it seems to me that all the evidence says he would do the second thing. >> tim and i have argued on a lot of these issues. i am finding myself drawn into his perspective a bit. attribute to your advocacy. i agree with the point that actually, surveillance law is developed more than other areas i mentioned. national security and counterterrorism law in checks and balances. and so, there is reason to think someone would blow the whistle if the trump administration tried to do something illegal -- and i fought hard for my 20 years in government, when i worked for national security for increased information sharing, breaking down barriers within domestic agencies, and for the modernization of advisement so we could have a better approach to surveillance. but for my part, i would say -- as i fought for these changes, i did not bargain on a president trump. that was beyond my ability to imagine as a leader of the country in thinking about how these policies would be implemented by the chief executive. and so, so this is a time of soul-searching for me. what you said susan, you have to think about it now in a different paradigm. and then, i would suggest the way to think about it, if you really want to put yourself to the test, not sitting here at cato institute in this panel, but the day after an attack in paris or in washington or new york or chicago, anywhere there is 150 dead americans in an attack that has been carried out by people connected to isis. and how the trump administration responds when you have the statements that have been made by the leaders -- by president-elect trump about his view of what we should be doing with muslims in this country, whether that is surveillance or torture of terrorists or killing terrorists' families or the national security advisor saying fear of muslims is rational. and how does our country respond in a crisis to that scenario? that, i think, is uncharted territory for me. >> just to follow up. matt i do think it is worthwhile , kind of saving the other sort of grounding here. especially when we start to talk about 702 specifically. >> briefly explain 702 really quickly. >> 702 is the section of authorization act that prevents the targeting of foreign relations based on broader selectors, other requirements. it is a split debate between allowing the government to search whatever they want and those particularized ones. susan: the controversy extends to the communications of americans are incidentally selected during the targeting. there is a sunset provision. it either has to be affirmatively reauthorized by the end of 2017 or it goes away. my, so there is sort of a forcing function. we have to have this debate no matter what. previously, there was a broad assumption that we were probably heading to clean authorization as it existed. maybe there were some minor sort of questions about marginal transparency and civil liberties changes. now there is a little bit more of a question of whether we will see 702 not being reauthorized or we will see really dramatic changes. within that context, i think about -- does president trump change my view of 702. no. i didn't support it as it currently exists because i love the executive branch and think that is cool information they would like to see. i think that is information that keeps americans safe. it keeps people around the world safe. whatever criticisms there were about 215 and other programs this is one of the most , important programs the intelligence community has. i think the president needs that information whether he is donald , trump or barack obama or george w. bush. the challenge here is going to be, how do we preserve that core of information that i think is absolutely critical, while at the same time building in safeguards to assure the -- ensure that the rules that exist are being followed. and also that we have prudence, wise policy that overlays those basic statutory and constitutional protections. can i put a finer on section point 702. as susan described it is a , provision that was in the law that enables the government to target non-us persons who are reasonably believed to be outside the united states for foreign intelligence purposes. it does so without requiring a probable cause more and, but that's probable cause -- requiring a probable cause warrany but approval by the court. picking up on tim's point where there are potential areas of common interest amongst those of us who have historically been supportive of government efforts to conduct -- have robust surveillance authorities like 702 and those who are concerned about privacy. carrie: my perspective on that, given where we are, if the privacy community spends the next year fighting about 702, my view is that is a complete waste of their time. it goes to the point of section 702 is an area that is probably the most oversight-laden surveillance authority we have in the national security space. that is a statutory that has -- statutory authority that has tons of oversight. congressional oversight, department of justice oversight. that is the most regulated area. and so, i think that is the area that folks should really be the least concerned about. if you want to talk about areas that i would find common ground on, and where i think there should be kept a watchful eye, it would be if the new attorney general decides to reopen fbi investigative guidelines for domestic operations and lower the standards for investigating americans. that is an area to keep an eye on. if you want to talk about an area that should be of concern to