panel featuring lori andrews, author of i know who you are, and i saw what you did; annie jacobsen, and michael shermer who wrote "the bleeding brain." this panel on surveillance and secrets originally aired as pawrt of the 2012 los angeles times festival of the books. it lasts about an hour. >> panel is surveillance and secrets, and i'm just going toly briefly introduce each of these terrific writers and then ask a them to speak about their own books for a few minutes, and then we'll have a discussion,av and then i'll throw it open to you guys fairly early on, because i think there are going to be a ton of questions aboutwi these subjects which touch all of us very sort of immediately. immediately. the set down the and we have lori andrews. she is a professor of law at the illinois institute of technology . she has been a visiting professor at princeton. she is an expert on biotechnologies, the author of the clone a inch. much of what she has written has been about the legal implications of genetics, science, and research. her new book, i know who you are and saw what you did. [laughter] -- >> great title. >> of very scary read about the information that we give away about ourselves without even thinking about it every time we go on the internet or log on to facebook or even just go to a website and not even buy something, but research something. it really does feel like my wife said to me when she saw me reading it the other night, this is as bad as i think. since what they found out, i said, it seems to be way, way worse than you can imagine. [laughter] sitting next to her is michael schirmer whose new book is called the leading brand -- to be believing brain, which is basically a study of how we come to believe some of the things we do believe and how those beliefs mutate. michael is a specialist in crazy thinking. [laughter] he took a degree in psychology, a detail i did not know until i read about it this morning. he was a competitive cyclist and even has a medical ailment named after him. he's the editor and crete to the creator of the sceptic magazine and the author of many books. i know because i've been on a panel with him before. he's one of the most brilliant and entertaining panelists i've ever encountered in all the time i've been doing this. so michael has something to live up to. [laughter] here we have any jacobson whose first book, and ethical piece of research about area 51, that huge piece of edwards air force base up in the nevada desert that the government still i think sometimes tries to say does not even exist where the above ground nuclear testings were going on through the '40's and 50's's and where various high-tech surveillance, the jets, the stealth bomber, before that the black bird was developed there, right? and of course it is the sort of locus in popular mythology of the place where the aliens were taken by the government when they landed in the late 1940's. if you all remember the film independent state, the nasty creatures that come from the spaceship's, there being probed and investigated in what presumably is area 51. so anyway, i'll just ask each in turn to talk about their book a little bit starting with you. >> well, what did you reveal about yourself in the past 24 hours on line? did you post drunken pictures from last night? did you like a certain author you saw yesterday? did you apply for a job that your current employer does not know about? well, amazingly everything that we're doing on the web is being tracked by data alligators in one form or another. sometimes it, where a favorite band is playing. other times it may be used to disadvantage you. so google routinely search is g mail to craft ads. so if i e-mail a friend and say, i'm getting a divorce, they have that information. if i google search a medical condition they have that information. if i search for guitars to buy, well, it turns out if i have done that and then i go to a credit card website there will use that information. if they think i'm about to get divorced or am in a band, and we know that divorcees and members of, you know, i rise rock bands are more likely to renege on their credit-card, the offer me a lower limit without giving me the chance to correct that. and so in my book i look at how that's occurring and what we can do about it. 2,205th anniversary of the u.s. constitution. so i bring up issues about why is it that our offline rights are more protected than our on-line rights and what will be need online to protect privacy and freedom association and right to a fair trial? because some jurors are not actually posting the facts of the case on facebook, in one case a criminal case, and asking their friends to the upper down on whether they should fry the guy. those are some of the things i talk about. >> michael. >> so my book is based on what i do for a living which is published sceptic magazine, science based magazine in california that investigate claims of paranormal pseudoscience fringe groups and cults and claims of all time. unless you been abducted by aliens and then in area 51 for the past few decades universal lot of it out there, nonsense. some people call us debunkers, but they're is a lot of bunk. it's our job to debunk it. more importantly try and understand why people believe those things culprit things. so the short answer why people believe weird things is because we have to believe things, and weird things are a subset of things. we are not good at