Transcripts For CSPAN Congressional Relations 20141214

I think both broad and domestically they are not going to forecast what we are going to be going through as we are traveling home to see loved ones but we are on high alert. Mostly abroad. I think there was significant concerns in thailand, pakistan but, thats the world were living in. Wonder, but at some point that is part of it but when will the enhanced threat end. This is something for the long term. Well, thank you both for being. Tomorrow, a federal budget analysis. That will be part of the discussion hosted by the brookings institution. That is live at 9 30 a. M. Eastern on cspan three. 3. We were also have live coverage it later in the day from the Economic Club of washington dc. That is live at 7 00 here on. Span next, Edward Snowden talks about government surveillance. He also discusses the recent Senate Report. This is from a conference on privacy and Civil Liberties posted by the Cato Institute. This is one hour. While we arrange for him to be able to be heard and to hear us, we want to set up we have had a year of disclosures that have ignited it debate. So the question is for someone who has paid an extraordinary price, surrendered a fairly comfortable life, do you feel satisfied with what youve seen, how this is unfolding . Youve seen major legislation proposed, nothing yet passed, weve seen a president ial directive. Are you satisfied with the reaction youve had . First of all i want to confirm, can everyone hear me . Yes. Yes. Hello. Great. Okay. Thanks. Apologize there. I am broadly satisfied with whats happened in the last year. We have seen an extraordinary change in Public Awareness. We have seen an increased openness. I would say innovative spirit in government, not by choice, but by necessity. I believe we had bob lits speaking earlier, which was great. He mentioned theyll be more transparent in the future because they recognize these policies of over classification, over secrecy, are not helpful and, in fact, are damaging. I think we should really scrutinize the value not just of the governments, shall we say, improvement, and not just the encouraging moves were seeing around the world in the court systems. A number of panelists have spoken about the beneficial things were seeing in the United States court system. The First Federal court system, or the first open federal courts review programs found theyre unlikely theyre likely unconstitutional. The European Court justices struck down the european version of sort of a smith v. Maryland. Said the Data Retention directive is unallowable, a fundamental vile rights. Weve seen the United Nations issue reports that mass surveillance is not permissible under any circumstances. It is necessarily a contradiction of our fundamental values and it is an inherent violation of rights. We see a lot of things like that. But beyond that we see the real change thats happening is actually occurring outside of court, outside of congress, outside of the executive agencies entirely, and this is happening through things Like Technology companies. Let me actually make sure that ive i can see these right. What weve seen are things on the technological side, sort of in the fabric of the internet, where immediately upon the Public Awareness of the problem, technologists, academics, engineers around the world all came together and went, this is a serious concern. And how do we address this . How do we solve these problems . How do we make sure we dont have to deal with this in the future . We see that individuals as well are taking action, taking steps to try to retrieve their rights that have been sort of unnecessarily taken out of their hands, out of their domain. This is a poll done by a canadian group. They dont really have a dog in the fight. They got a representative sample of Internet Users around the world and they found that 60 had sort of heard of the revelations of last year. Of those 60 , 39 of those had taken active steps to improve the security of their privacy of communications online. And it was interesting how the media interpreted this. Because they said, well, this is a minority. People must not care that much. Nobody is really making changes. But when youre actually doing the math on what 39 of 60 of the worlds global Internet Users is, thats 702 Million People around the world who are now safer today than they were just a year and a half ago. And this is i think really where we begin to see the framework of how we can move forward in the absence of political reform, in the absence of legal reform, and this is good. Because what weve seen politically around the world throughout the development in history is that politics is about power. When you have people in great power positions, when you have super states, they will not cede any sort of authority that theyve claimed back to the public, back to civil society, unless they are afraid of a more undercutting alternative. And this is really what is setting us up to really have a sort of renaissance of security and of liberty in the way we associate, the way we speak, the way reresearch online. Its critical. When we think about reforms, we think about the challenges, these are big picture problems, but at the same time these are only the things happening within the United States. And the policies of the National Security agency and Central Intelligence agency and the f. B. I. , as bad as theyve been in regard to respecting the boundaries foundations of our rights, they are good relative to many governments around the world. So we have to think about not just how to protect the rights of americans, but protect the rights of individuals around the world who live under regimes who are much less liberal and much more authoritarian. The only way we can do that is to ensure that there are International Standards that are well agreed upon as to what behavior is proper and improper. We have court mechanisms that can enforce these and, ultimately, fundamentally, we can enforce these through technology on the basis of all of this i would say im tremendously satisfied. Julia . Sandisk corporation well, hello. It is great to meet you, because you did a great job of marketing my book for me. I was already half way through writing it when your revelations came out, and i benefited greatly from that, so thank you. Also, i want to say one other thing. I dont know if anyone has seen citizen four but in case you were not convinced that Edward Snowden was great, appearing in your bathrobe is really a brave move in a documentary film, so if you havent seen it, there is a bathrobe scene. At any rate entirely unflattering. You know, everyone makes their own choice about that. We could have a bathrobe up or down vote, you know. So, you know, im a huge fan of encryption and i try to use as much encryption as possible. I think that youre right that there is a renaissance of encryption programs going on. But i am concerned about an arms race. So if i, a citizen, am trying to beat huge agencies trying to defeat my encryption and im trying to keep one step ahead of them, i feel this is something where im under funded. Right . Im concerned that im not going to win that. I think we have some evidence, actually, that the arms race is escalating. I would point to one thing that really disturbs me which is weve seen a lot more spy tactics that involve spoofing, we saw the d. E. A. Spoofing a facebook page. We saw the f. B. I. Spoofing an Associated Press article. We saw the n. S. A. Spoofing a linkedin page. Weve seen commercial hacking companies spoofing adobe updates. And so i would like to hear what you have to say about, can we win this race in a world where we might not be able to trust the contents that we see in front of us . Are we going to enter a world we cant authenticate anything we see online . This is a real challenge. Computer security is a field rapidly expanding i think much more so than almost any other academic discipline. It is a fertile field. Computers are so fundamentally insecure today it is impossible to rely on them and trust them fully. Many reasons i was successful is i did not have to rely on any particular computer or communication. This is not a world we want. This is the reason were having the debate and people are fighting in countries around the world to push back against this kind of evasiveness, this kind of truth in policies, also the state of play in terms of our security around the world. Now, there are a number of business interests that have been referenced by some of the other panelists. The representative from the aclu, matt greene, john hopkins professor, and many others who referenced the fact that there are commercial incentives today to find vulnerabilities, weaknesses in our system. And rather than work to fix those, rather than work to secure our systems, they actually leave those open. They will sell them to the highest bidder and use those to enable the exact kind of masquerade attacks, spoofing attacks, phishing attacks you are describing. More concerningly, we see agencies of government, for example, the National Security agency, which has secured the name, actually using this same paradigm to weaken our own infrastructure. Weve seen them go to bodies and spy on them and look for vulnerabilities and rather than fix those standards, rather than correct those flaws, they leave them in to try to exploit them and in other cases look at where