civil libertarians, it is the proposal that i have not heard from the president-elect -- but i have seen in some reports about maybe things that are of interest to some of his advisers, would be the proposal to eliminate the director of national intelligence. the director of national intelligence's creation was the single most important recommendation of the 9/11 commission to improve the workings of the intelligence community. post-snowden environment, recent transparency that can be -- things that can be declassified and ensures a common voice in briefing congress. those are areas where those of us who have been on different sides of issues would have common ground and are far more consequential than fighting over section 702. >> do you want to make a comment on that? >> i agree with a lot of what carrie just said. i have tried to do with my colleagues in the privacy community have been to remind them that 702 has a lot of safeguards, and if they want to look at nsa surveillance and big data which is an important , issue i agree the guidelines , are equally or more important. they should be focused on executive order 12333. we should be focused where there is less oversight. that is part of my point. 702 is only about data inside the united states. that is why you have to go to the fisa court there are these , oversight methods. the other, much less oversight as long as they are not targeting u.s. citizens. there is a time data all over the world these days, so, you know it is still a little , screwy. yes matt did a lot of jobs to in certain ways but it is still screwy have a law treats data not , only sensitivity or whether it is based on physical location of the data. in a globalized world, that doesn't make a lot of sense. >> you made the point of 702 providing the intelligence community rich repository of information that could save lives. it also comprises a significant portion of the president's daily briefing. we have been told. president-elect trump in a , lengthy interview on sunday with chris wallace on fox news sunday, which is worth looking at talks in great detail on a , number of national security areas. talks about the fact he will -- has only received the briefing about three times. and gave explanation for that. he said he doesn't need the same facts over and over, which implies there were some repetitive elements for the briefing that he found not useful for him. but praised the people who gave him the briefings, which was an interesting juxtaposition, considering he is fighting the cia publicly but praising the briefers. the vice president and other people who are coming into his cabinet are getting briefed and he has let them know that if there is something i need to know that you think is important, alert me. i will be there at a moments notice. it seems to set up a framework where, i don't need the brief every day. you tell me what i need to know if there is something new. let us react to that. he is not the first person to decline getting the briefing every morning. that is not unique to this president, but what you make of that in terms of -- we are talking about these intelligence programs that not only provide information for the community, but do inform the president on the state of the world. what you make of the fact that he has laid out this reaction to getting the briefing? >> i think it sort of goes back to evidence-based policymaking. these are enormously complex decisions, it is hard to get it right. this is a little like a doctor saying, "i don't care so much about the x-rays or the blood test, there is a lot of math. that is boring. i think you have, i don't know, " and throws out whatever his gut instinct is. i don't know, sometimes it might be right and sometimes tests are wrong. but if you are looking at your doctor doing that, you would fire that person. you would say, that is not how good decisions are made. good decisions are made because you collect the available evidence. sometimes, it is tedious. it is in the weeds, it is detail oriented. trust me, i was as disappointed as anyone to discover the nsa was a lot less like a bourne movie. there was a lot more paperwork. things that might some und repetitive to him, but to a person versed in intelligence, the person understands this is detail, this is nuance, this is significant. going back to his statements about the general hostility to the evidence for information, that it's frankly that is scary , to me. we have troops deployed around the world. the u.s. intelligence apparatus isn't just consequential to the united states, but our allies. these are areas in which we want someone to take it seriously and try to be getting it right and to have someone say, not just pdb, but intelligence, paired with this general hostility towards the intelligence community. "you guys got it wrong towards the wmd's, so who cares what you think." that to me is some of the most frightening things that we are hearing. delegated, the other doctors under him to get the x-rays and blood test and all of that kind of thing every day. >> as long as those are the doctors are the ones making the decisions. there is not clarity here, there is some sort of speculation that vice president-elect pence will be the day-to-day president while donald trump focuses on "making america great again." there is some speculation. at the same time, donald trump appears to be making appointments, making the decision. and so, yeah, you want that person to be informed. if he is not going to be in interested in putting the work in and