Transcripts For CSPAN National Security Agency Surveillance Programs 20140428

There are a lot of consumer choices, but that means we need to have an antitrust approach and making sure they are not engaged in anticompetitive activities. We want to make certain that the fcc releases all of their information in a timely manner. If we are going to go through an entire process of fcc reforms, we think the agency should be more transparent and focus on what they are doing with a spectrum and licensing. That is their core mission. We do not want them getting into Net Neutrality and trying to have government of the internet. Privacyt want them in and Data Security issues. Those go to the ftc. It is time to narrow their focus and get them back to their core mission. The Telecommunications Issues members of congress are considering in this session, monday on cspan 2. Prime ministers questions will not be seen tonight. Members are in recess and will return to the house of commons tomorrow. Argan gelman and a team of journalists recently won a pullet surprise for their reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks. They had to do with the nsa Surveillance Programs which collected metadata on Surveillance Programs. Mr. Gelman is now with Time Magazine and took part in a discussion hosted by the Washington Post. They spoke for about two hours. We are proud of the recognition and of the coverage. We recognize that there are sharp divisions of opinion about the source of the documents that form the basis of our coverage, Edward Snowden, and also about our role here at the controversy has been intense at times, and i expect we will explore that today. In the u. S. Edition of the guardian, the board embraced the idea that it is in the Public Interest. The new yorker wrote this this was a defining case of the press doing what it is supposed to do. The president was held accountable, for he has to answer questions that he would rather not have, and when his replies proved unsatisfying to the public and in some cases false, his administration had to change its policies. Congress had to confront its own failures of oversight. Private companies had to rethink their obligations to their customers and to law enforcement. People had conversations at home and at school and everywhere about what they themselves would be willing to let the nsa do to them. Journalists have had to think about their own obligations to the law among the constitution, their readers, and even in the practice of reporting in the age of technical tracking to sources they might expose. On the other hand, representative peter king declared awarding the pulitzer to snowdens enablers is a disgrace and suggested we should be prosecuted. A reader of ours were that he was shocked that the paper should be praised for publishing classified information that has resulted in a lessening of this countrys security. I do not think the post should wrap itself in the text of the First Amendment and give itself an immunity bath. Much to talk about here. We will talk about, this story came to be, how and why we decided to publish them how we went about our work, and how we think about issues of National Security and our coverage. National security is an area of intense focus for us. That should be no surprise. The governments powers to incarcerate, prosecutor, kill, rank as the greatest powers of all. If we are to cover the federal government, these are not activities that we can ignore. These are not activities where in my view we can simply defer to the government cost wishes on what we report, what we do not report or how we report, whenever government asserts National Security. On the grounds of National Security the government has secretly implemented policies with profound implications for individual rights. We here at the post have an experienced staff. We heavily on their expertise and their history of navigating the most sensitive subjects imaginable. We take National Security concerns seriously. It is a dangerous world. We know that. As a result our Reporters Committee met with the pentagon, the white house intelligence agencies, and private companies. On the nsa documents we spent many hours on each story in detail conversations with officials. On many occasions about the request for government officials, we withheld information that would disclose methods. We did not agree to every request of every sort made by the government. Had we done so, there would have been no stories whatsoever. The intelligence agencies were opposed to publishing anything at all. What we saw in the documents was something that went beyond specific sources and methods that the press had guarded on grounds of National Security. The documents would repeal the National Security agency was engaging in surveillance and Data Collection of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness. What had transpired was a dramatic shift toward state power and against individual rights, including privacy. With no Public Knowledge and no public debate. So now the public knows and the debate is well under way. With that i will turn it over to cecelia kang. She is a National Reporter for the Washington Post who will focus on Telecom Policy and the social impact of technology on families. She joined the post eight years ago. She began her career at dow jones as the bureau chief of the south korea office. All yours, cecelia, and thank you to you for coming. [applause] thank you for this work and your support of a project that was quite an endeavor, as you can tell, that involved legions of people whose work behind the scenes, graphic works, editors. I am pleased to announce this panel these reporters who work. Barton gellman on my left is a pulitzer prizewinning reporter and author. He is a senior fellow at the century foundation. He is one of three journalists who received classified archives from Edward Snowden. He has helped lead the coverage at the post and is writing a book on the surveillance industrial revolution. He is being humble in his admission of his prize. Ellen nakishima is a reporter for the Washington Post who covers issues relating to intelligence and government surveillance and Civil Liberties. She has written about the nsa and evolution of cyber policy. She served as the South East Asia correspondent for the Washington Post between 2002 and 2006. She has reported on the Islamic Militant network and the indian ocean tsunami. Since 1995 she has cover the white house and virginia politics. She grew up in hawaii. Ashkan soltani helps understanding that technical capabilities of government surveillance. He served as a technologist in the division of privacy at the federal trade commission. He also worked as the primary consultant for the wall street journals series what they know. He is working with the Washington Post on their coverage of the nsa. Craig timberg is reporter who covers privacy, security, and surveillance. He came to the paper in 1998 and has done stints as a reporter covering africa. He is the author of a book, tinderbox. Thank you for joining us. I would like to start out with two minutes from each of you to talk about what the response has been that you have received to the pulitzer prize, which happened one week ago. It seems very long ago, actually. My friends like to tell me the stories of what an outrage it is. There have been some. There are serious criticisms to be made, and we are not immune from that. There are people and there have been a number of commentators who said that this was undeserved. There are others who are very happy for the validation of the debate, the idea that the fundamental boundaries about what secret intelligence can do in a Democratic Society need to be decided by the people, who the government is working for. Information is power information is even more power, and that although very clearly the u. S. Intelligence cannot operate entirely in the open by any strain of imagination, its fundamental boundaries have to be subject to public debate. I think bart said it well. I do not have much more to add, other than to say that the reaction has been generally quite positive from Civil Liberties communities and rather muted from sources in the Intelligence Community. Overall, i think the general public has been appreciative. I think my favorite response has been from the tech community, because the response being that the value of Understanding Technology or bringing technical people out from the basements, to explain things more openly, as we have seen a lot of interactions now where digital media, over computers, over phones, and i think the response in being able to highlight how those things work and bring them to public debate and demystify how the technology is no different than it was years ago in the sense of how it impacts our lives, that has been a valuable response for me. For me it has been humbling and inspiring to realize that you had a small role in such important work, but has been a reminder how fractured my life is. I was supposed to coach my sons baseball game tonight. Parents of the team knew me as coach craig. They did not know i did this. It has been fun to share in this and understand how much people interact with you in a newspaper in a way that is different from the way people react to you and the rest of your lives. There will be plenty of time for questions. We will have almost 40 minutes. You should have received a card in your packet. If you would like to ask a question, that we may not get to, we will continue to answer questions after this event online. After the Panel Discussion there will be two people with microphones who will be available. Raise your hand if you have a question and please stand up when you pose your question. Tell us about the development of this story. You have been away from the paper for a few years when you received the documents and access