it is embarrassing. i am sorry i did it. especially for a public figure or no elected official. or no elected official. some member of the you parliament was caught in a financial scandal. that is important for the voters to know, who they are going to reelect. i would say, the dialogue in the debate is far more nylon -- nuance stunning other side gives -- is far more nuanced than we give the other side credit for. my privacy origins have made me go far over to the speech is what is under attack.

speech of the individual, of women online, in particular. speech against the government. that is what is under attack on the internet today. i worry greatly about it. >> we are going to take questions from the audience. we have a microphone over here. everyone can hear it. we will take them one at a time. if you feel like introducing yourself, do. if not, do not worry about it. >> i am very interested in the freedom of speech, or the inhibiting of the freedom of speech that the lack of privacy provides. recently, i was clicking very excitedly on bernie sanders on facebook. some statements he was making have me interested. the next thing i know, i had a pop up invitation to the communist party. i thought to myself, i am actually building a political profile. i need to wake up to the fact that i am doing that.

i need to be either an active participant, or i need to back away and reassess it completely. any comments you have about the inhibition to freedom of speech that i think is happening, due to a lack of privacy. >> i think that is a very important question. it is important to remember there is a big difference in how you experience something and the potential that something will be used against you. in my own work, i differentiate between the subjective kind of privacy harm and the object of one. where by subjective i am talking about the potential chilling effect. for instance, i think it is fair to say that being able to google thinks that are controversial about gender identity, about diseases, about anything. about anything, to google thinks and get an answer, is less chilling than having to go to a library and, or go to your

parents, or one of your friends. he talks about the fact that people are not good at these seemingly straight answers. google has a record that you search for these things, but you can ask anybody. on the other hand, there is a prospect that unlike your friend that you go and ask a question two, or the librarian or the doctor, the company is in a position not to leverage it and use it against you. using it against you or using it in a certain way, you come to be aware suddenly that -- subjectively aware of the fact you are being tracked. and then you have both. i think it is useful to talk about the difference between feeling like you are being surveyed and the consequences of that. sometimes used to not think

you're being surveyed at all, but thing and -- but then things are being denied to you. >> my question is about privacy in the commercial sector. also on the initiative i don't include touched on. it is the advertising model. google and facebook, and other social media sites are in the business of selling ads. they are reselling the data. what sort of protections do you think are necessary for guarding privacy of that kind of data? >> secondary use. i will let you do that. it i>> it is a great point. i am more concerned about content. access to opportunity. we are moving toward for transparency and poor accountability and the ability to choose not to be a part of

that. that worries me -- what worries me is what we looked at recently. a job search site where people navigating to that site were shown, i think it was a seattle search. they were shown to 88% men and 12% women based on their surfing history. it was not just the ad. it was the opportunity. the people surfing did not even know that they were being shown. that was based on assumptions. interestingly, it is not based on a search based on the person's name. they have come to this site -- let's speech area of -- let's be stereotypical and gendered. that to me is the unintended impact. the algorithm was not set up for that.

it was set up to show people looking for this level jobs across the board. output was based on a kind of advertising model or a cross website tracking model. that has a very different impact. that worries me. it is not only the data. it is what is bein -- it is the decisions being made about you. >> i would go further than that. people have a right to know what data is being collected. how it is being accused by the entity that is collecting it and who they are giving it to. so they can make the decision whether they want to continue in the transaction or not. if you get the three pieces and you are able to do it, i don't think the market gives people adequate information. there are a lot of arguments. people are going to facebook. idle think the majority of people truly understand what information is being collected. or how it is being aggregated with other information.

i think it is a concern, that it is one that ultimately, we will solve through legislation and regulation will sto. >> you may have just answered my question. i was thinking of the feasibility of something like your credit report. he would be able to, once a year, and at what data has been collected from you and how it has been used. then, companies would be embarrassed sometimes to admit what they were collecting. that might cause them to back off. people are then be aware what was being done with everything we did on mine. >> that is a good thing for people to understand. the ftc and others have been talking at a federal level. anyone who is a data collector would have to show individuals the information they have collected, almost like the fair

credit reporting act. you can see if it is accurate. then, you will love what is being collected on you. that will only happen if the market demands it. >> i am glad someone brought up the subject of government and corporate blurring. corporations now sell products in such an intriguing way that kids don't even -- i worry that in time, they think people under the age of 25 are interested in privacy. they are really not. have to make sure the people under the age of 25, especially teenagers, start getting interested in data being collected on them. >> i think that is an important point. i do not want to say, oh, that

generation. it is not just that. i am over 25. i will say, often times, i am someone who is hired people. i have hired people who are in their mid-20's. i am fascinated at the things they think is ok to put on the internet. they choose to put them on the internet. i do think that -- i don't think this is a technology issue, or a death issue, or a privacy issue. i think this is a young person issue. when i was young, i was the same way. technology and data was not where it is now then. they do not think about long-term consequences. period. that is the case for every generation. all of us went through that moment when we realized there are consequences for our actions. i think that for this generation, the problem is those consequences never leave because of the internet.