discriminating between correct and weird or incorrect. as a matter of course the whole cluster of cognitive diocese that help reinforce our beliefs as troops turn out to be very powerful. you're not objective, rational reason there's. we're not the embodiment of the enlightenment idea of rationally calculating human being. we aren't like that at all. the reason we need sciences because it is still the best system we have for getting at what we think israel in terms of not just what i think, but what you can go out and check and run the experiment in the same way in check the data as well as i can i might be biased and you might be biased, but there is some other black double in value in debunking our idea. the competitive nature of science is what gives us confidence that there is some hope to figure out the way the world actually is. surveillance and secrets, the closest thing might chapter on conspiracy theories. the reason in part, they're are secrets. governments do conspired to do all sorts of things, not just governments, everybody. whenever two or more people get together to talk about what they're going to do that's technically by definition a conspiracy. that happens all the time. so it's not unusual or unreasonable to be suspicious in thinking that there might be people conspiring against you. the problem is, how do we know which are true and which aren't. some are. lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy. there was a conspiracy to decapitate the entire link in cabinet. watergate was a conspiracy. here's a clue, the most powerful administration on the planet could not even break into a hotel room. the idea that they can run a world economy like the alumni the, 12 guys in london running the economy and doing a crappy job of it. i sort of go through a bologna detection kit of conspiracy detection. the more people that are involved the less likely the theory is to be true. two reasons. most people aren't confident and most people can't keep their mouths shut. the most it -- more people you have involved the more leakage and bumbling and fumbling your way through. the more elements that have to be involved, the have to come together it's just the right time it's just the right place perfectly, the less likely anyone will be able to do that. the bigger in grander the conspiracy is the less likely it is to be true. most involve very specific, target things. conspire to collude about the price of a product or control some little market or spy on some particular government agency that we are not sure -- those are more likely to be true then global dominance of the new world order to build a highway that goes through the entire north american and south american continent and they're building concentration camps to put americans and in places that are invisible. the more grandiose the less likely it is to be true. so the fundamental principle of science, the null hypothesis, your hypothesis is not true. this is our assumption. whenever your idea, it's not true until you prove otherwise. we have to do that because most of india's people have are not true. i have the cure for cancer. 10,000 of these. 99 percent and not true. the fda just passed to start off with that. your cure for cancer is not true . you have the studies in controlled experiments, then we will consider. that's the way i think we should apply to everything. you're crazy idea might be true, but probably not. go ahead and give us your best shot. >> what a great panel to be on. secret and surveillance. there is certainly in my opinion no greater place where secrets and surveillance me, and that is at area 51, which is located in the nevada desert about 75 miles north of las vegas. yes, you are right, the government has never officially admitted that area 51 exists, although it certainly does. i assure you it does. i interview 74 men for my book. they're stories are in my book, and they all worked and lived there for extended times. it worked for the cia, airforce, atomic energy commission, department of defense and are living, breathing human. i did not come across any aliens when i was researching my book, but i did come across some very, very strange, dark ideas about conspiracies and why they might assessed. i have a couple chapters which i write about black propaganda. area 51 is tied to ufo's for a very good reason. the surveillance that was developed their starting in the 50's, starting in 1951 surrounds us today. when you read, as you may have last month, when president obama on valentine's day gave the faa $63 billion to revamp the rules of the sky and made, and a very secret way, room for what is going to be 30,000 drones flying overhead by 2014. that traces back to area 51. that is where we first began developing drones, the cia. many people think i'm part of the cia. i'm not. that is where we developed drones. very interesting, in 1960 they could go mocks three. this is astounding that the still holds the record for speed if you believe that it still holds the record for speed the government tells you it holds the record for speed. 