Will. Hello, everybody, welcome to the National Book festival. One thing we can do and i know you are all loving it as i am is to read a good book. I wrote a book that was published about a certain struggle with one of the central problems of our times, knowing what is true and what isnt. It is my pleasure to have with me today to people that wrote two of the very best books of the summer related to the world on the dangers. First i want to introduce Barton Gellman my colleague at the Washington Post who wrote an extraordinary memoir of the feelings with Edward Snowden that led to the revelations about the nsa, technology and surveillance and the subtitle of the book says the american surveillance state. And i also want to interview another outstanding offer, thomas rid who teaches at hopkins and has a history of what weve come to call disinformation, the ways of which our election systems, our very fabric can be manipulated by foreign governments and a history of that operation going back many decades. Im delighted to have them with us this morning and i want to ask each of you if you could begin with a brief one minute summary of what you would like the readers to know about but lead us off. Dark mirror is an attempt to combine three books. Its a story of Edward Snowden and how he did what he did, why he did what he did and it takes you behind the scenes of our interaction. It is a story of the surveillance state and content of the revelations made about the nsa and the change of boundaries that it secretly put into effect after 9 11 so there were lines that were crossed and the American People didnt know about. Third is a more personal memoir, the story of the investigative reporting that went into this. It brings you into the newsroom, into hotel rooms and all of the places. When i was doing my own reporting and the dilemmas and risks and some cases dangers that i face. We should say in closing the opening, the readers will find a modern highly technical version of the sort of dilemma and drama that we associate. He takes us inside of the newsroom of the 21st century and i think that is one of the strongest parts of the book. Your book similarly is a one i had a chance to talk about early in the publication and i ask you just to describe a little bit of what you were trying to do is this brought a look at the history of active measures over time. 2016 when the election interference hit Getting Started in mid june that year. I was investigating a russian hacking company. While i was able to understand most of the technical forensic evidence it quickly became clear that i wasnt able to understand the history or the dynamics of what it means when large intelligence organizations develop a focus on dis informing and interfering in public sometimes private conversations in a broadway or targeted way so that is what allowed me to put into context what happened in 2016 and i spent years writing that history. We are now in the days before the 2020 president ial election but i want to ask you this effort to manipulate the politics of god and in particular by russia continuing in your judgment it appears to be continuing. But look at the 2020 election from the perspective of the Russian Military intelligence or indeed another russian intelligence actor be it the government or private sector they have a problem because the expectation a lot of people have is they will be aggressive but they will be effective at trying to play this game of Political Warfare so the delivering against these expectations and 2016 in many ways was the perfect storm for them, highly polarized situation but obviously a lot of people are expecting it today which creates a certain amount of immunity so they are trying but its harder for them to succeed. A. I want to turn this question to you and ask you to assess the threats to the citizens by the computer technology. The thing you focused on, the american surveillance state is there a way for you to assess the danger external from the kind of people that thomas is focused on in moscow and internally in the continued efforts by the collective information around the world if it is the commercial or the traditional american style defense and National Security espionage then you have many actors, some with criminal motivations and some of commercial and some with security and some that are penetrating Computing Devices and others more sophisticated methods so they are breaking into defense contractors and University Research and commercial processes. And those who are coming after americans they think can pay it is more of a shifting of boundaries between the government and its own people in a democracy. Its the fact that in the course the nsa has moved into the digital comments and its surveilling large swaths of the internet and in so doing it inevitably pulls in huge volumes of u. S. Citizen traffic so we are being asked to tolerate that which weve never had before. Let me address the question you discussed today, some in your book, but to put it in the most direct way, dont you worry that the revelation of all of the things the nsa could do. To defend itself against a very aggressive and increasingly sophisticated adversaries. Because of the opportunity costs, the time and personnel and money that was expended on mitigating against those risks. With hundreds and hundreds of people in the community that are occupied fulltime with learning what risks there have been and mitigating those and finding alternate paths to the same information that those people are not doing Something Else they normally would have been doing. There are other ways in which they could have been argued to the lawsuits but i dont know that you can count that as damage in the way the system operates as to say if the revelations led the consumers to demand greater privacy because they didnt like having their own data intercepted and so then Internet Companies like google encrypted its connection from the servers. That could be said to interfere but that is the market place working the way its supposed to if the citizens didnt like what they were learning and asked for the changes were brought legal challenges that is the system working the way that its supposed to work so a lot of things the Intelligence Community regards as damaging about snowdens leaks is the system responding appropriately and according to our own Core Principles and how we govern ourselves. I also had the privilege to review the book in the Washington Post and it was an impressive book and changed my opinion and views but if you read his book next to mine it is a question that leads up from that comparative so to speak and the question is how can it be that the nsa as these signal intelligence capabilities barton has talked about, yet failed and i say failed in reference to the entire u. S. Intelligence Community Rela really is significantly if not spectacularly in understanding and ongoing election interference before it happened and even in real time because lets remember the people