the only way i would be able to write it because i was involved in the story. normally i would have to recuse myself and they agreed to my pitch that there was an unusual story about journalism and how journalists cover national security topics and this was the best way to tell it. essentially it was a story of john kiriakou former cia officer who was a source for me and for any number of national security reporters around washington. after he retired from the cia. and now through a lot of twist and turns, he ended up being the first cia officer to be in prison for leaking classified information to the american press. never happened before and now he's in federal prison in pennsylvania. >> part of your story starts with interview in 2007, brian ross of abc. got just a 30 second clip so our viewers can catch up with john kiriakou looks like and kind of a sense what he was talking about. [video clip] at the time i felt that waterboarding was something we needed to do. as time passed and has september 11th has moved farther and farther back into history, i think i changed my mind. i think waterboarding is probably something we shouldn't be in business of doing. >> why do you say that now? >> because we're americans and we're better than that. >> at the time you didn't feel that way? >> at the time i felt so angry and i wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks in the united states and i felt it was the only thing to do. >> that was six years ago. what was the importance of that interview? >> that interview made a big splash. even though we all written about waterboarding this technique that certainly historically has been considered to be torture. one of the favorite torture techniques through the ages where water is poured over the mouth and nose to give them a feeling of grounding. we had written about how the cia had engaged in that practice on at least three prisons in 2002 and 2003. even by 2007, no one from the cia had actually spoken publicly about that. it was considered classified and so john kiriakou happened to be the guy who first talked openly about waterboarding on national tv. it made quite a splash. those of us in the national security reporting business i think i speak for all of us, immediately rushed to call this guy because he was a former cia officer talking openly about something that was pretty sensitive. so i called him and talked to him among other things i wanted to establish how does he know this kind of thing. one of the things that was pressed give me a little bit of pause he acknowledged to me he hadn't witnessed the waterboarding. that his information was secondhand. he came across as a very nice guy, very candid and i got to know him a little bit and we had lunch from time to time. in that respect, i was not unusual. there was a bunch other reports. >> how old of a guy is he now? >> he's in his late 40s now. he worked. he's from the steel country of pennsylvania. his grandparents immigrated from greece. speaks fluent greek which was an advantage to him at work as it turned out. he went to work -- he went to george washington university here in town. he was recruited by one of his professors who suggested that he might want to apply to the cia. we worked first as an analyst and moved over to the other big side between analyst and operators and officers. he moved over to the clin destined side, worked against terrorism in greece out of athens and after 9/11 in pakistan. and was practices most well known for having helped capture the first of the guys considered at least at the time to be an important terrorist guy name abu zbada. who was caught in pakistan. this guy kiriakou helped run that operation. he left the cia in 2004. by 2007 when he gave that tv interview, he had been gone three years. >> i remember the time somebody acknowledged he ever worked for the cia. >> yes, it's funny. something has happened. i think it's changing the nature of the relationship between the government and journalism. it's still very much unresolved. kiriakou case is an example. post 9/11, a whole lot more people cared about national security issues than was the case before. all of a sudden, there was a market for former cia pokes, former defense intelligence agencies and even former national security agency, the big overs drop -- eavesdropping agency. all of those used to operating in the shadow saw a marks -- market for their services as commentators and book writers. there was this somewhat uncomfortable interaction between the agencies and these usually former employees who were coming out of the shadows and writing about what they done in their lives and there have been many lawsuits over that since. >> in the end, we got a lot to discuss about john kiriakou, why is he in prison? >> he, got to know a number of reporters and would be helpful within limits sometimes he would say, that's classified and i will not talk about that. but, relative my a officers, he was pretty candid about things. as a reporter in this area, you treasure anyone you find who sort of is willing to talk about things. i think he saw it as a lot of people see it as a legitimate thing. we're a country where the government doesn't get the last word on what the people learn about. that tends to be a system. i spent some time in the soviet union and that tends to be a system that doesn't work well. i think his view was that the public deserved to know what the cia had done to prisoners in these so called black sites, secrets