it is always going to be there. >> [indiscernible] professor calo: one trend i worry about is a trend from what we have been doing the last few years, which is online preference marketing. the ideas that you see advertisements on the basis on what companies believe your preferences are. the idea is that you are matched. we gave examples on this panel. the way it is headed is something called persuasion profiling. it doesn't look at what you are interested in, and looks at how persuadable you are in the best techniques to persuade you.

let me say that this is science. one example, it turns out some people are worried about what other people think and they want something popular. for those people, you say of the same product, our most popular item. there are other people out there who could care less. for them, they worry about scarcity. the exact same product is advertised to that person by saying, while supplies last. the author of this study is on the data science team at facebook. that is the direction these things are going. ms. durkan: sir? >> i just graduated.

ms. durkan: we already knew that. and you shop... [laughter] >> you talked about things having to start from design. ryan, you talked about companies -- you have a sense that they are not working with mallon tend. they are creating products without thinking, this will discriminate. i think it is because of where education is, we are in the art school. it is a studio-based curriculum when we do not consider the things that we are doing as far as ethical or social implications but we are producing things that are a craft. that is what has been happening in silicon valley.

pipelines to facebook and microsoft. they are visiting -- they are bringing designers into the technology world without any bearings about we are working on. we only have a sense of what the craft is. this is also happening on the engineering side. i did a research thing about ethics in design. i talked to a bunch of students and art students and i talked to some people at berkeley, and all of these people doing engineering and design don't care about ethics. i know that sounds flippant, but it is true. i don't know. what do we do? >> i don't think it is their job to care about ethics, but the company has to hire somebody who does. the designer, the engineer, you have a job.

develop. code. make sure it works and it is perfect, but there needs to be somebody at that company who is thinking about privacy and thinking about moral issues. i get your point. i don't think it is in a vacuum. a company is not just -- trust me, i am not an engineer. ms. durkan: but she does have morals. raquel russell and i have ethics. it is not ok, but it doesn't mean that the company or the organization is off the hook because of that.

ms. durkan: there are three good points you raise on that. i have been talking to a lot of the educators in silicon valley. instilling that sense of should we with can we is going to be a change. we talked about it at dinner, having it in the companies themselves, interdisciplinary teams. in engineering team can say they can do this, and somebody can say, that is creepy. or should be even do that? making sure that you have that in the development stage. you are seeing the same thing around security. people were building all sorts of intelligence that did not have security and we are paying a heavy price for it. sir? >> i am from chicago. i'm from the president posh neighborhood. president's neighborhood.

i would like to look at the big picture. i am wondering how damn efficient all of the internet and so forth -- i must admit -- it has helped me -- i mean, i could barely type when i got out of high school. it has made me into a writer. i am grateful for it. at the same time, with all those the communications it is supposed to be giving us, and all the marvelous central intelligence and so-called intelligence, the hundreds of billions of dollars that we give, we still didn't know that the ussr was falling apart, that the berlin wall was coming down.

we did not know how many tanks that hussein had when we invaded iraq. we did not know how to get a hold of bin laden. and we sent thousands of troops -- and tens of billions of dollars to invade iraq. and i'm wondering, tell me, how efficient is the internet with all of these marvelous intelligence agencies working in the government, to give us the information we are supposed to know about so that we stop making wrong decisions.

