>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin this evening talking about national security and whether one government tries to influence the election in another. we talk about russia and hacking the d.n.c. and timber cases of all that -- and the implications with david sanger, adam segal, raj de and michael riley. >> the one big question is the relationship between the hack assuming russian actors and the leak. i know officials are trying to actively think through that because that is an important step in policy consequences and the question you asked, charlie, is is there a direct attempt to influence an election. whether or not that was the case, clearly the episode highlights for the american public the importance of preserving the integrity of our

process from cyber adversaries, have the spotlight on them. >> rose: we conclude with steven brill asking the question 15 years after 9/11, are we any safer? >> i was curious to document and see how we had done. i did a book in 2003 after the immediate aftermath and standing up of the department of homeland security. as a citizen, i hadn't paid attention but had a vague sense that we spent a ton of money, there were a lot of dedicated people doing a lot of good things, but that the record might be interesting and mixed and turns out it is mixed. >> rose: russian hacking of american political parties and the question of being safe 15 years after 9/11, when we continue.

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: the cyber attack targeting the d.n.c. appears to have been more extensive than officials first believed. russian hackers allegedly breeched a number of email accounts associated with the democratic party and its officials. the original leaks in july forced d.n.c. chairwoman debbie wasserman schultz to resign. whr the hacks are part of a larger effort to influence the american presidential election. joining me is adam segal of the council on foreign relations. he is the author of "the hacked

world order." from washington raj de, served as general counsel at the national security agency. he currently leads a global cybersecurity practice at the mayer-brown law firm. and michael riley from bloomberg news, and david sanger of the "new york times." i am pleased to have them all here. david sanger, since you have been here so many times, tell me where we are. >> i think we're at sort of a predictable place in the course of this because what we knew a year, year and a half ago though the government didn't announce it as such is the russians got inside the state department's unclassified email systems, the white house unclassified email systems, part of the systems of the joint chiefs of staff, then we discovered the successor to the k.g.b. more than a year ago got into the democratic national

committee systems followed by another russian military agency, the g.r.u., going into the same d.n.c. system. when you go in, you follow the bread crumbs out. it wouldn't be surprising to me if one of the hacked e-mails or individuals that the f.b.i. is now looking at was either the one that led these agencies into the d.n.c. or from the d.n.c. they went out to them because that's simply how you do. this you follow the string as it proceeds in and out of the networks. >> rose: tell me what role wikileaks plays in this, dade. >> well, wikileaks was the recipient of a number of the documents, but they were not the primary recipient. initially, after the d.n.c. hack was discovered and the firm crowd strike turned out a report pointing back to two russian

actors, didn't quite call them the intelligence agencies but made clear they were sophisticated state-run actors, after that we began to see some of the documents surface on the web from someone we talked about who identified himself as gusifer2, named after another hacker who is actually in jail, and it looks like that was probably a construct that probably there was probably no gucifer2 but probably a committee of russian hackers. but whoever it is, they published this material themselves, and they didn't get very much news bounce out of it. i think after that it ended up in the hands of wikileaks. we still don't understand much about the transition belt about how it got from the people who hacked this to the people who published it.

>published. >> rose: has he hinted he has more? >> he hinted he has more and hinted he has no particular love for hillary clinton and all that, but in an odd way, the contents of what was in these leaks apart from the fact that the d.n.c. was favoring hillary clinton over bernie sanders, which i don't think was probably the best kept secret in washington. the fact of the hack and the concept that the russians may be inserting themselves into an american election is far more newsworthy than what we've seen out of these e-mails. >> rose: any doubt that the russians did this? >> i don't think there is any doubt that the russians are behind it given the publicly revealed information and the reporting that we see that most u.s. intelligence believe with a

high degree of confidence the russians are behind it. i think the big question still is was this primarily directed at espionage, so we know, as david said, that the russians for a long time have been ency servers and networks, and we know the chinese have been long interested. we think the chinese were behind the hack of the mccain and obama campaigns in 2008. so was it primarily espionage or did they, in fact, intend to insert themselves into the election or did they make a decision after they were caught? did they decide to dump the documents and make the best of a bad situation. >> rose: have we seen the tip of the iceberg or do we suspect there is much more. >> no, i think there's much more. this appears to be something like an information wa warfare operation. that shouldn't surprise us. the russians have been running these operations in europe for a couple of years. they did it in ukraine, eastern europe, hacked a television station in paris and claimed to be the islamic state. where they seem to have upped

