Transcripts For CSPAN Washington This Week 20110820

really anything that i can see to enhance cyber security. since that there are a number of things that we send to -- that we can do. let's divide this into two different areas which i think are useful. one is a basic attack. these can be very devastating. we know tons about how to prevent those basic tax. in fact, there has been consistent research by the academic community, the private sector, and the government all agreeing that if we simply adopted standards, practices, and technologies that we already have, we could stop between 85% and 95% of those attacks. the reason that we're not doing that is because of cost. we have to find ways to make those investments economically viable for the enterprises. we need to be protecting our systems. if you use liability, insurance, a range of things that the government can do to provide those incentives. that would address the vast majority of the attacks. then we have the old dress sophisticated tax. one of the characteristics is the bad guys will get in. that is what persistent refers to. they will get in your system. you really have no perimeter defense. the bad news is that we have to alter the model away from perimeter defense to a different strategy. we don't have a lot of control over the attackers when they are out there in the wild, as we like to say. there are too many interest points, etc., etc.. we have a lot more control over them when they are in our system. if you include the internal analysis, and you can find them when they are in the server. many of them are not successful and they are break-in. they are successful when they break back out. if you lock the thief in the vault, so to speak, you really to thwart the attack. if we can come up with ways to find the websites that they're sending the data back out to and blocks that unauthorized out down traffic, even when they succeed in getting by, you can still thwart the attack. this is a pretty successful method. what we need to do is to develop a new sort of structure where we leverage the companies that really do this well, lockheed, raytheon, they will invest in this kind of thing. if we can share the information that the really sophisticated people to about this on authorized access, we can create a different model of security for those soldiers sophisticated attacks. what we are advocating are several things, one is to deal with these basic attacks. we have to do with the court issue which is economics. tois not that we don't want handle security is that that we don't want to buy security. you did not probably ask about security on the smart phones that you bought. you have to do with that economic issue. the all to sophisticated things, we have to get a sophisticated companies, which we have and leverage their ability said that they will share that information. a lot of them are willing to do this. we would love to have a really good structural agency that we can develop these enhanced strategies to deal with the enhanced threats. >> when you talk about these altars sophisticated attacks, you might be indicating that more intelligence or military involvement is necessary. there are calls for that and that is viewed as the alternative for the white house's proposal. is that your companies are relying on? >> not at all. we're dealing with these companies and they do a lot of work with the military. there are banks and others that do this kind of sophisticated analysis. what we are talking about is a system that is on the private- sector collaborating with each other and then sharing more broadly. would there be intelligence agencies involved, i don't envision it. the big problem in cyber security in regard to information sharing is trust. the reason we don't have the trust now is that the intelligence community does not want to give up source data because they are afraid it will get back out to the bad guys and frankly that is pretty reasonable. the private sector does not want to give up proprietary data. the model i have just described circumvents both of those problems. we are talking about giving of source data. most companies don't care who is doing the attacks. most companies, they don't care, they just want the attacks stopped. by changing the model of the sort of information, we can stop this without getting much more involvement from the intelligence community, etc.. with thee dealing basic tax, there is lots that need to be incentivizing. we want these companies to want to do it. with the sophisticated tax, we need to evolve our thinking about the strategies and a variety of different ones. i don't think that this necessitates the sort of broad involvement. >> live clinton is the president and ceo of the internet security alliance. thank you, next week, the conclusion of our series on cyber security. we will have three experts talking about the threats of the u.s. faces. we will see you next week. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> before leaving for his vacation, president obama tape his weekly address in alpha, illinois. he calls on congress to pass international trade agreements. he is followed by the ohio governor on his approach to creating jobs and how close in his budget could be a lesson for washington. >> hello from the country corner farm in alpha, illinois. for the past few days, i've been traveling to small towns and farm towns here in the heartland of this country. i sat down with small business owners in gutenberg, iowa, and ranchers and farmers in peosta. i had lunch with veterans in cannon falls, minnesota, and talked to plant workers at a seed distributor in atkinson, illinois. and to the girls volleyball team at maquoketa high school, let me just say one thing -- go cardinals. now, i'm out here for one reason -- i think washington, dc can learn something from the folks in atkinson and peosta and cannon falls. i think our country would be a whole lot better off if our elected leaders showed the same kind of discipline and integrity and responsibility that most americans demonstrate in their lives every day. because, the fact is, we're going through a tough time right now. we're coming through a terrible recession, a lot of folks are still looking for work. a lot of people are getting by with smaller paychecks or less money in the cash register. so we need folks in washington -- the people whose job it is to deal with the country's problems, the people who you elected to serve -- we need them to put aside their differences to get things done. there are things we can do right now that will mean more customers for businesses and more jobs across the country. we can cut payroll taxes again, so families have an extra $1,000 to spend. we can pass a road construction bill so construction crews -- now sitting idle -- can head back to the worksite, rebuilding roads, bridges, and airports. we've got brave, skilled americans returning from iraq and afghanistan. let's connect them with businesses that could use their skills. and let's pass trade deals to level the playing field for our businesses. we have americans driving hyundais and kias. well, i want to see folks in korea driving fords, chevys and chryslers. i want more products sold around the globe stamped with three words -- made in america. these are commonsense ideas -- ideas that have been supported by both democrats and republicans. the only thing holding them back is politics. the only thing preventing us from passing these bills is the refusal by some in congress to put country ahead of party. that's the problem right now. that's what's holding this country back. that's what we have to change. because, for all the knocks we've taken, despite all the challenges we face, this is still the greatest country on earth. we still have the best workers and farmers, entrepreneurs and businesses, students and scientists. and you can see that here in alpha. you can see it along the country roads that connect these small towns and farmlands. these past few days, i've been seeing little kids with american flags and grandparents in lawn chairs. i've shaken hands with folks outside machine shops and churches, corner stores and farms. it reminds me why i got into public service in the first place. getting out of washington and spending time with the people of this country -- seeing how hard you're working, how creative you are, how resourceful you are, how determined you are -- that only makes me more determined to serve you as best i can as president. and it only makes me more confident in our future. that's why it's so important that folks in washington put country before party. that's why it's so important that our elected leaders get past their differences to help grow the economy and put this nation back to work. because here in alpha it couldn't be more clear -- if we can come together, there's no stopping the united states of america. there's no doubt that our future is bright. thanks, and have a great weekend. >> the president traveled through the midwest. he did not stop in ohio. if he had, i would have shared the same story i told you. when i entered office, ohio was facing the largest budget shortfall in history and an economy suffering from the same problems that is hurting businesses across the country. we reduced our shortfall to zero, all the while cutting taxes for every person in ohio. in the past, our state, like many others relied heavily on one time federal stimulus dollars and use tricks and gimmicks to do the rest but that approach crated a massive shortfall, caused job graders to lose confidence in ohio, and lead to increased unemployment. we looked our problem square in the eye and we did not blink. we have achieved real savings and made long reforms to provide better value without raising taxes. we cut their taxes and eliminated the death tax, which is driving successful business people out of ohio. we have privatized economic development by creating an innovative and new nonprofit organization run by successful business people. it can move at the speed of business, not at the speed of statute and bring businesses and jobs to ohio and give the but i state the economic damage it needs. of course, we have a long way still to go. these are difficult times for ohio families. ohio was in a very deep hole and we are digging our way out. we face an unprecedented $8 billion deficit and we were among the highest tax states in the nation. raising taxes was not the answer. the president has said that before because it would have made ohio less competitive. instead, we chose the reform programs that politicians had shied away from touching. we would not have to waste taxes and drive out more jobs. for all the good we are trying to do here, our success in ohio would be thwarted if washington continues its spending spree and its punitive taxes on success. if we have learned anything, government cannot tax, spend, regulate its way to prosperity. government should not be making promises it cannot keep, especially when it is more than 14 and a half trillion in the hole. our national debt represents a claim on your future hard earned tax dollars. this will erode our economy and our children's future. when i hear the president and his allies say that we need more spending and higher taxes, this is a real cause for concern. there is a better way and americans can learn from ohio. we need to start thinking about what we can do to have our children have a great future. we can reform the behemoths of the federal government to create a space so that businesses can invest and create jobs. government is not the answer but it can be part of the answer. is the ability of providing for a robust private sector where people want to invest and take risks. that is what this -- will get this country moving again. republicans in congress have offered these kinds of solutions that will are in the president's considerations if not is full support. i am encouraged that republicans fought to ensure that both houses of congress will vote this fall on the balanced budget amendment to the constitution. i can tell you if there is no better way to control future spending and give our job creators long-term certainty. 15 years ago, the balanced budget amendment came within one vote of passing congress and going to the states for ratification. i cannot help but wonder how different things would be if we had succeeded. both parties should come together this fall to send the balanced budget amendment to us and our state. divided government is no excuse for inaction. we have had our fair share of gridlock. our differences might have been stark but president clinton and his team worked with us said that we could do what is best for the country. where is it written that washington cannot do it again? where is it written that both parties cannot cut through this partition and find consensus? no where. it is my hope that president obama will part with republicans to get our economy back to creating jobs. it is just as important that republicans not be stiff neck about working across the aisle when important work must be done. it is ok to compromise on policy, as long as you don't compromise on principles. the playbook was simple, to grow more, you have to tax less and spend less. if we can do it here in ohio, washington should do it also. together, we can get it done. on behalf of the people of ohio, thank you for listening. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> from today "washington journal," a look at why the government asked the syrian president to step down. host: our focus on this segment is what is occurring in syria. we are joined by one person from the "washington post." thanks for joining us. that could reaction from syria whent comes to the announcement earlier this week by our government and the european union as well. guest: no reaction at a. business as usual. they are not going to let up on this crackdown. host: on the ground, what does the latest in tms of calls for removal of the president and his response? guest: we saw people going out to prague -- protest as they always do on fridays. they're calling for overthrow of the regime. we heard -- the government is struggling. all they want to do is crash of this revolt completely. host: are they using the argument that protesters are shills for other forces trying to overthrow the government? -- shields for other forces trying to overthrow the government? guest: -- in some parts of the country on some occasions, people have used weapons to defend themselves in some way. the overwhelming majority want a peaceful end. host: when it comes to potential resources not going out of the country because of embargo trade and otherwise, can the government a sustain themselves with that happening? guest: we have indications that the eu is going to stop purchases of gas and other items, which would be a huge blow. it would have an effect on people's behavior. upper-middle-class this that have turned against the regime -- once they see their life styles have been affected, to change their attitude towards the regime. if they are worthless, they will tough it out somehow. host: what has been the role of turkey? guest: today of played an interesting role. there were hoping to persuade the turks to join him to make it a multi-national effort. they have made it clear that they do not want to join him. they sit in geographically above the middle east. they want to broker solutions and to solve problems not create them. they see themselves as a power that does not want to sabotage or have a confrontation, but continue to deal with them while changing their behavior. host: does he have a firm hand on his country? guest: -- it is impossible to say that he is as strong or as in much control as he was a few months ago people have been hoping that the regime would crumble and there would be the factions, the army would be split. there has been nothing so far. host: is the real impact from announcements made earlier today? guest: there is going to be an impact of course. a lot of people believe that they have been a bounded by the outside world. -- abandoned by the outside world. now they feel they are not alone, they tell me. it will encourage them. it does not change anything on the ground. you sll cannot see how you will get from aysha to ration of people protester should be getting shot every week, to the government being over flom. -- overthrown. host: thank you. guest: thank you. host: the joining the conversation is acholar at the middle eastern institute and y professor. guest: what president obama did this week is an important step. it really inspired some people in syria to join the protest. richard we do not see our way t of this yet. the regime is being compelled to a terrific violence against the protesters and u.n. factfinding report shows very clearly that there is more provocation on the protesters that justifies what the syrian merriment is doing. host: did the presint wait too long? guest: the coordination of the effort is important to. he that the europeans to come a long way. the turks have come a longay as well. they said publicly that he is going too far and the needs to stop. i think you have a feeling now of coordinated international pressure growing there will be a u.n. fact-finding gro too to syria this weekend. there is a meeting in turkey and the national council is what they're calling it now. they are organizing the government in exile. these are the things. host: if you want to ask questions of our guest for the next half-hour or so, here are the numbers. earlier this week it was secretary state hiary clinton and made a verbal addressed by the united states. here is part of it. >> the transition to democracy inyria has begun and it is time for the president to get out of the way. as president obama said this morning, no outside power can or should impose on this transition. it is up to the syrian people to choose their own leaders in a democratic system based on the rule of law and dedicated to protecting the rights of all citizens, regardless of ethnicity, religion, sex, or gender. host: she said the transition has begun. do you agree with that assessment? guest: there is some transition that has begun. -- we have to wait and see. host: does it matter that she made the announcement instead of the president? guest: it matters, but it may not matter that much. it is the middle of august, and the president is on vacation. her saying these things is important. host: of talk about other nations going through turmoil of sick -- similar nature. guest: it could be a wise decision but has not worked out particularly well in libya. it was mh more problematic in syria not only for political reasons. there is arab support for it. the geography of syria is quite different. there is no call for it among syrian protesters. we see civilian instruments of power being used. i am an enthusiast for the civilian instruments o power. it seems to be a good idea to go in this direction. the platform is a lot better than the violent clash. host: will the economic embargoes work? guest: i do not know. this is the big elephant in the room. iran is reportedly giving syria a great deal of money. it is t clear if the gas exports is going to have the full effect, because of the efforts to soften the blow. host: the first call is from port richey, florida. democrats line. caller: hi my name is andy. i was a rescu worker at the world trade center. we are helping all of these countries out. how about them giving us a cell -- some of their oil? host: illinois, republican line. caller: my name is a jaime. i think president obama's foreign policy is void. i was wondering about the comment as to whether he would be willing to start a war. normally warme presidents when the election. richardw-- win the election. guest: i do not think president obama wants to have a military action in syr. we are already full of military action. host: from torture, we have a viewer who asks this. -- fromwitter, we have a viewer who asks this. guest: i do not think the military has the popular support in syria as it does elsewhere. as such in egypt. i do not think you could completely rule it out. there are elements within the regime, which may want to take over and manage a transition process, so it does not impact of them too much. we will see if they are successful or not. host: who is waiting in the rngs. guest: we do not really know. it is kind of a one-family state. it is important and has signed been noted much in the press, but all of the appeals this week was for the president there to step aside. they did not say step down, but stepped aside. i think what they are saying is you have to get out of the way somehow. you do not necessarily have to do what mubarak did. host: would it be someone in the family, someone that he choose. guest: it depends on who he is and how wide the -- wise they are in managing the transition in committed they are to managing the transition to a real democracy. there is a real, triangular ballot -- a battle going on. the management in transition is much harder than the management in an effort to get them to step down. you have clarity of purpose and it becomes easier. winners, losers, and politics starts to break out. host: indiana, democrats line. caller: where do you see this moving forward? obviously the president will be gone. he has no reason to be in this environment. there will be continuations of crackdowns. i think syria is our threshold for something here. what is your honest assessment of where you see syria going? guest: it is difficult to predict. i would like to see the syrians organizing themselves for the transition. a meeting going on in turkey on monday, where they are trying to form a syrian national council to be a kind of government waiting or the legislature is waiting. it seems to me with the syrians taking on th responsibility of managing on transition is a way of getting it in the best possible way. the regime -- i do not know if i would be comfortable having my name listed inhe issue of council today. i would think many people would be hesitant. we would have to seeing how this will work itself out. there are a lot of people that survived a long time having lost legitimacy. host: how is the goverent set up? guest: a one-party state. only one political party has been allowed in syria for decades. it is a government that is largely in the hands of a single family. various relatives took on key positions, pticularly the commander of the most important of the military forces for islamic tradition into the republicans. family members and other security traditions are kept as well. it is not a regime like gaddafi, which was spelling -- the money in york. they realize the need to cut what the business community, to make sure the largest city was on a warm weather regime. you see whites protest, but nowhere near the intensity that we have seen in other voices. >> wie host: we have about 20 minutes left with our guest. you can contact us at the numbers below. you can also e-mail or send us a tweet. our next call is from washington, d.c. on our independent line. caller: it seems that we as the american people seem to be on the two sides of the same coin. we will be held responsible if we do something or do not do something. i would like your opinion on to what degree should we as american citens engage ourselves in these kinds of internal conflicts that are happening all over the world? guest: we have to pay attention to the rest of the world. it is pathetic of those that see democratic solutions. we cannot take on the whole responsibility. it seems to me at we have to do is support those trying to democratize the country, syria, without removing responsibility from their end. hopefully, the outcome in syria is up to the syrians as the president made very clear. engagement with the rest of the road is very important. citizen engagement is very important. we should understand what is going on and we should support those whose aspirations are for democracy and freedom. host: birmingham, alabama, a republican line, steve. caller: i have a question. why does the united states thinkhey are the peacemakers of the world, when the real problem is that we spend millions and millions of dollars to invade in other countries where we have no business being there. guest: there are responsibilities that come with being the united states. those, because we are powerful, we are economically under noal contortions usually fairly strong. responsibilities in the rest of the world have been with the united states for a long time. i am completely sympathetic to the caller at the same time in the previous ones,oncerned about the amount of money spent. we have to think about what we do abroad, not only in terms of spending money, but in terms of the engagement, which is somewhat ctly. we have to seek aid but also in terms of diplomatic engagement, governmental and a citizen engagement that is relatively cheap. host: two questions from twitter. guest: the first answer is we simply do not know. there is no way to tell. serious elections have never been held. the answer to the second question is they are aligned with hezbollah. they are joined at the hips. one of the reasons the syrian regime has to be more forthcoming to the demonstrators is they know full well more democratic syria would not necessarily support hezbollah. the alliance between syria and iran depend on that support to hezbollah. host: of the protesters generally younger? what arehe living conditions like? gues we are not certain, but they look to be youer rather than older. there are indications the demonstrators come more from the orer areas. some of the demonstrations are clearly all or virtually all male, the women have participated. we do not know a lot about the ethnic makeup of the demonstrators. the protesters will tell you that it crosses sectarian and ethnic lines and they have mobilized people from all of the communities in syria. what the precise percentages are, nobody knows. host: victoria, texas, is next. john is on the independents' line. caller: there is a book called "the pentagon's blank check." he stated that weapons built on solid gold would be cheaper than what it costs of the federal government. it seems the military industrial complex has already broken the backs of the american taxpayers. they talk aut air conditioning at triple dit temperatures. that is a necessity. they go round and stir up all of these ant piles and then have to give the taxpayers to pay for the ant poison to exterminate them. host: what is your question? caller: why are we having our soldiers dying for somebody that does not even care about us? they do not live like we do. they have their own society. guest: i doot think anybody can accuse the military industrial complex of stirring up the trouble in syria. the trouble in syria was stirred up by the syrian citizens who objected to an oppressive, autocratic regime. i am sympathetic with the caller's concern about the military cost. that is one reason why i emphasize the civilian instruments of power. the military is very powerful. it is necessary. i have admiration for them. we need to learn to use diplomacy, sanctions, a citizen diplomacy. we need to use the civilian instruments of engagement with the rest the world. host: are countries with tribalism less likely to move towards successful democracy? guest: tribalism exists in many countries. in some respects, even we act tribally from time to time. personal and family relationships can be very important to americans. i do not think there is anything about the existence of tribes in society that renders the possibility of democracy impossible. it may be a different kind of democracy. host: our guest is daniel serwer. what do you think about the current conditions in libya as far as gaddafi is concerned? guest: gaddafi looks like he is approaching the end of his days. the rebels have clearly ten territory and have been able to hold it. tripoli will be virtually isolated. the problem is taking tripoli by military force is really problematic. it is problematic because it is a large city. there will be a lot of supporters of gaddafi there. it is problematic because the regime still has deep roots, weapons hidden, the possibility of resistance movements even after gaddafi falls. it seems important that some arrangements be made. we can only gather from the press reporting that they're talks about getting gaddafi out of there. the key is that gaddafi and his whole family have to depart. it is hard to picture a transition that in any way involved that family at this point. the rebels are winning on the battlefield. if they hesitate before taking tripoli, we should understand there are good reasons for such hesitation. i think a large part of it is due to the nato action. it is much better coordinated with the rebel military forces than initially. is having a big impact on the libyan army. there is the real possibility that taking tripoli militarily can be done. i do not think it is necessarily the best way to handle it. i will leave it to the libyans to decide that. host: any clear picture on who assumes power? guest: yes, anyway. there is a transitional council that has been formed. it has been enlarged to include other parts of the country. whether the transitional national council will manage the transition or establish a new institution is not car. it will be managed by an institution that is institutional. that seems to be a big commitment. host: go ahead. caller: the united states should leave libya alone. libya needs to take care of libya's business. the united states needs to take care of its business. the united states has its own problems. guest: i have sympathy with people who feel this way. we do have our own problems. but we are engaged in libya through nato. the international support for the transition process should not be done by the united states. it should be done by the united nations and european union whose interests are more directly engaged in libya than american interests. host: dean is on the independent line from ohio. caller: i heard a professor from a college the other day. he was a transplanted syrian. i believe he was the united states citizen. he sd the problem was we were moving too quickly on this. the administration in syria as stated they were moving towas the