my name is tim hart anderson i'm the senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and i'm the moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's guest speaker for over twenty years valerie plame served as a covert cia operations officer working to protect america's national security and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in two thousand and three she found herself in the midst of a political firestorm when her role as a cia operative was revealed in a nationally syndicated column resulting in her resignation from the agency since leaving the cia plame has become a public advocate and respected authority on issues of national security counter proliferation and politics she's an active leader in the global zero initiative a movement to build a world without nuclear weapons she's the author of two books their first book fair game is an autobiography recounting her years with the cia in her just released novel blowback she and co author sarah love it and written a story quote about a female covert operative who relies upon her intellect more than high tech weaponry to gather intelligence one wonders if that's fiction or fact in tonight's presentation security surveillance and privacy ms plame offers her perspective on issues of international security government accountability and protection of the public trust all timely topics given recent revelations ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster town hall forum valerie pla good evening and thank you what it delight it is to be here i'm really honored i've heard about the forum and now i understand why a gorgeous venue a beautiful place and plus i'm always happy to be in minnesota where you send such an interesting a ray of politicians to us to you never know who you guys are going to say but the fact is i'm in the middle of this book tour for blowback and it gets really old after a while talking about yourself so i am really thrilled to talk tonight to have an opportunity to talk about some real world issues and not just fiction i've been asked to speak about national security and privacy so it's appropriate that i first give you my credentials for doing so i served my country as a covert operations officer for the cia i went through intensive paramilitary training which included how to fire a variety of weapons i survived interrogation exercises weeks of escape and evasion sort of exercises in the woods and then i also did operational training where you learn spy trade craft that is how to conduct clandestine operations for example how to spot develop and recruit assets that will provide intelligence to our policymakers how to detect surveillance clandestine communications how to write intel reports in the cia i developed my expertise in nuclear counter proliferation essentially making sure the bad guys whether they're terrorists or rogue nation states do not get weapons of mass destructions or nuclear weapons in the run up to the war with iraq i was ahead of worldwide operations to obtain intelligence on the genuine state of iraq's  presumed we targeted and recruited scientists investigated their procurement networks tried to figure out what was the stated there are indeed looked at how they were financing it and this was all so that we could give our policymakers good intelligence so they could hopefully make wise decisions in the course of my career i submitted many requests to the face of court feiss foreign intelligence surveillance act so overseen by a secret court and they were always approved we now know that like ninety nine point nine percent of those are approved but i will say at the time when we submitted these requests those of us my former colleagues that did so did feeling that they were genuinely well vetted request these were really bad guys that we needed further information on so as we all know we did go to a war with iraq in march two thousand and three a decade ago and in it he accused the bush administration of twisting and manipulating the intelligence to exaggerate the iraqi nuclear threat so to sell that to the american people to sell the war to the american people remember how many  times ministrations told the american people there is an imminent nuclear threat and we don't want to see the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud one week later by name in covert status in employment with with iraq the end of my covert career started a messy ugly political scandal that ended with the conviction of then vice president's chief of staff scooter libby so now i'm a private citizen i live with my family in new mexico and but i'm still deeply passionate about national security issues and it's in that capacity that i speak to you tonight the issue at stake to be discussed this evening is the appropriate balance between national security and privacy ever since this story broke in june of this year about the n s a revelations i have followed this very closely as i said i now live in new mexico and i totally understand how washington d c and that whole inside baseball world particularly as we're seeing it playing out right now with all the issues at stake with the debt ceiling and so forth can seem really far away and not relevant to our everyday lives however the snowden revelations about the extent of the n s a surveillance in this country will be felt by each of this individual it will have a profound impact these issues matter deeply because they go to the core essence of our constitution in particular the fourth amendment and the ever tense dynamic between security and privacy in a world that seems to have decreasing amounts of each so let's take a moment and so review the national security agency we now know that the n s a has been secretly ordering phone companies such as risin and others to sweep up and hand over all the metadata from the phone calls of millions of its customers and this includes phone numbers duration of calls routing information and sometimes even the location of the callers this collection actually started in the weeks in the months following the nine eleven attacks when president bush initiated warrant domestic surveillance as a result of this warrantless wiretapping program high ranking officials of his administration including james komi who's now the head of the f b i and his predecessor robert mueller they threatened to resign they thought it was an overreach bush consequently backed