jails for years after 9/11. so, he begin to talk to a number of us. there were referrals from the cia to the justice department. a referral, a leak referral is a form that an agency fills out when people at the agency feels that classified information has been made public. it's fairly routine. doesn't always result in a criminal investigation or criminal prosecution. it's essentially a form a heads up to the justice department. one was sent after that brian ross on abc with john kiriakou. it was still technically speaking even though it had been widely written about, classified that waterboarding had gone on. here was a guy who signed a nondisclosure agreement and talking on tv about it and a referral went over to the justice department. essentially take a look at this and see if it needs to be investigated criminally. he gave a number of other interviews after that resulted in referrals. as far as i can tell from my reporting, none of those really went anywhere. finally, what got him in trouble came from a different angle didn't initially involve him. folks at guantanamo at the prison in cuba discovered photographs and sort of bios of some under cover cia officers who including interrogators at guantanamo and some of the cells. this set off alarm bells because the immediate reaction was oh my god, these al qaeda guys are somehow targeting the people who targeted them and people who caught them from the cia and may be this will be very dangerous. as it turned out, it was not quite as alarming as that essentially defense attorneys had sought to identify the interrogators and the other folks who had been at these black site so they can call them as witnesses ultimately in these military trials. that was a criminal investigation was that whole episode. at some point they started looking at kiriakou and got his e-mail, i believe with a search warrant and started looking into his e-mails and discovered what they considered to be, several occasions where he had discussed or exchanged information about classified subjects with reporters. i was one of those reporters. that's why i had to write about him in the first person and why it was somewhat unusual situation. in the end, he was indicted in january of 2012 on a bunch accounts. some of which involved me. i was not identified by name but i was identified as journalist b and it was obvious that it was me because they listed one of the articles that i written that quoted john kiriakou. in the end, after a long and very expensive legal battle, he decided that he didn't want to roll the dice and risk going to prison for 10 or 15 years which seemed like it was at least a possibility. he has three young children and he just didn't want to be gone from their lives. he agreed to plead guilty to one count involving a different writer, a guy who's a freelance journalist to whom kiriakou had given the name of someone who was under cover a cia officer. he was sentenced as part of a plea bargain 30 months in prison. >> how long do you think you will serve? >> in federal prison, you serve most of the time you're sentenced to. sometimes there's special programs. i think he was expecting to serve certainly at least 20 or 25 months. >> when in prison, what day do you remember? >> he went into prison in mid- february. they gave him a little time to get his stuff together and say good-bye to his family. >> have you talked to him? >> i have written to him. i have not managed to talk to him. there's kind of elaborate process to reach folks and the bureau of prisons in my experience, is very aversed to journalist getting to prisoners and particularly in controversial situations. i had done long piece about terrorists in federal prison. i corresponded with a bunch of them but when i tried to visit them, i was completely shut down at several people, several prisons seem to be pretty much a ban. >> here another clip of john kiriakou talking to amnesty international panel discussion back in 2008 to get a flavor. [video clip] >> i think waterboarding is torture and we should not be using it now seven years after september 11. in the immediate aftermath of september 11, osama bin laden said two things, i think we rightly concluded we should take the man at his word, he said al qaeda was planning an attack that will dwarf september 11th and it was just a matter of time before it was implemented. he said that al qaeda will not stop attacking americans and american interests until the green flag of islam flew over the white house. he had to take him at his word. with that in mind and with the immediacy trying to disrupt that massive attack that was coming along with the guilt we had that we couldn't do anything to stop 3000 murders the decision was made to pour water on abu zabada face. >> abu did what? >> at the time he was caught in march of 2002. he was described by high level bush administration number three in al qaeda. later on they backed away from that. he was actually not a sort of sworn member of al qaeda. he was a fairly significant character. he'd run essentially a terrorist training camp. he'd run guest houses where a lot of these militants came in and out. he was probably more accurate described as a facilitator. i even heard him described as a travel agent for terrorists in pakistan. he kind of knew everybody and he would help them move in and out, help them to forge documents, help them with a place to stay. in that sense he was valuable to the cia because he knew a lot of people. >> have