bench and a federal court on the bench for life, so it's very important and it's a priority for any president democrat or republican and priority for them. i think the last president bush did an outstanding job of shipping the federal judiciary to what he wanted to be and what his constituents wanted that court to to represent. i think he did an outstanding job. .. >> you will be joined by shane harris author of "the watchers: the rise of america's surveillance state." p.w. singer author of "wired for war" and bruce riedel, author of "the search for al qaeda." the second panel will begin in about an hour and 50 minutes on the world of water. we expect the third panel at about 1:15. it will be on wall street. >> we're going to get started. can you hear me okay? thanks for joining us, and i wonderful thing because so many of you want to spend a beautiful saturday morning in a dark jim talking about cheerful subjects like al qaeda, terrorism, robotic soldiers and war was electronic surveillance. but welcome. i've been asked to remind you to turn off cell phones and to emphasize that point i'm going to ask if any cell phones rang that the camera turned on new. to be as humiliating as possible. i'm going to be very brief and introductions so that we have as much time as possible to talk about the books in question, which are all fascinating. to my left sets two of my colleagues and ask her sort of three colleagues. one of them sort of honorary. bruce riedel who sits to my immediate left is senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the brookings institution, and has been had a 30 year career as a cia analyst. he's the author of "the search for al qaeda: it's leadership, ideology and future." to his left is shane harris, who i think most of the biographical information you have in the little packet is now out of date. shame, since this was published and has moved from "national journal" to the washingtonian, where he is going to be doing expanded feature coverage for the washingtonian on big media issues like the one he is right about for "national journal." he's the author of "the watchers: the rise of america's surveillance state." and to his left is peter singer who is also a senior fellow at the brookings institution. and he is a great expert in matters of sort of the future of warfare, including the latest contribution to the come his book "wired for war: the robotics revolution and conflict in the 21st century." and so without further a due i would like each of the office to sort of talk about their books, give you an overview for about 10 as eight and it will go to questions from the floor. bruce? >> thank you. and i want to also read and to rate his welcome. coming out on a beautiful day and talk about and unpleasant subject is or how but for you to be here. 12 years ago in eastern afghanistan osama bin laden also where he and three other individuals declared war on the united states of america. and declared war on every single american, man, woman and child. in the 12 years since then their organization al qaeda which means the base in arabic, has waged a campaign of terror and carnage across five continents. from indonesia to washington, d.c., to new york, to london, to madrid, to virtually every city in the islamic world this organization has carried out dozens of gruesome terrorist attacks. it has become today the world's first truly global terrorist organization. and has headquarters somewhere in the mountains along the pakistan-afghanistan border that it has franchises in different parts of the islamic world, in yemen, in iraq, in north africa, in southeast asia. it has cells supporting its terrorist operations throughout most of the muslim diaspora. in the last year we've seen those cells in the united states. for example, in the attack on fort hood. and it continues to wage what it calls raise on america. it was foiled last christmas but we can be certain that's not the end of them. the first rule of war is to know your enemy. and, surprise her, we don't know very much about our enemy. we haven't devoted attention and resources in the cold war with the institutions of higher learning across the united states of america to so i didn't study the soviet union and china. but we haven't devoted the same kind of effort to try and understand the enemy we face today. when i retired from the cia three years ago, i thought i would try to fill the gap. and that's what "the search for al qaeda" is all about, time to give a better understanding for americans and for people beyond america as well, the nature of the enemy we face. why do they hate us? why do they attack us? who are their leaders? what are their strong points and what are their vulnerabilities? now, a book written about a bunch of murderers hiding on the other side of the planet who don't give a lot of interviews to journalists or to academics, and you really don't want to do an interview with them, given their declaration that they will kill every american they can find, is a bit of a daunting task that the research for this book then had to be a little bit unusual. fortunately, they are not rational. if anything, they are quite -- quite eager to put their story out. and in the 10 years since september 11, they have put out scores of audiotapes and videotapes, and several books explaining why it is they do what they do. these are not easy to read books that they are filled with allusions to islamic history. they are filled with allusions to the koran, and you have to have a pretty good reference point in order to figure out where they are going. but if you have that, they tell a very clear story. and give you a pretty clear statement of whether ideology is and what their narrative of history is. i've read all of those, and in addition to that i tried my best to interview people who, over the years, had an opportunity to meet osama bin laden or al-zawahiri, or to deal with some of the other characters in al qaeda like zardari, the leader of al qaeda in iraq. this gave me the opportunity to interview people like prince turki the head of saudi intelligence. or the indian foreign minister who dealt with al qaeda when it hijacked an indian jetliner in 1999. these interviews were a significant way of supplementing the record from al qaeda itself. i think, i hope, that what emerges from that is a relatively clear and incisive analysis of what al qaeda is, working from, and where it's going. it's organized around four biographies. osama bin laden, al-zawahiri, zarqawi and mullah omar, the head of the taliban. the man who is leading the war against us in afghanistan today. i tried