Basically just discredit him inf his followers. And thats what this document was. I mean, it basically said the same thing. It was dated just back in october of 2012, and what it argued was that and the director of the nsa, general alexander, his title is at the very top of it. And it said they were looking for personal vulnerabilities, viewing sexuallyexplicit material online and so forth. A lot can be learned by people visiting porn sites. Besides, its probably more fun to listen to the north koreans. [laughter] so then the idea here is to exploit. I was amazed at the listening they used, you know, like nobody would ever see this document, so lets use explicit language as possible. So they would exploit these radicallizers. And, again, they said were not talking about terrorists here, were not talking about criminals, these are people who are radical. And it actually identified the people. I saw the original document when i was down there, i actually saw the names. But, you know, i agreed with him that you shouldnt publicize it. But when i saw the names, there wasnt any division between because at least one of the names i saw was a u. S. Citizen or u. S. Person is what they call it, and others were foreigners. So there wasnt any division. Were only going after the foreigners. Its americans or u. S. Persons and foreigners. And then, you know, whens interesting to whats interesting to me among the distribution lists was the Justice Department and commerce. I mean, what is this because theyre trying to regulate the porn industry or something . I didnt get what the Commerce Department would be getting a top secret document from nsa about eavesdropping on peoples visits to porn sites. Theres a lot i dont understand about nsa. So going back, this is what happened back in the bad old days, the 1960s. The fbi used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities such as sexual activityies against radicallizers such as Martin Luther king. J. Edgar hoover, the longest serving fbi director, now comes from general alexander, the longest serving nsa director. It says something about not letting people stay in a job too long. And nsa played a role back in those days too evidence dropping on antiwar protesters and so forth. So nsa would pick up some of the information and pass it on to the fbi. So in terms of reforms now, you know, those are i couldnt see anything that i really disagreed with on those 46 recommendations that came from the white house panel, you know, hearing all these rumors that the president s not going to hes going to do sort of cosmetic changes tomorrow and not anything really substantive which would be very disappointing. But actually it goes along with his track record. I mean, hes the guy that tripled the number of people, tripled the number of forces in iraq instead of ending it in the first six months. Im sorry, in afghanistan. Tripled the number of forces in afghanistan when he first got into office instead of ending it in the first six months. George bush had one drone attack in yemen in eight years, and obama has declared war on yemen. I mean, there is drone attacks going on all the time. And the first attack on yemen wasnt even a drone attack. It was, i think, december 17th, 2009. That was when he launched his first attack on yemen. Which was very telling. There werent enough drones in the area, they were all in afghanistan and pakistan. But there was a navy ship. It was maybe a missile cruiser or a submarine, one of the two. He used that. And they thought there were some terrorists down in the really rural part of southern yemen. So they fired all these cruise missiles at this group in this tiny little village. Cruise missiles happened to be filled with cluster bombs, outlawed in 109 countries. I mean, this is a perp i voted for a person i voted for president . I mean, really. Shooting cluster bombs, rather shooting cruise missiles of cluster bombs at a country were not at war with and then missing the target and killing 50 women and children. But that wasnt the end of it. The next day he made a very public phone call to the president of yemen thanking him for such a great terrorist operation that he performed when the president of yemen, saw salia, had nothing to do with it. It was entirely the Obama Administration, but salia had agreed to go along with it. Which gets me kind of to the point im making, the point i want to make. We find out a lot of these things not from the u. S. Government, but from whistleblowers. A lot of this came from the material that was leaked by manning, chelsea manning. So what happened was among the documents he released was a meeting between petraeus and the president of yemen, salia. And at that meeting which took place a couple months after that attack, and after that attack there were more, there was one on Christmas Eve and other attacks in yemen. And in that meeting there was a transcript that was leaked by the manning documents. And it said the they were laughing about it in the meeting, and the president of yemen said, yeah, ill keep lying about it. And matter of fact, im even lying to my own parliament about it. So petraeus and salia had a good laugh about that. So these are the reasons why i really admire whistleblowers, because they tell us the things we really have to know lath rather ruther than the things they want us to know. One of the things i thought was really fascinating since i knew a number of people at the Church Committee was they were able to get nsa to come up and name a lot of the people that were targets of of their eavesdropping, the antiwar protesters and so forth. There were 1600 of them. And they actually came out with names, you know, real fear many people like dr. Benjamin spock, joan baez [laughter] lets see, jane fonda. People you really have to worry about. Well, there was one name there were actually a couple names, but one name in particular that they refused to release to the Church Committee despite all pleading. They would never