The discussion is 45 minutes. Do we get a cold start here . I am bob woodward, the washington post. Let me introduce the panel. First, jane mayer, whom i have known forever it seems, worked at the wall street journal, the new yorker for almost 20 years now. Many journalism honors, especially for your 2008 look the dark side. That is one of those titles where you know where you are coming from. We have bob dietz, a distinguished professor of Public Policy at george mason. He has been the consiglio ari to the Intelligence Community. Did you work for dulles or not . The first cia director. Bob was general counsel to the nsa for eight years. Amazing. He then was the counselor to the cia director general hayden, for three years. Has worked in defense department, state department, and was unbelievably, a law clerk to Justice William odouglas, one of the great civil libertarians. We will get to the question of what douglas would think of your career path. [laughter] Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times. He has worked for the l. A. Times, earned an award for his work in afghanistan and pakistan. I will say this from the point of view from the washington post, covers the senate and Intelligence Committee better than anyone. Next to him at the end is peter maass, who writes for first look media. Done a number of books, including the book Love Thy Neighbor about the war in bosnia. I want to make this a conversation, not presentations. Do not hesitate to interrupt. I will do the same, if that is ok. Our topic is the perils of covering National Security. I think we will start with jane and go around. What are the perils of covering National Security . I think it has become harder, in that i think our sources are under more pressure than they used to be. I had a source in particular, during the bush years, who was under investigation by the Justice Department for violating National Security and for having spoken to me. My phone number appeared on his cell phone apparently, and it ruined his life for quite a while. Very expensive for him to get legal counsel. Do we know who this is . I do not think i should identify him but he was falsely accused and later cleared. The point is, during that period, the cliche of what happens to the press in such situations, that it had a chilling effect, it was frozen. He could not speak, i could not speak to him, i was toxic to others who wouldnt want to get drawn into this. This was during the bush years. This was during the bush years. I do not think it has loosened up a lot since, but when there are more legal risks for sources, there is not a clear dividing line between the sources and the journalism that comes from them. It becomes an issue for the reporters as well. We get people in trouble by interviewing them and we do not mean to when we do not need to . When we do not mean to. We get them in trouble, we cannot guarantee that we cannot put them out of legal risk. It makes it very hard to get stories and tell the truth about what the government is doing. So is it tougher now . I think it is, for sure. Bob dietz. Inevitably, in conferences like this, there is a lot of talk about the risks that reporters undertake, editors undertake, reporting the news. Of course, the First Amendment makes clear that news is important to the American People. The trouble i have is, while that role is very important, the government also has an important goal, and that is to keep the American People safe. What we are talking about here are National Security leaks, we are not talking about leaks from the fda or department of agriculture, we are talking about leaks that may, in some circumstances, imperil the united states. Between those two issues, the safety of the American People wins. I understand the Important Role the press plays, but stuff that is highly classified, provided to people who swear they will not violate the confidentiality that has been provided to them, and then going ahead and leak it and the press publishes it, they are imperiling do you think there have been examples of things published, that have really endanger the American People . Yes, i do. Example . The principle is, in the intelligence area, the leak ends up being the harm. If something is leaked about a new military capability, that is serious, but the bad guys still have to figure out how to counter that new weapons system or defense. In the intelligence area, when you leak information about how information was acquired, the bad guys immediately know to stop using the means of communication. That is, i think, very risky. Do you have an example . I think the leak involving that special nsa program during the bush years was very damaging. In what way . You were there at the nsa at that time. Yes. I was told and i think responsibly that you would get a stream of data and then all of a sudden it would stop and you would see a correlation. It was not like somebody said, they are on to us. You would get intercepts, and then they would stop, and you would see the correlation between the leak and the stopping of the communication. Mark, what do you think is the main peril of covering Intelligence Security . I agree with a lot what jane said. I dont think it has ever been harder to do this kind of reporting. It is not only the crackdown that has taken place on leakers, the number of investigations that create this climate that jane talked about. Also, in the wake of the revelations about surveillance last year, has created this perception among the people that surveillance is everywhere and that everything is being watched. A similar experience to jane, you have people who you have developed relationships over the years who will not talk anymore because