Targeted assassination of terrorist watch list and really violating peoples Civil Liberties and so thats why its so important that we do see this kind of work and really acknowledge those policies because for the most part they are happening in secret and under secrecy and so when people are uninformed, then they cant necessarily push back when they are far removed from these types of policy they become detentize. They make jokes about raining down bombs on people and thats why its important that this work is out there. Thats one thing i would like to say. [cheers and applause] also its so important that we have these journalists that are doing what they do. A job that puts journalists at risk and thats because aggressive policies and the freedom of speech should be very clear and its a rarity. I was in washington, d. C. This weekend surrounding the events of the white house Correspondence Dinner and its not the same people that you see there winning and dining here in brooklyn. I didnt get invited to the event. So thank you so them. Im fortunate enough to call these people my friends but also inspirations as journalists and the last thing that i will say is that with unlike Edward Snowden, the fact that there is a source tells you that transparency is contagious and that whistle blowers are not and being scared away. Let me introduce the first speak er, a lot of speakers tonight and stay with us there the whole program and editor in chief betsy reed. [cheers and applause] hi. So this book has origins last fall called the drone papers and that series was the product of a tremendous, you know, longterm effort by the practically the whole organization and, you know, its about at the heart of it our series of secret documents that were shared with jeremy by a whistle blower. This is someone in the Intelligence Community who was so so heavily weighed on his conscious that the outraging of was going on in this world in secret, the fact that we have a government that is carrying out assassinations with no transparency, no trial was, you know, enough to motivate this individual to risk to take huge personal risks to bring this to jeremy and i want to Say Something about the number of people involved in the intercept and a mass i have group. A whole list of people here and we really brought to bare a whole range of skills, multimedia. And also josh begley and we are grateful for the opportunity that we have to pursue journalism that is so hard in this day and age. We work digitally so its exciting to have a permanent artifact that you can share and read and since youre here tonight, its clear that youre motivated and you care and you actually regard this these revelations serious and important. As we can see in the Political Landscape today thats not why we share view and thank you for coming out and i hope that you read the book and share it and carry on. Thanks. [cheers and applause] sorry. Had to take a sip of my beer. Betsy reed, everyone. Yes, give her another round of applause and coming up next i would like to introduce peter. Im sure you know his work. Hes going to read an excerpt from the book. Okay. Hello. Hello. All right. Listen, you have to remind people, i have kids. I start off every story like that. Listen. Why i leak it had watch list documents, the following statement was provided by the source who leaked the march 2013 watch listing tbiens. Over the past few years weve heard a lot about president obamas secret kill list yet we still no virtually scrutiny despite aclu lawsuits some basic questions remain unanswered. How do you get on this list . Am i on the list, who put me on the list, how do you get off the list, can you get off the list. Some lists are closely kept, others spent multiple intelligence and local Law Enforcement agencies, their lists use to kill or capture highvalued targets and others intend today threaten or monitor a persons activity, however, all the lists whether to kill or sly lens originate from the terrorist identity data mart environment and maintained by the Screening Center at the National Counterterrorism center. The existences of tide is unclassified yet details about how it functions in our government are pleatly unknown to the public. In august 2013 the database reached a milestone of one million entries. Today it is a thousand entries larger and growing faster than inexception inception of 1993. Not only reserve the right to store your name, date of birth and other basic identifying information but stores your medical records, transcripts and passport data, license plate numbers, email, cell phone International Mobile subscriber identity, your Bank Account Numbers and purchases and other Sensitive Information capable of identifying you and using facial recognition to supplement any information missing from entries already in its databases or to add more entries, individual entries in the database are assigned a personal number, tpn. From osama bin laden, anyone who has ever been the target of a covert operation was first assign ad tpn and closely monitored by all agencies, all agencies who followed that tpn long before they were put on a separate list and extrajudicially sentenced to death. When governments tally enemy list they run specially when they consider their own citizens to be a threat, of the more than one million entries in the database 21,000 of those american citizens by leaking this information which is unclassified but by reverse logic consider too sensitive to be released. I hope to give the what is use today monitor everyday activity. For the first time the public has opportunity to gain inside of criteria that could potentially lead to their own trial by drone strike. In 2008, i shook hands with senator obama when he came through my town on his way to the white house. After his inauguration he said, transparency and the rule of law will be the touch stones of this presidency. I firmly believe they were crucial to society. If this administration lacks up courage to keep promise i and others like me will do so for them. Amen. [cheers and