release this one name to the Church Committee. But that name was finally released. I think it was last september it was released. And heres who it was [laughter] which is why we need another Church Committee. Anyway, thanks very much. [applause] so ill be happy to take questions, and i think john has a good. Microphone. Do we have fine. Its a fabulous presentation. I think all the audience learned much from the narrative, recounting the National Security administration. I guess one of the things james to mitted, it was created by a top secret memorandum by harry truman in 1952. There wasnt any congressional debate, there wasnt public debate, it just sort of emerged from zeus head. But im sure harry truman thought wed be embarrassed by a discussion. Thats true. Yeah, its the only agency in the u. S. Government that wasnt created by a law in congress. It wasnt created by hearings, it wasnt created by a bill through congress. It was created by a top secret memorandum signed by harry truman in 1952 that was even the congress wasnt allowed to know about it. So it was, its the only agency in the u. S. Government that was born secret. Yeah. Which is, of course, the opposite of our postulates, that government must be transparent in order to have government by the consent of the governed. But it seemed apart to me that apparent to me other than a few cameo appearances nothing in your presentation involved congress. We have the whistleblowers, but wheres congress . Article i at least not until 1975. Yeah. And that was just sort of an episodic instance in any event. Were talking about, as john henry said, the constitution of the United States. Article i, section 6 specifically endows all members with whats called speech or debate immunity. It was exercised in the pentagon papers, 47 classified volumes of the pentagon papers into the record. He was investigated by the Nixon Administration i think i know where youre getting. I know the punchline here. [laughter] the reason for these observations is we cant depend upon our liberties that some brave whiting blowers from time to time whistleblowers will expose the wrongdoing of the the executive branch. It needs to be institutionalized. And until thats changed, we may get ed snowdens from time to time, but it isnt going to change the dynamic unless theres an insistence by the American People and congress that this be made public. I dont see any of that generation. You asked for another Church Committee. Dianne feinstein or mike rodgers . Yes. If anything, they help the cover up. Yeah, exactly. [applause] and that was one of the points i usually make and i should have made it here was that im not asking for a Church Committee in congress, im asking for a external Church Committee, a committee that would be like a 9 11 commission and also one that just doesnt have former government officials on it, one that has a civil libertarian, a journalist and so forth. Anyway, weve got to get other questions too, bruce. Thanks. Dorothy, you had a question. That was my question, which was who is the frank church of 2014 . Yeah. That was why i unless we could find somebody with the medical ability to bring him back to life and put him back into the senate, i wouldnt put the senate i wouldnt allow the senate or the congress to do this committee, because look where, look where theyve come so far. You know, ive been following in this ever since the Church Committee, and the Church Committee, they took it upon themselves. Their mission, at least the way they looked at it, they were the buffer between the American Public and the committee. Its revolved now so that the Intelligence Committees in congress feel that theyre the protecter of the agencies, not the protecter of the public. They argue for a bigger budget for the intelligence agencies whenever theres a cut in the budget, or they argue for more freedoms for the agencies. And where were they during the two and a half years until the times released the, you know, let the information get out about the warrantless eavesdropping which came from a whistleblower, not from our overseers in congress. Yes, any other questions . Jim oh, yes, sorry. Deborah. Deborah bormans a really good friend of mine. Of she was the lead attorney on the tom drake case, and i worked on that case with a tremendously successful case. Tom drake was a whistleblower from nsa who was charged with five counts of espionage for leaking some rather mundane information. I was able to show with the help of debbie that the information they were charging him with was not only unclassified and they wanted to put him in jail for 35 years, it was not only unclassified, but it was in the Public Domain and put there by the nsa and the pentagon. So when it came time for the trial, the prosecution threw the case out and asked him to, please, just sign this thing agreeing to a misdemeanor with no jail time and no fine, and a judge spent 20 minutes yelling at the prosecutor and the nsa. So it was a really good case, so i appreciated debbies work on that. [applause] so hi, jim, its good to see you. Thank you for that. [laughter] for em embracerring you. Slightly. Im going to play dells advocate a bit which is driven partly by this uncomfortable feeling i have with Edward Snowden, actually, and its driven in large part by my experience in toms case which is, you know, ive read articles in the post and the times that there are millions of documents well, i guess 1. 7 million documents that he took, only a small snippet of which weve seen, and the vast majority of the documents that are in greenwalds possession and i presume you saw had really nothing to do with metadata or spying on americans. And, in fact, one of the slides you showed was a map of the world showing where our malware is. And i dont want want to comment on whether we need to know about that, but at what point is Edward Snowden going to be not this glamorous hero, but a thief . [inaudible] well, thats a good question because thats one of the major questions that people have. I mean, the question is youve got 1. 