you ever known of anybody that has died of waterboarding? >> no. waterboarding has, as some of us learned in the early years when this was being discussed, a very long history. one thing that in my reporting i found and was amazed to find was that as far as i can determine, neither high level white house officials in the bush administration, nor even the tops at cia actually knew the history of waterboarding when they approved them. it was presented to them as part of a military training program. in fact, there are amazing wood cuts of waterboarding being used. these wood cuts show it being used pretty much exactly as it was used centuries later by the cia. which is that a place to -- water is poured on. this is a person who is bound and they can't remove the water. the person gasps for breath, inhales water, can't get their breath, and it causes a panic reaction and intense fear i'm told. haven't tried it. if you were to keep pouring, the eventually the person would drown. generally speaking, the situation is such that you trying to get the person to talk and therefore you pour for a while and ask them questions. in some instances in inquisition, they did something a little bit different. i suppose this was in a case where it was being used as death by torture as opposed to interrogation technique. that is they will pour water until the person ingested so much water and their belly was swollen up. then they will jump on the belly. as a torture and interrogation technique, it was famously used by paul pott in cambodia. in the museum they now have in the former prison. there is the water board that they used which again, is not very different from what the way the cia waterboard was described. there was a famous painting showing a torture using essentially watering can to pour water on the prison's face. all the history was unphone to the folks at -- unknown to the folks at the top of the american government. >> how much of surprise or reaction have you gotten that the obama administration has prosecuted more of this type of individual than the bush administration or anybody else? >> it is quite shocking. it's a bit of mystery that we spend some time reporting on. you talking about prosecution for leaking classified information to the press. which on the rare occasions when it's been pursued has been pursued under the espionage act of 1917. oddly enough. certainly those of us in the journalism business bristle when this process of talking to sources in a classified matters is described as espionage because it certainly isn't that. there's no law of that's tailor made for this. it happen sod rarely in history and it's been known in congress creative statute for it. historically first time it was used in 1971 in the famous pentagon papers case. when daniel, perspective consultant leaked vietnam war. they were charged and that prosecution fell apart because of the prosecutorial misconduct. he avoided prison. then there was a man named robert morrison who sold some classified satellite pictures to defense publications in the 1980s. purely for money basically and wasn't really a leak of information to the press. it was more of commercial thing. he was prosecuted and did serve time. then there was a gentleman named larry franklin in the bush administration, george w. bush administration, his crime, which he pleaded guilty to was slightly different. he actually shared classified information with two lobbyists for the pro-israel lobby apec. they were sharing it with journalist so it was a similar thing. he also pleaded guilty and served some time. by most people's count, those are the only three cases history before obama came into office in 2009. since president obama has been in office and in his first term, there were six prosecutions. he has by far broken the historical record in this area. he came into the office with transparent office in history directing agencies to share information with the public unless there was an urgent reason not to. that was the rhetoric that he used. this is one of these areas where we ie jourlism business has a personal stake. we can't pretend to be neutral bystanders because to the degree this interferes with gathering information. but also because it's a matter of great public interest. we set out to find -- why did this happen? did obama get angry about leaks like so many presidents do and order a crackdown? we were told he got angry about leaks. they want to control the agenda, they want to roll things out at their own place. they want to keep some things secret and other things not. they find that's difficult in this town. he was very angry about leaks but i've been told on pretty good authorities that he never did order a crackdown. perhaps even more surprisingly, the attorney general of the united states, eric holder also did not order a crackdown. what happened here appears to be the result of two things. perhaps the most important thing is e-mail and sort of the electronic records that we all sometimes kind of unwittingly leave behind of our interactions. each of the six cases under obama involves either e-mails or some other kind of electronic record. for example, private bradley manning, the intelligence analyst who's been prosecuted for delivering 700,000 government documents to wikileaks the anti-secrecy organization. he spoken in internet chats and those are also recorded on the web and the authorities have those chat logs. in all of those cases, including kiriakou, there