 I'm Jamil Jaffer. I'm a lawyer for the ACLU and I'm up here with Bill Binney, Alex Ubdo and Jim Bamford who I will introduce more fully in just a second. I'm not sure how many of you got a chance to hear Keith Alexander yesterday, the head of the NSA, talk about the NSA's activities. I wasn't there myself but I have heard that he offered a few reassurances. One of them, apparently, was that the NSA is not in fact keeping a file on every American. I'm just reporting, all right? The second reassurance he offered is that when the NSA incidentally or inadvertently collects information about Americans, it's required by law to minimize that information, meaning it's required by law to delete it or to redact it. And the third thing he said is that the NSA's activities, and I think this is in some ways the most reassuring thing, the NSA's activities are fully consistent with the Constitution and with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the statute that governs the NSA's activities inside the United States. So the question I want to ask is why is it that the head of the NSA feels obliged to offer those kinds of reassurances right now? I think there are a few reasons. One reason is that the NSA just has much, much more power today than it has ever before. That's because of technological advances. It's also because of social behavior. We just share a lot more information electronically than we have in the past. And it's also, and this is perhaps less known because the law is so much weaker now than it was even 10 years ago. Over the last decade, the laws that govern the NSA's activities have been weakened repeatedly in 2001, in 2005, in 2008. And as a result, the NSA really operates without a leash right now. The people that I'm up here with today are perhaps the best people in the country to explain precisely what that means. One of them is Bill Binney who was with the NSA for more than 30 years. He left the NSA in October of 2001. When he was at the NSA he was working on the very issues that we'll be talking about today. Alex Abdo next to him is a colleague of mine at the ACLU. He's a staff attorney who works on surveillance issues, especially in the national security context, including a case that's before the Supreme Court right now involving a challenge to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And then Jim Bamford, who many of you already know, is the nation's leading expert on the NSA. He's written many books about it, many articles about it. Among his books are the Puzzle Palace, the Shadow Factory, and The Body of Secrets. So with that brief introduction, let me ask Jim first, putting aside the legal issues, putting aside the legal restraints on the NSA, what is it that the NSA can do right now? What is it that the NSA is technologically capable of doing? And how is that different from what the NSA was technologically capable of doing, say 10 years ago? First, I just want to say I'm really happy to be here. And I was here 10 years ago and it's really grown. Defconn's really grown since then, so I'm really happy to see that. The other thing is General Alexander asked me to fill in a few blanks that he left when he was speaking here. And I said, be very happy to do that. I've been talking about NSA since he was a private, I think. And don't be fooled by that black T-shirt he was wearing underneath it is a giant parabolic microphone. So what can NSA do today that it couldn't do 10 years ago? Well, first of all, pre-9-11, NSA was following the law to a large degree. Basically, since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed back around 1978. But that all changed after 9-11 and that's when George Bush decided to do the warrantless eavesdropping. So since then, NSA has had an enormous building boom, like nothing in its history. Billions and billions of dollars of new buildings, new infrastructure, new listening posts, built of new listening posts. Some of these are reconstruction of existing listening posts, but a giant listening post, actually largest in the world, outside of Augusta, Georgia. It will have 4,000 positions, 4,000 eavesdropping positions. And another one in Texas and then there's a downlink in Colorado for NSA's satellite information and then another one in Hawaii. But the high point of NSA's building boom is a building I just wrote about in the April issue of Wired Magazine, the cover story of Wired Magazine on NSA's enormous data center in Utah, Bluffdale, Utah. Ironically, the only other thing in Bluffdale, Utah is the second largest polygamy sect in the United States. So you've got both groups there listening for messages from the heavens. So it'd be interesting to watch these two groups socialize together. But NSA's building this huge data center now in Utah that'll be a million square feet and cost $2 billion so they can store, it'll be the central place for storage for virtually all the information that they collect. It's basically going to be their cloud so that all the listening posts, all the analytical positions, the headquarters and so forth will be able to go in and come out, take stuff in, pull stuff out, analyze it from their distant locations. And the other thing is this huge supercomputer center they're building down in Utah, I mean down in Tennessee, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the place, Secret City where