From manchester. Speakers include five president ial candidates, former secretary of state hillary clinton, vermont senator bernie sanders, and lincoln chafee, former Maryland Governor martin omalley. Saturday at 9 30 a. M. Eastern on cspan, cspan radio, and cspan. Org. Cspan campaign 2016. Taking you on the road to the white house. At the oversight role of congress and u. S. Intelligence and National Security manners matters. David sanger of the New York Times moderates this discussion. And welcomemorning to day two. We continue our examination of the state of u. S. Intelligence thosehe perspective of who provide oversight from congress. Congress plays a Critical Role in ensuring the health and operation of intelligence. The house are meant select Community Committee on intelligence [indiscernible] we are pleased to have congressman devin nunes and the ranking minority member congressman adam schiff with us this morning. They represent the great state and have long and distinguished records of performing rigorous oversight of intelligence in the interest of accountability and transparency. Our distinguished panelists are joined by david sanger, chief washington correspondent for the New York Times. We are thrilled to have you with us today is well. Thank you and thank you for coming at this early hour of the morning. I am looking forward to what will be a conversation of under one hour because both of our panelists have to get to what i hope will be a pretty interesting open hearing on cyber. Leadinghave many of the Intelligence Agency heads and i think including the director of who was intelligence here yesterday. I think you both. As you heard in the introduction were fortunate to have devin nunes and adam schiff with this. That is the role. I want to get to the question of the quality of the intelligence you are getting now with what will be at the end of the week, 14 years since 9 11. Great time of upheaval in the way we organize the Intelligence Community and the way we assess information. Let me start with this. When you look around the world and you see the assessments that come into you, we are in an odd moment. Postpostcold war moment. Where the assessment of the threat differs considerably. If you look at the National Threat assessment you get each february, it has said cyber for the past two years as the biggest threat. If you look at what the pentagon would tell you they would say a resurgent russia under vladimir putin. If you look under at the assessments that come from others who are more focused on the middle east they would tell you the rise of isis. Is perhaps the vigorous challenge we face now although not necessarily one that can reach the United States. I would like to ask each of you to tell us which of those you believe but more importantly, tell us what the fact we are getting why we are getting such a different assessment, what we should draw from that about the current state of how we assess intelligence threats. Thank you and i appreciate the opportunity to be here with my colleague am a adam schiff. Party to start out to be bipartisan. It is behind closed doors so we do not have a lot of the political banter you will see in public hearings that you see on the other committees. The politics we try to check at the door. This is one of the most important roles that we both play in this town and for the United States of america to look over 17 agencies, that is very difficult. We looked at this before we both came on, we wanted to build what didn what our predecessors and we divided the committee into new subcommittees and tried to spread out the 17 different areas where we have jurisdiction to get our members more engaged. We had very active members on , forsa Cyber Committee example, and we have a defense in overhead architecture, emerging threats, and cia. We try to divvy it up i the workload. And then we will have we will big, important, maybe the first meeting of the week usually. Then we try to let the other Committee Chairman do the rest because there is too much to cover. That is how we break it down and how we view our role in oversight area oversight. I do not think you can rank getting to the second question. I look at these and kind of equal buckets that are always changing and that are working together and i see those buckets as you have the whole overarching cyberproblem. You have the russia problem. You have the china problem. And then you have what i call the jihad triangle which is isis, al qaeda, and iran. Overarching with that is the cyber problem. So at times when you look at who are the ad cyber actors, they happen to be russia, china, iran, even some of the isil folks. And then you have the Nuclear Threat with north korea. I do not think if you live at sony it is cyber threat. When people ask how is the Intelligence Community i think too many people expect the Intelligence Community to be fortunetellers and they think they will predict the future. As we know that is hard to do. You just hope to have really educated folks, educated members , we can provide good education to our military, to the military planners, to our policymakers both at the executive and legislative level. And through that we know that change is always going to happen. New bad things are always going to emerge and you hope that you have some education level amongst all the people i just named. Congressman schiff we have strongly left coast domination of intelligence oversight with myself, senator new years, senator feinstein. The chair was mentioning our committee tends to be nonpartisan. That does not mean we dont have our differences. We do that it is a very collegial environment. We try to basically cordon off the areas where we know we are going to be in disagreement and we agree to disagree without it becoming personal. Then we focus on the breadandbutter of our job which there are no party line differences. It is a wonderful retreat from the rest of the congressional