The 19th century. Applicants 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Enjoy book tv this weekend every weekend on cspan2. Hi, i am david. Welcome to the National Book festival in this difficult time of the pandemic, one thing we can do, i know you are all loving, read a good book. I wrote a book published this summer, cia officer who is struggling with one of the problems of our times, knowing what is true and what isnt. It is my great pleasure to have with me today, two people who wrote very best books of the summer about issues related to our new technologically sophisticated world and the dangers. First i want to introduce mark, my former colleague of the Washington Post wrote an extraordinary memoir, the revelation about an essay technology and surveillance and the subtitle of what the book says, the american surveillance. I also want to introduce another outstanding officer, author, thomas who teaches at johns hopkins, active measures and history of what we have come to call this information. The ways in which our election systems, politics of very political fabric and being manipulated by foreign governments history of that operation. Going back many decades. These are two extraordinary books, delighted to have them this morning. I want to ask each of you, with a brief one minute summer summary of this National Book festival know about your books and then we will go on. But we do soft. Dark mirror is an attempt to combined three books. It is a story of edwards and who he is, how he did what he did and why he did what he did. It takes you behind the scenes of our interaction, journal. It is a story of the surveillance state and content of the revelation about the nsa and change of boundaries that secretly put into effect after 9 11 so there were lines crossed after 9 11, the American People did not know about. The third is a more personal and more did not expect to write, the investigation and the reporter that went into this. It brings you into the newsroom, into hotel rooms and places, doing my own reporting and the dilemmas and wrists and in some cases, dangerous. I should say in closing that opening discussion of dark mirror, theres a way readers you will find in this book, a modern highly technical version of the dilemmas that we associate, stakes are high and it takes us inside the newsroom, the 21st century. I think that is one of the strongest questions in the book. The book is one that i had a chance to talk about with the public early in the publication, extraordinary book, i ask you to describe a little bit of what you are trying to do in this broad look at the history of active measures of disinformation over time. In 2016, the election here was Getting Started mid june, i was investigating an older one. I was paying attention to russians the time and very quickly, we looking at this literally within one day i was able to understand the technical project, is not equipped to understand the history. Hows not equipped to understand the dynamics of what it means when large Intelligence Organization is a focus on this informing and sometimes private sessions. In a broadway, that history was what allowed me to put into context what happened in 2016. I spent four years on writing that history. The 2020 u. S. Election, i want to ask you, this effort to manipulate our politics from abroad in particular by russia continuing. It appears to be continuing but look at the 2020 election from the perspective of Russian Military intelligence or another russian intelligence, any other russian intelligence, they have a real problem because the expectation that other people have is that they will be aggressive, effective and try to play this game of political warfare, so that delivery of extraordinary expectation and 2016 many ways was a perfect storm for them. Nobody expected election interference in 2016. Not everybody but a lot of people are expecting it today which to a degree, creates a certain amount of immunity tod today. So yes, they are trying but it is probably hard to succeed again. I want to turn this question to you and ask you to assess the foreign threats to american citizens by a computer and technology, the thing you focused on, is there a way for you to assess the relative danger external from the kinds of people that thomas is focused on in moscow and internal in the continued efforts around the world. Are very different kinds, the external threat is broad. Commercial or traditional american style, National Security so you have many acto actors, some with criminal motivation and some with commercial and some with security who are penetrating american Computing Devices with other more sophisticated methods so they are breaking into contractors, they are breaking into university research, they are breaking into commercial processes, they are breaking into covid research. In order to gain some sort of advantage and of course, theres a large number of hackers looking to steal personal information for financial theft, there are blackmailers coming after americans who they think can pay and using random way to lock up computers and threatened to destroy information if the ransom is not paid. The threat from the nsa is more of a shifting of boundaries between the government and its own people in a democracy. It is the fact that in the course of surveillance of foreigners, the nsa moved into the large digital common, it is surveilling large parts of the internet itself and in so doing, it inevitably comes in huge volumes of u. S. Citizens and traffic. So we are being asked to tolerate a level of surveillance over americans that we never had before. I addressed the question discussed some new book but to put it in the most direct way, do you worry the revelation of all of the things the nsa could do, all capabilities may have weakened the u. S. s ability to defend itself against very aggressive and increasingly sophisticated adversary. I think there