Administration and explains why conservative solutions are needed in washington in leadership in crisis. And finally in a time for truth, another declared president ial candidate texas senator ted cruz recounts his journey from a cuban immigrants son to the u. S. Senate. Look for his book in june. Coauthors Benjamin Wittes and Gabriela Blume take a look at the threats well face in the future and discuss the role governments should play in protecting us next on booktv. So just a few i think weve covered all the housekeeping actually, so i think were good to go, and i will just go ahead and introduce our authors and panelists. So our two authors are Gabriela Blum and Benjamin Wittes. Gabriela blum is professor of human rights and humanitarian law at harvard law school. She specializes in Public International law, international negotiations, the law of Armed Conflict and counterterrorism. Shes also the codirector of the hls brookings project on law and security and a member of the program on negotiations executive board. Benjamin wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the editorinchief of law fair. And join ising joining our authors, we have the professor of entrepreneurial legal studies and faculty codirector of the Berkman Center for society and also the henry l. Shadegg professor of law. I will happened it over to benjamin. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me, and thank you all for turning out. This is quite overwhelming. I want to gabby and i started out thinking we were writing a book about the governance of catastrophic risk, and rather to my surprise anyway though im not certain to gabbys we ended up writing a book that was as much a book of political theory as anything else which is odd for me because i actually had never really studied political theory. So i want to talk about sort of how we got there a little bit and what, what we ended up thinking about and some of the sort of head scratching questions of governance of what we call a world of many to many threats and defenses or as i sometimes i dont pejoratively or reductionistly reduce it to a world in which anyone can attack anyone from anywhere. So i want to start with three we might call hypotheticals except theyre not really hypothetical. Theyre all real events that happened about which im going to change one fact. And each one i think illustrates some portion of the world and the security environment that were now talking about. Or that if we are not yet quite talking about, we will be very soon, or were sort of on spectrum to talking about. So the first is, um, the i want to change one fact about the anthrax attacks that followed the september 11th attacks by a few weeks or months. The anthrax attacks as you will remember involved an individual later identified after seven years identified by the fbi but never brought to trial who sealed anthrax in a set of envelopes and mailed them through the u. S. Mail. Along the way killed a number of postal workers through seepage in the envelopes and killed some of the people who the envelopes were addressed to. I believe that altogether seven people were killed. Now, if youre going to mass distribute highly refined anthrax, mail is a very inefficient way to do it because youre actually sealing stuff inside something you dont disseminate it to large numbers of people. And youre sending it to an individual. So we thought well, what if instead of doing that he had gotten himself one of these increasingly ubiquitously available small drones and flown the same anthrax over a crowded stadium . Now, this may sound improbable except that if you look at the recent security around the super bowl, they actually imposed a nodrone i cant even say that nodrone fly zone for a couple hundred miles around the super bowl because they were afraid of exactly not necessarily a biodistrict, but exactly that sort of means of attack. So i think if that had happened, you would have had Something Like 50,000 people simultaneously infected. And many of them probably would have died. And then today nobody would doubt, i think, a proposition that we assert in book, but i think a lot of people regard as an alarmist proposition which is that its perfectly possible for any one of you to have your own weapons of mass destruction program. And thats really the first time in the history of the world that thats true. Second hypothetical, not so hypothetical, imagine that the Bp Oil Disaster in 2010 had been caused not by an accidental explosion, but by an intentional act. Same volume of oil spills, same you know damage to the coast same now this is actually not remotely an unrealistic scenario. In fact, the day that the explosion happened the working assumption inside of much of the u. S. Federal government was that we were dealing with a terrorist attack. And is as one former official and as one former official explained it to me, you know, when we finally got the all clear that this was an accident, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief and said, okay, this is the epas problem. Right . But that was not the working assumption at the moment that this happened. Now, i think a couple of things would become immediately apparent if you imagined that this was a terrorist attack or a, you know, individual level attack. The first is this would be the most successful attack on the United States since 9 11, right . I mean, it was it killed 11 people, and it really just spoiled a huge amount of natural resources. The damage in economic terms was immense, tens of billions of dollars. And the second thing you would notice is that defense of the coastline of the United States was not handled by the United States government. The coast guard, the navy were there as observers and sort of egging on a private multinational foreignbased corporation that was responsible for plugging the well, that was responsible for cleaning up the oil and that was responsible in a meaningful, kinetic sense for the defense of the coastline of the United States. Thats a pretty