they worked on the atomic bomb in World War II. And now they're working on basically the computer equivalent of the atomic bomb, a computer that is into the petaflops in terms of speed now. And they're building another building down there now that will be able to get into the exoflops, which I've got a statistic here, I'll read later on how fast that really is. But it's very fast. And then maybe on to Yoda flops or whatever. So that's pretty much where NSA is right now. It's this enormous building boom, enormous storage capacity for all the new communications that are going to be intercepting and a new supercomputer center for attacking encryption, maybe even public key encryption or other kinds of encryption, although it's hard to say exactly what they're going to be using that center down in Tennessee for right now. So Bill, how do you reconcile, is there some way to reconcile General Alexander's statement that the NSA isn't keeping track of every American with the existence of a facility like the one in Utah? Well, first of all, I'd like to say first of all that his statement about not keeping track of every American is absolutely true. He missed a few. Not many, but he missed a few. Okay. But that's the kind of word game they play. I've been in that business for a long time, so I knew their word game. But there's absolutely no excuse for him even implying that he's not collecting all this data. I mean, it's not just for processing after linear recursives or things like that. It's actually storing information that they're collecting, which is emails, FTPs, those kinds of things, Twitter things and all kinds of data about everybody. And what they're doing then with that is of course indexing it in a B plus tree kind of index where they take attributes where that describes the communicants involved or label zoo. And then you build social networks for everybody out of that by doing indexing with B plus trees. And there's virtually no limit that I know of that you can do in indexing that way. You can do trillions of relationships and still be able to manage it. On a very large scale, including interrogating into that base to do make decisions against flowing data that you're looking at, like terabytes of data flowing by. But the problem is unless you know what to do to begin with, you can't tell the program how to execute the rules or what to make decisions to make at every step along the way. And that's really where they have a problem. It is in the ability to automate analysis of large data sets and large sets of information to make decisions as that data is passing by. Or to go into large bases that they've stored like they will be storing in Utah, but they have other storage facilities too. I mean, Utah's could probably store, I did some calculations on it. I didn't include this in the EFF article that I, or the affidavit that I signed earlier. But if you, if you looked at it, even if you take the current capabilities that's being advertised online at cleversafe.com, they have 10 exabytes of storage that they can put into 21 racks of equipment that occupies 200 square feet of space. Well, if you take the 100,000 square feet they're going to have at Bluffdale and divide it by 200 and then multiply that by 10, you get 5,000 exabytes that they can store there. Well, I mean, that's a, I mean, in order, if you had 100 years of communications of everybody stored there to maintain 100 years that is replacing every year, you're collecting a year, a year falls off the end, you know, you keep the latest 100 years online in Bluffdale, it would take 1,250 NARIS devices to do that. Now, that's, NARIS device will do 10 gigabits a second which means it could process and produce output and give you a display of say a million and a quarter, 1,000 character emails a second. So it will take 1,250 of them running full time, all the time to keep that last 100 years online. So that's an awful lot of processing just to fill that one storage site. That is not the only storage site they have by any way, by the way. They have a lot of others that's just planned to take the overflow that's coming out the next year or so. So up till then, I see, I don't see, I see him saying things that are verbally or by the word are correct but he's missing the basic, you know, the reason I left NSA was because they started spying on everybody in the country. That's the reason I left. NSA's charter and it was illegitimate, one was to do foreign intelligence and I was with that all the way and I did the best I could in that job. Unfortunately they took those programs that I built and turned them on you and I'm sorry for that. I didn't intend that but they did that. So Alex, is this, is this a problem with the law? Is the problem that the law is not sufficiently restrictive or is the problem that the NSA is violating the law? I think it's quite clearly both. You know, after 9-11, we saw excesses of the Bush administration that we never would have guessed would happen. We saw the executive simply ignoring statutes, engaging in warrantless surveillance. And, you know, for the centuries before that the key protection of the Constitution was that when the government wants to surveil Americans that do so with judicial approval after making its case to a court. And that was abandoned by the Bush administration. But that was just, you know, one instance