Discuss cyber hacking and the u. S. Elections. The center for American Progress action fund hosted the event. It is about an hour and an hour and 20 minutes. Ready to go . I want to thank you all for coming today, including our panelists and of course representative schiff and his staff for their help including my tim my friend tim berger and tim who works for the congressmen on the intel committee. I will be brief because we have a lot of time do not have a lot of time and we have a lot to talk about. It is my honor to introduce representative adam schiff who represents californias 20 Congressional School districts in los angeles county. Representative schiff among other things is the ranking democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence. He is the leader in all intelligence issues and has been particularly outspoken and thoughtful on the issue of russian interference in the recent u. S. President ial election. After the congressmen gives some opening remarks, he has agreed to participate in a panel he has led by agreed to participate in a panel. I also want to add that serving his country in the amount. Jeremy bash, another old friend and colleague from the cia and the pentagon will be on the panel. Jeremy is managing of global Beacon Global Strategies and was in excellent shape as that julie smith will also participate in the panel. She worked at the pentagon for Vice President biden. She now works with jeremy at the center for new American Security. If she is also one of the smartest people in town on europe and russia. Finally, when i started studying detente wasnion, top focus. We then went to peering into putins eyes, to reset to today. Who knows what phrase we will come up with to describe the put. Intrump relationship. A line from an old buffalo makes it clearg sums it up for the moment for me. Theres something happening here, what it is aint exactly clear. Rep. Schiff thank you it is a , pleasure to join you today a special appreciation for American Progress for the fabulous for the center does an invitation to come and speak with you today. There is a much there is a lot to talk about. I thought i would focus on the convergence of two trends in the world. The trend affecting russia and its place in the world and the worldview of Vladimir Putin as well as the trend of increasing weapon andcyber as a intow those trends come uniquely pernicious combination last november, which will bring us to the heart of the topic today. Let me start by talking about russia with an anecdote from a few years ago when i was oligarchd to a russian in los angeles and made the observation that it was a shame that medvedev hadnt been given a freer hand. I thought the relations between United States and russia could have been very different, that putin seemed very much to have a chip on his shoulder. That anything in the United States interest was High Definition and pathetic to russias interest. Had putin given him greater autonomy they mightve had a , different relationship in our countries might have been on a becauset trajectory there were a number of common interest. His answer was very dismissive. Medvedev he said was nothing. Do you know, he asked me, that medvedevs had at that medvedev at all times someone called the pillow carrier . Do you know what the job of the pillow carrier is. He said it was the job of the pillow carrier to smother the smother him in his sleep if he did something he didnt like. Putinsly, i think worldview sharpened after the mass protests in 2011 because they play such an informative role to the antipathy to secretary clinton. I think it is also an important chapter in modern russian history because the gravest concern for Vladimir Putin is the longevity of his regime. He saw mass protests and the russians think revolutions were inventions of the cia. What i mean when i meet with the cia, i congratulate them on. Heir omnipotence they have far greater capability than i am aware of, but nonetheless, this is apparently the russian perspective on things. I used to describe even as recently as a year ago the threat emanating from russia as a form of creeping authoritarianism coming from the kremlin. I would no longer say it is creeping. I have think we are not in a new cold war, but we are in a highly consequential war of ideas. Not between communism and capitalism, but between authoritarianism and democracy and representative government. We see that obviously vividly in the russian propagation of its model and its desire to tear down the democracies in europe, tear down the american democracy. One of the core conclusions of the Intelligence Community in terms of russian interference in our election was the desire to sow discord in the United States. This is, i think, a hugely important battle of ideas and sadly, in this battle of ideas you see autocracy on the march. You see countries in europe that are becoming increasingly autocratic, increasingly nationalist in their origin. You see changes here in the United States were our own new president displays often very authoritarian qualities and i think the weakening of europe, the brexit, all of these factors are greatly endangering the future of democracy and i think this is going to be the struggle of our times. Briefly aboutw the other trend and that is the explosion of the potency of cyber. Have hadany countries a desire to blur the distinction between different kinds of cyber activity. There is, obviously, cyber for the purpose of theft, intellectual property. This is a problem we have had with many countries, but probably among the foremost, china for many years. You have cyber for the purposes of the gathering of foreign intelligence, which all nations that have