they can introduce them to make them less secure overall in certain vulnerabilities where they did not exist before so they could exploit them and gain access. We can understand the intentions for why they might want to seek to do this. It would give them access in novel places, places previously denied, but at the same time the same vulnerabilities can be used against the American Government, american people, allies and other citizens around the world. But also in our products and services. Google has had a pretty big presence here. Its not just about google. It is about every American Service around the world and product. If were creating phones that have inherent insecurities, were creating flaws in our standards and protocols that every interoperable system relies upon, were weakening the basis of our modern economy, because america relies more on the internet for productivity, for trade, for economic gain and comparative advantage than any other nation on earth and, yes, it may give us some sort of comparative advantage in spying on china, once they discover it, theyll be able to use the same thing against us and even if not them, even if its latin america, russia, france, and they begin to do the same thing, we quickly learn that being able to spy on other country, particularly based on how we restrict the uses of the product of intelligence, for example, the American Government is very fond of saying recently that we dont give economic secrets to private companies, we find out that the benefit of having secrets on other countries is worth less than the benefit they gain from knowing ours because we put more into research and Development Efforts than other countries do comparatively. We put more into education and research than other countries do. We put more in military spending than other countries do. So if everyone is insecure at an equal level we dont benefit because we have the best spy agency. We actually lose because we are more reliant on security than everyone else. Edward, you alluded to and julia was alluding to also the spoofing and the sort of suite of malware tools collectively referred to as quantum. One of the stories that flow from your disclosures that i found most troubling was related to that and the idea of a system apparently called turbine that is delivering these in an automated way, to think of it very crudely, an a. I. For hacking that lives on the internet backbone and pushes out malware to thousands and potentially hundreds of thousands of target computers, categories of target computers and the goal is to eventually be able to sort of automatically compromise millions of computers around the world. That was i was surprised at sort of how little i dont know if anyone here is aware of turbine, i guess this is not a representative audience but i dont know how many people heard that before. It seems like of all of this sort of stunning stuff, people have heard a fair amount about the telephony program and maybe something about prism but a lot of the other stuff, i guess im surprised that it hasnt gone as much hasnt gotten as much attention as the earlier disclosures. Im wondering what the what have you thought deserved a few more stories and hasnt gotten that much attention and what bothers you most . Right. This could go on for days as opposed to the short time we have here but really what youre touching on is a fundamental problem that we discussed earlier. Weve got a few representatives in congress trying to protect and promote the interests of millions of americans, but the classification authorities who provide the clearances, offices like the d. N. I. , say their staff cant be cleared. This is problematic because people in d. N. I. , people at c. I. A. , at the n. S. A. , say i wish i had this and that. Id want a private secretary, too. They dont represent millions of people. They represent small agencies. The same dynamic happens with the press. We have a few editors, a few reporters who are not grounded. They dont have a background in technology. They dont have ph. Ds in computer science. They dont know what stories matter and which dont. In technical reporting, in main stream news at the new york times, the Washington Post, its incredibly a modern thing. This hasnt happened before. So one of the reasons we dont see the media real keen on stories that are of critical importance, is because they dont realize they are of critical importance. And because of this, were increasingly reliant on the Technical Community to kind of do this for us and represent us. Now, this is increasing the dangers over time i believe because what we see is an increasingly disempowered citizen class and even in politics, because they have no idea what is going on that matters and an increasing empowerment of people who have sort of an elite, technological diversity. I think this is dangerous over time because you will see a concentration of power around small groups, small individuals, who can increasingly Impact Society in greater and greater ways. I, personally, am an example of this. Im not the worlds expert in technology but because i was where i was, because i saw massive crimes against the constitution happening on an unprecedented scale, and i had the technological skills and capability to do something about it, i was able to change the conversation in a way, make some small contribution to the public that has really had an outside impact. We do not want our government to rely on this model because that relies on the actions of the individuals. This is inherently dangerous. Back to the basic question, stories that have been overlooked, one of the very significant stories is the fact that all of this information were collecting in bulk, bulk collection, the governments euphemism for mass surveillance, the unreasonable seizure that is forbidden by the fourth amendment, these programs, mass collection, the 215s and what not, the n. S. A. And so forth assert this is okay because they apply what is called minimalization. They say if we see youre a u. S. Citizen well remove your name and replace it with a pseudonym. We will take measures like this and say an analyst cant target the u. S. Citizen though we can target and read all of your information. We cant look at you. We have to look at who youre talking to. That kind of thing. But this is not done when were sharing this with overseas allies in many cases. There was a story that was run i believe last year, late last year, that showed that we were sharing unminimized information that included information on u. S. Political figures, on judges, on officials across the spectrum, private industry, private businesses, private individuals, their private records were being shared en masse with israel. This did not get a lot of play in the Mainstream Press in the u. S. In the new york times, the later investigated this and said why. This is a story of public importance. There wasnt a really satisfactory answer. One of the editors previously worked for the l. A. Times and also sat on this story. We also saw a story last year in the Huffington Post that found that the National Security Agency Documents reflected that they were intercepting, collecting, and planning to use information on individuals pornography habits to discredit them in their communities and in public on the basis of the political views they held. Now, these individuals were islamists. Their politics were considered radical. So we can understand why this sort of interest would be there. But it also said these individuals were not suspected to be associated with violence. These were not actually terrorists. These were people who on the basis of secret judgments made by a secret agency with no public oversight and with no authorizing legislation had decided that a certain brand of political viewpoints would authorize the intrusive monitoring collection and eventual disbursement of your private records related to your sexual activities. This is a fundamentally unamerican thing. We have to ask ourselves, why do we allow this in the first place . Okay. Maybe mistakes were made. But how do we i think this follows to a fundamental point. I dont want to be on bob. He came to the forum. He is kind of what weve got. He is doing a hard job. We all know he is trying to do his best. He said something fundamentally concerning in regards to false testimony of james clapper. He said, that the real problem was not that the most senior official in the United States Intelligence Community committed a crime in front of congress. It doesnt have to be perjury or a willful lie. Giving a false statement to congress in itself, providing false testimony, is also a crime under u. S. C. 1001. I believe u. S. C. 181001. That false statement is itself a crime. He was not concerned about the crime and he was not concerned about the impact this had on the public. He was concerned that the question had been asked at all. This kind of paucity of concern for the publics role in the function of American Government is a real danger. And i hope that this is, you know, he spoke quickly and that was not a representation of his true intent. The reality is we see this consistently and it becomes increasingly concerning, this incautious language that causes them to lose credibility, causes us to lose faith in the institutions of government upon which americans must rely. He said something such as, it is indisputeable that the exposures of