of extreme violation of the law but then Congress essentially codified that in 2008 when it authorized the government to engage in domestic, dragnet surveillance of Americans' international communications. And so what we have now is an institutionalization of the law breaking that occurred after 9-11 with the result being that the key legal protection that has protected us since the enactment of the Bill of Rights is no longer in place with respect to our communication. So we can't be sure, you know, that the law is protecting us. We can be quite sure actually that it's not protecting us. But even putting aside what happened after 9-11 with the violations that are now well known and exposed, there have been countless others that we don't know about. We know we have hints and suggestions from documents that we've gotten through FOIA, through leaks to the press, through the great work of Jim and through what we've learned from Bill and a few of his other colleagues at the NSA who defected. We know that there have been other violations but what you didn't hear in General Alexander's speech is any explanation of those. Any provision of the transparency that is so sorely needed. We have those hints in the documents and when we have even a new one coming out of Congress just a week ago about the NSA violating the Constitution and its use of its latest surveillance authority. But we don't know in what ways exactly. We don't know how often and we don't know with what effect. You know, if you're a lawyer and you work on these kinds of issues, the difficult thing here is you've got this set of laws, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act principally, that lay out what seem like pretty clear restrictions on what the NSA can do. For example, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act says that in most instances when the NSA wants to essentially wiretap somebody inside the country, they need to get something called Foreign Intelligence Probable Cause, some version of Probable Cause. But what you guys are describing, Jim and Bill, and what is described in a lot of newspaper articles that have come out over the last few years is something that seems wholly inconsistent with those restrictions. And I'm trying to figure out, is that just because the NSA doesn't care at all about the law or is it because the NSA can manipulate laws that are poorly understood by the public? Is it that they're playing word games? Is it some combination of all of these things? Because what you're describing really is hard to reconcile with the laws as the laws are generally understood by the lawyers who work with them. Well, one, I think I'm noticing looking at a lot of documents I've gotten from the Freedom of Information Act and so forth and writing about NSA. I mean, there's several sets of laws. There's the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and there's a FISA amendments act. But then there's another thing. That's just the congressional, that's the statute. Then there's an implementing, a set of implementing instructions and they're known as USID 18, United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which is top secret with about a dozen code words after it. And that sets out different, for example, sets out different definitions from what most people are familiar with. Most people are familiar with the Webster's definition of intercept. So speaking of General Alexander, speaking about intercept, you have your own impression of what that word means from your history and from reading dictionaries definition. But the USID 18 has a different definition and that's an intercept doesn't take place until it's actually listened to, until somebody puts on some earphones or actually reads some text on a screen. So you can pull in all the communications you want stored in a media and stored for as long as you want in Bluffdale, for example, in Utah. So there's these definitional differences between what civilians talk about and what NSA talks about. And then there's different sets of laws and regulations, most of which are top secret. So that's sort of this miss that you have to look through, this fog you have to look through when you're dealing with the legal issues with NSA. Well, as far as I could see, the real plan here was to spy on Americans because it didn't start in October of 2001. It actually started before that in February when certain people like three star generals from NSA went around asking different telecoms to provide them customer data. That happened in February of 2001. So that to me implied the plan was to spy on Americans from the beginning. Because at that point, that was three months after they were doing that three months after we had put our system together where it worked all the way to the end and you could manage graphing huge numbers of things, trillions of things. So once we had shown that we were connected all the way, three months later they went around asking for this data to spy on every American. So that to me seemed to be the intent from the beginning. But I mean, they didn't openly say that. Okay. But they were going around asking for the data to make that happen. And then 9-11 came along and that was a good excuse to execute. Okay. At that point, the execution started. So, and there is another real problem. Unfortunately the software will, once it