We need stronger on that issues. The cspan Battle Ground states tour. And were live this morning as the Washington Post hosts the Cyber Security summit with remarks from former Homeland Security certificate Michael Chertoff and National Intelligence, james clapper. Live on cspan2. One year ago this morning journalists in Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered in istanbul. The post has been paying tribute to jamal throughout this week and just moments ago post publisher fred ryan and the posts owner jeff baseos spoke at a memorial for him in istanbul just steps from where jamal was killed. Jamals courage and his work will not be forgotten. For me, jamal inevitably brings to mind the importance of a free press. But more broadly, our ability to access information and communicate openly is the life blood of our democratic society. So much of our communication is done digitally over texts or emails, on social media platforms. Our digital lives are encoded in data. Theyre pingponging around servers all over the country, on networks throughout the world. Securing these spaces is critical for Free Expression and for Free Enterprise and understanding the threats were facing is an important first step. But issues of Cyber Security are not always clearcut. The same technology that keeps classified government information from getting into the wrong hands can be used to field criminals in the darkest corners of the web. The hacking tools used to track journalists and distents are similar to what Law Enforcement use the to track criminals and terroris terroris terrorists. Were going to get through the front lines of Cyber Security and governance working to keep everything from our elections to our smart phones and emails safe. Before we get started id like to thank our nonprofit sponsor the Washington Institute and our supporter sponsor the university of virginia. Id specifically like to thank our presenting sponsor ratheon and hes going to say a few words. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you kris and the Washington Post for a discussion on such an important topic to our National Security and thank the university of virginia, my alma mater, and those alongside raytheon. The speakers ar are keeping us from Cyber Threats. And addressing the community and the challenges we face. What better time to come together than the national Cyber Security month. This years theme is to owner it, secure it, protect it. And making it a lifetime campaign and not just something we focus on once a month. I believe that Cyber Security is truly a shared responsibility. Not only is it in our democracy, over the years weve seen interference in our elections, Critical Infrastructure and private sector. Todays experts will address three key themes, the need for trusted publicprivate partnerships, the importance of information sharing and helping combat the threat. The place where it truly lies providing Technical Solutions to cyber service, secures the Security Posture and improves the government organizations. Thank you, agn, i look forward to a Great Exchange of ideas this morning. To washingtons most blata blatant the election may be 14 months away, but the campaign is now and we are probably, as we speak, suffering from the foreign influence on our democracy through pushing out extremist views and fake news. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming this morning. I just want to join in what kris said at the outset. This is an anniversary that has a lot of meaning for us at the post, the fact that our publisher, fred ryan and our owner jeff bezos traveled all the way to istanbul to talk about my colleague and friend, Jamal Khashoggi and all of us here at the post feel very grateful for and i wanted to share that with you. Today we are going to talk about Cyber Security, interference in our 2020 elections and a way to deal with that and well talk with two of the people who are most familiar with these issues. First, former director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. Second, former director of National Intelligence, james clapper. Each knows cyber and these issues and the difficult political and legal background, as well as anybody who has served in government. I want to start, gentlemen, with a question thats on everybodys minds this week. It involves the question of interference in our elections, but this is the complaint thats been raised by the still unidentified whistleblower whose complaint is now before the House Intelligence Committee and subject of an Intense National discussion going all the way to the issue of impeachment. Without asking you what you think about whether the president should be impeached, i do want to ask you each the baseline question, whether you as experts in this area, find the whistleblowers complaint which weve now read, urgent and credible, both of the words used and then second, whether you would think that it ought to be investigated to determine whether its accurate . Well, maybe i should start since its im sort of familiar with the Intelligence Community, whistleblower protection act and the complaints that are submitted with it. I would say that of all the whistleblower complaints that i ever saw during my six and a half years at dni that this was the best written, best prepared footnoted and caveated as appropriately as it should be. And the law prescribes that once a whistleblower complaint is submitted, it goes directly to the inIntelligence Community and Inspector General which became statutory during my time as dni and