is no doubt in revelations, they must have reduced collection, must have interfered with an essay operations because of the opportunity cost, the time and personnel and money that was extended on mitigating against the risks. So if you have hundreds of people in the Intelligence Community who are occupied fulltime with learning what risk there is and mitigating the information that those people are not doing Something Else that they would normally do. There are other ways in which revelations could be argued to lead to collection process but i dont know you could count that as damage and say if the revelations led consumers to demand greater, they didnt like having their own data intercepted, things like google encrypted its connection from google servers to your own service. Interfered with an essay collection but that is the marketplace working the way it is supposed to. If citizens didnt like what they were learning and asked for legislative changes or broad legal changes, that is the way in which is supposed to work. While those things the Intelligence Community has damaging, it is a system responding appropriately and according to our own core principles. I also had the privilege to review the book in the Washington Post and it is impressive and changed my opinion and views. If you lead, read his book next to mine, the comparatives so to speak and the question is, how can it be the nsa has these impressive intelligence capabilities yet fail, i say theyll hear in reference to the entire u. S. Intelligence community, really significant, if not spectacularly and 2016 and understanding and ongoing election interference before it happened and even realtime because the people tracking it early on companies and outside experts not in the Intelligence Community at least they didnt mention the early findings publicly and not convinced they have their eyes on the ball. That is a great question. To some extent, i can speculate this relates to something you dont find that you are looking for. The nsa and Intelligence Community are governed by an extensive and prioritized list of topics that are meant to be looking at. Proliferation of nuclear weapon, what is happening with iran on any of the following subject areas and so on down the list. Did they think to look for outside interference in the u. S. Elections, there could be some doubt about that. I think this might be a useful time to ask you to share with our viewers, what edward stone is like, this is an elusive personality but if somebody has really shaped the world we live in, you have the opportunity to talk with them, im guessing as much as any other person except his wife, seen him in moscow, describe for our National Book festival viewers what hes like as a person, what you admire and what you take away from it. Is someone follows his own rules if not interested in something as a student, he doesnt pay any attention to it, he is tired of high school so after spending most of the year, he never returned to face the ged which is what he does with flying colors. He teaches himself computer techniques because he enjoyed the computer as he takes Certification Courses for advanced certifications in the computer field putting certified hacker, which is my favorite. In many cases, without even taking the course, he just takes the exam as this natural ability to understand the examiner is looking for an answer the questions. He takes the highly unusual route shutting off as nighttime Security Guard and finding his talent for computer work is accidentally discovered and is encouraged to get microsoft certification and start applying for jobs. A community that doesnt care very much only on what he can do. Hes someone who has a very strong extent of what is right and wrong. Many whistleblowers are like that, they see the same things that other people see and they say no one else is going to do something about this, then i am. Hes capable of being funny, he will every now and then, relax and shoot the breeze and talk about offtopic things but he is unusually focused and quite stubborn about what he will and wont say on the subjects hes best known for. So we had a fraught relationship and a lot of tension about what he would and wouldnt tell me. There was one significant moment in which i believe he misled me lead to another confrontation. If we had a Different Administration come next year, would you like to see noted allowed to come back and face trial here in america that immunity . What do you think the terms of the child be . Should he be allowed to make an argument that he helped moore that he hurt . How do you see that going . First of all, i do think it will happen, it certainly wont happen voluntarily on his part. The charge he faces include espionage. You cant make up time he would like the trial to go. It would fit his own sense of justice and i agree, if you were able to have public interest, he would try to persuade a jury that he had done more, 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, the elements of the crime or that he had lawful access to classified material give it to someone who did not have it. Thats it. So he cant say it turns out that i exposed legally doubtful operations even if every program have been found to be unconstitutional by the supreme court. He still be 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 affect. Lets ask about the riddle i found in your book, active measure. You go through in detail and powerful description of all the things with russia over decades and manipulate other countries. Whether you talk about recent events the way america was turned upside down during the 2016 elections, you talk about the way in which individual american citizens have been carriers of disinformation. You think of how drug cartel works and carries poisonous materials back and forth. If it wasnt for us, for our amplified disseminating russian tidbit, it wouldnt have the effect. Is that an