last year caused damage. That terrorists changed their communications and we lost reporting as a result of the leaks. But the evidence on the Public Record shows this ness fact not the case. It is entirely contrary. There is no evidence on record that this has been caused a is a result of the disclosures made last year. I do believe him when he asserts that, you know, some sources of intelligence have gone dark. Some taps we had up are no longer functional but this is part to the process of signals intelligence processing. People change their route of communication all the time. As anyone knows the correlation did not imply we also know from the evidence on record there is no reason to suspect causation in the first place and there is actually no evidence for a correlation at all. Al qaedas methods changed in the same rate in the same manner in the last year they had in the years past. The only study that had ever shown anything contrary was actually done by a contractor that is funded by the Central Intelligence Agency Investment arm. And so we need to be careful about these kinds of things and the representations they make. It is entirely in dispute that damage has been caused at all but the benefits of this are not in dispute. In fact, the director of national intelligence, himself, argues that it is necessarily in the Public Interest to know about these policies about these processes and the fact they should not have been classified in the first place and the justifications being made to disclose these. How can it be we use the language of indisputeable we havent reaped the benefits. The answer is politics and their understanding. This is a community that feels itself under threat but this is unnecessary. If they were more open we wouldnt have these problems in the first place. What happened last year was preventable. It was avoidable in the same way that the torture program, itself, was avoidable. I mean, one of the things that was not well understood in the torture program was that individuals throughout the Central Intelligence agency and other factions in the government knew these programs were wrong. On both a moral basis and a legal basis and they raised concerns about it. The second bullet point shows people were concerned about how long it went on for and the third bullet point shows that individuals were actually brought to tears as a result of being confronted with the reality of these programs. Others were transferred away. Others said, you know, prepare for something thats never been seen previously. This is unprecedented. And what is the response to this . These were within the agency who raised concerns. As this shows it went into official paperwork which is extraordinary at the c. I. A. Having worked there the only things that go into official cable traffic are things coordinated on and agreed upon by a number of individuals. Only the chief of station has release authority. The analysts write the report, the officers write the report, then they send it to their superior and his superior who talks to the round table about it and then it finally goes out. They were questioning not just the legality but the utility. The questions were rejected, buried, and the head of the Counterterrorism Program said that these things, these concerns need to stop being put in official cable traffic, stop being put on the official record. They need to be buried because such language is not helpful. I think these are the things we as society need to think about how do we correct . How do rerestructure the incentives to ensure that when individuals have these serious concerns, when we see clearly unlawful activities occurring as is still the case today, regardless of the justifications being put forth by this, that, or the other, when you look at them on their face and they are clearly at least in dispute as to leality how can we ensure they are protected and these decisions be made not behind closed doors but in public . Because you mention that, it occurs to me before we move to the questions from the audience, might give you an opportunity to direct a comment to maybe a couple members of our audience since you talked about what you regarded as illegality and the importance of mechanisms to correct for that and we have Sharon Weber Franklin from the board which is one such mechanism. While they took a fairly dim view of the 215 telephony metadata program, the 702 authority used for prism, and upstream collections, the sort of general warrants that involve a single authorization and then tens of thousands of targets, oversees the task at the analysts discretion, and were base they were basically satisfied with how that was being used and it seemed not to be used in an abusive way, i wonder if you were comforted looking at the findings of the board or if you think that perhaps they neglected something, something that you sort of suggest they take another look at . Look at . It is a challenging question because i have personally use the 702 authority in targeting and i believe the conclusions of the board specifically in regard to the values, the productivity of the program, are accurate. It is an extraordinarily invasive authority and it does allow you to get incredible intelligence when used in a certain way. The real danger because when we saw the response to the 702 done it was universely by anybody with any kind of peripheral connection with any Civil Liberties experience, they looked at it on a target basis where you look at individuals already suspected to have some nexus to this, that, or the other, particularly the prism type of authorities where youre requesting content from a private entity. They werent looking at the mass applications. They werent looking, for ample, at the upswing of the authority in the way they should have. Because that is where the real danger is. There are very few people who contest we should not be able to pursue investigations using almost anything, against individuals where you can get a judge to sign a tickized warrant. Benjamin witty earlier basically argued should we have legislators involved, should we have public rules about the way we apply our surveillance capabilities . Because Vladimir Putin might know about it. I say, yes. Because there is no court in the world, no court outside of russia, who would not go this individual is an agent of the foreperson government. I mean, hes the head of the government. Of course they will say this guy has some kind of foreign intelligence value. Well sign a warrant. If we know about the authorities and how theyre used, there is no problem whether theyre public or private because he cant sort of hide in the noise. We know whoa is and what his capabilities are. There is some argument to be made this is not the case with terrorists, but we have also seen that mass surveillance is not beneficial in the context f terrorism. All of this 215 collection, all of this internet collection, all of this stuff happening with retrospective search where we can go through gmail boxes, or go to facebook and say i want to see ev contact, the pictures, every i. P. Address you ever checked in at, every device you ever used, all of these things, they did not stop the Boston Marathon bombings. In fact, they may have contributed to causing them because they gave us a false sense of security and made us think these individuals were not associated with terrorism despite the fact that we had intelligence from human sources including actually from the russians who saw this guy going into chechnya and saw this guy associating with terrorists, known terrorists, and said, hey, you might want to take a look at this guy. We didnt do a good job. The same thing overseas. Mass surveillance didnt stop the london bombings, the madrid bombings. Mass surveillance has no proven track record and should not be part of our policy. It should not be pursued. It should not be funded, because it takes resources away from things, methods and mechanisms of investigation that we know work. And that we know are effective. This is a very timely analog to the torture case. We know that rapport building in interrogations work. E know that becoming friends with these people and saying, basically, the interrogator is your advocate against your captors works. In all of the intelligence we got from the program that was beneficial, it was gained before we applied torture techniques. Yet, we did it anyway. We funded it to the tune of millions of dollars. All of these individuals and all of these officials have never been held to account for what are unambiguous war crimes. I want to i want to ask julia if she has a last question before we turn to audience questions. I want to challenge you on two things just because i have to stand up for journalists. Some of us do have some technical skills. I built a team at the wall street journal that had two technologists working full time, so i agree thats not always true in every newsroom. I just felt i needed to raise a flag for journalists. I guess that leads me to sort of another question, which is that i think that the decisions that are made about publishing these stories are in the hands of a few people, and you, yourself, might not agree always, right, with what choices are made. Right. I wonder if going back you think to yourself, maybe i should have sat and sifted through more carefully before handing over or do you feel that maybe there just needs to be a