please, tell me. [laughter] ms. durkan: i think the answer is we can never rely on the technology if the humans are not good. the technology should never, cannot replace humans. the bottom line is, it is only as good as the people making the decisions. >> we have time for one last question. ms. durkan: sorry, folks. >> i'm from nyu. i found this conversation interesting, but i don't think the dangers were talked about. we are talking about

corporations that they might use information against us in a black male way, but i don't think that is a lot of risk with tracking and who can have access to that data. my family just got into the iphone steps and can count every step that you're making. the idea that my iphone knows exactly where they are and whether they are moving are standing still seems something very serious and concerning. additionally, the idea of using google as a search engine. that is better than talking to a librarian or parents or friend. is not as harmful as it might seem but we knew and that the court -- when you end up in court or have been accused of raping someone and now your entire internet history is being scrutinized or whether there are psychological studies coming up to determine, what hours are you

searching this information or how many times did you search for that information? was it an educational inquiry or an addiction? do you have any comments on that? ms. durkan: i apologize to the people who had questions that were not answered. i think it is a really good question. one of the questions we didn't get to was personal safety. particularly, domestic violence victims. it is very hard to hide nowadays. if you find people, you can get aerial surveillance of their house, the plans to their house, incredible amounts of information about individuals. it was an acute problem because we had a number of potential terrorist threats against infrastructure and yet because we are transparent society, we had online access to all of the emergency exits and tunnels for all of the public buildings in seattle. i think you are absolutely right

that there are built-in things that we have to look at the individual cases. professor calo: are you a law student? awesome. ms. durkan: will give you an internship. professor calo: i think as a privacy law nerd, i should tell you that there is a back-and-forth that happened early on between privacy scholars. one reviewed the others book, and she gave it a slightly negative review, saying, where are the dead bodies?

you are talking about the digital person, but what about people's lives? i feel like we are seeing more and more dead bodies. some of the bodies are dead by their own hand because of something they did and they kill themselves. other people are dead because of drone strikes and other reasons. information is power. sometimes that power gets abused in violent ways. i appreciate your point. i recommend that back-and-forth as a student of privacy law. ms. durkan: everybody gets to leave with one thought. >> i am still the optimist on the panel. we should be worried about the physical, the blurring of the lines between online presence and real-life presence and the risk that you are sharing.

despairing of congress, i doubt -- the supreme court is getting it -- in the majority holding -- analogize in -- for example -- the riley case, that your cell phone is the digital equivalent of dragging a foot locker behind do in saying that that is beyond the scope of law enforcement for a search -- in recognizing the tracking -- the gps tracking -- that was far beyond -- not just law enforcement, but social norms in the individual relationships -- i think we will try on a lot of things and get the wrong -- in the corporate space in the government space -- but we will get the right answer. the platform is not laid but we are doing the right thing by engaging. raquel russell: any invention or

innovation can be used for good or bad. we have to make sure that we are not sleeping when innovation and intervention -- is being used for bad. the conversation around the information and data, the expectation -- i do think it is shifting. as it shifts, i think that is ok. i honestly do. there are still the checks and balances of making sure it is not going to work against you, the same way that technology can be efficient. it can also be used against me and can be a power that is abused. we, as a society, have to make sure that we are doing what we can as a democracy.

professor calo: on a hopeful know, i things have gone too far, and now there is beginning to be a reaction and a correction. i think you see that in the supreme court. they're all of these cases -- there is some meaningful competition around privacy in places that you might expect, like companies competing with one another. even among federal agencies, we are seeing competition among privacies. different agencies are getting into the next and pushing each other in terms of what to pursue. on one level, i am hopeful. i think it is said we had to get so far down that road before reaction started to happen. ms. durkan: i think looking in this room shows that this matters.

i believe in our democracy, that it is the people who can and will to size -- decide if they have the information. thank you for coming. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

bush residency. each of our panelists will open with a short statement of their own perspective on the topic we will then have discussion among y

invite audience participation. i have a minute bad news i have to give at the beginning, which is you will notice that scott mcclellan is here. he is ill, and not is able to make the trip. we are sorry he is not here for we will try to soldier on as best we can. i just want to note the presence of mr. calico in the audience and thank him for his longtime support. [applause] i will introduce the panelists and sit down and allow them to go in order. i want to underline the question. many people will be arriving as we get underway. to give everyone a to ask questions, please ask questions and not make statements. thank you. i will introduce all four of the panelists, and unwanted go in order. to my immediate left, worn

crispy leads strategists. he was special assistant to president bush and deputy assistant to vice president dick cheney. he has also been a fellow at the kennedy school of government he is the author of three books. next to him, howard dean is former chair of the democratic national committee. is he was presidential candidate and six term governor of vermont. he is now a strategic advisor and consultant for the affairs practice. most important for today's event, he is senior presidential fellow of the calico center for the study of american presidency. julie mason is heard nationally weekdays from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. on potus channel 124.