off from some of those measures but what happened then did congress check this executive overreach did anyone hold them accountable it did not it adopted two worst features of the bush program is law and the protect america act of two thousand and seven and the foreign intelligence surveillance amendment act of two thousand and eight congress took the additional step of immunizing all those corporations involved in those programs from any legal repercussions so far from correcting those abuses congress institutionalized them and at the same time it supported the executive branch's cloak of secrecy over these abuses and the classification of the legal opinions of the fisa court whose rulings had given legal protection to the new surveillance programs so over the past decade we know the n s a has secretly worked to gain access to virtually all communications entering leaving or going through the united states why would this be so a key reason according to a draft of his top secret n s a inspectors general report leaked by snowden is that of at least a third of international telephone calls in the world enter leave or transit the united states they all go through a small number of switches or choke points and route to their final destination so the united states is a major crossroads for international traffic here's what's more important virtually all internet communications in the world pass to the united states so we've learned about two particular programs from snowden the first one is  prism gives the n s a access to data from internet individual internet companies such as yahoo google microsoft however the companies claim they don't give the agency direct access to their servers there's still a lot we don't know about how works but basically it allows n s a to request data on specific people from all those major technology companies google yahoo facebook and so forth the government insists it's only allowed to collect data when given permission by the foreign intelligence surveillance court according to sudanese documents there is another more invasive program code named upstream and it's described as a collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as that data flows past so in contrast to prism upstream involves a collection of communications both in metadata and content as they pass through undersea fiber optic cables as part of this cable tapping program and upstream the n s a has installed what amounts to computerize filters in telecommunications infrastructure throughout the country according to this leaked i g report that we have because of snowden the agency has secret cooperative agreements with at least the top three telephone companies in the country the filters where all this data goes through our place to key junction points known as switches for example almost all the information going in and out of northwestern united states passes through a nearly windowless nine story building on folsom street in san francisco this is a regional switching center in two thousand and expression equipment that examines the metadata the names and addresses of people communicating on the internet all as it zooms by at the speed of light according to william binney who is a former senior an essay official denied that the agency had surveillance records on millions of americans let me talk to you a little bit about the man who runs the sam pyar general keith alexander i don't know if anyone here has ever been to fort meade which is the n s a headquarters just outside of washington sort of between baltimore and washington it's a top secret city by city i mean tens of thousands of people move through more than fifty buildings it has its own post office fire department police force and this is the domain of general keith alexander the man who runs the n s a if he came in here and sat down i doubt i doubt hardly anyone in here would recognize him but he no one in american intelligence has come close to his degree of power is a four star army general and his authority extends across three domains he is the director of the world's largest intelligence agency the national security agency he is chief of the central security service which is a military command and commander of the u s cyber command so he runs the nation's cyber war efforts and empire he's built over the last eight years by insisting that the u s is inherent vulnerability to digital attacks  amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe in his telling the threat is so mind boggling and so huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian internet under his protection requiring tweets and e mails to pass through his filters and putting the kill switch under the government's thumb to quote him he said what we see is an increasing level f to the on the networks he said this at a recent security conference i'm concerned this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in it's been reported that his mentality is captured by his motto collected all the personality driving all of this not just alexander's but much of washington's perhaps is best captured in a profile that foreign policy magazine put out that  director this keith alexander prior to his position he modeled a more a war room after star trek's enterprise and the room was christened as part of the information dominance center i find personally i found this really alarming i'm just go read this when he was running the army's intelligence and security command he brought many of his future allies down to fort belvoir for tour of his base of operations and his facility notice information dominance center it had been designed to get this by a hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship enterprise from starship complete with chrome panels computer stations a huge t v monitor and doors it made a wish sound when they opened and closed an important aspect of the story has been the focus on contractors because when the news first broke about snowden and that he was on contract to booz allen for the n s a there was a huge outcry how can this be while i'm here to tell you just haven't been paying attention to the roots of this trend of contracting out to the private sector goes back at least as far to the reagan era when the political right became obsessed with limiting government and denigrating those who work for the pup for the public sector began in a wave of privatization and this whole