takes in data, it will build profiles on everybody in that data. And if you want that profile, you can simply call it up by the attributes of anyone you want. So in other words, the process does so much analysis already. And it's in place for people to look at if they want to do it. But what they're trying to do now is they realize they have too much data. So they have to automate that process too. So that's what the big data initiative is really all about. Out of the White House, the recent initiative is to try to get automated processes to go through that because they can't hire enough people to do it. There's just too much data. Okay. So that's not possible. So they've got to get an automated process doing that. And this to me was the intent from the beginning. And to do that inside this country, it was obvious from what they're doing, the sequence that they were doing, that that was the case. And the law they didn't pay any attention to. So just to channel General Alexander again, you know, the law requires the government to minimize data about Americans once it's acquired it. So why isn't that a sufficient protection? Why shouldn't we be reassured by General Alexander's statement that minimization requirements protect Americans from precisely what you're complaining about now? Because all the oversight is totally dependent on what NSA tells them. They have no way of knowing what they're really doing unless they're told. So plus I would add a simple little point. We put in protection for U.S. citizens by doing a unique anonymization that we would encrypt attributes of U.S. citizens. So you couldn't tell who you were looking at, even if you had it in your base. So but you have to ask yourself, how could I do that from the beat? How could I do that with the databases they have unless it was in already there in the clear and so I could encrypt it? Alex, I know that that, you know, one of the complaints you have sometimes made about the existing FISA is the weakness of the minimization requirements. I'm going to say a little bit about that. Sure, you know, the legal problem with the minimization requirement is just that it has a gaping hole which swallows the rule, which is that if the information is essentially what the NSA wants anyway, if it pertains to foreign intelligence, which is defined extremely broadly, then the NSA doesn't have to get rid of that information. They can continue to keep it in their database. But we've learned something else that's actually quite interesting in the past few weeks from a few senators who've been very vocal in their objections to reauthorizing the latest surveillance statute at the end of the year, which is that even supposing they have information in their database that they're not supposed to or not supposed to target from the outset. They can then keep it in their database and target after the fact by going back and conducting data mining searches afterward, in other words, to get the information that they couldn't target from the outset. And it sounds like a minor loophole but it's one that a few senators think is the key to the entire program, that the NSA isn't concerned so much with using its authorities to target foreigners, but that they're using it as an excuse to accumulate masses of information that they can then later search under the legal theory that Jim laid out that the search doesn't happen until they run the query later on. It's not the acquisition isn't the search, the querying later on is the search. So and of course what's troubling about all this aside from what's obvious is that the secrecy that pervades the program makes it impossible to know whether any of these speculations are true. We obviously have the experience of Bill and Jim to flesh out these theories, but so little is really known about how the NSA actually interprets its statute, how it interprets its authority and how it's using those authorities. One thing is in terms of the internal controls it's really two, one is the general counsel's office and the other is the inspector general's office. And just to give you an example of how effective those organizations are during the period of the war on the sea is dropping during the Bush period. When it was decided that we were going to go into warrantless these dropping when it was decided by the administration that the NSA was going to do warrantless these dropping. They refused to allow the general counsel's office or the inspector general's office to look at the legal justification for doing this. Even though at one point a couple times NSA said we'd like to see what the legal authority is for us doing this. The Bush Justice Department said you're not clear to know the reasons that you have to do this. And General Hayden at the time just saluted smartly and turned on the bugs. So, you know, you have to really wonder what the usefulnesses of some of these internal organizations are. Somebody from the higher up in the administration could just say it's none of your business and you're not clear to know. What is there? Why do they want to do it? Why do they want to do it? Why do they want to surveil? That's their job. That's what they do. That's what they were born to do and that's what they like doing. That's their job. They surveil the eavesdropping is what they're charged to do. You don't see very many people except for Bill. There