 December's CSIS Schieffer School Dialog discusses the impact WikiLeaks is having on public policy and journalism. CSIS's own Dr. John Hamery said that what was most remarkable about the leaks is that information revealed is consistent with what we already know about U.S. policy. Following is the full video of today's discussion. You can also see a highlight package on csis.org. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I'm a little nervous tonight because I've got like four of my bosses here, Dr. Hamery, Bob Schieffer. I think there's my dad's here, too, so I've got to be really on my best behavior. I'd like to, if anybody's confused from the cold, this is not a press conference for the Rose Bowl. This is CSIS and a partnership with TCU, the Schieffer School of Journalism. I'd like to acknowledge Dean David Willock, the Dean of the School of Communications who's here with us now. I'd also like to introduce the Vice Chancellor of TCU, Larry Lauer, in the back, and for any of you horned frogs who might want to connect with them later. I'd also like to really announce the presence of a true American hero. General Hayden is here with us tonight. I'd like to say a little bit of him. Thank you for being here, sir. Before we get started on this really fascinating session, I also like to, I feel compelled to say a word. This has been a sad week in Washington. Ambassador Holbrook, of course, passed away last night, and we wanted to say here at CSIS that we're thinking about the Holbrook family and all of his friends. I know many of you have had the occasion to work with him in the past, but we're all thinking about Ambassador Holbrook. With that, I'd like to turn to my good friend Bob Schieffer and go for there. Thank you very much. And the horned frogs of TCU will be going to the Rose Bowl. They'll be playing Wisconsin, which is why I'm wearing my purple socks. I've been wearing purple socks all season, and it's worked. So they're two and a half point favorites in case those of you who are reminded of that, I think it's a really good bet. I'd also like to introduce, this is the first year for the Schieffer School of Journalism to have a semester in Washington, and two of our scholars who have been here, Courtney Jay and Kaylee Hunter. And I think Lauren Sanders is also here. Lauren is one, I think, is interning here at CSIS. So she's one of the people up taking tickets at the door. Courtney and Kaylee. Well, this is really, this whole subject we're talking about. I can't thank you for anything more timely or more important, and we're so happy to have, making his first appearance as a panelist here, Dr. Hamre, the head of CSIS. And you all know Dr. Hamre, former Defense Department official, Deputy Secretary of Defense. Before that, 10 years, he was one of the professional members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a professional staffer. Karen DeYoung, my friend, longtime friend, author of Soldier, The Life of Colin Powell. She's an associate editor now at the Washington Post, currently writes about terrorism issues from the National and Foreign Test. She's had a great career at the Post and truly one of the most respected reporters in town. And I would also say the same about Scott Shane, reporter for the Washington Bureau of the New York Times, covers national security. He was one of those who, I guess it's fair to say, I don't want to say you negotiated with the State Department. But when the Times got all these documents, you were one of the ones who went to the State Department and said, we want to show you what we've got here and what do you think about it. I'm going to ask you about that in a minute. He's been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize before coming to the New York Times. He was also a reporter at the Baltimore Sun Moscow Bureau Chief there. Dr. Hamre, I want to start with you as a former Defense official. A private first class somehow has access to 250,000 documents, many of them highly classified. How did that happen? Well, it was a good idea, very badly engineered. After 9-11, we had a sense as a nation that we had information that other people needed in the government in order to accomplish the larger task of situational awareness. So we decided to try to provide much, much broader access. That was the good idea. But the bad implementation is to not differentiate who has the need for what kind of information. So a corporal in the Army may have need for relevant tactical information about terrorists or suspected terrorists in the Middle East, but would have no plausible need to know about a conversation with the President of Russia about arms control. Yet we did not in any sense engineer access the right way. We made it broadly available because that was the easiest way to make it available. And it reflects, I think, the failings of our clearance process. It's a larger issue. It's something that we need to change. We have basically a perimeter security concept. You get into the perimeter, we give you a clearance, and then you can see anything you want. So if you drive into Washington D.C., you can go in any home you want to go into. That makes no sense. It needs to be engineered in a different way, and we've got a real black eye here. I mean, it's beyond making no sense. It's absurd. Well, you know, the challenge of government is taking ideas and engineering them practically with the constraints you have. And we have, you know, the department has a large network of classified information, and