really examining evidence and doing -- taking in the fact, s, you would hope he would have the judgment to understand he should not be making those decisions. there would be a clear delegation. >> two quick points. as this changes every single day, cnn reported yesterday that the trump team says he is now receiving an intelligence briefing three times a week which from my perspective is a really positive development and big improvement from what was know what he had , relayed last weekend. carrie: i think part of that is because based on what he demonstrated throughout the campaign, there is concern in the national security community that he really does not have a good knowledge of world events and security challenges and so he would really benefit from his national security and his intelligence briefings and that one would hope he would take advantage of this time before the inauguration to develop a relationship with the intelligence community and become better informed. and that is, again, that speaks to the question of how does he yet understand that the intelligence community is there to assist him in his decision-making process and can tailor the reports to areas that he wants to focus on and that is where we really need to see some improvement in terms of him fleshing out who his senior leadership team is, who is going to give him the briefings. i think that if it is in fact true that he is receiving his briefings three times a week versus just a couple since the election, that is an improvement. >> yeah. >> the problem is this is not about, that is good but this is not about how many times a week you get the briefing or whether it is the presidential daily brief that he reads and then gets briefed. are you just hear the briefing -- or he just hears the briefing. presidents do this differently. in history and in my experience, president bush and president obama handled it differently. it does come back to how the world actually works and how the people make important decisions and they do not make decisions with the idea that something important happens, come tell me. matthew: that is absurd. that is not the way somebody in a leadership position who is responsible for putting american lives at risk all the time should be making decisions so the information that comes to the president, if you think of this as a pyramid, at the base of the pyramid, there is the vast amount of intelligence that are collected by the intelligence community. and it works its way up his pyramid to the top where senior level officials within the intelligence community with the best writers and the best analysts are making judgments about what their most important customer needs to know, the president of the united states and that is at the top whether an in person briefing and if the president is dismissive of receiving that information and is disdainful of facts in making those decisions, as we have seen, then we are in a very perilous moment. the decisions the president makes and is accountable for making, not the vice president, not the national security advisor we elected to president , to make these decisions are not decisions he makes once a month or even once a week. they are decisions that the president is called upon to make multiple times a week. on counterterrorism operations in particular that involve the deployment of u.s. military forces, and putting american lives at risk, so the notion that we can accept a chief executive who is in the position of "tell me something important happened" is truly alarming. >> a quick follow up. i think that is exactly right and just to put a finer point on it the deliberate rejection of briefings should be viewed not as a benign, i am busy doing other things but as an abdication of responsibility. when a senior executive and -- in government does not want to know what is in the briefing, that i think can be viewed through a lens of therefore, should something happen as a result of the information that is in that briefing, they are not accountable, and we have seen, we have experience, we have seen unfortunately some members -- i can think in particular -- members of congress who have done this and when they decline a briefing and therefore can speak publicly at will because they do not know, that is not a benign thing. that is a deliberate strategy. >> right. i agree entirely with what carrie said about willful ignorance, and we had a big debate about surveillance and privacy. i have made the point that you can simultaneously believe there needs to be more controls on surveillance and because there is a lot of surveillance and data gathered by agencies that know what they are doing, they probably know a lot of stuff, those two things make sense. you know, i have actually gotten some pushback or criticism saying, now you guys like the intelligence committee. -- intelligence community. i always liked the intelligence community personally. ,yes that is the point. , they gather information and they have it available to the president. we can debate 702 and whether -- it has the right balance, but it is valuable and provides all this information for the presidential daily brief. if the president is not reading it, what is the point? and i think, carrie's point is well taken. this is not just sort of a lack of competence or wanting to do other things that are less boring. it is a deliberate strategy. i agree with that. i think the people who push aside information are doing so because it pushes aside the responsibility. since i did not know that information