It is my honor to introduce representative adam schiff who represents californias 28th Congressional District in los angeles county. Representative schiff is the ranking democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence. He is a leader on all intelligence issues and has been outspoken and thoughtful on the issue of russian interference in the recent u. S. President ial election. After the congressman gives remarks, he has agreed and other participants on the panel include rand beers who has a distinguished career of Public Service including as acting secretary of the department of homeland and at the white house working with people like dick clark. He started serving the country as a United States marine in vietnam. Jeremy bass will be on the panel as well. Jeremy is managing director of Beacon Global Strategies and an excellent chief of staff and one of the best people i have worked with at the cia and dod. Julie smith is also on the panel. She was a colleague working at the pentagon and for Vice President biden. She works with jeremy at the center for new american security. She is also one of the smartest people in town on europe and russia. When i started studying the soviet union we went to peering into the putins eyes and who knows what phrase we will use to come up with a putin change. Representative schiff, maybe you can help us get clarity. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you. It is a pleasure to join you today and my special appreciation for the center for American Progress for the fabulous work that the center does and for the invitation to come and speak with you today. I very much look forward to the panel. There is a lot to talk about. What i thought i would focus my brief remarks on is the convergence of two trends tht world. The trend affecting russia at its place in the world and the world view of Vladimer Putin. As well as the trend of the increasing potency of cyber as a weapon. We saw those trends come into a unique combination last november which brings us to the heart of the topic today. Let me start off talking about russia with an antidote from a few years ago when i was introduce today a russian al and i thought relations between the United States and russia could be different, that putin very much had a chip on his shoulder and anything in the United States interest was by definition antithetical to putin. But we might have a different relationship based on the autonomy because there was indeed a number of common interests. His answer was very dismissive. Do you know what the job of the pillow carrier is . And when i asked him he said it is the job of the pillow carrier to smuggle mev in his sleep if he does something putin doesnt like. I dont know how well he slept but i would not be sleeping well in that case. I think punts world view was sharpened after the mass protest in 2011 that we have heard about. I think it is an important chapter unemployedern russia history because in modern the greatest thing for putin was his longevity in his running the country. When i meet with the cia i always congratulate them on producing these world changing events. They have far greater capabilities than i am aware of but this is the russian perspective on things. I used to describe even as recently the threat as a creeping situation. But i dont think it is creeping any longer. I dont think we are in a new cold war but a war of ideas between authoritarianism and democracy and representative government. We see that vividly in the russian propagation in its model and desire to tear down democracies in europe, the american democracy, of course one of the core conclusions of the Intelligence Community in terms of russian interference was the desire to discord in the United States. So this is i think a hugely important battle of ideas. And sadly in this battle of ideas, you see atocracies on the march. You see countries in europe becoming nationalists and changes in the United States where our own president displays authoritarian qualities. The weakening of europe. The brexit. All of these factors are greatly endangering the future of democracy and i think this is going to be the struggle of our times. Let me talk about the explosion of the potentancy of cyber. There is cyber for the purpose of theft, intellectually properties. This is a problem for many countries. You have cyber for the purpose for the gathering of foreign intelligence. You have what we saw very recently in our own election cyber for the purposes of affecting political outcomes, of met medelling in the affairs of other countries. Cyber tragically, i think, for the United States is a wonderfully a weapon. It is phenomenally difficult and expensive to be on defense. One of the illustrations i love to give is target. When target was lacked the hackers got into target through the air conditioning system because in an internet of things you are only as secure as your least vulnerable part of an air conditions. So the example of a heist where they came through the air duct and the thieves were able to migrate to the Financial Data and then target had a huge problem on its hands. This is cheap to be done and it be be done remotely and always with some level of whether it is north korea attacking a company or russia attacking our democracy it will always put the administration in a difficult position of proving its case when it makes attributions or deciding when it cant do so without giving up important methods and making the decision not to attribute to conduct. This gets me to the point i would like to conclude on and that is our new president is doing deep damage to himself and to our country. He is doing this in