were only Bill or a couple other people associated with Bill that actually said, wait a minute, I'm not going to do this. I'm opting out. You know, it's time for me to look at the agency from the outside in. So basically whatever people at NSA are told to do, they do. So you have that period during the war unless eavesdropping. Now not everybody at NSA knew that they were involved in warrantless eavesdropping. I shouldn't make that clear. That was a very compartmented program. But after it was revealed, there were very few people that objected and left the agency. So NSA's job is eavesdropping. Their original charter is eavesdropping on foreign countries and foreign people in foreign countries which there is no legal problem with because they don't have any constitutional protections. The problem is when NSA is told to eavesdrop domestically and this wasn't the first time. Nixon during his time told NSA to start eavesdropping domestically and it did it for about a week. And NSA was very happy. They were overjoyed that they were being given that opportunity to eavesdrop domestically on anti-war protesters. It only stopped because this big civil libertarian named J.G. Hoover came in and said I'm going to blow the whistle if NSA keeps doing this. He told that to Nixon primarily because he saw NSA is stepping on FBI's turf. And so a week later Nixon canceled the program. But there's a willingness at NSA, there was a willingness then, there was a willingness during the Bush administration to salute smartly and say, you know, turn on the microphones when they're ordered to do that by senior officials in the administration. You know I just want to say something about the distinction between targeting people inside the United States and targeting people outside because you know it's true that there is this sort of obvious distinction between those two categories of surveillance but one of the things that's going on now is that the NSA is, it's engaged in dragnet surveillance of people outside the country. And they say that they can do this because those people outside the country don't have constitutional rights to assert. The problem is, from a constitutional perspective, the problem is that when they're surveilling those people outside the country, often those people outside the country are communicating with people inside the country. And so the NSA is sweeping up these huge volumes of communications between Americans inside the United States and non-Americans outside the United States. And those huge volumes of communications are going into these databases including these Utah databases. And the problem that Alex was alluding to that Senator Wyden has been harping on for the last few weeks is that once all the information has been collected on the theory that it was collected in the course of surveillance of people abroad who don't have constitutional rights, all of that information sits in a database here and then can be searched even if the NSA is concerned not about some foreigner living abroad but about some American living here. And from, you know, there are lots of reasons to be worried about NSA surveillance even of non-Americans living abroad. But, you know, even if your only concern is about NSA surveillance of Americans inside the United States, this is, as Alex says, you know, a really huge loophole in the legal protection. So one other point also is that the, when you're thinking of targeting overseas and not targeting U.S. citizens, it sounds fairly innocent but one thing you can target for example would be the overseas data, or call centers. You know, all these call centers they have in India, Philippines and different places now, all these companies from AT&T to American Express, Bank of America, all these companies are outsourcing their, when people call up and want to know what their balance is in their banking account for example, it might be answered by a calling center in India. Well, you can target the calling center in India because it's a center outside the United States. It's foreigners that run it outside the United States and you're not specifically targeting any American within that call center but everything going in, if I call up and say what's the balance of my banking account or a question about some financing that I'm doing, that's picked up and would also go to Bluffdale because it's not being specifically targeted against me but it's being targeted against an overseas call center so that's sort of a loophole. So I want to ask the question that we started to talk about a minute ago but ask it more directly. So why aren't more, you know, if this kind of thing is going on at the NSA, why aren't more people speaking out about it? Well I think the point is they're all been pretty much scared by what they did to us. They threatened us with prosecution. They tried to prosecute Tom Drake and they basically made our lives a mess. They made us incapable of getting business so but that kind of thing is the power that they have. They can harass you in many different ways and so they tried doing that with us and so every and they advertised that by the way internally in NSA on their internet inside the NSA. They put our 60 minutes take on their video internally and they made it clear what they were doing to us internally so the whole idea was to scare the entire population