Transcripts For CSPAN Former DHS Secretaries Chertoff Napoli

Transcripts For CSPAN Former DHS Secretaries Chertoff Napolitano And Johnson On The Agencys... 20240712

Comprehensive assessment of the future of the department and the need to reshape the [indiscernible] around emerging threats. It went like this morning. I encourage you to read it on our website. Today, i am thrilled to a discussion on the future after the future of dhs, emerging threats and the american public. I am joined by two esteemed guests. The creator, writer, and director of call of duty black ops, steve anthony. Max brod. You two are some of the most creative people i know. You both spend your days thinking about how the world is changing. You have been very successful applying gaming and fiction to imagine the future. I cannot think of two better people to dig into this discussion with us. As a reminder, i encourage our audience to pose questions by the q a tab at the bottom. We only have 25 minutes in this first session. I will try to pose as many of your questions as i can. Lets jump right in. Threatstion of emerging is a critical one. It is something addressed in the report. The United States used to be protected from attack by two oceans. September 11 showed that terrorists can use nonmilitary means to kill more americans than were killed at pearl harbor. Today, we face a spectrum of below threshold threats in the cyber information, commercial domains that bring security challenges to the u. S. s doorstep. David, maybe i can kick it to you first. I would be interested to hear how you think Homeland Security has evolved in the last 19 years. What are these security challenges that most concern you . In terms of how it has evolved, i think given the threat that we are currently facing and how difficult they are to predict, i think evolved might be generous. I think the types of things are very difficult to predict. I make video games, and we spend time coming up with these crazy scenarios. This can happen. That can happen. The secret is, we never believe it is going to happen. But i have to tell you, there was a moment this year when i very specifically asked myself the question i was watching something happen on the news channel, could our democracy actually fail . That type of threat is something that had never occurred to me as a possibility before. I watched this documentary called the unknown known, which i think was Donald Rumsfelds answer to the war. Im not sure that i believed everything in there. They highlighted pearl harbor as a failure of the imagination. I think you guys include it in the blurb for this event. The 9 11 Commission Said the greatest failure for 9 11 was a failure of the imagination. So i asked myself since 9 11, what has been the next failure of imagination . There is a case to be made the ramifications in 2016 the ramifications of electing a president who refuses to play by the established rules of democracy, what could possibly happen as a result of that is another failure of imagination and perhaps the greatest one so far in 2020. We have a 9 11 death toll every four days. It is not only that these failures of imagination keep happening, but they are getting worse. The gaps between them is getting smaller. That is not a good trend. That is why Everybody Needs to Pay Attention today. We will not keep getting away with this. At some point, something really bad is going to happen. I am going to steal a quote. Said to me yesterday, this is not a call to arms. It is a call to imagination. I think that is how we desperately need to look at this. That is very interesting. Max, i want to bring you in here. Tools to get at some of those more imaginative pieces and elements that seemed unimaginable previously in some respects are our reality today. You previously remarked on how the u. S. Adversaries, notably china and russia, have gone to school on the american way of warfare. Is the u. S. Adapting to it era adapting to an era of Great Power Competition . Is our National Security toolbox tackle thesed to challenges . Do we have max . Sorry about that. We have what is called an imagination gap with our enemies, the same way that we had a missile gap with the soviets in the 1960s. That goes back to the worst were worst war we ever fought, which was desert storm. While that was seen as a victory for us, it was a crushing defeat of imagination. What happened was we thought we were teaching our enemies not to confront america. We were fighting a war of deterrence. We thought the message to our enemies and our future foes, if you confront the United States on the battlefield, we will utterly destroy you. We thought that would deter aggression. What we did not understand was the lesson we were teaching our enemies is do not confront us on the battlefield. Develop alternative means to go over, under or go through without being noticed, this line of military might that we have been building since the end of world war ii, and that is what has been happening. Since the 1990s, our enemies have been developing asymmetric means to get america off the world stage, because we push them into that. That is why at the department of Homeland Security has now been catapulted from rear guard to frontline, because our enemies have learned to go right over our military might. And penetrate the heartland directly cyber, information, economics, and now biologic. Even though covid19 might be natural, it has done what a massive soviet fleet could never do, take an american supercarrier off the high seas. You cannot tell me right now other countries and nonstate actors have not recognized the power of the germ and are trying to harness it the way we did during the Second World War and the cold war. We have an imagination gap right now. We have been developing a bigger, badder way of fighting desert storm