many ways. He is doing it in his willingness to make up facts as he goes along. We are under the invention that millions of Illegal Immigrants voted. Why is this significant . There is a time when the president needs to be believed by the country, there is a time when the president needs to make the case when the intelligence agencies tell us without revealing had sources. If the president cant be believed by his own people, let alone our allies, if the president has impugned the incredible of the intelligence officials providing the best insight in the world what hope does he have of persuading his own country, let alone allies to deal with a threat. This, i think is an enormous problem. As you may remember as early as the september senator feinstein and i made the unusual decision to go public with attribution of russias hacking before the administration was willing to. We were lobbying the administration to make attribution. My argument was that the administration didnt need to reveal sources and methods. But it did need to make attributi attribution. Whenever that is the case, you have people in the public and press saying where is your proof. But it is going to be very much in our National Interest to disclose. I would sure the kremlin would like Nothing Better than a full account of how we know what the russians were doing. The russians are reverse engineering everything in the open source report to try to figure out how do we know what we know. I think it is important the president have the confidence of the public to be able to come before the American People and say either the iranians are cheating if they are cheating, or the North Koreans are advancing on their Nuclear War Heads or whatever the case is that warrants action it is important that president have credibility. I think there is no one who is doing more to undermine his own credibility and legit than the president. And revisiting black sites or back to waterboarding or interrogation techniques, the consideration of a ban on immigration or visas to muslims in any form of these are colossal mistakes that will cost us relationships with our allies, many who we depend on in our war in terror. This is a chapter many of us hoped we turned the page on and i think it would be a tragic mistake for the country to revisit this and make the same mistakes all over again. On that optimistic note, i will conclude and look forward to your discussion. Thank you very much. [applause] good morning, thank you for the introduction for the panelist and congressman. We have julie, jeremy and congressman schiff. I run the National Security program here. I am grateful for there panelists joining us today. There is a lot going on in the news and i am grateful for you taking the time to be here and talk about what might be one of the most important issues we have sort of faced as a country. I am going to bounce around the panel a little bit and come back here and i will try to save time for questions. I think we will have a bunch of them at the end. I would like to start with you, jeremy, former chief of staff for the pentagon and the cia, one of things we saw this week was maybe an attempt by the president to bridge a divide by going to the langley and talking to cia staff that didnt necessarily play out as we would have expected or liked . And it was sort of questionable whether it has the desired impact. What is the implications, i guess what congressman schiff was talking, what is the consequences for this dynamic between the president and his premier Intelligence Agency and what does that sort of mean for us having the intelligence we need as a country . I was at the agency on december 30th, 2009, a day we sent a dozen of our best officers out to a post in eastern afghanistan to conduct a sensitive counterterrorism operation. An operation that went tragically wrong when the asset our officers we were supposed to meet detonated a suicide vest and we killed darryl, jennifer, liz, scott, jane and an officer named jeremy and they are memorialized on the wall in the lobby of the orange Headquarters Building at langley along with hundred other members of the agency who lost their lives serving our country. It was jarring, disturbing and upsetting to a number of intelligence professionals to see the president s presentation there on saturday. As i think about it, there are four areas where this important relationship between a president and his Intelligence Committee is going to come into tension and potentially conflict. The first is as the congressman noted an the assessment about russia. The Intelligence Agency has been clear and warned about the threat of russia and i dont think that is assessed by the president and his team. Second on Counter Terrorism, the president said on saturday essentially we invited isis. That is something he said before and we should have taken their oil and we may have a Second Chance to take their oil. If you combine that with some of the other misguided count counterterrorism policy he announced such as a hiring freeze for tsa, kucustom and Border Patrol and others that keep the country safe, and you combine that with going back to waterboarding, misguided policies that dont make us safer or prevent terrorist attacks on the country, you dorsey you see a collision between the president and Intelligence Officers. It will make the job of Intelligence Officers harder. Third, in an era of alternative facts what does an Intelligence Officer do . An Intelligence Officers credo as emblazed in the lobby is from john, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. All Intelligence Officers know they have to speak truth to power even when it is