the easiest thing is to simply add more to it. Without differentiating on the side of who's reading and do they need all of that? We just aired on the side of making far too much information available to a broad range of people, most of whom did not need it. Now, most of them don't go off this kind of voyeurism that we saw. That's not the norm. Most of our people behave quite appropriately. But we clearly had a problem individual who chose for other reasons to undertake what was a little more than voyeurism. And it is so easy now to put this material on a media and haul it out and then transmit it. But it was a very badly engineered good idea. Let me talk to you, Scott, about, so here you are at the New York Times, and this stuff comes to you. What happened after that? How did you make a decision, the editors at the Times, to accept it? And what did you do with it after you got it? What happened between that time and when we first began to see it show up in the New York Times? Well, there were, as you recall, there were three sort of batches of documents that the Times got from WikiLeaks, the first two directly, the third, because the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, apparently had taken offense at a profile that we'd published of him. He didn't want to give us the third group of documents, which were the State Department cables. But the Guardian, which had sort of agreed along with us in Der Spiegel in Germany, agreed to give us the cables so that we would continue this sort of cooperative arrangement. So we had 250,000 cables. You referred to them as highly classified. They're not actually that highly classified by Washington standards. About 11,000, if I remember correctly, of the 25,000 were secret, but nothing was classified higher than that. And a lot of it's unclassified, a lot of it's confidential. But certainly from the State Department's point of view, an awful lot of it, they absolutely did not want out. So as you can imagine that you're sitting there with 250,000 documents, it's an almost impossible amount of stuff to go through. So we created a search engine that you could limit by time, by the embassy from which the cable was sent, by the classification level, and certain other criteria, and then we just started doing searches. And you tried to think of keywords and subject areas that might be newsworthy. And you would sort of plow through everything out of the embassy in Kabul, for example, in the last two years. This is time-wise, this collection. How many people did you have? Probably all told working on it. In terms of people actually reading cables, there were probably about 15 of us, and there were another two or three people who were sort of the tech people designing the database. But I should say that the very earliest cable in this collection is 1966, but there's really only a handful from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and the majority of it is actually from the last three years. So it's sort of, there's far more recent and it cuts off presumably because of the circumstances, which it came to us in February of 2010. You go through that and then you get it down to how many? Well, I mean, everybody kind of came up with a different way of doing this, but I, for example, one of the things we wanted to look at was Afghan corruption. And so, you know, my way of looking at that was to narrow it to the last few years of cables from Kabul and then use words like bribes, corruption. And, you know, gradually you would, you'd find a cable and you'd copy it out into a document and you'd create a kind of collection of Afghan corruption cables, and then you'd sort of use that as the base of the report. And before you published them, what did you do with those that you thought were of interest? Well, we had a sort of elaborate arrangement to publish this on a schedule, on a rough schedule by topic with the Guardian, with El País in Spain, with Le Monde in France, and with Der Spiegel, the magazine in Germany. And so we kind of had a rough schedule for about ten days or two weeks of days and subjects. But we also identified about 100 cables that we wanted to publish on the New York Times website and we gave those to the State Department and said they had them, of course, but we identified those 100 cables. You told them you had them. We told them we had them and these are the ones that we intend to publish. And do you have, you know, do you want to participate in sort of advising us on what you think might be particularly damaging or dangerous if it's published? What did they do? Well, I mean their initial stance was this is stolen classified material and you shouldn't have it and we don't want you to publish any of it. And that was understandable and we said, well, we still intend to publish it and then they were very helpful in identifying stuff that in many cases we'd already redacted. I mean, I'd been through a lot of the cables with the reports working on the stories and we'd taken out a lot of stuff before we sent them over to the State Department. What did you take out? I mean, give me an example. Well, almost the vast majority of what we took out were the names and identities of people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats in what you would consider to be repressive countries. So there would be human rights activists or journalists or even government officials or military officials whose lives might be whose lives or probably in most cases perhaps their freedom or their