who were tracking in earl it early e private sector companies, crowd strike and outside experts, not people in the Intelligence Community at least but didnt mention any of the early findings publicly and even in hindsight and actually had their eyes on the ball, so what happened there. To some extent i can speculate that this relates to you dont find something that youre not looking for. The nsa is governed by extensive questions and topics did they think to look for the interference in u. S. Elections. Hes somebody thats shaped the world that we live in. Any other person except his wife, youve seen him in moscow. Describe for th the national bok festival viewers what is he like as a person, what you troubled, admired, what the takeaway was. He is someone who followed his own rules if he isnt interested in something as a student he doesnt Pay Attention to it and gets terrible grades. He is tired of high school after spending most of the year away he never returns and takes the ged instead which he aces with flying colors. He teaches himself computer techniques because he enjoys the computer and signed up to take courses for a bunch of advanced certifications in the computer fields including one of my favorites. He just takes the exam and has an ability to understand what they are looking for starting off as a nighttime Security Guard and finding his talent for computer work is accidentally discovered for a microsoft certification to start applying for jobs. It doesnt care much for the educational attainment. It cares for what it can do. He is someone that has a strong unbending sense of whats right and wrong and in that sense is a zealot as in my experience many whistleblowers are. They see the same things other people see, they judge them and say if no one else is going to do something about this, then i am. He will every now and then relax and shoot the breeze and talk about sort of offtopic things, but he is it unusually focused and quite stubborn about what he will say on the subjects that hes become best known for. So we had a fraught relationship and a lot of tension at the margins about what he would and wouldnt tell me. There was a significant moment that he had misled another confrontation. If we had a Different Administration come would you like to see him come back and face trial year in america, people i think would demand that at the National Security. What do you think the terms of the trial should be, should he be allowed to make an argument to help hi more than he hurt, hw do you see that going . First of all i dont think it will happen and certainly not voluntarily on his part. The charge he faces includes espionage. You can sort of make up how you would like a trial to go. It would fit his own sense of justice and i think i agree if he were able to try to persuade a jury that his intent had been to advance the interest of the United States and his own citizens. But the way the law is written right now he had access to classified material and thats it, thats the whole crime so he cant say it turns out i exposed some legally doubtful operations even if every Single Program he exposed had been found to be unconstitutional he would still be guilty of espionage under the terms of the law so we are not going to get the kind of trial in which he is allowed to offer evidence of his intentions or actual effects on the security. Turning to ask about the riddle i found most haunting in your book. You go through it with a detailed powerful description of all the things russia over decades have done to try to manipulate the country that as you talk about recent events and the way that america was turned upside down, you talk about the way individual citizens have been the carriers of this disinformation. We have been the mules, think of how a drug cartel works, carrying the poisonous material back and forth. If it wasnt for us and are spreading russian tidbits it wouldnt have had much of fact. Is that an accurate way to describe the book, and elaborate on that theme the underlining body politic is crucial in how this information works. Its almost like a parasite that lives off of an existing body politic and what, i mean, by that is for example active measures would exacerbate existing contradictions in the old communist language emerged in the 1920s. Disinformation was designed to exacerbate somebody that was already existing. For example a highly polarized situation in the 1970s in the context of the Peace Movement with strong deterrence and Nuclear Weapons and soviets and east germany for example studied very much trying to help the Peace Movement because it serves their interest to criticize american forced modernization but that creates a difficult problem how do you react. Im going to suggest something unusual. Look at this from the point of view of an operator running operations a the kgb in the cold war. If youre exacerbating a phenomenon, how can you tell whether you are the cause of a certain development or something was already happening without you. So i think what were looking at today is a situation that they are trying to especially now in 2020 they try to take advantage of existing debates and fraction in the United States but if we fall into ascribing to their action, too much power for example as you think or claim the Russian Election interference with response before getting donald trump elected as simply not enough evidence to support that claim we cannot say for a fact it had an impact on the 2016 election but you make that call of judgment if you say i believe the Russian Election interference is responsible for donald trump winning. Then you are ultimately helping them achieve that goal so in a nutshell the risk is a narrative becomes part of the disinformation. We really are in a constructive manner. Let me ask each of you to think with all of us about what we can do about the threats that you described so well in your book because the title is big brother is watching and going to freeze it. What can we do to help the modernday Winston Smith who was the hero of the book to resist, fight back, survive amidst all of these technological threats . I will start with you and name some of the people and you can tell me if they will or wont. Obviously Technology Companies could help but we are not sure whether that is a good idea or bad. Conceivably, government could help us protect its citizens, again terrible problems occurring. What way do you see to get the citizens of the United States better protection, better security. How is that going to happen . It reached a line with respect to surveillance of its own citizens then you have a number of possible actors here that have already done a substantial amount to restrict about because just about every website you go to now is a secure website, http us. That wasnt the case when he made his revelations. The internet made that change with a few Companies Like google whose motives were the desire to spend tens of millions of dollars with an order of magnitude to work the