also at the end to give some recommendations on how to proceed forward. but we need a policy for dealing with al qaeda that goes after it in every aspect. that uses smart weapons including drones, to target the leadership. but also uses of smart weapons in the battle of ideas. in order to wage the struggle for the hearts and minds of the islamic world. it's a nexus, it's a synergy of different strategies that have to be brought together in order to defeat this enemy. and, of course, we have to do it in a way in which we keep our heads sober. we need to ensure that we don't overreact, that we don't panic. that we maintain our civil liberties and our freedoms here at home. at the end of the day, al qaeda is a very, very serious threat to the united states of america. but let's keep it in proportion. al qaeda is not nazi germany that controls all of your. it's not the soviet genius that has thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons train at the united states. it's a relatively small group of fanatics who are determined to attack this country, but i think if we keep in proportion the threat, we can come up with a strategies in order to defeat them. thank you. >> thanks. shane? >> thanks to you all again for coming and thank you to the key is cool for hosting us that this is a fad this event and i'm honored to be here. my book is "the watchers: the rise of america's surveillance state," and i thought i would try to give you sort of a sense of the sweep of the story because it is a work of narrative nonfiction that takes place over a 25 year period, roughly from october of 2003 to early -- on october of 1983 to early 2009 and covers a lot of ground in the area of sort of digital surveillance, electronic surveillance, people in government are trying to build a computer system to organize information in order to predict the future, essentially. but i thought it was worth giving you a bit of background how it came to write a book and how i arrived at the sort of central figure and rather unlikely hero of the narrative, who happens to be one of the most notorious political figures of the past quarter-century, and that's retired admiral john poindexter, who many of you all will know from his central role in the iran-contra affair in the 1980s. it sort of an unlikely bit of a path to making the centerpiece of this book, but just quickly, i was a journalist in 2001 covering sort of the intersection of government and technology, particularly in the intelligence community after 9/11 for a magazine in washington called government executive. and very quickly, a theme emerged after the attacks that the intelligence community and the government, the law enforcement agencies had all this information about al qaeda and all these various silos, and none of it was being shared and that one had wasn't talking to the other. and his failure to connect the dots was one of the principal causes for the surprise attack on a 9/11. so it came to pass that everybody was in the technology field at the time sort of came forward with what they thought was a magic ball solution of how we will organize the data, finally see what we can't see and achieve some huge level of awareness about intelligence. john poindexter had conducted government, in charge of one of these main projects at the defense department. is background of course was in the navy, but had a real proclivity for having technology for going back to the art 80s. and showed an aptitude for computers and design. he came up with the program at the defense advanced research projects agency or darpa which is the pentagon's big train under and brain trust which he could total information awareness to describe the system that would achieve what it is that the watchers, the people i write about in the book, have been trying to do for many years, gather up the intelligence about a particular organization or a particular threat and try to analyze and predict the future. the thing that was remarkable about poindexter's idea, which was not unique in terms of the people pitching these ideas at the time, was that he wasn't just looking to go find information that was in government databases that he proposed going beyond that. the rationale was that if the hijackers on nine 9/11 were moving about in the united states before the attacks, if they're opening bank accounts and communicating them if they were renting apartments, cars, traveling around, they were leaving electronic footprints with every one of those actions that require a transaction in the digital ether. and the government had to go out and find that in as well and hard as it did of course this would probably require a rather radical rewrite of our privacy laws, much less our concept of what privacy and individual privacy men in this information age. his second part of the plant which struck me as entirely novel at the time, was the idea of using the very same technology that he wanted to employ for sophisticated data mining camp or pattern analysis, if you like them if you like rather regular people internet system back on a very same agents were using it as sort of a constant eye watching the watchers to try to set up a system whereby ideally anyway it would be difficult for anyone to abuse this kind of power and system without being noticed. and to use technology to try and build a very strong privacy protection as well. it was a fascinating idea on paper, which might highly impractical in reality, and certainly suffered at the outset from a disastrous public relations effort. to say the least, john poindexter's role as the head of this project struck some as rather preposterous and somewhat scary. and that really kind of go down in the public's mind was a logo that poindexter had helped design for his new program, which featured the pure made from the back of a dollar bill on the great seal of the united states, top by a sort of all seeing eye casting a beam of light down on a picture of the globe with a latin inscription knowledge is power around the edge of the ring. so poindexter did not last long in this endeavor. and i tried many times to get an interview with him, unsuccessfully. i found out later this was because his old friend don rumsfeld and the pentagon had basically said under no circumstances are you to get anywhere near every border in your current role. ultimately, i had a chance to meet him after he left government, and through a series of sort of conversations, we came to this agreement whereby i was going to start writing something about him, and profile perhaps for the magazine i was working on at the time about his life after