careers or something would be in jeopardy. In Russia, in China, in Libya, in any number of other places, if you spoke sort of out of school to American diplomats, you could get any help from them. Did you withhold any documents at the request of the State Department? We withheld a couple of documents that news-wise, they were certainly interesting, we would have published, we didn't post them at all because, you know, there was a strong case that they would damage, you know, in the case of one that I'm thinking of, American, a sensitive intelligence cooperation program involving another country. All right, well, let me go now to Karen. Now, the post did not get any of these. Let me just ask you, oh, why? And what would you have done if you had gotten something somewhere out of it? We, like the Times, were told with the early releases, you know, there was the release of Afghanistan documents and Iraq documents, military documents earlier, and we were told by WikiLeaks that we had published something about Julian Assange that they didn't feel was to their liking, and we were told specifically that they were not going to deal with us. Obviously, we knew the documents were coming, we didn't know exactly when, and so we were in the position of simply watching for it to drop, which it did on that Saturday afternoon when the Times and the Guardian and the Spiegel published their initial accounts, which ran on several Sundays ago. And so each of them published documents along with the stories that they published, often different documents. And so I think in fact the Guardian probably posted a lot more than you did. Actually, it was interesting that WikiLeaks itself had a very strange selection of documents and still does, that they've chose to publish themselves, and often you will see very obscure things that have come up on their website wherever you can find it on any given day, because obviously it moves all over the place as it gets shut down in various places. So we were left close to our deadline every day to look at the documents, and I did most of the stories, and what I tried to do was not look at everyone's stories about them, but to look at the documents themselves that were released across a wide spectrum of organizations and try to see what we thought was important in terms of stories. You know, people almost immediately began to talk about this as they did about the Pentagon Papers. Of course, your paper was the one that published the Pentagon Papers, and I notice now that Daniel Ellsberg has said that he's strongly in favor of this WikiLeaks undertaking, and he compares it to that. I'm not sure I would, do you? No, I don't compare it to that. I mean, I think that what's amazing about these documents, at least the ones that I've seen so far, is that with very few exceptions they tend to cover issues that we or other media organizations have already written about and provide additional details that are always good to have in stories, and it's always good, obviously, to have actual words of officials as opposed to anonymous officials, which is what we usually end up quoting on these kinds of stories. But I think in terms of substance, now there were some exceptions. There were some having to do with Iran, some having to do with North Korea, and some that in the aggregate seemed to show policy going in a certain direction that actually did move the ball in terms of what we knew. But I think, by and large, it was, there were things that we knew, and in fact that we and others had written about before. Can I just? Yes. The reason the Pentagon Papers had such impact is because it was a private story that was at variance with a public presentation. We're not seeing that with this. What you're seeing here is fairly good objective reporting by diplomats written fairly well that's quite consistent with the public message. So it doesn't have anything like the Pentagon Papers in terms of its meaning. Do you think, as a reporter, it's always hard for me to argue for government secrecy, but I do believe in some cases that you have to have some things that remain secret. I mean, I just think you do. And I stand second to no one in my defense in the First Amendment. I stand second to no one in saying that there's too much government secrecy. But having said that, I find this extremely troubling that something like this could happen. And do you think the government, Dr. Hamery, acted quickly enough in getting on this and trying to come to some understanding of how this private could somehow get a hold of all this stuff? Well, the dilemma of how a private could get access to this kind of information is really deeply embedded in a much larger problem. It's how we give clearances to people, the kind of information we give to them, the nature of modern communication tools. Solving this is a huge problem. It's going to take many years to fix it. And frankly, we need to get on with fixing it. So the government responded with the immediate crisis. It now has to figure out the long-term viable solution. Do you think, Karen, this is journalism? WikiLeaks? I don't think I classified as journalism just a sort of release of documents for the sake of releasing them to say that you have them. I mean, WikiLeaks has described this as an effort to stop, I think they've said, an immoral and illegal set of policies. But they themselves did not analyze what they thought was immoral or illegal or point out what in these documents would support that thesis. I think that it's incumbent