accurate way to describe for you what the book elaborate on that, the underlying politics is crucial and how the information works. Disinformation almost like a parasite. It lives off an existing host. What i mean by that is for example, active measures would exacerbate existing tensions and frictions, existing contradictions in the old communist language emerged in the 1920s. This information is designed to exacerbate something already existing. For example, highly polarized situation in the 1970s in the context of the Peace Movement in favor from Nuclear Weapons and east germany, for example, started very much to help the Peace Movement because its their interest to criticize americans in a sense but created an intellectually different problem. How do you react, im going to suggest something unusual, look at this problem from the view of the operator running an operation. The cold war, if youre exacerbating an existing phenomenon how can you tell really, whether you are the cause of a certain development or something was already happening . So i think what we are looking at today is a situation there trying to, especially in 2020, russian intelligence communities continue to try to take advantage of assisting advancement friction in the United States but if we fall into this trap with the action, too much power, for example, if you claim that the Russian Election interference was responsible for getting volatile elected, there is not enough evidence to support that claim. We cannot say for a fact they had an actual impact on the 2016 election. But if you make that judgment, if you say i believe the Russian Election interference is responsible for donald trump winning the election, then you are ultimately trumping them to achieve that goal. In a nutshell, the risk is that the narrative of disinformation becomes part of disinformation. We are in a constructive nightmare here. Let me ask each of you, with all of us, what we can do about what you just described so well in your book, your active measures. Our title is big brothers watching, what can we do to help the modernday event, the hero of the book, resist, fight back, survive these technological threats start with you and ill name some of the people who might help and then you can tell me if they will or wont. Technology companies conceivably protect us but we are not sure it is good or bad. Conceivably, government could help us protect but again, a terrible problem in that regard. What way you see to get us better protection and security, how will that happen . If you can see it as yours government, u. S. Intelligence community having reached a line previously in respect. [sirens] into surveillance, you have a number of possible actors here. Technology companies have already and quite delivery, a substantial amount to restrict that because just about every website you go to now is a secure website, theres this little icon in your browser bar that wasnt there, the whole internet has made that change led by a few Companies Like google whos voted for explicitly, a desire to send tens of millions of dollars, possibly more than that, in order to work by its own government. Which is a remarkable thing. It hasnt happened before the Tech Companies were largely cooperators. You could look at it and say google facebook, microsoft, there will attitude toward this, no one get by on our users but us because theres a different set of problems with the information economy and surveillance economy in the private sector. You have other players, there are political processes here with ngos and lobbying groups and political coalitions demanding more privacy and achieving it to an extent. There are litigators who are challenging some of the lawful basis for some operations but fundamentally, if citizens and consumers in the marketplace are asking for more privacy, theres a chance they can get. Want to ask you to talk about the future threat beyond the nightmares we have been discussing my new novel, i talked about the ways in which computers can now create video and sound imagery so perfectly woven together that you can create a fake novel or fake joe and its very difficult to know the difference between the fake and the real. We are entering a new era in which will have to begin to put quotation marks around truth until weve done our checking. I want to ask you, as the historian of disinformation, if you will, what you think of this new world of deep lakes and the ability to create not fake news but fake events. How do we deal with that . And some days, forgery we are seeing in the cold war was higher than anything ive seen today. Of course, the use technology that was more handson but you can almost say its artisanal but they are industrial today. The quality of forgery today, the future threat you are describing now, but i am more concerned about his almost the threat of deep denial as opposed to deep fake. For example, imagine the access hollywood has, or candidate donald trump follows language and the hollywood tip came out today, it would simply deny authenticity because of credible and easy to forge, it is easier to dismiss friends of evidence in a way that was not possible before so this unpleasant sign as well but what can we do . I dont think it will be impossible to draw the line between fact and forgery. What i am seeing is an entire discipline, an entire community of people emerging including intelligence officers, Law Enforcement and investigative analysts, scholars, intelligence researchers who are obsessed about the quality of forensic evidence of all kinds through images, forensic artifacts. An obsession with the truth and it runs counter to the prevalence of lying we see in disinformation today but i am hopeful we will be in a position for the community emerging for people who have the mindset of investigating this way will be able to teach others to enjoy the moment when you find a new piece of evidence we in that