the game is they decided to intervene in a very contentious election in the u.s. and i think there is no doubt they have a lot of information with which to do that. so far, the attacks, the victims have come out are part of a small subset of a much larger set of people who were at least targeted. a security firm said they attract almost 4,000 spear fishing e-mails from the g.r.e. intelligence unit and they crossed a bunch of categories -- lawyers, lobbyists, foundations. they basically go into every corner of the washington power structure. they include n.a.t.o. officers, military stuff, defense contractors. a lot are personal e-mails and they combine personal with what

people talk about in personal. one question is how much are they giving to wikileaks or other people to release, do they plan to do this all the way up to the election and is there a response the u.s. could make that might curtail this or change the calculus the russians are making. >> rose: raj. i'm sure senior officials are debating that question and the complexity involves a host of factors. publicly attributing something to a night state is different than privately doing. so we saw the u.s. government made significant strides when the sony hack was attributed to the government of north korea. officials are seeing the public benefit and need for at tribiewtion to hold hostile actors accountable. >> rose: how do we hold north korea accountable? how might we hold russia accountable? >> there is a range of tools at the government's disposal,

everything from diplomatic action. we've seen diplomatic approaches with the chinese in the wake of a number of chinese hacking activities to criminal indictments, as we saw with several p.l.a. actors, to economic sanctions as we saw in the case of north korea. so there is a host of options, all which have various advantages and disadvantages in terms of actual, practical impact and public messaging to the adversary. >> rose: the question often comes up with respect to hillary clinton's server, do we assume that if in fact the people who did these other hackings wanted to hack hillary clinton's server, they could? or was her service so secure it would have been much more difficult to penetrate? david? >> well, it's a question we have been asking a lot about and what we've heard from the f.b.i. director so far is he said that there was no direct evidence that anybody had gotten inside

hillary clinton's server, but then he went on to say that the actors -- state-run actors are usually so good that they might not leave any evidence. now that raises the obvious question if they're so good, why was it so easy in the case of the d.n.c. hack? and the answer to that may well be that there was more than one hacker inside the d.n.c. it could have been that the f.s.d. and the g.r.u. were there and that others were there, too. in fact, in cyber, it's not uncommon, once somebody gets caught, for them to sort of leave the door open quite deliberately to other hackers so the crime scene gets polluted. so there are all those different elements, and it may be a long time and we may never figure out whether or not her server was hacked. i wanted to pick up, charlie, briefly on one thing raj said which is i think there is a growing sense in the u.s. government that naming and shaming actors here has some

utility. the justice department indicted some iranians for attacks on some banks in a dam outside of new york. the chinese raj referred to, the naming of the north koreans. one interesting question here may be did the obama administration make a mistake by not naming the russians for the state department and white house and joint chiefs of staff act and, had they done so, would it have created some kind of deterrent for them to act against the d.n.c., or would it have made no difference? and we'll never know the answer. i think one thing that's in the way to have the administration now from naming the russians in the case is first the investigation is ongoing but, secondly, will raise the question what about the previous hacks the u.s. government knew about and never discussed publicly? >> rose: they named the north koreans after sony, correct? >> correct. that's right, and it was a very quick attribution. the president had gotten briefed

on it and named them in december just before he went off to vacation in hawaii. you may remember that, immediately after that, there were a lot of people who came out and said, no, the evidence is no good, it's not the north koreans, and the u.s. government didn't want to reveal its evidence because it didn't want to reveal ho how much it ws up inside north korea's own computer systems and had evidence from inside north korea, and that could be going on in the russian case where you could have intelligence agencies -- and i don't know this is the case, i'm speculating -- but it could be the intelligence agencies know more about this case from our own implants inside russian systems, and raj's former colleagues in the intelligence community may have decided that they couldn't risk revealing the depth of that penetration and, thus, can't talk about what evidence they have. >> rose: that make sense to you, raj? >> generally, yes, it does. and generally in these situations what will happen is a