were electronic records that allowed investigators to identify fairly readily the person who was delivering information to the reporter. that had been very problematic in the past. it's become much easier. i was shocked in january 2012 to look at my e-mail and see john kiriakou's name in the headline of a press release. read down into the indictment and find excerpts from my e-mail with john kiriakou. that's part of the biggest factor. the second factor is that eric holder as attorney general doesn't appear to have exercised any prosecutorial discretion in these cases. he appears to have taken the view that if the prosecutors with bring one of these leaked cases, go for it. in the past at least some attorney generals have said, this is a case where no harm was done by the leak of classified information where may be there was a compelling interest in the resulting story so we're not going to prosecute. in mr. holder's case, he appears to have green lighted either all or most of these prosecutions. >> i want to take a brief time out and go into your background. school here in washington, williams college massachusetts, oxford university of english in 1978. >> that was a fellowship given by williams cleanly but a two year study. i had studied russian in college. i had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating. of course this was during the cold war. they were the great enemy that you grew up hearing about. i just had this enormous curiosity about life in russia and so on. i was fortunate enough in the summer of 1976 to go on an exchange program and go over and study for the summer. it gave me a whole lot of practice in russian and lifelong interest. >> here you are in 1991 on this network talking about your time in russia. [video clip] >> in 1976 what was going was this tremendous hypocrisy, this pretense that everything was wonderful. in 1976 outside our dormitory on the river across from the hermtage there was a sign that had the slogan which was efficiency and quality. the s in the russian word was in giant plastic letters. the s in the word for quality, came loose and hung russian s which looked like a c, hung down barely hanging below the rest of the word. it was like that when i arrived in the summer of 1976. two months later when i left, it was still hanging there. nobody bothered to put it back up. >> 21 years, since 2004 with the "new york times"? >> that's right. >> how did you get into the national security business writing about that? >> i had written about courts and medicine and education early in my career. my first exposure national security was when i was working in russia from 1988 to 1991. because i was covering among other things, this is under gorbachev. i remember covering some amazing moments in their national security history. for example, the leaders of the k.g.b. being summoned by the first democratically elected parliament and questioned. the senate look into the cia and say, it was sort of a similar moment. i kind of watched their giant national security apparatus of the soviet union come under scrutiny for the first time. when i came back to the states, one of the things that i noticed was that -- i was working for the baltimore sun -- that the national security agency, the big eavesdropping agency based in fort meade, was the largest employer in maryland. very few people knew that. very few people knew who it did. they got it mixed up with the national security an sell -- counsel which was part of the white house. i kept bugging the editors to let me spend some time poking around on the n.s.a. at first they were reluctant and they considered some degree a waste of time. it was extremely secret. the whole joke that n.s.a. stood for never say anything or no such agency. eventually the editor john carol, kind of caught the bug himself and set me and another reporter loose for 18 months. getting doors slammed in our face. we ended up writing a six part explantory series where the n.s.a. does and did, where it came from and what kind of issues its work raise. one of the gratifying things about that was we did a reprint of that series and sold thousands and thousands to residents of the counties around fort meade. mostly these were family members of people who worked at n.s.a. their father or their brother or their son would come home everyday and not say anything about what they were doing. this incredible curiosity about the place and we set up to satisfy. >> can you get that on the web today? >> you know, i think you still can find it. it's littered with ads. i think if you google scott shane, you can find it. you can find it in the old database and that kind of thing. that kind of certainly gave me an exposure and interest in the area. like many reporters at 9/11 it seemed like for a while everybody was working on national security and then i stuck with it. wrote a lot about the anthrax letters in case people remembered elite in 2001. after coming to the times in 2004, i wrote a great deal about sort of the cia and the bush interrogation detention. all of lot about target killing and drone strikes. >> john kiriakou's story after you wrote about it and brian ross all the interviews, it seems that some organizations picked up on it and just covered it are like russia today. russia today with anti-american bias if you watch it. i want to show you, they did actual party that was held before john kiriakou went to prison. i don't know if you seen this. i will run a little bit of it