applause] thank you, peter. I hate to say it that a president Hillary Clinton and President Donald Trump will make things any better. Again, lets just take to that that this happened under Obama Administrations watch. Lets talk to three people. Director of National Security and ryan, both reporters focused on National Security issues and human rights and let me welcome them all here. [cheers and applause] good evening, everyone. I want to begin by thanking the staff, you guys, everyone else as well as your source for the tremendous Public Service that you have done by shining muchneeded light on area in which there has been far too much secrecy. I think about what your source said about president obama said earlier and i counter that with transparency and accountability are hallmarks of the rule of law, yet, weve respected tremendously consequential programs and policies that have huge impact on the civil and human rights of citizens and noncitizens alike from the nofly list to select list to kill list, we have lacked both transparency and accountability. And this is something that the aclu has worked on for years now starting in the Bush Administration into the Obama Administration and we expect in to whichever administration comes next. With that there, i want to talk a little bit about the specific revelations that you and your source have been able to provide the public in in the book. I wanted to begin by asking you about the first article in the book which is by you and jeremy and its called death in the watch list and ask you about revealations in that piece. Thank you for the kind words. Its really the compilation of different stories that jeremy and i did, nofly list and the select list which you can get on that triggers and enhances screening and what we published was the sort of rule book that exists to govern these kinds of watch listing processes and its sort of rule book that people have fought to get in courses for years and years and finally appeared before us and once we started digging into it, you really saw a system that was so elastic that the rules could in many cases be meaningless. You could bend them to be whatever you wanted them to be an created a system thats bloated and overloaded and all kinds of questions about how effective it actually is and whether it is a real deterrence for terrorism and whether we are building something to make ourselves more comfortable, i mean, that was that was the guidance itself, the rule book, being able to see how these things were actually managed with and i think its been helpful for court case that is you guys have been fighting for years. Thats what it was. What the watch list stuff sort of is the ground work for a lot of other lists and talks about in the essay and it would be she worked on others that have consequences that go beyond not being able to get on the airplane are much more serious. One thing that i wanted to highlight about the guidance and what it shows and the importance of what your source provided is just how this country has embarked on when it seeks to blacklist people and prevent them from doing something that is as necessary to personal and professional lives as flying based on a future prediction of harm that they have not committed. How do you prove yourself innocent of something that you have not done . Thats one of the things that we are trying to litigate in court now, so thank you for that. I wanted to turn to you and your series of articles on information that youve provided and written about based on materials about kill list and how it more broadly applied. Thank you. So i worked on two articles that are featured in the book from the june papers, one of the documents that we received was an internal pentagon study evaluating the military drone program, targeted killing program, really, its not just drones. Its a program to target alleged alqaeda and al shabaab members and theyre evaluating it on their own terms and one of the revelations from the study was simply just a map of the fingerprint of the u. S. Military operations in africa, where the man planes are flown from and the infrastructure in kenya and et ethiopia over yemen and somalia and a second thing that was note nbl the strike was the administration talks about the strikes being against people. Eminent threat to the United States but this document showed the process by which the president approves people for targeting with lethal sprent and theres been a 60day window that the military has to target them. Thats a 60day which is not the common sense one. [laughter] and another thing that was revelatory results, but the documents contained quite a lot of data showing that are basically nonexistent and when they did happen, they were reliant on other governments probably in this case the yemani government that carries them out which raises a whole another issue of human rights and the so you hear a lot about drones as precision weapons but the story layed out the problems with whats called pid, positive identification of the targets that they lack the resources and the technological capacity to always know who they were targeting. And we know over two just two years in 20112012 there were more than 50 strikes in yemen and somalia. Some 300 people killed, at least 50 of them civilians and so, you know, the strikes are killing a lot more than the socalled highvalue targets who pose an imminent threat to the United States. One of the things thats so important about what youve written about and further reveal details about is that these are strikes being carried out in countries in which and with which we are not at war, the expansion of the notion of a global war paradigm without territorial or temp temporal limits, who will for next president be that claims the same authority, but even with respect to the use of drones and killing authority within traditional actual battlefields, you worked ryan on an article that talked about operation hay maker and if you can talk a little bit about what that reveals. So the story that i worked on the drone papers, this