concept that everything was more cost efficient when done by the private sector last year the project on government oversight sent a letter to government officials poking holes in the department of defense's claims that it utilizes a cost effective workforce it showed that the contracting budget and spending data that of contractor employees to the department of defense cost nearly three times more than the average d o d civilian employee performing the same job this new data highlights the fact that the federal government is contracting out services regardless of the extra cost i can tell you today as i follow the intelligence community very closely it is so immense that no one person can manage or even comprehend its reach my question is when an operation of critical importance goes south who do we prefer to try to correct that damage would it be a government employee whose loyalty belongs to their country despite a modest salary or the sub contractor who wants to assure that his much fatter paycheck keeps coming i would recommend to you a book by dan a priest who writes for the washington a prize winning journalist she wrote it i think it came out two years ago top secret america with waymark it came out in two thousand and eleven and it details the down doing growth in contractors and sort of what i call the military industrial intelligence complex since the nine eleven attacks i can tell you i go to washington a couple times a year i was just there recently and every time i am taken with how it is absolutely a boom town the billions of money the money that is rushing out like a fountain under the whole rubric of homeland security you see it in the millions of feet of office space you see it in the crowded restaurants you see it in the cranes on the sky it you know it's no wonder that many of those in washington really don't understand what's going on in the rest of the country when these programs first became public knowledge it seemed to me that there was sort of a huge shrug from americans much more interested in edward snowden's flight from hawaii to hong kong and then his long stay at the moscow airport much more interested in his pole dancing girlfriend he was sort of the shiny ball that the media was racing after my friends and probably yours didn't grasp at first what these revelations actually meant everyone felt like everyone's saying well i'm not a terrorist what do i care at that i don't care if the government has all my information it's fine well what's happened is we have become accustomed to this we have voluntarily given up so much of our privacy we know that already with say an online retailer like amazon saying to you well if you bought these loafers you're going to love these sandals right and most people under the age of twenty five and i can say that as of the mother of thirteen year old twins they really don't understand privacy in the same way as those say over twenty five because of the tremendous rise of social media which has on the positive side you can keep in touch much more closely with loved ones and share photos and find out where your friends are for dinner and on the downside you've just about given away every last little bit of your privacy what's the big deal let me tell you why it matters to date to date there is no proof that the government has used this information to pursue and harass u s citizen based on their political views there's no sort of j edgar hoover like enemy lists yet but history teaches us the accumulation of personal information about law abiding citizens carries tremendous potential for abuse including harassment of minorities political enemies social activists it cannot be that hard time vision a scenario where one of us you know it's only a what is a kevin bacon the sixth up so way to find someone who maybe is on the terrorist watch list what then you have no idea who this person is but a super computer at fort meade or the soon to be operational utah data center near salt lake city has made this connection and the next thing you know you have a knock on your door this spying business officials from the director of national intelligence james clapper to very self important senators are in effect telling americans don't worry it's not that big a deal trust us we're keeping americans safe what i say is this position must be turned on since head and open up to a genuine discussion about the necessity of the necessary dynamic tension between security and privacy president obama said not that long ago that he quote welcomes the debate over the balance of security versus privacy which is a wee bit disingenuous because we would not be having this debate if we had not known about these revelations and just last week killer clinton said it chatham house in london that we need to have a quote sensible adopt a conversation about the boundaries of state surveillance of our citizens in our democracies exactly as it now stands these programs are really ripe for abuse and less we savage ground rules and barriers between authentic national security interests and potential political and i'm telling you my husband joe wilson and i know a little bit about political to cannery bruce schneier who's at cryptographer and an author on security topics has been working with the guardian as they're going through these vast amount of data all the documents that they have attained from the n by snowden and he was asked taken all together what do we know what does it reveal that we didn't know already and he said and i agree it's not a big surprise to those of us watching the intelligence community i mean this is that brazil was very upset that we were you know spying on them but you know that that those that of us that follow this what is amazing however is how robust the n s a surveillance is how pervasive and to what degree the n s a has commanded the entire internet and turned it into an internet surveillance platform excuse me he was asked well you know the n s a his mission is national security how is this snooping really going to affect the average person his answer was and i agree is that these n s a actions are making us all less safe they're not just spying on the bad guys they're deliberately weakening internet security for everyone including the good guys and it's sheer folly he said to believe that only the n s a can exploit the vulnerabilities they create internet of course is essential to our