and have you comment on the violent and the code pink folks were there. [video clip] >> today he will check into the federal corrections institution in le -- laredo, pennsylvania. >> in december 2007, i said on abc news that the cia was torturing prisonsers and that torture was official u.s. government policy that went all the way up to the president. the next day the president said, i still smile when i think about this, the president said i don't know this man. i don't know this man's motivation. i don't know why this man would throw me under the bus. but i did. i threw the president under the bus. >> you know russia today, why would they spend so much time on that story? >> well, i'm hardly in position to criticize anybody for spending a lot of time on this story. i spent a lot of time on this story. we wrote a huge story on john kiriakou in january. i think both of the soviet area and in the putin era, russian and russian officials get tired of being criticized by the united states on human rights grounds. when the united states is sending former cia officer off to prison, certainly in his mind in the mind of many of his supporters for among other things speaking out on waterboarding on torture, that has a certain appeal. it's a little bit of the russians, i think, saying aren't you guys kind of being hypocritical. >> john kiriakou in a story you quoted him saying he didn't see abu zabada being water tortured. you go on to point out he was water tortured 83 times. >> one of the many surprises along the road was that while john kiriakou spoke with great authority on abc in 2007 about what had happened to abu zabada during the waterboarding, it turned out he was wrong. he said that after 35 seconds of this waterboarding treatment, abu zabada broken and spoken about everything openly. while he had come to believe it was torture and we were americans and we were betterbe doing it, he also suggested it was extremely effective. he said that he believed that at the time. i actually think that's right. he had moved out that program, a very compartmented program where people learn about things only on a need to know basis. he claim that's in both cables and from conversations with colleagues at cia, he had learned that the waterboarding worked like a charm. after 35 seconds abu zabada started talking. there's a wrinkle we'll get to on that. on a inspector general in 2009, cia inspector general report on this program came to light. it mentioned that abu was waterboard 83 times. khalid mohammed had been waterboard. working in this magical way turning a recalcitrant terror into information. waterboarding had not caused abu zabada talking after 35 seconds. some questions in retrospect about whether it produced any information from abu zabada. the question arose, why did john kiriakou say this. some people actually suspected may be he put up by the cia and this was sort disinformation propaganda about the water boarding. at this point i'm sure that's not true. i think he actually said what he believe and what he had been told. the wrinkle come up more recently that we still don't us fully. the senate intelligence committee had responsibility four years looking at this same program. they have a 6000 page report which remains classified at this point. even the summary something like 325 pages. we only know the basic bottom line findings because a few senators talked about them. we don't know the details. one of the things they've said is there was a lot of disinformation about this interrogation program inside the cia. between the cia and the white house. there's been a suggestion that some folks who the cia was presenting this is far more effective than it was even inside the place into the white house. so may be john kiriakou was hearing a longer version of the true story in 2007 when he made those statements on tv. >> the main reason we asked you to talk about this was the fact, this was back in january, this is unusual place to find a story like this in the "new york times" on sunday. what went into the decision -- you say in a story that you got permission from john kiriakou to reveal the source thing. did you have that in writing? >> you know, there was a kind of long legal history because at one point -- what you fear in a leak investigation is a reporter you will be subpoenaed by the government as a witness to come and say this person was my confidential source. something you obviously don't want to the and in most cases reporters say they will prefer to go to prison. in this instance, the prosecutors made clear pretty early on that they were not going to subpoena me or the other reporters who john kiriakou had talked to. partly as i mentioned, they had e-mas between repoer and kiriakou. what did happen, this was completely unexpected, john kiriakou's lawyer subpoenaed some of us including me. this was sort of an unusual situation because why would the source want to come in and talk about your dealings with him. i didn't like the idea of going into court talking about a confidential source even with the permission of the source. we objected to that and pushed back and eventually they decided not to do it. in that process, john kiriakou did give me in writing sort of waiver that said, i authorized scott shane to talk about our previously confidential exchanges. what happened actually be i suppose i can talk about this and it's sort of an interesting story, after he was indicted in january 2012, my first instinct was to call