internally and that's really what's happening with our government the way I see it. You know Ronald Reagan said we're a country with a government. I think we're reversing that relationship. Our country is now thinking, our government now thinks it has a country and the only way to maintain it but see the only way to really maintain that is to like all these other totalitarian states have done around the world. You have to gather information about your population so you can control it and that's really what's driving all of this. They're afraid of the population of the United States. They want a country, this country. That's really in my view what they're doing and why. So I had this. I want to save a little time for questions where I have at least one more question. This one for you Alex. I mentioned at the beginning that there's a case before the Supreme Court this fall. What's at stake in that case? This is our ACLU lawsuit on behalf of a number of human rights groups, journalists, activists challenging the latest surveillance statute, the statute in 2008 that really shifted the paradigm from individualized surveillance to drag net surveillance. And unfortunately for the past four years we haven't been litigating in court about whether the law is constitutional or not. We've been litigating about whether our plaintiffs have standing to challenge the law. Whether they can file the lawsuit to begin with. And what's discouraging about the suit is that the government's argument all along has been our plaintiffs can't sue because they can't prove that they were surveilled. But of course we the NSA would never disclose whether anyone in particular is surveilled. And the consequences of that argument should be obvious there that no one can challenge the law. So even if you're not concerned about the extent of the NSA's authorities you should I think perhaps be concerned that not even the government wants there to be constitutional review of these laws. They don't want anyone in court discussing them let alone in public or in Congress. They don't want courts reviewing these laws to establish meaningful limits if there are limits to establish or even to say if the government is correct and the laws are constitutional which they're not. So that's what's at stake in this lawsuit is whether this statute can be challenged but it's not just this statute. There are numerous surveillance authorities that not only the NSA has but other agencies use on a daily basis to intercept our communications or to gather intelligence. And if this suit is turned away by the Supreme Court then I worry that there'll be little opportunity to flesh out the constitutionality or the limits of the law in this area. And without those limits we know what happens. And if not for you know a few intrepid whistleblowers we wouldn't know about what happened after 9-11. That wasn't the success of the rule of law in this country. That wasn't the result of a lawsuit that brought that about. That was luck. And we can't rely on that forever. We're a system of checks and balances for a reason but those checks and balances are not working in this area. Just one point also. I was actually one of the plaintiffs along with Christopher Hitchens and a few other people of the original suit dropped by ACLU. We were among the people that was identified as not being able to show that we have standing. We weren't able to show that we were physically eavesdropped on because NSA doesn't tell you who it eavesdropped on so they threw our case out. And that's what this case is going forward with now which I'm very happy about. The problem with the case however is that even if the case is successful in the Supreme Court the government has this ultimate way to turn the switch and end the case. It's called the State Secrets Act which is used a number of times against cases where it looks like it's either going to lose or it may end up exposing government secrets. And that's one of the problems you have here is that even if the courts accept the argument and find in favor of the ACLU the problem is that at one point at some point the government may flip the switch, turn the off switch off and use its ultimate weapon which is the State Secrets Act. Yeah, this is maybe worth underscoring. The secrecy surrounding all of this surveillance obviously prevents us from knowing the full extent to which the government is spying on Americans. You know, we don't know in what instances and what context they are getting location information for example. We don't know who in what context specifically they are getting content information from emails and we don't know in what context they get purely domestic telephone calls. So all of this is shrouded in secrecy but perhaps even more troubling than that is that the secrecy insulates all of these surveillance powers from judicial oversight. So you've got all of these statutes that look like laws in the sense that they are enacted by Congress and nominally subject to constitutional limits but it's literally or has been literally impossible to enforce those constitutional limits because the government has all of these procedural objections that have in many cases been successful. One of them is standing, the one that Alex was talking about and another is State Secrets, the one that Jim was talking about. So if you have... I mentioned State