lives and it's been subverted into a gigantic surveillance platform the solutions solutions must be political and he said the best advice for the average person is to agitate for political change this scandal is no longer about privacy or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations it's gone much beyond that and i saw a metaphor that really caught my eye it said that the american body politic is suffering a severe case of auto immune disease that our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body people i respect argue that if we do not ruthlessly expand our intelligence capabilities will suffer  and they say whatever minor tweaks are necessary the argument goes the core of the operation is absolutely necessary and people will die if we falter but for me the question still remains how much of what we have is really necessary and effective and how much is bureaucratic bloat resulting in the all too familiar dynamics of organizational self aggrandizement and expansionism we need fundamental organizational reform the so called outside independent experts committee which the president has appointed with insiders insiders like michael morrell and richard clarke don't come close to doing the trick it has been suggested that maybe the n s a needs to be put into sort of receivership and insiders beginning at the very top need to be removed and excluded from the restructuring process it was their expertise that led to this mess and it would be a hindrance not a help in cleaning it up we need of forceful truly independent outsiders with strong direct congressional support who would require crude former insider dissenters like thomas drake or william binney to reveal where the bodies are buried i'm going to conclude with a quote from senator frank church and this is really prescient considering he said this in one nine hundred seventy five himself as some of you may know was in fact also the target of n s a surveillance decades ago so it's a long quote but it's worth it so stay with me he says the capability at any time could be turned around on the american people and no american would have any privacy left such as the capability to monitor everything telephone conversations telegrams it doesn't matter there'd be no place left to hide if this government ever became a tyranny if a dictator ever took charge in this country the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose a total tyranny and there'd be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government no matter how privately it was done is within the reach of the government to know such is the capability of this technology i don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge i know the capacity that there is to make tyranny total in america and we must see to it that this is agency in all that possesses technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss that is the abyss which there is no return and mind you that was spoken in  ninety five senator church has certainly absorbed the lessons of george orwell's one thousand nine hundred four and i would say from the recent evidence there is still a lot of lessons to be learned i thank you for your time and i really look forward to your question tonight is national security expert valerie plame while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i'd like to invite the radio audience to join us here at westminster church on thursday evening november seventh at seven p a conversation with howard g buffett and his son howard w buffett on the topic finding hope in a hungry world visit our website westminster forum dot org for more information on our upcoming events an plame if you would return to the pulpit i will present the questions from our audience done some good for the country as the saying goes it's always easy to point out the mistakes made right but the successes are unheralded i was really proud to serve my country i love my job and if none of that had happened in two thousand and three i would be i would be overseas right now collecting my government paycheck but doing work that i really from which i drive to a great sense of satisfaction a terrific success that i can talk about because it has been made public i was fortunate to work with some of the people that were responsible for bringing down a q khan who is the pakistani nuclear scientist who for decades was essentially a nuclear entrepreneur he would sell any nuclear technology or widget you wanted at the right price he is now more or less under house arrest in pakistan but his tentacles spread worldwide and he was very much involved in selling nuclear technology to libya and if you recall in december two thousand and three they were caught red handed and libya essentially said uncle ok we're not going to do that anymore so it's a very public case that i can talk to you about a great success and i continue to work as you mentioned in the introduction i work with a group called global zero which works toward a world without nuclear weapons i've sort of evolved in my viewpoint when i worked for the cia i was so busy in t operations i was doing things to sort of de lay her do it you can to stop nuclear proliferation or at least give a chance for diplomacy and other politics to work but i've moved a little bit down the continuum now where i really believe we have to put zero as our alternate objective we have to go to that we've just been lucky so far and that may be true that has not yet actually been demonstrated what i think is the issue of whether he is a whistleblower and heroic or whether he is a traitor will ultimately be decided but he is irrelevant to the issues that i just spoke about that's where we have to have our conversation and i think as i mentioned president obama said we need to  have a robust conversation on this he welcomes that debate indeed we do and we would not be having that debate if it were not for the revelations from snowden i'll say one more thing on that which is we now know that there  about one point four million americans with a top secret security clearance edward snowden was one of them when you have that many people with a top secret security clearance is it any wonder that maybe you have a twenty two year old private bradley manning now chelsea manning or someone like snowden who whatever their motivations comes forward and says this is this is something i feel that my conscience tells me i