she has more than three decades of experience covering state will pull, and national including four presidential campaigns. went straight to increase his announcement we can make it five. congratulations. [laughter] edward rawlins have a distinguished career as a communications expert. he managed president reagan's landslide victory in the 1984 campaign, and has had major roles in nine of the presidential campaign. he has served in the imitations of four presidents is a frequent political commentator for fox news and other networks. he is a senior presidential fellow at the calico center's 2009. our first speaker will be mr. christie. >> thank you.

thank you for that warm introduction for all of us. good morning to all of you. letk you to you, those of you here at hofstra university for the interview tonight. i am honored to share the stage, to give my perspective about the experiences i had in dealing with mutations in english white house. it is also privileged to share the stage with friends. i know governor dean for several years. we actually agree on issues more often than not, believe it or not. we always joke about that. julie mason, who now is at serious xm, i actually have the privilege to host a show on the same channel, with the former governor on saturday mornings. i want to give a shout out to and rawlins, who i have known for a long time, who i consider a friend and a mentor of mine.

i was in dallas last friday to sit down with president bush for a little while. he is very happy, very healthy, and he is angry spirits rolling his administration this in happy spirits following his administration. if you know anything about george w. bush is a phase wealthy and. what better time to fight him in better spirits to talk about his favorite pastime? how do you turn from dallas, where the president was in good spirits last week, to a conference here at hofstra in long island, to check about the george w. bush administration, in general, and more particularly to talk about how we communicated in the white house?

i think of course, the best place for me to start is at the beginning. i started in day one committed the george w. bush white house as the deputy domestic policy adviser to vice president cheney, before moving over to the special assistant to george bush in 2002. from day one, what we tried to do is we tried to define how the president would communicate his policies to the american people who had alike at him, as well as our friends and allies around the world. in the opening days, call rose, who was the senior adviser, he had an organization he has brought together on a regular basis of all the senior staff in the white house. he named the group that blair has group. they did meet in the warehouse. they sat down and they looked at the president's policies, they looked at his messaging, they looked at all sorts of things of how we are we are president -- how we are listening president bush for success, and how do we make sure we keep them there and keep him on message? these are the most senior folks,

who in the white house, the national security advisor, the press secretary, they can all gather around. call rose was pretty smart. he recognized that those who sit around the senior staff table in the white house every morning by not necessarily give him the most candidate lies and candid approach. he brought together a second group of which i was a part of, call the conspiracy of deputies. he figured that the deputies have nothing to prove except using the candid counsel, and they might be more forthcoming about where we are. is the president messinger or doing a good job? in one of the earliest meetings we had the conspiracy of deputies we sat down and thought what does george w. bush presidency look like? this was early in 2001. how are we going to make our

market and communicate to the world who we are? the first thing we sought to do, we wanted to be a different kind of republican. we wanted to position the president as a different kind of republican and communicate that. we wanted to look at new ways to communicate our policies, we wanted to offer solutions, and we ended to look to try to find the coalitions that we could build a bit beyond our traditional base. we also wanted to make sure that the president changed the tone in washington and communicate that he sought to do so. here we argued over things like how do we stress personal responsibility? i do we share credit with our allies, and how can we treat others with dignity and respect rather than attacking one another? we also sought to deliver on what we promised. for president bush investment number one, reforming public education.

number two, finding ways to have is to shins of faith to work together to modernize security, and of course to find it description drug benefit part of the medicare program. i will look to historians to assess our track record of success, but i think that we did a fairly good job. before i close, i want to give you a sense, very briefly, on how we communicated internally to make sure that our methods were being articulated properly to the country of the world. twice a week they would bring together a group calls the message meeting. yes we talked about the message. we would talk about president bush's calendar, the day following we were sitting in the meeting, and we would go three months out and we would talk about everything from who he would meet, where he would travel, what human vision -- what he would visit and what he would say. do we have a strong theme?

we have a purpose? the most valuable commodity that the president has is their time. where we properly utilizing the time? beyond this, we would sit and we would say that we need to make sure that his policy time, the policies he has articulated when you look at no charge best you hide, window that modernization social security, that it was spent well. the meetings were beyond the walls of the white house. the was difficult when i had to be a part of was the policy one. we would bring together every single policy deputy in the white house policy organization. we would have these big easels that war on the back wall, and they would say monday, 20 minutes available, tuesday, 10

minutes available, and they would let the policy deputies pointed out. i need five minutes of the president's time because of this, and another deputy would say that that does not make sense because the theme and message we have this week, that is off message. that is not what the president is talking about. from an internal perspective of making sure we really zealously guarded his time, so that he can prepare for his speeches and prepared to go out and interact with the american people, as well as our internal discussions of dealing with those who live your way to get to the oval office you need to make sure your utilizing that time for early, we felt that the first term of the administration did not go beyond this form. there is so much more complex