they are concerned. People who otherwise may have been on the fence, who had never dealt with reporters, who might be inclined to do it, maybe secondguess it and think, what is in it for me to do this . You have phone calls people ironically talking, if anyone is listening to this call now people without any irony will say, to whoever is listening to this call, i am not revealing classified it is accepted that somebody is listening to this phone call. Do you think they are . Possibly. Over the last year, whether it is people listening to my calls or my sources, i think, increasingly, we have to be under suspicion but you are still able to function and work. Definitely. You have to be more careful, certainly, about electronic communication, phone calls. It is less efficient, i suppose. Especially at a daily paper that can be hard. So how do you communicate, do you move the flowerpot . You meet in parking garages. [laughter] you try to have more firstperson meetings. But to set those up . It is hard. You have to set them up by some means. There are people who go into encrypted communications now. If you do that, both sides have to be doing this. The concern is, when you are a reporter, and you want to get somebody to be comfortable and talk to you, and you have never met the person, the first person you say is, i want to talk to you, and you have to use this phone, otherwise you are going to go to jail. Who is going to want to talk . Do you use encrypted communication . I do not know how much i should say, but yes. It is more recent. You are talking to somebody for the first time, or the 20th time, and you say, lets go encrypted, arent they smart enough to realize that automatically that is an admission that there is some sort of transaction going on that people are surveilling . If they find out x, y, and z have established encrypted communications with intelligence reporter for the New York Times, that is somewhat incriminating, right, mr. Dietz . Yes. [laughter] maybe we are just talking about sports. What is the main peril here . I would respectfully disagree with what bob said here about leaks being the harm. In many cases, the lack of leaks is the harm. If there were more about the intelligence upon which those decisions were made, our National Security would have been bettered rather than harmed. It is more difficult for everybody up here. Is aple i will give couple months ago, somebody contacted me through a friend and had something that this person wanted to talk about relating to iraq. It was not monumental but interesting. I said to this person, ok. We were talking not through phones that could be traced to me at least. Dont send it to me by email. Print it out, and send it to me by mail. At this moment in time, i think mail is more secure than email for certain things. This was a workaround, which did not work, because i never received the material. Either it was intercepted or never sent. Having to set up that security operation, obviously, affected the fact that this person did not provide the material. That is a tax in a way on this new era we are in. Sources will not come forward. But i would say, on the other hand and that is why i do not like the framing of this in such a dirgelike way. We as journalists are presented with a challenging story. What is that story . Challenges to the first and Fourth Amendment of the constitution. Which involves a crackdown on journalists ourselves, and sources. I think we have this incredible role to play to expose what is going on, to prevent it from continuing to go on. Most of my life, i covered overseas conflicts. I made my name in bosnia. That was a story that people here did not care much about, but it was also difficult to cover because it was hard to make people understand why it would affect this country and their lives. I could not make a very persuasive argument about that, but when you are talking about challenges to the first and Fourth Amendment of the constitution, you are talking about how our democracy exists, what the future of our children is as members of a free society. That is a much easier argument to make, and a more important one, then the slaughter of people in the balkans. I find myself as passionate about this story as i did about genocide in the balkans. Jane, go ahead. What i was going to say is, what is hard, one of the things that is difficult from the standpoint of the press, is the way that the National Security community defines what is protecting the American Public. It is not as if the press is trying to harm the American Public. We just defined it as a stronger country when there is a free flow of ideas, when there is consent of the governed, because they understand that the programs are you are implementing in their name. And we feel, even bad news, sometimes strengthens the country because the rest of the world just to see our transparency and accountability system. And so it is a larger framing of what National Security is. But because of the way that the executive branch has a monopoly on defining what National Security is, you get to put your own parameters around it and define us as outside of it sometimes. We are not trying to harm the country by writing these stories. In fact, i think most reporters feel they are really helping my getting this information out to the voters. I accept most of what you said. I, too, agree that reporters are not out to undermine the country, but im also clear in my mind that reporters do not often understand why something can be harmful, or why certain things could be guarded. One of the arguments that is always dragged out in these kinds of meetings is the overclassification of materials. I am sure they are. I accept that. This