need to do one of our listeners as we had no interest in snowden's flight from hawaii where the media seemed upset with it or obsessed by it how can we get the media to do its job to inform us oh that's the whole conversation isn't it me back up a bit in the run up to the war with iraq i had a front row seat i was working as i mentioned on a rock w m d the operations at cia headquarters and my husband joe wilson was very actively involved in that debate leading up to the war he had served as our charged affair at the embassy in baghdad during the first gulf war he had met with saddam hussein he was serious sponsible for helping  the release of hundreds of american hostages during that first war and the first president bush called him a true american hero so he was very much to engaged in that whole debate and maybe you don't remember this  decade ago but since i was there and watching it very carefully i know that those that said wait a minute this might not be in our in our national interest to do this the me i would say you know you were called a traitor or and worse for even suggesting that maybe we need to have a more substantial conversation before we undertake the most serious of our obligations the country which is to send our sons and our daughters to kill and die in our name and the media particularly in washington you saw this was exposed more than ever the truly symbiotic relationship are reporters that of course want access to the white house they need to do that for their stories but then you know if they maybe some of the reporting is not liked by the administration they are denied access which is not good for their career much less their their networks i don't have a simple answer to that only that we need to continue to press our media ask questions maybe if we'd asked had the media ask more invasive questions in the run up to the war with iraq of like what are you going to do the day after what do you you know what is the planning how is this going to affect we would not be looking back i think this country does with great regret with our actions in iraq i was somewhat heartened to see that despite the truly horrific pictures that everyone saw in august with the chemical gas attack in syria and there was a hue and cry we must do something the american people though clearly fatigued by our military adventures over the last decade sort of with more or less one voice said what are we going to do what how is this going to make things better and furthermore we're not even sure that those that are against the assad regime are really going to be on our side after that you know the next day and so we did pull back and there does seem to be some very good progress there they through a variety of several events that lead us to the point where they are destroying our chemical arsenal now so now they can kill each other by more conventional means but it's it's really the role of the media in this is critical and we as citizens need to push and keep asking those questions are interesting intelligence about iran's nuclear program appeals like a similar build up to the iraq situation i believe tomorrow talks start in geneva at a very high level between iran and the united states on the issue of iran's nuclear clear clear they they desire a nuclear weapon and i am heartened by that because it's the first time since the revolution that the iranian revolution that we've had diplomatic talks at that level that's huge imagine with your friends that you haven't spoken to  some weeks or months or even years how the potential for misunderstanding miscommunication grows right when you don't speak the same thing goes with nation states i don't believe that diplomatic relations should parcelled out like you know ice cream cones for those we like i think the united states is great enough that we can speak to our enemies and our friends alike and i am really pleased that we are finally on has clearly been deeply hurt by the sanctions that we've imposed on them but they also want to rejoin the community of nations i believe that there is a there is a lot of interesting things that are swirling around right now but i think any time that you begin to have that dialogue of what's in their best national interest in what's in our best national  interest you can and you can start someplace and i'm very i'm going to be following that very carefully how does a scope and effectiveness as a visual information monitoring compare with that of other countries say china for instance i'm not an expert clearly china or is very much using their capabilities offensively but from what i have read in  preparation for my remarks this evening and everything that i have seen i think n s a is capabilities are certainly superior i'm not saying that by any means that you take anyone  else's any other country's attempts at doing the same thing casually or underestimate them but the point of my remarks this evening is we really need to pay attention to how this will affect all of us and ask questions and find people that think like you to say wait a minute is this really how we want to set up our democracy or to continue to be in this society in this d government more foreboding or ominous to you now that you're on the outside compared to how it looked when you were on the inside there is a little to something to be said for when you're sort of in the water swimming with the other fish and you know you don't you don't realize that you're in water right and then when i resigned from the cia and two thousand and seven because obviously my covert career was over i thought i had the best job in the world i could no longer continue and then you step away though that was a little strange wasn't it but living that cover and living that life and of course they give you a lot of training to go into it it i never found it particularly strange i mean it was i loved working on counterproliferation issues i loved living and working abroad i had some i met some amazing people along the way when you whether you're in the cia or serve in the diplomatic service or serve in the military when you were overseas you were not serving as a democrat or republican right you were serving as an american and that was definitely my mindset when we were back in washington and all of this happened for terms of the leak of my dennehy in two thousand and three and the resultant consequences of that i certainly