on us to try to put things in context and to try to explain why it's important, what preceded it, what came after it, and what was going on around it. That I think is our responsibility. But I wanted to go back to something that John said. What surprised me was even more than the fact that someone at a relatively low level apparently could have access to these documents in the military, but that there was no trigger for when there were downloads that had not been authorized. It would seem to me that that would be even easier if you wanted to do a sort of interim. Our security system, again, it's a perimeter security system. If you give someone a secret clearance, they can see secret material. The only way that you can constrain that is by going through a fairly disciplined effort about putting additional qualifiers on information. That's a hard job and we chose not to do it. We should have, but we chose not to do it. Sorry, go right ahead. I was just going to say there are a few things, depending on what it is doing, that's already done. Disabling the CD and DVD write drives on many of its computers so that a guy like this can't just put everything on a CD as he did and walk out. That's one thing they've done and they are supposedly experimenting with the kind of, you know, you get those calls from your credit card company saying, you know, this is an unusual purchase for you, is this you? It's a fraud detection mechanism and so they're beginning to build that stuff in so that if someone, you know, suddenly downloads, you know, a thousand terabytes of information in some of the outposts that alarm bells go off. There are things we can do, but it's a more complex dimension than simply how you use a credit card. Tell me, Scott, I mean, obviously you were very responsible. The Times was very responsible in how they went about handling this. Tell me about some of the thinking that went into this and how you decided to publish it in the first place and why you thought this was something you needed to do. Well, it is a QL. You said it's obvious that we were responsible. I think there are many people who don't find it obvious. Including the U.S. State Department, but you're kind to say so. We still, we did try to exercise judgment in terms of what we published and what we wouldn't, both in terms of newsworthiness and in terms of, as I was saying, you know, what the downside would be for the government or for individuals. And I guess the three categories, there was that first category which I think we tend to agree with the government on, of individuals in oppressive countries who could really be in deep trouble, whose lives might even be at stake. That was probably the easiest category. The second category would be sensitive programs that the U.S. was engaged in. And an example of something that they, that the government was not happy that we ran but we did end up deciding to run was a cable that went out and it was one of many cables along these lines that went out to embassies into the U.N. to say to diplomats, here are categories of intelligence information we'd like you to correct and it could collect. And some of it was biographical information about foreigners they were dealing with but some of it went all the way down to credit card numbers and frequent flyer numbers of foreign diplomats. And we knew from talking around to people that there was controversy within the diplomatic corps about whether they should really be asked to, you know, God knows how you do it, I guess at the lunch table kind of peer over and scribble down the credit card number but whether that was appropriate, whether it was too risky and whether it blurred the line too much between intelligence collection and diplomatic work. So that when we decided to run, you know, over their objection then the third category would be where their objection was more geez we just really would like you not to run that because it's really going to strain our relations with this guy or, you know, just make things more difficult the next time we talk to him and in general I have to say we did not usually go along with those requests. But again the majority of their requests and of what we agreed to were protecting the individual. Let me just ask all three and I'll start with you Karen. Was there anything and there were some of these things like that that were fascinating, I mean in the same way reading other people's mail has a certain fascination. We're human beings, we can't help it. The interesting things we're not supposed to know about. Karen was there anything in there and I'll ask all three of you in these releases that was the surprise that told us something we really didn't know because it strikes me that a lot of it we just saw background to tale on a lot of things that we already knew about for the most part. Well I think the one that Scott just mentioned the collection the asking diplomats to collect information like credit cards bank account numbers was of people at the United Nations was sort of surprising. If you'd worked in foreign policy for long enough that this had to be something that would cause a lot of consternation. The same way it does with journalists who are asked sometimes in some places to be a source of information in terms of damaging their credibility. I don't think in substance you know if you look at the corruption in Afghanistan certainly there were new details. There was some new information more specifics about President Karzai's brother in Kandahar. So you