gain-los analysis and as folks think through whether public attribution should be made, they will weigh the benefits of doing so publicly versus the potential loss of an intelligence source and method, for example. >> it's important to point out we're trying to create certain enormous of behavior inside of cyberspace. we're trying to distinguish a good and bad act of cyberespionage. so to target the d.n.c., we basically signaled those are legitimate targets. we don't believe you should be able to interfere with elections, so we need to draw the line between what type of espionage the u.s. conducts and influence operations we see beyond the pale. >> rose: government wouldn't try to influence elections, would it? >> well, not elections, but this weaker or last week, the russians said by the way we discovered all this malware in

our servers and we won't say who it came from, but we know. >> rose: the chinese adding to the chinese claim that they'd start supporting industrial espionage, am i correct in that? >> they did and the evidence is that the cyber industrial espionage is going down. >> rose: because the chinese said they'd try to do something about it. what does this open up, though, in terms of where hacking may be going in a larger sense in terms of access to everything? medical records, for example. >> i think the problem is that we have often described a threat as a kind of live free or die, hackers are going to cause massive destructions and explosions, and what we've seen is that cyber is really used below the threshold for an armed

attacker use of force and there's a whole range of ways to use cyberfor influence operations, espionage, and it's very difficult to figure out who the targets are. sony is a private company. the d.n.c. is a political organization. opium hacks were individuals for the personal records of federal employees. so the target is shifting, not the nation state as we traditionally thought, it's a whole range of private actors that give states the ability to influence and coars coerce in we haven't thought about. >> rose: where is this on the priority of the n.s.a. >> it is rising to the top and i echo the points that cybersecurity today can be as much as protecting the confidentiality of communications as it can be about protecting what we all traditionally thought of as core assets, whether you're a business, intellectual property, personal information, or if you're the government which you could have meant classified information or cultural

infrastructure. but if you're the head of a party or c.e.o. of a company, hack of e-mails could have a real world impact. >> rose: do we know who in russia might have ordered this? >> we don't. in fact, we don't even know it was ordered. it's possible the intelligence agencies were rooting around because that's what they do, and once they got into the d.n.c. and got this material, they may have brought it to their political masters and said look what we've got, either for bureaucratic approval or because they thought it was useful. it's hard to imagine a ban bunh of people sitting around at the table saying, wow, we have all this great stuff about how the d.n.c. was faving hillary clinton over bernie sanders. doesn't strike me they would think that was that fascinating. but if they see a moment to disrupt an american election, they may see it as payback, as you and i have discussed before, for what vladimir putin views as

an effort by secretary clinton when she was still secretary of state to denounce a rigged or at least partly fraudulent parliamentary election in 2011 in russia where she said some things that putin views as having encouraged protests. adam got in a very important point before which was that we have spent our past few years thinking about the cyber pearl harbor extreme, to use the phrase leon panetta used in a speech, and that's bringing down the power grid and so forth. and that's certainly something to worry about. but what we're seeing here in sony or the d.n.c. hack is much more common and below the threshold of an act of war, and somewhere between espionage and information war fair, as --

warfare as michael said, that may be the future of where cyber war is going, along with the kinds of attacks that the u.s. and israel did against, say, the iranian nuclear program, which was essentially an act of sabotage. but all of these are acts that stay short of what could prompt an armed response. >> rose: where are we, michael, in terms of the race between people who hack and people who want to resist hacking? >> well, i think it's pretty clear that the people who hack are pretty far ahead, in part because it's much, much easier to play offense than defense. i think one of the things the d.n.c. hacks has shown us is there are interesting tactics that are being used and used effectively. among them is you can hack personal e-mails by getting a piece of malware on a computer at home, get credentials to a

gmail account, and that can lead to all sorts of information that can have surprising sensitivity. one of the victims of this sort of larger set of hacks is a n.a.t.o. general breedlove who apparently based on e-mails posted, the russians were reading his email from 2012-on. it's a gmail account, but he was talking to colin powell and wesley clark. what we've shown is just because the way people use information, go back between secured email accounts and personal accounts, the spice have the upper hand and we haven't figured out a way to counter that. >> rose: i thought that would have given the f.b.i. ability with respect to hillary clinton's server, if they wanted to, to find out more about the e-mails that were deleted. there was somebody at the receiving end of those e-mails