2,300 miles-per-hour, drones in 1962 out in the nevada desert. that is some very serious advanced technology. people often ask me what i think is going on now, what kind of drones' they're coming up with,i can only imagine. i know that to be on the panel with these two interesting authors, you know, all of our ideas kind of meat and merge in this idea of secrets, surveillance. for me to write about really the military and has been nuys, elements of surveillance, it's fascinating that the private sector and the military sector, people see now how they merge with a look at drone stay. of course this goes back, you know, to the 1950's when it all began out there in area 51. i love answering questions on this. >> i wanted to ask you -- i just want to play devil's advocate for a moment here with your book. hey, you know, if i go on amazon and amazon remembered that i was looking for a novel by, i don't know, he as michaels and suggests he might want to try been opry. isn't that just a kind of furtherance of the excellence of capitalism, isn't that something that we should all be applauding ? what was it that kind of first really kind of spooky about the net and what prompted you to ride a different kind of book than the ones you have written before? >> you're totally right that these tracking technologies started with amazon. remembering my credit card number, remembering what i like to, which is a real benefit to me, but then it got a little wild and terms of the type of targeting they did. imagine you're a 13 year-old girl and your feeling fat. you put in, you know, i'm interested in weight loss or something on google. now every place you go, movie time, feeling fat, you should take this. it's sort of psychologically harmful but also can be financially harmful, socially harmful. google admitted in 2010 that when young people were saying on a google chat room, you know, i'm thinking of committing suicide using x chemical an ad appeared to the same time now to for one x chemical. there's something about it that gets to be creepy. you may have all followed the girls like me application. nothing illegal or wrong, but what it did is if you were in a bar you could see pictures from the facebook pages of women. a sense, you know, 13 year-old can go on facebook , young people really were, you can click on it and find their whole page if they had a public page. it just is like stalker had been . one woman's rape her found her through tokyo. my thought is you should at least be asked. amazons and said you want to your remember . average of 14 books. i love dictionary dot com. it puts 233 tracking mechanisms on my computer without tracking. >> michael, and one way there is a common ground between the three of you and this idea, the interior world, the individual in habits supposed reality, whenever we mean by that, which is kind of out there, and then this nebulous area where the virtual world belief system act on them both and the days between the two, between what we mean by the real and what we mean by our own personal consciousness in ways that can come to seem manipulative. >> so that is why i mention science. it helps us get out of our own skin in terms of the competitive nature of it. if i don't identify my own cognitive by cs and slant on the data that i put somebody else will be motivated to do so because they can actually gained career advantages are whenever by debunking my ideas. that's the idea of peer review. it's not perfect because there is the problem of collective ignorance for people collectively think that everybody else thinks x even though i personally don't think so. i think you think so and therefore i don't want to stand up too much so i pretend like i do and you think the same pretty soon the whole room is actually thinking one thing but saying something different. we know how that works psychologically. the three matching lines. four out of five people, they all identify the other line, the obviously incorrect line 65% of the time the subject will go along. there's a whole series of these readings, literary criticism, tasting wine. if the subject things everyone else in the room lights the vinegar there will go, yes, and so rich even though they don't really think that. this goes a long way to explaining how totalitarian regimes can last as long as they do even though most people in the country don't really believe the line. dick think everyone else does and have to send the signal socially -- they think everyone else does and have to send a signal socially that they do to. a party meeting in moscow under stalin where he got some award on his birthday or something. they gave him a standing ovation . no one dare sit down. finally after 13 minutes some guy stopped clapping. he was promptly arrested. this is how that -- this is the problem. there is no good solution. i call that belief dependent realism. reality is dependent on relief -- belief in the only hope we have a some kind of check and balance which is what science provides, not perfectly but better than nothing. >> in a way what lowry's book says is that, you know, you could not elect a totalitarian regime in america, the whole ideology of american democracy is so powerful that it could never happen, but in a way this defacto capitalist form of totalitarianism has happened to the internet which is extraordinary. we have given away this stuff. >> one of my favorite quotes is from a security analyst to said, think about if the government tried to get this information that we post on facebook or google. you know, the most intimate information, political belief, sexual preference, where we are various points in time, what we like and don't like about our life, family, boss. if the government tried to get it it would take money, lawyers and might even take guns. yet we posted, you know, freely. 