committees. I would say a couple of things ic. T the state of the a time ofne through tremendous growth and capabilities where technology ithnological advances made possible to gather information. As a result we are seeing a couple of phenomena. One is that our Public Policy do not always keep paces with the changes in technology and changes in capability. Perhaps we did not ask as much about things we could do, whether we should do, what the implications of disclosure might mean. That environment has very much changed. There are new analyses where almost the expectation is turned on its head. This willation now is be disclosed, leaked, whatever. Oft requires a new analysis what will the implications of that be, what are the cost benefits of any kind of intelligence gathering, so the Public Policy debate is struggling to keep up with the technological advances. We have been trying to deal with the challenge of the assimilation of great amounts of data which is a different kind thehallenge than perhaps in days gone by when the challenge was getting information, not so much assimilation of information. Functionalht is very and contrast too much of the congress. Nonetheless, we are at a tremendous mismatch visavis the intelligence agencies. We cannot take our work home area and we are reliant to a large degree on the agencies telling us if there are problems. Within those constraints i think that the oversight mechanism is working and working reasonably well. In terms of the threats we face i find it interesting when team people talk about the about cyber. It is floating out there not connected to any particular actor. It is relevant in the context of who is using the cyber weapon against us. Russia isirman said, the most sophisticated actor. China may be the most lithic actor. Prolific actor. We have concerns about iran, north korea, and the increasing democratization of the cyber threat as other countries make use of it. It is a very asymmetric battlefield where a lot of the advantages are to those on offense and that provides great challenge for the Intelligence Community and all of our agencies. Actors ornation state nonnationstate actors on what poses the greatest threat, i view that through the prism of what poses the threat of changing the way we live. , theen i look at isis threat from isis compared to the threat from al qaeda, i have been more worried about al qaeda because of their capacity to launch major attacks against this country. To bring down our aircraft or an attempt to do a spectacular attack. That could have a transform an event negative impact on the country in a way that the one isil model attacks will not be transformative. I have tended to worry more about al qaeda. That is changing as al qaeda, the core leadership becomes increasingly decimated and isil is increasingly on the rise. That for me is changing. We may be getting to the point where isil has eclipsed al qaeda in my perspective as the predominate terrorist threat. Russia presents a very real threat also. Potentially transform at its impact in our country. Should they miscalculate should lead to warfare on the continent. You have the same risk although to a lesser degree by china with its aggressive action in the south china sea. Those are two of the main nationstate actors we worry about. And then finally, iran, we will be training a lot of our on irans compliance with the nuclear agreement. That will be the next type rarity. Host tom and i want to leave on the two things you raised. Move on to iran and some of the cyber issues. , wementioned at the outset work from an old assumption in the Intelligence Community that most of what you dealt with if not forn secret periodire 25 or 30 year that you would see at the bottom of a classification stamp but most of that. The dni got around to declassifying president ial daily briefs Lyndon Johnson received early in the vietnam war. That is the old model. The cia went through a procedure, annual review of the white house that basically said, is this operation, is the data we are getting out of this operation, this effort worth what were getting if it got disclosed tomorrow morning on the new york of times or the Washington Post . The nsa never went through that process until postsnowden time. Tell us, go one more beat about how that is changing. What you are saying happen in the culture. Is there now an underlying assumption that even the deepest secrets may only have a shelf life of a couple of years. How does of that affect ones thinking on how to measure risk . The has been an overreliance on technology. We have to continue to improve how we use technology and data. You can also overrely on it. Theres Nothing Better than good oldfashioned human intelligence gathering. It is going to be more difficult to gather human intelligence times it isa lot of human intelligence that enables better technologies, new technologies or even discovery of what adversaries are doing. I think the allegations regarding angelas cell phone and i can only say allegations were a real Tipping Point in compelling policymakers ic to thinkof the long and hard about the risks of disclosure, the risks of relationship with allies, the ,isks to sources of information most acutely human sources of information from disclosure. To think in new and different terms about the cost benefit analysis, because i think one of the dynamics that has changed is the conversations that traditionally have taken thee between the media and Intelligence Community when the media has a story and they go to the icn say, we are going to run with the story and there is a discussion about, what impact with that have and the newspapers willingness to self censor and not publish out of the public interest. I think that dynamic has changed. You may be in a better position to speak on this. My perception is that postsnowden there is such a rush to publish. If we do not run with this some other paper will. We will