remarkable thing, you know, just in terms of the distribution. If you take the anthrax example as an example of a destructs of offensive capability the hypothetical bp example is a really powerful example of the distribution of defensive responsibility. Bp is formally under the statute the responsible party in financial terms but it was also in very real terms the responsible actor for responsible for preventing the damage that it had caused and for cleaning it up. A third example is a real, and i apologize in advance for my description of it, quite awful individual level case out of southern california. It involves a hacker who had a i guess the only words i know how to use for it is a kind of mass online Sexual Assault thing going. He wrote some malware which he distributed to young women and underage girls. The fbis stunted there may be as many as 00 victims 200 victims around southern california. And the malware worked as follows. First of all, you know as almost as an afterthought it stole your credit card information which sort of in a garden variety theft sort of way. But it also turned your web cam against you, and he would then take surreptitious pictures of people in various states of undress and then approach them with extortionate demands for them to produce sex tapes for him. And also use their contacts database to further distribute the malware. The fbi finally caught up with him. Hes now serving time in prison. And so heres my one hypothetical change to that case. What if he was not within the territorial United States but was based as a lot of your spam comes from nigeria or some other ukraine, some other place where the jurisdictional reach of the fbi just doesnt go. And so i think what you would conclude from that is that you can actually be attacked at an individual level from just about anywhere. And thats also the first time in the history of the world that thats true. Um, so i think we started with the idea that we wanted to unpack some of the connective tissues that linked the debates other cybersecurity over cybersecurity with the debates over biosecurity with the debates over drones and robotics. And what we found was that, you know, there are these theres a cybersecurity debate with which a lot of you are im sure, very familiar. In which people talk about the uniqueness of the cyber environment and the things they say that make it unique make it different from anything else thats ever come before is that, you know, you can attack remotely with great, over great distances with limited capacity to attribute the attacks. Attribution is very difficult. You know technology has, you know disseminated down to the level of individuals and equalized kind of, you know, in a tom friedman sort of way. The earth has gotten much flatter in an attacking framework. And then you talk to people who do biosecurity for a living, and they say wow this environment is so unusual because you can attack over great distances and with limited attribution and you know, almost anybody with a you know, reasonable Grad School Level proficiency and Lab Techniques can do some pretty awful things. And you realize that theyre actually describing the same set of effects. And so what we tried to do in this book was to kind of break through to a Higher Ground and describe the effects of what we call technologies of mass empowerment, distributing the ability to attack and, b distributing vulnerability to attack and c distributing the responsibility for defense. And the more we worked with this the more we ended up with a puzzle that i have to say having, you know, cowritten this book im still not remotely sure i know the answer to which is how do you know, how do you govern a world in which so many of our working assumptions about why we have governance, how it works and what the role of the state in it is . Im not going to sit here and say these arent true anymore. I think a lot of people have spent a lot of time saying, you know the state is over. Theyve all been wrong. A lot of people have spent a lot of time, you know, questioning whether, you know, the world is going to end and im not going to do that. So that there is a third tray or maybe the liberty tray is now the liberty and privacy tray. There is an understanding and you see this throughout the entire debate about the nsa surveillance but the other modern security delimas, too. And people say we need to have a balance balance, right . We need to make sure our pursuit of security doesnt upset the libber a liberty and security balance. And ben franklin comes into play here. And we have a quote from ben franklin in the book that doesnt mean what people think it does. One things the set of tech nilogical developments made us think about is if the metaphor was appropriate. I always had a problem with this because if you take it at face value the freest place in the world should be somalia or yemen because they have the least security and a secure place in the world should be some place like north korea. There is something debatable about this baseline proposition. As we started working in an area where you are where if it is not at all clear that the marginal increase in security does not increase a marginal increase in liberty we began having a really hard time with this metaphor. Let me give you a couple examples and i will turn it over to gabby and i will say this at the risk of upsetting. We assume marginal increases in survilance come at the expense of liberty but we dont assume that in a lot of daytoday life experiences. So one of the ways we have of avoiding this problem is by using words other than surveillance to describe surveillance. Communities will demand greater surveillance on their street corners but they will call it we want more cops on the street, communityoriented police. They will not say come survey us. They will say they want more cameras. The police chief in washington described how she went from an environment where she initially had communities that objected to the instillation of cameras to now