the guy and say, look i'm really sorry. i felt partly responsible. certainly i had absolutely no intention obviously of seeing this guy criminally charged. i was shocked that he was charged, particularly in the area of our exchanges. i thought it was unjustified due to this day. however, it's obviously a very sensitive thing. we had to cover the indictment. another reporter took on the job of writing because i was involved. our lawyer at the "new york times" told me i should not talk to kiriakou. that kind of made sense. i gotten him into enough trouble to begin with. i was banned from talking to him for quite a while until finally i guess it was in october, he pleaded guilty. after the guilty plea which i also didn't cover, i asked my lawyers,ky get in touch with this guy and have a personal conversation with him? they said sure. i sent him an e-mail and said -- >> by the way did you suspect the united states will be reading that e-mail? >> it's conceivable that they were continuing to monitor his e-mail. i think it will be the fbi i think. i wasn't going by anything classified. i said, i felt terrible when you got indicted and i wasn't allowed to talk to you. you may never want to talk to me again. if you willing, i love to buy you lunch. he responded very graciously and we had lunch. he told me a little bit more about the kind of -- what it was like to be prosecuted. some of the story about when he first became aware that perhaps he was under scrutiny. what he thought about it and so on. i thought, wow this is a great story here. i actually initially -- i wrote a long memo. i said i have to write this in first person. i wrote a long memo and then they thought again and decided i could do it. initially it was scheduled to run in the "new york times" magazine. we heard that the "new yorker" was planning a long story on john kiriakou. in the end to my great relief, the editors agreed to just kind of crash it into the paper as we say on short notice and put it into the sunday paper so we can beat out the "new yorker." that's basically how i came to write about this in the paper. >> there are pictures that you had in the article with john kiriakou and his daughter and the children. why would he want his kids seen in public? >> well, i don't think he has huge fear from terrorists and that kind of thing. he was one of these people i mentioned who got out of the cia and wrote a book. it's called "the reluctant spy" it's a good read. like most former cry officers write books he fought a bit of battle what they call a public publication review board. i believe it's true when he first admitted his book manuscript, he's obligated to show it to them so they can look for classified information. i believe the first message he got back from them was, everything is classified in this book. there was a long fight and that went on as often happens and he took out some things and eventually the book was published. he was worried both when he spoke on television in 2007. i know he had some concerns about would terrorists go after him. nothing in the end thank god happened. that's generally been the case. these folks who come out and speak publicly, al qaeda seem to like kill large number of americans randomly rather than hunting down individuals. when he was talking to me later and when he knew he was going to prison, i think he probably wanted sympathy. he wanted understanding for the moment and the punishment his government was handing him. whatever you make of his case and i now people who know his case well who think, yes, they need to crack down on leaks. he's a good sort of poster boy. this will send a message. people will be more discreet in talking to reporters. i certainly know lots of people in my profession who feel the opposite of that. these leaked prosecutions are over kill and they are misguided and they pose a bit of a danger to the press. in any case, this is a guy who, i think, by all accounts meant well. who served his country well for 15 years in some very dangerous situations. he risked his life to take on al qaeda and pakistan. he's going off to prison for 30 months leaving his young family behind. >> after your article was published in january on the web, a lot of comments campaign in. i want to read one from a woman named catherine fitzpatrick. i was reading the article about kiriakou, i kept thinking the reason scott shane thinks he should not be punished severely, he is his source. might being kiriakou. the other thing i thought, he and his editors feel guilty to try and talk themselves away from the conscious they feel and mission not accomplished and in shane is challenging the view of a lot of progressives at the time. it simply fit their view. i can go on. >> that's a well put version of an argument that i certainly hear a lot. after that article was published in another times as well, in that article as someone who reads it carefully, i don't hide my conflict of interest. i have an interest in getting government official to talk to me about national security affairs. that's my bread and butter and that's how i make my living. i guess the second argument in a more important argument in a way is this not is this good for me, is it good for the country for the government? some of my thinking about this is actually shaped by my years in russia. when i came back from russia, i wasn't ready to give up the experience and i spent a while writing a book about the soviet collapse. it was gorbachev decision to