joining me, hank paulson, a former secretary of the treasury and c.e.o. of goldman sachs who knows china well. >> so when i look at things we need to do to build trust between our two countries, i see a need to get tangible things done that the publics in both countries can see. and understand. and so continue chemical weaponsly i look at areas like, you know economics and i see that this is the best time i've seen since 2001 at the time when the w.t.o. agreement was negotiated to get some positive economic agreements that the people in both countries can understand and see a real opportunity to do things together to meet the climate challenge and the need for clean energy and new environmental technologies. >> rose: we conclude with jim turley, the retiring chairman and c.e.o. of the accounting firm ernst & young. >> the profession wasn't as focused on the delivery of quality as we needed to be back in the '90s lead up to the enron era. so what happened after was really important ernst & young, all of our peers did everything they could to scrub every process that could touch quality in the marketplace. how we hire people, how we train them, how we assign them to jobs. the methodologies we use, the technology wes use, how we review technical material, our compensation systems. how we promote people. so you name it, the clients we accept, which ones do we want to work for and which ones don't we want to work for? all of these things got scrubbed in ways that i think, you know, was overdue and hadn't been scrubed in enough time. >> rose: that's the lesson of enron. >> that's the lesson. >> rose: siobhan gorman, alex gibney, hank paulson and jim turley when we continue. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: we begin this evening with a look at the leaks that have shed light onen the government surveillance prian" and the "washington post" announced that the national security agency had been collected phone records and u.s. data on u.s. officials. edward snowden came forward on sunday as a source behind the leaks. meanwhile, bradley manning faces trial for giving classified documents to wikileaks. the two incidents are among the biggest security breaches in u.s. history. joining me from washington, siobhan gorman, she has been reporting on the n.s.a. for the "wall street journal." here in new york, alex gibney, an oscar-wining film make we are a new documentary called "we still secrets." the movie takes a look at bradley manning, wikileaks founder julian assange and secrecy in the information age. i'm pleased to have them on this program. siobhan, let me go first to you. is there anything new about the story of edward snowden and what he has come forward to say about what he did and why he did it and --. >> well, there haven't been any developments today. yesterday there was this rather extraordinary interview the guardian published on its web site where he came forward to explain that he decided that he needed to release this information to the public to create an opportunity for public discourse on the matter and he laid out a rather detailed case for why he thought that the public needed to know this information. i don't think that we've -- we haven't seen a lot in the way of specific developments today beyond the fact that obviously there is an investigation under way and folks on the intelligence and law enforcement side in the u.s. are certainly gathering all the information they can about how this came about. >> rose: tell me about a bit more about who he is, what he did and the consequences of it. >> sure, well mr. snowden is currently, i suppose, an employee of booz allen hamilton, which is a major contractor with the intelligence agencies in this area. he is working right now i guess at an n.s.a. facility in hawaii, or he's at least stationed there. and he -- he's only worked there for three months. he was with dell computers as a consultant for them for some period of time. prior to that he worked for the central intelligence agent any geneva and other places for about four years. it's a little bit mysterious in terms of a career trajectory because he doesn't have a high school diploma. he obtained his g.e.d. and managed to swing a job at c.i.a. shortly thereafter, after just a brief stint as a security officer with the national security agency. so one of the things that we peer sort of trying to put together right now is how somebody with that sort of background ends up in such a sensitive position, both, you know, with his c.i.a. employment as well as obviously being in a position to view and review a number of very sensitive documents at a national security agency facility. >> rose: he said it was important, he thought, to say who he was and why he did it. he's in hong kong now, somewhere in hong kong. i guess worried about his future. >> yes. it sounds like he is said to have checked out of a hotel, a rather luxurious hotel, in hong kong today. i'm not sure about his specific whereabouts but he has had some discussion about perhaps retreating to iceland which he thinks is rather friendly to the idea of freedom of expression and the values that he says that he's trying to put forward with his leaking these documents and so many more public discussion about government surveillance. so it sounds like he is either -- he's kind of awaiting his fate whether or not he will be allowed to remain in hong kong or go to iceland or whether he will ultimately be extradited to the united states. >> rose: has the united states government in any -- either in any branch said what they will do? >> no, they've been very, very quiet today. when you call over to the various agencies, they all seem to mysteriousbly in meetings. (laughs) so perhaps we will see some sort of late-night statement again like we have on a number of days. but so far they've been very quiet today. >> rose: all right. i want you to stand by. i'm going to introduce to you film t film which is called "we steal secrets" the story of wikileaks which is in theaters now and whether that story and this story have a connection because one is about surveillance and the other is about letting u.s. secrets reach a worldwide audience. we begin with the trailer for the film. here it is. >> disclosure like these tear at the fabric of responsible government. >> we're lookinging at all the things we can do to stem the flow of this information. >> this was the biggest leak in the history of this particular planet. >> my name is julian assange. i'm the editor of wikileaks. >> we help you get the truth out. >> if you get this material, give it to