is not caused generally by evil intentions. When people are writing reports, there are three different classification levels. Most people put the default, topsecret. There ought to be a way to address that, for sure. Ok, but reporters are not helpless in this. Bob dietz, you are saying, reporters do not understand the implications of publishing some of this stuff. Mark, peter, jane, i am sure you can testify, when you find out something, you go to the government and you engage in, lets be honest, a negotiation of sorts, and a listening like one of Hillary Clintons listening tours you listen and you say what is the argument that this will cause harm . If you look at the snowden case, in my own newspaper, the washington post, we have been extremely careful about what we publish, always going to the government, and the government making their case, and i think, erring on the side of, lets listen, does it make sense. So there is a lot left out. You are kind of the adjusting that the reporters are a bunch of people rushing in and reporting willynilly, but that is not the way it works. On any beat you cover, you will call for comments, you will go to the agency you are writing about. It is happening far more than it used to, where the government pushes back now to try to get you to not publish. I think we keep pretty high standards for what we would not publish, and there are different standards. If the government is making a case that this does specific harm to specific individuals, that is one thing. We listen to that seriously. If the argument, as was the case in many of the wikileaks arguments, this is going to be really embarrassing for us, the government, that is a lower standard. Usually that is not a reason to not publish. And when you go to the government, you learn all kinds of things. First of all, you get a second or third source, if you can get them to validate what you have, which makes sleep much easier at night. And it is not just a matter of calling and saying, i want your one sentence comment. It is meeting with people, having serious discussions. Sometimes weeks or months go by before some of these stories are published. I think we are beginning to learn what bob woodward does. The inside story. Well, it just makes sense. I have been in the oval office, the seventh floor of the cia, and other places, where people say, if you publish this recently, somebody said if you publish this, we could lose a war. That gets your attention and you listen very carefully. I agree. Premuch everything i wrote in the dark side i ran by the authorities at the cia to make sure it was correct, which is incredibly important, and see, basically, if it would cause undue harm. We did not always agree, but at least i was able to weigh their arguments and whether or not i thought it made sense. I do not think it is just a question of whether something is over classified. We all agree that generally things are. I do not think there is a period in the countrys history entire wars are conducted in a classified manner. There were the wars of iraq and afghanistan, but so much of it is intelligence, wars carried out clandestinely, and they are still secret, even though they should not be, like the drone strikes. Which by the way, they are not secret. But still technically classified. There are people in the government who will officially validate and discuss that. But after a strike they will not say this is what happened. Some people would like that to happen. They think they would be able to explain it better. I just think, therefore, it has never been more important, because this is the conduct of the war, it is all secret, the National Security reporters tell people what is going on. Peter, what do you think of that, going to the government, here is what i understand happened, what do you say . That is a useful and generally necessary step. We have a story out this morning that i coauthored on the intercept of one of the first sites, which is about some nsa documents that were leaked to us by snowden. Summarize the story. That the nsa is hacking into the computers of system administrators who are not themselves suspected of doing anything wrong, but control Computer Systems that the nsa wants to infiltrate. These are innocent people being targeted by the nsa because they have, as one of the documents said, the keys to the kingdom. In this case, we said, is there any harm involved in publishing this . The answer was no. So we have gone to them and asked. I would say, however, in terms of the usefulness of talking to officials, of course, but right now, i trust documents more than officials. These documents say a lot more and tell me a lot more and they are a potent tool when you go to the government and you say i have this document and it says the following. My personal feeling is, im not using these as tools. Im publishing them we are publishing them. The greatest tools or instruments. I think these documents operate best not as instruments in terms of leverage with government officials, but instruments to inform the public. Not only as a tool, yes, publish them, but when you go in to see someone in the government and you say i have these notes of this meeting, i understand the following is occurring that gets their attention. But it does not necessarily get much truth out of them. Sometimes it does. Dont you find that to be the case . Sometimes. I think the National Security part of the government has a credibility problem at this point. When you look at cases like the case of tom drake, and nsa official former who was prosecuted under the espionage act, facing potentially 35 years in prison. He is 57 years old whatever age she was at the time rest of his life in