objectives of the protesters but that it was going to take time. we run the risk of setting -- upsetting the apple cart by moving too quickly. i wonder what your response would be to th. guest: i think there is concern about a transition in syria that looks more like the collapse then a transition perio that ist of the reason you hear the phrase "step aside" instead of "step down." there shou be some stability maintained through the transition. they are afraid of the ethnic and sectarian conflict in syria. i do not think the administration moved to quickly to call for president bashar al- assad to step aside. if anything, i think they moved too slowly. we have to be careful about causing collapse. collapse could be calamitous. host: the united nations report shows most of the victims will wounds were located in the head, chest, and upper body area. guest: the u.n. report is magnificent. unrtunately, it is not based on being in syria. they interviewed people in lebanon and elsewhere. they have some telephone interviews with people in syria. the evidence is of an unjustifiable military crackdown on peaceful demonstrators. that is what is destroying the legitimacy of president bashar al-assad. it is a peaceful rebellion that the regime is trying to turn into an armed rebellion so they can use its military forces. host: we have provided a link to that report on our website. you can read it for yourself. maryland is next. leo is on the democrats' line. caller: i have a question. saudi arabia is recalling the ambassador from syria. those countries'credibility has to do with syria. the united states should not base its decision on theirs. guest: i do think saudi arabia and some other countries have been unwilling to tolerate protests in their own country and lack of democratic legitimacy that the caller refers to. nevertheless, saudi influence in the sunni majority population of syria is important. taking a stand against the regime hopes to push things in the right direction. host: are there still refugees pouring over the border into turkey? guest: tre are still refugees. i am not sure they are poring over the border in nonsense. -- i am not sure that they are pouring over the border in that sense. i do not think people are starving yet, but we have to be cautious and prepared to be helpful. large numbers of people are being displaced. lebanon and turkey have been welcoming to them. you can provide services to them once they'ren those countries. we do not know that much about the situation inside syria itself. i have not seen widespread reports of humanitarian issues of this point. host: warren is up next on the republican line from new hampshire. caller: i am concerned about american foreign policy in the middle east. it seems the administration targets in the arab regimes -- targets. regimes that are nintelligible] of christianity. i am dumbfounded why they want the president of syria to resign when he is one of the very few that allow catholics to have the freedom of religion. our religious people over there are totally afraid of what will happen to them with the jihad muslims, much like the people were in iraq. there flooding out of their ancient homeland by the droves. guest: i think the caller has an important concern. the syrian regime did not allow political freedoms, but it did tolerate religious diversity to a large degree. i spent the summer in damascus studying arabic. i saw for myself that catholic and protestant churches were quite strong. i do not think the united states has targeted regimes that are tolerant. to call saddam hussein tolerant is mindboggling. bashar al-assad has allowed a limited degree of religious practice. concern about what redeems may do is quite legitimate. i think the united states should express concerns abo those issues. caller: i am worried about muslim brotherhood rising up and getting more control over the militaries of those countries. guest: the muslim brotherhd is many different things in many different countries. the notion in the united states has been that this is a massive islamic conspiracy that will take over in country after country. i think that is a mh. some of them will be islamists in orientation. i do not think in any of these countries do you see a predomince of islamist views. the muslim brotherhood will have trouble competing for votes in a democratic system. it does exist. is there. i do not see how you can support democracy and not allow it to compete for votes in the coming regimes. host: daniel asks about who trades most with syria currently and what their position is on assad. guest: oil and gas are the biggest exports. it is your. europe is moving towards blocking the oil and gas exports from syria. the volumes are not large, but it will hurt the regime because of the money it gets from the trade which is significant. iran i another important economic partner in trade and investment with syria. there is little we can do to cut off the relationship. we can expect the iranians to ante up for whatever money is lacking. russia is more of a political supporter of the syrian regime and then an economic supporter. we have not seen the security council action or resolution on syria because of the russians principally but not exclusively. i wonder if that will change in the next week or two. i think even the russians are reaching the end of their rope with the syrian regime. host: carl from new york is the last call. caller: president assad and his father before him had a target on their chest for many years in terms of american foreign policy because of their refusal to sign a peace treaty with israel and the fact that theyere concerned for the plight of the palestinians. now is the first opportunity that i can see for our state department to stick their noses in and say to resign. guest: i think the administration actually hesitated for a long time to try to push bashar al-assad aside. if anything, it can be accused of being too hopeful that he would make peace with israel and that removing him would make the syrian-israeli peace more diffult. they have now come to the other conclusion, that getting rid of him is a necessity. i do not think it has much to do with the israel-syria issues. it has to do with the crackdown and the fact that bashar al- assad has delegitimized himself. host: daniel serwer is a scholar at the middle east institute. guest: i blog >> net, because creators of twitter talk about the future of the internet. then a discussion on national- security cents 9/11. a speech by republican presidential candidate, texas republican ron paul. next, the creators of twitter, biz stone and evan williams, talked to walter isaacson about the future of the internet. this discussion about technology and what is ahead for internet users from the annual aspin ideas festival is just over one hour. >> steve jobs once said if you want to predict the future, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. these three gentlemen have all had something to do with the creation of the internet and post-internet. our illustrious e zero, walter isaacson. he released one of the first internet portals called pathfinder. it is still out there today. biz stone and evan williams are co-founders and two creators of blogger and twitter. both of those inventions will be feeling the repercussions of that for another generation at least. without further ado, walter isaacson, biz stone, and evan williams. [applause] >> can you put your name tags back on silicon remember them? >> it does not matter. >> it does not matter? ok. we are going to start with a piece of news about the future of the internet. a significant piece of news. these are the co-founders of twitter. they have something to announce today. do you want to start? >> evan bayh, i, and jason goldman -- the bald man in the front -- >> do not trade on this information because the market is closed. >> the three of us had been longtime collaborators and really good friends. our dream was always to build our own company where we get to make whatever we want, whenever we think is going to be helpful. we want to make the world a better place. we put up a web site today. we are calling our company -- the obvious corp.." we do not have anything specific to say about exactly what we are going to be working on just yet. we are not ready to reveal that, but we are excited to announce that we have started a new company. >> this actually is the lots of the new company with you as ceo? >> yes. it is actually a relaunch. obvious incubated twitter before spinning it off. we decided to focus on that for a few years, but the original idea with obvious was that we were going to create multiple things and see where they went. we did not end up doing that many things, but this is a relaunch of that company and we are very excited. our mission is that we do not have specifics what we are going to build. we are excited about building systems that help people work together to improve the world in various ways. we think that is so much of what the internet promises. getting into our topic today with the future of the internet will entail people working together to become greater than they could individually or > organizations and institutions can be. -- or greater than organizations and institutions can be. >> without going further than you are ready to go, you are talking about watching a new problem of twitter-like quality that would help people collaborate. >> yes. collaborate in being very things. twitter-like quality can mean different things. maybe we will launched a few things if we get as lucky as we did with twitter. that would be great, but the goal -- what we think is possible, there is a whole wave of new companies and services that are about helping people work together to do things. what twitter actually does and most communication technologies do, they enable people who would not necessarily act on their own to find like-minded people. it is one thing to find like- minded people and talk about stuff. it is another to find like- minded people and do stuff that is what we have seen in the middle east. that is what we have seen in much smaller examples throughout the history of twitter. people saying, "it is christmas time. there are homeless people on the street. let's give them blankets and food. who is with me?" we are convinced that would not happen if people did not have this communication channel. they do not get out there unless you give them a way to connect with other like-minded people. that scratches the surface of what is possible in the bigger arena to date. >> it seems like we are just beginning to scratch the surface on the internet and on specific applications like take a starter -- like kickstarter, that are allowing people to collaborate to affect real world, positive change. in many ways, twitter has done that. it is not entirely what is it -- what it is about, but it has done that in certain cases. there is a proliferation of start-ups and applications that are doing that now. as we get into our discussion about the future of the internet, hopefully this is a lead topic. >> in some ways, this is the history of the internet. it started as a collaborative medium. it became something different for a while. a "put some stuff out there close-" medium. >> it was originally to help scientists collaborate. it took on this very commercial motive. in the default paradigm of commerce, it was one way. we put a stop out to people and they will consume. you will buy things and they will consume our media and our advertisement. then there is the next wave where we figure out this is a two-and late medium. people create be yet themselves. there are many great examples of people collaborating on the internet to create software, to create information, like wicked mkipedia. to bring that collaboration back to the real world is the next phase. >> the way i think about it is there was a collaborative seed in the very beginning. the three phases of the internet, if you want to vastly generalized -- they paved the internet and built a mall. then blogging came along and a little seedlings started to sprout through the cracks. we lowered the barrier to self publishing. the democratization of information suddenly flourish. now we are entering that sort of a third phase where it is not just an overwhelming amount of information, there is people working to give you the best information as quickly as possible, but also, it includes taking the virtual and making it real, making it true, real, positive changes in the world. >> why did you call it the obvious corporation? >> for a couple of reasons. we want to create products that were obvious, easy-to-use, and straightforward. not treaty, not trying to be too clever, because we cannot be. we are not that clever. [laughter] probably a bigger reason was all of the biggest ideas or obvious in retrospect. only in retrospect. >> for the first nine months of twitter, everyone thought it was totally useless. they said it to our face every day. finally one day i got frustrated and said, "so is ice-cream. do you want us to ban ice cream?" [laughter] >> you are going to be the ceo of obvious, but both of you will still be connected with twitter in some ways. >> all three of us, jason as well. jason is an adviser at twitter. i am on the board of twitter. we all have a relationship with twitter. i run the board of directors. >> all of us are deeply invested personally and financially in twitter. evan is an active participant on the board. i am still working -- i work through this with dick, our ceo. i said you guys are so awesome, i will just get out of the way. if you need me, just ask me to do something. i will be working a lot with coms and bouncing ideas of the products. it is funny. jason is tied to the guidance counselor. all the employees are constantly asking jason for a private meeting. he is involved. we are all involved. we want to see it succeed tremendously. we want to try to help as much as possible while putting our efforts day-to-day into obvious. but let me pick back up on something you said, which is the arab spring. malcolm gladwell came out with the argument "of the revolution will not be tweeted." he responded, right? >> no one was arguing -- his argument was these revolutions are not twitter revolutions. no one said they were. that was weird. [laughter] that is what he was arguing. basically, i wrote a rebuttal that said, look, agreed. huge, major change, like the civil rights movement, comes from people. people need tools. the telephone was a big part of bringing down the berlin wall, but the telephone did not bring down the berlin wall. i just think his argument was kind of a straw man thing. i think he was angry that people kept writing twitter into the headlines. so he said, twitter had nothing to do with it. in fact, it did have a sideline part because these people were ready to speak up. twitter was a tool that help them realize the others felt like them. it emboldened them. it allowed them to feel like, ok, maybe we can do this. it has a role as a simple tool, but at the same time, twitter must remain a neutral technology, not taking sides, not getting involved, not celebrating any, you know, part of helping in any success. >> you call it neutral technology, but let me ask you a question. do you think from gutenberg to twitter, the technologies that enable a freer flow of information in communication inevitably being geared towards democracy? >> what do you think? i want to know your answer to that. [laughter] [applause] >> the answer is, yes. >> if it enables people, that makes democracy not neutral. it does not help an authoritarian regime. >> you could probably use it to do that, but it would not be as effective, i do not think. the thing we are facing now is that, you know, the state department is suddenly very cozy with twitter because they are like, "we tried to get this done with ak-47s and you got it done with tweets." [laughter] >> can we be friends?" i maintain that it has to be a neutral technology because there are different forms of democracy. you do not want your technology, you do not want twitter to look like it is simply a tool to spread the united states' version of technology around the world. what did i say? democracy around the world. he wanted to help for good, but you do not want to look like you are in the pocket of the u.s. government. we try to do that as much as we can, to speak out and say this. >> speaking at the future, as people have been starting internet companies sense whenever people started internet companies, one thing that changed a lot is the global nature of the antoinette. now -- of the internet. now if you create a consumer web service, most of your users or outside the united states. it does not matter if you are in the heart of the silicon valley and lots only art -- launched only in english. that changes have you think about things from the get go. it comes up i get all kinds of policy decisions as you get big. the state department stores calling at all kinds of beer things happen when you are right up -- all kinds of weird things happen when you are a company of about 40 people. an interesting factor in designing anything these days is if you can make -- is you can make something truly global. it is more global than it was even five or 10 years ago. i went to korea to launch twitter in korean in january. twitter and facebook or the first two services -- are the first two services to grow in korea that are not korean. even though they are very advanced -- they have high-speed internet and lots of homegrown effort that services, there is something culturally that keep people on the homegrown side. now with things like twitter and facebook, they have local competitors, but people want to be connected to the global network because they want to follow what is happening. they wanted all the bill gates and he is not on twitter career. you cannot separate this stuff anymore. it has to be part of one massive system, which also please do interesting things like the internet becoming more closed and less centralized. but that is another topic. >> let's get to the topic. is there a problem with the future of the internet that you think it might become more closed? >> absolutely. there are a lot of trends that pushed it toward being a more closed environment. specifically, the economics of the centralized system and the user experience are very powerful. >> are you talking about apple, for example? >> apple is a good example. as is facebook, as is youtube. let's take youtube as a less talked about example. youtube is not closed, but it is very centralized. 10 years ago if you talked to any technologist, they would have said obviously video was coming to the internet as band with the increases and storage costs decrease. at the time, no one i know would have said 80% of the video views will be run through one service. that would have been a strange thought at the time because the internet model was decentralization. every website, every newspaper, everyone has their own island of the internet so why would video not work the same way? now we look at a world where if you want to publish a video, you probably publish it on at youtube. maybe you publish it on your own site, but lots of organizations published on youtube. at first, it was a lot easier, but now it is where the viewers are. it as a big network effect. those network effects will make it more and more powerful. the same thing with facebook and the same thing with apple. if you want to write a mobile phone application, you will publish the apple store because that is the only way to get on the phone and it is great for users. it is the same thing over and over again. the user experience if this is centralized -- the rich is better in the economics are better. what we are getting our platform wars where there are a few major players and getting bigger and bigger and there are opportunities for little guys to be on these major players' platforms, but we are more dependent on these platforms. >> could you put twitter on that list? >> yes. hopefully. [laughter] >> it is like there are a bunch of different actor nets and you just pick the one you want. >> by internet, most of us have grown up thinking of the after net as -- internet as basically http web pages. there are other variations. we have had 20 years of the web page internet. now you say we are moving towards a social network based internet, but there will be certain platforms, like facebook or whatever. that will be more centrally controlled? >> you could go on your isopod touch, not have safari, and get everything you need. >> you can do it on your-own. >> everything is on there. the distinction is not whether it is http. that confuses the story a little bit. what is important is the paradigm has shifted from a completely decentralized internet to a more and more centralized internet. you have to go to the app store phone.an app on your anyone can put up a website. that eyesight is as facebook and that or twitter accounts -- facebook connect or twitter accounts to log in, that is different for the days recreated everything from scratch. i liken it to in the early days everyone had sort of an island and they tried to live on that island. they try to attract visitors. they try to attract tourists to the island. they would show up and they would issue them a passport and feed them whatever cocoanut they grew on that island. over time, a lot of them were like we cannot be completely self sustainable, so we will import things. one of the first things they would import more advertising. we will import surge. it's kind of stop there, but you could import your cms. that is what blogger did. now you can import your identity. now people are saying, screw it. we do not need to own land. we will be in the mall and the services will be provided. that makes a lot of sense from an entrepreneurialism standpoint. -- of entrepreneurial standpoint. maybe the land owners get too much control. that is the downside. when we started odio, a podcasting service that lets you record into your browser and send that recording out to anyone within i fophone. apple said we have podcasting in itunes. once they made a decision, we had to give it. >> if you are doing app-based , it is not as searchable and likable. >> it is not a part of the greater internet. in many ways, apps are a step backwards from the web because they are not compatible. >> do you remember a l l and top reserve? >> of course it -- aol and compuserve? >> of course. daylighting just got different. >> they got more ominous. [laughter] >> what else do you worry about? what's you should ask jason. he is the more cynical one. we are, in a sense, hallucinogenic cly optimistic. i am definitely an optimist. one thing we talked about is quality of content. for the last 15 years we have worked on lowering the barrier to content creation. that has had all these positive effects, but it seems like this is -- no one has been working on improving the quality of content on the internet. i think this is highly possible, but if you look at reading an article on the web today, it is basically the same as if you print it out. yet the same experience. once it is published, it rarely changes. the collective intelligence available in the world does not really collaborate to improve it. the process of creation is not very much different than traditional media. the distribution is the only thing that has changed. all these things could potentially change. the consumption experience, the evolution of the information once it gets out there, the production process could be weighed more efficient and open. that is an opportunity and a way that things could actually improve. in the publishing energy -- publishing industry there is a lot of turmoil and disparity because the internet spoiled the business model. there are more fundamental things than how distribution happens to change about publishing. >> where does collaboration, i again beyond the -- collaboration come in beyond the wiki model? >> there has not been nearly enough experimentation between user generated content and professional content. they are pretty much different worlds on the at burnett. the best you get is an article and a bunch of comments underneath the article completely separated. those comments can be from anybody. no one ever reads them. i want to read my "new york times" after walter has read it and highlighted in the margins. not everybody in the world, but depending on the article. there are all kinds of ideas. just like wikipedia, there is a collective intelligence that collaborates to give more accurate information most of the time. what does that not exist outside of wikipedia? >> there are more ways of thinking about collaboration of the web than group ware or specific apps. apps like twitter, which wrote wide open and you can follow any interest that you like. whether you tweet or not is up to you. you can call your interest on twitter. you can call your mom. you can follow cnn. whatever it is. nike. there is a lot of potential for collaboration because people need others they would have never admit that they were just on a social network because you connect with someone you already know there. you are just confirming your relationship. on a different system where you are falling people you wish you knew as that of people you used to know -- [laughter] -- it is more like an aspirational thing. we have seen it over and over again. we have all started falling each other on this -- on twitter. why do we not get together and meet each other in real life? it has all of these wonderful repercussions. one of the earlier tweets was let's get together and raise money for charity water. i am going to say in my town and let's all be together at this club and by a $20 ticket. at $20 will go to charity water to build wells for people who do not have clean water in developing nations. that grew to 250 cities around the world. it made $250,000 11 tuesday night. >> that is a good example of how you make the virtual world connect to the physical world. in other world -- in other words, people at the virtual friends and virtual followers. is the future of the internet better at integrating the real world enter your virtual world? >> yes, it is. you know longer have to be sitting at your desk to experience the internet. it is more interspersed in our daily lives. new applications are available with that. the simple idea of i can now call a taxi from this is integrating the internet. you do not actually have to tell the taxi where you are. you just the -- you just push a button and it shows up at your house. >> white i am excited about is more examples. had you heard of carrot mob? it is so named because its is the opposite of a boy caught -- boycott. the idea is people should vote with their dollars, but the only organized way to do that is to say we are going to boycott this business. that is-and does not seem to be affected. someone said we should use a carrot instead of a state. go to a business and say we want you to do this and, if you do, we will give you our money. this guy from san francisco went to all of the liquor stores in the mission and got them to bid for how much they would contribute to improving efficiency in their store out of all the people who organized and bought stock. the highest bid was 22%. they rallied the troops and got all these people to show up. they got over to what the people to show up in the bought everything in the store. bigeye normally makes $1,000 a day. he may $10,000 that day. he put $22 into replacing the lights. then all of those people -- $2200 into replacing the lights. that all of those people presumably bought things they would have anyway. they were further invested in the store both emotionally and financially. >> it was a fun thing. the pictures he showed us of all these people in line talking and making each other. since then, there have been lots of them in germany and around the world. it has taken on a life of its own. >> with the future of the internet be better if there was less anonymity, or at least the option of being in a new net where people were not anonymous? >> i think so. there are a lot of benefits to onymity. leave behind the politics of it, i think sometimes in more dangerous situations you need to be able to protect your anonymity. when you want to open up and get ahead in life because he was a better job or whatever, you want to use your real name, opened up, answer your interest and what you can do. if you or more of a whistle blower i get a dangerous area, you want to be able to protect your privacy. >> you keep talking about the collaborative web. it seems that only works if i trust you in collaborating with. >> i think that is true. reputation is important in society. we need to replicate that to some degree on-line. most large systems do have a reputation. behind the scenes, most modern systems do because it is a way they combat abuse. abuse is a huge problem if you're running one of the services. it is not even necessarily anonymity. you do not have to use your real name. you can participate under a pseudonym or something, but there needs to be longevity and a history of your actions. there has to be costs to throwing away an identity and creating a new one because if there is not, there are no consequences. --bugle today lost bug google today launched google +. do you see the possibility that facebook could be displaced as myspace was? >> the general answer for that is when you get this place, it is because you displaced yourself. myspace shot itself in the foot. they took their eye of the user and focused on junky ads making money. another company took their eye of their customer, the people buying homes, starting families -- and i almost lost a 200 year- old institution. now they are on a huge campaign. their new masters are less keep 1 million people from foreclosing this year and that the 4 million people we know we are going to foreclose on, let's try to preserve their credit and get them into a rental. these are actual metric state are trying to achieve. the key is to execute, keep your eye on the user, do what they need to do. myspace tripped up there. facebook seems to have a firm grasp of its users, but they also seem to have a "we are going to do it whether you like it or