7 million documents, weve only seen a little bit. And by the way, snowden didnt show me all these documents, i just, i was down there, he happened to show me a couple. But, yeah, thats a really good question, what happens to i mean, the major questions are, is could the chinese have gotten access to it, could the russians have gotten access to it . According to what snowden says, they didnt get access to it. I mean, speaking . Speaking in snowdens defense, to some degree, you know, if youre a whistleblower and youre trying to get the documents out and you dont have time to sort of edit those documents while youre sitting there at your desk at nsa, so the idea is he would pull the documents out and not just put em up on the internet, but to give them to responsible journalists. And the journalists would go through them. Thats what happened with dan else burg whos, actually, a good friend of mine. He gave it to the New York Times and the washington post, and we ended up, ended up helping to shorten a war that we should never have gotten into. So, yeah, theres no perfect i dont think he went to whistleblower school. He probably didnt read how to be whistleblowers for dummies or whatever. Is, you know, i give him a lot of courage, a lot of credit for the courage that he had what he did. I think theres a lot that the government is always saying, that, you know, the worlds going to come to an end. They said the world was going to come to an end when yardly wrote the black chamber. They said the world was going to come to an end when david khan wrote the codebreakers. They said the world was going to come to an end when i wrote the puzzle palace. They say the worlds going to come to an end every time i write something. But so far the worlds still in pretty good shape, and the main problems we have of is getting into wars that were not supposed to be in. [applause] and if we dont have whistleblowers occasionally, may not be perfect people, may make mistakes, then, you know, were going to have these more wars, and were going to have more government that we dont want and that we dont know about. So anyway, i am always happy to debate you, debbie. Youre such a great lawyer. I always feel that im up against the greatest challenge. So i appreciate it. Thanks for your questionment question. Oh, yes. Uhhuh . Hi, thanks, jim, jeff steinberg. I wanted to pick up and follow a bit further on the hozny business because you hasny business hosni business because part of this is a subject of the 28page section of the original joint congressional investigation into 9 11 right. That was suppressed by president bush and remains suppressed by president obama. This section from what we can derive from other writings and speeches by senator bob graham who chaired that committee indicated a line of investigation on saudi intelligence connections with the two hijackers in san diego funding mechanisms and apparently, also, the fact that the fbi refused to allow the Congressional Committee investigators access to the informant who owned the house where these two guys were staying. Yeah. I know i wrote a whole book on 9 11, so but just give me the predicate of your question now. Just for the comment, two members of congress have introduced a bill, walter jones and steve lynch, calling for every member to read the 28 pages and have it declassified. I wonder what your thoughts are on that dimension of this. Well, i completely agree, and i actually have a lot of admiration for walter jones. Walter jones, republican from north carolina. And he was the person who put a bill in, and when we went to war in iraq to change the name of french fries to Freedom Fries because the french werent supporting our war. And then one day he read the book i wrote on iraq called a pretext for war, and he completely changed, and he became one of the most vocal antiwar opponents within congress. So i was, ive always had great deal of admiration for him for admitting a mistake and trying to get out to get others to change also. Yeah, or its amazing whats still classified in those reports. I have no idea what it says. I havent seen anybody leak it to me. I dont know what the saudi part is. Theres a lot of people that have speculated what the saudi part is, so i dont know. But the committee did a very poor job on the nsa aspect which i wrote a lot about because they never focused on what the nsa knew and what they didnt know and so forth. And i agree with you that that should be released as soon as possible. Oh, sorry, bill. Judge schilling, a comment and a question. Yeah. Several years ago i was told what nsa really meant was no such agency. [laughter] yes. It now stands for not secret anymore. [laughter] and you might want to ask those who are visiting here to give their comments later on from nsa. But my question is, in light of the situation where the nsa and cia werent cooperating before 9 11 and if they had it might have prevented it, Going Forward what do you think would be the proper balance between this kind of Data Collection and analysis for National Security and protecting individual privacy . So what should whatever nsa turns into or other agencies be doing, and how should they cooperate with cia and others to protect interests while still protecting privacy . Well, you know, one problem here is that, first of all, id like them to at least start telling the truth about how useful some of these programs are. You had the nsa go for years telling congress how useful the email Metadata Program was. And it wasnt until senator wyden and senator udall put their feet to the fire and said, well, come back here and show us where its been useful, and nsa couldnt do it. Nsa had to shut that program down in 2011. The internet Metadata Program. And then when were discussing this telephone Metadata Program, the director first came out and said theres 54 cases where this was it helped prevent 54 attacks or Somet