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 FrontierFoundation 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, weir