not" kind of attitude. we are really smart and we know the right answer, even if you do not think we do. >> suppose you were building a new service or product that needed to be based on a social network with the identity and whatever. would you be comfortable basing it on facebook ads? >> earlier on we did that and we did not have a lot of success with it. >> i would probably use facebook if it was useful, but i would not depend on it. facebook is useful for bringing in people you know. i do not think facebook will be displaced. however, -- what they do is fundamental -- connecting with people you know. sharing photographs and messaging with people you know is very fundamental to most of the world it seems. i think what is going to be hard for them is the same thing that is hard for every big company, which is extending that to everything. what i hear from people who use facebook a lot is a guest to a point where it is too big for certain things. he form a network on facebook based on what you do on facebook. google has been pretty public about their theory -- you do not want to share all the same things with everybody. if they can successfully get people to create these different circles, or what ever they are calling them, of people, that will more naturally reflect what people want to do. that could be successful. people will probably still use facebook for what they use facebook for today because that would be hard to displaced, but something else could come along to be better for some specific other use. i think that is what happened with twitter. >> being so obstinate as to say something like "what can you not have everything in one place? what are you hiding?" it is just a normal thing in life. >> to be fair, facebook has all of the functionality that the new google does, but people are not used to using it that way. that is the thing we have seen in grading services over the years. -- in creating services over the years. the core of the system define what people do with that as much or more as the national -- natural functionality possible. people can cook their twitter to their facebook and published their tweets over there. for a lot of people who just use facebook, this does not even make sense. let alone the syntax is a weird. it is also the type of things people share on facebook -- it is a different use for what people do on twitter even though the functionality of twitter is a subset of the functionality of facebook. >> tom friedman said he had never used twitter or facebook and does not know why he would use it. >> i would challenge him on whether or not he had ever used twitter. id what cnn or read the new york times? there are tweets the and the new york times. there are tweets all the time on cnn. chances are he has read a tweet. >> can people get by without social networking? is social networking going to be a fundamental part of our allies from here on out? -- of our lives from here on out? >> on the web? >> on the internet. >> yes. [laughter] >> let me open it up. either way your hand and shalt or go to a microphone. -- either leave your hand and shalt or go to a microphone. >> the other side of the internet is connecting to knowledge. the latest example is ibm. it seems that maybe we should be thinking about those kinds of uses where, say a physician wants to get best practices or something like that, you are not going to get it on facebook where you get a bunch of ideas from wacky people. you want to get it from something that has distilled all this knowledge and gives you something. there is going to be a place for the side of computing i would like to suggest. >> i totally agree. i think that is a great example. when it comes to the collaboration we are talking about, it does not mean with everybody in the world. most of the systems developed have not allowed -- it is like user generated content versus professionals. it is everybody in the world including that job. there has to be new ones in between that to allow people to our credibility or be able to connect with only those to have a certain amount of trust. >> one of the things we were excited about with twitter was maybe one day down the line since twitter was designed to work on all ibm mobile phones because they all have sms or mobile texting, we always thought we might be able to have an impact in rural areas where a farmer could ask a question -- can i get a better price for this grain? where a pregnant woman u.s. to travel 50 miles for the doctor could ask a question -- are the symptoms in worth the trip? and get an answer back from the doctor, yes or no. tests have already been done in uganda and other places with simple sms. lives have been saved because they have been able to report medical diagnosis just over sms. some guys in berkeley created a microscope you can slip over and iphone, take a microscopic picture of a virus, and send that picture in an e-mail to a fancy clinic and get back within a minute a diagnosis. >> we have a collaborative web next time where someone takes a cat scan and says let's have the collaboration around how to deal with that? could you be creating a high and putt like that? >> yes. why not? definitely. >> somebody probably has. the internet is really big. every time we had a genius idea, we look it up and see there are already can guys working on it. [laughter] >> he started off about the separation of the internet with companies, but there is also the issue of separation of the global common medium with countries. i wonder if you have any concern about that -- iran, china, what happened in egypt -- in terms of the global common medium of the internet and if you have any interest in pushing for a single global digital market. >> yes. our philosophy right now is that the open exchange of information can have a positive impact of the world. we often get blocked by countries that do not agree with that philosophy. we are blocked in china. we are probably blocked in some other places. the funny thing is, people find ways to continue twittering. we found that in order to completely shut down people from twittering, you have to shut down the entire telecommunications service in the after net. when you do that, you cripple your entire state. who was it that did that most recently and said we had to turn this thing back on? it is really not worth it. even now, we are blocked in china, we still see in our logs traffic coming from china. people are figuring out ways around the block to continue to collaborate got to tweet, to share information. does that answer the question? what this is not exactly what you are asking, but what i am worry about is separate worlds within the u.s. and people only pay attention to people who agree with them. that is one of the ironic things about what all of these technologies have created is more separation in some ways rather than more connection. there is less of a common marketplace of ideas to some degree because people are filtering out everything that is from a different viewpoint. the technology encourages you to filter these things out. what's your gut to shuffle the deck. -- you have to shuffle the deck. >> one of the genes of ours has been to say, okay, we know you lived in berkeley and you drive of the bay bridge every day. maybe you do not fall of the bay bridge on twitter, but it is 4:45 and we thought you might like to know that the bay bridge has fallen down. and you go, yes. i would like to know that. thank you. you are like, this is good there are 1 billion tweets every six days. there is information out there for everyone that is relevant. we have to work really hard. -- it really hard on the libya -- we have to work really hard on delivering those relevant tweets to people who need them so their lives can be made smarter, richer, better for it. >> this is for all three of you. could you speak to the conversation about the singularity and roll that you have adopted -- role that you have adopted that this is coming at this -- and that this merging is coming? >> the singularity? that is a book i read in sixth grade. >> this is different. [laughter] >> it seems kind of crazy to me, but i am not that well versed in singularity. walter, what is your take? [laughter] >> i have read a lot about it. [laughter] i do not think we have to worry about it, yet. i have read the wired magazine accounts of it. i do not think we are about to lose control. we will find out next year. we will put it on the agenda and find out whether we are right or not. >> running systems that involve thousands and thousands of computers, it is hard just to keep them working let alone been working on their own. >> singularity is windows machines i do not need us anymore and they can work off on their own. i almost think the opposite -- we keep seeing the limitations of machines every day as opposed to the fact that they could run amok without us. we still have not gotten face requisition and voice recognition machines. >> i think we need to learn that to work together before we teach machines out to work together. [laughter] when twitter first broke out, it is because we went to a conference called south by southwest in austin, texas. it was early on in twitter's history. basically it was just nervous at the conference. there is a huge overlap. -- nerd at the conference. there is a huge overlap. there is a man at a pub who wanted to talk more freely and openly with his colleagues, but it was really loud. he used twitter to send a quick to say "it is too loud here. let's go over 26 st.." they went to the club. it was filled to capacity. there was a line around the block. his plan backfired, but what happened was i in 8 minutes, 800 people had conversed in one spot from one tweet. he said it to his followers. his followers thought it was a good idea and set it out. the metaphor that came to my mind was that of a flock of birds moving around an object like a tree or a telephone pole. when you look at it, it was like it is incredibly choreographed. it looks complicated and difficult, yet it is not. the mechanics of flocking are totally rudimentary. it allows the many to be paid as if they are one organism. for the first time ever, we were seeing people behaving almost as if they were one organism. we had never heard of a tool and had never seen anything like this before. it sent chills down our spine. this was a party, but what if it was something more serious? a disaster, a political situation? we went back two days later and formed twitter inc.. that was the first realization that we are on to a new form of communication among humans that could potentially change the world. >> my name is jason pollock. i am a filmmaker and twitter added. i had 92,000 followers on twitter. it has changed my life in so many ways i cannot begin to describe. thank you for creating it. one thing we always read about is there are people use it all the time, but are a minority of the user base. a lot of people know what twitter is, but not all of them are active users every day. how are you tackling the issue? >> it depends on how you describe an active user. we like to say that you can get value out of the internet and you do not have to create a web page. you do not necessarily have to tweak to get value out a twitter. 6 billion tweets every six days is a lot of information. there is a lot in there to find. >> there are two answers -- there are two answers. most of the reports that have come out are only looking at tweet creation. we see this as a little bit of a misunderstanding that people have people say i do not use twitter. i have nothing to say to the world. it turns out the either read tweets all the time or we ask what they are interested in. two out of three twitter sessions result in no tweeze being created. people are using it as a source of information. most of the measures do not look at that. twitter as a company cares about the people who are getting information from it as much as the people who are creating information. that percentage is increasing over time. the early adopters are more likely to create. there actually are a lot of active users, but they may not know about it. two, because of that misunderstanding, we have been able to correct for a long time, people are getting more and more of an understanding. the osama bin laden think was, for twitter, a great milestone for a lot of people who thought, this information came out on twitter. twitter is a new source. i did it now. it is not about the cliché, "here is what i had for lunch today." it is about getting information from the world. i may not have to have a twitter account, but this stuff is here and real time and is relevant to me no matter what i do or where i am. >> i probably check twitter 22 times a day and to meet once a day. i think that speaks to -- i think you can define engagement in two different ways. for a long time, a lot of internet companies have been defining engagement the wrong way. if you define engagement as hours spent staring at a computer screen, on average, our users spent eight hours staring at our site. i think that is a very unhealthy way to measure engagement. i think that if your users are checking your service 20 or 30 times a day for 10 seconds at a time to make a quick decision or figure out what they want to do next or what have you, that is a way better type of engagement, a healthy engagement that shows that our service is helping them make choices every day efficiently, smarter, saving time, etc. i'd prefer that lever up -- i prefer that level of engagement rather than slopped over the computer for eight hours playing a game. >> i have a question which applies to twitter, but also the internet in general. when is misrepresenting yourself or creating a new identity good, ok, and part of fair play and when does it change to manipulation that is not ok? for example, obviously people who are protesting should be allowed to create false it's about who they are. i am a comedian, so mike twitter personality is not a real person by any measure. i also misrepresent, for example, the company bourse said on twitter. i have a fake relationship that implies they provide live on twitter.master'ses yesterday a professor was talking about stifling mechanical [unintelligible] obviously companies can create shell accounts to create a trending topic. but did you go on and pay 1000 people 10 cents to make a chanting topic? would that be ok? or if people are representing themselves as citizens when, in fact, they are working for a corporation, etc., etc.? >> reask the question. [laughter] >> the answer is pretty clear. you are creating, the verse is trying to manipulate the world for profit. -- you are creating comedy versus trying to manipulate the world for profit. this happens a lot. the number of astroturf campaigns going on between facebook, twitter, and the internet in general is probably a lot greater than anyone has an idea of because it is clear to deduct. it is a problem that relates to walter's question earlier about reputation and of 40. that is something that all the systems or only getting started at and are pretty primitive at. eventually, i do not think an account that is created overnight for 10 cents is going to have very much influence. influence has to be turned over time. there is a little bit of that in twitter today. i do not know about other systems, but i think that is the inevitable for the internet eventually or otherwise. it is not going to have the authority it is capable of. >> i do not know what this relates or not, but parity counts on twitter. during the bp oil spill, someone created "bp global pr." they started saying all of this sad, but funny things. as if bp could not care less. bp did not call us to take it down. i thought that was a brilliant move because it was letting off some steam. if they had gone all the way down to the minutia of shutting down a little twitter account, it would have been like they were completely and utterly evil beyond all means. bppr.com was funny and clear. >> they have the logo that was kind of dripping. >> would you have shut it down if it was somebody pretending to be bp pr? >> if it was a straight up logo and they said it was official, i would have said it was an impersonation that is against the rules. >> twitter just out impersonation accounts at a rate of 1000 per week. >> in general, inventors of new technology do not have -- inventors of new technology do not have a good track record. >> except for us. >> alexander graham bell of the great thing about the telephone was it would be a great way of listening to concerts'. i am just curious, what has really surprised you about what twitter has become? i am assuming the scale of that, the magnitude, and diversity is beyond what you might have expected, but what has been a surprise to you as twitter has become an emerging phenomenon and changed overtime? >> can i answer the first question? >> yes. are there is an lement of holy crap, we didn't know it was going to be this big of a deal. but we had worked on blogger so long that giving a voice to the voiceless, and allowing them to create a web page for free that spoke about injustice or was in many ways they could get their information out was important, and we supported that, and we designed our rules and fought against our parent company to keep it free and open, and err on the side of freedom of speech and all that stuff because we news -- knew it was important. we also knew there was the potential of it having the same kind of impact in the world. what wasn't expected was we lowered the bar so much more down. with blogger you had to have an internet connection, and at first you had to know how to f.t.p. and stuff like that. with twitter you just needed to know how to do a text message, which the world was getting to know quickly. what really surprised me, anyway, was the speed that twitter grew at and the speed that all of this stuff was adopted, and the way it sped up democracy, sped up business, and sped up all these other things. >> was it a holy [beep] moment when somebody said i am jared from the maintenance department and say don't have that this weekend? >> there was some energy in the office, yes. [laughter] but again, my primary thing on that was oh, boy i don't want people to think we are doing this because they asked us to. we had hundreds of e-mails, hundreds of tweets, and we had lots of phone calls, and one of those phone calls in the middle of all this stuff was from the state department. we decided to change the mapets window because all these users thought it was a good idea. frankly, we really should be up anyway. we are not doing this because the state department asked us, and they don't have access to our decision-making capabilities. we wanted to have that global neutral vibe to us. but yes, there was a lot of energy that day. >> another thing that is surprising to me is the casualness with which a large number of well-known people are using twitter. a large number are interns, but a are a lot like lady gaga and justin bieber who are there. >> and all of congress. >> we have gotten almost to the end without saying that dreaded name, and we will keep that intact. >> that is part of what i meant about the casualness of the nooge. but people are out there saying stuff. >> in the very beginning i had an argument with somebody, and i said celebrities aren't going to use twitter. the reason they are celebrities is we don't have access to them. we only see them in movies, and we look forward to that. then they all started to go out on twitter like crazy, and some of them probably shouldn't have. but it was great for us because celebrity have built-in large groups of people that love them following them on twitter. >> how about somebody way back there? >> my name is peter. i work for two degrees. i have a whopping 13 followers. >> it's all quality, not quanity. >> not very good, either. our company has a mere 200 or something. on places like twitter and facebook, how do small businesses gets more recognition and being followed aside from being bigger. >> go ahead. >> the beauty of small business and twitter has not escaped us from the very beginning. early on i was in new york city, and i walked by a bakery that mostly did cookies, and they had like part of a cardboard box with a magic marker that said follow us on twitter. when the cookies come out of the oven warm, we will tweet. i was like that is genius. even if only 8 people in the neighborhood follow that account, when those guys say chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven right now at like 3:00 in the afternoon or something, everyone gets out of the office, runs down there and buys them. even if it is only 90 people, they have just sold all their cookies, and they can either go home for the day or make another batch. all they needed for their marketing department was a sharpie and a piece of a box. then you extend that out to developing nations, and people who sell grains on a blanket at a market. they could say follow me on twitter, and i will tell you if i get a special grain or something like that. there is a huge group of small businesses that aren't going to build a website, and buy ad words and all this other stuff, but they can get a twitter acounty and go -- twitter account and go for it. >> back in the back. >> my name is eric. i am a talent agent and ran social media no c flnch n. there is a lot of talk right now about the tech bubble, if it is going to burst. i am not going to waste my question and ask when are you filing for p. -- i.p.o., but where are we in the bubble? >> that is a good jason question. >> i am not a speculator about the stock market, but i think there is a lot of excitement right now because a lot of the stuff is getting read -- real. the people foresaw the interpret from the firstdom boom. it is becoming people's lives. you can reach a billion people on a service and make a lot of money is very clear to people. as usual, investor excitement maybe is outpacing the development of the businesses. long-term i don't think it is a problem. i'm holding my twitter stock long-term. i think if there is a correction, these things always go in cycles. but there are fundamental businesses here for the long-term. >> jena is going to come up and talk about the yoga that we can do. but first, let me thank our people here. let me thank evan biz for doing what they did. when is the hash tag? >> the hash tag for this? >> yes. >> i don't know. aspen ideas is the hash tag for this. thank you all very much. appreciate it. next, a discussion on national security since nightfall nightfall. after that, a speech by texas congressman ron paul. then seeing the co-creators of twitter talk about the future of the internet. tomorrow on "washington journal," a political round table on the 2012 presidential campaign. retired lieutenant currently john nagl has the lateos on insurgent attacks in iraq and the plans to reduce u.s. presence there by year end. and peter gaytan on unemployment. >> it's a country fraught with corruption, natural disasters and islamic extremists. >> what was shocking to me and many people in pakistan was that these assassinations were welcomed, were congratulated by many pakistanis. these are not terrorists, not al qaeda, not taliban, but ordinary pakistanis, who feel their religion is threatened, that the country is becoming to secular, that the islamic values are under attack, and that blasphemy, which is anything that insults the prophet or islam is something to be defended with your life. pamela constable sunday night on c-span's "q & a." >> next a panel of intelligence and national security experts looks at why the united states has not had a major terrorist attack since 9/11. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> jamaica harmon, former member of congress, president of the woodrow wilson scholars, and last but not least, philip, who literally wrote the book on 9/11 as executive director of the 9/11 commission. you couldn't ask for a better panel. i am going to start right here with you to ask the most obvious question. some of these questions are going to be obvious, and some are not. the most obvious, and we will start here and go down, is this. it is almost 10 years since 9/11, and it happened again. why? >> joseph, i am single out four things just to help get the conversation going a little bit. number one, we came after their home sanctuary, broke it up and set them on the run. what this does is it did he graded their operational capability. 9/11 was actually the third intercontinental operation. we had operatives who are organized and trained on one continent, actually deployed to stage on another continent to launch an attack. they did intercontinental operation ns east africa in 198. in 2000, the operation against the destroy cole. and then 9/11. since 9/11 they have not really mounted successfully another significant intercontinental operation. their operational capable has been did he graded, so they basically rely on local regional networks of people in europe and asia, who may then get some training and advice from the base in pakistan or in yemen, but launch primarily regional operations on a lesser scale. so number one, they broke up the sanctuary in afghanistan and the aleyed government in kabul. number two, the sheer quantity of effort and attention given to this by law enforcement, intelligence and defense officials. if you simply did the numbers and calculate the amount of money spent on countertwism not just in the united states, but in all the western european governments, but in asia, japan, australia, pakistan, jordan, egypt, the number of people twoted to this -- devoted to this task and mission, you would see off-the-charts magnitude of challenges. and the effort, much of it coordinated, but a bewildering variety of ad hoc international connections, had an effect. third is the united states became -- and one reason why no attacks in the united states so that the hassan attack at fort hood was the worst aa tack since 9/11. united states became more difficult to operate in. the united states was actually a good place to stage. they chose to stage and train inside the united states for a year before the attack. in the case of the hijackers, five or six months before the attack. the united states was a good place to stage and train at leisure. the united states actually became a difficult place to stage and train, especially with foreign operatives. not only with the work of d.h.s., f.b.i., and many local law enforcement agencies like the nypd, but another thing that has brought attention is travel. it has become much harder for terrorists to travel. there is a lot of attention to terrorist finance that is very important. i don't think there is usually enough attention given to terrorist travel. if you think terrorists are like submarines, they need to pass undetected under destroys at certain points. travel where they have to go through international airports and present documents to federal officials, those submarines have to surface. if you read the terrorist literature, they devote enormous resources to their travel problems. they want people who have western passports and who look western. they think if you have a one in three chance of being caught, meaning you have to spend the rest of your life in jail or in simon gagne, one in there is too high. those three things is where i would start off answering your question, jeff. the basic al qaeda narrative has fragmented and has become more discredited in the muslim world. it became fragmented because what happened before 9/11, you had an islamic extreme agenda that was primarily local against the local regimes they hate tread. that was then preempted for a time by a globalist islamist agenda. it has turned back more to the local islamist agenda where they are focused more on regimes they hate, pakistan, yemeni and others. the global agenda has lost a lot of its credibility and force in part because a large majority of the people they have killed since 9/11 has been muslims. >> that is positive and up lifting. it begs the question is it time to stop worrying quite so much? >> well, first of all, i want to clarify. i am not jeff's favorite person. sidney harmon was jeff's favorite person. let's be honest about that. >> that is very true, and i wisher here. >> and i wisher here, too. no, it is not time to stop worrying. i don't think he said that. >> i am missborpting -- i am misinterpreting him to provoke you. >> that is not going to work. turning airplanes into weapons of mass destruction is not going to do well here. we have hardened cockpits, u.s. flight, air cargo screening and so forth. i think everyone here gets that. they almost made one. abdul mataleb almost got through christmas day, 2009. i believe that specific kind of attack is less likely to happen. however, i think that al qaeda, as i have said on other panels has momped into other kinds of -- morphed into a horizontal organization with loose affiliations with aqap, al qaeda and et cetera. our very special efforts to degrade the top leadership in pakistan do not mean there isn't very potent leadership in other places, especially in yemen. in that connection, by the way, i just learned -- and maybe everyone here is ahead of me. but jed john brennan gave a significant space that the administration focus is now shifting worldwide to a counterterrorism strategy focused on this loose affiliation of al qaeda cells and the intent is to block them from attacking us here in the home land. that is the right focus and something we should have done. let me add one more thing. i said i think an airplane attack is less likely, but there are other ways, and i am sure you are going to get to this, that we could see a significant attack in this country, and we need to be prepared. one of them is a dirty bomb attack. when we get back to this, i will explain why i think we might see here, which could be a far more lethal attack. >> let me turn to michael for a couple of things. i will get to the t.s.a., believe me. i want to stay on -- >> bring it on. >> i want to go to something that we were talking about before, which is this bin laden moment. i wanted you to try to answer the question. are we saver because bin laden is dead, or are we less safe because bin laden is dead? or is it irrelevant actually to our