paid much closer attention to politics and i ever had before but i have to say honestly it seemed the entire country sort of there was some seminal shift some polarization that happened after the election of two thousand when i was growing up it was sort of considered poor form to talk about politics right at the dinner table and no one has inhibitions anymore  which is goes both ways but i am concerned just as a private citizen now of of course what we're seeing in the news right now is seemingly inability to govern to come to any sort of compromise to find practical solutions and on the issues that i just spoke about this evening of security versus privacy you have any evidence or suspicion that your communication is being monitored  well i will tell you that my co author who's sarah love it and she also lives in new mexico by by coincidence she we work together on blowback and it is fictional ok it's a spy thriller but i will tell you that a lot of times our communications don't get through to each other a lot and i had i don't know i had i would be who knows  clearly there is a big net out there a big big that we should know that the n s a doesn't need to listen in tonight they can hear you tomorrow on n p r i had new england how convenient how convenient how would any of us know that we are being monitored by the government i refer i was preparing my remarks for this evening i was looking at that and people who i look to that are a lot smarter on those issues than i am say basically we're in trouble there is no way a lot of back doors have been built into the internet security products that are out there because the government knocks on the door of the company that's making them and says ok this is very very well and good that you have your private communications but in case there is any sort of terrorist action we need to be able to get into this and you may have heard over the summer there are some of these private encryption firms that actually closed their doors rather than allow the government turning over their sort of customer lists to the government and they were really i listen to some of their interviews they're extremely prescribed from what they can say publicly i mean they can't even say publicly yeah the government won't let me do this they may have to really just talk around it but i find that frightening i there is no guarantee of safety right there is no guarantee of safety that is part of the that is a human condition so how much are we willing to give up i've flown a locked within the last two weeks on this book tour and you know every time i stand in line and take up my shoes i think you know how much are we going to give up to continue that a false sense of security if we follow the money where do we end up who is especially is profiting from the privatization of security well as i said just go to washington d really it is boom town folks it the money there is unbelievable and this comes from out i think the figures are somewhere between estimates between sixty and seventy percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors what really i agree there are some things that can be done more effectively more cost efficient in the private sector but i don't think we should be hand if we should be giving them core core intelligence mission work and they say they're not supposed to and they don't do that but that's not how it happens in reality so who is profiting the i would say those that have those really nice government contracts and they go billions and billions and billions of dollars that we have spent in the last decade as a result of the nine eleven attacks and our need for security at the expense i would say of things like infrastructure education jobs you know you know the list say something about your personal background if you would how did you end up working for the cia who were your role models growing up what put you in that direction i think what i can say i can't tell you the specifics or how old i was when i joined the cia because the agency has taken the position that i'm not permitted to acknowledge any agency affiliation prior to two thousand and two i dropped from the sky but what i can tell you is this so i come from a family where public service is considered something something noble maybe that sounds corny ok so my my dad fought in world war two in the south pacific he was an air force officer my brother served and was wounded in vietnam as a marine my mother was a public schoolteacher so when i was given this opportunity to join the cia i left i it sounded first of all it sounded like a lot more interesting than what any of my friends were doing and i was delighted that the government was going to pay me to live and work overseas and as i said i love my job and growing up i can say that i can't say that i grew up thinking that working for the cia or espionage was a viable career option i didn't i didn't think that at all but it sort of fell in my lap and although i i think back now and i really did enjoy harriet the spy you know that book thank you for revealing that secret now another security agencies have gotten the taste of near total surveillance is putting the genie back in the bottle even possible is resistance futile imo i'm an optimist by nature we we are at the point you wonder what is the tipping point there is no constituency really in terms of pushing back against such a vast call it the military industrial intelligence complex right there's not a whole lot of money in it you're not going to see lobbyists giving millions of dollars to their congressmen and women to say you know you really need to downsize here is just way too big but where it can be changes as it always is in a democracy you find like minded people you find the candidates who support your viewpoint you began you are engaged whether that is at a local level serving on your local library board or whatever you know stuffing avalos for a candidate you believe in or i mean there's so many ways to be engaged and i there are days as these days are very disheartening to be a citizen of this country but i am slightly heartened when i remember winston churchill's quote which he says democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried if the president were to call you and ask you to come to the oval office and make two or three suggestions about the military industrial intelligence complex what would you say