Secrets Act, that was a mistake. It's not an act, it's called the State Secrets Privilege because there's never been anything enacted allowing them to do it. They just do it and get away with it. So they don't have any basis in law for that privilege. If you have questions just come up to the mic up here. Yeah, Kim Seder with WIRED. I have a question about Alexander State Minister. I wonder if you can clarify. He said that when talking about the minimization, he said that minimization means, which means nobody else can see it unless there's a crime that's been committed. That to me sounds like we're not talking about national security. What's the legal basis for that? So the question was, does minimization mean that you, that the NSA can't look at the communications unless there's evidence of a crime? And that's simply not true. That's not what the requirement is. You can go and read it if you want. Come up, I'll send you a link to it later. The requirement, that's one of the problems with the dragnet surveillance since 2008 is that it doesn't have to be tied to wrongdoing. It just has to be tied to foreign intelligence, which can mean a lot of things. It can mean a human rights advocate talking to an embassy abroad. It can mean anything relating to the foreign affairs. But is there a legal basis for collecting data under national security reasons and then seeing criminal activity in it for use domestic prosecution? Is there, is there a legal, what's the legal basis for that? Because that's what it sounds like he's talking about here. It doesn't sound like he's talking about national security. I think what he's saying is that once we've collected something for foreign intelligence reasons we can use it to prosecute people for crimes. And that's certainly true. But it's also true that they don't have to minimize information that falls into this very broad category of foreign intelligence information. And so whatever protections apply to, you know, whatever minimization protections apply, that those protections don't apply to this very broad category of information about foreign affairs, about the economy, about national security, about terrorism. And if you're a human rights researcher, for example, in the United States and you're talking to the victim of some human rights abuse abroad, then you can't be assured that your communication isn't being listened to by the NSA. The law gives the NSA the authority to listen to that communication. And if General Alexander said something different yesterday, I think he misspoke. Softly generous of you, Jamil. My question is for Bill and Jim, but anybody else can address it if you so desire. I'm often struck by how little anyone in Congress really besides Ron Wyden is willing to challenge any of this. There's almost near, you know, silence or agreement with the government's arguments about state secrets and, you know, wiretapping in the FICE Amendment Act passed in 2008. Obama voted for it. So my question is, you know, we talk a lot about surveillance in this world. We don't talk very much about blackmail. And I don't really get why. Because it seems to me that, you know, there are 535 people in the house and the Senate who could affect some change in this regard, right, ostensibly they have power over the NSA. And they don't. And I'm wondering if there's any, you know, if there's anything you know about blackmail, frankly, that, you know, people are actually afraid to do the right thing because they too have emails and cell phones and, you know, personal lives that are potentially, you know, stuff that they don't want public. So thanks. Let me take that. I think there's a couple of factors involved here. One is that NSA produces an awful lot of intelligence for the U.S. government on a very large scale. Most of it is coming from NSA. In fact, for all of the government. So they look at them as a source of input of intelligence on decisions they may have to make. So they look at them as a valuable resource. But NSA also looks at Congress as a way of getting money. And they really, they focus in on preparing stories which I refer to as Techno Babel, you know. They go down and bamboozle Congress. And Congress can't challenge them because they don't know any better. Okay. You have congressional people down there who don't know what, not necessarily some of them don't even know what an email, some of them still don't email. So they aren't technically swift. Okay. So these guys go down there and bamboozle them. And you can see some of that in that testimony that happens in the various committees there. You can see that. So they get bamboozled that way. But also from the congressional perspective, they look at NSA as all these different buildings they're putting around the country are going into somebody's area, right? And so there's money going there and they have that means that they're supporting their constituents and therefore they feel they have to support them. And so they let them do basically what they want them, they want to, whatever they want to do, they say it's okay because there are intelligence resources in the government. So those are the kind of factors I think that are involved in that. Well, yeah, it's great with the, with the person who asked the question, it's changed a great deal from the beginning back in the mid-seventies when you had the first