93 percent of the time when the government asks google for that information they cough up. some people have been tried entirely based upon their google searches. heaven forbid, like my sister should disappear because i have written three mysteries and google search date rape drugs, that death of -- depth of lakesr group poison. if i'd taken away in cuffs i didn't do it. >> it's also important to remember that it was the apartment of defense that created the internet during the vietnam era it was the advanced research projects agency, now known as barbara. when you looked at were a lot of the finances coming from it's certainly not necessarily with google, but general atomics, the people that are creating and learning about these informations systems and providing them in the private sector, they're funded over here by places like darpa. there is an interplay. on the subject of a totalitarian regime, it is important to remember that area 51 the reason why surveillance was born, and it was born there in peacetime, peacetime overhead surveillance equals area 51. that was to track essentially the soviet union. the whole idea of government surveillance is so that you don't know what's going on, and that is the underlying premise that i find fascinating when people look talking about the internet because there could not be more of a conflict of interest of giving your information out and at the same time trying to remain private. i just love looking back because i think it's interesting to look forward. one of the earliest drones that the cia created and this was in 1971 and i saw this, little version of this called the insect of softer. it was designed to look like a dragonfly. it beat the wings and it was filled with a thimbleful of gasoline. that was then. of course now we have hummingbird drones. much more realistic looking. we go from the internet tough what is outside your window looking at you. >> and your pocket. you know, a perfect situation for surveillance. and iphone, there are applications that people down love that seem innocuous. if i'm watching the good life on tv it remotely activates my phone and can tell what i'm watching. puts me in a chat room with other people watching that. ads come on. all this. you don't realize that by remote activation of your microphone and also collects data about things like, dishy in a restaurant, at home, have sex with someone of the same sex are opposite . very technologies can be used to spy on us. a high school in philadelphia give laptops all of their students and did not tell the students or parents that the web kemp could be turned on from the school. the school tech people took tens of thousands of photos of both the teachers and students. only supposed to be used if your laptop was stolen, but think about high-school students, open in their bedroom coming out of the shower, friends over, during who knows what. yet that, you know, no one was prosecuted for that. it only came to light when one kid was called and, and the principals showed him a picture taken of him in his bedroom. he was shocked. said you're using illegal drugs. he looked at what was in his hand and it was mike and i can be. a warning about the actual technology used, what you -- google collects information when you have turned the gps often iphone. looking at the 9-0 supreme court decision about how gps tracking can be an invasion of privacy because it tells things like whether you have gone to a synagogue or a church or whether you're at an aids treatment center or abortion clinic. you can't find that out through gps. we may be our own worst enemy in terms of what we buy in terms of applications and so forth. >> in your book the details that make it so concrete for me was the school story with a send out the computers. the girl who notices that the computer, the light is blinking after. she thinks, why is it doing that. >> yes. so now i have a posted on the laptop camera in my hotel room. >> in principle why couldn't you just do that across the board? if you get ads on amazon ignore them. to what i do every time a guy in a pickup truck pulls up next to me listening to rush, roll up the window. >> most of us don't know it's occurring. >> change the channel. >> but it's not a matter of changing the channel when this is on the back and so that when my web searches and used without my knowing it in terms of whether i get a credit card or not. so under the fair credit reporting act if the credit rating agency said something bad about me i would have a right to correct it. if however the credit-card agency thinks because i, you know, looked up things on suicide for a novel that i'm likely to commit suicide after running a public bill and they make these decisions, i can't change the channel because i don't know i'm on it. >> what we're talking about is the difference between what the cia would call him it corset. human intelligence or electronic intelligence were signals intelligence. again, using the note to pat -- the analogy of espionage the reason we created surveillance platforms in the first place is to spy on the russians because the iron curtain was so difficult to penetrate that the human intelligence, the spies on the ground were unable to deliver that information to the cia. they so desperately needed it to advise the president to make, you know, decisions on national security. along came the idea. i right in my book, the precursor to all of that took place at area 