had a broader and deeper sense of what it was that the Americans objected to about him. I think with Yemen you saw what we had already reported that the government their cooperation with the US government in terms of counterterrorism operations was pretty deep. You saw in the case of Yemen and in Pakistan where governments had denied agreeing to these kinds of programs but everybody and his brother had reported that they agreed to it. It certainly causes them difficulties at home when you see in their own words their agreement to it not only their agreement but their desire to cover it up from their own public. So you expand your knowledge on those things. I don't think in the first instance the fact that something has happened or that a policy is in motion. No, I think there was very little of that. What about that? Do you find out anything that you didn't know? No. Let me just say I think very important. Democracies have to undertake, governments have to do things in secret but democracies have to ultimately sustain a public debate about their policies and their goals. What was remarkable here was how consistent this was. We did not see any activity being reported that was not broadly sustained by our public discourse. But democracies do need to have the capacity to have private conversations. I know you think it's so what if it's about making relations harder. That is an important dimension. If there was a broad disconnect between what we were saying as a nation to our citizens publicly and what we were saying to ourselves privately it would be a more legitimate complaint. But the fact that it was largely consistent, hugely consistent tells me that the government does deserve a vote of confidence in being able to protect the informal discourse of diplomacy. Do you think there is any serious damage that's been done? Well, Big Brzezinski here says, you know, this is like I think Metternich once said well this is catastrophic but not serious. You know, this is really bad. I mean ultimately I don't believe it's going to because it testifies to the integrity of our diplomacy in my view. But it is very difficult for our diplomats to have the next conversation and the next conversation with people. And I think we're going to find foreign interlocutors that are going to be less forthcoming and we're going to find our own diplomats less forthcoming and how they convey things. And I think this is going to be a detriment. Any real no's, I mean... You know, I think I would agree that there were no huge scoops which is sort of what you'd expect given the secret and below classification level. But I think, you know, in a way, in a democracy it's newsworthy that what the diplomats are saying is not at odds with what we generally understand our foreign policy to be. And, you know, while undoubtedly there are some relations that are strained you know, this is sort of a scattershot thing and, you know, you could all... Very quickly you saw Secretary of State Clinton and others using these revelations to the advantage of the United States. For example, there were a number of leaders in the Arab world who were outed as being extremely fearful and outspoken against the notion of Iran having nuclear weapons. That is not a huge surprise, but it's something they tend not to say publicly and certainly not to say, as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said, you know, you must cut off the head of the snake. And Secretary Clinton very quickly while deploring the leaks and talking about the damage it could cause also began to say, geez, you know, it's interesting to see we're not alone, we in Israel are not alone in being fearful about this. And one other thing I should say is that I think diplomats, many diplomats including some I talked to were very distressed at this and thought it would make their jobs harder. There was a sort of undercurrent of pride in what I think many people that I spoke with were impressed with the general quality of their work, the quality of their writing and their reporting. And you know, one of my favorite cables was something I stumbled across early on that I think kind of became a little bit of a hit. I know NPR read part of it and it was a report by a diplomat from the embassy in Moscow on a wedding in Dagestan in the Caucasus. Just a wild, thoroughly reported and extremely entertaining account that's not momentous in the kind of annals of diplomacy or statecraft but you know, certainly doing a service in trying to tell Washington, you know, here's part of Russia, it's a volatile part of Russia, you know, the dictator of Chechnya came to the wedding with his entourage and supposedly left a five kilogram lump of gold as his wedding present. And you know, just a wild scene and a wonderful piece of reporting. So I think, you know, it did show that a lot of diplomats have a lot to be proud of. Let me ask all of you, and then those of you in the audience, we certainly want to take your questions, you have some. So while we're going, making this final round, we think of your question. What do you make, Karen, and I'll ask all of you this, of this so-called anonymous group that sprung up the sort of take on the people who took on WikiLeaks like PayPal that closed their account and Amazon and so forth. Should we all be shaking in our boots here that these people might be going after all of us here if you say an ugly word about WikiLeaks or something? I think it's distressing, I think it's kind of sad that, and it's a reflection of