prison. The case fell apart. The reason was, it was complete overkill. The judge himself eventually threw most of it out. Even general hayden said, publicly, that it was a case of prosecutorial overrule. As the panel quoted, the judge said it was unconscionable what happened to his life in that period. There were five documents that he was alleged with taking them are unauthorized. Three of them have to do with a complaint that he had made to an Inspector General and he was told to take the documents home. The other two, one was classified as plain office items. The other was declassified three months after he was prosecuted for having it. Eventually, the case ended up with him pleading to a misdemeanor. The idea that that could have been portrayed as a huge National Security case under the espionage act, and that he could have faced potentially life in prison, suggests there is a judgment issue sometimes on these calls about what National Security entails. Bob dietz, how come that was not stopped earlier . I do not know. I know drake, some of the people hes dealt with, but i do not know the facts of the case. Let me ask this general question, which i think is important. The earlier panel said quite directly that the Obama Administration is antipress. Actually, it was said earlier that the effort to get jim from the New York Times to testify is a persecution. Do you think the Obama Administration is antipress . Peter . I wish you couldve started with somebody else. [laughter] antipress is a broad phrase. I would like to get away from that maybe. The specifics, how many have been prosecuted as leakers under the Obama Administration compared to previous administrations . The Previous Panel went over it and it is more than any other administration by several factors. That is rather concerning to me. What i was listening to in the Previous Panel, one of the people said there was that jim risen case, but that is really it. Yes, you do not need more than one case to make your message. That is the point of that case. That case is equivalent to 100 cases to me because the impact is the same. Mark, do you think the Obama Administration is antipress . Like peter, i will punt that term. To answer your question, we have had trouble digging into what are the origins of this incredibly large number of investigations. They are not just investigations, they are prosecutions. Tools available to the investigators are far better than they used to be, so prosecutors want to make cases, so they can be better than they used to be. That is part of it. At the very least, you see supervisors telling investigators not to go in certain directions. At the very least, the aggressive prosecutors making their case against leakers are not being stopped. Yet, some of these cases are holdovers from the bush administration. There are conscious decisions being made not to stop them. And that is, i think, where you see the continuity between bush and obama. Bureaucratically, being realistic about the way the Justice Department works, people at the lower level start a case, they get very aggressive, and it is just like one of your editors at the New York Times hesitating to tell you, dont pursue that story. It might appear that they are stopping you from a legitimate inquiry. So, up the chain, if you talk to these people, there is a lot of reluctance to stop it. The difficulty is, they are not setting the policy at the very top and saying from my point of view, i think they are harming themselves by either declaring or appearing to declare a war on the press. What frustrates me a little bit about the way this discussion is categorized my hypothesis, all of these cases involve somebody who committed a felony. Maybe. Prima facie case. Just like the Police Investigate robberies and whitecollar crimes and so forth, it is hard for me to understand the argument that says this felony should not be investigated. If you are trying to put together a case archie cox, the watergate prosecutor, until he was bounced, in one of his briefs, start out by saying, the grand jury is entitled to every mans evidence. He was quoting some british jurist. How is it that you put a line around this felony and do not worry about it, but pursue other felonies . So that every time a white house official gets some comment about classified drone strikes, isnt that a federal felony, too . I agree with your point, and every time i have been involved in these discussions, i point out how the official leaks makes the administration lose the high ground, for sure. It is so hard to explain rationally why a senior official can leak, but what happens at the gs15 level, the world is about to end. But that is a really big problem. In the earlier panel you cannot talk with people about National Security issues and not discuss classified information. That is just the reality. You know that. I agree with you. So the idea that these few cases where they seem to have evidence, and they pursue them with this zeal and these tools they have, somebody at the top and i think this is a commonsense solution to say come on, lets get real. In this case. Is it really worth it . The idea that the Obama Administration do you think the Obama Administration is antipress . I think every administration is antipress. I have known some. Some more than others. I think there is a continuity here. It is what the framers of the constitution understood. Power has a certain tendency to make people want to hold onto power. Leaks, particularly of unflattering information, are not welcome by people in power. The problem with the prosecutions, there is this sense that they are arbitrary because there are authorized leaks that are favorable and push one particular