Colleagues will join us to act on it. Are we likely to see any debate clacks it is Democratic Leaders have been promising for months they would bring this to the floor but wednesdays procedural vote is still not expected to advance the bill and thats a good digestion terms of the politics for both sides, the republicans created the democrats voting based on the polls. The congressional leadership correspondent for the National Journal follow his reporting it nationaljournal. Com. And other congressional news the Washington Post reports new york congressman Michael Grimm turned himself in on the band is expected criminal charges. Charges are expected to be released later today. Those charges will be related to the ownership of the manhattan restaurant which has the ties to a fund raiser to raise more than 500,000 some of which were allegedly improper. The housthe house will begin tot 2 p. M. For the consideration of a number of noncontroversial bills. The senate will meet at 2 p. M. And begin general speeches and both related to the judicial nominations are set for 5 30. The Associated Press reports this morning that the white house is saying they are sanctioning government officials and 17 companies with links to Vladimir Putins inner circle. They are levied because russia failed to live up with commitments on the International Accord and the escalating the crisis in ukraine and in addition to the sanctioned the u. S. Is revoking export licenses for the hightechnology items that could contribute to the military capabilities. We will keep right on this for a further update. When you are living in a world you dont have monopolies anymore and multiple companies are competing for their options on tv for example, that really doesnt work when they form a monopoly negotiation and so that is one of the reasons they dont have as many options as they could have and by the prices are still going up for your television and vide video servid where they should be going down. There is a lot of competition between the different companies. When you are getting Internet Access or watching tv it used to be you watch tv or had a Cable Provider and now theres everything from Cell Phone CompaniesOffering Services to Satellite Companies to just doing it over the internet with Everything Else like hulu so there are more consumers aware today but that still means of course we need to have an antitrust approach and make sure there are enough monopoly providers that engage in the activities. What we are wanting to do is make sure that they release all of their information in a timely manner. We are going to go through an entire process of reforms this year. We think the agency should be more transparent and focus on what they are doing with spectrum and licensing as the core mission. We dont want them going off into next neutrality to have governments in the internet. We dont want them offering privacy and Data Security issues those go to the ftc so its time to narrow the focus and get back to the mission. Members are considering this session tonight on the communicators at eight eastern on cspan2. A discussion with a team of journalists from the Washington Post and london Guardian Newspapers that recently won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting on the links give you two weeks in the nsa data on american phone records. In the presentation came during a panel hosted by the Washington Post looking at the nsa surveillance and recent revelations. This is about two hours. We are proud of the recognition and especially proud of the coverage. We also recognize of course that there are sharp divisions and opinions about the source of the documents that form the basis of the coverage from Edward Snowden and also about the controversy that has been intense at times and i expect we will explore all of that here today. Awarded the pulitzer along with the addition of the guardian of great britain, the Pulitzer Board and raised the idea that it served the Public Interest and that had a reaction of its own. The new yorker magazine and he gave it a sin is and is yesterday endorsing the award wrote this. This was a defining case of the press are invited is supposed to do. The president was held accountable and he had to answer questions that he would rather not have any when his repl anyow unsatisfying to the public and in some cases rainfalls his administration had to change its policies. Congress had to confront its own failures of oversight, private companies had to rethink their obligations to their customers and Law Enforcement and people had conversations at home and at school and pretty much everywhere about what they themselves would be willing to let the nsa do to them and journalists have had to think about their own obligations to the law, the constitution, the readers and even in the practicf reporting in the age of technical tracking the sources they might expose or make foldable. The representative declared awarding the pulitzer to snowden enablers is a disgrace and suggested that we should be prosecuted under the espionage act. A reader in a letter that we published last week quoted he was disturbed the paper should be published for disclosing classified information that has resulted in a lessening of the countrys security. I dont think the post should be able to wrap itself in the text of the amendment and give itself and in unity at the cost of citizen safety. So much to talk about here and we will talk about how it came to be coming how and why we decided to publish and how we went about