I think what's some of the worst of the internet and social networking that it simply throws things up against the wall like spaghetti to see what will stick. And I don't want to say that the mainstream media or lame stream media, whatever you want to call it, has an inside, should have an inside avenue into all that's good and worth talking about. But I do think that there's a responsibility to look at what's done with information. And information in and of itself is not worth all that much unless you have a context to put it in, unless you have some understanding of why it's important. I guess personally it's sort of my, to the extent I have a problem with it and as a journalist there are many ways in which I don't have a problem with it but to the extent I do it is this sort of, going back to what I said before, we are attacking the immoral and the illegal about what the United States is doing without being able to articulate exactly what that is. And so to the extent that people jump up and say, everything should be public all the time, I think that that both personally for people in this country and in terms of the government is problematic. We've got three issues that are kind of frequent conflated and fortunately we've not done that here but one is a flawed government employee who acted independently in violation of this pledge and a government that engineered very poorly a security system. That's the first. Second are these cyber-anarchists that do not have a rationale other than just a capacity to create chaos and then we have the story of responsible journalists struggling with information bridging across the two. To me it's why I'm so worried about the collapse of professional journalism because we've had the discipline of editorial observation that has given us a sense of what is and is not news. We're contrasting here what cyber-anarchists are putting out for the world to see and what responsible journalists are struggling to manage. We may not like it. I frankly don't like anything about this but I respect the fact that you've wrestled with it and you did a very responsible job within the boundaries of how you saw your duties. I really do respect that. We're going to deeply regret losing that as being the foundation of journalism and that's what's in front of us is a world of these cyber-anarchists. What is ground truth in cyberspace now? And that's a problem. Well one of the most interesting things to me in this whole episode and something that's sometimes gotten lost in the reporting you often heard on the radio or TV, WikiLeaks is an organization that released 250,000 secret diplomatic cables. In a limited sense that's true. They released them actually initially to a number of European publications. As far as we know they got these, I don't have any inside knowledge but it appears they got them in May or June. If they were really living up to the cyber-anarchist creed that everything should be public all the time they could have in an instant dumped 250,000 unredacted cables online and it would have been much more of a tidal wave of information whether people would have really been able to make their way through it. Who knows. But either because they felt burned over the Afghanistan documents where they took a lot of heat for failing to redact out some names of Afghan informants who were presumably put in danger they retreated with the Iraq document dump they actually ended up redacting with computers and stripping names out of them and the documents they put up were more severely redacted than the ones we put up. With this cache of documents they basically have been mostly in lockstep with these publications and I have been part of a kind of bizarre process where when we redacted documents we were sending them back to WikiLeaks and they were posting them in redacted form and they were actually saying sometimes Al-Pais has redacted this document this way and you redacted that way and they were taking some care and these are anonymous people. I have no idea who these people are. Let me just ask you. I was just going to say they have only released this is a little known fact it's kind of lost. WikiLeaks has about somewhere in the neighborhood of I think 1,500 documents up on its website now out of these 250,000 so they're not even at 1% yet and what's going to happen from here on out who knows but the cyber anarchists have sort of realized that some restraint is necessary. It appears. Well do you know who these people are? I mean other than Ashash does anybody know who they are? Where do they operate from? Do they have an office? Maybe this is public but I don't. I mean I know very little about them. I mean it's a bunch of volunteers in a number of countries. Assange has been reported to be with some of his associates outside London in recent times. He's been in Sweden at other times. I mean they're sort of a virtual group. You know I've heard some names. I've known some names. There have been people, you know it's like the PTA or something people drop out. They get disgruntled and they leave. They left and started something called Open Leaks now. So it's not exactly a stable organization like CSIS with an address. I mean they don't. They have some similarities though. Despite the overwhelming somewhere. You don't know where they are basically. I mean you know there's some people out there. They're very hard to, you know I have one e-mail address for a guy but they're very hard to connect. I think there's some in Iceland. Yeah. I mean