51. the first nsa agents. they say it used to be a dirty word. people at that upper echelon of government did not want to be looking at signals intelligence and electronic intelligence. it was foreign and to scientific. they liked the idea of men on the ground with the cloak and dagger aspect. see how far we have come and you can certainly see how much easier and how much less expensive it is to have eyes in the sky. suddenly the stakes are a lot lower for the united states. the predator. fighting in entire war with the drone with a few missiles on it. >> you get into that. in a very concrete way the issue of what they were actually trying to produce an area 51 all looks like, why wouldn't we want that in one way. then there is the other side, well, once you open that door we certainly did and i wonder whether we can actually close pandora's box now. i know you are appealing for the constitution about the way the nets should operate, but do you really think that that can -- isn't that pie in the sky, that hope? >> constantly working on hopeless causes. seventeen years trying to get a genetic discrimination bill passed in congress which ultimately happened. i think the fact that in your we do -- there are more protections. you can find out what companies know about you and an austrian law student wrote to facebook and requested information and get a pds with 1500 files. you have certain rights to collect. the big issue, whether some, this being capitalist countries, a market economy, whether some of it will come along and create some more privacy enhancing technology. for example, some people are working on digital tax in those so that they self-destruct after two years so that my law students in chicago who i don't know why they think is a great idea, drunken st. patrick's day green river froze in chicago wouldn't exist when they went out to the job market. >> it would suddenly behoove the department of defense to have that technology because when our drone recently went down over iran the sentinel, our top-secret stealth drone developed at area 51 and the iranians get ahold of it, it did not self-destruct. the first people they invited to come look at it with the chinese someone asked me, well, reverse engineering is difficult. well, that's not true. my kids do it with light goes all the time. reverse engineering is the way to find how something works, and that's a big part of area 51 and also a big part of why they call all of this a race and not a standstill. as things move forward and people are in a race the technology cumulative. >> i'm sure that lots of you're going to have questions. if we can get ready for that part of this panel. if people would step forward to the microphone. >> an example of a camera spy run by the government that is very invasive. a red light camera at wilshire and the beverly hills hotel that if you were going east on wilshire and turn right on the red light, there's no street, just a driveway into the hotel, off $4,709 ticket. why do you suppose they put it there? because anybody going to the beverly hills hotel has money and don't live around here so that won't fight the ticket. >> with a live around here and they're with someone they should not be. >> and the high-video. you could definitely see. that would be an example. >> that could some questions going. >> i have two different e-mail addresses with two different domain names. i'm wondering if i send myself and e-mail talking about islamic jihad and permanent where warfare how long it would be before i get an answer from some government agency. >> well, the department of homeland security does have a group of 350 words that they search. i talk to us some of them in my book because some of them are pretty innocuous, pork, vaccine, even the term social media. if the l.a. times promoted this in any way talking about social media it would be picked up. maybe that's why conspiracy's fail so much. they have created a lot of information which also they did with the early surveillance in the cold war. at a friend's father worked in that program and told me all about the naked russian women on the tops of apartment building sunbathing that he has pictures of. you get a lot of stuff that may not actually be what you can most use. >> this did not dissolve after five minutes. [laughter] >> from my understanding from the different folks in the cna that i use the sources, most of the words they're looking for are coated because the coach art, you know, somebody isn't going to say thermonuclear weapon. it's more like popeye resulting. there actually were -- an interesting legal opinion because drug dealers, they smartened up and are not carrying drugs in a jag wire or maserati but they're using a gray honda. so cops from florida to pennsylvania stopped every gray honda because there were drug lords now using normal cars. the judges finally said, you cannot have a rule that something is suspiciously normal people using the word pork for some incredible reason like could you pick this up by the store on the way home gets swept in has potential funders a long with people who are actual offenders. >> a fascinating panel. i have a dozen questions. i agree that you could term the data collection that goes on every day as insidious, but if we were to actually care about it with debt not be paranoia? do we actually think that the government really cares about all these little things that populate our lives? >> my concern is