apparatus to say, in particular the george w. bush white house. are we on message, are we communicating, and are those vacations resonating? it is not all seriousness, and it is not all about whole numbers and words president coming up and coming down? after 9/11, the vice president of the united states was insecure in undisclosed locations that we euphemistically dubbed as the cave. i'm a big fan of saturday night live. and one night they had darrell hammond, the comedian, who had been tasked to play dick cheney. they had him in this little cave in afghanistan, and he had a little coffee maker where his heart was supposed to be. it said i am invincible, invisible, and it tastes grade. i said, did you see that saturday night live's it that they did about you with zero hammond? i brought a copy. it was avg and just for those

students who do not have dhs machines. scooter libby looked like he was going to kill me. but we paid our close attention to the way we sought to make it with the public, and the public talk to us through serious discussion as well. thank you very much, i look forward to our discussion. [applause] >> thank you very much. i've never been inside a white house bush press operation. i'm going to take a slightly different tack. most people know that i have extremely strong views about this particular president's administration, and his successes or lack both foreign and domestic. i do not see a lot of pointed reiterating. but i do want to make some observations that i think are fair and i will be surprising to

most of you. i do president bush for six years while he was governor and i was governor. he was a good guy, a standup guy. he kept his word on business dealings that he did not have to do. he was in his legal rights to not have to do it, but i liked him as a human being. he was very politician. he does not get a a lot of credit for getting angry politician, because he followed the greatest politician, bill clinton. the last one was franklin roosevelt, we do not people like that very often. he related to people well, and i tell you these things in context, because i think the

relationship between the media and george w. bush was not a grade one, although it often is not. it is probably because of the character of the media, which i want to spend the bulk of my time on. i divide the bush presidency in terms of npr the into four. in the postelection phase, it was a disputed election, at i would argue that core actually one, and the supreme court decided to do something different. but i do not want to antagonize ron. it has nothing to do with supreme court, it is congress. my view is that he was probably responsible for what happened because he could've just said, we appreciate the supreme court's views, but the congress that the ultimate say.

's numbers after he got to the presidency were not as good as most residents would be because it was not a coronation, it was an ugly process. then there was the post 9/11, his numbers were in the 90's for this reason reason that any president who presides over a that has been attacked, or where troops are sent in america's interest, their numbers are grade them and everybody wants to support the president regardless of how far away they may be in their political views. then came the iraq war, and initially there was a huge surge of support from the president because he's for our troops, and everybody supports the troops and supports the president or that began to be a liability after given there for a while. and then after that was katrina. i want to reiterate this by

saying i like event is seeing. i do not think he met any of the things that people accused him of meaning. i think it wasn't pr blunder and it was not his fault. i think the press has been a failed institution in this country for at least three presidencies. i mean it in this way --the relationships between the chief executives have been on this a city, somewhat hostile for a long time. i think it is a good thing. 92 foreign policy course, and one of the things that is amazing to me, even back to eisenhower and kennedy, where people would see us numbers that

would have a conversation with the president of the united states, and then on the way out, the procedure would say that was all of the record. and it would be off the record, edit never appear in print. it is not in the best interest of democracy to have that kind of relationship they since that time, it is the opposite, and it leads to all kinds of problems. we are at the opposite because not because the modern -- reporters are people people, but you're at the opposite because of the corporatization of the media. where the owner whispers in the year of what to say it was not to say, and every show is a profit center.

today, if you're not making money, you are getting your staff cut, your salary cut you cannot send foreign operations. even then a bus news or for assistance -- best news organizations do not have the coverage that they once had. this is because the news has become a profit center and it is driving down the quality of news the pressure in the newsrooms is a norman -- in our mess. it is not get it right, it is get it first and we can fix it later. the pressure is so grave, you may do 4, 5, 6 stories in a day. in the old days used to do for stories in a week, and that was a big deal if you can get your byline out there.

it is a very different industry. it is not a different industries simply because there are terrible people who are reporters, i do not believe that. it is not true. reporters are interesting, fun, and i want to do the right thing and for the right reasons. but the pressure on them to do things for the wrong reasons is enormous, and an effective president bush, edit effective president obama, ineffective president clinton. it may have started with nixon. i'm not sure when the magical time was that it suddenly went south on us. but it is an enormous problem. all of these presidents, certainly but clinton, bush, and obama create these walls where they do not speak to the media. it is a very tough environment, and i think it did not serve

president bush well, it has not served president obama well, and it certainly did not serve president clinton well. we want to have a debate about not just what happened in wenzhou administration, will have to have a debate about where the future of the media is, and with the social media means if there is no referee or editor anymore. i know a lot of reporters saying that the editor writes the story before you get the quotes, and then he put them in when you come back to the newsroom. that is not a good model. they can fail, but what you cannot have in the press is one that does not assert freedom and judgment. the only reason democracy works is that somebody independently has to hold us accountable for what we do in the political stream. that is a very difficult task in the last three presidencies.