line, and then some that are unfavorable, and then prosecuted. So the question is, who gets to define and decide what the American Public should hear about what the Intelligence Community is doing . Should the Intelligence Community get to decide only . Should the press get to decide also . And what do you do with dissidents in your ranks who are critics, who feel maybe what they are seeing has crossed some lines, and is wrong, and they want to speak out about it . Such an american act to sort of speak up in dissent. Most people, not everyone, to use the legal term, bob dietz, admission against interest. If you can find people to talk to for a long time, they may Say Something that is against their interest that is true. Just in the last 10 or so minutes, what is the remedy for the press, in terms of how we operate . Is it to go encrypted . Snowden told you, peter an amazing quote unencrypted journalist communication is unforgivably reckless. When encryption is required. Not every communication i have requires encryption. Not every relationship requires it. When it is required and you do not do it, it is reckless. What do you do as a reporter, mark, in this environment . What kind of frame of mind do you go into . Now i have an excuse, i can tell my editors, i talked to six people and they all hung up on me. That sounds pretty good, actually. [laughter] as i said, a lot of it is less efficient. I think you have to be conscious of the security of your sources. You are entering into a trust. I think, when you are dealing with people who have been involved in government, as your sources, you are inclined to think, they know how to keep themselves secure. They know better than i do the state of the surveillance. But i do not think that gets you off the hook. I think that means that you have to be very careful, increasingly careful, that it is not because of something that you have done that get your sources in trouble. I would also say this is not a big mystery to me. This thing that we all carry around, sometimes you do not carry it around. That is an important measure of protection and is easy to take. For a very long time, reporters managed to do well without these devices. I remember i talked to the first time to somebody who was in an important position in the intelligence world and he got out his blackberry, and took out the battery. I thought, what the hell are you doing . He said, then they cannot listen. I remember in 1999, when i was covering the balkans, during the milosevic era, cell phones had just entered society there. Before any conversation about politics, you would not only take out the battery of your phone, but you would put it on the table, the phone and battery, not just to show that other person that the government was not listening, but that you are not recording their call with your phone. This was 1999. It is not so new in many ways. The question you asked a minute ago about what is the solution well, the solution is the American People. The American People, through their representatives, have decided that there are some things that are sufficiently important, that they ought not to be discussed in the open press. There are plenty of ways of addressing that. You have the American People agreeing to a shield wall. That is not going to happen. I would be surprised if that ever happened. Sometimes, the representatives of the people get it wrong. Of course they do. We are on the outside. I do not buy that. I think part of the remedy is to be more aggressive, frankly. As a reporter. You have to work harder. I remember working on the fourth bush book i did, and there was a general who would not talk. Emails, phone messages, intermediaries, nothing. So i found out where he lived, it was in the washington area. And when is the best time to visit a fourstar general without an appointment . 8 15 on a tuesday. They will have eaten, are not in bed, not getting close to friday, so i knock on the door. He opens the door and looks at me and says, are you still doing this shit . [laughter] and he meant it. He looked at me and just kind of had a disappointed look on his face, disappointed in himself and said, come on in. Sat for two hours, answered most of the questions, why . Because i showed up. We do not show up enough. It is incredible, the dropin visit if you are worried about security and so forth. I have done two books on the Obama Administration trying to understand, and i think there is a lot of ambivalence about the press, as there always is, and you can deal with them. If you just show up and persist and you say i have got this, we can do our job. The tragedy of this is if we pack up and say, it is too hard. The snowden era and the prosecution era has created a new world for us. I think it is really kind of the old world. I started in this in the nixon era. It wasnt that you were on their Christmas Card list. It always is tough. We should remember that. If you work eight hours a day, maybe you need to work 10 or 12. I have sat in culdesacs, by curbs, waiting for people to come home. It was not the grand life that i thought it would be that the new yorker. I thought it was going to be cocktails at the roundtable. And if you are honest with yourself, you probably do not sit on the curbs enough. I am sure not enough. I will say one thing from your standpoint, what i imagine would be your standpoint. I think the press needs, also, to make sure that when we do push hard and make our calls or something important enough to publish when the National SecurityCommunity Says dont it really should be important enough to publish. We should think about something that serves public interest. Not every secret is equal. Just because you find it out does