wider array of technically capable journalists . I just wonder if you could design the optimal system, where would it land . You know, i dont want to go back and second guess the reporting in hindsight. We can look at the record and see that harms have been mitigated if harms do exist. They are minimal. There has been no evidence of the record despite incredible incentives to show lives lost, but caused that occurred there is always the chance this could have been done better. I cant say i made no mistakes. This was perfect. What i can say is i was very advice. D about my own i evaluated all of the things coming out because i believed it was in the Public Interest to know these things, that these programs went too far and had constitutional implications and the government shouldnt have assumed for itself these authorities behind closed doors without a public debate because they were limiting boundaries of rights. However, it is an issue i am passionate about. I recognize that i could be drawing the lines in a radically different way than what could be considered Public Interest. It is for this reason i worked with journalistic institutions and demanded that they coordinate with the government and give the government a chance to comment and say, this could cause unnecessary harm if published this way. If you redact this sentence, thats mitigated. To address those concerns and allow them to draw the lanes. I pleasing by creating that system of checks and balances which was intentionally done that that was really the only thing i could have done. There is no way, sitting back when i was where i was sort of operating with only the benefit of one brain and no debate partners on this, how i could ensure that we could get the best possible outcome. Im not sure we have the best possible outcome of all worlds, but i think its pretty clear the pub hick globally agrees this has worked out relatively well. Should we start with audience questions . There are a bunch of them about sort of how they can protect themselves. We are having a Wonderful Party after this event. Thanks. I dont think edward will be able to join us due to tech support. [ laughter] you never know. I think that actually it would be really interesting, you know, we had two representatives from google here. I think it would be interesting to hear if there were like the top three things you would tell google that they should do to make all of us more secure. Actually the fact that each one of us is going to be less effective at doing it than if they do something for everybody, or apple. So i thought maybe you could address it in a broader way, which is, what are the things that should be done to secure the internet. We have microsoft in the room, as well. Fplg sorry. Your wish list for google and microsoft. So the first thing that i would say is, google actually needs to stand in solidarity with a competitor here and get on the same page with apple and say were going to encrypt our phones. I believe the reason they havent done this so far though they dont want to discuss it publicly is because the benchmarks on their phones that have encryption enabled show there is a pretty significant performance impact because they have some kind of driver problem or crappy hardware on the given model phone, whatever. Really, we need to take a standard here that goes the government does not have a mandate to say what corporations can and cannot do to protect the quality of their products and services. If google is not going to take a position on leadership in the way apple is doing here and say that the one thing you can do is when we sell you a device, the device, itself, is going to be secure even if we cant guarantee the things that happen off the device. They really have no place in the selling of the hardware. This has really got to be the standard moving forward. Sort of the counterargument there i have to point out is i forget how they represented themselves in their introduction, sort of the unrepentant status which is to prevent Law Enforcement guys, i actually worked against chinese hackers. That is a complete fiction. What someone said previously, its not going to be about compelled disclosure but about using exploitation using actual remote exploitation, basically flaws in services, flaws in websites, flaws in devices. For judges to say, i think, i suspect this is the direct were going and will be the debate as well, for the government to say, in this particular case we will authorize you to commit a criminal act, hacking into this device, for the purpose of a limited investigation, which is analogous to the way they tell police, we would grant you a warrant to do sneakandpeek on this house or to kick in the door and search it. I think thats the biggest thing. Beyond that we need to end encryption which google is well on its way to doing but many others around the internet need to do this. They need to commit to guaranteeing that they will protect these certificates that protect sort of their their these sort of communications. Eric schmidt made a reference to sort of 28bit encryption certificates. This is for the little lock icon you see on your browser. If the government or any government or criminal group or adversary can gain access to this certificate suddenly that encryption is meaningless. If they commit to saying, all right. Well make best efforts to protect this within our network to make sure its not hacked. They also need to say, if we receive a secret order from any government, any jurisdiction, we will fight this publicly to the highest court of appeals to prevent that. I think those are really the obvious best steps that are relatively low effort. So let me ask because you talked about technical solutions. It seems like in the background of this is that while you may be optimistic on the whole, you dont seem very sanguine about the prospects for productive political change. We have a question on twitter from sarah. Its particularly about hr4681. I dont know whether youve looked at the intel authorization but really just talking about that legalizing aspects of some of the programs you revealed. In case you havent studied that specifically, let me broaden that a little bit and say, is there legislation that u looked at that you feel is helpful or moving the ball in the right way . Or we have, you know, certain folks like marcy wheeler, who while a lot of people are supporting the u. S. A. Freedom act believed it in fact locked in some of the very programs that it was trying to reform. Obviously, this is rand pauls stated reason for nonvoting for that, for that bill. I wonder if you could give us a kind of quick take on the legislative developments. Youve got section 309 which some could read to be providing sort of a legislative halo, sort of a congressional recognition of eo12333. That is an authority that only exists on an old piece of paper. It basically says you can do ever whatever you want overseas. Dont sweat it. If its not happening over there its fine. The problem with that authority is it actually collects American Communications as well because of the global internet, of course. Our communications go to for example googles data centers outside our borders and then they bounce back and come to us. So the nass has in the past sort of authority to do an end run around congress and collect information about americans although theyll say it was not targeted, of course, that did not need to be reported because eo12333 is not required. There is no congressional reporting requirement on how its applied because its not provided through the legislature. But we do have, you know, again, mr. Lit from the d. N. I. , who has said on the record and i hope everybody makes a historical footnote of this, that there was no legislative intent in providing that kind of halo. So if, you know, we were to have any faith in our institutions we have to assume and that e accepted his statements can be accepted and relied upon. If that is the case, lets go with that. Maybe lets just restrict the activity. Beyond that as far as reform legislation, weve got a lot of reforms out there which are good ideas and they make small steps. But we dont have anything that really solves the problem. Were looking at kind of baby steps reform. This is fine. Weve got to start somewhere. Weve got to build some momentum. We really need to, if i can suggest something radical here for a minute, we need to think more broadly about the kind of guarantees and process protections we want to enjoy in regard to our rights, in regard to our access to courts, in regard to our ability to challenge evidence thats not just used against us in court but gathered for use against us within agencies through some kind of means. You know, we have to have some way to provide for redress of grievances, which today do not exist. And could we actually take any bigger step back and go, all right. We have intelligence agencies but where were these intelligence agencies born . They were born in times of tal war, in world wars, in contests between super powers. They were intended to exist for particularized reasons for what everyone would imagine is a limited period of time until they would eventually be demobilized. Now, anybody who understands government knows this never happens once we institute an agency we never shut it down unless there is some kind of scandal and it cant be avoided. Particularly in the context of state