to the story. In that time, in your absence, marty was appointed the executive editor. I understand you did not know each other very well. It happened to lead to the introduction of this story at the post, the acceptance of the post of this story, and decision to Carry Forward . It is not obvious from the coverage that i am not a Washington Post employee. I am on contract now. After working for 21 years, i left in 2010. In the first half of 2013 i developed a correspondence with the man i later learned to be Edward Snowden and received documents from him. I knew that there was only one place to do this story for me. It was going to require resources and the decades of collective experience here and the mutual trust of people i had worked with for a long time. Fundamentally it was going to need big, hard, risky decisions to be made by the boss. The boss was one guy i did not know at all. I walked into a room after asking for a meeting and figured out who marty was by process of elimination. He is the managing editor. He is the lawyer. This guy must be marty. I was asking him to take on risks and to put his trust in someone that he literally never laid eyes on. It was obvious to us that a story of this magnitude was going to need a lot of lawyering and careful thought about how to balance the risks of disclosure with the necessity of bringing the big policy decisions for the public, and they are going to be really hard problems. How do you verify . You have a piece of paper that says it is an nsa document. How do you know that is true . How do you know that is authentic, and if authentic, it is accurate . How do i know that this guy who says he is Edward Snowden used to be a contractor of the nsa is either of those things . I was asking the paper to a gone all of that and to devote resources and to accept new kinds of security measures that normal newsrooms did not have to have before. I was thrilled at the answers i got. Marty understood exactly what he was getting into. He was very thoughtful about what the Big Decisions would be and the successive steps would be to carry them out, and he embraced it. It was a revelation when you explained your pulitzer speech in the newsroom, some of the Research Even on the i. T. Side that it involved. Could you talk about that . A little bit, because there are things i will not talk about. We took very seriously the responsibility to protect material we did not think should be disclosed. We said in every story that we write that we are holding back certain elements of it. We are not doing that because someone told us we have to. We are doing that because having to the government and thoughts are the implications, we decided we agreed, we should withhold the stuff. Theres no sense saying youre going to hold Something Back if you leave it on a network or on a hard drive were any competent actor can come in and take it. The post stepped up its game in terms of physical and Digital Security and encryption and things like that. I do not want to get into the details. What was your role in the coverage, covering nsa . Talk about when you came in, what your guiding mission was and reporting on this story, and apart how this coverage has affected change in government. The disclosures has had an impact on the policy in the process and most significantly on public awareness. I wanted to make a few observations up front about how the landscape has changed from the perspective of a beat reporter who did not receive the documents, at least not directly. And how certainly we are engaged in a debate, that is unprecedented in breadth and depth. And that would not have happened were it not for the disclosures, unauthorized by Edward Snowden. It is not for want of trying. Lawmakers, journalists, and others, as long ago as 2006, senator ron wyden was warning publicly but cryptically about the existence of secret law under the patriot act, the counterterrorism law passed after 9 11. But he was bound by classification rules from going any further, from explaining his discomfort with the interpretation, and he and other lawmakers continued to warn about the secret law. Journalists, including myself, tried to pry from government officials some insight into what the secret law under section 215 of the patriot act could be. They were bound by custom location rules. They wanted jobs they did not want to risk their jobs and families, and it was to no avail the Civil Liberties groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation Filed lawsuits to try to force the government to be more transparent on this law. Nothing worked until Edward Snowden came along. I remember june 5, last year, the first document emerged. It was a court order to verizon or directing the company to turn over all records of its customers to the nsa. We know that is now not the content, but just a phone numbers and the call times and durations. It quickly became apparent that this was a program of vast scope in terms of collecting data of americans, many lawabiding, and it did stun americans. This was what wyden had been warning about. It was quickly followed by more disclosures and stores by bart and ashkan and others and nakashima. About how to break encryption and significantly its growing overseas collection and attempts to game communications. Edward snowden and his leaks forced a degree of transparency from the government. After june, they declassified from my perspective, i saw that this date was happening that this was happening. Edward snowden and his leaks forced a degree of transparency from the government. After june, they declassified the existence of the program. Subsequently thousands of pages of court documents, opinions, reports, a lot of those documents that months earlier intelligence officials have been telling me it was difficult to release because so much of the classified material was intertwined with legal analysis full top legal analysis. This newfound transparency, a permanent change in behavior or as some suspect, a shift in response to disclosures . I want to say one quick thing. I heard an observation that came from a former Inspector General at the nsa, joel brenner. He said that by withholding the existence of this Metadata Program, the government may have avoided or obtained a shortterm tactical benefit in terms of not tipping off terrorists. It missed an opportunity to secure a longerterm strategic goal of Winning Public support. That is important to the Intelligence Community and their activities. Did you want to say more . You are a technology expert. You were brought on to help decode some of the slides. Some of them are cryptic to say the least. Some were amateurish. It will be interesting to see some of the slides. Those thought bubbles, are they really part of an nsa slide . I want to pull up one slide. Muscular. We should have that ready. It is the drying of the cloud. There is a smiley face in the middle. I want to say one quick thing. I have seen a lot of government powerpoint. Most of them are not classified. One of the things that convinced me that these might be authentic is the crowded, weird graphic design. [laughter] here we go. Can you walk us through decoding some of the slides . This one in particular. How does a slide like this lead to a story on october 30, 2013 title nsa infiltrates links to yahoo , google data sites. I am just going to quickly read the first few graphs. The nsa has secretly broken into the main communication links that connect yahoo and Google Data Centers. This is according to documents obtained by Edward Snowden. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect that will any of them belonging to americans. Two engineers with close ties to google exploded with profanity when they saw the drying. I hope you publish this, one of them said. Talk about how you got from this, to the story. It was an incredibly fun adventure. On one hand, it has been very difficult. The nsa internally was extremely cryptic. There were code words for code words. There were secret program names. They are sealed under multiple levels of security. They go to Great Lengths to classify or hide their operations. On the other hand, it is not obvious, but somewhat apparent. These are network engineers. They are tapping into technology that we all use. If you go if you know Network Architecture or cell phone architecture and some of these underlying technologies, they focus on the same issues. They draw them out. The other thing that is interesting is working on a number of the stories, i got the sense that i know these guys. These are not the brass, upper management guys. These are the reddit geeks. They hang out online forms. They make inside jokes and funny drawings. They make random, tasteless computer jokes. This is one of the first documents that we reviewed. We thought there was something there. We were not sure. Again, from a Network Engineering perspective, this is essentially how the cloud works. This is a cloud system for many of the major cloud providers. Theres a point at which the data from a user and the cloud provider is encrypted. There is internal traffic. It is behind the door. They handle it. That is not encrypted. The assumption is that it is private. There is no reason to encrypt it. We called her head around and we tried a bunch of theories. We look at architecture diagrams and documentation. Both in terms of what was in the slides and what is publicly available. It clicked. We tried a bunch of theories and it made sense. They were tapping the cables between data centers in the cloud. That was interesting and surprising. You would have to think from a Hacker Network perspective. They are giving a set of constraints. Legal and technical constraints. They are given a mission to collect data on target they find interesting. They exploited a property of the cloud architecture, which is if you are here in