or somebody sending e-mails she was receiving. >> absolutely, and the state department released e-mails that have sort of gone e-mails carefully and released them, but, i mean, e-mails that were deleted, you know, the f.b.i. was able to go in and reconstruct some part of that in terms of the fragments of the data they had. they may have more information about that than we know. but the clinton campaign has been pretty clear. they said, look, we had a very legal process where our lawyer sat down, went through everything that was in that account, and the only thing that was left out were personal or e-mails or political e-mails that didn't have anything to do with state department business. we have been stuck at taking the word, donald trump said there may be another hand the russians could play if they hacked into the servers and had some of the e-mails, they could present that themselves, and it presents the possibility of interesting surprises between now and

november. >> rose: and also interesting questions if, in fact, he was encouraging them to hack into a private server. >> absolutely, yeah. >> rose: david, and others, adam, within the legal framework, will we see a seizure of things -- a series of things? david reference add meeting you may have been in. i know there are conferences going on about cybersecurity. i know there are a lot of meetings taking place. we know cyber has risen in terms of focus within the u.s. government and certainly within the military. what do we need now? >> well, in the more immediate case involving the d.n.c., charlie, i think there is a series of hard decisions president obama is going to have to confront. he doesn't have an investigation

report yet to act on. the f.b.i. is still looking at this, as our story this morning showed, this is continuing to spread and yet, at the same time, i think the president's probably feeling some pressure, and i know some of his staff are, to be able to send an official message to the russians before the election happens because there is always the possibility that this could be the beginning of a more broad -- or a broader and more complex attempt to go try to tinker with the election itself. we have no evidence at this point that they're into the election systems, but we certainly know there are vulnerabilities in the systems of many of the state. so i think he would want to be able to issue some kind of warning to the russians that they should keep their hands off of the american elections both from an information viewpoint and from the actual votes and counts. the broader question is can you

set norms for all this as adam referred to before, we've had a little success with that with the chinese. i've never seen any indication of success with the russians. >> rose: because the russians are different than the chinese? >> well, they're less interested, to some degree, in the kind of commercial data and intellectual property that the chinese are focused on to help their state-owned companies and more interested in the espionage and information warfare part of this and then, of course, the traditional military secrets. and the u.s. doesn't want to set any norms to cut into its own ability to conduct espionage against the russian military or maybe even some of the financial institutions and certainly its political institutions. so there are going to be people saying to the president, before you cut the deal with the russians, think about what u.s. espionage activities you might be affecting. >> rose: go ahead. we've had a little success with the russians on group of

experts at the u.n., 20 experts between russian, china and other countries, and they agreed there are very basic rules of behavior in cyberspace that international law applies, that states cannot attack the infrastructure of other states during peacetime, which is a norm. moving forward, how to define credible infrastructure. so the electoral, the voting system is not now considered by the d.h.s. as critical infrastructure. so i think one of the things the obama administration will be doing, as david said, is sending a signal that we're going to consider critical infrastructures including the voting system and there is a line there. >> rose: you will say to the russians, stop this because you know what we can do. >> i think we'll send a signal that there are certain behaviors that will be outside and there will be repercussions. >> what would be the

repercussions. >> i think most of them we're not going to see. i think probably we're already engaged in some disruption of cyber operations in russia, so are we disrupting whatever the russian spies are doing themselves? are we sending signals to russian leaders through our own cyberoperations that we could respond if we need to? i think given all of the other interests we have with the russians now in syria, the iran nuclear deal, i think we're very unlikely to use sanctions or other more punitive measurers. >> it might be worth noting they may have played cards already, the u.s. intelligence community and others that we haven't already seen. there is a lot we don't know about how this evolved in the last few months. we don't know how the d.n.c. figured out it had been hacked by the russians. it's possible they could have got a heads up, called an external notification, saying you guys should look at that.

they called an i.r. firm who was relatively quick to put out the message that it was russia. they called in two other firms who confirmed that. quickly the narrative became not just about what's in the e-mails but who's doing it and why. that may be a pretty effective counter already to operations that the russians planted to really influence this. you know, there is the possibility that it's already come back, there's a lot more scrutiny on trump and trump's connections to russia, you know, there are some complex things going on that we just don't know yet. >> rose: what do we know about trump and his connections to russia? >> well, a lot of people will point out a couple of things. he's got some pretty strong business connections. paul manafort, his primary campaign manager now, spent several years in ukraine working for the president of ukraine who, once he was ejected from the country in the protests,