security agencies, spy agencies, do we really need them . Are they a product of developing societies, developing government, developing civilizations that can be replaced by our methods of Law Enforcement . When we talked about, for example, earlier ben wittys reference to Vladimir Putin, do we really need the n. S. A. And a secret court to say, hey, well wire tap putin . Or is it easy enough to get any judge to sign that warrant . I dont think we need a special mechanism to provide for targeted wiretaps for targeted efforts to gain intelligence related to a particularized investigation. Its not far from me to say we could provide for legislation that affords that outside of secret organizations that inevitably push the line beyond what the public would agree with. Thats thinking outside the box. You know, im just kind of thinking out loud because i wasnt expecting the question. But why not . We have probably the most Law Enforcement funding of any government around the world just as we have the greatest military funding. Weve got tanks driving around ferguson. We have sting rays flagg above new york city and other places collecting all of our movements. We have license plate readers, ez passes tracking individuals communications en masse and providing for retrospective searching where Police Departments can go, hey, where was this guy march of last year . That is an intelligence power. You know . When our police are capable of things that other countries spy agencies arent capable of, we need to start asking questions about what utility is unique to our spy agencies that cannot be provided through transparent public legislation. Let me, i guess, chase one idea you talked about. The inevitable misuse capabilities. A couple questions along the lines of it doesnt seem as though weve gone i mean, there is some disturbing revelation in there that youve disclosed, but it doesnt look like we see the kind of real hoover level, you know, trying to drive Martin Luther king to suicide, you know, really targeting peaceful protesters, stuff that, not just is disturbing because of the scale of what theyre collecting but the way its being used in a sort of obviously antidemocratic way. Is it that you do you think that in fact there are uses we should be worried about in addition to the collection . Or is it more that youre prospectively worried the architecture is so fearsome that even if its not being misused now the damage if it were to be misused would be so much greater . Well, one of the arguments i would make is first off remember i worked at n. S. A. I worked at c. I. A. Both of these are outward facing organizations. Cointel pro, the attempts to get Martin Luther king to commit suicide, these were by the f. B. I. , the inward facing agency. As so many guests mentioned today we have very little insight into how theyre operating and we dont have any perspective, oversight, even at the level of the d. N. I. Into how to manage this. Beyond that, let me argue by anecdote and provide some data. Just two days ago, a report was released that the Central Intelligence agency tortured at least one man to death. He died after being tortured, chained to a concrete floor without pants apparently and froze to death. Beyond that, 29 other more individuals disappeared. Now, i worked at the c. I. A. , and i can tell you nothing happens there without, you know, people making a record, without people making note about it, without people picking up the phone and coordinating. 29 people do not disappear from a secret government torture program without any records. So we dont know what happened to them. Away ow, maybe they ran and disappeared off into the forest and are living a happy life now. We can hope for that, but the reality is much more sinister. When we look at the, i should say the probability is much more sinister. The other things, rectal feeding, rectal rehydration, weve had physicians say these are not medical procedures that have any indication for use on anyone anywhere yet we were using them for what they said increased, it had the ancillary benefit of increasing compliance. If you think these things are not related to trying to get someone to commit suicide but not actually torturing them to eath, i would have to question not you personally but in a general way. Beyond that when we talk about scale and scope and domestic abuses let me provide another data point and actually credit the wall street journal here, who i have not worked with, but they reported a story very recently that found that we were using sort of these sting ray type devices that have been they basically ingest any signals that emanate over certain radio frequencies. That means your cellular phones, that means wireless cards on your laptops, that means, you know, certain kinds of smart cards and things like that, though smart cards probably cant be heard from up in the air, and they correlate these to the device identifiers. Then we simply did a little searching to coordinate the device identifier with the user name that you log in to, say, your itunes account or, you know, your google account and suddenly we know who owns that phone. Now, we can then correlate this really briefly with going, all right. We got a plane circling over this level and it hears this song. At this point in the transit, this point in the transit. Youve got a point you can triangulate location. You can index that location. This is actually a very of ressible, small amount data to allow them to create a comprehensive index of movement of not just a target individual t by necessity nor to have the data set to get the annal itics to work they have the data set of everyone carrying a phone, within these cities. You go, okay. These have surely got to be exceptional authorities. Maybe theyre only used in certain ways. But where did it come from in the first place . What is the grounding for using this for the d. O. J. Operating this program domestically in the United States, which is the case today . Thats the story the wall street journal broke. When we look at where it came from, we see that it was actually broken in a story by the intercept earlier this year, a program called shenanigans, incredibly. I cant imagine who chose that code. [ laughter]. They call it shenanigans. This is a program putting these sort of sting rays on someone, actually called a drt box, putting it on a phone and using these things in yemen to target the drone program. They try to figure out where this phone is and then they shoot a missile at it. Thats what this program is developed for. It was an extraordinary authority. It was being used overseas allegedly against terrorists. And yet we saw within the span of just a few years without any Public Awareness, without any fight in congress, without any authorizing legislation, now its being operated in the United States on common criminals that are not threatening the existence of our society. How can this possibly be justified without the involvement of the public in some way in some manner . And as was mentioned previously, these programs are not briefed to all members of congress. When we talk about sort of these covert programs, these black programs, missile trikes, drone strikes, were relying on a very small group of people. You know, theyre called a gang of eight and so forth. Even when we expand this to the Intelligence Community, the incentives are entirely wrong for them to represent the Public Interest because everyone sitting on the Intelligence Community, even opponents of the agencies receive twice as much in terms of Campaign Donations from defense contractors, from people seeking business with the n. S. A. , from the c. I. A. , and so forth. Than any other member of congress. So they have every incentive to approve the programs, to maintain their own chairs, their own seats as to hold people who are asking for them and authorizing them to account of the law. We need to think about how we can fix these structures and fix and provide for mechanisms that will prevent this in the future. Maybe this is a yes or no but im wondering in sort of the mirror universe where there is evil Edward Snowden who is motivated not to disclose things for because its in the Public Interest but because they want to help one Political Party and hurt the other, lets say, could evil Edward Snowden have targeted someone for those political purposes and gotten, you think your evil counterpart could get away with that . Absolutely. I mean, its no secret. Here we are sitting in, you know, i dont know, december, 2014. The n. S. A. Still says, and asks in public under congressional oath and everything like that, what did he get, referring to me. They still dont know. If their auditing is so poor that after a year navel and a half of investigation and god knows how many man hours, how many forensic professionals they brought in, they cant tell what happened with an individual who like myself was not trying to cover his tracks, whats going to happen when they have an individual in a position of access who is trying to stay under the radar, who is trying to abuse the system, who is trying to use sort of these incredible authorities, these exceptional powers for the benefit of themselves, their class, their group, their own interest . Today there is no protection against that and that is an incredibly dangerous, oncerning problem. I think we have time for one last question and there are so