d. C. , and you are connecting to a Google Data Center in North Carolina or mountain view, your communication will stay in the u. S. Stop because of the way google architects their networks, your data is replicated to all those locations in the world stop in the event of a power outage on the west coast, they will collect the same data that would be illegal or not available to them domestically, they will connect and access that data overseas. They are essentially finding ways to explore the architecture of the cloud. It is insecure and it is on the backend. It is redundant and immediately replicated. That became the fun angle. The thing that was most surprising to me in all of this was not the geek terms, but the definitions for words you and i use everyday. Words like collectives. Under these mechanisms, the data has not been collected. It is recorded and saved to a desk. It is collected when it is in process by human rights system that analyzes it. Again, based on the Legal Definition and these vulnerabilities. They are able to perform these tasks that would otherwise seem illegal to us. I just want to say couple words. The time when i found this is right around the time that i persuaded marty to hire him to figure this stuff out. Many of you are not involved in this world. If you come across that cartoon, you have to say, theres a story here. There is a little smiley face and it says encryption. It is added and removed here. Theres definitely something going on. The reason why the engineers erupted into profanity, the family newspaper version of the conversation, is because of the smiley face. That was the declaration of victory. It was the football in the face of the company cost engineers. We found a way around her security. We talk it was either five or six weeks, to figure what that cartoon meant. It was an illustration taken from a document called google cloud exploitation. We had illustration, but not the document stop there were lots of times when there be a powerpoint that was taken from some other thing and it will clearly answer all the questions. But we do not have that other thing. You are trying to put together. What they mean to say that they are removing encryption. Are they ceiling stealing certificates from the companies . Have they figured out a way to break encryption . Have they are they spoofing them, pretending to be google when you connect to them. We discarded a bunch of theories. We were not going to get the answer within the corners of that one document or even any combination of documents. We had to get out into the world and report not only on this, but all sources. It was not until the interviewed people who are intimately familiar with the architecture of the systems and run it through our computers that we figure out what was happening. This is a real moment for the Tech Industry. The response that they had to this, can you talk a little about the evolution of the Tech Industry response to all of these stories . In the beginning, they said they did not know what we were talking about. It has been a real roller coaster. Thats my role in this is different. I did some surveillance for and. My main responsibility was keeping an eye on google and facebook. I was the recipient of some phone calls after the first story ran. That was the story that made it clear that the government had access to private data. The companys format. It today while the companies were mad. It took a while to figure out what the disc this juncture was. The industry realized that they had been had. It is clear that a lot of it was happening through core procedures that were super to us, but not to them. I can remember the story that they were talking about. The google and that google and yahoo datalinks. Everybody in the Tech Industry did not know that Intelligence Services have wired into their brains. They were really mad at us. Eventually they were really mad at the u. S. Government because they felt as though their place in the world had been jeopardized stop you use google email service. You imagine that it is private. It hurt them economically from an industry point of view. They were seen as a conduit to the u. S. Intelligence services. There was a visceral quality. They felt betrayed on a personal level. They had built the systems that were supposed to resist hackers and yet you had these uber hackers breaking into a. It was in ways that were imaginative. They are good at this. By the time we got to the end of the year, the companies were thinking us. We are glad that we know this. They put in new encryption measures. We may never know if they are sufficient, but it is clear that the defenses are stronger on the corporate level now. Lets think about how extraordinary this is. He is talking about some of the biggest American Companies there are. They are spending a lot of money and engineering talent in a deliberate effort to thwart the efforts of their own government to spy on them. You can say that their philosophy is nobody can spy on our users. Us, but this is a big moment. They are not trying to stop the government from doing any kind of targeted surveillance. Even if what they are doing is perfectly effective by increasing their internal links, the government can still go to them and get information about any individual target. The nsa will still be able to spy on anyone, but it cannot spy on everyone. One of the big differences between the prism story and the datalinks between googling yahoo with prism, the companys new they did not know the codename prism, but they were aware that the National Security people were aware of the program. They had a court order to comply. This has been debated on the hill. It culminated in an amendment act. With this story, they were completely taken by surprise. They felt betrayed. This was not the result of public debate. There was no fire the fisa over whether nsa should gain access to the links between these data centers. That was taking place outside of the domestic surveillance law that we have under president ial authority exclusively. That is an issue that deserves a lot more exploration. What we are saying one of the big benefits of the snowden disclosures over the last year is a heightened awareness of the nature of government surveillance. Since 9 11, and as a result of advances in technology, we have seen a fundamental shift in approach moving from individualized protections a different sense to vast collection with limits on use at the backend. At the same time, because of the Global Nature of the network, the communications of people like you and me are mixed in with the communications of terrorists and legitimate target. As the former director of the nsa said, today there is no home game were away game. Theres just one game. That raises questions of whether those backend protections sufficiently protect our privacy. The companies have much to lose in terms of reputation. That is a key point. One additional thing that the disclosures helped motivate is investment in security on the backend and frontend. Security experts have been warning about the ability to collect data that is not encrypted for years. There is a personal vendetta to get yahoo to encrypt their email communications for a number of years. An earlier story we did, prior to the other story, about how the nsa was collecting address books awful public internet connections, one company have statistics on the number of collections. It was like 500,000 a day. One company had 10 times more accurate books collected than the other. They wanted to comment on the record. Why are we being targeted out . The obvious answer is, you guys do not provide security tools. You do not build security into your product. This closures have made a very clear. That has become salient. Rather than give us a response, their statement was, we will begin to encrypt our yahoo mail starting with this year. In one line . In the front row here, he led a Large Campaign of activism in technology to get yahoo to scramble its connections from their computers to yours. For years. This was to protect against ordinary hackers. When you do not encrypt, your credit card data, your email, it goes in clear text over the web and anybody can read it. For four plus years, yahoo said no. On the day that the story ran, yahoo announced that it would encrypt all connections. That is correct. A question clearly that we hear the most and that we got through messages ahead of this event was, how did you and the editors, how did you weigh National Security concerns with the Public Service of uncovering these government Surveillance Programs . What is the post be right to post stories about classified government material stop the New York Times was asked about the pulitzer the guardian received. He said, i have complicated views. I am a little nervous by the fact that they really did benefit from what i think is a repellent, unpatriotic act. A question submitted to the coast, can you please explain why this important work of journalism does not negatively impact National Security . What is your response . There are a lot of pieces to that. I think anyone who wants to ask that should ask it again. But politely. We will try to get different pieces at different times. A lot of people have a visceral reaction, it is classified as stop that at the end of the discussion. Do not put in the paper. You have to understand what that would mean. There are is now more classified information, classified by the u. S. Government, then the entire contents of the library of congress and all other open libraries in the world stop there is more classified data than unclassified data in the world. I have a classified laundry manual. I am not making this up. Even the strongest defenders of National Security discipline i have never met anyone who would not say that there is massive overclassification stop that is one thing. The