actually less the government then social institutions. fascinating that no 75% of employers require their human resource people to look at your online profile . one-third of employers say they don't hire someone if they have a drink in their hand on facebook, even an innocent one glass at a wedding . as a big deal things to me because it's not like something i can knowingly avoid if i don't realize that going on. i'm more concerned about people being disadvantaged. do we really want -- right now if you play college sports they're starting to require that athletes -- if you think social networks are valuable and all should they be, you know, constantly monitored for signs of bad behavior? right now if women in a custody case post anything sexy on their facebook page they lose custody of their child. that shouldn't be. that doesn't relate to their ability to mother. those are the concerns, private institutions and court use. i would change that. >> is there a point at which caring becomes bothering? >> strong libertarian leanings of liking privacy. i don't like the idea of government spying on us, but evil happens in secrecy. facebook, this is a good thing. everyone has a camera, it's harder for governments to pilaf violence against citizens which in the long history of civilization is the norm . we are the exception in america. government normally suppress people using different tools in secret. so i like that aspect. >> go ahead. >> it's an interesting question. from the standpoint of looking at the military and government, most of the surveillance project they're working on or four were fighting, be they defensive or offensive. the average person is absolutely not important to them as the gentleman pointed out. however, it does create technology that as you're writing about can be used for those purposes. >> i just finished a book that painted a very detailed and explicit picture about how certain groups in this country are immune from the wall. i listened to progress is with intelligent and exclusive analysis of what is being done to us. i listened to the news where in tennessee they're going to balance out religion with science on an equal basis. it seems to me that while as middle class you from los angeles and not about to go out and commit domestic terrorism, it seems to me the only model that stance against this is what we are seeing in afghanistan with the taliban and where they're not electronically depend and where they're saying, we ain't going for this. i put out a website called per daily dot com where i talk about the purposeful paling -- failing a public education. i look at the get those, 44 years after the walkout east los angeles latino education is worse than ever and no one pays any attention. i go to seminars like this. i finish my question is, would you address yourself to the possibility of domestic terrorism in the not too distant future as the only response to was going on? >> while. [laughter] >> the first part, well, so i'm not sure about the school stuff. in general i guess i would repeat what i said. evil happens in secrecy. there is a trade-off, and there are some benefits to their being surveillance, i guess, in that sense. i don't know. i wouldn't take conspiracy to far because for the most part governments are incompetent at using that but not 100 percent. i don't know. >> you brought out, you know, twitter and facebook contribution to the arab spring. you might recall, you know, a few days into that egypt, you know, shut off the web. they called the internet service providers. you may think that couldn't possibly happen here, but there is legislation pending to have a director of sever security for the united states that could slow down the internet and homeland security has a proposal to put digital tags where they could keep out other countries from communicating with us or if they did not like what i was saying. >> it would be an argument against allowing that. >> so one of my -- my first rate is the right to connect. i agree that is a way to get things, you know, done. and i do agree that we need better it educational system. the science is so key to everything here. my heart breaks to see that there are schools in east l.a. where books are actually stamps outdated because things change . i mean, i think that's one of the great things about supporting libraries and books. >> solution is better technology , free internet access to all students everywhere instantly. [applause] >> i'm going to disagree with the idea that that television does not rely on contemporary electronics because they do. mahomet auto was the first taliban commander killed by the u.s. military. the way they tracked him was by himself on. there was also interesting, to bring in around to surveillance, he was the first killed in afghanistan by a drone, although it was reported for several years that it was an air strike because back in 2002 no one in this room, including me, knew that we had drones that were equipped with missiles. we believed -- the general population believed at that point that there were just still lies in the sky >> thanks for having such a cool interesting and important magazine, first of all. looking at subjects or issues in the magazine, has there ever been anything you looked at, paranormal were just interesting that you could not really debunk and thought it was intriguing that we might not have heard about? >> lady got out. [laughter] no explanation for