cyber capability engage in. You have what we saw a recently in our own election cyber for the purposes of affecting political outcomes of meddling in the internal affairs of another country. We have seen this from russia in europe in the past. This was the first and most brazen example of cyber being utilized in those means here in the United States. , i think forally the United States is a weapon. Lly asymmetric it is easy and cheap to go on offense. It is phenomenally difficult and expensive to be on defense. They just need to find an opening. One of the illustrations i love to give is target when target was hacked. The hackers got into target through the hvac, the airconditioning system because in an internet of things, you are only as secure as your least vulnerable point of entry and in that case it was apparently airconditioning. It is the equivalent of a jewel heist where the thief climbed through the airconditioning duct and they were able to go through the hvac system and migrate into Financial Data and then all of a sudden target has a huge problems had a huge problem on their hands. It can cheap to do and be done remotely and always with some level of deniability. In the context of a nationstate actor who is doing damage to the United States, whether it is north korea attacking a company or russia attacking our democracy, it will always put the administration in a difficult position of proving its case when it makes attribution or deciding it cannot do so without giving up important sources and methods and making the decision not to attribute conduct. This gets me to a point i would like to conclude on and that is our new president is doing deep damage to himself and our country. He is doing this in many ways. He is doing this and his willingness to make up facts as he goes along and we are in the of the most recent flareup in the invention that millions of Illegal Immigrants voted. What is this have to do with russia, National Security, or anything else . They will become a time when the president is to be believed by the country. There will be a time when the president will need to make a case for what intelligence agencies tell him without revealing what sources of information are. If the president cant be believed by his own people, let alone our allies, if he has so has so impugned the credibility that the intelligence professionals are providing the best insight in the world, what hope does he have of persuading his own country, let alone our allies to make common cause to deal with a threat . This is i think an enormous problem. As you may remember as early as september, senator feinstein and i made the initial decision to go public with attribution of russia involvement in the hacking before the administration was willing to. Obviously we were lying the administration to make the attribution. My argument was that the administration didnt need to reveal sources and methods, but it did need to make attribution. Certainly, whenever that is the case, you are going to have people in the public and the press saying where is your proof . But it will be very much in our interest for the government to make attribution and not disclose sources and methods. Im sure the kremlin would like Nothing Better than the whole that a more full some accounting of how we know just what the russians were doing. Right now, the russians are reversing reverse engineering everything in the open source report to try to figure out how we know what we know. I think it is very important the president have the confidence of the public to be able to come before the American People and say either the iranians are cheating or the North Koreans are advancing on their miniaturization of a Nuclear Warhead or whatever the case may be that warrants action, it will be important that the president have credibility and i think there is no one who is doing more to undermine his own credibility and legitimacy than this president is doing himself and i will define a coda on this revisiting the creation of black sites or going back to waterboarding or enhanced interrogation techniques, the consideration of a ban on visas to muslims in any form are colossal mistakes that will cost us relationships with our allies, many of whom we depend on in the war on terror and this is a chapter that many of us hoped we had turned a page on and i think it would be a tragic mistake for the country to revisit this and make the same mistakes all over again. On that optimistic note, i will conclude and i look forward to our discussion. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you. Good morning, everybody and thank you for being here. Thank you for the kind introduction of the congressman and out all of our distinguished panelists. We have julie and jeremy and. Ongressman schiff i run the National Security program here. There is a lot going on in the news. Thank you for all of you for taking the time to be here and talk about what might be one of the most important issues we have faced as a country. Panel bounce around the and come back here and try to save time for questions. I think we will have a bunch at the end. I think i would like to start jeremy, as the former chief of staff of the pentagon and the cia. One of the things we saw this week was maybe an attempt by the president to bridge a divide by going to langley and talking to it was questionable whether it had the desired impact. What are the implications between the president and his Intelligence Agency . And what does that mean for us having the intelligence we need of the country . Oni was at the agency december 30, 2009, a day we sent a dozen of our best officers to a post in eastern afghanistan to conduct a counterterrorism