while our enemies have been developing a hydra to go all the way around and get at us directly. That is why now dhs is the primary frontline defense against our enemies. I think that is a fantastic way to describe it in a lot of ways. Homeland security has moved from being in the rear to the front. What you touched on it is difficult to untangle domestic and International Threats now. Physical borders, physical boundaries no longer exist in the age of information that we are in. How do we get about formulating solutions to tackle these threats . If security abroad is being fought on the homeland, if our adversaries are taking advantage of our strengths, how can we rewrite our own playbook to tackle these threats . That is exactly what we need. You hit the nail on the head good head. We need a new playbook. After the Second World War, we developed an entirely new grand alliance in order to defend ourselves from communism and an entire strategy of how to go about it. We developed things like flexible response and the nato alliance. We do not have any of that now. If you take the sliver threat of cyber attacks, we have no grand cyber doctrine. If you look at the National Response framework, there is no delineation of responsibility and resources. We have no International Treaties for how to respond to a cyberattack. If, lets say, Vladimir Putin decides to shut off the power grid just to shut down an antiputin rally to teach them a lesson, but in doing so that power grid shuts down the power for hospitals, and patients died, he is directly responsible for killing citizens of a nato ally as if he sent a backfire bomber to drop a bomb on those hospitals. We have no legal framework, we have no flexible response, have no tiered response. So right now with cyber, we have left it up to the minds and the whims of whoever is in power. And as a citizen of the United States talking to someone with a british accent, between our president and your prime minister, that is a very, very scary scenario. David, i want to give you the option to jump in, or i can ask another question. I think, like max says, we dont have a playbook, and we need one. How do you get one . How do you have a playbook thats going to deal with these kinds of threats that can come from anywhere . Max and i are creatives and i am biased, so i will give you a creative idea. If you look at some of our enemies and the techniques they use, take 9 11 as an example, its like they hired some failed hollywood scriptwriter to come up with an idea of how you can take down america. I just wonder if an idea might theres a lot of great, Creative Minds around the world and they put all their energy into creating entertainment. I wonder if you could take some of those best minds, put them in a room for a year with some washington folks, have them brainstorm just every possible, implausible scenario they can think of, and every time one of those scenarios comes up and you think, thats absolutely preposterous, that couldnt happen, then you know you are onto something. So you get them to come up with all these ideas, and then you get the washington folks to say, how do they solve that . Get all the solutions down to all these things, look for the consistencies between them. Consistency in these things. That solution is the same as that solution. And then take a framework like that and try to figure out, how do we do a radical rethink on how we are approaching Homeland Security . And of course the government is like a battleship, it turns very, very slowly. You cannot just replace everything. But i think at the very least, that might inspire some thinking as to how things could be looked at a little differently. I would like to go one step farther. David and i both understand the creative process, and i think we both understand that creativity is the first link in a very long chain, in order to turn dreams into reality. I can tell you, working at the modern War Institute at west point, i met some of the most brilliant, Creative Minds in my entire life. However, good ideas are meaningless without the courage to champion them. You can have all the good ideas in the world, and we have. The United States army has reports of somalia that would have been the playbook in iraq if someone had had the courage to champion them, and they didnt. We had the playbook on fighting in afghanistan in the 1980s, but no one had the courage to champion them. This is one of the key problems, ideas need the oxygen of courage. And if you dont have a system that rewards that courage, it wont matter how creative you are. Things will never get done. This is another thing that needs to happen. Bringing the creative people in is great, but then you need the people with the spine to stand up and say we need to champion this, and this may be my job, this may be my career. This may mean being ridiculed, because we know psychologically, the number one fear of most human males is ridicule. Its in the geneva convention. Outrages upon human dignity. If we dont address that, if we dont find the champions and cheerleaders that are willing to embrace and fight for these ideas, they will end up, as they say in hollywood, on the cutting room floor. I couldnt agree more. This country and the government particularly has the agility of a petrified tree. What you desperately need in the situation and what max is talking about is agility and people who can effect these changes. I will give you a quick video game example of what im talking about. I used to be the cool father at school because of call of duty, and along came a game called fortnite, which took over the world. What that company did, epic games, the Ceo Tim Sweeney is a genius programmer and the most agile leader i have seen. He makes decisions very quickly, very smartly with the right people around him, and he knows how to