accordingly, acts independently. The Inspector General makes a determination about is the complaint credible . I dont recall ever having one declared to be urgent. And so that was done. The whistleblower complied meticulously with the provisions of the law. And for me, it was one of the most credible, compelling such complaints ive ever seen. Should it be investigated . Absolutely. Thats the whole premise of the whistleblower protection act is that a serious, credible complaints of wrong doing should be accordingly investigated. Mike, whats your feeling about the same issues . Was it credible, urgent and should it be investigated . Well, i cant judge whether its credible because i think you have to obviously investigate, you have to determine whats the basis of knowledge is. If the person were they in a position to know certain things or not know certain things. There are probably other people that will have to be talked to. What i would say is this though, obviously its a matter of significant concern. Any investigation ought to be dispassionate, fair, thorough and expeditious. What should not happen is people announcing the results they think theyre going to get before the investigation is done because that impairs the credibility of the whole process. If i could add just one other point just to be clear, the law stipulates of period of 14 days, i believe, where the Inspector General can investigate the allegations contained in the complaint and that was done in this case where there was, within the time limit of 14 days a corroboration, at least in the igs mind before he forwarded it. And, jim, let me ask you, because you were in the position acting dni that maguire was in. He made the decision when he received this from the Inspector General to go to the white house and the Justice Department, the office of legal counsel, both institutions part of the whistleblowers complaint. Do you think that was appropriate . Well, he is in a tough place. Here he had been acting director of National Intelligence for about six weeks and this you know, arrives on his doorstep. So i think the way ive answered this, ive been asked this, beginning to be an faq, frequently asked question and the way ive responded in the past, i think that institutionally joe did the right thing. The problem of course, by consulting with the doj and the white house, and he had a genuine concern about violating executive privilege or he doesnt have the authority to waive executive privilege. Now, you can argue that the cows come home, but was that the right thing to do where hes consulting with an element of the government thats implicated in the complaint . And you know, thats a judgment call that he made and if it were me, i honestly dont know what i would have done. I trust what i would have had is a very extensive and deep counsel with my general counsel about the pros and cons of doing that and im sure joe did the same thing. Mike, i want to ask you about a question that is becoming more and more central now, and that is, how can congress compel testimony either through subpoenaed witnesses or depositions, other documents in an investigation that it deems essential, but where Administration Officials are withholding that information . What happens next . Typically whats happened in the past, particularly when you get a subpoena, but even if Congress Wants you to testify is, they usually hold the power of the purse through appropriations and generally government officials go along with it because the sanctions they face, the money gets cut off. I guess if youre going to be technical about it, what would happen a subpoena would issue. If someone failed to appear, they would then go to court, that congress would go to court and they would get a court order mandating the person to appear and if the person still failed to appear, they would be held in contempt of court. The other possibility is someone could appear and decline to answer certain questions on the ground that they are privileged. That gets you into some tricky legal issues about whether congress has the direct ability to impose contempt or whether congress has to go to court. As with most things in the american legal system you usually wind up with a potentially extended litigation because youre dealing with unprecedented issues and that means everybody is going to wind up being careful about how they deal with them. And would you guess, based on your experience that this issue is going to end up in the Supreme Court before its done . Its quite possible. Obviously, everybody remembers back in the early 70s with the nixon case, but the court, given its schedule only has a certain amount of bandwidth and in some ways by the time it gets up to the Supreme Court youre talking about months having gone by so there may be a tension between the tempo of these investigations and the tempo of the court system, but again, its hard to speculate because we dont we havent yet seen a concrete dispute that emerges thats ripe for court. So i want to turn now to our main subject of political interference Going Forward in the 2020 elections. And i want to invite our audience here and also watching this on live tv, if you have questions you can send them to me, right at this little ipad pos postlive and i in theory will see them here and ask them. Let me ask jim first and then mike to give us a sense as we head toward 2020 of how wellprepared you think we are to protect our elections from the kind of interference that weve seen now powerfully in 2016 and in 2018, too. Well, having happily left