 Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to welcome all of you to the Carnegie Endowment. And I can't tell you what a pleasure it is and an honor it is to welcome Jim Clapper to Carnegie and to sit alongside him on this stage for half a century. As all of you know, from his service as a Young Air Force Intelligence Officer in Vietnam to his service as Director of National Intelligence, Jim has truly been the consummate intelligence professional, is dedicated, and skillful a public servant as I've ever known. What I can tell you is that it was always immensely reassuring to sit alongside him in another room with even less outside light than this one in the White House situation room for many hours on many issues. Jim's brings back memories. Nostalgia is under control probably. But Jim's judgment and integrity was admired by everyone in that room. He was always careful to distinguish between what we knew and what we thought and always committed to calling things as he saw them, no matter how inconvenient to some of the other people sitting around the table. Jim has continued to offer wise perspective and honest judgment since leaving government, especially in his new book, Facts and Fears, Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence. It's a terrific book. And Jim has kindly agreed to sign copies downstairs after the discussion. And with another holiday season fast approaching, I'd urge all of you to buy as many copies as you can carry. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I'll start the discussion with three or four brief questions and then open it up to all of you. But first, please join me in a warm welcome for Jim Clapper. Thank you. Uh-oh. So Jim, let me just start with a broad question. And as you write very elegantly in your book, The Intelligence Profession has changed enormously over the last half century. As you look ahead to the next decade from the point of view of the US intelligence community, what do you think are the biggest challenges out there? What are we well-prepared for today? And what do you think we're not as well-prepared for? Well, first, it's an honor to be on the stage here with somebody I regard as a personal hero and who is a stalwart when he was in government service and basically in those many, many hours we shared in the sit-room. I think the biggest single driver of change in the intelligence community, looking back over 50-plus years that I've been in and around it, has been technology. That has changed things. Both our own technology and the technology of adversaries. And I think that will be what drives change more than anything in the future. The area I have highlighted consistently since I left the government were, I don't think that the entire national security apparatus and specifically the intelligence community is paying enough attention to, and that is the profound national security implications of climate change. You can argue to the cows come home about, well, how much of it's man-made and all that, but it has, this is going to have huge implications for the globe, not just the United States. And climate change is not something that respects nation-state boundaries or sovereignty. And that it, relatedly, of course, the changes in the environment and the, I think, pretty scary prospects for disease as a result of climate change. One little factoid is that the world's population is gravitating to megalopolisis. I can't say that three times fast. Most of which are located in coastal areas. So if you just watch what's happening in the Arctic and the Antarctic and the melting of the ice caps and what that's, the effect that's going to have on sea level, where an inch or two of increase in sea level will have huge impacts on these major urban areas. And I just cite that as one vignette where I believe we don't pay enough attention. Another simple factoid is the condition of arable soil all over the globe, whereas the Earth's population is increasing, the arable soil we have is actually wearing out and is not being replaced with sufficiently rapid enough pace to sustain the projected population of the world. These things have, I won't drone on about this, but they have huge national security implications for us and for everyone else. So that's an area I concern. Now that is somewhat of a form of technology. I think another area I'd mention briefly because it has huge potential is artificial intelligence, which I think will be a big driver of intelligence, a change in the intelligence profession and understanding of it, how to apply it. When I left, after 50 plus years in intelligence, the intelligence analysts still spending way too much time gathering, correlating, synthesizing information before they would get to actually analyzing it, that is doing what only the human mind can deal with and they still spend way too much time on things that can be automated. Artificial intelligence is a great example, though, of the two-edged sword nature of technology. It's like fire, has good applications and bad. No less a character than Vladimir Putin has stated that whoever dominates artificial intelligence in the world dominates the world. That may be an overstatement, but it's certainly recognition of the importance that he attaches to artificial intelligence and I think the Russians collectively. The Chinese have mounted a very large and centralized, centrally orchestrated campaign to dominate artificial intelligence and they're spending a lot of money on it. We're probably still ahead in that realm, but we're in the, let a thousand flowers bloom