many people who want to know about your personal life. Ill combine them into one last question. Do you expect to return to the u. S. . I think you said yes. Do you like wine . I think you said you dont drink wine. I would like to know why you chose the name sit zen four and you mentioned in your new Yorker Interview youre working on a tool you might offer journalists in dangerous areas. I wondered if you could update s on that. Combine those into one. Thats a lot. It is my goal to return to the United States. Unfortunately, there are no provisions under the mechanisms, the charges leveled against me, for a fair trial. That provides some challenges. I am constantly working with the government to see if we can do this in a manner that serves the public good. Unfortunately, everything weve heard implies they want to basically use me to scare everybody in the world out of has a ing the public say in the federal government. Obviously that is something ill never agree with. There is work to be done but things are changing all the time and the government is becoming more open. Who knows what the future holds . Internationally it is becoming more and more clear as well as in the United States as no harm surfaced that i never should have had to do this in the first place. So well see. Second thing was do i drink . No i dont drink. Ive never been drunk. Its not a religious thing or ideological thing. I just dont like the way it tastes. Citizen four, im neither the first nor the last. When i was thinking about that i used a number of synonyms then but the point that i wanted to reflect was that this is a tradition in the history of society. You know, people have to put themselves on the line. People have to take risks. Citizens have not just an interest but an obligation in not just believing in the truth but standing for it and challenging the government when it goes too far. If we see our constitution being violated on a massive scale and we have been demanded by our own government, by these officials to swear an oath that we will protect that constitution against all enemies not just foreign but domestic as well, we have a duty to stand up and do something about it. I try to do my best to do that. And i hope that others would do the same in the future. I hope well have no need for something as dramatic as weve seen the last year but well go from there. The last one i completely lost track of. Im not sure. Whether youre working on a tool to protect journalists and other right. Okay. That is still an area of active focus. Im doing a lot with the freedom of the press foundation, pursuing other venues as well. There are active projects im working on developing. Im beginning to develop in my thinking there which is we should not develop tools that are specific to we should develop tools targeted toward the general audience which provide value and serve everyone but they also take a specific interest in providing to protect the use cases. Because the issue is if we create a tool, i provide a tool tomorrow which says, all right, journalists. Your sources can communicate with you on this. Itll be bullet proof forever, its much more nuanced than that. It is a you suddenly stand out like a sore thumb when people are looking at the crowd. You know, when you look at the analysis of the mass surveillance systems, they go, all right. Who is using the communications signature of this one program that we know is associated with journalist sourced communications . I dont know who said it but it was said encryption makes you invisible to ordinary mortals but highly visible to the suddenly the n. S. A. Goes oh, man. Why is this person different . What is special going on . We see this as actually changing and normalizing the use of encryption which is why it is so important. We have to create an environment in which we provide a were hiding within the cracks. This is being done through efforts like torb, a very good program. I use it myself. I trusted my life to it and history shows it did work though it is not bullet proof. Hdbs for transactional things, basically what you use for your Bank Transactions online, all of this stuff has to happen. I will say one thing i have to point out that im a little disappointed in is amazon. Com still uses unencrypted communications. When you look at a copy of 1984 online or look for a book about community organizing, protesting, petitioning the government, wherever youre at, wherever that jurisdiction is, they can see what books youre looking at. This is an incredibly dangerous thing and morally irresponsible and as a business is problematic to allow this to continue when we know for a fact that they have the capability to provide for secure communications because as soon as you go to purchase that, as soon as money is involved, they turn it over to encrypted communications. I would hope amazon would take a position there and say, all right, guys. Weve waited too long. Flip and encrypt the world library. Something our friends from the Washington Post can convey. I would love to do this for another hour but we are at the end of our allotted time so i just want to thank you for both taking the time to talk to us and thank you for taking the to s you have that you inform the public. Applause] the Cato Institute also heard from google executive chair eric schmidt who talked about Data Collection by private companies and other issues pertaining to google and the tech industry. He is interviewed by the. Ashington post reporter google and seen other Big Companies do these encryption initiatives. There is a new wave of encryption though that doesnt have a front door where the government comes with a search warrant. The company doesnt even keep track of it. Apple has done this. Im curious what you think of these encryption initiatives that actually lock out the government entirely where the company cant open the door and im curious if well see that with any google products. Let me not preannounce any google products here but simply say that one of the its been known for a long time and we wrote this in our book that encryption in the hands of individuals is very empowering. Encryption is an incredibly powerful tool for Freedom Fighters in repressive regimes but also does allow people who are evil or nasty to communicate bilaterally. The good news is that these are systems are not that easy to use. We argue in the book and ill say again that youre probably winning when the evil person is using a cell phone. Because, trust me, those cell phones if youre trying to find them and youre a government and youre willing to look for them, you can find them. The cell phones emit where they are. And, indeed, this is how Osama Bin Laden was tracked down ultimately is through cell phone tapping according to the reports. So im not as sensitive to this argument that this is the only way to solve this problem. It is a fact, right, that powerful encryption has been around for, since 1975 when it was invented in the public system by hlman and because of, in my view, the overreach of, perhaps, well intentioned but ultimately flawed strategies, this encryption capability is becoming more and more available. And so do you like these kinds of services that actually are encrypted so thoroughly the companies, themselves, cant get into them . Is this a good idea or a terrible idea for the reasons you mentioned . Youre asking me sort of an emotional question as opposed to factual questions. Either one. The fact is that p. G. P. Awe thentcailings which is the kind of stuff youre talking about has been possible for many years. Right the thing that held it back has been Key Management, the ability to handle the keys. Because of what the government did, all of the services are getting a lot easier. So my opinion is that youll see more and more of these essentially proxied, cloaked, otherwise communication systems. Historically if you go back to the small towns of the world 200, 300 years ago there was no anonymity like that. And so you worry that that anonymity could be misused and you never want it to be misused. On the other hand, i would say that in every case, remember, the person who is doing this with a device, that itself can be followed or what have you, if they are a legitimate danger to society, if its an evil terrorist you can find that phone. It sounds like youd like to see the front door, the proper court door remain open. I have my own interest in the patriot act. Is it a secret court . I think one of the great strengths of america has been an independent court system, proper balance of rights in individuals and ill give you an example. Im not advocating thfment please dont say this. We can end essentially all very n this city in a short period of time except spur of the moment crime by massive surveillance. Now we should not do this. Other countries may choose to do that. The fact that you can do it, you can, for example, put cameras in every Street Corner and do face detection which is indeed what is happening in britain is not something we should do. But i can assure you itll affect price. You want to be careful about these tools. They can be very seriously misused and, again, so were clear that kind of mass surveillance is completely counter to what america is and counter to the american constitution. About a year ago after the snowden revelations the Washington Post polled on how people felt about surveillance and you will not be surprised