uncomfortable but also to allies and advisory about what america stands frchlt when you start with alternative facts, made up facts, lies, it undermines intelligence. Intelligence is designed to put parameters around policy. Make sure policy is guided by facts. Every meeting begins with a predicate of an intelligence picture. If we throw that out the window we are destinned to make bad views. The president talked about america first. The people i know believe america security depends on the work with other countries. Much of the work Intelligence Officers do is working with other countries to keep us safe. These are many of whom live overseas, like serving oversea. There is more Like State Department officials than anybody in the country. Than raise their children overseas and they believe and they know and they understand you have to be involved in the world. If we just pull up the draw bridge and retreat and have a nationalist approach to our security it wont work. For all of those reasons, i think we are potentially in for Stormy Weather ahead. The longstanding Intelligence Community assessment that russia is engaged in aggressive cyber activity in the United States and obviously the election is getting all of the attention button rand is the acting assistant secretary for Homeland Security and many of the other positions what you do now and what is the spectrum of threats we face and what is beyond the election and what should americans be worried usht about in terms of effecting their every day lives from cyber at large and particularly russia . I would start with a simple statement. Russia is the greatest threat to the u. S. In cyber space to the world today and we have known this for some time. Just looking at the election and the brief of the dnc or the revelation of the emails of john podesta and others. But that is not all there is to it. If we look at the whole spectrum of crime that congressman schiff referred to and we know russian organized crime operates within Russian Space and what we dont have a clear demarcation about is what is the connection between russian organized crime and the russian state. Well, if we cant specifically identify that we can look at a visible fact that isnt happening and that is russia is not cooperating with the United States in criminal investigations of People Living in their country who have breached particular databases within this country whether it be a retail store or other kinds of Economic Activity within this country. If they are not prepared to do that how can we separate russian organized crime from the russian state . It bothers us is really important consideration of how we need to move forward in the administration. Take a look at the critical infrastructure. From electricity, oil and national gas, the financial sector, the retail sector, all of these have areas of vulnerability and all of these are susceptible to the standard practices that any cyber criminal or state would use. We know fairly clearly that the entry into the dnc came from a fi fi fishing expedition. We know somebody clicked on a site that opened up his email when it was a fishing expedition. As in the case of target to find its way from the hvac vendor into the space and the personal identifiable information that was stolen. All of these represent vectors into our country in vulnerable areas that whether they are manifested today as in the recent efrforts with respect to the election or down the road to vulnerabilities we will have to correct. We have to come together in a bipartisan passion to deal with these. Congress has made some modest steps in this area. But there is a lot more that can be done to allow the government and the private sector to Work Together in a much more concerted fashion with the ability to get companies and people to adopt the kinds of cyber practices that are necessary. The point about the internet of things or Industrial Control Systems both of which have been built primarily without the kinds of protections in front and allow individuals or countries to get into the those systems and do or potentially be able to do significant damage to the United States, to the economy, the security, and the personal safety of americans. So i think this is something we will have to face up to. This is a big warning but in many ways it is only the tip of the iceberg and we will have to pay more attention to it. I know congressman schiff is intent upon doing this but it has to be on both sides of the aisle. It cant be an argument about well any regulation is a bad regulation. Lets think about what kinds of authorities we need to give to the government and what kinds of liability we need to give to the private sector for the kinds of p cooperation. It is necessary if we will have any chance of dealing with this. But as congressman schiff said, it is a lot easier to do offense than defense. If you dont do defense at all shame on you. Julie, turning to you, congressman schiff pointed out the breadth of the activity and he noted the criminal nexus. But clearly this has been a bigger problem or seen as a bigger problem in europe and for our transatlantic partners. This has been field tested and expanded by russia. Can you just tell us a little bit about the aims you think russia has against us and also closer to home in europe and in its immediate neighborhood. Sure. Everything we have talked about here this morning russian acts of intimidation, russian aggression, russian hacking, cyber attacks, this is in essence old news to our friends in europe. They have been experiencing this for years. They have been warning us about it. And they have been trying very hard to work with the United State