our work and how we think about issues of National Security in the coverage. Certainly National Security is an area of focus and that should be no surprise. The governments power to make to interrogate, prosecute and incarcerate, kill range as the greatest powers of all if we are to copy the federal government these are not activities we can ignore and these are not activities in my view we ca can detebesure to the wishes on whae report. What we dont report or how. When the government asserts National Security or whenever the basis for the coverage is classified material on the ground of National Security the government has secretly implemented sweeping Government Policies with profound implications for individual rights and we have an experienced National Security staff. This organization relies on their expertise and history of navigating the most sensitive subjects imaginable. We take National Security concerns seriously. It is a dangerous world and we know that. Reporters communicate regularly with the pentagon, the white house intelligence agencies and private companies. On the nsa documents we spent many hours on each stories into detailed conversations with highlevel officials and on many occasions the request of government officials we withheld information that might disclose very specific sources and methods. We didnt agree to every request of every sort made by the government. Had we done so, there would have been no stories whatsoever. The intelligence agencies were opposed to publishing anything at all. What we saw is something that went beyond specific sources and methods as guarded on the National Security. The documents revealed the national securitthat thenationas engaging in surveillance and Data Collection of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness. What had transpired was a dramatic shift towards the state power and against individual rights including privacy with no Public Knowledge and no public debate. With that im going to turn it over. For the National Post focused on Telecom Policy from internet privacy and social impact of technology on families. She joined the post eight years ago on the mercury news where she was a technical reporter. She began her career as the bureau chief in office and in new york as a Financial Markets reporter. Its all yours and thanks again all of you for coming. [applause] thank you for the words and support [inaudible] it involves people who are not here at work behind the scenes from the graphics to the designers and editors and reporters and im pleased to announce the panel. These reporters that did work on the story. Martin is a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter and author. Hes a senior fellow. Hes one of three journalists that received classified archives. Gellman has led to the nsa coverage of the post and is writing a book on the surveillance industrial revolution. He is also being humble in his submission. Nakashkima covers issues relating to intelligence, government surveillance and Civil Liberties and shes written about the nsa and the evolution of cyberpolicy in the u. S. Government. She served as a Southeast Asia correspondent for the Washington Post between 2002 to 2006 and shes reported there on the Islamic Militant networks on the indian ocean soon on me. Since joining she also covered the white house and the Virginia State politics. She grew up in hawaii and attended the university of berkeley. Ashkan soltani is to your right hand is aand is an independent r and consultant focused on privacy, security and behavioral economics. Understanding the abilities of the commercial and government surveillance is. She served as a technologist for the division of privacy and identity protections as the federal trade commission and also worked as a primary technical consultant for the washington journal what they know an investigative series and is working with the Washington Post on their coverage of the nsa. She also covers privacy, security and surveillance in the digital world. He came to the Washington Post in 1998 and has done stints as a political reporter and correspondent covering africa. He is also the author of the book tinderbox west spots the epidemic and have a world can finallworld canfinally overcome. Thank you for joining us. I would like to start with two minutes from each of you to just talk about what the response has been that you have received the Pulitzer Prize. This seems very long ago. My friends like to send me the stories of what an outrage it is. There are serious criticisms to be made as described and we are not immune from that house was anybody else that we covered and there are people that a number of commentators have said that this was undeserved. There are others who are very happy for the validation of the idea of the debate and the financial boundaries about what the secret intelligence can do in a Democratic Society needs to be decided by the people that the government is working for and that information is power and the secret information although very clearly u. S. Intelligence cannot operate entirely in the open by any strain of the imagination. Its fundamental limits boundaries rules and regulations have to be subject to public debate. I dont have much more to add to say that reaction has been generally quite positive from the Civil Liberties communities and rather muted from the sources on the Intelligence Community that overall, i think the general public has been appreciative. From the kind of Technical Community to the response being the understand