that. [laughter] sorry. [laughter] it's a good question. there is an actual serious answer. probably most of the stuff related to altered states of consciousness or explaining consciousness. there is a little -- we know a lot about the brain but little compared to what we need to know. most of the great mysteries involving that are still out there. the origins of the universe, why should there be something instead of nothing. we don't have answers to that, those kinds of questions. there are a few of these conspiracy theories. they're not going to lead us into area 51 with cameras to find out what's going on. maybe someday we will know, but there are certain things that will remain open. there's a skeptical principle. the fact that i recant explain it doesn't mean that it is in support of your pet theory. ufo just means unidentified. that's all it means. it just means i don't know what it was a three in the morning in a former boss field the fact that i don't know doesn't mean it's extraterrestrial. it just means we don't know. it's our principal for anyone to grass because a brain is a vacuum just like maj. we have to fill it with an answer. >> or on jump in and say we do know what it was and it was a spy plane but no one can know that because that's a secret platform . will just go along with terry, we being the cia, that it is actually a ufo . the propaganda of that idea works for itself. let the people think it's x because then they won't know about why. >> this gentleman. >> i recently saw someone speak about area 51 supposedly according to ham the cia is training and iranian terrorist. he said definitely reliable sources about it. can you comment on it? also if you want to find out more about it he wrote on line about it, an extensive article. he says this obviously. [inaudible] >> i could not quite hear the question. [inaudible] says -- and i saw him on television speak about it extensively that the cia is turning an iranian group, a terrorist group in terrorist activities in area 51. >> i'm going to definitely go home and read the new yorker block. >> i saw it. >> i mean, we have in the past trained -- i do know for a factory trained in vietnam in area 51. soldiers from south vietnam. the equipment, put it on the her achievement trail. having foreign folks come and train. >> illegal according to u.s. law. terrorist group hamas terrorist activities. >> that i don't know about. >> it's definitely. [laughter] >> he must be right. [laughter] >> he said he has reliable sources. >> i love your buck. i read it covered a cover. >> it's coming out in paperback next week. >> i want our back. >> my dad worked on the youtube. one question i had from your book was from the walls well crass . >> contents of the one. >> i don't want to give away the best part of the book. the language, the alphabet found by the kraft put away because of the concern that the american population would go nuts if they learned the soviets could get that far into the united states with this type of technology. can you describe what must have been a rubber or something? a disk type object. how were they able to get that craft over here? >> well, you might just preface that question by answer to that question by telling about roswell. >> area 51 has always been linked to the conspiracy theory about roswell. in the last seven pages of my book i write about what a source told me about what that is and how it links up. as for the riding mysore's who handled this round shaped disk that was used as a means of black propaganda , that's how he described it. but i always love hearing michael talk about this topic. this is his area of expertise, black propaganda and how it works. we differ a little bit on the idea of how it actually has an effect on american pop culture. michael. >> in the late 1950's a ufo group summarized all the great cases of the last half century. the most important ufo sightings it was like the top 500 roswell wasn't even on the list. it did not become the roswell incident until the 1980's when nbc made them made for television movie about the roswell incident. then the eyewitnesses started coming out. i remember where i saw. we know how fallible human memory is. all that is concluded with the fact that project mogul which is a military top-secret project to loft into the upper atmosphere surveillance using balloons made out of this tin foil and balsa wood, which is exactly what it describes. you can see the photograph in the living room of the kernel that said he found it, on the front page of the newspaper , these high-altitude balloons launched to monitor soviet upper atmosphere nuclear explosions with an acoustic signature that this device would be able to record. and it crashed. farmer bonds field in roswell. so when the government said -- okay, what will we call it? who will say it's a weather balloon. then later it came out that is not true. the government's light? yes, of course. that doesn't mean extra terrestrial or super secret soviet whenever. it just means we don't know and it's more possible that in the middle of the cold war we're not about to tell everybody that the russians can know what we're doing by monitoring the upper atmosphere because then they will do with. there are reasons for national-security secrets. that is one. that leads to the lie which becomes the extra terrestrial and five decades later eyewitnesses come out to remember what they think they saw. that is the short story