second is that having covered diplomacy and military affairs and Intelligence Matters for a long time, i can tell you that it is only a little bit exaggerated to say that almost everything i want to know, every story, could be classified somewhere. I have seen documents that have my story published. I have not making that up. The problem is all bureaucracy wants control of information. When you are working in the secret world, you have this mechanism. Almost everything that has to do with our relations with the world or military threats were Intelligence Matters, even policy, that is not testified in congress are in a press release or news conference, is classified. We said we could not cover some of the biggest expenditures that the country makes, the hardest decisions, the ones that involve the greatest risk and allow us to hold accountable our leaders for the way that they use their power. You have to cut out theyre a big blank spot. Theres never been anything like it. We have had stories, thousands of stories in the time i have worked at the Washington Post, that touched on Something Like that. We cannot let the stamp itself be the decider. We have to try to way, what are the stakes . Their stories we have killed over the years. There is an archive we did not consider publishing. That was my first conversation with the director of national intelligence. Just so you know, everything between these pages will not be considered. It is specific and operational. It reveals targets and specific techniques. The publication of this would end it. It would no longer be useful at all. We want to read about the stories that describe a Public Policy decisions. Like the ones we have talked about before. Is it ok . Do we as a society think that is a good idea to allow u. S. Intelligence services to collect overseas were no statutory laws apply . Theres no fisa court to oversee it. Is it ok for them to break into data centers . They are not targeting americans for specific pieces of legislation, they are not targeting us, but incidentally, there collecting substantially all of they are passing through their collection systems all of the content of our internet. What we were trying to explain before is that google, yahoo , some of the other companies, they have these giant facilities all over the world. They have biometric locks and guards. They look like giant factories filled with computer servers. Theres one in ireland and hong kong and singapore. They are across the north american continent. If you sit on the cable that synchronizes the data centers, it is the same thing as if you reached into the data center. It is ok with us to say that the nsa will collect that will from all of our communications in the service of its foreign intelligence mission. That is a big Public Policy question that needs to be debated. That is what we are looking to do. Just to touch on Public Policy. Theres also this disconnect between definition. What the public would believe to be implied music collect, and with the government means when they say collect are two different things. We did a story on collection of entire countries phone calls. It was recording of the entire countrys own calls. One of the core attribute of that story was that it is not collecting until it is actually processed. I could record our conversation. It is not surveillance. You listen to it. Is the public realizes the definition, i think a lot of people would push back and say no, that is not what we thought we were approving. We saw this with a number of comments from senators and policymakers. A lot of the comments were that we did not realize. It was about definitions are technical capabilities. People were not aware of it. That is the value in reporting it. The store you are referring to was published last month. It is called nsa Surveillance Program reaches into the past. That was last month. Why are we still seeing stories today . The reason why i ask is that there is the impression, the question, of how documents were received. The one big dump. Is snowden still involved . Is he still releasing information . Many people are wondering if he is calling the shots on some of the releases. I should be the one to address that will stop snowden gave me the document last spring. He has not handed over any documents to anyone since approximately that time the word. He did not even carry them with him when he left hong kong. It has been a long transit. He does not try to direct, suggest, hints at what should be written about and when there was a general agreement that i made with him. He did not require an agreement, because it is what i would have done anyway. I must look through the material and way carefully. I must not dump high volumes of it out there. I have to consider with the balance must be. At the Washington Post, we are not sitting in our armchairs making up thoughts of what would harmful to security. We are usually pretty good at anticipating what the government will be worried about. We consult with the government on every story and every fact. This might look innocuous to you, but it is not. They will tell us why. They tell us things that we do not know. It will help explain to us why they believe we should not publish something that we do know. Those conversations are very successful. There is a good enough outcome on both sides where they will say that the whole thing you should not mention it at all. There is a huge Public Policy question in that. I do not need to do this or that. That is not relevant to the point that the public needs to know about. The point is, we do not just get what would give security harm. We hear from the u. S. Government directly and what they think would be a security harm. The number of times when we have published something after getting those kinds of arguments is tiny. To finish your question, snowden does not continue to dribble out documents. He does not attempt to control the coverage. The reason stories are still coming out is that there is a lot of material and we are not casual about putting it on the public record. We could go through this material a lot faster if i said, lets just dump the whole thing on the internet stop we will crowd source it. It will be faster if i said, lets take the 50 people in the newsroom who know the most about this stuff, lets give them reacts as to the whole archive. Stories would come up faster. Because theres so much sensitive material, we have much more control than that. Is their life . There is more. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the revelations affect government. There is also a discovery of more consumer surveillance efforts. That is something you have worked on. Can you talk about how this has expanded our thinking about private sector surveillance efforts . Is a good question. I covered surveillance a lot for a year or so when all of this broke loose. I used to debate with other people, should we care more about what google and yahoo are doing . Should we care more about the nsa . Pretty soon after all this stuff came to light, it dawns on me that the distinction is not meaningful. Everything that google and yahoo and facebook are collecting, the nsa is eventually getting their hands on it. Certainly they can get their hands on it. The consumer stuff and the government stop lens together to a degree. None of us fully appreciated it until these documents came out. It is interesting what we have seen. Theres been a focus over the past 11 months on nsa collection because of these amazing stories. There has been less focused on consumer connection. Gmail, they have ads based on what is in your stock. There is a whole host of issues. Should you post pictures of your kids on facebook . These are a more prominent part of the conversation and what i was doing. It has been shifted over to try to make sense of what we have learned. I do think that the time is approaching where we will have to wrestle with these questions. What are real giving up to these companies to get Free Services . How much data is on our smartphones. Every once in a while, i have to sit down and think about what is on my iphone stop it is scary. I do not have a huge number of secrets, but the precision about me and my life and my family and my friends that is encoded in the location data and facebook postings, it is stunning. I like to think that theres a moment coming when that conversation will come back to life. We will be reengaged on the question of how much is too much to be out there and in the cloud that anybody has access to. Ellen, how about your thoughts on surveillance beyond the nsa . What are you exploring . What are the areas of government surveillance . There is always the debate and disclosures of the past year. We have heard of all collection extends beyond the nsa. The cia also has engaged about election of money transfers. Unfortunately, we do not have a lot of disclosure about the protections and rules for that. It is under section 215. You asked earlier about what has changed. I want to say that it is not just all talk. When the telephone Metadata Program was first revealed in june of last year, president obama, you may recall, came out and defended the program. He said he was relieved it was legal, affected, subject to rigorous oversight. Intelligence insiders i spoke to said that they felt fairly confident he would continue to back them in the program. The debate took off. We started to see opinions move in july of last year. The house fell 12 votes shy of ending the program. A federal judge ruled that the program was probably unconstitutional. In december, the president class own surveillance review board included concluded that the program was not essential to preventing terrorism. By january of this year, obama was ordering his subordinates to come up with a way to end the program as it currently exists. That is concrete