then went to russia and is there now. that sort of close relationship between manafort and some figures that have close connections, the kremlin sort of being brought up as a connection of things, people are like what did this add up to if, in fact, the russians are trying to interfere in the u.s. elections on one side and not the other. "the washington post" has done pretty good work on this and looked at some money that flowed between russian oligarchs and at least some of trump's financial interests. that's several steps removed from saying that he's got, you know, direct financial interests that coincide with the russian oligarchs or putin's that would explain why they're going doing what they're doing now. a better explanation might be just that, you know, the russians looked at the field and don't have any love for hillary clinton and may have just

decided that an information operation like this, even if it doesn't get trump elected, it's a way to confront the west and specifically the u.s. without much that the u.s. can do about it. >> i think that's an important point. a lot of russian information operations are not necessarily a specific outcome, but as long as you can create distrust so you can undermine people's trust in information, then that for them is a positive outcome. so it may not be that they thought, you know, we want trump to win and may just be enough to throw the election into chaos, that they would see that as a positive outcome. >> rose: raj, let me ask you directly, do you believe the runnings are trying to influence the result of the american presidential election? >> i think the one big open question is the relationship here between the hack, assuming it was russian actors, and the leak, and i know intelligence

officials are actively trying to think through that because that is an important step in both policy consequences and into the question you asked, charlie, as to is there a direct attempt to influence an election. whether or not that was the case, clearly this episode highlights for the american public the importance of preserving the integrity of our electoral process from cyber adversaries, everything from the party process to voting machines now have the spotlight on them. >> rose: did i hear you say we just don't know? >> i don't think we know publicly that critical link. i think in line with some of the other comments made, it would not be unusual in tradition of russian operations for this activity to be undertaken to influence an election, but i think the jury is still out on this one and we shouldn't leap to that conclusion until we know more. >> rose: david? i agree completely with raj. i think the evidence that there were russian actors and that there were almost certainly linked to or part of the

intelligence agencies who did the hack, that's very strong. as i said earlier, the transition to making these public, who made the decision, who was in control of it, whether there may have been others who hacked into the d.n.c. who actually leaked the material, that is still, i think, unclear, at least to me and to the people who i've talked to. on the broader question to the degree our voting system is vulnerable, i think this is something the u.s. government is going to have to act on quickly in next 90 days, aneth not easy because it's a very decentralized system, every state does it differently, so every system is different. some will be more vulnerable than others. the good news is because it's so decentralized, it's not as if a hacker could sit around and come up with a way to manipulate the entire vote in the united states. they would have to do this state by state and sometimes locality by locality and that would be

difficult. >> rose: david sanger, "new york times," thank you so much, raj de, national security agency, so much, adam segal, council on foreign relations, thank you, and thank you, michael riley. >> rose: on september 11, 2011, since the u.s. has spent $1 trillion to protect against terror attacks. steven brill discussing his article to answer the question are we any safer? it is the cover story in the september session of "the atlantic." welcome back. >> thanks, charlie. >> rose: why pursue this question of all the questions you could be asking and pursuing. >> i was curious to document and see how we had done.

i did a book in 2003 about the immediate aftermath and the standing up of the department of homeland security and other than as a citizen, i hadn't paid muspaid -- hadn't paid much attention to it sense but had a vague sense that we spent a ton of money and a lot of dedicated people were doing a lot of good things but that the record might be really interesting and really mixed. turns out the record is mixed. >> rose: but it's clear, we are safer. >> we are stronger. we have much stronger homeland security defenses because of the tens of thousands of men and women who now work at it every day. sometimes -- >> rose: but why doesn't that make us stronger? >> because there are two things that are part of the equation. one our defenses, the other is the offense. the offense has multiplied. it's much more diffuse, in part because we went into iraq and just caused all kinds of turmoil

in that part of the world. so we faced many more threats, many different kinds of threats, and we haven't even completely responded to the threats we faced on 9/11. you will recall, right after the attacks, there were the anthrax attacks, and we still haven't made the progress we need to make in dealing with the bioterrorism aspect. >> rose: you know what happened in iraq was not the reason that osama bin laden attacked on 9/11. >> of course. no, that's the point. that was a gratuitous raising of the threats against us. it really backfired. not only wasn't the war, you know, justified as a response to 9/11, but it was dramatically counterproductive. >> rose: counterproductive because? >> because it unleashed all these destabilizing forces that we now face not only in the