[applause] julie mason: thanks, governor. i would add on top of it, that people expect their news for prey. they do not want to pay for it. it is a big problem. in some point today maybe we can talk about what your friend george bush never made it to vermont, the only state in the united date, where he never went. there was a warrant out for him. there was a lot going on with vermont. for me, obviously, the major story with the bush administration is what many of us can agree as the stunning failure of the news media to provide a critical bulwark against the administration's highly effective propaganda campaign to sell the war in iraq.

it is wrong to say that no one in the media asked questions the questions were asked, the questions -- answers were terrible. freedom is on the march was a regular insert. the strategy is victory, and the people one. there were a number of factors that we forget in the atmosphere surrounds this time, that must be considered in context and we talk about press coverage of the bush administration. his approval ratings were very strong his average first term with 62%. barack obama would kill a man to get 62% right now. he went out to 52%, still incredibly good. people were terrified after 9/11, they were willing to believe anything.

70% of americans agree that iraq was responsible for 9/11, and of course even the administration was saying in the side of their mouth that they had nothing to do with it. but we were attacked, and saddam must go. while all of this was happening, the news industry was in a crisis. it has gotten better and leveled off, but as it was mentioned, still in terrible shape. by the end of the bush administration, 17,000 journalists have lost their job because of the recession, not because of him. [laughter] these included hundreds in washington dc, including me. i got laid off in the very last day of the bush administration, and i was the white house reporter. everybody was losing their jobs it was terrible. it was a scary, depressing, miserable time in the industry. and what a lot of us forget when we hope generalists will occupy

the church of truth is that it is a business. these discusses do not make money anymore. it is very tough when you read the washington post right now, which is a wonderful paper with a terrific history, it is all written very fast by kids who do not make a lot of phone calls. democrats in congress, echoing with the administration was saying about iraq is making the same statements. there were not a lot of naysayers, they were sidelined and marginalized and made fun of there was not much of a robust opposition for journalists to cover. shortly after 9/11 we had the anthrax attack targeting washington leaders and journalists. the fbi director said that another terrorist attack was inevitable, all night long over washington dc fighter jets patrolled the skies and the d.c. sniper attacks began.

all of this began all at once. it was crisis to crisis, and it is part remember that these were the days of beginner. proctor be an american -- get hurt on, proud to be an american. it seems so long ago. 35% approval job rating, it is easy to complain now why the media did not do its job. and i was stipulated that much of that, there was some critical reporting, when a president has a 90% approval rating, they do not want to hear reading stories from the press. i wanted to put some of that in perspective. there are so many other green stories.

the president's trip to graceland with the japanese prime minister, which for me was a high point. thank you. [applause] ed rollins: can you imagine every day, to get up and go to work at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, every single day and you have world crisis ceased to deal with? economic crisis to deal with? you start a day, most of the white house staff comes in at 7:00 a.m., you try to make the decisions, all day long, and people try to interpret what you

done, and they are the press corps. it is not that we tie to manipulate you, but if you look around this room this is about the size of what across core is every day. and the prosecutor he stacks out and says here's what the president did today, and here's why we did it, and what is happening. and then you try to coordinate the message. i think president bush, who am a big fan of, and his presidency was terrible in terms of the things that came into the environment. he did not want to duplicate his dad, he wanted to do what the reagan administration did. it was a much different environment, and we want to control the story. we understood that your job to do, and you were not going to write our press releases. we wanted to drive our message, our story, and do it in a coordinated way.