posture. >> i wouldn't say it is i have relevant. first of all, a positive development from a variety of stps. it demonstrates to the world that we are willing and ready to take successful action. it is an important lesson that needs to be driven home time and again that is positive. here is what we don't know. we don't know really what the next round of leadership is going to be. zaur is the next one. he led a younger generation of folks. you have two guys -- >> tell else about them. >> he is a radical preacher. he is an american citizen. shuker is a pilot. these are younger folks. they are operational, and they understand the united states and the west. maybe most significantly, they are not bound up in repeating the success of 9/11. like anybody else, when you have a guy like bin laden where he has done one thing where he has succeeded, there has been a tepid eans to one to repeat it, and we have benefiteded from that. they have focused in the u.s. on high-end i tax, which are difficult to execute. now we have a generation who may feel liberated from that. they may say we are going to do several small attacks, and we may do it eight or 10 times. the note effect would be troubling and problematic. we are going to need to retool our strategy and not getting complacent about what has worked, but start to look down at what is going on at the ground level, including in the u.s. we saw the times square bombing effort, and hassan. these are projects launched within the united states from people entitled to be here. we have to make sure that we collect and analyze intelligence collected at the grassroots. >> the strategy that she was just praising has some problematic features. it is very focused on al qaeda as an organization and its affiliates. it doesn't really -- and brendan's speech doesn't get into very much the idea that is his actually too late or semi-irrelevant to deal with al qaeda central because what you have is self radicalization of lone cells. >> i don't think that is right. i don't think that in terms of travel, and particularly in terms of international operatives coming in, i don't think it much matters whether the people are formally al qaeda or not. that is why you are seeing an emphasis on trying to radicalize people in place. >> but it doesn't grapple with ideology of the under pinnings of this movement. >> there is some of that as well. part of the challenge in tackling the ideology, that is part of own area where we are not well situated to be out front. people who are listening to the narrative of radical islam and islamist extremism aren't interested in what the united states government's interpretation of the c-span. it has to get involved and rescue its own youth from al qaeda coming in and turning them into suicide bombers. >> can you grapple with the obama strategy and something that is very interesting that has developed in the last two, three or four years. i was doing a session with tom from the "new york times" this morning. we have essentially two combatant forces. in the real world, we have special forces doing operations in any number of countries. online, on the internet, we have a whole other cadre of fighters battling them in the internet space. talk about that, the thing you are known as a worldwide expert on, cyberterrorism, by talking about terrestrial attacks or bombs. talking about that, we are talking about the wrong thing at this point. >> i didn't think the new strategy was that much different from the old strategy. it is to find those who wish us harm and hold them accountable. i was giving a speech in detroit the morning after it was announced that osama bin laden was dead. i chose to start my speech by lighting a cigar. i puffed on my cigar, and i said to the group how about them seals. i got a roaring round of applause. it was a defense group, and we enjoyed the moment. a reporter came up and said are you celebrating the death of a human being? i said no, i am celebrating the success of american. we were severely wronged with the killing of 3,000 people. i don't see the strategy as particularly different. what i do worry about is those who wish us harm at an extremist level, who want to change the world order, can attack the united states in different ways. what i have spoken on most is the cyber vullnerabilities. there are a lot of potential attack vectors. one would be biological. you will see the at stration starting to focus on this issue because it is so simple to do. do you recall after 9/11 we had the anthrax letters? imagine if you had three pounds of anthrax, and they were put in the postal system and mailed to 10,000 addresses in this country. that would shut this country down. we have to be ever vigilant. the big change in my few of how the law was changed post 9/11 was it forced us to address foreign and domestic threats in a more comprehensive way. we divided those things after the nixon years of watergate. my community was only foreign, could not focus on anything domestic. the f.b.i. and law enforcement had much higher standards to do surveillance, tap a phone or whatever had probable cause. so we have changed that a bit so there is less of a wall between foreign and domestic. >> you raise something very interesting about this particular moment, the danger of success. you are talking about the possibility of a biological attack, and she mentioned a dirty bomb. phil said we have mechanisms in place to stop these kinds of attacks. we are very good at this now. talk about the paradox of counterterrorism success. a lot of people may think there is a lot of scaremongering by government officials, even by the obama administration, about terrorism. but talk about the consequences of not having attacks and how that could lead to more atook? >> a big change from 9/11 to now is before nightfall you had a paradox of revenge. it is very difficult to rally massive action against a perceived throughout at the time the athlete is most vulnerable to withstand corruption. we had a paradox prevention that the 9/11 commission spent a lot of time describing. but what we have now is a paradox. you inside to right size the threat. you need to normalize the thrill, because the united states has a lot of purposes and worries in the world besides islamist extremism. i am reminded of the fact that when lehman brothers went down, hank paulson turned to his it aid and said this is an economic 9/11. there are other 9/11 shocks out there. the next 9/11 shock may not come against islamic extremists. it could be another systemic flaw. the president can't go out and say we have taken care of the terrorist thing. it's over. the paradox is how do you right size and normalize something for the long hall without dulling the edge of alertness in the sense that this has now been routine. how do you keep a people on alert for a threat that has been right sized. it is hard for a politician to say that a threat is going down for fear the next day it may come back. >> we are coming to michael chertoff. the broad question is this. once the bureaucracy of government puts in place a security countermeasure, will it ever be able to remove that security countermeasure. there are a lot of stories from airports. i have the story of a 95-year-old woman being taken home in a wheelchair to go home to die. the t.s.a. made her remove her diaper. you hear these things every day. is there a point where we can simply take down a notch some of these? >> i think you will see modification over time. one will be development of technology. continues forbade and continues to forbid use of a lot of the daughter out there commercially to adjust the risk on certain people. if that changes, that may also alter this. you raise a money that i think is really important to address. you probably see it with a lot of other agencies in different walks of life. >> it is the ardvard case. the story doesn't seem right, and it is used to argue the system doesn't work. i am going to give you two important things to bear in mind when you look at t.s.a. one is the conception of a lot of people about what a terrorist looks like is wrong. the people who have been home grown in this country, hassan, blonde haired, blue-eyed, these people do not look like what you think a terrorist looks like. a 92-year-old person. what was the age of the man who walked into a hospital and started to shoot people? 92 years old. how many infants and children, including people mentally impaired have had bombs strapped to them and sent out to american troops to be blown up. what about the woman that was going to get on an airport in 2006 with her baby and blow the plane up. i after ten hear the argument that the t.s.a. doesn't work because you have never caught a terrorist. it is not many to catch. it is men to deter. fort knocks has never caught a bank robber. does that mean fort knocks isn't secure or that it deters bank robbers. you have to have a realistic understanding of what security delivers. not a perfect system, but a series of systems that end to end give you much better chance of averting trouble. >> i have argued there could be more intelligent measures put in place. two points. the ardvard affect? >> kind of a weird-looking beast that everybody picks up. >> i thought it was an acronym for something. >> no. >> and the second point is you are absolutely right. when i walk through an airport -- i once saw an obese nun in a wheelchair, and i said that would be a great disguise. but i'm talking about an invasion of privacy that is really humiliated. this one was put through a terrible process of having to undress. there has to be a better way to do this. >> there may be technological issues to fix this. unfortunately, one of the things we learned, and i think it was revealed in the detroit bomber, is the adversary understands we are uncomfortable looking or touching certain places. so if you put a bomb there, you have a better chance of getting by. what makes no sense is only look at half the body. either you don't look at all or do what you need to do. >> the new screening machines used in many airports where you put your hands up like this are getting increasing acceptance ffment i think everyone understands you are not going torre irradiated. the radiation bounces off you. i am not sure whether there was one in the airport with the woman with the diaper or not. two other points. i think michael did say this, but not this way. we have laird security. we shouldn't bet the farm on one thing, and i know we do. if you go to an airport, there are things that you don't see which protect the airport and identify a passenger very quickly who could be a problem, including taking that passenger off the airplane if that passenger gets through all the other of security. so we have laird security. the other thing we have, and it is a big deal, and i would hope we increasingly have it, is unpredictable. these folks have very evolved doctorate craft, and if they know we only do these three things, and that is our boundry. they will game against that and attack us around that. if they now believe, and they should, that well not only do three things. they can't game around it. that is our goal. i don't want us to end this without talking about other forms of attack. i have to put the dirty bomb back. dirty bombs can be made by taking radio isotopes out of a hospital. ccm-137 is disposable has a lavell life of years and sticks to con greet. you could take two sticks of dynamite and blow them up. it would kill yourself, but you could have a half life of 30 years. this is not a randomed idea. we have not done enough yet to harden the machines. i saw a film which scared the heck out of me about how easy it is for kids who know how to get the stuff out. we have hardened cases around it, but it can still be blown up. we need to get the nuclear regulatory commission to find a substitute to put in these machines that will not have these consequences. i put out there that we are very good against the last war. we need to start thinking about the next war and folks in this country who are can self-radicalize, and we are think background it. and read readily made materials in english, prepared by our friends in yemen, and learn how to build a bomb in the kitchen of your mom, which is the title of one of the articles. >> let's do two more things before we open it up to questions. the first thing is to continue jane's parabolic of questions. what name scares you as a possible attack. we have been very technical and specific about some things. we are talking about law enforcement and military applications designed to stop terrific, but i want to move this to the ideological and political level and talk about whether policy over the long run can affect what we do. i want to take a wild guess that you are going to talk about cybersecurity. we have done this before. >> let me put it in the context everybody will understand, money. oreconomy was $14 trillion last year. a bank in new york city cleared $7 trillion to $8 trillion a day. our economy is $14 trillion a year, two banks, $7 trillion a day. we went off the gold standard sometime ago. what about dollar bills? it is maybe 2% or 3% of the $14 trillion. so what is it? it is an accounting process. the world cannot function without banking. we depend on it. a relatively small group that is sophisticated could contaminate the clearing process for reconciling exchange. what do i mean? tokyo calling new york. i have a $10 billion transaction. tokyo, this is new york. send your transaction. new york, this is tokyo, i've sent. new york responds i've received. we are second siled, we are done. less than a second. that is what it takes to do global banking. that process could be attacked by a small group for a relatively small sum of money. that is one example of the kinds of things we depend on to run our lives. when the framers did the constitution, the vast majority of us were farmers. think about today, how we depend on electrolytes, money, the grocery store, delivery of goods and services. if you could interfere with that, it could have a devastating impact on a country. >> mr. chertoff? >> i fully agree. we had an anthrax attack in 2001. putting aside very fancy genetic engineering, the eningredients for a basic biological weapon or chemical weapon are available pretty much in the kitchen or on a farm. if you happen to know how to fabricate it. this is a good news and bad news story. the good news is we have a pretty good way of reducing the risk on bio. it is not that we are going to catch everybody who fabricates it, but we do have obvious types of attacks. we have stockpiled a lot of this. we have a process, although underfunded, in putting out a detection capable. there is one problem we have. that is getting the countermeasures into the hands of people. this is a great example of how we can't get out of our own way sometimes. the solution which was suggested in 2006 was why don't we get the most common countermerchandise, things like cipro and put them in kunitsyn and distribute them around the country, or people can buy them. you can have them in your medicine cabinet and fire stations. when you need to take this, we can get to people in a couple of hours. we said great, let's run a pilot and see if people while lose these. after a year, 97% of the people had kept the medical kit, hadn't misused it or launched it. we said great, let's launch. well, you can't. f.d.a.'s model is you don't distribute things that have to require a description unless a doctor has seen you and expressed a need. there there was an anthrax attack in new york, there aren't enough doctors in the world to see the number of people who need to be seen. we can fix this next we're and start the process of putting it out. it would tell the terrorist if i weaponize anthrax and distribute it, the united states is going to be able to react and mitigate the harm ins atlantaly. >> apart from the f.d.a., what is the most dangerous threat to the united states. >> and it is not jeff goldberg. >> worrying about one thing, what it? >> mumbai-type attacks, which require virtually no technological expertise. people with small arms just go out a star shooting like they did in kabul yesterday. it requires people willing to kill a bunch of other people. hassan multiplied into squats. you have to get the people in the country. the arms are readily available. then what you do is rely on our culture to produce the terror. what is remarkable is when you her the parade of hearbles, you are thinking how has this not happened yet? the motive is there. this is an indicator of how degraded their capability is. they are probably going to start surmounting this to some degree because there are just too many people in the world, and a handful of zealots are going to attack our system and culture. we need to develop a culture of resilience and resilient systems. interestingly, the department of defense hasn't thought of systemic defense. in some ways, the department of homeland security could be more important in some ways than the department of defense as the lmp ecus for defending our critical systems. think about that. think about the value of an in the seven -- ntsbc board. the most important thing it has done, political and cultural, every so often, hundreds of people die in jet accidents. we know that a board will go out. it will look hard at what happened, disnash naturely analyze it. very professionally they will come up with solutions, we will tweak it a little more, and millions of people will get on the airplane the next among. that is the cull tour of resilience. >> one final thing, and we will go to a quick round. we haven't talked on the political plain -- plane. the common perception in washington now is that pakistan poses the biggest threat to the united states because of what is going on inside pakistan and our inability to understand how things operate, whether in tandem with the government or not. how would you fix this problem if you could? if you were president of the united states, mike, what would you do to mitigate the damage done to us by the people in pakistan. do a quick round. >> first of all i would say we have to maintain our relationship with the state of pakistan. and its endemic corruption is something we have to face up to and deal with. their core concern is india. they have fought several wars and lost them. today they are worried that india is surrounding them by going into afghanistan. mounted with their economic problems and the focus on india, it is pretty bleak. that said, it is in the interest of the united states to sustain that relationship in the best way that we can and have this collaborative arrangement. now for the last 10 years it has been very effective. cofments were made about degrading al qaeda and leadership, and in large part were carried out as a result of that successful partnership. just recently, in the last day or so, the defense minister of pakistan has ordered us out. that is where the threat is is. >> mike, real quickly. when you were d.h.h.s. secretary, how many threats you were dealing with originated from pakistan? >> i would say the majority of serious stuff you looked at came out of pakistan. >> what would you do about it? >> i agree with mike ffment by newspaper reports, they arrested people helping bin laden. if that story is true, it is infuriating. we lost about a decade with pakistan when an amendment was passed. a group of folks that would have come to the u.s. and trained a and formed relationships did not come. we have to remain engaged with them. >> two things. first of all, i agree with john brennan, who said in the speech we are talking about that the largest throat to our home land from a foreign place is from yemen at this point. because it has a failing government and it has active al qaeda cells hiding in the mountains where there is basically no police function preparing to attack our home land. that is where they are trained, and that is where these internet materials are developed. they don't have nukes like pakistan, but i think they are more dangerous imminently than pakistan is to our home hand. the hakani network is a terror group protected by the pakistani government, off limits to their counterism attacks. it's training operatives go across the border and kill our troops. i am wes mystic about our relationship with pakistan at the moment. i know we have to work on it, and i know we are doing this, but we have to take courpt terror measures to protect our country, even in the borders when we see there are groups there that intend to attack us. that is why i applaud two things. one is the reset of the afghan policy by obama last week because it gives us more crane cells and resources to focus on pakistan. two is this refocus by brennan yesterday, that our goal has to protect our home land from groups, mostly al qaeda and its affiliates. it is a war on al qaeda and its affiliates who are intending to attack us. >> phil? >> i agree with plan a, but i think you need a portfolio strategy. let's keep working with the pakistanis as best as we can, hard as it is. long story, complicated, you read about it all the time. you need to keep doing that. that is plan a. the interesting play space is not how to tweak plan a. nobody here knows enough to get into that. what is interesting is what is your hedging strategy? since no one has high confidence in plan a, if the times square attack had sucked and that truck bomb had gone off last year and killed 500 people in times square, my estimate there is a better be 50/50 chance the united states government would have launched a massive attack in pakistan. that attack emanated pakistan. the president through his aids told the pakistani governor this. you really don't wants us to invade your country at scale, so please try to manage this so that is not necessary. what is your hedging strategy? your hedging strategy has to be -- what if pakistan becomes a failed state? we need to plan now for what we do if the pakistani situation not manageable internally with respect to the security of its nuclear stockpile, with respect to the fact that it is becoming a sanctuary for extremist groups. including the providence vation of an indian-pakistan war. that may mean a strategy of containment and isolation with the capability of conducting long-range strikes in. plus, international cooperation with the people pakistan will still rely on as key friends, namely china and saudi arabia, who will take an interest if pakistan goes that route. take an interest as to what the hedging strategy should be. >> thank you. questions? raise your hands, and there are mics right here. >> can we reverse this? what is the greatest threat to al qaeda at this point in time? global threat, not just u.s. is it the governments of pakistan and afghanistan? what is the greatest threat to al qaeda? >> let me start with that. i think there are two threats to al qaeda. first is what is happening in the round. the trend is going in the right direction, but it will be a long time before it plays out. the unifying effect has been destroyed. second thing is primarily the leadership of the united states and going after and holding acountyable leadership in a determined way. it has taken a long time. cost a lot of money. we had to change laws, develop operating procedures that were different. but that operation -- let me use the death of osama bin laden as an example. it was u.s. navy seals trained and equipped under title x as an element of the dope of defense. carried out that operation under title 50, commanded by the director of the c.i.a. it took a long time for us to work through that. so i think the determination of the united states and the persistent to see justice 10 years after the fact has been the greatest threat in addition to this trend. >> anyone else quickly? >> if i could add to that, phil has mentioned that al qaeda has killed more muslims than anonymouses limbs, and the muslim world is aware of it. the arab spring had nothing to bo with al qaeda. the change that is occurring is a bottom-up change by people who actually want freedom. so that is one point. the second point is that the u.s. finally, and other countries, too, is developing the right counter narrative. we are not in a war against muslims. it is not that george bush didn't make that clear or obama didn't make that clear. but the b role of us bombing in five muslim countries can be distorted to make that point. we are now clarifying the fact that we are in a war against al qaeda and its affiliates, and we are clarifying what we stand for. obviously what we stand for is very appealing to younger people who are rising up and taking huge risks in tunisia, egypt, syria, bahrain and a number of other countries. >> it is very clear that we have become more sophisticated over the last decade. how has al qaeda and the other networks become more sophisticated? are we fighting last year's war? >> we have mentioned anwar and others in that next generation. where you see the sophistication is in a couple of respects. one is the deliberate targeting to recruit westerners, or people who have western experience and peaf to have clean records as use. secondly, some that would appear to be to some subset of the population an appealing propaganda about what is going on with visuals, and exploiting that. as the generation changes -- i think the elimination of bin laden may wind up in a way accelerating this process. we are going to see a much more sophisticated and nimble organization. >> right there, yes? >> while clearly domestic and global airport screenings and homeland security measures have been very successful in preventing another major attack, could the panel speak to what teams to be an open border with mention and the constant flow of people coming in. clearly the majority are here for work and to improve the quality of life. there have to be a fraction of the -- a percent of the people coming through that have nefarious intents. what do we have to do to secure the southern border. >> let me give you two facts. i always get in trouble with my friends from canada, but it is true. almost all the terrorist threats coming over a land border have come from canada, not mexico. there are some groups that migrated to canada that recruit people there. place. we built 600 miles of fence, double the border patrol. current administration appeared to do that. unless we invest huge amounts of money, it will take a period of time to continue to make it harder to get across. i used to believe in office and still believe it to be true, one thing can could help immigration reform so a lot of pressure on the border would be funneled into a system that's regulated and that would actually give us a better ability to manage the remaining physical border. no country in the world other than a totalitarian country sealed its borders. and even they didn't do particularly 100% job. >> to add something to that, i don't think seeling our borders is the right answer. letting students come here to study and permitting foreign tourists to come here, obviously screening them in case they are terrorist affiliated makes sense , but if we close that, we lose the values we stand for. i think that's a mistake. second point is, our near-term threats are not from foreigners coming in here. i think it's from homegrown terrorists who are here and who have clean records and are either radicalized on the internet or through their own travels go somewhere else and seek out training in other countries. they're not invited to do this. they generate their own interest in this and go and learn something. >> before we go over there, i want to ask phil to follow up on something that you said. i think there's one flaw in something you said, there's a general notion about all right thinking people, we should give visas to students and they should come here and they will learn to like us, et cetera, et cetera. while it's true in most of the cases, i would point out to phil, who is an expert on khalid shakes mohammed, -- khalid shaikh mohammed, he spent years in north carolina. we can all name a dozen people who came here as students who were somehow immune to the charms of the united states. >> from libya. >> yes. >> i love his name. >> dozens of people who have come here and have not fallen in love, fallen out of love with the american idea. can you talk about that as a national security problem for a minute? >> the most important id log from modern islammist extremism is a fellow who became ral calized by living in rural colorado in the early 1940's and 1950's and so shocked by what he saw when he returned to his native egypt -- >> qatar. >> yes, he developed a whole ideology in which the west was a source of all evil. it's definitely true someone can go to an american college campus and conclude the united states is a cesspool of sin and should be wiped from the face of the earth. unfortunately, that's not the experience you would have at the university of virginia, i will just tell you right now. >> it's a very high-minded place. >> i'm sorry people have these experiences in places like north carolina and colorado, but you would not have that in charlottesville. it is true -- >> i had a friend who was the budweiser distributer and he was very, very busy. let's not go oversell this, all right? >> it's a very inclusive community. what happens here and this is why it's interesting to think about this problem sociologically. the whole notion this is a problem of west versus islam, of course that's completely wrong. war in islam about different people trying to cope with islam and within that there's a fairly radical fringe and the radical fringe is mostly focused on local conditions they like and minority of that develops a global agenda that attaches all of these evils to the united states. that agenda and that narrative became very powerful during the 1990's as a function of history. but a useful way of thinking about this historical point of comparison is the last phenomenon that reminds me a lot of this was the large-scale growth of european centered an arcism, which reached its peak between 1880 and 1920. this was a source of enormous fear and terror in the western world during that period until six heads of state around the world, including a president of the united states, william