House and Senate Intelligence Committees, you had Frank Church who was a very, very much going after NSA. He had the first real hearings that for the first time exposed what NSA was doing and had been spying illegally for 30 years at that point until Frank Church and his committee found out about it. That's what created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And what you had, that was at the beginning. Now you have the opposite. At the beginning they were watchdogs and now they're lap dogs. All they do is salute smartly and do whatever the intelligence community wants. Actually, they're gone beyond that now where they actually suggest to the intelligence community that they should be doing more and so forth. And I think one of the reasons for that is that, especially post-911, it's this whole idea in Congress that your opponent the next time up is going to say, you're weak on terrorism, you're weak on defense, you're weak on U.S. security. If you vote against anything that NSA wants or really that the Pentagon wants. So you've got that factor that the Congress is very much afraid of constituent reaction if they look hostile to anything that has the word terrorism in it. But there would be more Ron Wyden's if the Civil Liberties constituency were louder. If more people wore Sue the Vaster's T-shirts. Hi, I'm Corey Doctorow and I write about this stuff a lot. And the question that occurred to me when you were speaking earlier is the one that someone shouted out from the audience. Why? And the answer you gave made it sound like there's someone sort of at the, there's an upper echelon at the NSA who eavesdrop on people the way ants build hills. That it's just sort of a compulsion like if they weren't doing this they'd be hand washing or something. And then it sounded like you said maybe no the reason that they're doing this is that it's just a way of building an empire and if they could build an empire by pasteurizing milk they'd be out there pasteurizing milk instead of listening to people's conversations. None of those sound like a totally complete account of what their internal theory is of what happens when you harvest the entire communications corpus of a nation or a planet. Is it merely compulsion? Is it merely empire building? Do they have a theory about what they're going to get? And as a kind of end to that, as a Canadian who lives in the United Kingdom, can someone explain to me why eavesdropping on me is okay but not okay for Americans? And maybe explain how that relates to the answer to why people harvest all this communication on Americans. Thank you. First of all, there are treaties with different between countries that we don't spy on each other's people. So that does. Those do exist. So I know. It's hard to believe. But right now I don't think any of that really applies. They're taking in everything without minimization. They don't minimize anything as far as I know. Everything's being taken in. And part of it's a fear. I think that they're afraid of not having the data so they couldn't figure out something out. Or if they pull all the data in and eventually they'll figure something out and be able to go back and resolve the issues in retrospect. So I think there's several drivers there. But my real point is this is much larger. It has to do with the government that's virtually implanted in Washington. People don't get, I mean that's why I'm for term limits, right? These people don't rotate. So they stick down there and they think they know better, okay? And so now that's why I said I think we have a government that thinks it has a country. But it seems conceivable to me that with the right analytical tools, it's true that if you collect more information you're more likely to find something. But it's true in the same way that it's true that if you searched everybody's home inside the United States you would find more than you do right now. But ultimately there are value, there are trade-offs that we make. We make decisions about the limits we want to place on government power because we want to be not just safe but also free. And ultimately this question of would we be safer or will we know more if they collect more information? I think it's an interesting and useful question. I think people should ask that question but it doesn't answer the ultimate question which is do we want those policies? And to answer that question it's not susceptible to an empirical study. You have to make value judgments and you know for the same reasons that we don't think it makes sense for the government to search everybody's home without a warrant. We don't think it makes sense for them to collect everybody's communications without a warrant. I would like to add just one thing there. Technically that is for all the programs that we had and everything we ever did. There was absolutely no reason to collect all U.S. citizens communications at all. We could have determined all the bad guys inside and outside this country without doing any of that. And we could have done it legitimately, legally and conformance with FISA, the constitution and everything. But they chose to go down the dark side. Unfortunately we're getting kicked out of this room. But we have another, we have a Q&A room. It's called Track 2 Q&A and we'll be there for at least a few minutes right after this. Sorry Jim. Thanks for coming.