it's the girl with the dragon tattoo. Exactly. Does anybody got a question here that they step right up Lloyd? With your permission, three related questions. One, did any of the publications pay WikiLeaks for any of the material? Secondly, is that true? Well to my knowledge the answer is no. I don't think any of the ones we've been dealing with have paid. There was the Wall Street Journal I believe reported that they were once offered a deal where if they broke an embargo on the documents they would have to pay WikiLeaks $100,000 and they refused to enter into it. It wasn't exactly an up-front payment but it was some kind of scheme where they'd pay if they published the documents before a particular date. But that was never I don't think part of our deal so we've never entered into any kind of monetary agreement with WikiLeaks. Let me ask these two parts and then you can answer them. One is that setting aside the legal niceties if the gravamen of the offensive espionage and treason is the damage to the country is the country damaged any less by someone who steals classified document and sells it to a foreign government in contrast to someone who acquires known stolen classified documents and makes it available to all foreign governments. And the second question is what is the rationale do you think whereby someone substitutes his or her judgment for an official who determines that a document should be classified? Well, let me try to strike a balance here without being a partisan. No, I mean any release of classified is damaging but so too is it damaging for us to have a debate that tears at the consensus of American society. Americans want, everybody that came here wanted to leave where they were and they were nervous about the government so every American's got a genetic disposition towards wanting to be protected by the government and to be protected from the government. And this is that delicate balance where we have to strike it all the time. I personally think this was quite damaging and I deeply regret it. I also think that if we were to try to shut down the New York Times it would be far more damaging in American society. This is one of these painful things we go through all the time to basically rely on the professionalism of very good journalists and responsible companies to work with us at times like this. I would just say as a journalist I think there are times when a journalist puts his judgment ahead of that of someone in the government. Just because somebody's in the government doesn't automatically wisdom doesn't automatically accrue with a title as a government official and I think there's a question when you come to it when you have caught the government in an absolute lie and it's a significant lie and you're able to show that it's a lie then I think a journalist is justified in publishing that and I think that's kind of what American journalism is all about. Even if it involves classified documents. Well, sometimes documents are classified for no other reason that they might not be true. Anybody who's been in Washington knows and understands that but I'm just saying you're asking for a justification. That would be one of the justifications that I would cite and you know if if people didn't make those judgments the whole idea that whistleblowers people of that nature I think there's a lot of good come from whistleblowers from time to time but I think there are times when responsible news organizations make a decision to do that they don't do it just off the top oh let's just do that it'll be a lot of fun they give it a lot of thought just like New York Times has done just like CBS News has done in Times Pass it's responsibility and that's the part that a lot of people in mainstream journalism wonder where the responsibility was in WikiLeaks in making the decision but I would ask if you draw a distinction between information that is not passed through a document information that's passed in conversations that we have every day of the week that could be considered classified or does it have to be just something in a document I think it's pretty well established law that the First Amendment means that if we know something that we have the option of publishing it you have the option as a citizen of saying this is garbage and you shouldn't be allowed to do this and then trying to take action to stop it but I think our responsibility is whether it's through conversations or looking at documents that we don't publish which we do all the time or somebody actually handing you a document which is actually I mean this was a kind of massive handover of documents but the fact is that very little of what I do and I would guess what Scott does too is having someone just hand you a document that just doesn't that's a very rare experience relatively One other thing about classified documents however is anyone who's walled around in declassified documents or filed a Freedom of Information Act request and gotten documents that were previously classified delivered to them I mean there are sort of semi-famous examples some of them you can find on the web and most of us who've been doing this for a while have seen them where a document through oversight or being asked for from two different organizations agencies redacts it twice you know once it's redacted in 1990 and once it's redacted in 1995 it's a very different agency and the first agency figures the top half of the page is very sensitive and blacks it out and the second agency thinks actually