mckinley, self-radicalizing people inspired by genal looking ideologues living in exile in london, mainly from germany, france, spain, italy and russia and immigrants from those countries coming to the united states, throwing bombs in chicago and believing in the ideology of the deed. what were these people? these were people who were profoundly deeply alienated by the term oil of modernization and urbanization in their harshly repressive societies at home, who then externalized this as trying to bring down the system and create utopia that could never be. there's no chance the al qaeda idolized will ever be created in life. no chance. it's a hopelessly utopian agenda. it represents rage and dream. what will happen among that small group of people, many of whom are expatriates, disassociate from their home communities who then form an identity around this kind of extremism, expatriates and madrid and in paris, or the guy at north carolina a & t in greens burrow, north carolina who feels alienated because he can't fit into that society and needs another identity that welcomes him, what happens to these people they get channeled into other areas of alienation or in the case of an arcism and somehow more ominously t. all morphs into more dangerous movements that are able to tap into that rage and dream and much more operational and powerful ways which movements like fascism began doing in the teens and 20's. >> i think there was -- back there, yes, you, sir. >> someone who's been sitting here the last hour becoming increasingly terrified, and sort of listening to the discussion on policy terms as fascinating and very energizing. but my question is, on an individual basis and not meaning to sound silly, it sometimes feels like the only way me or him or her, only way we can protect ourselves is never leave the bathroom. if you never leave your bathroom, you'll be fine. but you have to go outside on an individual basis, how can one address the concerns we are feel something >> first of all, the bathroom is the most dangerous places in the world. there are more slips and falls in bathrooms and then the kitchen. the thing to do, move yourself to karachi, where it's safe. >> i knew this was going to be helpful. >> jane. >> that's a serious question, and it -- it speaks to a certain failure among the political class. and i will include me in it, even though i'm a recovering politician. i think it's very easy to play the fear card. you get a lot of traction from that. you should be scared of this and that. if we haven't done a good enough job on the panel saying there are threats but things and phil just put the whole thing in perspective, in a very brilliant way, phil. that's the last compliment i'm ever giving you. nonetheless, spectacular answer. we have to do a better job in helping the public understand what to do. phil used the word resilient. you and your family are resilient. i don't know where your bathroom is and i'm sure your bathtub is big and you can hide out from. you can also as michael said, even if they won't give you cipro, you could have a kit at home. you can have your own form, and we talked about this five or six years ago of a phone tree or e-mail tree of how you get in touch with your family members. we do not have a national interoperable communications network in this country after ten years, which is a pathetic government failure. nonetheless, you can get that to happen. then you can think about this stuff and put in perspective. israelis have attacks all the time, fewer now. police state comes down in about a matter of hours and they go back to whatever they were doing. that's the people of israel understanding there are terror threats against their country, more than there are against our country. the best way to defeat them is not to be terrorized. it's a state of mind. that's what terrorism is. if we are not terrified finance we have a plan to respond or better yet, a plan to prevent. their car smoking then called law enforcement and law enforcement was spectacular. and they quickly realized what the plot was. i'm saying you're stronger and unfortunately we the government or i the former government member haven't given you enough encouragement to be confident. >> just want to frame this just for a second. jane, you make a very good point and it begs the question, and this is by the way, a question we will see as we move towards september, which is the last ten years represent a massive overreaction on our part? we spent trillions and trillions of dollars now in response to the 9/11 attack. >> the way we talked about this issue, i think this is a message of the group almost uniformly if things have gotten considerably better, there are still things we have to be concerned about, we have to adapt, which we actually have done quite a bit to make ourselves more secure. the problem is i don't often find media frames this as either panic and hysteria or whole thing is overblown and there's no problem. both of those are false choices. we're in the middle. this is true with a lot of things in life. we are good about managing and dealing with it then but we're not perfect. it will be some failures. the public is by and large more resilient then we give them credit for. for example, i think that if there was a mube-style attack with guns and, frankly, this country experienced gun attacks before, including colorado. if we recovered from that, i don't think we would fall to pieces. and by not doing what jane said, we need to spend an hour together putting together a plan and reasonable supplies in case we had a zrummings of food or water, which you can get from a national disaster as well as terrorist attack. i think the message here is kind of in the center, things are -- real problems out there and we have to be concerned about some medium to long-term serious problems. but we do make progress and we have a lot of innate capacity as individual citizens to manage, not eliminate, but to manage our risks by planning what we do in emergencies and by building certain capabilities in case we have to rely on ourselves for a short period of time. >> do you -- >> i would just add to that, america is the safest place in the world. the message i think you hear consistently from this group is resilience is the key. when you think about these things, it's a series of choices. a whole core of professionals out there that worry about these things or intelligence or law enforcement or department of homeland security or whatever. some level of resources need to be dedicate to that kind of thinking and potential reactions and it's something we need to keep sight of. as an intelligence professional over the years, my job was to predict the threat, what might be coming. what level of resources are we going to commit to whatever the threat might be? we are very good at thinking about the last war or last problem or last issue. i think what we're arguing is just be mindful. let's do the things we have to do, calibrate it in a way and go on with a little of resilience we will endure. >> we have one last question and final overarching question for the panel. make it quick if you don't mind. >> it will be quick. thank you drirktser mcconnell, for finally mentioning intelligence, which i think is our first line of defense against this issue, against this threat. each of you have had critical roles in the country's intelligence structure. following 9/11, there was an enormous flurry of activity, new laws, new structure, new departments, new agencies. it's now ten years later. some say time to revisit that, put that in order, things are confused. i wonder if each of you can give us a brief one on where you think intelligence needs to go from here. >> bill, why don't you start with that. >> practically ten years away there was a 9/11 report, you should all read it, and there were a lot of recommendations in that report and many had to do with what you're talking about. to piggy back on that and talk about intelligence reform and where we have come, phil and everybody else can also participate in that. so talk about what have not been fulfilled and what you could do to enact some of those recommendations. why don't you start with that. >> i will make a couple broad points. last week john brennan, president's counterterrorism adviser said the president's highest duty is to safeguard the safety of the american people. well, that is not his highest duty. when he raised his right hand and gave the oath, he said his highest duty, one in the constitution of the united states, is pro-preserve, preinspect protect, and defend the constitution. that is the highest duty. massive panic inkurt. -- insecurity. that's when the constitution and its protections will be in greatest jeopardy. i think it's an important principle to keep in mind on intel reform. the greatest victory so far of intel reform and the one least discussed is the one director mcconnell alluded to not too long ago and so far bridged without jeopardy to our constitutional liberties. it's been well managed. it needs to be sustained in a conscious effort. the last observation i will make about intel reform is this, what they have been the last 10, 20 years, well, before 9/11, what they should do is subjectively analyze how well the community is managed by such subjective criteria as can you move large amounts of money to adapt changing priorities. can you imagine back office systems more effectively and so forth. and they did better than any aiei than managing the possibilities under current law. he's more qualified to talk about, as jane is, whether or not we need to go further. the go further issue is this -- all of the intel reform issues so far have been relatively easy. when we had the huge national security reforms between 1947 and early 1950's, rapid success of laws, why so much turmoil? the defense budget was being radically cut. bureaucratic battles were enormous because of the cuts. for the last ten years, the budget has been going steadily up. it's much easier to manage a pie constantly getting larger. the real pressure on intel reform is beginning now was the pie was starting to shrink and voices are moving in the foreground. jane? >> a couple of points. first of all, i think the takedown, but most of the credit should go to the intelligence operatives and our new intelligence systems, which is massively revised in 2004, which put together clues to find couriers, find the safe house, and then to enable navy seals to understand in specific terms what they might find if they went in the compound, et cetera, et cetera. that was a massive intelligence success and would not have happened without the legislative reform that's came out of 9/11 and recommended by the 9/11 commission. the biggest failure in terms of those reforms is congress, the biggest reform ha has not been implement sd a reorganization of congress to advise the committee structure to be able to do the right kind of oversight to protect our constitution, and don't see any chance that will be corrected soon. let me finally say i was yesterday in washington meeting with jim clapper, our director of national intelligence, i'm on an advisory committee and we were talking about congress and just listen up, i wasn't aware of this, the house appropriations committee has just reported a bill which requires the d.n.i. to get specific organization from congress every time he tries to move money between point a and point b. totally undermines the joint command structure we set up in the 2004 law. obviously, jane's job in the next week or so will be to try to make sure congress never enacts that and now we are trying to micromanage a system that is just now trying to succeed. >> we have to let jane work. >> i'm not talking about intelligence. 4 -- the director of 9/11 implementations was not full limb piloted. one of the key recommendations is false documents enabling people to travel. as part of a comprehensive set of reforms, we upgraded our passports and do two things passed into law. one is the requirement of a passport or passport equivalent to cross a land border and second is a requirement to strengthen the identification and security for driver's licenses which we used to get on plans. you would not believe the donnybrook we had going forward. we got the first piece of this done. it was actually 90% done under my tenure -- the last 10%, over the finish line, and i was in a constant struggle with members of congress who represented districts along the canadian border who felt there would be a little bit of negative equipment impact even though i could say yes if someone comes in from canada and set up a bomb in new york city, that might not be a problem for your constituents but a problem for your people in new york city. we still haven't completed the problem of driver's licenses. everybody agrees with a need but not in my backyard and not in my term of office rule is a tremendous institutional obstacle and if god forbid we don't get it done and it's the cause of another attack, we will bitterly regret it. >> quickly, because kitty boon, who is to me a personal terror thanks a lot, is going to leave the room. quickly. >> we're at an evolutionary process and point of decision. -to-let me use as my example the department of defense. the bill in 1986. we established it in 1947 and argued for years and years. congress got frustrated. leadership of senator gold water and the bill was passed and streamlined. it forced jointness and forced joint duty and did a lot of things to unify army, navy, air force and marine corps. jane and i have a debate on this. she says all it takes is leadership. and my response to that, if that's all it took, as a leader in congress, you would have written a better law. >> i said 50% law, 50% leadership. >> we got a 50% law. here's where we are. community is 16 agencies. 15 work for a cabinet officer. first prerogative of the staff of that cabinet offer is protect that cabinet officer's prerogatives. the first focus of any debate about updating executive order or changing the law, whatever. the one that is not subordinate to cabinet officers but cia. the law says the director of cia will report through the d.n.i. you can drive a train through the word through. legally, three words are direct, control and authority. we're at a point where it's working better. are we safe? secretary chertoff had to deal with seven oversight committees. i don't think that was the right way to set it up. we're at a point in time we're evolving and this question will come up again, do we want to have a more streamlined intelligence community that is controlled by an authority, who is accountable for its performance. the draft, d.n.i., seeing a problem cannot move money from one problem to another, we're at a point made progress, it's better. we have this debate until we have another crisis and then we will adjust. >> thank you very much for coming. thank you to the panel. it was very, very interesting. thank you very much. thank you. >> next, a speak by republican presidential candidate texas candidate ron paul. and then co-creators of twitter talk about the future of the internet. after that, we will show you again the discussion on national security since 9/11. on newsmakers, as american children head back to school, education secretary arne duncan talks about the state of the u.s. education system as well as waivers from the no child left behind law and other education issues is. newsmakers, sunday at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> notice the color of the bourbon. it's all coming from the inside of the barrel. this char is where bourbon gets all of its color and a lot of its flavor. currently they discovered over 200 chemical flavors just in the oak in the char from the barrel. >> next weekend we highlight frankfort, kentucky on book tv. look for the history and literary life of kentucky's state capital. on book tv on c span2, life, violence, corruption and urban renewal, douglas boyd and crawfish bottom. and the life of ninth kentucky be cavalry reporter tom porter. and a visit to one of four distilltries in operation during prohibition for medicinal purposes, of course. the first two statehouses burned to the ground. stop by the third, the old state capital. book tv and american history tv in frankfort, kentucky, next week on swfment-span2 and 3. >> texas republican congressman and presidential candidate ron paul was the keynote speaker friday night at the florida liberty summit in orlando. he talked about the current tax system and the federal reserve monetary policy. the ument is hosted by the group campaign for liberty. congressman paul finished in second place in last week's iowa republican party straw poll. one percentage point behind the winner representative bachmann. this is just over 45 minutes. >> thank you. thank you very much. thank you for coming. thank you for that very nice reception. i want to thank jack for the introduction. i also want to thank mark for his hard work. it seems i get to florida quite of on for campaign for liberty. mark has something to do with it. he has good organization skills and he has a lot of people to work with. thank you very much for helping out. this year i particularly wanted to make sure i made this meeting because, you know, we had that little straw vote last week. i wanted to make sure you knew about the results. i wanted to let you know how things came out. someday when this momentum continues, which it is, the crowds are getting bigger, the enthusiasm is getting louder, the country is coming our way, pretty soon we're going to get some big interviews sunday morning. who knows? it is great, great to be here. i would like to talk about what i talk about all the time and that's liberty. i want to address it in a certain way. generally speaking i am sure you have been challenged as i have been through many years and continue to be and that is the accusation that we who w.h.o. have these particular belief that's we believe sincerely in the constitution, strange ideas, out of the mainstream, something odd about them. but i would like to talk about what's going on in this country because i think the oddball had been in control of this country way too long. [applause] now, the one issue i have talked about for a long time and motivated me even in the early years of me being involved in politics, having to do with the monetary system, just think about it, how often now they say this idea of commodity, money and gold and constitution, how silly it was. the other day i read something i found rather entertaining. i was by myself. i had to laugh a little bit. the person writing this said that, yes, ron paul has interesting ideas about monetary policy but it's pre-industrial. i got to thinking, does he realize where this country is moving. what happened in the last 40 years. we have been deindustrialized by this runaway paper standard. it is only honest money that really promotes the industrialized world and money is very important in doing that. so monetary policy is key. key for those who believe in the entitlement system because you have to finance it. key for individuals who will finance wars overseas and, therefore, it is a very, very important issue. if you think about what happened over the last 100 years since we had our federal reserve, i had to keep up and check every morning, how much we have lost against gold. it's about 98 1/2, 99% of the value of the 1913 dollar we have lost. i would say after 1200 years it's time we re-evaluated and should come to the conclusion, we don't need a central bank and we need to get rid of the federal reserve system. when they tell you it's a silly idea to think about gold, how can anything be sillier than taking pieces of papers and writing numbers on them that have value. i think grade school kids can be taught something about money that they don't understand in washington. it's because they want it that way. they know it serves a special interest. they know it serves the interest of big government. it serves the interest of big corporations, the military industrial complex, financiers, bankers. they know they can make a lot of money getting hold of that money first but they also know when they control the money and they can control the ability to inflate at will, they also bailed themselves out when necessary and that has to come to an end. we need to do a lot more concern about our middle class. [applause] and congress has these stimulus programs, billion dollars here, billion dollars there, soon up to a trillion dollars. that's a lot of money. but it's minor compared to what the fed does. and the fed actually believes they should be able to and allow to do it in secret. you know, if we don't get rid of the fed soon, we better at least get to audit the fed and find out exactly what they've been doing. just think they've been pumping around 15 trillion dollars these last four years. a third of it went to the foreign banks, foreign central banks and foreign governments. this is such an outrage when the people hear this, they become outraged and more and more people are hearing it. the truth is i'm very surprised, pleasantly so, that we are this far along on delivering this message. four, five years ago before the last campaign, i didn't know -- nobody knew how many people like you were out there that had already thought about it and knew about it and here there were thousands and thousands. i believe today there are millions and millions of people who are now aware of what's going on. here we take monetary system. argued the case printing money is real. we should do it in secret and bail out special interestsment at the same time they mock the notion we should follow the congstution. congstution said only gold and silver could be legal tender. you cannot emit bills of credit, which is paper money. and what do they do? how do they have to protect their system? by force. they use the force of government and say with the legal tender laws, you must settle all of your contracts and use the only money, which is paper money. if you are so eager and so bold and think you have the right because of the constitution, you have the right to use gold and silver coins, even though admitted by our government and still says legal tender and constitution said legal tender, which some have done, they can be arrested and put in prison and counterfeitings are over at the federal reserve. [applause] so it's an absolute economic fact that by duplicating units of money with nothing behind the currency but zwroust duplicate paper money, there is no additional wealth put into the economy, none. all of it does is dilute wealth, redistributes wealth. it's well ve well known in the study of monetary history that governments do this and they've been doing this for century. this is not brand new. when they do it, it wipes out the middle class. in recent history, mexico's gone through remodernization and runaway inflation, germany did it. zimbabwe's done it. south american countries have done it. and it's been done so many times. and yet inevitably the only way to restore confidence sauls to go back with real money and, of course, when you do and when we will do that, the people have to believe the individuals doing it because if they announce tomorrow, ok, looks bad so we're going to the gold standard. it's safe. we will make the gold 1/115 of an ounce of gold and we will honor that. we won't change our foreign policy. we won't change our spend habits. won't change our deficit. we had one example where we did that. people had a little more conviction about the country and what government said and that was after the civil war. they had resumption act, took three years. quit printing greenbacks and withdrew some and then they -- didn't have a welfare state. didn't have an empire. after dwhreers, price of gold went down dramatically from a couple hundred dollars down to $20 and it was a nonevent. but today it is so different. so to deal with the monetary issue, you have to deal with something else that is very important and that is the role of government. and the more important thing is to have people and government from the presidency on down, individuals so you can trust and understand and won't lie to you. [applause] as bad as it is in washington, from top down, as bad as it is that we are suffering from the consequences of decades of teaching by socialists and inflationists, it's really as much the people at fault as anybody. we're not in a challenge now. we're in an audience like this. sick and tired of it all. we know what has to be done. we're still probably numerically in minority because more than half the people in the country have become dependant on the government. therefore, any attempt to do it will make people very angry and we've seen this already. we've seen this happen in the states that have tried to correct things. people get quite angry. they are angry around the world. they're very upset about what's happening. they don't quite understand because prices of food are going up. they don't know that the world economic system and monetary system is manipulated by us printing so much money. so they're reacting to prices going up and, therefore, they act out and they're capable of doing it in this country. and they already served anger around the country as well. but the people have an appetite for big government. that's what happened. we have a large number of people. i mean, i meet them on the stage when's i have debates. they think -- they don't think we have enough wars going on. thank goodness we're breaking through. the people are with us on that. when you get robert gates coming home and saying anybody who thinks we need another war needs their head examined, and i agree. [applause] but if we allow those who find a reason to keep our presence around the world, so many bases and so many countries with no real effort to bring these troops home, there was an announcement today we're working now on an agreement with the afghan government to be able to say and they're inviting us to stay until 2024. and we get somebody in foreign office so we can change the foreign policy! [applause] >> sometimes little items stand out bigger than the trillions of dollars, it's hard to comprehend the trills and hundreds of billions. there's one thing that went on in iraq that i think can you remember continue makes them look silly, why are they doing this? and that is they decided after we conquered iraq, you know, they had all of those nukes and everything over there and we had to conquer them, but we conquered them and we started to have the green zone and we built an embassy in the green zone. and the embassy is as big as the vatican. just recently in the dod budget they put authority, authorization and funding for 17,000 people to be employed in the embassy in iraq. do you think they are planning on coming home? i would say the suggestion be that if you're going to save that $1 billion, what we should do is save the billion, put half of it to the deficit reduction and put it into some program here at home that -- where we can help some people who have learned unfortunately to be so dependent on the government, just to stay alive. i think that is a solution. if we stop spending money overseas and help people home and take those 17,000 jobs and make sure there are jobs here at home, not overseas. [applause] the one thing the president can do without presidential authority is he shouldn't go to war without congress' approval and have a declaration, but one thing a president can do and i would do, is that i can end the wars that are undeclared and unconstitutional. [applause] the commander in chief is in charge of the military. he can direct the military. he can bring them home. they say, you want to bring them home too fast. don't have enough time. when they want to send them over, get it together and ship them off rather fast. why can't we ship them home just as fast. it's not just in the war zones of the middle east but it's in the perpetual occupational countries that we don't need to be occupying and that is south korea and japan and germany. all of these countries and the nearly 900 base that's we have. close them down, bring them home. and very quickly, i mean, if we pursue this, we will organize a military someday. don't do that the first week. get them home. think of how many people will be spending their wages here at home rather than in the germany economy and japanese economy. bring that back. that would be like a stimulus. the big issue in the campaign has been the economy and jobs. and the interviews have been pretty good. you get a chance to answer them. but if you get 30 seconds or 60 seconds, what are you going to do to turn the economy around? answer in 30 seconds. they took 40 years to mess this up and you're supposed to answer in 60 seconds about how to correct it. but i can lift a few things in 60 seconds that would help a whole lot. have sound money, get rid of regulations, reduce taxes, bring our troops home and change our foreign policy and lo and behold, that could be very, very helpful. and repeal, repeal the laws but it does take a while to get a con sense ounce have this happen. but the most important thing we have to do it turn it around is you have to get rid of the mistakes that have been made. pricing in the free market is crucial. way back in 1912 said socialism cannot work because they don't have a free market pricing structure and it's impossible to work. he was right. but keynesianism and what we have today, we fix the price on one half of it. we fix the price and alter the value of the dollar and fix the interest rate. so this would be -- this causes all of the distortion. you can't get back to growth until you get rid of the distortions. so you have to liquidate that and you have to get rid of the malinvestment. politically, that's difficult. people don't want toff do that because they're frightened. when the crisis came in 2008, it was announced. if we don't bailout the banks, everybody's going to suffer. there will be a depression. so we spend trillions and trillions bailing out people making all of this money and guess what? the people got the depression and the people lost their homes. so that didn't work. we still have the debt on the books. it was just shifted from the wealthy to the poor and middle class