unfortunate for the first president bush, when he got elected, and he thought i will do it differently than president reagan, and i will not have coordinated efforts, and i will not have a story of the week and i will not have removed talking on the same page, i will go into meet the press and threw everything at me that you want to, and he did. when you do that, it each and every everyone of your writing a story, and it is not controlled story, and you ask questions, you can go 25 different directions. to a certain extent, if not his presidency is given much higher marks than it was when he left office, to the bush people, the father had lost a good man. for the reason was they were not able to tell the story. i was an observer of the administration, and i think you

will agree with me, they had an extraordinary woman in their name karen hughes. she had been the closest advisor, a newsroom anchor in texas, she came with him. she was clearly one of the real strength of the administration. karen had a greater relationship with the president and could put real discipline into it and was not afraid of karl rove. unfortunately, she left after two years to go back home. she had a young family and the pressures were for her to go back. she later connected with jerry secretary of state. but -- deputy secretary of state. when you hear the stories, the bombings, the train centers in the pentagon and what have you, you sort of loose track of whatever you want to talk about. you want to talk about

education, everyone wants to talk about something else right you can never underestimate the importance of the media today. when we were in the reagan white house, which was the beginning of the modern how to control television of the story, which we did pretty effectively, we first came into existence and the white house had to go into federal court and more networks were a legitimate news agency, and the world changed dramatically. you did not just have cnn, you had fox, you can be seen coming that msnbc, you had other main news. it was beginning of the blog era. used to be, control your story, your job all day long twist to make sure your story did not get

complicated by what they were doing, and your battle was to make sure that on network news that night going for a million people to the 40 million people watching, you have an entire day to manage your story. today, something breaks, 15 seconds later it is on a blog, 30 seconds later it is on a network. i think, when the bush people came in, particularly after the feeding frenzy that went on during the clinton administration, and i agree he is the most gifted politicians i have seen in my lifetime, he understood politics for a well, but he did not control his message all the time very well. a lot of what the bush people wanted to do was to really control the message and make sure we thought was important, not writing a press release or your story, but what we thought

was important with get out there. you can never underestimate this, george w. bush would go nuts about leaks. they had a newly policy. there was greater discipline and that white house about not leaking stories. every time there was a leak, one time bill casey came into the senior staff of the white house, to complain about cia stuff getting linked. 15 minutes after he left, the white house correspondent of the washington post said that 8 meeting people had a call about a link. i think the team was good, i think a lot of the problem, the press had dreams dramatically -- changed dramatically.

we have lost a lot the greatest fears and entities that used to be. we have so many fundamental differences out there today, and the 17,000 journalists back on displaced cannot all right a blog without making sure that the editor is there. it was a lack of and ability to control an environment. you do not control war, terrorism, the economic breakdown. as much as they attempted to do all that, and they were pretty darn good at it, the stories were just overwhelming. i give him grade credit. i think the american public never got to see the george w. bush that a lot of us saw. he was extremely personal man. he was able smart man, a lot smarter than people give him credit for. dick cheney as his vice president, he did not deal with

the press, but had a very capable personality. one of his assistant senior advisers knew the media as well as anybody. and counter forces, but at the end of the day, it was more the circumstances and the changing of the environment of the national news media that have real impact on the presidency and to a certain extent, not that they did not impact the incoming, but it was hard to sell story. he, in a different environment, with a different economy, what have been sitting here praising a president who understood the country very well. [applause] >> the first thing i would like to do is to ask the panelists to respond to anything they heard said that they would like to

weigh in before i ask a question or two. julie mason: i appreciate the remarks of all the other panelists about the likable guy george w. bush was. he was smarter and meaner that he got credit for, but he also inspected the role of the press, and have us to his ranch for dinner. president obama cannot name 10 people who spent the last 10 years covering, but president bush knew everyone in the government, and their wives. >> either question about that. howard dean: before he had a press conference, they would decide ahead of time who would do things and in what order? obama still does that, but bush was the first one to do that. i do nothing president clinton did. ron christie: paging dr. dean.

[laughter] ed rollins: there was an order. people who got calm on -- called on, the major networks, and then the rest of the press, you could distinguish anymore was important. this was a way of -- i am sure this was part of the discipline, let's not call on someone who will not ask a question but make a commentary, which show many of the dead -- so many of them did. they would make a statement and

then ask the president if they wanted to comment on the statement. julie mason: if the president wanted to have a question about the automakers, they would call on the detroit news. everyone expects tv to get a question. they spread it out pretty evenly over time. >> the new york times was banned from the plane. i might have done that if i had thought of it. [laughter] ron christie: you sure to the office at 6:30 a.m. in the morning, and you come and work an eight hour day on saturday. one thing that they first taught us was you never get out before

the president. you do not talk to the press about his policies until the president announces them. you do not get around and show off to your friends and talk about this is what the president is going to do next week. when the white house press secretary makes an announcement about the present schedule or his policies, that is when it will be made. we were extraordinary discipline from the first term, from 2001-2004. that is the strong role that karen hughes had in his early years. she was the enforcer, but also a brilliant strategic communication strategist. i think a lot of people with the passage of time forgot about that is how we approach this, a discipline first and foremost. it is the president's announcement, and the president's position. not you, not your ego of trying to get in front of the president. ron christie: some of the most powerful women became players.