region but face them in paris, and you could even argue that because to have the internet and the communications, we face them in san bernardino and we face them in orlando because, you know, individual lone wolves get inspired. >> rose: okay. let's just stay with that idea. i want to understand it. are you saying, take 9/11, put it over here, osama bin laden wanted to lash out against the united states. >> orchestrated a planned attack. >> rose: by him and some of the people, and now one of the principal people in captivity and others. but the question in terms of iraq destabilized the region, because we were in iraq, because that war had the destabilizing effect it had, it allowed terrorism to grow and provided a much more bigger series of people who wished us bad as well as what else? >> well, they also had a target. you know, suddenly, you know,

the americans were invading an islamic country, and the terrorist's greatest dream is to be able to have the ultimate war with western civilization. >> rose: would that have happened if we had not gone into iraq? >> i don't know, but i certainly know it happened after we went into iraq, and what i know today is that goal of the terrorists is the same which is to lure us into a war between western civilization and the muslim religion -- >> rose: which is the argument used by many people as to how we have to respond to this and, in other words, if we engage them in land warfare we're playing into their hands. >> and if we even say we're at war with a religion, that's what they want us to say, and president bush didn't take the bait, president obama didn't take the bait, and donald trump

spends 100% of his time declaring that war. >> rose: and a lot of other people as well as donald trump do that. >> but he's running for president. >> rose: i understand, but it has been sort of a divide between republicans and democrats and others. >> not national security republicans, per se. >> rose: you can be a national security republican and still have a difference. my point is to understand whether you can make a distinction between not saying it's a war against islam and recognizing the fact you are fighting, in most cases, a radical extremist islam. >> that's exactly the way to put it. that's exactly the distinction we have to make that you just made, but it isn't the distinction that the terrorists want us to make. they want us to declare war, and that's what inspires people, you know, on a laptop in their basement somewhere, which, is you know, the great satan west is declaring war on this

religion, so now i'm going to show that i'm joining the battle and i'm going to shoot up the nightclub or a shopping mall. so the answer to your first question is are we safer is, no, we have done a lot. we are stronger, tougher. you know, you can't hijack airplanes anymore the way they did. >> rose: and we've learned lessons. >> a lot of lessons, but there are new lessons to learn and some of them we can't prevent. we certainly can't prevent them if we let anyone who wants to walk into a gun store and buy an assault rifle. that would help if we did something about that. but in a world which our enemy, unlike the soviet union during the cold war, the soviet union was deterred, we and they had missiles and we both decided not to kill each other. but if your enemy is the people trying to kill you don't care if they die and can't be deterred,

in fact they glory in the notion they might die, and if they have access to assault weapons, then we're going to have more of the kinds of attacks we've seen lately, and one of the things that the president has tried to do is get the country to adjust to that, to understand that and say that it's not the end of the world, it's awful, we're doing everything we can every hour of the day to prevent it, but in this world that we live in today, that is going to happen. the cliche after 9/11 was, you know, "never again." and president bush used to say the terrorists only have to be right once, we have to be right 100% of the time. you can't be right 100% of the time, this stuff is going to happen. >> rose: most people are surprised there has not been attack against the united states. >> or a dirty bomb. >> rose: and they also point out there have been a number of times in which they stopped

possible attacks. >> i'm surprised but less surprised now that i've spent a year looking at this and seeing everything that this administration and the bush administration have done to fortify our defenses. they have done a good job. >> rose: you talk to james comey, you talked to ray kelly, a whole range, le head of homeld security, you name it. the ultimate national security threat is terrorist organizations having weapons of mass destruction. >> correct, and there are lots of different kinds of weapons of mass destruction, and if you're talking about terrorism, you can have a weapon that doesn't destroy masses of people but scares masses of people, and that's what the dirty bomb that i write about is. >> rose: explain the dirty bomb. >> it's a standard explosive that you lace with enough radiological material which you can get at any hospital in this city or at a logging company,

there are zillions of potential sources of that kind of radiological material that you can steal. it's not well secured. you mix it with a standard explosive, and when the police show up after a bomb goes off and kills half a dozen people in the middle of midtown or washington, the radiation levels they get on their radiation detecters which they now all carry is going to show that there is contamination. now, what's your definition of lethal? what it would show in the example i write about is that in washington, d.c. they did a test on this, it showed that, unless you evacuated all of downtown washington from, like, the library of congress up to the smithsonian, one person for every 10,000 people living in washington, one additional person would die of cancer in the next five or ten years.