because it's on our books, on our monetary system and our treasury. that has to change. when the crisis comes and somebody's bankrupt, have you stricter regulations, not weaker regulations. stricker regulations saying you messed up, you go bankrupt and wipe that debt off the books. you don't go to the people! [applause] but in many ways we lost confidence in freedom in general and lost confidence understanding how free markets worked. and we have been always talked into saying, well, there's always going to be people that will need help and, therefore, we have to help or they'll fall through the cracks. when do you it their way, the way the keynesians have done it, cracks get bigger and more people fall through them. we say, well, we always get charged saying if you don't help those kind of people, then you don't care. you have no humanitarian concerns. but have i come to the conclusion if we do have humanitarian concerns which i have and i'm sure you do, the best way to take care of human needs is to have a free society and free market and sound money. that will take care of the maximum number of people. [applause] they are always saying and charging us with this not caring. but if you sacrificed a little bit of liberty, let's say that you do say, well, we have to help those in need, the reason i think that is wrong is because first, it's not morally right to steal from one group and give it to another, regardless of what their needs are. economically it doesn't work and fails and not constitutionally authorized. but when you help a little bit, a few people, you sacrificed 100% of the principle. you have endorsed, redistribution of wealth and it's bound to grow. that's sort of like saying the income tax is not so bad if it's 1%. like it started out. but 1% has endorsed the principle that the government says they own all your income and they'll allow you to keep a certain percentage according to their dictate. that's why the income tax is the worst type of tax on a free society. and i think so much of what we have done in these last quite a few decades has been undermining this principle of our personal liberty. so vm not understood exactly where our liberties come from. they think it comes from the government. that's why in our lives, i had one member of congress sitting beside them and voting on something that was protecting the consumer, doing something. i said why do you have to do this? you know, why do you feel compelled to vote for this? people are too stupid to take care of themselves. those were the words he used and that's the attitude to have. they believed that. but they don't recognize it. we can't argue there will be no problems in a free society. just they will be minimized and there will be a lot more wealth in the country and there will be a lot more charity in the country and we wouldn't need the government. as soon as you do the government, you just destroy the wealth and destroy the free market and the whole thing on property rights. what we have done, we undermined across the board the whole idea whose life it is. the government assumes it's their money, the government's money. and it's your life, the basic principle of the draft it says we can draft 18-year-olds to go off to war. i know there's not a draft now but young people still have to register, just to remind everybody in case we need you, we will ship you off. the most outrageous suggestion that i hear, and there's famous liberal economists today, now talking about and arguing the case that war ends depression and recession. that is so -- that is a criminal thought as well as it's absolutely wrong. this idea that the second world war, it was taught to-to-so many of us in school. the depression ended with the second world war. because they held off 16 million americans and put them in uniform, the unemployment rates went down. but they were getting shot at and killed. but prosperity did come. prosperity came well after world war ii. took 17 years to get rid of it. this idea when we get into trouble, if you have a war, that will stimulate the economy. it doesn't. it just redirects the investment. there will be war profits. workers and business people might make it. if you built a bomber that goes over and gets blown up, it didn't increase our standard of living in any way whatsoever. this is a very dangerous thought but it's based on the fact governments think they own us and control us. they do that with the assumption of foreign policy that they use our young and send them off to fight these wars of -- with no purpose. they do it in economics assuming they have to regulate you to take care of you and tax you and assume that they own you. but what about in the other sense, the other sense that they are convinced that you can't protect yourself? but giving up liberty in order to gain protection from the government is fool hearty and we should never have to give up any of our freedoms to provide security for ourselves. [applause] so in a personal way, this attack has been systematic for many, many years it's been done with this ill advised war on drugs. just think what they do in the name of regulating drugs. i thought we had a pretty good test of prohibition back in the '20's and we had to repeal it. but right now, everybody assumes, well, we spent over a trillion dollars on the war on drugs. we haven't gotten rid of the drugs but we've gotten rid of our liberties. people have swat teams going into the wrong houses and killing people. it's time we recognized it's your life. if you want to do something dumb, you're allowed to do in a free society but you can't go and beg other people or require the government to take care of you and do dumb things. one thing that's always been hard for me to understand, our country's still pretty good in protecting religious freedom. there's less tolerance than used to be because there's phobias around on this. most americans say you have a right to no religion or any religion. that seems to be fine. we protect intellectual freedoms as well pretty well. when it comes to your own body and making your own decisions about what foods you eat and what you drink and what you smoke and what you do, your personal habits, all of a sudden there's a bunch of there, liberals and conservatives saying the people are too dumb to protect themselves. they're always going to do harm to themselves and we know what's best for them. we will take care of them. that is insidious in the culture and there's this belief we need some nanny state to take care of us. there is an argument to have a perfect society. but the society i don't want is when the government controls us, financial control or personal control or religious control or control by forcing us into wars, that's what we don't need. we need to stand up or demand our freedoms. [applause] >> thank you. first up, nobody will forget where they were on 9/11. that's ten years ago. and those were difficult times, especially for those of us who are trying to explain exactly what 9/11 is about. immediately afterwards there's a fair amount of legislation that came up. the first bill that came to the floor to rectify these problems that existed wasn't to address foreign policy or exactly asking questions y. do people commit suicide, terrorism? where do these people actually come certainly wasn't iraq. it didn't ask that. they said what we need to do is pass the patriot act. [booing] it makes no sense. i walked to one member of congress, why are you voting for this? you haven't even had a tchoons read it and it has some terrible stuff in there. he said, how can i not vote for the patriot act under these circumstances. how can i go home and explain it. i said, well, that's what your jobe is. >> almost every bill in congress has title to it, which is exactly opposite of what it does. this is a perfect example because i think if it had been properly named, it would have been called, repeal the fourth amendment act. and most likely they would have had a difficult time passing that piece of legislation. but how in the world can attacking your freedoms initiating these attack on our privacy search -- searches without search warrants, all the way down, which more or less established what's good. we have to go through airports y we are suspect terrorists without problem cause and we're treated that way y if you're involved in the monetary issue, you might well be charged as a terrorist, and it's just the term is thrown around. how in the world does passing the patriot act make it safer without an understanding of what's going on in the world? it's an attack on our personal liberties. so it is liberty that is the cause. that is why we continue to campaign for liberty. that is why this organization is so important. it's to change people's minds and to change the political situation in washington. ward locally, i'm astounding about what happened since the last election period with the campaign for liberty going around the country. i meet people that ran for office. i don't think we've counted them all, different offices they won and state legislatures around the country and even here in florida some have run and won. they are numerous. that is where the encouragement comes from, because the ideas are alive and well. yes, we have terrible problems. yes, they have undermined our liberties. but we still have some left. we are still in this room. we still have the opportunity to elect different people in washington. right now we have a tremendous opportunity because the evidence is crystal clear, that the views of the last century almost, at least 70 years, 80 years on foreign policy and multipolicies, the evidence is in, they have failed. our views are now appropriate to be put in place. [applause] and we must remember that armies can't stop an idea whose time has come. i believe our ideas, our time has come. [applause] >> the country is waking up due to all of the evidence that we see, the political landscape is changing. they're desperately struggling for that one single candidate that will capture all of america can represent the status quo. but it doesn't look like they're finding one very easy, which opens up the door for us. i really believe it. but the great strides have been made at the grass roots. the tea party movement and the change is going on. this is all beneficial. there's a good reason why the tea party movement arose and it isn't so much that we know who's in the tea party and exactly what the beliefs are. there's no one tea party movement. i think i remember when it really got started back in 2007 though. [applause] [applause] there was a necessity for a group of people to stand up and tell us the way it is and speak out against this party system that we have. we don't have a two-party system. we have a single party system. just think. just think of how much doesn't change regardless of which party. does medical care programs change with republicans versus temperatures? does foreign policy change? no, they endorse the same ideas they have been taught by the same people. what's happening in the country now is this standing up and saying yes, we can't get their attention but we don't have the opportunity to get it in a third party. i'm always annoyed by the fact that we know what one of these excuses has been for us to go overseas. i just think it is a real stretch of their imagination. we're overseas to spread our goodness and democracy. we're going over killing a lot people. a lot of our people are getting killed and we're spreading democracy in the world. at the same time, our democratic process and not democracy, a process where we can little bit and have different competing parties. it is virtually impossible. it is so difficult. tried it once. i spent most of my money trying to get on balance. how many interviews do you think i got? it doesn't happen. there was a need and there was a vacuum and something had to be done and that's when i think people finally got so incensed and followed up with what's happening in 2007. of course have i to admit there have been a few that have come over to join and get some of the benefits from the tea party movement as well. nevertheless, i think it is very, very healthy, but our job is to help define that movement and how many people were upset and i think that is what campaign liberty has been doing and will continue to do because we know and understand what liberty means. we know that it means personal liberty and a different perm policy and monetary policy and economic policy when we take the oath of office very seriously. at the university, young people, a lot of times represent any significant change and if we had no young people and if the campuses were dead and totally uninterested in what we were doing, i would be very discouraged, yet, today, this is place where we get a lot of attention. this young americans for liberty as an organization, an outgrowth. [applause] it is an outgrowth of the campaign for liberty and jeff has done a magnificent job getting hundreds and hundreds of organized individuals on the campus and i believe that is very significant. the people annoy have access to so much more information. i struggled when i decided in the 1950's there was a lot i'm not getting. i don't fully understand. i'm looking for information. i was trying to figure out the plain truth of these things. it wasn't that easy. i certainly didn't learn it in college. just the desire to find it motivated me to keep looking. no internet. didn't hear it on tv. didn't get it from your politicians. you don't get it from the professors. where do you get it? you had to get it elsewhere. it wasn't books -- it was in books. give a lot of credit to how the foundation for economic education helped me because it was back in the day when there were so few people trying to keep it together. there is always a remnant in society that holds things together. they were part of the remnant. we still don't know where and how big the remnant is. i'll tell you what. i get to see a few of the remnants and it is a lot bigger than i ever dreamed it was. [applause] so there were a few organizations but now they have blossed. they have blossomed and actually invaded the universities, the conventional yufrltes, the professors getting into the colleges, associated with the stews. this is magnificent what's happening. this, to me, makes the big difference. and then, again, this dissemination of information whether it is pure, political information or education information, it comes through the internet. it is magnificent. it is a real tool. [applause] so there is reason to be very concerned. i'm talking about and believe sincerely although i do not claim to be a progress nost indicatesor and claim that i know when things are happening and i believe that good economic thinking tells you that the dollar value but i think things are going to be much worth less next summer. i think the dollar is in a crisis. i think that's what the price of gold is telling us. all other countryings use dollars in their re-- countries use dollars in their reserves. it is not just one country. not just greece. not just the united states. everybody has to face up to this. this is why people are rushing into things they can fully trust. even putting money into banks isn't worth it anymore because they are talking about charging you to put money into banks. nobody has any confidence. this is a sign that something big is coming on. this week, we saw that the consumer price index is going up .5%. which means it is going up .1%. twice as fast as the government tells you. housing prices this week are continuing -- the housing veals continuing once again to go down. but interestingly enough, if you look at the prices of houses in the past three months, they have been creeping up. that means that all things of real value eventually will have -- there will be a need for those things. i think that is what's happening. and we have this opportunity to use all of these issues because the world is changing. the attitudes are changing. the understanding is changing. and there is a lot of room to be very optimistic about our opportunities. but as bad as things are, this -- it will not be easy. but we're much better off than we were five or 10 years ago. many of us were concerned at that time. the evidence -- the evidence is now -- and they know these problems are here and so we're being so much better received because of this. freedom is the answer. bringing people together. i am -- i feel to have so emphatically positive about the benefits of lisht. i don't shy away ever -- liberty. i don't shy away ever from saying yes, i care about people. it is only the free society that cares about people. that's what we we have to convince people of. the magnificent thing about a free society, it is not judgmental. you may be judgmental in the sense that you know right from wrong but not judgmental in the sense that we want to write laws and decide how you should spend your money and what you should eat and whether or not you can drink raw milk or not. we should not do that. [applause] but i'm convinced that it brings people together. i'm convinced that this philosophy brings together those who claim they are progressives and those who consider themselves moderates and those who consider themselves conservatives and libertarians. they have bits and pieces of the freedom ideas. there is no reason why we can't work with people on those issues which we agree. this is the way that people feel less threatened and will come together and i claim is that i have worked as well with any other group in washington as anybody instead of being stereotyped and saying i'm a right-winged conservative and don't talk to others on the progressive side. you get a lot of progressives who are sick and tired of obama's constant attack on the wars and civil liberties. [applause] but in a history of freedom, it is a rather young philosophy. awe authoriatism, they want to tell us what to do. we did have a good start. we didn't have a perfect constitution. a lot of shortcomings there. but it was good compared to others. it drid introduced us into an age where we recognize private parties and contracts and self-reliance and not a welfare state and not a world empire. we have this chance that we became the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. we're still very wealthy, but our problem is we destroyed our production and got careless understanding what liberty is all about. now our pros parity is very, very fragile because we destroyed the foundation and thes not going to take a lot to push the whole house down because the foundation is gone. we need to restore the principles of liberty. when we became pros produce people became infatuated with the materialism. it is wonderful. it is perpetual and all we need is a government that helped redistribute it and we forgot all about defending the principles that produced the wealth. now we are being pushed. if we think we can do this by spending and deficits and printing money and not address the subject of preparing the foundation, we're kidding ourselves. we have this opportunity. we have the people now coming with us and right now, the evidence is so clear that it is failing. governments is failing around the world. the only question is what is it going to be replaced with? are we going to go backwards and get dictorial power? can we restore that and get the people encouraged enough to say let's use the remaining freedoms we have to defend our liberties and promote this great country of ours once again. thank you very much. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] ♪ >> next, the co-creators of twitter talk about the future of the internet. then a discussion on national security since 9/11. after that, republican presidential candidate texas congressman ron paul. >> watch more video of the candidates. see what political reporters are saying and track the latest campaign contributions with c-span's website for campaign 2012. it is easy to use. helps you navigate the political landscape. plus links to c-span media partners in the early primary and caucus states. all at c-span.org/campaign 2012. >> here is the key. we were stunned. the law of social security is so clear that if the scheduled benefits cannot be paid, and that's a clear word, they will give only the payable benefit. now that may sound like garbage, but that's a real gut wrencher because that's the one that is going to hit in 2037. last may there was less coming in than going out. may. this may. last may. so you gets to this point and you're going to get payable benefits and not scheduled benefits and you can see sue and you can moan and you can shriek and it won't do you a lick of good. that's absolutely goofy to me. went to the aarp and said look, we think you ought to help. if 38 million people bond together by love oir their discounts and their magazine has picked up. it is a thriller now that -- sex over 50 is the cover. now it is sex over 60 and they are into 80. and the ads are about how to get something and not have to pay for it. medicare will pay for it. ads on sexual dysfunction. read the aarp magazine. these people are -- i said to the top guy. it is a harsh statement and i intend it to be just exactly that. they have not helped one bit. they have said we have two things that we can suggest. modest changes will take care of social security. what are they? we're still waiting. >> watch more from this vept online at the c-span video library. >> next, the creators of twitter, biz stone and evan williams talk with former time magazine editor walter isaacson. the discussion of technology from the annual aspen ideas festival is just over an hour. >> jere murdock can introduce me. >> i'm the co-founder of inside venture parties and a trustee here at the aspen institute. this session is entitled what is next for the internet. steve jobs once said if you want to predict the future, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. these three gentlemen have all had something to do with the creation of the internet and post-internet. our illustrious c.e.o., walter isaacson. he released one of the first internet portals called pathfinder. biz stone and ev williams are co-founders and two creators of blogger and twitter. both of those inventions will be feeling the repercussions of that for another generation at least. without further ado, walter isaacson, biz stone, and evan williams. [applause] >> thank you, biz. thank you, ev. >> can you say that again? >> can you put your nametags on again so i can remember that? >> it does not matter. >> it does not matter? ok. we are going to start with a piece of news about the future of the internet. a significant piece of news. these are the co-founders of twitter. they have something to announce today. biz, do you want to start? >> we -- evan and i and our long-term partner jason goldman, the bald than the front -- >> do not trade on this information because the market is closed. >> the three of us had been longtime collaborators and really good friends. our dream was always to build our own company where we get to make whatever we want, whenever we think is going to be helpful. we want to make the world a better place. we put up a web site today. we are calling our company -- the obvious corp." we do not have anything specific to say about exactly what we are going to be working on just yet. we are not ready to reveal that, but we are excited to announce that we have started a new company. >> this actually is the launch of a new company with you as c.e.o. >> yes. it is actually a relaunch. obvious incubated twitter before spinning it off. we decided to focus on that for a few years, but the original idea with obvious was that we were going to create multiple things and see where they went. we did not end up doing that many things, but this is a relaunch of that company and we are very excited. our mission is that we do not have specifics what we are going to build. we are excited about building systems that help people work together to improve the world in various ways. we think that is so much of what the internet promises. getting into our topic today with the future of the internet will entail people working together to become greater than they could individually or greater than organizations and institutions can be. >> without going further than you are ready to go, you are talking about watching a new problem of twitter-like quality that would help people collaborate. >> yes. collaborate can mean various things. twitter-like quality can mean different things. maybe we will launch a few things if we get as lucky as we did with twitter. that would be great. but the goal -- what we think is possible, there is a whole wave of new companies and services that are about helping people work together to do things. what twitter actually does and most communication technologies do, they enable people who would not necessarily act on their own to find like-minded people. it is one thing to find like-minded people and talk about stuff. it is another to find like-minded people and do stuff that is what we have seen in the middle east. that is what we have seen in much smaller examples throughout the history of twitter. people saying, "it is christmas time. there are homeless people on the street. let's give them blankets and food. who is with me?" we heard stories like this. we are convinced that would not happen if people did not have this communication channel. they do not get out there unless you give them a way to connect with other like-minded people. that scratches the surface of what is possible in the bigger arena to date. >> it seems like we are just beginning to scratch the surface on the internet and on specific applications like kickstarter that are allowing people to collaborate to affect real world, positive change. in many ways, twitter has done that. it is not entirely what is it -- what it is about, but it has done that in certain cases. there is a proliferation of start-ups and applications that are doing that now. as we get into our discussion about the future of the internet, hopefully this is a lead topic. >> in some ways, this is the history of the internet. it started as a collaborative medium. it became something different for a while. a "put some stuff out there close-" medium. >> it was originally to help scientists collaborate. it took on this very commercial mode where in the default paradigm of commerce, it was one way. we put a stop out to people and they will consume. you will buy things and they will consume our media and our advertisement. then there is the next wave where we figure out this is a two-and late medium. -- two-way immediateup. -- medium. people create be yet themselves. there are many great examples of people collaborating on the internet to create software, to create information, like wikipedia. to bring that collaboration back to the real world is the next phase. >> the way i think about it is there was a collaborative seed in the very beginning. the three phases of the internet, if you want to vastly generalized -- they paved the internet and built a mall. then blogging came along and a little seedlings started to sprout through the cracks. we lowered the barrier to self publishing. the democratization of information suddenly flourish. now we are entering that sort of a third phase where it is not just an overwhelming amount of information, there is people working to give you the best information as quickly as possible, but also, it includes taking the virtual and making it real, making it true, real, positive changes in the world. >> why did you call it the obvious corporation? >> well, originally we called it obvious for a couple of reasons. one is we want to create products that were obvious, easy-to-use, and straightforward. not tricky. not trying to be too clever, because we can't be. we're not that clever. [laughter] probably a bigger reason was all of the biggest ideas or obvious in retrospect. only in retrospect. >> for the first nine months of twitter, everyone thought it was totally useless. they said it to our face every day. finally one day i got frustrated and said, "so is ice-cream. do you want us to ban ice cream and all joy? [laughter] >> you are going to be the ceo of obvious, but both of you will still be connected with twitter in some ways. >> all three of us, jason as well. jason is an adviser at twitter. i am on the board of twitter. we all have a relationship with twitter. i serve on the board of directors and biz, go ahead and say. >> all of us are deeply invested personally and financially in twitter. evan is an active participant on the board. i am still working -- i work through this with dick, our ceo. i said you guys are so awesome, i will just get out of the way. if you need me, just ask me to do something. i will be working a lot with coms and bouncing ideas of the products. that's pretty much it. jason, it is funny. jason is kind of like a guidance counselor. all the employees are constantly asking jason for a private meeting. he is involved. we are all involved. we want to see it succeed tremendously. we want to try to help as much as possible while putting our efforts day-to-day into obvious. >> before we get to the future of the internet, let me pick back on something you said, which is the arab spring. malcolm gladwell came out with the argument "of the revolution will not be tweeted." this is all bull. you responded to that, right? >> no one was arguing -- his argument was these revolutions are not twitter revolutions. no one said they were. that was weird. [laughter] that is what he was arguing. basically, i wrote a rebuttal that said, look, agreed. huge, major change, like the civil rights movement, comes from people. people need tools. the telephone was a big part of bringing down the berlin wall, but the telephone did not bring down the berlin wall. i just think his argument was kind of a straw man thing. i think he was angry that people kept writing twitter into the headlines. so he said, twitter had nothing to do with it. in fact, it did have a sideline part because these people were ready to speak up. twitter was a tool that help them realize the others felt like them. it emboldened them. it allowed them to feel like, ok, maybe we can do this. it has a role as a simple tool, but at the same time, twitter must remain a neutral technology, not taking sides, not getting involved, not celebrating any, you know, part of helping in any success. >> you call it neutral technology, but let me ask you a question. do you think from gutenberg to twitter, the technologies that enable a freer flow of information in communication inevitably being geared towards democracy? >> what do you think? [laughter] [applause] >> the answer is, yes. >> if it enables people, that makes democracy not neutral. it does not help an authoritarian regime. >> you could probably use it to do that, but it would not be as effective, i do not think. the thing we are facing now is that, you know, the state department is suddenly very cozy with twitter because they are like, "we tried to get this done with ak-47s and you got it done with tweets." [laughter] >> can we be friends?" i maintain that it has to be a neutral technology because there are different forms of democracy. you do not want your technology, you do not want twitter to look like it is simply a tool to spread the united states' version of technology around the world. what did i say? democracy around the world. he wanted to help for good, but you do not want to look like you are in the pocket of the u.s. government. we try to do that as much as we can, to speak out and say this. >> speaking at the future, as people have been starting internet companies sense whenever people started internet companies, one thing that changed a lot is the global nature of the antoinette. now -- of the internet. now if you create a consumer web service, most of your users or outside the united states. it does not matter if you are in the heart of the silicon valley launched only in english. that changes have you think about things from the git-go. it comes up i get all kinds of policy decisions as you get big. the state department stores -- starts call all kinds of weird things happen when you are a company of about 40 people. an interesting factor in designing anything these days is if you can make -- is you can make something truly global. it is more global than it was even five or 10 years ago. i went to korea to launch twitter in korean in january. twitter and facebook or the first two services -- are the first two services to grow in korea that are not korean. even though they are very advanced -- they have high-speed internet and lots of homegrown internet services, there is something culturally that keep people on the homegrown side. now with things like twitter and facebook, they have local competitors, but people want to be connected to the global network because they want to follow what is happening. they wanted all the bill gates and he is not on twitter career. you cannot separate this stuff anymore. it has to be part of one massive system, which also please do interesting things like the internet becoming more closed and less centralized. but that is another topic. >> let's get to the topic. is there a problem with the future of the internet that you think it might become more closed? >> absolutely. there are a lot of trends that pushed it toward being a more closed environment. specifically, the economics of the centralized system and the user experience are very powerful. >> are you talking about apple, for example? >> apple is a good example. as is facebook, as is youtube. let's take youtube as a less talked about example. youtube is not closed, but it is very centralized. 