government and what he had been trying to do. he said that he would do this on one condition which was that i had to come out to his house which is not too far away in suburban maryland here. and agree that all the interviews would be done over the course of several weeks, lasting for many hours each time and we were to record everything and it would be on the record. he apparently considered as an onerous request. shows you how much he knows about do it that i jumped at the chance to really begin a sense of conversation that lasted for the better part of the next four or five years. probably close to 20 images in all in 14 exclusively for the book. so began my kind of tuesdays with morrie version with john poindexter. i mention this because it really does sort of form the heart and soul of the narrative character driven part of the book that poindexter is a sticky that shows up in many parts of the book and just to give the very quickly the brief narrative sketch, he enters the scene not in 2001 where the book begins in october of 1983, and in the aftermath of the terrorist bombing of the marine barracks in beirut. you will remember they were there for international peacekeeping force that is in aftermath of that event that just after like 9/11 was a sort of realization within government that there were various clues about terrorism in the area that were pointing to some kind of spectacular event, specifically targeted at marines but the information had been kept inside that's a poindexter has sort of been on this total information awareness vision since 1983. the book traces him in those early years, and into the iran-contra period where he is sort of the of course exits from the scene and then to find other watchers as well. specifically, a group of analysts working at a very low-level intelligence unit in the army and the late 1990s and early 2000 which was working under the project codenamed able danger which was argued technology to go into the public information name and put together information to map out the global presence of al qaeda and probably the preceding year, year and a half to 9/11. it traces the experience is that they have is what was trying to understand this very powerful new technology and its limits and inevitably, the collision course that is set towards privacy in our traditional notions of privacy and what it means to be able to go out as a government agent fishing about in the public space for information about threats when you have to look at innocent people at the same time. the book really find sort of its more presents kind of narrative hook, if you like him in the third and fourth i ask what i look at the national security agency's wireless wiretapping program. you might remember that in october of 2001 president bush signed a then secret order which is technically secret, we haven't seen the text, often to national security agency to intercept phone calls and enough communications international to negation of americans who were suspected of a quote on? mixes to terrorism. the book sort explores that whole program which was very much a parallel of what john poindexter was doing with total information awareness, but in an unclassified white at darpa and goes into some of the real interesting connections between those two programs and a pedigree that they share and ultimately charts out how the national security agency took over poindexter's program when congress finally pulled the public funding for it. the conclusion of the book sort of arises at the watchers have been on this quickly for 25 years and disability to connect the dots and see the future. they're not necessarily much better at making those connections than they were in 2001 or even in 1983. and old alike the governor has become very good at collecting information and gathering up lots of dots and is still not very good at connecting those dots. and so the book is sort of charged this out from the perspective of the watchers themselves. i think cast these people less in a political light and more as sort of techno- warrior geeks on a mission that is lasted for the better part of the past quarter century and they are unified by this passion. it was really remarkable thing to get to know them and to spend time with them, particularly poindexter. i think that what you find in the book is much more of a real story told on the ground through their eyes as opposed to what normally i do, which is worth stepping back as a journalist and trying to get you that objective view. so if you read the book, i hope you enjoy and i hope you find it entertaining and enlightening as well. thank you. >> peter? >> let me add my thanks to the organizers and all of you for to do. what i would like to do it again with a story from the book that i wrote, "wired for war." for this you have to imagine yourself in iraq. and ahead of you on alongside the road looks like a piece of trash. but that insurgent has hidden that ied, improvised explosive device with great care. now, by 2006 there were more than 2500 of these roadside bombings come every single month in iraq. they were the leading can cause a cache is among american soldiers as well as iraqi civilians. the team that is hunting for this ied is called and d.o.d. team. explosive ordnance disposal. if you've seen the movie that won the cannes award, it is about and d.o.d. team. a typical tour, and even the team will go out on just about 600 bomb calls. that is to be asked to diffuse about two bombs every day. a number that may be the better indicator of their fight to the war effort though is the fact that the insurgents reported 50,000-dollar bought on the head of and d.o.d. are prepared to kill one of these soldiers and get $50,000. unfortunately, this particular bomb calls wouldn't end well. by the time the soldier got close enough to the device to see that it wasn't a piece of trash that was a bomb, it exploded. you have to be as far away as a football field to escape death or injury from the blast frankly, at you at both the that even if you're not hit, the sheer force of the explosion itself can break your limbs that the soldier though had been right on top of that bomb would have exploded. so when the dust settled, and smoke cleared, the rest of team advance and they found little left of them. so the night the commander of the unit wrote a condolence letter back to the united states. they apologize for not being able to bring that soldier home. to talk about how tough the loss had been on the rest of the unit. but then they tried to talk up the silver lining they took away from this tragedy this is what they wrote. quot