the government, i dont know. Its my i mpression that a lot has been done certainly among the key agencies, fbi, Homeland Security, all of those that are sta stakeholders and i think a lot has been done over the situation where we were in 2016. But youve got to remember, you know, our voting apparatus is very decentralized. Its done at the state and local level, not at the federal level. I was really taken aback during the 2016 and what we were seeing the russians doing when jay johnson, then secretary of Homeland Security reached out to voting, election commissions at the state level and got a lot of pushback. We dont want the feds messing with this sort of thing. So, i think but having said all that, i am confident that a lot has been done to make it better. If i may, david, just make a point here, which i, whenever this topic comes up. Securing the voting apparatus, Voting Machines, computation votes, the transmission of votes and all of that, thats hugely important. But thats to me is the is one bin of the problem of the the other bin is what i might call for lack of a better term, intellectual security. Meaning how do you get people to question what they see, read and hear on the internet and this is where the russians exploited us, exploited our divisiveness by using social media. So, that part of the problem im not sure about. Mike, let me ask you the same thing of how vulnerable you think we are headed into 2020, whether the resistance that jim describes to federal help, to the state and local governments, whether thats changing. And then also, maybe you can comment on the broader question that jim raises about the way in way our Information Space as a whole, now, has been it looks like contaminated. So, first of all, i agree with jim. I think that the federal government has been much more active and i think the states have been much more willing to accept help. I figure well hear more in the later panels about that. I also agree that actually the machines themselves in some ways are the least vulnerable because, a, theyre decentralized and b, not normally hooked up into the internet just briefly. Youd have to have physical access. Where the greater challenges are the Registration Data bases, the tabulation date a bases and the infrastructure around voting which includes, you know, is your power working . Is transportation working . Can people get to the polls . And these issues require, not just preparing to raise your level of Cyber Security against hacking, but it also means resilience. If there is something that makes it difficult on election day, either the data base goes down or if we can verify who is entitled to vote or the trains stop running because of a cyber attack, is there a plan for what do you do next . And thats the essence of resiliency. You have to have that in advance. You have to make sure you know what the plan is, that you have the authorities and that you have the capabilities and i think thats an area we ought to look at. And on what jim called the second bin, which is disinformation, i think thats a challenge broader than the election itself. Obviously, one of the approaches that the russians and frankly chinese also, take to geopolitical conflict is the Information Space, what they use today call active measures. And the idea here is if you can disruptive the unity of effort of the United States or europe or other democratic countries then basically you win without firing a shot because people dont trust each other and they dont trust institutions. Thats what weve seen over the last ten years. In fact, it goes back decades. What has changed recently is social media and the ability to manipulate that to drive carefully tailored messages to particular individuals and thats an area where i think were still trying to implement a standards and approaches that would mitigate the effect of that and job number one is to get people to be critical in their thinking when they see a story and not to be accepting it as true because, its, quote, on the internet. So just going to this point that jim and you both now have discussed, the more we talk about the insecurity of our election systems, in a sense, the more people have it in their mind that theres something wrong here. A friend who runs the Cyber Security for one of the big social Media Companies said to me recently, what the russians really are doing is weaponizing uncertainty. That the very fact that youre uncertain whether these systems may be attacked leads to less faith in the outcome. I just want to ask you, i think its one of the hardest questions there is. Is there any way to reduce that weaponized uncertainty that you can think of thats appropriate for a democratic government, jim, mike . I would say this. I mean one of the points thats been made repeatedly is you need to have a verifiable, auditable systems for actually getting voting and whether its a paper ballot or various types of tools that would encrypt a copy of a ballot. They need to assure people if there were a dispute it might take time, but you could go back and actually manually count. I think thats an important confidence building measure. So any thoughts . You know, i dont have any Silver Bullet suggestion here other than imploring people to think critically, try to corroborate the information theyre absorbing, pick and choose your sources, that sort of thing. Ill often fantasize about some sort of a National Fact checker, unassociated with the government, perhaps. I dont know quite how youd constitute this, but the fact checker would be seen as unifo