communities asking where are the cameras. And i think also about Airport Security screening. This is something we all hate. I had to go through it this morning. And yet, we do not say that going through that Airport Security screening deminliberty. It is intrusive but we feel it enables a greater freedom to travel. And that is why diminish and that is why i think most people despite the indignity accept it and without a grudge given the behaviors in question might otherwise we prosecuted like a Sexual Assault. And as we migrate into a world in which you have to worry about more and more peoples use of technologies of greater and greater power that can be or you can expect might be a raid against you the question of whether marginal security steps including surveillance steps make you less secure less free more secure or more free or some combination of those in a complex ego system is not a simple question and not one that can be reduced to a simple balancing test. I will say a few words before turning to the panelist to tear this apart. We say in the Book Technology by and large is a wonderful thing. Before we get to the athlete side of things threat lets acknowledge it has improved our quality of life Life Expectancy and empowers us in wonderful ways so much we are dependent on it and that increases our vulnerability when people use the technology to do the most noblest of things but in a small margin might use it to cause great harm. Even a questionable harm depends on where you stand, right . We love the idea that political dissidence in egypt or hong kong have access to these kinds of technologies and we like it less with isis uses them to recruit sympathizers and people for their cause. There is no question these technologies are doubleedge in the sense of what you can do with them and who gets to do what with them. The other thing to remember is it is not just individuals or groups that benefit from technology the government is a major beneficial of technology. The government is this timid and vulnerable and everybody else is empowered. Everyone is becoming more powerful. We dont know who wins the arms race and we do know it is much more difficult to defend yourself and citizens if you owe these obligations against billions of sources of threats, or at least a high number of threats at all times, some domestic and some foreign. And so what happens is as ben said a lot of basic distinguishments and dichotomy of how we organize government is questionable. Think even the line between National Security and personal security. How we think about our personal safety, safety from crime verses our safety from terrorism or act of war and the motivation behind the threat. Does it matter . How does it matter . And that brings up who owes us security . In the traditional contract the sate is empowered and entrusted with the duty to protect us from each other and external threat. Think now about companies. The private sector. How much power has evolved into the private sector . Some we have given them and some they got technology in the market. What do they owe us . What do they owe you in terms of your security . What is the relationship between the government and the private sector unemployedin providing us as a collective with that security . What can the government demand of the private sector . What can you as consumers demand of the private sector . And finally there is this territorial question that traditional behavior was bounded by territorial boundaries. Each sovereign or state had rules and Enforcement Mechanisms and security and crime control policies. The more these threats cross boundaries the most they are not bounded territorial. There is going to be a huge pressure on government, certainly the capable government or the stronger government that is not true across the board, but on the stronger governments to reach beyond borders and expand power to citizens who are not their own. You can do that through legislation just as the United States tried to do after 9 11. You can do it through surveillance and there is an interesting question; what does the United States government owe german or brazilian citizens when it surveys them . You could do so through more aggressive means like abduction or targeted killings. And we predict in the book we are going to see more of these unilateral actions across the board on the global level. And the only way to sort of if i am going to completely counter act that and a check from not letting the world turn into the wild west we need more International Cooperation and real cooperation between the intelligence sharing and outfit to really thinking about cooperation and enforcement and cooperation in policing and cooperation in actual powers that allow Foreign Forces to effect arrest and preempt threats on a much more global level. And that will then open the question not just to us how we manage liberty, security and profsacy internally and how we regulate companies, individuals, and intermedaries but raise questions about what do governments owe foreign citizens and what do foreign citizens owe government and how do you manage security in a global place. Okay. So this is a great book and i urge you all to read it. It is a frightening book and scary book because it explores how the technology we have come to learn and love might be turned against us and empower individuals or small groups around the world to do significant harm to us all. Ben described briefly the idea that individuals would have wmvs in their pockets. I want to read a sentence from the book itself that a Political Science at stanford he wrote a short paper about a thought experiment that is part of the theme of gabby and bens book. We seem to be heading in the direction of a world in which every individual has the capacity to blow up the entire planet by pushing a button on his or her cellphone. We are clearly not there. But gabby and ben explore in great detail if we continue certain trends that are empowering individuals in the cyber context and the ab