take a battleship and turn it quickly and with agility. That is something thats absolutely crucial to these challenges that are coming toward us. Lets all remember everyone who is watching, that there was a plan for covid19. Its the biological annex of the National Response framework. Covid is not a failure of imagination. We are ready. Ive been part of an exercise where weve seen responses. We are trained, prepared. What happened . That was not a failure of imagination. Agility a failure of and guts. On that point, i would be interested to hear, this report really focuses on adapting to the challenges we face in 2020. But as we know, bureaucracy is slow to move. I would be interested to hear from you, what are the challenges of the future, the challenges in 2030 . Max, you wrote about a bioterrorist scenario before we had the covid19 pandemic, and weve seen how that is playing out. I would be really interested in what you think we need to be adapting to now, those crazy ideas that could play out. We need to reabsorb the hard truths about soft power. The United States used to be the master of soft power, and we have completely dismantled that in favor of simple military lethality. Our enemies are ramping up. They are 20 years ahead of us. The chinese have become the masters of soft power. This is why they are buying up Media Companies like theres no tomorrow. Its why they buy Companies Like grindr so they can control all of the members and use kompromat on anyone in a position of power. Its why they pressure hollywood movies to parrot their agenda. They tried to censor my book , world war z, because i was critical of the government, and therefore i lost access to a potential billion readers. I remember videogames in the 1990s, were tons of them where you could play for or against the Peoples Liberation army. Where are they . Where are they now . So soft power infects every aspect of society. If you want access to chinese markets, you have to play by their game. And western companies are by nature global companies. So they are much more vulnerable to manipulation than we believe. Weve seen it with the nba. We see it now all over the world with infrastructure programs. So i think we need to really get serious about soft power, how our enemies are using it, and what its going to mean for a free and open Democratic Society to remain free. Clementine so we should keep going. I want to make sure that we ask one or two audience questions in here. We have an interesting one from the embassy of costa rica. Is the increasing use of cryptocurrency something that could be catalogued as a threat . For its possible effects on the Global Financial system and international trade. What can be done about it . Dave cryptocurrency is a fascinating space, and its based on a technology called block chain. The technology itself is actually extremely secure and thats part of the reason why its been so successful and prevalent in these new currencies that have come out. In terms of how that can affect the future and security, i dont think anybody really knows. I can tell you the Financial System itself in its current form feels to me very, very fragile. The stock market is essentially run 60 70 by ai now. You can see what is happening right now the current climate and the madness of where the stock market is versus where the country is right now. These things do not connect. The Financial System is still based on thousands of years old systems of trading things, and who knows how long that can last . So i think these cryptocurrencies are going to be very important for the future. We just need to be sure that we have the right people in control of it. Max i think its part of the bigger issue, the old National Defense model of 1945 is that everything was connected. That every institution had a National Security element to it, and therefore even in the Business World there was always the idea of how do our transactions affect our safety . We still have this. Like a venereal disease, the committee that thinks of does every transaction affect National Security . You look at small things like monsanto, farmers have to buy the seeds now every year, which means that if monsanto was sold to a foreign country, they could sell it to china. If that happens, the United States, for the first time in its history will be vulnerable to food blackmail. The idea of analyzing all our systems and seeing what the National Security risks are has to be part of dhs. Clementine we could go on, but we are at time. I will give you both the opportunity to provide final thoughts. One final question is about disinformation. Our enemies are taking advantage of the principles of the open society, freedom of speech, and disinformation is prevalent. As we know, across social media. How can we counter these threats without undermining the foundations of our own society and lifestyle, and ill tack onto that, how can we use novel communication tools, given that communication is such a crucial part of this, what do you both think about the challenge thats at the heart of the issues we face today . Attackssinformation americas greatest strength, the American People. That is americas greatest strength. What we need to do is we need to develop a defense first strategy, where we build strength from within. If the American People are strong, Everything Else will follow. I think what dhs needs to pay very clear attention to, because the American People right now are very fractured, is they need to Pay Attention to the conditions that breed internal threats. Things like poverty, identity, polarization, us versus them. All of these things are things which need to be clearly identified and reinforced. You talk about potential future threats, what could they be . What we were talking about earl

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