result of the debate leading to policy change. There have been others. Can each of you briefly talk a little bit about how every person, every consumer, everyone in this room, how does it affect you . How do these revelations affect you . I have been reading the stories in the focus should be on outrage or cynicism. What should they be thinking about . I do not want to tell people what to think. Some of the things that we put on the table are we are aware as a society that there is a lot of information about us out there. We just leave the digital exhaust. We think of ourselves often on the one hand as normal and uninteresting. Why would they bother with me . Or we are basically good people with nothing to hide. Or, so what if somebody sees my Kids Birthday Party picture . The more you learn about how much is known about us and how we are tracked, the more most people start to feel a little squeamish. I will give you a quick example. I live and work primarily in new york. A guy in the office thought he did not care about this kind of stuff. He was not worried about digital privacy. He uses twitter a lot. He had locations turned on his twitter account. There is a tool online that you can download called creepy. I downloaded it and i directed it at his twitter account. I got three months worth of date and timestamp locations. He felt that they deserved americans respect, but not their trust. He said, we should never ever trust the nsa. The distrust is essential to the foundation of democracy and Holding People accountable. I thought that was a very interesting observation. It was from this member of the panel. I think it is worth thinking about in terms of the public. It really allows us to understand the issues that are at stake. We should not try to personalize or demonize the intense. We should understand where it is coming from and what the issues are at stake and hold them accountable. As accountable as we can stop that is our job. Both of those are true. There are three things to consider that we are experiencing. We leave data exhaust everywhere. Theres no practical way to use Technology Today and not leave a digital trail of some sort. There are security tools you can try. Every interaction by email, sharing a cell phone, driving a car, or walking in the street leave some sort of digital trail. As a result of these trails, collection of this data becomes incredibly cheap. If i wanted to surveil you, i would have to allocate men or people to follow you around or to take notes and photographs of you. It has become incredibly cheap because of these digital trails that exist. When you search on google, when you use twitter, when you use their services, you create a trail that the nsa or some other government can monitor and collect. With regards to the nsa, the mandate they have been given is not to reduce terrorist attacks or to keep 9 11 attacks to one in every 10 years. At all cost, they have to prevent attacks on u. S. Soil. Your data is now everywhere. It is incredibly cheap to connect collect. Except for when is legally prohibited, do your best to prevent all attacks. Those three things in tandem create an environment where even if you are not that interesting, the likelihood that you might get swept up into the system because of the mandate and the cheapness by which you can be collected, because of your data, it has gone up. That is something we have to contend with. The only thing restricting that is legal forces. That is the world we are in now. That strikes me is dead on. I will say that it struck me throughout this has surprised lots of people were. I was surprised by the detail. Google was really surprised. U. S. Senators were surprised. Even senators on the Intelligence Committee were surprised. It makes you wonder, how is it possible in a democracy, not just ours, but what we imagine a democracy to be, that Something Like a Surveillance System so sweeping and powerful could grow to become as robust as it clearly has become. All sorts of important people know it and have some say whether that is a good thing why bad thing. If we had had his panel a year ago, think about what we knew about what our government was collecting about people all over the world and whether or not we were targeted unintentionally. I have to say, i find that unnerving, how little we knew before now. Whether you think we were right or wrong to publish these documents, i feel like is the inherent function of unimpressive democracy to place these issues in the public sphere so that us citizens, we can wrestle with that. We can become more enlightened and make decisions on what the limits are. Maybe people do not want more limits . I get the sense that people do. There is no possibility of that if we do not know enough to imagine what is going on. It was not an accident that we did not know. There are no evil motives, but there were very deliberate efforts to mislead us when anybody got near the trail. The program which collects all records of all the phone calls that we make, that is what is referred to here. It is a provision of the act. It had been controversial. Not because anyone had any idea about this, but people were worried that the f b i would use it to get Library Records on what books people were taking out. Even the number of times we use this provision of the law, that was the provision for several years. They were mandated and disclosed his a number of times. Thats not an accident. Thats deliberate because they think what theyre doing is important. Theyre worried that you might sk them to stop. It never wasnt surprised the security geeks and for a long time warned that look this Technology Makes it possible that the systems are vulnerable that you can get peoples phone records by hacking into although telco remotely. He saw quite a bit of these tools and decided to highlight that and that indicates a deliberate misleading but this technical misleading where a Technical Community with use their prowes in understanding loopholes and prowess in understanding loopholes to skirt around public proseppings. Thats another gap that needs to be informed. I just wanted to add to that there were people who knew, senate Intelligence Committee, judiciary, house and senate, the ficea court, justice department, executive branch agencies. The problem is these committees and the court were sworn to secrecy. Hey couldnt disclose anything publically. So their oversight is conducted entirely in secret how does that understanding enable us to hold the government accountable . Crux in this the issue and one we dont have a very good answer to. Do you create another independent board . Are they sworn to secrecy . Whats the point. We actually covered a lot of ground here but this is your chance to please raise your hand. E have two people who will come to those whose hands are raised. If you can stand please when you ask a question and and if you have one directed ask. Ght please can you hear me now . Yes. Ok. I actually have three questions. And i guess theyre all for mr. Gelman. The first one may i just read them out loud and sit down and let you answer them, ok . One, do you worry about your personal safety because of what you know either from terrorists because they know you have all this information or from nasa . Second question is what do you think should happen to mr. Snowden and the third one is do you and reporters at the guardian consult with one to divulge with security issues. No, i dont fear for my personal safety. I have good evidence that there are actors usually unknown who are trying to get into my material digitally. Seal my entire life off of the internet. If you put something on the network and someone competent can get into it, i dont put secret stuff there. But ive got a warning from google that if they sponsor the hacker, i was compromising my computer and my account. Google hopefully wont tell you whos doing it or what they know. But ive had ive got a number of other specific indicators that people are coming after any stuff. Thats different from physical security. You can you can say, you told me so if i disappear one day. But i dont worry about that. I have a relationship with him of a reporter to source. Im not his judge and you know, there are a lot more people with a lot more things to say than i have about that. And no, we did not consult with any other News Organization about what to public when. They made those decisions independently. And that includes not through any third parties, secret council or cabal. And essentially were them. S with the i find that the average person a lot of times gauges what side of the debate theyre on depending on whether they were supporting bush or obama. You know, its who do you trust to to have that information and what theyre going to do with it. D whether they trust them as the deciders or you as the deciders as to whats going to d divulged. I think about the whole debate about torture. It was finally disclosed that it really wasnt that effective over the period. And im wondering whether ltimately is is this n. S. A. Gathering of information effective in protecting this country . Have they really thwarted some, you know, attacks or plans for that . And how does that weigh into the decisions that are being made . So who so what has been the practical benefits, this n. A. S. Program from the n. S. A. s perspective . Does anyone want to tackle that. Certainly theres been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of the two major domestic Surveillance Programs that have been discussed. Section 215 tell them the Records Program and section 702 part of what is called prism which he wrote about and the head of n. S. A. Last year on the hill initially came out and said that the program ontributed to thwarted over 50 attacks, terrorists attacks and when senators including ron white pushed back on that eventually he and