i can do what i like , and that is very worrying. , >> we have some time for audience questions. so if there is something you , would like to ask, please raise your hand. why don't we go to the gentleman in the pink tie. please wait for the microphone to reach you so the online audience and everyone here can hear you as well and do make it a comment and not a lecture. thank you. a question, not a lecture. thank you. and your name and affiliation, serve. i'm sorry. >> woody kaplan, the civil liberties list. i come to this with a great fear of the imperial presidency. it started with lyndon baines johnson. this is not partisan. and i am taken by a lot of the comments. susan, but it might be naive you know more about it , than i do. the u.s. attorneys with whom i have spoken have told me they can get away with virtually anything by creating probable cause and walking across the hall from the nsa to at&t or something and say "we need these records. we need this information." the whole idea of having the watchers watch themselves, those employees of the organization's s, because they are so full of goodwill, i am greatly skeptical of that. and i am greatly skeptical of almost all of the internal oversights, and i hope you guys would comment on that a little bit. am i just paranoid or am i particularly paranoid? >> it is a great question, so why should people believe people who are sitting up here saying , trust us, these are rigorous efforts of oversight that were put in place. >> a quick comment. i want to be candid. it is possible i am wrong. i have -- this boils down to i know this people and i do not think -- i think they would resign. that is not a formal institutional protection. i really do think this goes to what is the strength of our faith in the institutional protections and what does look like? susan: when i look at get this with the history of the nsa and things that occurred before i was there, the president's surveillance program. the general counsel's office was not told. the general counsel was taught at the very end of events. that is a real problem. the way the agency is constructed, that could not happen again. i do not believe that could happen again. these programs could not exist without members of congress -- multiple members of the general counsel of office and members of congress knowing. i'm sure that is true only because the bad thing happened and there was a response. there are probably lots of different pockets of the government in which that potential has not occurred yet so there has not been a response. i think the way to address this is not necessarily to attack the substantive, "does this invade civil liberties, is there privacy right?" so what is the substance but think about how do we get multiple branches of government involved in that oversight process. how do we build in technical compliance mechanisms and do as much as possible to make sure we have multiple eyes and it is not just the watchers watching themselves. >> anyone else want to briefly respond to that? >> just to say that i largely agree with that but with the caveat that policies can be changed and that was appointed -- the point i was trying to make about the power of the executive branch. you know the director of nsa , works for the secretary of defense and the general counsel 's office advises that director. if trump's attorney general says this is my opinion about what the law means in the constitution means and there is no court decision that the says that opinion is wrong as a , structural matter, it does not matter with the general counsel of the nsa thinks about that, whether he or she disagrees with that. we saw a little bit and that was the rationale for denying access. there is a broader point here. i mean, the president has a lot of power and is in charge of the executive branch. all of these mechanisms are important and i believe in them not just because i know a lot of those people and i was one of those people but because i think they were well-designed in many cases. they are still nevertheless within an executive branch process, and they rely on types of control, and this is my biggest concern is not so much the calibration of how much or little you do and how close to chalk line that you get but they rely on a president of the united states taking that in as a control on his behavior even though they work for him. they rely on a degree of shame being required. that is true even if checks and balances for congress and the court. wonderfuln wrote a piece called "libertarian panic," criticizing people he me saying that we are involved in a libertarian panic, not so much criticizing, he was praising us in a sort of odd way saying it is a good thing you're panicking because that is the reason these abuses will not happen but it maybe a bit of a panic. my response was, that was the american revolution. that was a libertarian panic. you look at the list of grievances in the declaration of independence and they are out there. they are not a fair description of what the british were actually doing. they were over the top. in a way, our country was founded on the basis of a libertarian panic but making the point that i think all the controls jack was describing which come from his wonderful book "power and constraint" which i largely agree with, work for different philosophies and different political parties, but do they work for trump? >> the gentleman in the middle in the fourth row with his hand up. >> yes. i am with the freedom institute. you all seem to agree and i want to