ed rollins: the women in the press corps, they were very strong, and they had greater influence. >> one thing i would like to ask you about, we have not talked a lot about the bush administration to was happening at a time unbelievable change in the media. i want to lay out some things about that. to me, one of the landmark moments came in september of 1998, when the report into very's allegations against resident clinton was published, including in its entirety online. a week before that, out in california a company calls google was incorporated.

there was no reference in the water -- ripples in the water, but by 2004 you have howard dean's campaign being a pioneer in the use of the web as a fund-raising mechanism. you also have the beginning of internet memes, and the year that the 60 minutes investigation into the texas international guard service exploded by bloggers who had a greater knowledge of typography than the producers of cbs seem to have. twitter gets underway 2006. in if you want my opinion, that is the first place and a lot of them will turn when we get to breaking news. how do you think the bush administration managed that change?

were the leaders, follow, or not even figuring it out? ron christie: we were literally at a crossroads. it came into play of september 11, 2001. for those of us who were evacuated at the white house that day, all cell phone towers and d.c. for our network went down. there was not a means or mechanism for us to communicate. shortly after 9/11, the concept was introduced that we would now carry a blackberry, which most of us had never heard of before, to vacate with each other -- communicate with each other. if you look at the way which would news digital media, the white house photographer will still taking still photos in 2001, 2002, 2003.

we did not digitize until 2004. when you look at the way the students communicate today, i think for us the challenge was recognizing that this new technology was out there and how do we best not only hook the president into this new technology, but how can we utilize its half -- it as staff? president obama uses e-mail, president bush did not. by the time you get into 2006, 2007, the white house staff was a lot more sophisticated in dealing with this emerging technology. but for our cousins in the obama administration, 19 day in technological capabilities that they have the tools they have at their disposal to get the message out. howard dean: they gave an

interesting talk about the cost for of change that is going on. the bush administration was really at the crossroads of an enormous generational change in the world cannot justice in america -- world, not just in america. you had nationstates becoming individual groups, and even al qaeda, as mike said this morning, is now an institution and a doomsday cold which is incredibly effective as using methods that nobody could dream of other then someone like charlie manson. we're crossroads of a lot of things that are happening in the

world, not just in america, in a generation of you people that are looking at institutions in a completely different way. it happened to be that george w. bush happened to be presiding over this, which did not make his presidency any easier. one of the fundamental and mr. standings that we went into iraq on was that iraq was a country. it is an agreement european powers of hundred years ago that made no sense is a country. he unrooted all of that and created an analyst forces that nobody had any idea where is horrible as they were there. there was an enormous technological revolution going on around the world. the bush people just happened to be there at the time.

to say that the bush people did not understand technology is not really fair. that would be like saying shakespeare did not understand literature 300 years later. he just got caught in enormous historical change that affected everything, not just technology, not just the media, but the existence of a nationstate itself that began to change and the fundamental beliefs of all the people who have been trained in the past 40 or 50 years in the post world order became to come on board during the administration that had nothing to do with the president himself for the people he fired. the rules are changing under their feet and there was not a lot they could do about it and they tried to play catch-up. you always want to tell one story. ed rollins: you cannot tell 100

stories. you had a massive plane crash yesterday, you had bombings that started to take place last night, all of a sudden, when of the original game plan was, it is off. blackberries;, you see everybody sitting here with their iphones like this, and there is a temptation to go respond to that. as a press person or a strategist, to have that splint to say i just got this text from julie watson answer on this right now, and i sent a text to her answer her question, i will totally move away from my agenda to her agenda. the way to maintain this in the future will be extraordinarily

harder, and i remember i was mike huckabee's chairman and we were doing an event in iowa, and we had a room. he started going out to be the places with 10 people. by the end you have every major press person in the world. we did a press conference, and we had 150 bloggers, and another 500 on the phone. with the mainstream media, we did not let them ask questions. we said this is the future. it is controlling that message, and that is going to be very hard. it is just magnified 1000 times what it used to be. we used to have an office in times square, and you'd walk into times where and you are bombarded by billboards, lies, and all of that. it will be in a extraordinary it will be in a extraordinary challenge for campaigns and all