other intelligence officials clarified, ok, well, 702 prism was responsible for thwarting most of those but a lot of them were overseas. Which obama wants to end was responsible or would have had a role in 12 of those domestically and of those maybe only one in which it actually yield some information that was useful to a terrorist investigation and that one case involved a san diego cab driver convicted of Material Support for terrorism for sending 6,500 to someone in somalia al shabaab which did not involve an attack on the u. S. Or any other attack. Which led the surveillance review board to conclude that the program was not essential to prevent terrorist attacks but also the Civil Liberties and Oversight Board to say that it had not contributed in one case to preventing any terrorist attack on the homeland. Clearly from time to time, the government is going to exaggerate the importance of a plan that its trying to defend. On the other hand, having spent lots of time with the materials and done lots of interviews, how sad would it be if theyre spending 10 billion a year, 30,000 people and hiring some of the greatest talent in Computer Science and linguistic and accomplish nothing . Thats clearly not the case. They find out a lot of information that is essential to security. There are a lot of things in he file that i would guess almost of you if you do them would say i dont know they could that. Im glad they did that. That seems like a legitimate operation and if i public it youd say i wish they hadnt done that. So there are definitely Success Stories in the documents. The problem is theyre exactly the kind of things that the government least wants me to write because they couldnt be replicated afterwards. But the point you made about bushobama actually that is a known of trust is fundamental point which is even if youre prepared to accept that that the people who have this enormous power right now are responsible, youre also accepting that the next people and the next people after that are going to have the same or more power. And you know, plenty of examples in the country of very serious abuses o this specific kind of power from j. Edgar hoover. It was one of the articles of impeachment towards nixon was domestic surveillance. Ive seen documents that have. Een declassified and it will specifically say in there this would create big problems for us either law or Public Opinion were purposely exposing our soldiers to radiation. You dont want to give sole power to anyone. I dont want to leave a misimpression about section 702 which you have heard as the warrantless wiretapping program broke in 2005 in the New York Times. But then was subsequently put under statute in congress. And it is considered quite it ssful and useful and was reported if from one of the documents contributes a bulk of the daily briefs. More than any other single source. More than any other single source. 7 intelligence reports. With e are others malicious intent. Just a mere collection of the data we have learned that the n. S. A. Have delivered and have weakened standards for Computer Security or does not disclose the companies when their systems are vulnerable. So the fact they can exploit data center links means that other countries can also do that. And the fact that the government chose not to secure those but instead take advantage or collect that data. I think one of the questions to at is is it effective but what cost . Lets take another question over there. Over here. Right. And dont forget you do have a card where you can ask the question and we will answer it later online. My question involved we learned this week that general clapper issued a new directive, makes it unacceptable to for any member of the intelligence establishment to talk to any reporter about anything thats either classified or pain of ed and under being fired or being possibly even prosecuted. Number one, have they learned anything . Because it seems they want to make it even hard tore leak. And number two, does this have a Chilling Effect on your ability to cover the news, cover this National Security . Anyone, please pick it up. Ellen . When i saw that order, i thought, really . Youre trying it again. Mean, we see these periodically and after theres a big story and maybe that do a leak investigation theres a crackdown, more polygraphs. You hear about you know, theyre going to be doing polygraphs on announcing people. Ive had sources tell me they have to report any time they get a call from the press including me, things like that. And i think these things go in weaves. It does have a somewhat of a Chilling Effect to remind people that they you no, theyre being watched. They shouldnt talk to the press. Ut i think ultimately its footle. It always. Is im more concerned than you are. I totally take your point. But heres what the order says. If you work anywhere in any of the 15 intelligence agencies you may not speak to a member of the press or by the way anyone whose job o involves disclosure of the public that would involve certain kinds of lawyers, certain organizations about anything related to intelligence whether or not its classified. And that if you do, then you will probably lose your job and your security clearance. So lots of organizes, you know, i bet you even the Washington Post would frown on its employees speaking for the company or disclosing sort of the internal of the company and i suppose you could do it that you would get yourself fired. But what folks cant do is is lead to your career. There are 4. 1 million jobs that require classified search. 4. 1 million. So if you run into me at the promotion ceremony of some general and theres a Cocktail Party and you and we talk about, you know, whats happening in crimea these day, purely classified information and you dont rob that and report it, then you could lose your ability to work anywhere in the chosen field and that can end up a pretty significant deterrent and a real shame because a lot of the context and the richness of the storys that you get from the reporters that you admire suppose that theres any that you actually like reading that a lot of what they know, a lot of their able to tell you the story relies on informal, nonclassified background conversations just about the way things work in the world. And these official savvy ones, they understand that. And thats selfdefeating because these the smart officials knee the better informed we are as reporters, the better informed our coverage will be. And it ultimately comes down to their benefit to give us as much of the understanding their perspective on the issues. And that that will come through as bart said sort of informal context, Just Relationships of trust built up over the years. You cant do that just by going in the front door every day and getting you know requesting an interview through the Public Affairs office which is stopped by wellmeaning people. And people dont auch know there are a vast number of conversations behind one paragraph. Lets take another question. Panel to the comment isnt our Security System fundamentally flawed that someone this young at this lowlevel in the government could release this amount of material, this massive amount of material . Does it mean that our Security System is fundamentally flawed . Id like the panel to comment on that. I with will try to be brief so we can go get more questions. Look, for sure it didnt work the way it wanted to work. You wouldnt want to see you uldnt see sort of an open field on everything. We dont think everything should be prefaced. There are huge problems and these are huge institutions. If you backton down the hatches so securely that there is nokse no ponlt of a brief like this, it means that no information exists thats vital to their job. And the damage to security could be greater. That was the conclusion of the 91 commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of 2001 that the data had been had been they call it stow piped. That there was so little sharing among people who needed who could have put the big pick together if they only noted it. There are tradeoffs in all of life. You shouldnt be surprised if there are tradeoffs here. Take a question from this side. This story won the award for Public Serviceful at what point did you realize or start to belief that this is a story that you needed to tell and at any point did you doubt that belief . I had lots of doubts. These are really, really hard questions. Anybody tells you that its obvious that you should draw disi e i would strongly i would disagree. I wouldnt worry about the time and space about this subject, that we shouldnt have touched the story at all. I thought it was going to be significant and really, really ard. One has provided you with unauthorized information and youve done a marvelous job in responding to that. My concern is with the different situation where citizens who have wrongfully atemped the whole attention to major issues are not getting attention by the press. I refer specifically to the fact that in 1992, congress unanimously passed a law requiring the disclosure of j. F. K. Assassination records, thousands of pages of j. F. K. Assassination records still remain with held by the National Archives acting as the behest of the c. I. A. Doesnt require an ed war snowden to get focus on the release of those records. I add that in 19 in 2013, i on behalf of a number of prominent citizens including the former chief council of the House Select Committee on assassinations wrote a let tore the Washington Post about this. The letter was not even acknowledged. Sir, were going to try to keep this pretty focused on the n. S. A. Project that our panel worked on. So if you have a question thats specifically related to his . Its not anything specific. Im going to get questions in the middle. I think ill take you guys over here and right