to know 66 of americans expressed concern the n. S. A. Was over surveilling. We also polled on private companies and 69 of americans expressed concern that google was surveilling. Which we are not. But the good news is you can ask me and i can answer efinitively. You collect a lot of data. It shows up in the normal course of operations. You use that data for ads and your Business Model, fair . So for those americans that are concerned and in a way that is in roughly similar numbers, what can you say to them about google and the way private sector collection works . As a general statement i think that people are very concerned about privacy and i think that the recent illegal disclosures of personal information and photos, the sony attack, Jennifer Garner attacks, all that kind of stuff, heighten this sense there is this thing out of control and is dangerous. So the average person who i occasionally encounter, a normal person in my industry, sort of the normal person says i just dont understand this. Im worried about it. Why cant you get this fixed . Were working on that. A lot of these questions really come back to am i safe on the internet . Am i about to be attacked by a virus . Is my personal information about to be disclosed to everyone and so forth. Google has a series of answers to that. I think thats whats driving it and also what is driving a lot of the concerns in europe. The people are correctly worried that incredibly Important Information about them, to them, private information will somehow get released. So in googles case we have a bunch of mechanisms, a page which will allow you to control what we retain about you. I invite you to take a look. Its called the dash board. There is also a way in chrome to browse called incognito browsing where no information of any kind is maintained about what youre doing. And those are publicly anyone can use them. Good people, bad people, cant tell if theyre good or bad, whatever, it is available and theyve been around for a long time. So part of my answer to the question of googles role here is we need to retain a certain amount of information for our systems to work but unlike many others we make it very easy for you to delete that, mask it, or avoid it entirely. Google now makes the most popular mobile offering system in the world, one of the most popular browsers in the world. We know that our government collects zero days against all manner of potentially useful targets. Google has put some money into figuring out where this may be in its products with project zero. How do you feel about your government with your tax money potentially gathering and using this against your own products . Is there an arms race on between the companies and the government . I am not as worried about that. The government does a lot of things i dont like. And maybe everyone here in the room feels the same way. The fact is if you care about security, which im sure everyone in this room does, you could use chrome. The reason you should use chrome is its free. Always good. Its also faster. Good. It is also the safest and most secure. Chrome has the best detectors to look at what is known as man in the middle attacks and very fishy attacks so from a safety perspective we have invested a lot of money in making chrome the right choice from a browsing perspective. There is a debate over android versus i. O. S. And both are now working very hard. I publicly claimed android was safer. Other people have argued that my facts were wrong. Ive argued their facts were wrong. Well just be polite and say there is a debate. Both android and i. O. S. Are working which is the apple system are working very hard to make them more safe. Allow you to potentially clarify some remarks a few years ago in a cnbc interview where you said if you have something you dont want anyone to know maybe you shouldnt do it in the first place. Now, that caused quite a stir at the time. I want to give you an opportunity. Thank you is that still how you feel . What is great about that is that it was the first moment i actually felt sorry for american politicians. That entire paragraph was about the patriot act. If you read it in context youll see i was commenting on the patriot act but because of the echo chamber of the internet, right, i guess that little quote is long enough it fits in twitter but the paragraph doesnt. If you type in eric schmidt, privacy is dead immediately you get pulled in by google. Well, its important to know that is not driven by google but rather by frequency of query. Yes. I know. Google did not produce that result. In any case since we have a very smart audience the answer is i am not a fan of the patriot act and the reason is the secret court part of it. I understand secrecy has its purpose and so forth but our country over secrefies a lot of things. We would be a stronger country in almost all matters if we were left obnoxious about some of the classifications and some of the ways in which we collect data. I am quite convinced of it. The greatness of america is the speed with which we address problems and the way to do that is with knowledge. The answer is i was referring to the patriot act not general privacy. I care a lot about privacy and google has worked very hard to improve privacy. Google ends up with these debates almost more than any other company i cover. Google now apparently identifies my desires before i have them and gives me advice ow to organize my day. As smart as you are wouldnt you like a computer to organize your day . No. You heard that. You are in a minority. The average person would like the computer to help them get through their day because their lives are difficult. Is there something about google that makes these tensions particularly hard to untangle . My opinion of this is google, we set ourselves up for this and as of a long time ago i talk about dont be evil and when you said the dont be evil strategy, thats a pretty strong line. People feel like youre violating that rule. They have a pretty strong fight back. I get that. We have answers for these. In the particular cases youre describing with google glass, its interesting. For years we had the ability to do face recognition and tell you who you are going to talk to. In my advanced age this is a very useful product. When i was ceo we actually had one of these products in a meeting and ill never forget they basically said we built this product. I said, well what are we going to do with it . They said were canceling it. They said why . I said lets start with its illegal in europe. Okay. I got that. In europe its illegal to maintain a nonregistered, nongovernmental, private biometric data base which is effectively what it is. I said what about the u. S. . They said we tngs legal in the u. S. But is a mistake. I said why . Start thinking about the bad uses. Right . Stalking. All of those kinds of things. We there decided not to release this product. So when google glass comes along, what did we do . Normally we have an open approach. Google glass we banned those kinds of products for precisely those reasons. So i hear this sort of perception that somehow were not playing by the rules of modern society. I think its wrong. I think the evidence is google has been incredibly sensitive of privacy issues over these kinds of things and compared to everybody else in the industry i will stand on our record. We are very sensitive for many reasons. Its the right thing and also because we are so heavily criticized and scrutinized if we were to make a mistake and release such a product it would be a real disaster to the company. A couple questions from the audience because were running out of time. Back there in the blue shirt, weve got a microphone on him so people can hear him talk . Please be kind of brief. We dont have a lot of time. The question is does google receive information from the chrome browser that would not be received from the user if using some other browser . The same question with the android phone. Is there therefore danger, if it does, a danger that google will have a detailed profile on users that would be accessible to federal authorities through possibly a secret order . At the level of the question youre asking i think the answer is no. Browsers, themselves, you know, the apps do communicate information. But we dont sit there and track things beyond the u. R. L. And where you went. That information you can delete. If youre using incognito mode we dont have any of that at all. If you are concerned for whatever reason you do not wish to be tracked by federal and state authorities my strong recommendation would be to use incognito mode and thats what people do. The problem with incognito mode is you then lose the Authentication Services and the other Data Retention services where we retain the information long enough to make it better. You can control the length of time that its retained but if your position is i want zero retention, you use incognito mode. One more question from the fropt here. Can we get a microphone . I work for the aclu. I want to just quibble and say incognito mode will do nothing to protect you from surveillance by the authorities. That is not the right technology and there are technologies that do a much better job. My question is this. Let me respond to that. Im referring to googles part of that. Using tor is a whole nother conversation which may or may not be appropriate in certain situations. Let