that sounds pretty awful. >> rose: like chernobyl? that's much worse because that was real nuclear material. one person out of every ten thousand, sounds terrible, except if you do the math, half a people living in around washington, d.c., that adds up to 50 extra deaths. i could prevent those deaths if i went into an office on k street and got people to quit smoking. the essence of a dirty bomb is you hear the number and everybody gets scared and you say, my god, this is as dangers as a superfund site, we have to evacuate all downtown washington until we knock down all the buildings and rebuild them, that would be the natural impulse. the fact is, if you look at it rationally, we shouldn't be that scared of it. one of the places i fault the obama and bush administration is they've never had that discussion with the american

people. if the first time you try to have that discussion, the this isn't as bad as it seems discussion, you know, is the afternoon after a dirty bomb goes off, that's not going to be very credible. if you do it before hand and really explain it to people and get the experts out there explaining it, that takes that weapon away from the terrorists, and i'm worried about that. especially you could have an october surprise if you take it that the terrorists would like to have a trump presidency because, again, he's moving to declare war on them which is what they want, then the next logical step is they might want to disrupt the election. so that trump is more favored. the way to do that is to scare more and more people -- >> rose: do you think a terrorist attack would wok to the advantage of a trump candidacy? >> that's what the pundits seem to say, the more scared we are -- it's his campaign rhetoric. that's what he says is you should be scared and, therefore,

you should vote for me because secretary clinton is weak and obama is weak, he hasn't gone after terrorism the way i will. the moment i take office, i.s.i.s. is gone. >> rose: you see what he said today about president obama is the founder of i.s.i.s.? >> the founder -- i mean, who -- who could explain that? i can't wait to hear him asked about it if he ever goes on television or anyplace other than fox news. >> rose: my assumption is his answer will have to do with the fact that we withdraw from iraq and i.s.i.s. grew out of what used to be al quaida, iraq. >> if we had never gone in, in the first place, wouldn't have started. >> rose: but that would be his answer, his response. a lot of things happen. let me stay with the two notions here, they're important. number one, why do you think

they haven't been able to explode a dirty bomb? explain how difficult it is to do it. >> it's not that hard. it takes more expertise than getting an assault weapon and shooting up a nightclub. >> rose: right. in all the reporting, when i asked the experts, what's the thing that hasn't happened that you really can't understand why it hasn't happened, the dirty bomb was the first thing. so the answer is i don't know either, but i don't feel very comfortable with the past as a prologue here. >> rose: i assume they would make arguments having to do with intelligence and we've got more vigilant in terms of trying to understand who it is and more double checking. >> but we are not vigilant when it comes to protecting radiological materials. one of the things i write about is there are two agencies that are units of the energy

department in the obama administration. one, the nuclear regulatory commission actually regulates anyone who has any kind of radiological material, you have to have a license for it, and they prescribe security requirements. the n.n.s.a. suggests counterproliferation methods that people with with this material all around the world ought to use. their suggestions for security are ten times as strong as the n.r.c.'s regulations. so they go around trying to persuade hospitals and logging companies you should put stronger locks on your doors, you should have alarms, you should do this, but the n.r.c. doesn't require any of it. >> rose: why not? the people i talked to said because, you know, no surprise, they're a captive of the industry. so you have one agency of the federal government saying you really ought to do this, and the agency that could make them do

this says, and lirldly the guy in charge is quoted in the article as saying we like to make suggestions, we don't like to be prescriptive. this is a regulatory authority. we don't like to be prescriptive, we just like to make suggestions. >> rose: so we should be more safe and secure with respect to the radioactive materials and we haven't done that. >> right. >> rose: that's one to have the failures since 9/11. >> correct. >> rose: but let me go back to the central concern you have about the dirty bomb. so, therefore, they're not as secure. people who wish us ill can get their hands on them, number one. >> right. and security at the ports. >> rose: there's a hole in the security at the ports. >> right. >> rose: is it easy to learn how to make a dirty bomb? is it on the internet if you want it? >> it is really not complicated. i think i'm oversimplifying this a little bit but not much.