here. Oh, no, just can we gate mic into the center aisle please . We have somebody who stood up. If you can expand a bit on your publiced or not publiced decisions particularly focusing on the issue of revealing sources of methods. I looked at that cartoon of muscular and it seemed to me that drove right to the focus of revealing sources and methods. So im curious about your decision process. Yeah, thats a its applauseable surmise looking at plasabl surmise. No one would think that that drawing itself or the idea that there are places on the internet that are encrypted no one its not no one would think that its revealing anything to the enemy that the enemy doesnt know. If anybody works in that field thats fairly elementary. The clue was what they were doing and there are lots of things that i actually thought were highly sensitive because im a layperson too. And i would look at that and say, well, i have no idea that that was possible. I realize as we proceeded through and in consultation with the government that its not actually very sensitive at all and there were things where it didnt strike me at all that they would be worried about something and they would explain to me why. But the reason we with held an elementary fact from our last story on the on the n. S. A. s able and practice of reporting every single call in an entire country is not just to avoid alerting that the country about it entirely. But it had to do with the specific operation surmises that might be made by others if they knew which country it was. And i cant actually get into most of the reason. But we were concerned to avoid blowing a capability. I mean, there are certain what were trying to do is not cause a result. There are certain disclosures that are selfexecuting. Once you say its done. I would strongly defend the claim that we have not done and the government claims that it has. On the google data coverage, so the Prism Program still exists and the n. S. A. Still under 702 get information about ndividualized targets or individualized selectors from google legally through prism there 702 program. That capability on google still exists. It seemed like they were going after the same piece of data through multiple means some legal and some not. And a question right there. Id like to i mean a lot of things, you know, that would have been revealed in this discussion as well as through the revolution of snowden throughout past year have shown that these programs have been defended by the executive office all the way down throughout the ovras. At the same time it was brought up that knicks son nickson was impeached over something minor in comparison and there was no discussion within the mass media, within the political establishment to even, you know, hint at the level of criminality which, you know, the former president was removed from office for. Yet, this is currently going on within our society. And you know, at the same time its a story that we have a democracy, a democratic process. I just wanted to know in any of you wanted to comment on that . I did not say and believe nickson yson did did was trivial. He used National Security surveillance tools to spy on and attempt to crush his political enmist. Theres absolutely no evidence that anything like that is happening now and believe me if i saw the evidence of that that would be the first story id be interested in getting at. Unless its a specified journalist. So the the issue here is not that we have big brother in the in that abusive sense. Which is trying to control, sur press it. And yet it is a set of powers that exceed anything that we could have imagined. We have to worry about, you no, what might become of that. And im not going to be commenting i dont think any of us are whether so and so broke the law. Thats just not our job. A question right sneer here . Thank you very much for the work that you will have done. My wife anry just so pleased at what youre letting us know. Im a retired radio journalists from maryland. I interviewed six district congressman roscoe bartlett. Hes retired since about his repeated votes against the patriot act. And he said the thing that trumped it for him was, once you let the government into your house youll never get them out. Is there any hope that we could and have ock back them not spying on us . I dont know what the outcomes going to be. But its not that there will be some embarrassing newspaper stories and then theyll change their mind. Thats not the way our whole setup works. Checks and balances whasmtran parent si has done people not to say yes, yes, but to do something. So Silicon Valley which by the way makes a lot of political contributions and has a fair amount of sway tpwhothe the executive branch and in congress i ghezz terms and has the ability as weve discussed to make changes that would thwart some of the programs. The transparency was cause any of those to change their policy. It has created an environment in which there all these privacy startups. Buy can buy email and so they will not sell your data. They couldnt prove that they were affected. Now they can prove affected. Now for the first time federal courts can decide what the constitutional lines are. Proof that congressional oversight was dysfunctional before, and the same congress is not voting for completely different measures in the life of the Public Disclosure that it was proposing and passing before we knew what was happening. And down the list. Mean, we have lots of checks and balances and theyre all information. In the summer they reported that the amazon packages on laptops an things like that. Do you think this story is too close to the line of revealing n. S. A. Techniques . Did you hold back on the story or would you have . You cant play press critic on a story that im covering. First of all, if youre here intercepting a similar package, theyre not planting tips on every time you order an upgrade. So by definition targeted operations. Generally speaking we have not been writing about targeted operations. And we dont want to reveal the method they use or the identity of the target. In other cases and this is not our story where others have written about ways that the n. S. A. Has undermined encryption standards, for example. I think those are harder calls but theres a strong public case for accomplishing those. Go back to world war ii. Japanese japanese had a secret code called purple. And the germans had, was that ultra . They were homegrown. They were used exclusively by the military to mend. Now, almost everybody uses the same increppings. Good guy same encryptions. Good guys, bad guys. Triffs, foreign governments use the same thing. If they make their job easier to listen in on their target by undermining the encryption that all of us use thats a pretty big policy question even if you can legitimately say you are revealing a tip that youre using. Youre revealing it nort to say is that a good idea . Are vealing it doesnt stop them from doing it again . Because its just a matter of confidence. Ill take a question on this side of the room. Or here. Hi, does n. S. A. Now know aside from whats been revealed from your story what stone took . It appears from the variety of interviews theyve done that theyre not sure. I think that they have a very strong picture by now of what he had access to, what he could have touched or did touch. I dont think they know without any confers what he actually took. They had claimed that at some point said he took 1. 7 million documents if thats the case and i do not know that a much larger number than anything he gave any combination of journalists. We have a question up here n the front. Thank you for taking my question. Youve talked a lot about how much you censored. We call it editing. [laughter] so you know, youre going to write a story about this aspect of what you know but youre not going to reveal every aspect of that story. And i get a sense of that there are things that youve got documents from snowden and youre not going to touch them at all. Youre not going to write a story about that at all. So its commendable that you selfedit it. He didnt obviously. He may not have sent you 1. 7 million documents but i get a sense he sent you quite a lot certainly more than you could have published. What is your view of the fact that he didnt and not just because legally he should have sent you nothing but if you felt there was a Public Interest in new covering some of that stuff, he sent you clearly more than he should have. Entrusting that you and orcolleagues would post them, that they were all going to be very careful, have good judgment, not get this stuff on the network, not talk to their girlfriend, etc. , etc. , et. Ok. So im not his lawyer, advisors, spokesman. Ill just speak to the factual parts here. He did give me and others two, others a lot more than he actually believed to be published. If he wanted it to be public, hes pretty good at computers he could put it up on the web. Way that t it up in could not be taken down. He did not want that. But whats unique that someone would turn in this many secrets on the scale of this sensitivity but its been routine for people to tell me things that they did not want me to public and that they knew i wouldnt public for the purpose of enabe ling me to understand that i want you to public. Suppose this prism document, right . The first one i read about, the u. S. Governments gets information from nine u. S. Companies, Big Technology Companies Like facebook, gooling google, yahoo and so on. He knew that i would have to read that in context. To help me understand whats happening. Sometimes people tell me thats off the record for the purpose of helping me understand. And he knew i would be deeply suspicious that would have blacked out parts. What are you not telling me . Does that undermine the whole basis of the story . Theres a lot of reasons