oh that's such an overwhelming question isn't it first i'd want to make sure that you know i had the right shoes overwhelming i would speak to him if he would give me you know getting thirty seconds of the president's time is absolutely precious but i try to condense what i just said down into that thirty seconds and he is obviously got a long to do list a long to do list i'm sure there are days when he wakes up because i'm still the president but i am i do know that  his one of his personal feeling one of his personal things that he wants to accomplish and you know that he's thinking about legacy even in the midst of these really terrible anxious days and something he feels personally about is continuing to reduce working on reducing the nuclear arsenals of the u s and russia we still have the preponderance of nuclear weapons ninety percent in the world and this is somewhere that he has made tremendous progress he has moved the needle for the first time and so i might use maybe fifteen seconds of that time to like and keep encouraging to do that because with all the problems that we have and we do have a lot if you do not get that one right the nuclear issue in a political let me tell you one of the other ones matter it appears that our right to privacy continues to erode for instance i'm still unhappy that anyone can look into my backyard thanks to google maps what can an ordinary citizen do this is really hard again from my research on this you know i've asked that question we the internet now is the interval part of our lives i don't know who's willing to live on cash economy you know just cash the internet brings us tremendous amount of advantages as you know you get all kinds of things delivered right to your door i i go back to it has to be we're in a democracy and it has to go back to political solutions and if this is something that you care about you find those that are in office that are concerned most recently we have seen a great deal on this issue from senators ron wyden and senator udall who have spoken out again and again and again to say wait a minute what are we doing here on on the n s a this is a tremendous overreach are always very careful with their words not to go into any sort of classified territory but those are two senators that come to mind that have really worked very hard on this issue to protect our children and youth from the dangers you warn us about loss of privacy what do you protect your two thirteen year old twins  or my my i saw have a son and a daughter thirteen year old twins and in typical developmental fashion it's my daughter who is much more social and finds all of that much more alluring my son tends to just text you know suck up to his friends so i told my dad for that i would just speak from my my what i have been doing personally i allow  thirteen she really wanted a facebook account and up till that point i had been able to say it's illegal to do it before you're thirteen but at thirteen she can open an account and i told her that i had to open up an account but i said i'm going to be i'm going to be watching everything that comes in and goes out not because of you because you know it's a big wide world out there and of course a potential as we hearing more and more about bullying online bowling all of that you just want to watch everything that comes in and goes out and i tell you it is such a i feel like a fuddy duddy and i'm not but keeping up with whatever you know snap chat was the thing for a while then it's  these things which i try to tell myself that this is actually good is keeping my synapses moving i'm not you know stuck in 's you know but it requires constant vigilance and so parenting teenagers isn't hard enough right there's this whole new wave of things that you need to be aware of and how i think schools are really going to have to step up a lot more they were so far they be able to say oh what happens outside of school is not it's not our concern but in fact it becomes it's such a part of our lives now whether it's you know bulling or whatever it might be so i see a growth industry there over the next decade it's been ten years since you are outed in robert novak's column how do you feel about that now a decade later how do you feel about him which part well he's dead i know decade time and space as i mentioned we moved from washington to new mexico and that has been very helpful we've been busy rebuilding our lives professionally and personally it was a really searing experience but millions of people lose their jobs all the time and you need to figure it out and put your shoes on lay some up and keep walking forward what was really helpful was that we had then small children and they really don't care how your day was they really just want your affection and your love in your attention and having you know to be able to concentrate on them and move away from what could otherwise be completely toxic self absorption was probably really mentally healthy you have time for one more question given the state of washington today and what you know about it are you hopeful about america and its future it i can always joke about it of course but right we're on the we're on the eve we don't really know where this country's going to be going in the next few days and months how is this going to happen i am optimistic because i do a lot of speaking to young people in universities and they are bright and engaged and caring and i always encourage them to consider public service the other thing i'm encouraged about is when i see what comes of called social entrepreneurs right where they're using they're using the power of technology to solve problems used to be just sort of all non profits but now that it just sort of like been blown up and when you see what you can see in some of the problem solving of the world in places like in the ted talks and so forth that we go ok i mean i think it's always a race between for the human race between education and catastrophe which one's go ourselves i hope the answer is yes i just saw that i will end on this that paul mccartney just put out a new album the first one in six years and one of his songs the lyrics to one of his songs says something like before you go try to do something good right and that's all you can do is you try to take whatever you've been given whatever is positive pass it along in whatever form that might be and that's all you can