is one the documents about the manhunting basics thats stretched for a number of months in 2012 into 2013 and it was a targeted killing campaign aimed at wiping out the alqaeda andal man and what the documents reveal here is that in about nine out of ten of these operations, so not on the ground but air strikes, they werent killing the person that they were going after, they were killing other people. We dont know who they are but they get labeled as ekia, enemy killed in action and so that what its the statistic, nine out of ten statistics generate attention because its quite alarming and after spending weeks and weeks, months and months looking over the documents, it was really revealing is that the americans had gone in there with this idea that they were going to retake this province and they were going to do it through picking off highvalue targets and at the end of the day according to their own estimates they really failed at this and i talked to a lot of people who spent time in kunar working on campaigns, you know, conventional sort of military campaigns and the americans went into this part of afghanistan, not knowing what they were doing, not knowing anything about the people that lived there, not knowing about the history that listed and ended up getting duped and the way that the war in afghanistan has unfolded over the last decade and a half and this campaign to me became really sort of symbolic of this sort of convenient way in which this country has gone about war post 9 11 or seemingly convenient way that in the end doesnt really get us to where we want to be at all and has tremendous tolls. I think that hay makers example to look at when we think about going forward, when we think about who is going to be sitting in the white house in a year. Thank you, i think part of the story is a continuing one, what you have is despite repeated promises of transparency and accountability, repeated failures in official transparency and official accountability, so we still dont know the names, numbers, status of people who have been killed in drone strikes outside of actual battlefields, acknowledged as such officially except for a handful of western victims. And that is a shameful record. We are not as a public having meaningful debate that we need to about standards, about strategy, consequences, limitations, rule of law without official information and in that face comes necessity of that kind of information that your source has provided again. That im grateful. We expect a little more transparency, we will see how much comes in the aclu lawsuit which in the next month to six weeks the administration has said its going to provide its president ial policy guidance, the socalled play book for the rules applied to socalled targeted killings outside of hostile environments or active battlefields. Am i optimistic how much will be redacted or not redacted, well, long experience here. [laughter] but i think its specially important in the last period of president obamas legacy to push for meaning transparency, to push for actual accountability and limitations both with respect to law and policy because whatever this administration is doing now worst can come for the next one. Thank you. [cheers and applause] thank you all very much. And incredibly important words, right, about the dehumanizing effect. You see words like ukia. Dont forget that the book, the assassination books are out in the back if you want to purchase them, they are also a limited amount of the intercept tshirts so get them in you want. There will be a book signing later, but if you want to avoid the line and maybe you can pop out and do that quickly and just a reminder the books have been subsidize so only 20 and all the proceeds are going to go to the intercept and the work that these guys do. Thank you. [applause] this song is called i think i am ema goldman. Anybody know who emma goldman is . This is amazing. [music] i think i am emma goldman. [music] [music] [music]. Spee1 [applause] spread narrowed everybody gets their books. And now for another meeting this time in excerpt of the essays by a Edward Snowden featured in book. I have cut down this bit a little bit youll have to buy the book to read yourself. I was going to read the whole thing but one thing i want to say is when i was a kid living in Oklahoma City every morning, of redid the pledge of allegiance every morning blindly we would get up but it got into me and i consider myself not just a patriot but someone who really believed in the United States as the greatest country in the world. I really really felt that in my heart and as i became an adult was disappointment after disappointment that is what it means to grow what. When you are a kid, they are your parents you believe what they say you love the man to follow them and you do what it dash you grow up to have a mind of your own. [applause] the biggest adult among us is Edward Snowden. Elected by circumstance. I have spent waiting 40 years for someone like you. Those with the first words daniel spoke to me when we met last year. We felt an intimate kinship we both knew what it meant to risk so much to be irrevocably changed by revealing the secret truth. One of us challenges of a whistleblower is living with the knowledge just as you did to sit in that desk throughout the agency to see what you saw it to comply in silence without resistance or complete they learned to live not just with the untruth but the unnecessary enters the dangerous untruth the compulsive untruth it is a double tragedy. What began as a survival strategy ends and a compromise fought to preserve with the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice. I did not need to wait 40 years to break that silence with the pentagon papers to the New York TimesChelsea Manning provided the iraq and afghan war log church clap picture clap and that also with the leaks in 2010 i keyboard 2013 and now here we are with another person of courage and conscience has made available extraordinary doctor looked document a working. That bad policy shelters i