me ask this question. In 2009 you were interviewed and asked by the host of the show why google collected data and retained it about users. You gave two reasons. The first one being what you described before which is google needed a certain amount of data in order to provide the services it does to its customers, to mine data and figure out what they want to do. The second reason you gave in the interview was to hand it over to Law Enforcement agencies in response to a subpoena or search warrant. That was a very surprising response and i wanted to give you the opportunity to correct the record. Does google collect data in order to provide it to Law Enforcement agencies later . Again, i may have misspoken or you may have misheard my request. There are plenty of situations where the law effectively wants or requires tracking. In europe for example the European Data Privacy Initiative which started this. The way to understand this is that there is a balance of interest between Civil Liberties and shortterm police action. If you look at police action, most of the time when police need information, they need relatively recent information. We negotiated for a long time over all of these issues and came down with a 12point number which is essentially from Public Safety standpoint that was sort of 12ish months and that is roughly where the standards have been set. That is what i meant to say if its helpful. This was not our choice. This is essentially forced on us by governments. The thing about it is governments, the police want to have something they can subpoena in most of these countries especially for a legitimate police case and so forth and so on and that was ultimately how. That is true across the industry. We have time for one or two more questions. Can we get a microphone for this gentleman here . Three rows back . Fire away. You mentioned Key Management, you reminded me i had written a piece a couple years back suggesting google is in a unique position as a defacto identity provider to solve some of the Key Management problems to make strong encryption something that was not just for geeks but kind of a useable mass phenomenon. The response i got from a lot of people was you got to be kidding me. Their Business Model is collect a bunch of data and use it to serve ads and further purposes. Why would they make data less accessible . They dont have any economic incentive. Some months ago it was announced i think there was some a sort of test phase of trying to make that, do encryption as a feature compatible with gmail. I wonder how you balance those things. The people making these claims dont understand how google works. Googles job is to build stuff that delights customers. When governments illegally invade their privacy thats like a negative. Right . So it is easy to understand why we would try to make these systems stronger. We dont make decisions based on revenue but on really delightful products. Security and privacy are a key part of them. Thats literally how the decisions are made. Can we get the mike up here again . Do you already have one . Just wanted to check, in europe i understand the United States requests to have features like the right to be forgotten on the internet. Id like to know what google has done and also in conjunction with the industry to be able to effectively enforce that right. Thank you for asking. In may we lost a Court Judgment at the European Central court of justice and what they found, which in the european system is like the supreme court, forces the following. The order says, google shall, as opposed to anyone else, determine if information is from a nonpublic person and of nonPublic Interest. If its from a nonpublic person and nonPublic Interest, we are required to remove it. Even if that information is retained on, for example, newspaper sites, the particular court had to do with a fellow who had a tax problem in spain 20 years ago. He wanted the result removed. Even though the newspaper is protected by the spanish civil laws. So we have been forced to do that. There are more than 150,000 requests. Roughly speaking we grant slightly less than 50 based on the criteria. If people are rejected, they complain about googles choice. They have in theory a right to appeal to their governments although it was unclear to me. They have spent a great deal of money to input the system. It is by force of law and covers 2 countries 28 countries and european citizens. In the u. S. There is no such law. Well take one last question right there if we get a microphone for this gentleman in the fourth row. Yeah. Thank you. Do you worry that all of the data you collect will be misused somehow some day by your successor, by an employee of yours who is paid or essentially becomes a spy of one kind or another . If you live long enough you sort of see how things work. We do. Heres how we think about it. If there were a data breach that was by an internal person at google or something, it would be terrible obviously for the person breached but also for the reputation of the company. So we have many, many checks and balances on where information is kept, how it can be misused, and so forth. We pride ourselves on having the best such systems in the world. So while i understand the concern just because of our scale, the combination of the retention rules that we have, which is the amount of time we keep this information by query logs, i think well be okay. Its important that these breaches not occur. They are against our policy and almost certainly illegal. My successor is larry paige who implemented all these policies so i think were fine with larry and he is going to be around for a long time. 30 or 40 years from now when perhaps larry and sergei will be older, the same circus same chouns right . The same people, all of us who built google have the same view. Im sure our successors will have the same view. Thank you, dr. Schmidt. [ applause] thank you for joining us here today. Thank you. On the next washington journal the washington editor at large for the atlantic talks about the Senate Report on the c. I. A. s enhanced interrogation techniques and its impact on the president s Foreign Policy agenda. Scott pat ison, executive director of the National Association of state budget officers, discusses the fiscal situation in the 50 states. And politicos senior staff writer Garrett Graff shares his recent investigative report on the size and scope of the u. S. Customs and border patrol. As always, well take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Washington journal live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. On capitol hill tomorrow, the senate gavels in at 10 00 a. M. Eastern. Theyll be voting on several executive Branch Nominations that majority leader harry reid offered for consideration over the weekend. Among them is president obamas nominee to serve as the next surgeon general. There is also two house passed bills the senate has yet to take up including legislation to extend certain tax breaks for one year. And a bill that provides federal terrorism insurance to companies. Those could potentially come up later in the week. The house, meanwhile, has finished all legislative work for the year. Members wont return until the new congressional session begins in january. As always, the house is live on cspan. He senate is live on cspan 2. Monday night on the communicators mary gray on the ethics raised by Internet Companies harvesting users personal data and the Economic Research on that information. The creepy question is a great question, because i think for all of us as somebody who uses a computer every day, we have certain expectations when we fire up our computers about who sees what were doing, who were sharing information with, and at any moment if the applications i have the expectations i have are shifted because i realize that there might be another party who sees what im doing, say, for example, a message pops up and asks if i would like some help making a purchase, there are certain lines that we dont know weve crossed until its too late. Thats true for researchers. Thats true for companies. There isnt a clear sense of whats creepy because thats so culturally specific. One person talking loudly on their cell phone in a park has no problem with somebody standing next to them on a bench and listening to that conversation. And at the same time, you can have someone who is trying to have a private conversation and they wont go to Great Lengths to be somewhere thats completely secluded. So were not just dealing with the cultural context. Were dealing with individuals different preferences and experiences around privacy and their needs for that privacy. Monday night at 8 00 eastern on the communicators on cspan 2. Tonight on cspan, a profile on Mitch Mcconnell from two reporters who recover you covered him on the campaign trail. Clayis followed by nick taking questions from members of the house of commons. N, tributes to George Miller and henry waxman. Then the farewell address from michele bachmann. Q a is 10 years old. To mark a decade of compelling conversations we are featuring one program from each year of the series, starting december 22 at cspan. This week on q a, John Bresnahan and mother russia share stories about Mitch Mcconnell, at the first one a republican primary and then won the general election. This experiment of government has lasted long enough. [applause]