the bottom half of the page is very sensitive and blacks it out and you get both of them and you know and it just shows that what should be classified and at what level is a very subjective process and one other small point is you know and this is a fairly extreme example obviously but I spent a few years at Union and they used to have an agency called Glovelite which was essentially the official censorship agency and they had a big thick book of everything that was banned and government had sort of the upper hand in that society so the fisheries ministry put in there that you know dumping fish into the ocean waste you know was a state secret and pretty much everything got to be a state secret after a while so there's you know and when you ask should the bureaucrat have the have the last word on what's classified or should a journalist and why you know many people have asked why why are journalists appointing themselves as the arbiter of what should be secret well you know we are imperfect at it but so is the government and I think it's in this sort of interplay in this tension that exists in the way we run our society that you know generally we sort of muddle along fairly decently. I would just add one thing and then we'll go on to something else I mean far too much information is classified and because something is embarrassing to the government is not a legitimate reason to classify it just isn't and and the problem with all of that is that once it gets classified getting it unclassified even things that shouldn't be classified takes literally years and I'll never forget I was telling Dr. Hamry before this panel my favorite stories that I ever did at CBS News is years ago during the Pentagon Papers I was the Pentagon correspondent and one day I went down to the Pentagon bookstore which is down in the basement of the Pentagon and discovered that they were selling the Pentagon Papers if you'll all remember they had bound them as books and they were selling them down there and people were lined up to buy them and I took a camera crew down there and took pictures of it and did the story because what made it was a story was because upstairs they were still classified and they were still locked away and safe and I'll never forget that evening after the news Walter Cronkite called me and he said Bob if you hadn't taken pictures of that I wouldn't have believed it but that's the mess you get in with all this classification and Dr. Hamry I think just briefly along those same lines there's a controversy going on now where the Congressional Research Service people who work there who are charged to come up with reports for Congress on whatever subject Congress wants have been told that they cannot access any of these documents which are on every website in the world to inform them as they write their reports they cannot refer to any information that's in any of them in their reports to Congress so hopefully they can go home and turn on their home computer and have full access to it but then they can't acknowledge in their reports that they've had access to it so it's it is a pretty confusing and sometimes ridiculous system in a lot of ways anybody else have a question here I'm Harlan Ollman aside from the embarrassment it seems to me there are going to be two very likely consequences these anarchist cyber people with something like Stuxnet in the first case as you may not know Julian Assange has hired a top-notch British attorney and that's going to be a very interesting court case so I wonder how you come out with this issue about consequences for the First Amendment and secondly what happens when this is not information leaking but something along the lines of real damage the Estonian cyber attacks or the Stuxnet attacks into Iran where you may have thousands of fellow travelers who are anxious to jump on and support that well I think a very valid issue but I think it's a different issue and we do not as organized society know how to deal with this powerful communication tool that's grown up to be so hugely ubiquitous and open and that we've made ourselves so dependent on and so it now we have huge vulnerabilities associated with this and yet we don't know how to shut it off because we depend on it every day and so we're frankly just stumbling our way through this I personally don't think that there is an ultimate solution to this problem because clever people will always find ways to tear apart computer software so you know we use we have a kind of physical model for cyber security which is kind of you got a fence around your yard you got a gate at the driveway you got motion detectors you got double locks on the doors I think and I think that's inappropriate for cyberspace I think we should think of cyberspace is like how do doctors stay healthy working in hospitals full of sick people because that's what cyberspace is going to be this is going to be a polluted dangerous environment and you've got to stay as well as you possibly can so it's more about nutrition it's more about exercise it's about sleep it's about having you know the capacity to recover quickly you're going to get sick and it's about recovering once you get sick because there's just not going to be possible to stay pristine in this environment it's too ubiquitous a problem now alright well on that note thank you all for coming for the Sheeper School of Journalism happy holiday thanks very much oh I'd love to Scott that was really good that was terrific thanks so much I really appreciate it