according to the skeptics. >> history. >> i'm going to admit, a journalism student from usc, and i started a ufo magazine. [laughter] i apologize. i actually put all my career into it because i was one of the 90's -- i'm going to take whatever i deserve. i am no longer part of it. it still exists, so i cannot speak to the intelligence it has, but i wrote a lot of stories are making fun of. the people i talked to were sincere. something strange happened to them. they don't know what, but i interviewed tony lilly who talked to dolphins, quantum physics people. >> you mean john seely? that often die? >> his wife. >> the thing that was weird about -- i did most of the business part, the thing that was weird about the things that i did was that most of the people wanted to keep quiet because they did not want to get made fun of. there were like, only if you don't tell my research friends, only if you don't make it public because i don't want to get made fun of. i'm a researcher, but you can't tell anybody. you can quote me, but don't tell my name or i'll be made fun of in my other field. i thought, that's not fair. if there is something you're researching, the national enquirer should have the joke, but i want the real thing. >> the question. >> the question is do you think that there should have journalism happen -- albright, are there any stories that you think deserve to be treated seriously? >> of course. absolutely. >> what are the? >> people have to experiences that are anomalous, they can't explain it to my very sixth year , trying their best to explain what it is , absolutely. experiences that people have are very real. are they experiences out there or in here? the only difference between me and the serious ones that really get down and study every claim, they will it meant that 95 percent of every sighting is fully explicable. a planet, weather balloon, whenever. the only difference is that other 5 percent, the residue of anomaly. in science this is called the residue problem. no theory explains everything. what do you do? nothing. assignment to grad students. that's what they're there for. [laughter] >> where in society other looked at? everyone laughs at it. >> not everybody. quite a few. one-third of americans believe that ufos represent -- >> every cocktail party at gutted a laugh. what are you doing with your career? >> well, i can send you some other parties you could get to where they really believe that stuff. >> next question. >> i'm wondering if any of you have heard of internet service provider or operator fighting a national security letter. >> fighting one? so one of the issues is that, you know, there is a national security letter without a warrant test internet service providers for information about people , and they can't even tell the user if there were looking at you i'm not familiar with any it have fought it. i know google does turn this over. it's very different for me because i come out of a genetic medical background, and there are plenty of times where hospitals or doctors will fight for the patient's privacy rights when there is some other thing going on, a government request for a lawsuit, but i have not -- i'm not familiar with any providers to have taken on the national security letters. >> i've only heard of one. >> which one? >> make merrill, stop starting something called the caylee institute. he has a campaign for nonprofit isp concentrated on use of privacy and almost nothing else. >> and i think chris sigalert and is also working in this area and keeping track. there is an effort by the aclu to at least get them to file it in court. thank you. 202-585-3886 now. >> for many years there's been a controversy for people being very concerned about the possibility that we are going to have a national i.d., something much broader than your driver's license. for all those years people seem to forget the fact that we all have a social security numbers which are being asked for every day in many different forms. for example, health insurance companies have their own private system that is totally dedicated to tracking you and your medical history through your social security number. though we have focused in great part on the high-technology issue of the last x amount of years nobody i've heard has addressed any of the more low-tech things, especially your social security number and how that is being abused and what we can do to make sure that is something that does not impact us personally. >> has the stuff always been going on through that channel? >> our recent lawsuit where a consulting firm, one of their employees mistakenly put out the social security numbers, gender, and age of all massachusetts retired state employees, 28,000. merely through that use you could do identity theft. some known identity theft website from china actually access those. surprisingly the state, the people who sued did not get relief because their identity had not yet been stolen. we are seeing even low-tech things like social security numbers that are vulnerable with no recourse until something horrible happens. some of these things where something private like that is made public erroneously or negligently or maliciously, you know, we should have a privacy right in our social security numbers. .. so stuxnet was a virus in a nuclear plant in another country, not in the united states. but it looks like it was actually put there on a flash drive. it didn't come through the internet.