us, no questions asked and you will help change history. >> governments get more information than ever but they it will citizens do the same. is >> this was kid who reached out in confidence and said "i'm leaking secrets." >> the consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous >> the army has detained a u.s. soldier in connection with the leak of this classified video. >> two of the men killed worked for the reuters news agency. >> journalists' cameras were mistaken for weapons. >> the prime suspect is 22-year-old bradley manning. >> we promise that we would publish everything. by 1:00 in the morning i had 390,000 u.s. military records. >> it was material which could get people hurt. julian said if an afghan civilian helps afghan forces -- american forces he deserves to die. >> how are we going to stop it and how far has it gone already? >> he was a rock star. >> wearing bulletproof vests. >> he'd been trained in evasive techniques. >> this idealist became something else. >> i'm untouchable now. >> sweden issued a warrant for the arrest of julian assange. >> suspicion of molestation, rape. >> i didn't want this to be in the papers. >> i have never said not or it is. >> everyone has secrets. >> i'm not going to talk about that. >> but it does affect wikileaks. >> let me be very candid: the nation states need to be secret in order to be successful. we steal secrets. >> it's not about wikileaks, it's about transparency, who gets to control information. >> rose: based on what you know about edward snowden and bradley manning, did they have the same motive? >> i think so. i think their motives in general were to bring misdeeds and criminal alty to the attention of the american public. i think that was predominantly their motive. i think manning may have been a bit more naive about the way in which his documents might have been used. and i think snowden actually learned from what manning did and made a distinction. he said that while he admired manning he also felt that he was going to do things differently. he didn't want to leak to an anonymous drop box. he wanted to leak to a journalist he knew and trusted and he would only leak documents that he knew -- that he saw himself and scrutinized to make sure that nobody would be hurt. nevertheless, i think they both acted out of conviction because they felt it was a lot going on that the government was doing that was dead wrong and needed to be exposed. >> rose: do you see any similarities here, siobhan? >> oh, yeah. i mean, i think that in speaking with people, particularly today, that is the parallel that many people draw. although the volume of information that each gentleman has produced is quite different. it does seem like the motives are somewhat similar and it does seem like there is a little bit of a learning curve. mr. snowden was quite polished in his production both of the documents which he was obviously carefully giving to selected reporters and then sitting down for a very sort of well-produced interview piece that lasted 12 minutes. i think that it -- his packaging was obviously a lot cleaner. >> rose: back to julian assange. he would not be interviewed. you did not have access to interview him. >> no, i spoke to him a bunch. i went to his 40th birthday party. but at the end of the day he declined to be interviewed. he wanted money. >> rose: more than a million dollars. >> he said the market rate for an interview with me is a million dollars. i assume that was a negotiating gambit. i said i wouldn't pay him no matter what the price was. he said "how about if you get intel on all your other interview subjects." i.e., spy on your other interview subjects. >> rose: let him know what they said before he was interviewed by you? >> presumably. if i would report back to him what they were saying then he would consider giving me an interview. i found that a rather odd request for someone who's so interested in source protection. >> rose: did you change your impression of him over the course of this him? >> i think so. look, i'm tremendously impressed with what he did in creating this web site which i think served a terribly important purpose and, frankly, i think the publication of the wikileaks documents so-called, they all came from bradley manning, but these documents, the publication of them actually did a lot of good. and they continue to inform our understanding of the way government works. but i think other time he began to take on the coloration of the very people he was attacking. >> rose: so what's the next turn in the case of edward snowden, siobhan? >> oh, well, i think that -- i mean, we'll have to see both where he turns up next and what the united states decides to do. i mean, there's obviously an aggressive leak investigation going on and the justice department lawyers are trying too figure out the best way to proceed. they're going to have to make a decision about extradition requests which is ultimately a political one. i mean, the fact that he is in hong kong presents some political sensitivitys in dealing with china. i mean, the president just met with mr. xi of china over the wreak end and obviously the message out of that meeting was that the u.s. and china were going to try to seek new ways to work together. i don't know they were that they were looking for this to be the first test case of that reset of that relationship. >> rose: what's intriguing about this and the bradley manning case for me is the access that has edward snowden had and would what he could have done if he had no restraints in terms of what his purpose was do you agree, siobhan? >> yeah. i -- one of the things that's been fascinating and that we haven't sorted through yet is how somebody in his position gained access to something as sensitive as a document of the national security court known as the foreign intelligence surveillance court. that is among the most sensitive documents that exist in the u.s. government so people have suggested that he in effect played a role almost of a technical assistance administrator for the network in the office that he was working in in hawaii that he actually had very unusual levels of access to a system because he was there to make sure that it was able to run on a continuous basis. what we haven't sorted out yet is how it was that he used that system to gain these -- gain access to these documents. whether he had to break into elements of the system or whether he just had free access throughout. >> rose: and manning? >> well, manning -- i think -- >> rose: he was a respected analyst. >> he was. he was a respected analyst