get scooped. It is a very different dynamic now. From the press perspective that may mean that described to of thenfidence and trust government. But the bottom line i think for the Intelligence Community is a much greater expectation that things are going to be published. The celebrity for lack of a better word that has been attributed to snowden encourages other people to make disclosures. This is a great challenge. We can have an Intelligence Community where people can unilaterally make the decision even when something is lawful that they disagree with the policy and they will make it public. Tremendous challenge. I think it does affect what the ic does. It does affect our expectations about how long things will remain confidential. Constraints, some which may be useful and others which may be harmful in terms of National Security. Those communications inteln the times and have not changed all that much. There is a very good time at dynamic backandforth. While the times or the poster the wall street journal may call and have a serious conversation with the cia or others about whether publication would result in methods being revealed and so forth, wikileaks will not have that phone call or a blogger. We probably would not get the phone call returned. The game is being played at a far more complex level i think than it was in the old days. But you raised at the end the concern that some in the Intel Community about have whether they do this in and out of channel. One of the questions we have gotten up here goes direct to that. To ask you both to comment on the news reports that appeared monday thats on intelligence assessments of isis at varioustered points. This was mostly in the dia. To downplay their strength. When i read that story the other day i was thinking to myself, this is the same debate that played out during the pentagon papers in 1969. Where history of the vietnam war suggested that the government had overestimated our success against the viet cong. Except we were seeing played out in real time with the isis struggle. When you read Something Like that and maybe you have had some discussions with the Intel Community on that. Tell us a little bit about that dynamic. Are concerned about the politicization of intelligence and it has long been a political football that there is always of theions politicization of intelligence. I have never viewed al qaeda as on the run. It makes for good political rhetoric. Gives the market people who do not want to be fighting wars, wemakes them feel good but still have enemies out there and enemies are growing. By the storyprised or i was surprised that it sounds like now there are whistleblowers that are coming forward. There is an ig investigation. That will be of interest to both of us to figure out what that is all about. To have an open avenue for whistleblowers to come forward. It has not been easy in the past for whistleblowers. Some of thease whistleblowers came to my colleagues at the times. Could they have come to the committee . Absolutely. We have a process in place for whistleblowers to come forward. Anyone in the Intelligence Committee has the right to come actively sometimes it is not even whistleblowers that adam and i, we meet with people when we travel or even here in washington. Our doors are always open to people within the ic to come with complaints. Thanks for the refresher on the pentagon papers case. I took a class but it was at 8 a. M. And i slept most of it. We started at 8 15 a. M. And we gave them 15 minutes of caffeine knowing that you guys would be out here. Excellent. I think the chairmans point is exactly right. Make itevery effort to possible for whistleblowers not only to can indicate with us but to communicate with us but to have avenues to raise concern so they do not feel they need to leak information to be heard. That onnot to say policy differences that we will agree with someone who disagrees with the policy of the Intelligence Community, but we do need to make sure that there is an avenue available for overnt, for any concern wrongdoing or failure to adhere to the guidelines or politicization of intelligence. All of us have in mind concerns expressed over intelligence on iraq and none of us want to see anything like that happening with respect to isoor any other challenge we face. There have been cultural changes that have encouraged dissenting opinions that develop alternative analyses that question assumptions that seems to be part of the ethic of the Intelligence Community in a way more than the past. This is obviously not a perfect science. The analysts can reach for different conclusions and we want that to be reflected in the work product we get. Impressions can be different. I mentioned this to highlight within the last 24, 48 hours something that i think is telling in terms of the perspective we bring reading the same intelligence. Just this week all of the republican members on our committee have come out against the iran agreement and in part on the basis of their reading of intelligence. Although democratic members have come out in support. Similarly on the basis of our reading of intelligence. We are reaching contrary intelligence reading the same intelligence. The director spoke yesterday and it was interesting. John negroponte speaking earlier before the panel today about the impressions of what he had to say. I read them in the paper today because it was not present yesterday and i have one interpretation of what he said in terms of our capability of catching iran if they were to cheat. People who heard him may have at completely different impression of whether it was likely or not likely we would catch them. This is not a perfect science. We do want to hear those range of opinions within the ic and what level of confidence they hold. I have a lot of confidence we do get that range of opinion. You provided the perfect segue into that topic. I was out in vienna for the and of the ir