the way it's explained is you have a standard explosive and you just put this material in the same box as the explosive and when it goes off it will disperse. so, no, it is not. it's hard to make a nuclear weapon for sure. >> rose: has anybody used a dirty bomb anywhere? >> it's been tried in some other places around the world. i know that. i don't know what the result was, but i know that there have been tests done, table-top exercises here in the united states where they have, you know, mapped out what the contamination would be, how far it would be dispersed and, again, the contamination, you know, the new york post head line would be we're all living on a superfund site. the reality would be, yeah, there is more radiation out there but it's not lethal to any significant number of people. >> rose: the point you were making to avoid civilizations

and president obama and george bush was sensitive to this, the idea of not making this a war against islam and not falling into a trap of a clash of civilizations. >> mm-hmm. >> rose: the president does this, in part, a, by not using the word, you know, war against islam, even though he does not even use a war against radical extremist islam. >> correct. >> rose: okay. he also has said to a range of people you know that we have a mindset here that you can't go out and explain more people are killed in a lot of other areas than terrorism. you can't do that in political dialogue. >> he addresses that in the article with me because with people, there is a different sense of fear about this kind of danger. i asked him, you know, why is there such a difference between -- if someone's mentally

ill, goes to a gun store, buys an assault rifle and shoots up a school, that's one kind of tragic event and the people against any kind of gun control seem to accept that as almost a fact of life in the united states. but if the same person, mentally ill, gets an assault rifle and, as he is shooting up the school, yells out something in arabic, then it becomes this apocalyptic event. the president and jim comey says the same thing in the article, it's irrational but true. >> rose: jim comey says you have to worry about all the marginal stupid people, talking about i.s.i.s., who wake up wanting to kill us. balancing the threat is a challenge today.

>> comes back to the answer to your question, are we safer, when you put those two things together, the answer the equation is we're not safer, as well as we've done as as much as we should credit all the men and women who were doing it, the fact is that the kinds of threats have multiplied because, on 9/11, we weren't thinking about someone, you know, shooting up a community service center in san bernardino and claiming he was part of a terrorist group. >> rose: some of them may or may not have had contact. >> yeah. >> rose: may have been from -- the person who shot, you know, president ragan was inspired, you know, by a movie, by jodie foster. these people were inspired, they say, by terrorists. at the end of the day, if you look at it coldly, which is

impossible to do, it's hard to tell the difference. >> rose: so how long did it take you to research and write this? >> just about a year ago, i started thinking about it and started reading reports and congressionaltime. >> rose: you got to talk to almost everybody you wanted to. did you talk with the president? >> i exchanged e-mails with the president. >> rose: you talked to a whole range of people. >> right. >> rose: is there a consensus? i think the consensus is twofold. one is there are certain things we still haven't done enough to deal with in some cases the people were surprised that we haven't suffered from it, in particularly the dirty bomb, but the dramatic consensus, the overwhelming consensus is the threats have multiplied because somebody acting alone who's inspired by, you know, an online communication or reading

propaganda online, that that is stuff you can't prevent, and the potential to scare us multiplies because, when you do it in a random place, like, you know, a community service center in san bernardino, a nightclub in orlando, the intent of that or the result of that or both is to send the message that nobody is safe, it can happen anywhere. ray kelly is quoted in the article as saying he thought san bernardino in many ways was the game changer because it's such a random place. it wasn't an iconic building, it wasn't a jetliner, it wasn't a statue of liberty, it was in any place. >> rose: what is the consensus of what we need to do? >> more -- just, you know, we need to keep on doing what we're doing, but when it comes to the lone wolf who's inspired, who may not even be in contact, unless he's dumb enough to be

overheard at a bar talking about it or end an email to a friend that gets picked up, unless we're going to surveil every single american in their home, the one thing we could do it is at least make it if he wants to do something, he has to do it with a knife or a rowvolver that can get off six shots not a military grade weapon that can get off a hundred shots. he can't do it with the dirty bomb because we've battened down the hatches when it comes to protecting this radiological material. >> rose: good to have you here. >> good to be here. >> rose: steven brill, what's next for you? >> couple things. >> rose: you're not telling. i would have to know to tell. >> rose: this is the cover story in "the atlantic," the united states spent $1 trillion to protect the homeland. the new security space is vast and growing. while the defense is better the offense is much better.

thank you for joining us. see you next time. for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by:

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