working in iraq. he was a private but as a result of policies put in place after 9/11 where we moved from a need to know to a need to share he had access to a fantastic amount of information. i think it also really lays out the fact that, frankly, we have way too many secrets. i mean, there are four million people who have access to classified information. that's a lot of people. a lot of secrets. way too many secrets and that's one of the messages coming out of this. >> rose: all of what? the discussion about snoweden? >> and the discussion about manning. manning is on trial now for leaking these secrets but this is the tip of the iceberg in a way. and i think -- people have been talking about what the n.s.a. was doing. a man named james bamford wrote a number of great books about the n.s.a. and we all suspected what was going on. to see these documents confirm what we suspected. that we were being spied upon on a regular basis. >> rose: also there is this fact. since technology has risen to play such a prominent part, people have so much information about us and about everybody in the phone surveillance people are saying well, what does the government know about you? what do all the internet sites know about you is another question? >> i think it's this intersection between private and government that's also terrifying. so to some extent when you turn on your computer and you're searching for things already your choices are being curtailed by private enterprises which have -- like the film "minority report" have looked up your past preferences and are now pushing you towards certain decisions rather than letting you roam freely on your own. >> likes, like, and lakes. you say it's a contradiction of the internet, a tool of liberation, a spy magazine that brings us closer together and farther apart, it acts to expose hard truth and hides soft lies. >> i think that's true. i think it's a tremendous device for misinformation as well as getting information. and i think we have to be careful with that. we have to approach it that way. we see it as this kind of neutral mechanism that keeps our privacy as we navigate, but that's not what's happening. i mean, it's actually a data mining device, as the snowden leaks now prove. but it's also proved to be the way that citizens-- or people who object to what the government is doing-- can now use the very weapons of that the government has against government. so it's created an opportunity for a sort of asmes rick battle over what should and should not secret. >> rose: what's your view of julian assange today? >> i think julian assange was an important figure for a certain moment of history. he played a key role in terms of building a site that allowed us to see the possibilities for leaking important information that the public needed to know. that having been said, i think we've moved past wikileaks now and that people are beginning to learn how to do it better. what's important is not that wikileaks stays front and center stage but that we learn to do this kind of thing better. >> rose: so both of you, in the end of this, who decides what secrets should be throughout? i mean, even if you want to expose some secrets, who makes the decision as to what is okay and is simply something that's more important than the national interest for the public to know or something that on the other hand could lead to loss of life or damage the national security interests of the country? who makes those decisions? >> well, that's what we're all fighting about now and the united states government says we must always make those decisions but the fact is that leaks over time have been an accepted kind of pressure valve in a democracy. they're not supposed to happen, the government says "we'll stop them from happening." but we know that they happen. the government actually, you know, is responsible for a lot of leaks to people like bob woodward and others and they accept the idea that journalists will try to get leaks from the government. now the obama administration is trying very hard to clamp down on leaks but i think that the context that's being missed is we're seeing more leaks because people are more and more upset that the government seems to be improperly keeping too much secret. >> rose: one final note: n.s.a. is -- how would you characterize n.s.a., siobhan? >> well, they certainly have more information than any other institution in the world. one of the things the n.s.a. has had real challenges with over time is making sense of the information it has. increasingly it's had better tools to make sense of more and more of the information it collects, but historically it's had a very difficult time managing it. it doesn't know what it knows in many ways. >> rose: what's going to happen to julian assange? he faces some serious legal questions in sweden. >> that's the question. i mean, julian assange is now -- he has sought and received asylum from the country of ecuador. he's in the ecuadorian embassy in london because he's trying to prevent being extradited to sweeten where he believes he will be promptly extradited to the united states but actually that i believe simply the swedes want them to face allegations over sex charges in sweden. >> rose: did you believe the sex charges? >> well, i believe that the sex charges -- >> rose: in the beginning there were some people around that i mean raised questions they can't be true, that it's efforts of the c.i.a. or somebody. near the end you brought up credible people who seemed to say no, this was real. >> i at first thought it was a kind of conspiracy. the timing was so incredible it must have been a put-up job that the c.i.a. was somehow responsible. i found no evidence of that. i found that there was evidence of personal misbehavior, that the swedish prosecutor decided that there may have been a crime and they wanted him to come to sweden to be arrested and charged and face the consequences for that crime. but i think what julian did is he tried to take those charges which were personal and to conflate them with the transparency agenda to say, no, no, no, these are not about me, these are about people trying to prevent my freedom of speech. and i think that's wrong. >> rose: and the people within wikileaks thought he was wrong, too. >> indeed. they felt very strongly -- they all advised him to take care of this matter in person. instead he decided no, not to separate the two but make it part of wikileaks. >> rose: thank you. the film is called "we still secrets, the story of wikileaks." siobhan gorman from the "wall street journal,"