10 years ago if you talked to any technologist, they would have said obviously video was coming to the internet as band width the increases and storage costs decrease. at the time, no one i know would have said 80% of the video views will be run through one service. that would have been a strange thought at the time because the internet model was decentralization. every website, every newspaper, everyone has their own island of the internet so why would video not work the same way? now we look at a world where if you want to publish a video, you probably publish it on at youtube. maybe you publish it on your own site, but lots of organizations published on youtube. partly -- at first, it was a lot easier, but now it is where the viewers are. it as a big network effect. those network effects will make it more and more powerful. the same thing with facebook and the same thing with apple. if you want to write a mobile phone application, you will publish the apple store because that is the only way to get on the phone and it is great for users. it is the same thing over and over again. the user experience if this is central i'd, the reach is better, the economics are better. what we are getting our platform wars where there are a few major players and getting bigger and bigger and there are opportunities for little guys to be on these major players' platforms, but we are more dependent on these platforms. >> could you put twitter on that list? >> yes. hopefully. [laughter] >> it is almost like there are a bunch of different internets and you just pick the one you want to -- >> by internet, most of us have grown up thinking of the after -- internet as basically http webpages. there are other variations. we have had 20 years of the web page internet. now you say we are moving towards a social network based internet, but there will be certain platforms, like facebook or whatever. that will be more centrally controlled. >> you could go on your ipod touch, not have safari, and get everything you need. >> you can do it on your-own. >> everything is on there. the distinction is not whether it is http. that confuses the story a little bit. what is important is the paradigm has shifted from a completely decentralized internet to a more and more centralized internet. you have to go to the app store to get an app on your phone. that's very, very different. anyone can put up a website. that site that uses facebook connect and twitter accounts, to log in, that is different for the days recreated everything from scratch. i liken it to in the early days everyone had sort of an island and they tried to live on that island. they try to attract visitors. they try to attract tourists to the island. tourists would show up and they use a passport and feed them whatever coconuts they grew on that island. over time, a lot of them were like we cannot be completely self sustainable, so we will import things. one of the first things they would import more advertising. we will import search. it's kind of stop there, but you could import your cms. that is what blogger did. now you can import your identity. now you can import your identity. you can even -- and now now people are saying, screw it. we do not need to own land. we're just going to go rent. we will be in the mall and the services will be provided. that makes a lot of sense from an entrepreneurialism standpoint. >> what's the downside? >> maybe the land owners get too much control. that is the downside. when we started odio, a podcasting service that lets you record into your browser and send that recording out to anyone who had an iphone. apple said we have podcasting in itunes. we said that is probably a good place for it. probably a better place than our website. once they made a decision, we had to give it. >> if you are doing app-based , opposed to web spaced, it is not as searchable and likable. >> it is not a part of the greater internet. >> i think in many ways, apps are a step backwards from the web because they are not connectable. >> do you remember a l l and top reserve? >> of course it -- aol and compuserve? >> of course. daylighting just got different. >> they got more ominous. [laughter] >> what else do you worry about in the future of the internet? >> you should ask jason. he is the more cynical one. we are, in a sense, hallucinogenicly optimistic. i am definitely an optimist. one thing we talked about is quality of content. for the last 15 years we have worked on lowering the barrier to content creation. that has had all these positive effects, but it seems like this is -- no one has been working on improving the quality of content on the internet. i think this is highly possible, but if you look at reading an article on the web today, it is basically the same as if you read it in a magazine or if you printed it out, you get the same experience. once it is published, it rarely changes. the collective intelligence available in the world does not really collaborate to improve it. the process of creation is not very much different than traditional media. the distribution is the only thing that has changed. all these things could potentially change. the consumption experience, the evolution of the information once it gets out there, the production process could be way more efficient and open. that is an opportunity and a way that things could actually improve. in the publishing energy -- publishing industry there is a lot of turmoil and disparity because the internet spoiled the business model. there are more fundamental things than how distribution happens to change about publishing. >> where does collaboration come in beyond the wiki model? >> there has not been nearly enough experimentation between user generated content and professional content. they are pretty much different worlds on the at burnett. the best you get is an article and a bunch of comments underneath the article completely separated. those comments can be from anybody. no one ever reads them. i want to read my "new york times" after walter has read it and highlighted in the margins. not everybody in the world, but depending on the article. someone who is an expert. i don't know exactly what that looks like. there are all kinds of ideas. just like wikipedia, there is a collective intelligence that collaborates to give more accurate information most of the time. what does that not exist outside of wikipedia? >> just to your point about collaboration, there are more ways of thinking about collaboration of the web than group ware or specific apps. apps like twitter, which wrote -- that are wide open and you can follow any interest that you like. whether you tweet or not is up to you. you can follow your interests on twitter. you can follow your mom. you can follow cnn. whatever it is. anything. nike. there is a lot of potential for collaboration because people need others they would have never admit that they were just on a social network because you connect with someone you already know there. you are just reaffirming your relationship. if you're on a fundamentally different system where you are following people you wish you knew instead of people that you used to know -- [laughter] -- it is more like an aspirational thing. we have seen it over and over again. we have all started falling each -- following each other on this -- on twitter. why don't we get together and meet each other in real life. it has all of these wonderful repercussions. one of the earlier tweets was let's get together and raise money for charity water. i am going to say in my town and let's all meet together at this club and buy a $20 ticket. that $20 will go to charity water to build wells for people who do not have clean water in developing nations. that grew to 250 cities around the world. it made $$250,000 on tuesday night. >> that is a good example of how you make the virtual world connect to the physical world. in other world -- in other words, people at the virtual friends and virtual followers. is the future of the internet better at integrating the real world rather than your virtual world? >> yes, it is. you know longer have to be sitting at your desk to experience the internet. it is more interspersed in our daily lives. new applications are available with that. the simple idea of i can now call a taxi from this is integrating the internet. you do not actually have to tell the taxi where you are. you just press the button. they show up to your house. all that stuff. >> what i'm excited about is -- more examples. have you heard of carrot mob? it is so named because its is the opposite of a boycott. the anti- boycott. the idea is people should vote with their dollars, but the only organized way to do that is to say we are going to boycott this business. it does not seem to be affected. someone said we should use a carrot instead of a state. go to a business and say we want you to do this and, if you do, we will give you our money. for example, this guy from san francisco went to all of the liquor stores in the mission and got them to bid for how much they would contribute to improving efficiency in their store out of all the people who organized and bought stock. the highest bid was 22%. they rallied the troops and got all these people to show up. they got over 20200 people to show up. the guy normally makes $1,000 a day. he made $10,000 that day. he put $22 into replacing the lights. then all of those people -- $2200 into replacing the lights. that all of those people presumably bought things they would have anyway. they were further invested in the store both emotionally and financially. >> it was a fun thing. the pictures he shows us of the first vept were all of these people in line talking and making each other. since then, there have been lots of them in germany and around the world. it has taken on a life of its own. >> with the future of the internet be better if there was less anonymity, or at least the option of being in a new net where people were not anonymous? you could be secure in who they were? >> i think so. there are a lot of benefits to anonymity. but not most of the everyday use cases. leave aside the arab spring, the politics of it. i think sometimes in more dangerous situations you need to be able to protect your anonymity. other times when you want to open up and get ahead in life because he was a better job or whatever, you want to use your real name, opened up, show your interests and what you can do in that sort of thing. if you or more of a whistle blower i get a dangerous area, you want to be able to protect your privacy. >> you keep talking about the collaborative web. it seems that only works if i can trust in who i am collaborating. >> i think that is true. reputation is important in society. we need to replicate that to some degree on-line. most large systems do have a reputation. twitter, facebook. assignment sure every -- behind the scenes, most modern systems do because it is a way they combat abuse. abuse is a huge problem if you're running one of the services. it is not even necessarily anonymity. you do not have to use your real name. you can participate under a pseudonym or something, but there needs to be longevity and a history of your actions. there has to be costs to throwing away an identity and creating a new one because if there is not, there are no consequences for abouting badly. >> google today launched google +. do you see the possibility that facebook could be displaced as myspace was? as foundation for social networking? >> could facebook be displaced like myspace? the general answer for that when you get displaced, it is because you displaced yourself. myspace shot itself in the foot. they took their eye of the user and focused on junky ads and making money really fast. the same thing that city bank did. they got in all of these credit default swaps, all this other stuff, took their eye off the customer, the people buying homes, starting families and almost lost a 200-year-old institution. now they are on a huge campaign. their new masters are less keep 1 million people from foreclosing this year and that the 4 million people we know we are going to foreclose on, let's try to preserve their credit and get them into a rental. these are actual metric state are trying to achieve. the key is to execute, keep your eye on the user, do what they need to do. myspace tripped up there. facebook seems to have a firm grasp of its users, but they also seem to have a "we are going to do it whether you like it or not" kind of attitude. we are really smart and we know the right answer, even if you do not think we do. >> suppose you were building a new service or product that needed to be based on a social network with the identity and whatever. would you be comfortable basing it on facebook ads? >> i mean, earlier on, we did that and had a lot of success with it. >> i would probably use facebook if it was useful, but i would not depend on it. facebook is useful for bringing in people you know. i do not think facebook will be displaced. however, -- what they do is fundamental -- connecting with people you know. sharing photographs and messaging with people you know is very fundamental to most of the world it seems. i think what is going to be hard for them is the same thing that is hard for every big company, which is extending that to everything. what i hear from people who use facebook a lot is a guest to a point where it is too big for certain things. or -- because you form a network on facebook based on what you do on facebook. google has been pretty public about their theory -- you do not want to share all the same things with everybody. >> right. >> if they can successfully get people to create these different circles, or what ever they are calling them, of people, that will more naturally reflect what people want to do. that could be successful. people will probably still use facebook for what they use facebook for today because that would be very, very hard to displace, but something could come along to be better for some specific other use. i think that is what happened with twitter. >> being so obstinate as to say something like "what can you not have everything in one place? what are you hiding?" that's just silly. everyone has different aspects of their personality. it is just a normal thing in life. >> to be fair, facebook has all of the functionality that the new google does, but people are not used to using it that way. that is the thing we have seen in creating the services over the years. the norps of the culture of the system define what people do it as much as or more than functionality as possible. people can hook their twitter to their facebook and public -- publish their tweets over there. for a lot of people who just use facebook, this does not even make sense. let alone the syntax is a weird. it is also the type of things people share on facebook -- it is a different use for what people do on twitter even though the functionality of twitter is a subset of the functionality of facebook. >> tom friedman said he had never used twitter or facebook and never seen any reason why he would ever do it. do you have a response to that? >> i would challenge him on whether or not he had ever used twitter. i would ask him has he ever watched cnn or read any newspaper, have you ever read "the "new york times"? there are tweets the and the new york times. there are tweets all the time on cnn. chances are he has read a tweet. >> can people get by without social networking? is social networking going to be a fundamental part of our lives from here on out? >> on the web? >> on the internet. >> yes. [laughter] >> let me open it up. either raise your hand and shout >> the other side of the or run to a microphone. yeah. internet is connecting to massive computing powers that has a lot of knowledge. the latest example is ibm. it seems that maybe we should be thinking about those kinds of uses where, say a physician wants to get best practices or something like that, you are not going to get it on facebook where you get a bunch of ideas from wacky people. you want to get it from something that has distilled all this knowledge and gives you something. there is going to be a place for the side of computing i would like to suggest. >> i totally agree. i think that is a great example. when it comes to the collaboration we are talking about, it does not mean with everybody in the world. most of the systems developed have not allowed -- it is like user generated content versus professionals. it is one or the other. everybody in the world including that job and haters. there has to be new ones in between that to allow people to our credibility or be able to connect with only those to have a certain amount of trust. >> one of the things we were excited about with twitter was maybe one day down the line since twitter was designed to work on all five billion mobile phones because they all have sms or mobile texting, we always thought we might be able to have an impact in rural areas where a farmer could ask a question -- can i get a better price for this grain? or a pregnant woman who has to travel 50 miles to the doctor could ask the question, are these symptoms in worth the trip? and get an answer back from the doctor, yes or no. tests have already been done in uganda and other places with simple sms. lives have been saved because they have been able to report medical diagnosis just over sms. some guys in berkeley created a microscope you can slip over an iphone, take a microscopic picture of a virus, and send that picture in an e-mail to a fancy clinic and get back within a minute a diagnosis. >> we have a collaborative web next time where someone takes a cat scan and says let's have the collaboration around how to deal with that? could you be creating a high and -- end like that? >> yes. why not? definitely. >> somebody probably has. the internet is really big. every time we had a genius idea, we look it up and see there are already can guys working on it. >> he started off about the separation of the internet with companies, but there is also the issue of separation of the global common medium with countries. i wonder if you have any concern about that -- iran, china, what happened in egypt -- in terms of the global common medium of the internet and if you have any interest in pushing for a single global digital market. >> yes. our philosophy right now is that the open exchange of information can have a positive impact of the world. we often get blocked by countries that do not agree with that philosophy. we are blocked in china. we are probably blocked in some other places. the funny thing is, people find ways to continue twittering. we found that in order to completely shut down people from twittering, you have to shut down the entire telecommunications service in the after net. -- innernet. when you do that, you cripple your entire state. who was it that did that most recently and said we had to turn this thing back on? it is really not worth it. even now, we are blocked in china, we still see in our logs traffic coming from china. people are figuring out ways around the block to continue to collaborate got to tweet, to share information. does that answer the question? what this is not exactly what you are asking, but what i am worry about is separate worlds within the u.s. and people only pay attention to people who agree with them. that is one of the ironic things about what all of these technologies have created is more separation in some ways rather than more connection. there is less of a common marketplace of ideas to some degree because people are filtering out everything that is from a different viewpoint. the technology encourages you to filter these things out. what's your gut to shuffle the deck. -- you have to shuffle the deck. >> one of the genes of ours has been to say, okay, we know you lived in berkeley and you drive of the bay bridge every day. maybe you do not fall of the bay -- follow the bay bridge on twitter, but it is 4:45 and we thought you might like to know that the bay bridge has fallen down. and you go, yes. i would like to know that. thank you. you are like, this is good there are 1 billion tweets every six days. there is information out there for everyone that is relevant. we have to work really hard. after work really hard on delivering the streets for those people wherever they are on their mobile the lice. -- mobile device. >> could you speak to the conversation about the similarity and the role that you have adopted and that some of them have simply accepted that this merging with simply going to happen? >> singular? >> it seems kind of strange to me. i am not well versed in the singularity. [laughter] i do not think we have to worry about it yet. i read in the wired magazine's and i do not think we are about to lose control. we will find out. next year, we will put it on the agenda to find out whether we are right or not. >> for the systems that involve thousands and thousands of computers, it is hard to keep them -- keep them working, let alone keep on working on their own. >> singular is when those machines family don't need us anymore and they can work -- those machines do not need us anymore and they can work on their own. the fact that they could run amok without us and we still have not gotten voice recognition and the face recognition in the machines -- >> actually, i think we need to learn to work together before we teach machines have to work together. one of the things that -- when twitter first broke out, we went to a conference called south by southwest in south texas. we went to the nerd portion. early on in twitters history, it was nurds just like water and there was a huge overlap. -- it was nerds just like twitter and there was a huge or overlap. there is a guy who wanted to talk and a pub but it was too loud. so he sent a tweet saying let's go to the pub across the street. in the time it took to get there, the pub was full and 800 people had converged to one spot on one tweet. his followers thought it was a good idea to send it out and so on. it is like a flock of birds moving around a bird in flight, let around a tree or a telephone pole. it looks incredibly complicated and difficult, yet it is not. the mechanics of flocking is simply rudimentary they behave as if they are one organism. for the first time ever, we saw people organizing as if one organism appeared we have never seen a machine like this before. we thought, sure, this is a party, but what if this was a disaster, a political situation? it was two days later and formed twitter inc. that is one we knew we were onto a new form of communication amongst humans that could potentially change the world. >> my name is jason pollack. i currently have $92,000 on twitter. it has changed my life in some new ways that i cannot begin to describe. thank you so much for creating it. we read about people like me who use it all the time and we are the minority in the user base. most people know what twitter is, but they're not all active users every day. how are you tackling the issue? >> it depends on how you describe an active user. we like to say that you can get value out of the internet and you do not have to create a web page. you do not necessarily have to tweak to get value out a twitter. 