ease up on information control that actually toppled the system. the soviet system could not withstand the free flow of information about the soviet path, about living standards in the west and all kinds of other things. when i was levering there and -- living there and writing that book, i got a really good look at a associate where the government had the last word on what's public and what's secret. in that kind of country, this was absolutely true in the soviet union, every editor had a giant sort of notebook of directives that said what you could and couldn't publish. every part of the bureaucracy of course put something into that book to cover up its own mistakes. so the fishery ministry, said that you couldn't write about if you were soviet newspaper, you couldn't write about certain practices they had including dumping huge ams of fish into the ocean. incredible wasteful practices they engaged in and this ministry put it in there. it doesn't take a genius to realize that a government like that is not going to be terribly efficient. if you cut off all the feedback that you can get from the public about how you're doing, you're not going to do very well. i was acutely aware when i started writing about the secret government in the united states of this problem. i recognized that there are some things that the government does that have to be secret at least for a time. i mentioned the national security agency, historically, the national security agency one of its beg jobs is breaking codes. let's pick on iran, if n.s.a. is now reading all of iran's most secret communication traffic since they broken the iranian code. that's obviously a huge intelligence for the american government. if i write that n.s.a. is reading iranian code, then iran can fairly easily switch codes, switch machines and take away that windfall of intelligence. that's an important secret needs to be preserved. i recognize that if we have an agent who has infiltrated al qaeda, it happened in yemen. if we identify that person when he's in an al qaeda camp there, he's dead. he's a dead man. we lose that source and certainly has a human matter you would not want to do that. there are secrets that deserve to be preserved. the other problem, the problem with that is that bureaucrats love secrecy especially in the national security realm. if econtrol a certain amount of information and it's secret from everybody else, that enhances my power. if i screw up and i can keep that secret, that preserves my reputation, my career. there's always huge sort of urge for secrecy in the government. sometimes often not justified. i think you can fairly ask why is it so secret that we -- why is still many of the details classified about what we did to al qaeda prisoners these secret cia jails in 2002, 2003 and 2004. years passed and we know a great deal about this stuff. yet the senate's 6000 page report on this program still completely classified unclear whether any will be declassified. from my point of view as a reporter, if there's a proper balance between secrecy and openness, i would move that line far beyond where it is today towards open government. certainly, i think it's legitimate to have a debate about that and i happen to disagree with the person who wrote that article. >> have you noticed any change in attitude of people that work in government, in the cia, former cia agents and their interest in talking to you now that john kiriakou is in prison? >> yes. i think most of my colleagues who cover national security would say there's definitely an impact. it's not just kiriakou with six cases as i mentioned, this i don't think by any plan. there's one guy working for the state department, one guy working for the fbi, one guy working in the military, one guy working for n.s.a. all these agencies now have one case of somebody being prosecuted and if the goal is as some folks in the government say it is, to deter others from talking to the press, i think it's working to some degree. i think there is a chilling effect. i don't blame people frankly. the line between what's classified and what's unclassified has always been somewhat blurred. these cases have made it even more blurred and a lot of people these would be congressional staffers, members of congress, current intelligence officers former intelligence officers and intelligence officials. the obligation to protect classified information is a lifetime obligation that goes on until you die. all of those people, many of them, look at this possibility that they could say something that would be considered to be classified. that they could find themselves talking to the fbi and in the worse case scenario finding themselves going off to prison. they balance that against helping scott shane with this story and it's not hard for them to say, you know what, i don't want to talk about that. it's happening a lot more often today than it did some years ago. >> we've been talking about an article that scott shane wrote in the january 6th edition 2013 of the "new york times." you can find it online and read the whole article. we are out of time. scott shane thank you so much for joining us. >> my pleasure. thanks so much for having me. what it means for government and rebel fighters. live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c- span. first first lady to get a college degree. she influences her husband to switch from the wing parties to the republican party. she goes to the first-ever white house east trad