operation. N operation that went wrong he killed jennifer, darren, jeremy, and five others. Those seven offices are memorialized at langley, as well as other members who lost their lives. It was disturbing and upsetting to a number of intelligence professionals that i have spoken to to see the president s presentation on saturday. There were four areas that i think this important relationship between the president and his Intelligence Community will come into conflict. As a congressman noted about russia, the Intelligence Community has been warning about the threat posted by russia. An adult assessment shared by the president and his team. Second, on counterterrorism, the president said on saturday, we invented isis. And that we should have taken their oil. If you combine that with some of misguided terrorism for people who keep our country safe, and you combine that with going back to waterboarding, misguided usicies that will not make safer prevent terrorist attacks in our country, you see of collision that you see an making ourcollision jobs harder. Era of alternative facts, what does an Intelligence Officer do . Credoelligence officers is you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Knowntelligence officers they need to speak the truth even when it is uncomfortable, and when you start from the premise of alternative facts, lies, it undermines the whole premise of intelligence. Intelligence is designed to put parameters around policy. Estimates are that policy is guided by facts. Every National SecurityCouncil Meeting because of a factual predicate of. An intelligence picture factual predicated an intelligent picture. Address, henaugural talked about america first. The intelligence offices i know are globalists in their outlook and believe that American Security depends on our interdependence with other countries. Much of the work that our professionals do is working with other countries to keep a safe. Who live people overseas, they like serving overseas, they are more Like State Department professionals more than anyone else in our government. They know understand that you have to be involved in the world. If we just pull up a drawbridge and retreat and have a nativist, nationalist approach to security, it will not work. For all of those reasons, i think we are potentially in for more Stormy Weather ahead. Jeremy, the first point being longstanding Intelligence Community assessments that russia is engaged in Cyber Threats with the United States. And what you do now focusing on Cyber Threats, what is the spectrum of threats we face . What should americans be worried about . I would start with a very simple declared of statement russia is the greatest threat to the United States in cyberspace in the world today, and we have known this for some time. Just looking at the election, just looking at the breach of the dnc, or the revelation of the emails of john podesta and others, and looking at the fake news, we see the current manifestations today, but that is not all there is to it. If we look at the whole spectrum of crime that congressman schiff refers to, and we know that russian organized crime operates within russian space, and what we dont have a clear demarcation about is what is the connection between russian organized crime and the russian state . Well, if we cannot specifically identify that, we can look at a visible fact that is not happening, and that is russia is not cooperating with the United States and criminal investigations. People living in their country who have breached particular databases within this country, orther it be retail store other kinds of Economic Activity within this country. If they are not prepared to do that, how can we assuredly separate russian organized crime on the russian state . From thezed crime russian state . Take a look at our Critical Infrastructure from electricity, oil and natural gas, the financial sector, the Retail Sector all of these have areas of moment ability, and all of these areas of vulnerability, and all of these any crimeons that unit will use. The entry of the dnc came through a fishing expedition that got into the dnc database. We know that somebody clicked on a site that opened up John Podestas email when it was a phishing expedition. Mauer to getallows into systems, like in the case of target that is what allows malware to get into systems like in the case of target. All of these represent vectors into our country and vulnerable in vulnerable areas, whether they are manifested today as in the recent effort with respect to the election, or down the vulnerabilities that we will have to correct it come together in some bipartisan fashion to deal with this. Congress has made some modest steps in this area. But there is a lot more that can be done to allow the government and the private sector to Work Together in a much more concerted fashion with the ability to get companies and people to adopt the kinds of cyber practices that are necessary. The point about the internet of things, or industrial control systems, both of which have been built primarily without the , and allowotections individuals or countries to get into those systems and potentially be able to do significant damage to the United States, the economy, the security, and the personal safety of americans. I think this is something we will have to face up to. This is a big morning that we saw with respect this a big start witht we respect to the election and its only the tip of the iceberg. And we are going to have to pay more attention to it. I know congressman schiff is intent upon doing this, but it has got to be on both sides of the aisle, and it cannot be an argument about any regulation is a bad regulati