6 billion tweets every six days is a lot of information. there is a lot in there to find. >> there are two answers -- there are two answers. most of the reports that have come out are only looking at tweet creation. we see this as a little bit of a misunderstanding that people have people say i do not use twitter. i have nothing to say to the world. it turns out the either read tweets all the time or we ask what they are interested in. two out of three twitter sessions result in no tweeze -- no tweets being created. people are using it as a source of information. most of the measures do not look at that. twitter as a company cares about the people who are getting information from it as much as the people who are creating information. that percentage is increasing over time. the early adopters are more likely to create. there actually are a lot of active users, but they may not know about it. two, because of that misunderstanding, we have been able to correct for a long time, people are getting more and more of an understanding. the osama bin laden think was, for twitter, a great milestone for a lot of people who thought, this information came out on twitter. twitter is a new source. i did it now. it is not about the cliché, "here is what i had for lunch today." it is about getting information from the world. i may not have to have a twitter account, but this stuff is here and real time and is relevant to me no matter what i do or where i am. >> i probably check twitter 22 times a day and to meet once a day. i think that speaks to -- i think you can define engagement in two different ways. for a long time, a lot of internet companies have been defining engagement the wrong way. if you define engagement as hours spent staring at a computer screen, on average, our users spent eight hours staring at our site. i think that is a very unhealthy way to measure engagement. i think that if your users are checking your service 20 or 30 times a day for 10 seconds at a time to make a quick decision or figure out what they want to do next or what have you, that is a way better type of engagement, a healthy engagement that shows that our service is helping them make choices every day efficiently, smarter, saving time, etc. i'd prefer that lever up -- i prefer that level of engagement rather than slopped over the computer for eight hours playing a game. >> i have a question which applies to twitter, but also the internet in general. when is misrepresenting yourself or creating a new identity good, ok, and part of fair play and when does it change to manipulation that is not ok? for example, obviously people who are protesting should be allowed to create false it's about who they are. i am a comedian, so mike twitter personality is not a real person by any measure. i also misrepresent, for example, the company bourse said -- the company boar's head on twitter. i have a fake relationship that implies they provide live zoroastrian masses on twitter. yesterday a professor was talking about stifling mechanical [unintelligible] obviously companies can create shell accounts to create a trending topic. but did you go on and pay 1000 people 10 cents to make a chanting topic? -- a trending topic? would that be ok? or if people are representing themselves as citizens when, in fact, they are working for a corporation, etc., etc.? >> reask the question. [laughter] >> the answer is pretty clear. you are creating, the verse is trying to manipulate the world for profit. -- you are creating comedy versus trying to manipulate the world for profit. one is ok and one is less ok. this happens a lot. the number of astroturf campaigns going on between facebook, twitter, and the internet in general is probably a lot greater than anyone has an idea of because it is clear to deduct. it is a problem that relates to walter's question earlier about reputation and of 40. -- and authority. that is something that all the systems or only getting started at and are pretty primitive at. eventually, i do not think an account that is created overnight for 10 cents is going to have very much influence. influence has to be turned over -- earned over time. there is a little bit of that in twitter today. i do not know about other systems, but i think that is the inevitable for the internet eventually or otherwise. it is not going to have the authority it is capable of. >> i do not know what this relates or not, but parity counts on twitter. -- but parody accounts on twitter have been created. during the bp oil spill, someone created "bp global pr." they started saying all of this sad, but funny things. as if bp could not care less. bp did not call us to take it down. i thought that was a brilliant move because it was letting off some steam. if they had gone all the way down to the minutia of shutting down a little twitter account, it would have been like they were completely and utterly evil beyond all means. bppr.com was funny and clear. it was somebody doing a parody. >> they have the logo that was kind of dripping. >> would you have shut it down if it was somebody pretending to be bp pr? >> if it was a straight up logo and they said it was official, i would have said it was an impersonation that is against the rules. >> twitter just out -- twitter shuts down impersonation accounts at a rate of 1000 per week. >> in general, inventors of new technology do not have -- inventors of new technology do not have a good track record. >> except for us. >> alexander graham bell of the great thing about the telephone was it would be a great way of listening to concerts'. i am just curious, what has really surprised you about what twitter has become? i am assuming the scale of that, the magnitude, and diversity is beyond what you might have expected, but what has been a surprise to you as twitter has become an emerging phenomenon and changed overtime? and what do you think it might become in the future? >> can i answer the first question? there was an element of holy craft we did not know would be this big a deal. we had worked on blogger for so long that giving a voice to the voiceless and giving them a page for free and let the in talked-about injustice was the only way to let them get information out and it was important. we supported that. we designed our rules and fought against their parent company to keep it free and open and air on the side of -- and err on the side of freedom of speech. even though it was fun in the beginning, we knew there was the potential of it also having that same kind of impact in the world. what was not expected was that we lowered the bar so much more -- with blogger you had to have an internet connection and you had to know how to ftp. with twitter, you just needed to know how to text message, which the world was beginning to learn very quickly. that is what really surprised me. it was the speed that twitter brand at and to which everything grew and the way it sped up democracy and business and all of these other things. >> was a holy shit moment when they said it was garrett from a state department and please do not make -- please do not do maintenance this weekend because we are having a revolution? [laughter] >> my primary thing on that was, oh, boy, i do not want people to think we did this because they asked us to. so i wrote a blog saying that we had hundreds of e-mail and hundreds of tweets and phone calls. and one of those phone calls was from the state department. we decided to change the maintenance window because all of these users thought it was a good idea. frankly, we should be up anyways. we are not doing this because the state department asked us and they do not have access to our decision-making capabilities. we wanted to have that global neutral bvibe to us. but, yes, there was a lot of energy that day. >> the casualness with which a large number of well-known people use twitter is depressing. and a lot of accounts are handled by pr people or intern's. there are people who likour like lady goth and -- like lady gaga and others -- >> people are just out there saying stuff. >> in the very beginning, i had an argument with somebody and i said that celebrities will not use twitter. the reason that they are celebrities is because we do not have access to them. we only get to see them in movies and they're special and we look for to that. we do not want to see their regular lives because then they will not be special. then they all started to go on twitter like crazy and probably shouldn't have. [laughter] it was great for us because celebrities have built in large groups of people who love them. >> way back there. >> i work for two degrees. i have a whopping 13 followers. [laughter] >> its about quality, not quantity. >> our company has a mere two hundred or something. i wanted to know about places like twitter or facebook, how do small businesses get more recognition and get followed aside from being bigger? >> the small -- the beauty of small business on twitter has not escaped as from the very beginning. you do not have to have a lot of followers. early on, i was in new york city. i walked by a bakery that big mostly cookies. -- part ofcardboard a cardboard box with a marker that said follows on facebook. even if only 98 people in their neighborhood follow that account, when those guys say chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven right now at 3:00 p.m., everybody runs down there and buy is it, even if it is only 90 people. they just sold all their cookies. they could either go home for the day or make another batch. all they needed for their entire working department was a sharpie and a cardboard box. then you take that idea and you extended out to developing nations and people who sell grains on a blanket as a market and they could say, phone me on twitter and i will tell you if i get a special grain next week or something like that. there is a whole huge group of small businesses that will allow build a website and advertise and do all this other stuff. but, for free, they can get a twitter count and a chalkboard and go for it. >> last won back their standing up. >> my name is eric. i am a talent agent at utc. -- at uta. there is a lot of talk right now about the technology bubble, will it work? i would like to know your thoughts about where do you think we are in the bubble. >> that is a good hit jason question as usual. >> i am not a speculator about the stock-market. i think there is a lot of excitement now because a lot of this stuff is getting real. it is becoming essential in people's lives. and now the user base that you can reach a billion people on the service and make a lot of money is very clear to people. as usual, maybe investor excitement is outpacing the development of the businesses. long term, i do not think it is a problem holding like woodstock long term. i think that, if there is a correction, these things always go in cycles. that will be fine. there are fundamental businesses that are here for the long term. >> jerry murdoch and gina, where are you? first of all, i want to thank jerry murdoch who hope to get the twitter guys here. no wonder you came. he is a board member. and gene will come up in a second and talk about the yoga that we can do. first, let me thank our people here. but me thank evan and then for being here. when is the hash tag for this? >> i do not know. >> thank you all very much. appreciate it. >> next, a discussion on national security since 9/11. then a speech by ron paul. then, a forum on the future of social security. >> tomorrow, a political roundtable with democratic strategist karen finley and republican strategist tony from no -- tony fratto. peter gaytan on military veterans and employment. >> it is a country fraught with corruption, natural disasters, and islamic extremists. >> what was shocking to me and many people in pakistan was that these assassinations were welcome, were congratulated by many pakistanis. these are not terrorists, not al qaeda, and that taliban, but ordinary pakistanis who feel that their religion is threatened, that the country is becoming too secular, that the islamic values are under attack, and that blasphemy, which is anything that insults the profit or is long, is something to be defended with their life. >> pamela constable sunday night on q&a. >> next, a panel of intelligence and national security experts looks at why the united states has not had another major terrorist attacks since 9/11. they also discuss what types of threats the u.s. currently faces. this panel discussion from the recent aspen festival in colorado is one hour 15 minutes. > [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> we will jump right into this. i think you all know our stellar cast. director mcconnell, michael chertoff, secretary of department of home and security, and jane harman, everyone's favorite -- [laughter] you are my favorite come up with my going to do? former member of congress and one of washington's leading experts on reform and last but not least but philip zelikow, director of the 9/11 commission. you could not ask for a better panel. i will start right here with you to ask the most obvious question. some of these questions will be obvious sense a lot. it is almost 10 years since 9/11 and it has not happened again. why? >> i will single out for things just to get the conversation going. number one, we came after their home century, broke it up, and set them on the run. what this does is it degraded their operational capability. for instance, before -- 9/11 was the third intercontinental operation were you have operatives who were organized and trained on one continent, actually deployed to stage on another continent where they prepared for a case and launch an attack. they did intercontinental operations in 1998 in east africa and two different locations. in 2000, the operation against the destroyer coal. and then there was 9/11. since 9/11, they have not mounted successfully another significant intra-continental operation. they basically relied on local, regional networks of people in europe and asia who then may get some training and some advice from the base in pakistan or in yemen, but lodge primarily regional operations on may -- but launched primarily regional operations on a lesser scale. no. 2, the sheer quantity of additional effort and attention being given to this by law enforcement, intelligence, and defense officials. if he simply did the numbers and calculated the amount of money spent on counterterrorism, much is in the united states. but all of the western european governments, the governments in asia, japan, australia, even pakistan, jordan, egypt -- the number of people devoted to this mission -- uc and off the charts order of magnitude in changes and the sheer quantity of effort and a bewildering variety of international connections had an effect. third, the united states became -- and one reason there has not been no attacks in the united states -- the hassan attack in fort heard is the deadliest attack since 9/11 by an extremist. the united states became a much more difficult area for the enemy to operate in. the 9/11 attack -- the united states was actually a good place to stage. they chose to stage and train inside the united states. that was for a year before the attack. it took a the hijackers four to six months before the hijacks. the united states actually became a very difficult place in which to stage and a train, especially with foreign operatives. one aspect of that problem, not only the work of dhs and the fbi and many local law enforcement entities, including the nypd, but another important aspect that has noted attention is trouble. it has become much harder for terrorists into troubltravel. there is an attention to terrorist finance that is really important. they are like submarines. they need to pass undetected. travel, where they have to go through international airports and presenting documents, those are the rare times the submarine literally has to surface under the guns of law enforcement officers. if you read the terrorist literature, they devote enormous, even obsessive, attention to their travel problems. that is what they want people who have questioned past forced to look western. if you had -- if you think you have a 1-3 chance in being caught and that means you spend the rest of your life in jail or guantanamo, it is too high. you can significantly deter people from moving inter- continental the if you make travel much riskier or they perceive it to be much riskier. one last thing is that the basic al qaeda narrative has fragmented and has become more discredited within the muslim world. it became fragmented because, before 9/11, you had an islamist extremist agenda that was primarily local against the local regimes they hated. they had a hatred of the egyptian regime and the saddam regime and so on. that was preempted by a global agenda. they are now focused on the regime's closer to home. the globalist agenda has lost credibility by the largest majority of people that they have killed seven fellow muslims. >> that is a positive and uplifting presentation you have made. it begs the question -- is it time to stop worrying so much? notet's clarify that i am his favorite person. jerry harmon is his favorite person. [laughter] no, i do not think it is time to stop worrying. >> i am misinterpreting him. >> to revoke kim. >> note, to provoke you. -- to provoke him. >> no, to provoke you. >> i think it is much harder to mount here and i am sure michael can go through the range of things we have done to make airplanes more secure, including hardening cockpits, cargo screening and so forth. abdumatala was trained by al qaeda in the peninsula, not in central pakistan. he almost got through. i believe that that specific kind of attack is less likely to happen. however, i think that al qaeda, as i have said in other panels, has morphed into a very different kind of organization. is no longer top-down, led by folks first in afghanistan and now it in pakistan. it is now a loose affiliation organization. they have very successful efforts to degrade the upper level leadership in pakistan. but that does not mean that that diminishes the organization. yesterday, john brennan gave a significant speech at john hopkins saying that the administration focus is now worldwide to a counter terrorism strategy focused on this loose affiliation of al qaeda cells and the intent is to block them from attacking us here in the homeland. i think that is the right focus and something which should have done. i think an airplane attack is less likely. but i think there are other ways that we could see a significant attack in this country and we need to be prepared. one of them is a dirty bomb attack. when we get back to this, i will explain why there is a real risk for that, which would be far more lethal overtime. -- over time. >> let me turn to michael chertoff for a couple of things. i will get to the tsa, believe me. but i want to stay on -- >> bring it on. >> bring it on, bring it on. we have been talking before about this bin laden moment. i want to answer the question -- are we safer because been laid in it -- because bin laden is dead or is it irrelevant to our posture? >> justice is done. it demonstrates to the world that we're capable and willing to take a very aggressive and successful kinetic action to kill people that are trying to kill us. that is a very important lesson that needs to be driven home. here is what we do not know. we do not know what the next round of leadership will really be. i know that zalwahiri is the heir to bin laden. he lived in the u.s. for about a dozen years was a trained pilot can these are younger folks. they are operational. and they understand the united states and the west. most significantly, they are not bound to repeating the success of 9/11. you have been laid in who has done one thing and has succeeded. there is a tendency to want to repeat it again. they have focused at least in the u.s. on very high end attacks which are difficult to execute. but now the younger generation is liberated from that and they say we will do smaller tax. we will do mumbai and we will the five, six, eight, 10 times. none of them are catastrophic, but the net effect is troubling and problematic. so we will need to retool our strategy and not get complacent but start to look down at what is happening on the ground level, including in the u.s. where we have seen the times were bombing effort. these are projects launched from the united states from people who are entitled to be here. therefore, we need to make sure we can analyze intelligence picked up at the grass-roots. >> i want to follow-up on this. the strategy that jane was just praising is looking at al qaeda as an organization and its affiliates. it does not get very much into the idea that it is actually too late or semi-irrelevant to deal with al qaeda central. you have such a radicalization of the cells. >> i do not think that is right. in terms of travel and international operatives coming in, i do not think it matters whether people were formally al qaeda are not. you see an emphasis on trying to radicalize and train people in place. >> but the strategy does not grapple with ideology very much. it deals with knocking out an organization. but it does not deal with grappling with the idea underlying all this. >> that is an area where we are not well situated to be out front. people listening to the narrative of a radical islam and islamist extremism are not interested in what the united states's interpretation of the koran is. >> can you grapple with the new obama strategy for a minute? also, grapple with something very interesting that has developed in the last three or four years. tom chancre talked about how we have two combatants. in the real world, we have special forces in any number of countries. and on line, on the web, we have another cadre of fighters in the internet space. talk about the thing that you are known as the world wide expert on -- cyber terrorism -- and talking about terrestrial attacks, bombs, airplane projects, but completely the wrong thing of this point. >> i did not think that the new strategy was very much different from the old strategy. it is basically to find those who wish us harm and hold them accountable. i was giving a speech in detroit the morning after it was announced that osama bin laden was dead. i chose to start my speech by lighting a cigar. i said to the group and said, "how about the unsealm seals?" >> and a reporter came up and said are you celebrating the death of a human being? and i said no, i am celebrating the success of america. i do not see this strategy is particularly different. what i do worry about is those who wishes harm at an extremist level, who want to change the world order, can attack the seams of the united states and have -- what i want to focus on most is the cyber abilities. there are lots of potential attack vectors. one would be biological. focus on see increasing la this issue. after 9/11, we have the anthrax letters. just imagine if you had 3 pounds of anthrax and they were put in parcels in the united states postal system, ups, and fedex, and mailed to 10,000 addresses in the country. that would literally shut this country down. there are many ways to be attacked. we have to be ever vigilant. the big change in my view of how the law was changed post-9/11 was that it forced us to address foreign and domestic threats in a more comprehensive way. we divided those things after the nixon years of watergate. my community could not focus on anything domestic. the fbi had much more ability to do surveillance. we changed that a bit so that there is less of a wall between foreign and domestic. i think that is important for us to consider. >> the mentioned something very interesting. in a way, the danger of success -- you're talking about the possibility of biological attacks. a lot of people, for many reasons, say that we have all of these mechanisms in place to stop a lot of these types of attacks. we have not had an attack. we are very good at this now. i want to talk about what you might call the pair? of terrorism success. -- the paradox of terrorism success. talk about the consequences of not having to tax and how that could lead to more attacks. >> before 9/11, you had what i call it a paradox of prevention. it is very difficult to rally massive action against a perceived threat at the time that the perceived threat is most of vulnerable to destruction. until it manifests itself, it is too late to prevent it. we had one that the 9/11 commission have a difficulty in describing. now we have the paradox of adjustment. the threats have diminished, but have not gone away. you need to right-size the threat. you need to normalize the threat. the united states has a lot of purposes and worries in the world besides the slum is to extremism. i am reminded of the fact that, when lehman brothers went down, paulson said this is an economic 9/11. there are other kinds of 9/11 shops out there. the next one may not come from an attack by islamist extremists against a particular system they are targeting. it may be another systemic flaw. it does not mean that the president cannot go out and say that the terrorism thing is done and is over. the paradox is how you right- size and normalize something for the long haul without dulling the edge and say that this has now become routine? how do you get people on alert for a threat that is right-sized and alert? it is difficult to say that a threat is going down and you get your guard down. >> i have written a bit about the tsa. the broad question is this. once the government -- once the bureaucracy of government puts in place a security countermeasure, will it ever be able to remove that security countermeasure? i have in mind that there are a lot of stories from the airports these days. a 95-year-old woman in a wheelchair who was being taken home to die -- she had terminal cancer -- the faa agents at the airport made her remove her adult diaper as part of the search because she was in a wheelchair. you hear these things. is there a question -- is there a point where we can simply take it down a notch? >> i think you will see modification overtime. one will be technology. one of bay -- one will be congress for bidding to use data out there commercial way to reduce the risk to some people. -- commercially to reduce the risk to some people. you probably see where a lot of agencies are from different walks of life. some money their messes up or the story doesn't seem right -- somebody there messes up or the story doesn't seem right. the conception of a lot of people of what a terrorist looks like is wrong. you have those who are home grown in this country. daniel maldonado came from long island and he was hispanic and converted to islam. who was the man who walked into a customs and started shooting people? 92 years old. how many infants, how many children who are mentally impaired have had bombs strapped to them and sent in to be blown up to? it would be nice to say that these people of the population are out of bounds. we cannot do that. i often hear the argument, sometimes made by jeff, that tsa does not work because you have never caught a terrorist. it is not meant to catch terrorists. it is meant to deter them. fort knox has never caught a bank robber. does that mean the fort knox is insecure or does the security deter bank robbers? you have to talk about right- size and securities and you have to have a right understanding of a system of systems that, and- to-and give you a better chance of averting -- that end-to-end give you a better chance of averting these incidents. >> you are right. when i walk through an airport and i see -- i once saw an obese none in a wheelchair and i thought that would be a great terrorist disguise. that is smart. if your and al qaeda, you get someone dressed up like a nun and put her in a wheelchair. but i am talking about an invasion of privacy that is really humiliating. this woman was put through a terrible process of having to undress. there has to be a better way to do this. >> there are many technological fixes for this and issues like that. unfortunately, one of the things we have learned and was revealed in the detroit bomber is that we are on comfortable touching and looking at certain places. if you put their the components of a bomb, you have the likelihood of getting by. what makes no sense is to look at half the body. that is the stuff that is easy to look at, and think you have done the job. >> the new screening machine that seems to be in many airports now where you put your hands up like this are getting increasing acceptance. everybody's understand you will not be irradiated -- in fact, the radiation bounces off of you the way they are designed. i do not know what happened with the woman in a diaper or not. but better technologies coming. i think we have layered security. we should not bet the farm on one thing. i know we do not. if you go to an airport, there are things you do not see, which i will not talk about, which protects both the airport and identifies a passenger very quickly that could be a problem, including taking a passenger off the airplane if that passenger gets through all the layers of security. so we have cleared security. the other thing we have -- and it is a big deal and i hope that we would continue to have it -- is unpredictability. if they know that we will only do these three things and that is our boundary, they will attack us around that. if they now believe, and they should, that is not the case that we will do three things and we have these invisible layers, they cannot do anything around it. i do not want to end this without talking about other forms of attacks. so i have to put the dirty bomb back there. the bombs can be made by taking radioisotopes out of machines in every hospital and sitting in a window and blowing those isotopes. you can take this stuff out of the radiological machines, stick it in a window with two sticks of dynamite, blow them up and kill yourself with five other people. but you will make a to square kilometer radius uninhabitable -- a 2 square kilometer radius uninhabitable for 30 years. yes, of the stuff is deeply imbedded and so forth. i saw a film that scared the heck out of me about how easy it is for kids to know intuitively have to dismantle things to get the stuff out. we need to get the nuclear regulatory commission, which is focused on this, hopefully over a short time, to find a substitute to put in these machines that will let have these consequences. i put out there that we are very good against the last war. we need to start thinking about the next war and folks in this country who can self radicalize and can read readily available material in colloquial english on the internet prepared by our friends in yemen on how to put together a bomb. >> let's get through a few more things before we open it up to questions. what is the one thing that really scares you as a possible attack? we have been very technical and very specific about some things. but we're talking about law enforcement and military operations designed to stop terrorism. but i want to move this to the ideological level. here.start down i will take a wild guess and say that he will talk about cyber security. without scaremongering, talk about what a small organization, one presumably broken up in a way that phil has described, talk about with a small organization can do. >> let me put this in a context that everyone can understand. money. our economy was $14 trillion last year. two banks in new york city cleared $7 trillion to $8 trillion by day. what backs of those transactions? economics 101 will tell you that we went off the gold standard quite some time ago. what about dollar bills? that is maybe 2% or 3% of the $14 trillion. so what is it? it is an accounting process. the world cannot function without banking. we depend on it. a relatively small group that is sophisticated could contaminate the clearing process for reconciling exchanges. what one me? tokyo calling new york -- i have a $10 billion transaction. tokyo, this is new york. send your transaction. new york, this is tokyo. i have sent new york. new york, i have received. less than a second. that is what it takes to run a global banking. that process could be attacked by a small group for a relatively small sum of money. that is one example of the kinds of things that we depend on to run our lives. when the framers did the constitution, the vast majority of us were farmers. think about today how we depend on electric lights, money, the grocery store, the delivery of goods and services. if you can interfere with that, it could have a devastating impact on our country. >> i fully agree. we had an anthrax attack in 2001. putting aside very fancy genetic engineering, the ingredients for a basic biological weapon or chemical weapon are available in the kitchen or on the farm. this is it a good news and bad news story. the good news is that we have a pretty good way of reducing the risk on bio. we have countermeasures for her most of the obvious legal types of attacks. we have stockpiled a lot of this. although it is underfunded, we have worked on this and we are creating a detection capability. but there's one thing that could havthe problem, getting the countermeasures into the hands of the appropriate people. we're still in pre-9/11 thinking. it was suggested in 2006 -- why do we not get counter-terrorism measures to put it in a little kid and distribute them around the country? you can put them in a little container and people can buy them. and then when it happens, they can get to it in a couple of hours. great, let's stock pilot and see people will lose these if we give it to them. after a year, 97% of the people had kept the medical kit. they had not misused it and they had not lost a parent is a great, let's watch it. but we cannot. but we cannot. fda has

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