why they dont want you to public everything. A question back there. A question about the journalistic approach to this and the philosophy that you have here. Youve been in some places there was a piece in the new republic that this is not deserved. Were a source with an agenda that, you know, if you could speak that and say a word about that. But i also want you to know that i have an understanding that thats not what occurred because when you describe the muscular slide, the five to six weeks of trying to figure out, ok, what is this . Clearly that is reporting that had to occur that as opposed to the wicky leak dump you had to analyze what was going on and secondly if you could say a word about the traditional journalistic approach that you adopted to say that, you no, i am a reporter with this voice from nowhere as its sometimes called. Im here to start the debate not to advocate on behalf of Edward Snowden. Are you limited in that in some ways . Ok. You guys should pitch in here any way you want to. First of all, i dont care what my sources say. I want to try angulate. I want to authenticate. Lots of fimes i know someone is telling me something because they hate their boss and they try to embarrass them, that doesnt decide whether or not i put it in the paper. I want to get the truth of it. And then i want to talk to the boss. And i want to talk to why he hates his job. And then it turns out that hes got his hand in the cookie job. Want to know what he or she has so that i can cure it in terms of understanding the full context of the story. But many, many great important storys that whatever your lues come from people and as far as whether with holding my own advocacy or my own point of view i think putting it out there i mean, where i dont have a view from no wrfment this is the idea that reporters in the traditional way just do it he said she said and they done try to, i dont know, referee that. Thats not at all what were doing when it comes to fact. Were not saying, you know, joe said that why didnt and gene said its black. Were trying to find out and say what it is. Im not trying to say what you should think of it. To the point on other reporting and dumping documents. Ive had a number of journalist friends and tell me theyre desperately trying to contact the senate and get copies of the document and they feel like this is this huge thing that they want a piece of it. And its true that there is a lot of insights from the documents. Youd be mistaken with the exception of one or two stories where the order itself was going to play an English Reader goal and telling a story. The reporting is like wheel of fortune where you have three letters and a clue about the n. S. A. And you to guess the word or the phrase, right . And a lot of it involved like piecing together little bits thread s and you gate of a program and you want to link it and it involves a lot of kind of weeks of work. If you notice the time that it takes each subsequent story that kind of because the deeper harder stories are basically hard to piece together. You have while snowden did collect quite a bit of documents it wasnt the tchace that it ehensive map pictionary. And they have sources on their record to help fill in all of those missing letters. We have time for about two more questions. And right here. Thank you. I have a question. Ive read virtually every single article that request the post wrote on n. S. A. And what i found out is that it was all onesided against the n. S. A. My question is, why didnt you do it fair and say lets look at the other side namely the threat and how bad is the threat and how hard was the n. S. A. Work to prevent the threat . Well, we do have a n. S. A. Reporter who has covered the n. S. A. Quite a bit. Well, i think in terms of the all the stories i did which is to try to get at the policy debate. Respectfully, i think i tried to be fair and honest about at what were hearing and reporting. You know, there has been and its a legitimate debate to have whether having this discussion about prism, about section 2 15 program, encryption method. Sishe offense whether that in itself harbors National Security. To the extent that i think it does, i think its difficult to discern. N extraordinary voyume of reporting on threat volume of reporting on threat, Nuclear Developments and terrorist plots and i mean, theres a huge volume of that that has been at an accelerated pace since 911. Dating from the cold war. It has dominated National Security matters. One of the biggest part of the news is new. And what is new is a lot of inside material about the u. S. Response about the u. S. Surveillance, about the n. S. A. That we didnt know before. What im doing is looking at that. If you look at the whole package and reporting to the Washington Post and dont think youre seeing about threat information about Dangerous Things that are happening around the world i would be happy to direct you to several more on the day. We have time for one more question. Thank you. I think the question is whether or not you have warrants. I dont see any reason or any benefit for having a priority of gathering of data. I understand and believe that you can get information by analyzing data. But i dont see why you have to do it without warrant. Thats one question and the other question is who in the government have been held accountable . I would like to know who was held accountable . First of all, a question about warrants, you know . That is one of the big points of contention has been sort of he focus of about the constitutionality of these programs. The government believes that when youre collecting metadata, the phone numbers or the call duration and call times but not the actual content of the conversation then then taking that collecting that does not require a warrant because it is not seen as sensitive as actually hearing the words of a conversation. We have done reporting as well about how collecting that sort of metadata, you know, it can in large quantities have the important to disclose all sorts of things about who we are. People who are where we shop or what our religion is or what our preferences are or who ight visit at night when our our spouses dont know. Some people feel that it desevers more protection than just certainly shouldnt just be collected on a vast scale the way government has een doing without a warrant. Holding accountable the the administration has said repeatedly that it has not found, you know, any abuse of the authorities by the Intelligence Community, by the n. S. Oomplet that when they made mistakes and they have made mistakes and when there have been compliance of violation and there have been serious ones those are been reported and corrected and that in one level of accountability i guess the question is how accountability are they to the public or just the overall of just, you know, the balancing of the intrusiveness versus the benefit to National Security, that level of transparency has is so dee accountability and we havent had that. Were only start og see a little bit of it now which has led to efforts by the administration to to reign in a little besides obama saying he wants to end both collections. Hes also talked about hes ordered that there be Public Advocates now before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which traditional hears only from the government on surveillance issues and how he wants to have advocates to give the Public Interest side of surveillance issues. Hes ordered that there would be stronger Privacy Protection for foreigner whos data is collected. And that collection on thousands of heads of state be halted. A lot of that was in reaction to these stories you know, on eevels dropping on angela merkel. Thats some measure of accountability, i guess you could say. But it tern si doesnt go as far as one would like, some reforemans who want to see not just an end of metadata but an end to all collection by the Intelligence Community. They would like to see a warrant requirement for searches of Americans Communications in the program called prism. Theyd like to see greater disclosure of what the other collection programs are. And Greater Transparency around which rseas collection were learning a little bit more about. Clearly we could continue talking and there seems still to be many questions and you can fill out those cards again with a question. We will answer those online after this event. I really would hope that you all continue to talk about this issue. Please join me in thanking bart tukeshima for letting us walk three and it was an enormous difficult hard and you sea saw how difficult reporting this was. And allen and craig letting us walk through and get a since of what their journeys been like. Thank you again. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] nest, q a with High School Students scugs their participation in the senate youth program. And at 12 00 a. M. The Washington Post n. S. A. Urveillance program. And next border enforcement. The fact is i admire their commitment to cover all sides to the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate. John boehner isnt here tonight. Speaker boehner and president obama are still struggling to get along. Theyre kind of like a blind date between anl Anderson Cooper and rachel ma dow. In theory they understand each others position but deep down you know nothings ever going to happen. Watch this years white house Correspondents Dinner saturday night. President obama and Joel Mchale Community will headline the event. It stars at 6 00 p. M. Eastern followed by the dinner. Live saturday night on cspan. This week on q a, a talk with participants in the 2014 United States senate youth program, held at the Renaissance Mayfair Hotel in washington dc. Tell me your name, where you are from, and what his group is all about. My name is catherine and i am from thete