not mean you need to put it in the newspaper or the magazine. I feel, anyway, there has to be an important public purpose when you take that on. Peter. Following up on your point about sitting on curbs. It depends on whos curb you are sitting on. Generals have told you useful things, which is helpful for everyone. I have found in covering iraq and afghanistan, being with generals, colonels, lance corporals, that actually the people whose doorsteps i sit on, the better ones are the lower levels. The generals i have talked to i had an off the record talk with petraeus. Taking notes, thinking this was great. I looked at my notes afterwards and there was really nothing in there whatsoever. One of his geniuses. He is very good at that. And so is michael hayden, by the way. That happened again and again with the Senior Officers that i would talk with. Whereas, when i was hanging out with the specialists, the lance corporals, the captains, i was finding out a heck of a lot more of what was really going on. But then you move up the food chain. I agree with you, sometimes the best sources are names that we never hear about and no one else knows, but then, if you are ultimately trying to write about decision making, you need to get to the generals and the white house or pentagon who are making these decisions, or the cia. I do not have the bob woodward special sauce to get that access. What gets people to respond is information. If you have the document or the notes or the details. If you go in and say, i understand you are launching operation pink starling tomorrow. Pink starling is a protected code word. People will say, ok we will deal with this. Actually, higher lever people may not know what that is. We are just talking about the nsa. There are so many there, and they are so technical, i would be really surprised if the highlevel people know the details more than a small number of the most major of programs. I think you could be wrong about that. I think so. Many could not describe the engineering details, but i would be surprised if there were more than a handful of programs i suspect a handful, you are right. But impossible to count how many programs there are in the nsa. We could save thousands and probably more than that. I just imagine it is beyond the capacity of any individual to have significant knowledge about more than a handful of the thousands of programs. I agree with bob dietz, and i agree with you, but the answer is, work the lowlevel to midlevel, and then the top, if you can. Then you get a total universe portrait. We have a couple of minutes here before there is a coffee and martini break. [laughter] maybe not martinis. Dietz, you are the historian of this. What is going on here. When historians look back on this era, what will they say, the snowden era, prosecutors and of jim risen . I do not have an apocalyptic vision. Unlike some members of the first panel, i do not think the west is about to end. Civilization as we know it is disappearing. I think there are new challenges. The tension that jane was describing between administrations and the press, i worked in the carter administration. The wailings that went on in there about the stuff in the newspapers. I do not think that will ever end. I would like to mention one more thing, if i may. In these discussions, there is often a lot of talk, as peter did, reference to the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court has in two cases that address Fourth Amendment issues in the criminal context that may touch on National Security. They have always drawn a line between, on the one hand, domestic security, stuff that involves criminality in this country. On the other hand, dividing that from National Security involving threats abroad. In the two major cases on this, the Supreme Court went out of their way to say we are not talking about foreign intelligence here, we are talking about domestic intelligence. My experience at nsa is that line was rigorously drawn and observed. I think most reporters should rest easy about whether there will be a tap. I do not believe there is necessarily a Fourth Amendment right when you are talking about conducting foreign intelligence. But most reporters who cover issues like terrorism, for instance, have many overseas phone calls from terrorists . From as close as you can get to do reporting. They would try to get in there and understand what is going on. Many reporters john miller, who has worked in and out of the government, was famous for going in and interviewing bin laden. Is that a crime, should that have been eavesdropped on . If somebody is speaking with bin laden on the phone and we are not picking it up, the head of nsa ought to be tossed. [laughter] but under nsa rules, if that was the case, if it were jane mayer, an american citizen, her name would have to be minimized. You are right. It would have to be minimized. And the minimization rules are religiously followed. Ok. I think we are done, thank you very much. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] tomorrow the outgoing chair of the National Transportation safety board gives remarks at the National Press club. Her term as chair ends on april 26. She will take over as president and ceo of the National Safety council. Live coverage begins at 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan 2. During this month, cspan is pleased to present our winning entries in this years student cam video documentary competition. Student cam is cspans competition that encourages students to think critically about issues. Students were asked to base their videos on the question, what is the most important issue the u. S. Congress should consider in 2014 . Second prizewinning sophos