bulk collection by its own government which is remarkable. No one gets to spy on our users but us because theres a whole different set of problems having to do with the information and surveillance economy in the private sector. You have other players. There are political processes with lobbying groups demanding more privacy and achieving it in legislative forms and there are litigators who are challenging some of the bases. The novels. The way that the computers can create video. Its very difficult to know the difference between the fake and the real. I want to ask as the historian what do you think about this new world and the ability to create not t fake news but fake events. What we have seen during the cold war was much higher than anything ive seen to date and often technology was much more handson but you can almost say they were artisanal and industrial today. The qualities today are not there yet. What i am more concerned about is almost the threats of the denial for example imagine the access Hollywood Tape where he used foul language to describe women. If the access Hollywood Tape came out today he would simply deny its authenticity because it is easy to forge and fake his voice and dismiss actual evidence in a way that that was just not possible before so this dangerous flipside as well. But what can we do about this . To the draw the line between fact and forgery. In fact what i am seeing is an entire discipline and community of peoples emerging that includes Intelligence Officers and Law Enforcement and investigative journalists and scholars, open Source Intelligence research who obsessed about the quality of the forensic evidence of all kinds through images, additional and artifacts. There is an obsession with the truth is that of course runs completely counter to the prevalence of lying and that we see the disinformation today. But i am hopeful that we will be in a position to accept the community that is emerging of people in the mindset of an investigative journalists so to speak and will be able to teach others to enjoy that moment when you find a new piece of evidence that leads you to revisit your existing and that is one of the greatest things of the investigative journalist and i am optimistic. Could i mention in your own book you have come up with a new scenario, and i dont want to spoil it here, in which a deep fake is sophisticated enough to fool a lot of people in the short term and that it doesnt matter to the purposes whether forensic evidence comes along shortly thereafter. They have achieved their goal simply by causing people to believe it or to believe that it might be possible even for just a few minutes. I was thinking about that and i put to you the conclusion that ive come to you and tell me if i am being naive. In this world where it is so easy to manipulate and create false information that appears to be real, the value of the truth, reliable action, information you can trade upon, Securities Markets you can use. The value of that will become much greater and people will pay more for it because it is so important to them. So, that gives me hope. The market for what we do as journalists and analysts is going to be greater. The second question we wonder whether the technology and social media Companies Like google and facebook should be more responsible and reliable for the truth and falsities they put out there. If we write an article and if somebody says that isnt true, our paper could get sued that we published it. Should that case apply as well to a social Media Company like facebook just to be liable for what it posts. What do you think . That is an interesting question. There are two issues there among the probably many others that come to mind for me. One is that these Internet Companies have vigorously resisted that role if they are public utility or a neutral conveyor of information the same as the phone company. And you dont hold the phone Company Liable for the fact people make telephone calls or say untrue things or do damaging speech. So, that is the place they want to be. For the legal and regulatory reasons. If you ask them to be as Facebook Says it doesnt want to be an arbiter of truth. You have to kind of imagine how that could be done at scale with well over a million users. Yet they are deliberately promoting contact. Its valuable to them for their advertising and then their algorithms the most extreme content. You do want them to be responsible in the way they use that and then you are watching videos that are more and more insightful and extreme. Im going to ask you to wrap up this terrific instruction. Taking this information, pull your camera back and think 20 years from now how we are going to look back on this period that we have been living through with enormous uproar. Do we look back and see this as the beginning of a problem that we never found a way to deal with or over time to get more sophisticated and cynical. That is a historical statement. The situation right now, the two overarching threats and problems that i am really concerned about now are unrelated to the russian interference. The first one is the current administration, the president laid the groundwork for calling the legitimacy of the 2020 election and immediately afterwards, and hes not alone in preparing that. Combine that with a potential second wave of covid19 hitting us during that timeframe and october an november when the election happens which in some ways could support the argument that it wasnt legitimate because it was so risky to go out and vote so that is a pretty scary trend. In the covid situation, however, if i try to be optimistic, im an immigrant so i overcompensate sometimes but in some ways it is accelerating a positive development and that is the way that its handled the misinformation even coming from the president samanta the president himself they took action because now its not just an ideological argument of whether it should be somehow curtailed but now it is a question of life and death. If you think that its a hoax you have a Family Gathering and a couple of days or weeks later your motherinlaw dies that is likely going to change your perspective in the way that it never would have achieved so its teasing out the observation you made based on Clinical Trials and Reliable Research and science in the face of misinformation and extraordinary costs of getting information wrong. On that i think that its a good time to conclude the conversation. I want to thank our two authors, Barton Gellman, dark mirror is an exploration about Edward Snowden and what the future of surveillance is and thomas rid that has the best history of this information and the basis of what we see and think in politics. I am David Ignatius and we want to thank the National Book festival. The theme this year is american ingenuity. I think we have a pretty good dose of the techno version of that as our authors helped us walk through some of the biggest issues of 2020 so thanks very much and we hope to continue with you