technolog the tey and are bringing technical people from the basement to explain things more as we see a lot more of our interactions in the Digital Media and they respond being able to highlight how those things work and bring them to public debate and mystified how the technology is no different than it was years ago and a sense of how it impacts your life so we should be able to explain that. That has been kind of a valuable response for me. It has been humbling and inspiring realizing you had a small role but its also been a reminder about how fractured my wife is because i was supposed to coach my sons baseball game tonight but other guys looked at me and said what kind of things . I got a role in the fillets ar pulitzer it has been fun to share this and understand how much he played tracks in the newspaper and in the rest of your life. Thanks. I should note there will be plenty of time for questions to have almost 40 minutes and will be available as well. You should see a package if you would like to ask a question that we may not get too we will continue to ask questions and post answers online. After the Panel Discussion there will be two people with microphones will be available to please raise your hand if you do have a question and to stand up when you are posing your question. Tell us a little bit about the development of the story. Youve been away from the post for actually a few years when you did receive the documents to the story coming in the next time come in your absence, marty baron was appointed to the editor. I understand you didnt know each other well. What happened to lead the introduction of the story to the post into the decision to Carry Forward . Stomach its not obvious from the coverage but im not a Washington Post employee. Im on contract after having worked here for 21 years i left in 2010. Win over the course of the first half of 2013, i developed a correspondence with the man i later learned to be Edward Snowden and i knew there was only one place to the story for me. It was going to require sources and the decades of experiences here in the mutual trust of people i worked with for a long time, but it was a harder risky decision to be made. And the boss is the one guy that i didnt know so i walked into the room and figured out who marty was by process of domination. So those are the lawyers. This must be marty. And i was asking him to take on risks and put his trust in someone who hes never laid eyes on and a story of the magnitude was going to need a lot of lawyering and careful thoughts about how to balance the risk of disclosure with the big policy decisions before the public and there are going to be hard problems that are journalistic. How do you verify . You have a piece of paper that says it is an nsa document. How do you know any of that is true x. How do you know even if it is authentic but its accurate . How do i know that he used to be a contractor for the nsa is either of those things. I was asking the paper to devote resources and to accept security measures they have not had to have before and i was thrilled at the answers that marty understood what h hes getting into. He is very thoughtful about what the decisions would be had with a subsequent steps would be and he embraced it. It was a revelation when you explained the fillets are speech in the newsroom some of the resources even on the it side that was involved. Can you quickly talk about that . There are some things i wouldnt talk about, but we have the ability to protect material for things we didnt think would be disclosed in the said in every story we are holding back certain elements and we are not doing that because someone told us we have to. We are doing that because having consulted with the government and having thought through the implications, we decided we agree, we should withhold this stuff. And if youre going to hold Something Back and read it on a network or a hard drive where any actor can come in and take it. So they stepped up their game in terms of the physical and Digital Security encryption and stuff like that and really want to get into the details. What was your role in the coveragand thecoverage as the rr covering the nsa . Talk about when you came in with your guiding mission was on the story and about how this coverage has affected its change in the government. Of the disclosure certainly has had an impact on the policy process and most significantly on the public awareness. I want to make a few observations upfront about how the landscape has changed from the perspective of the reporter who didnt receive the documents at least not directly and how certainly we are engaged in the debate that is on precedented and that wouldnt have happened for the disclosures. But it isnt for the want of trying by the lawmakers, journalists and others. About the existence of the secret law under the patriot act which the law passed after 9 11. But he was bound by classification rules from going any further from explaining his discomfort with interpretation. And he and other lawmakers continued over the years to warn about the secret law and journalists, including myself and others tried to pry from the government officials and former officials for some insight into what the secret law under section 215 of the patriot act could be. But they are bound by classification rules. They have families, they have jobs and to no avail the Civil Liberties groups, the aclu, the Electronic Foundation that titled lawsuits to try to force government to be more transparent on the law. Nothin