way, that is one of the greatest thing in investigating. I am optimistic. That i just mentioned in your own book, you have come up with a new future scenario, i dont want to spoil it here, in which the deep fake is sophisticated enough to fool a lot of people in the short term and actually doesnt matter to the purposes of the figure whether forensic evidence comes along thereafter whether or not it can be true. Theyve achieved their goal simply by causing people to believe it believe it might be possible. Even just for a few minutes that is the problem that isnt solved, my friend we met i was thinking about that problem in the paladin and the conclusion ive come to, you tell me if i am being naive here, in this world where it is so easy to manipulate and create false information that appears to be real, the value of the truth, no quotation marks, the truth, reliable action, information and Securities Market you can use and our political case, the value of that truth will become much greater and people will pay more attention because it is so important. It gives me hope that the market for what we do as journalists, analysts is going to be greater because people are going to die if they keep drinking poisonous formation. The second question, i would like to ask both of you to answer. We wonder whether technology companies, especially like google and facebook, should be more responsive, more reliable for the truth or falsity of what they put on their site. As an argument that facebook should be like the Washington Post. If somebody says thats not true, our paper can be sued. Because they published it. Should that apply as well a social Media Company like facebook, which will have to be liable, what you think . Thats an interesting question. There two issues among probably many others, that come to mind for me. One, these Internet Companies have vigorously resisted that for regal and regulatory reasons. Their public utility, essentially a neutral conveyor of information, you dont hold phone companies reliable for the fact that people make telephone calls or say untrue things or make damaging forms of speech, that is the place they want to be for legal and regulatory reasons. If you asked them as facebook says, it does not want to be an arbiter of truth, you have to imagine how it can be done at scale well over 1 billion users and cognos how many posts each day, how could they possibly do that for all that many things . Yes, they are deliberately promoting content in order to keep us for ten seconds longer on a page is viable for them for their advertising. Their algorithms take the most extreme content that gets a rise out of people and promotes them and sells ads against it so you want them to be much more responsible when they use that. Same thing with youtube, clicking about the subject and next thing you know, you are watching videos that are more and more insightful and extreme and then youre locked into a pattern in which there is interactive processes. Thomas, im going to ask you to wrap up terrific discussion by taking your role of this information and put your camera back, 20 years from now, how we will look back on this. We been living through, this enormous uproar over disinformation in the 2016 election, we look back and see this as the beginning of a problem, weve never found a way to deal with this or will be, over time, get more sophisticated or cynical and not be as disruptive . Especially for anybody doing historical work, be very cautious about this. The situation right now though, the two overarching cards that i am really concerned about now are unrelated to russian interference. The first one is the current administration, the president himself laying the groundwork for calling the constituency of the 2020 election immediately afterwards. And he is not alone in preparing this. Combine that with a potential second wave of covid19 hitting us exactly during that timeframe in october and november when this will happen, which in some way will, or could have the argument that the election was not legitimate because of the voting in public. So that is a scary situation. The situation however, trying to be optimistic on the immigrant side, covid in some ways, celebrating, as twitter and the way twitter has handled this information, even coming from the president himself, they took action because now it is not just an ideological argument whether it should be somehow curtailed, now it is a question of his information becoming lethal. If you think covid is a hoax, you have a Family Gathering and a few weeks later, your brotherinlaw dies, that is going to change your perspective in a way ideological conversation on social media never would and we see stories like that coming up. Covid, in a way, is what you make yourself, the value of this information trials is reliable in the face of misinformation. Its the extraordinary cost of getting information. On that information of the privacy of facts, i think it is a good time for us to conclude that composition. I want to thank our two superb authors, dark near is a unique exploration of what the future of surveillance in america is in their active measures the history of this information in the, the basis of what we see in politics that i have ever met. I am author of a novel, we want to thank the National Book festival, americas ingenuity, i think we have a pretty good dose of the techno version of that as our two authors help walk our way through some of the biggest issues of 2020. So thanks very much and we hope to continue. You are watching tv on cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today how your code is provided. , we are featuring tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend cspan2. Tonight we focus on history. First, john hocking explores black women to win the right to vote. David david provides a history of the first Wheelchair Basketball Team comprised of world war ii veterans