get back to this question of the hacking by the russians, but you all seem to agree that the reason trump does not accept that is because of his disdain for the facts. i have two questions and i am not a trump supporter, but i can see why trump supporters might feel a disconnect from the people in power. there are two questions about facts. you criticize trump for his attributing political motives to the cia, but don't address the president of the clinton supporters were attributed political motives to the fbi, would you comment on that? the other question is, you might not want to accept julian hisnge saying he got information not from russian hackers but from a dnc insider because you don't believe julian assange, but he was supported by craig murphy, who said he met the dnc insider and that is where the information came from, and not russian hackers. would you address that? people who allege that jim comey weighed in for political reasons, i think were wrong. that was an unfair assessment. you can cover about whether or not it was the right decision or the wrong decision or a wise decision or unwise one, but to the extent people accused that activity of being political, that is plainly true -- plainly false -- and some of the leaks that occurred in the final weeks of the election i found deeply troubling and i do have concerns there were potential political motivations there, that is just as trump deserves criticism, people who took shots at the fbi fairly deserved criticism as well. as to this question of whether or not we should take the words of julian assange and craig wright over the unanimous judgment of the u.s. intelligence community, that is a nonstarter of a question. we are talking about signals , documents, the weight of public evidence. the notion that there is not a direct connection between the hacking of the dnc, the passage of those documents to wikileaks, and their ultimate dissemination, i think even from the outside, is absurd on its face, added with the views being very detailed intelligence assessment provided in october, i think there is no credibility to those claims at all. >> the questions raised demonstrate why there needs to be a bipartisan congressional investigations are that people can have better answers to these questions and have some actualnce that an investigation was conducted and done in a bipartisan way. >> one must, very brief, on the and here? -- on the end here? >> hi, i'm not nearly as sanguine as some of you that we can rely on the general counsel to protect us. the key general counsel are little coal appointments. that does not give me great confidence. i also agree that the greatest risk is not blatantly illegal conduct, but conduct within the great discretion that has been allowed by our expanded loss, ws, and it is a bit frustrating to hear matt's a that when we looked at these laws, we never thought about the potential of trump. advocates like myself were making that case as hard as we could. as much as you trust this administration, look at the next one, look at our history. question is not if, it is when. , so i feel like -- but anyway, i have a question. my question is -- like i said, i have a lot of respect for your perspective, matt, and all of you, and you talked about the fact that you think the greatest threat to civil liberties is not from the surveillance inside but other counterterrorism policies. you mentioned the fbi guidelines . what are some of the other counterterrorism areas where you feel like the potential for abuse is greatest and maybe some of us should be focusing more on the laser focus we have had on surveillance? >> this could be a long conversation. the respective mutual. i do think the focus on, we were engaged, uni, were talking about 702 and trying to figure out where to draw the line in searching for information. that really highlighted that , controversy, that debate had become focused on a very specific and narrow but important issues. i think we have moved beyond that now in terms of the things to be concerned about. to answer question, i do think that the greatest area of risk from a civil liberties perspective is domestic law enforcement. again taking the scenario of the , day after or the week after an attack in the united states, the wide discretion which we rightly give to the fbi and local police departments and law enforcement to investigate crimes and to preserve our safety domestically, there is the potential when the leadership of our country makes a statement that we talked about making in terms of the muslim community and how we should be reacting after a terrorist attack. i think the greatest fear and you are in a better position to think about how to constrain those activities but the idea of greater surveillance, it does not even rise to the level of going to a judge, investigative powers that law enforcement and that police officers, and i am finding that local police departments are going to have to basically be in a position to intrusively be involved in neighborhoods and communities in a way that is not american. >> please join me in thanking this great panel for a really stimulating discussion. [applause] >> we have a 15 minute break. yeah? >> we will reconvene here at 10:45 a.m. we will take 10 minutes. caffeinate if need be. we have outside on the table, we have extended by other fees in a panel outside. those watching at home can go to cato.org and find biographies there. please join us in a minute. thank you. [indistinct conversation] >> welcome back to the morning session he