approach where it's kind of decentralized. So I've drilled on long enough about that. Well, how well organized do you think we are as a government, given the obvious competition with Russia, with China, with lots of others? With respect to artificial intelligence? I don't, well, we're not, really. At least I'm not aware of any direction that's coming out of the White House or the OSTP office. It's not quite what it was during the administration you and I served in. And so our approach is, and maybe it's delivered, I don't know, has been not to centralize. Now, the government elements involved in research on this, IARPA, DARPA, NSA, I think they do a good job according to themselves, but as far as I can tell, there's no overall overarching strategy or approach to artificial intelligence. Another of the big challenges, as you write about in the book, that's produced by the revolution in technology, is the struggle to find a balance between privacy and security as well, which there's no new case brought into pretty sharp relief. Do you think we're any closer today to finding in our own society a right kind of balance? You know, I often found myself wishing for the Halcyon days of the Cold War when there were essentially two telecommunication systems. One dominated by the Soviet Union and their orb and the other dominated the West essentially by the United States, but they were largely musically exclusive. I was a young pup at NSA in those days at one point and it was a rare, rare occurrence if you ever saw a reference to a US person in the Soviet-dominated telecommunication system. This didn't happen very often. Well, now they're the advent of the internet and now everybody is globally interconnected. So you have hundreds of millions of people conducting billion innocent people, conducting billions of innocent transactions every day and all mixed up among them are nefarious people, either in nefarious nation-states or nefarious individuals, non-nation-state entities who are operating in that very same ecosystem, all mixed up. So it's not a question of finding a needle in a haystack, it's a question of finding a few needles and thousands of haystacks and trying to be as discreet and surgical as we possibly can be, the intelligence community, say we, be careful here, to try to discern only the needles and not in any way affect the haystack. And I think Jim Comey had a pretty good metaphor when he said, not only that, but we're expected to watch when a straw of hay is converting to a needle. So is a profound technical challenge from a volume standpoint of nothing else to only pick out those bad needles among those millions and billions of haystacks. That's, maybe I'm stretching a metaphor here too much, but that to me is kind of a simple illustration of a magnitude problem. There are all kinds of mechanisms that have been built in to the system where all three branches of the government are involved in oversighting that and to attempt to do both, safety and security of the country and civil reason privacy of its citizens and it can't be an either or thing, it has to be both. Some of the most fascinating passages in the book are about North Korea, Jim, and you write about your own direct conversations with the North Koreans and it was an issue we wrestled with a lot in government. And I remember you expressed some unease in the last administration that we weren't engaging more directly at high levels with the North Koreans and President Trump has already met once with Kim Jong-un, their plans for a second summit meeting and you've made the argument that the problem is not talking to each other, it's the risk of talking past each other. So if you were back in your old role and briefing in advance of another meeting with Kim Jong-un, how would you describe the North Korean calculus and looking at negotiations with the US over the nuclear and missile issue, North Korea's attitude toward China, its big neighbor, how would you describe? So, by way of background, I served in South Korea in the mid-80s, I was director of intelligence for US forces Korea for two years and I became kind of a student, an amateur analyst of the Korean Peninsula and North Korea. And I guess you take the boy out of Korea but you can't take Korea out of the boy and it was always on my professional bucket list. You'd be cool someday to go to North Korea and I got to go on November 14th to retrieve two of our citizens that had been in hard labor conditions. I might comment that anything you've ever read about what a bizarre place North Korea is, it's all true, it's bizarre. So the first talking point that I was given by the White House to recite to the North Koreans when I showed up there was you must denuclearize before we will negotiate with you. Well, I was there about five minutes and I concluded that was a non-starter. They're not about to denuclearize. They understand, by the way, their weaknesses. They understand their economy is weak. They understand that they are at a profound disadvantage when they look south from Pyongyang looking south that they are confronting an overwhelming conventional military force in the form of the Republic of Korea butters by the United States. So they view a nuclear capability as their ticket to survival. They went to school in Momar Gaddafi. They brought that up with me. He negotiated away his weapons of mass destruction in the United States and didn't turn out so well for him. So they drew a lesson from that. And instead of all that, the overwhelming impression when I was there which blew me away was the magnitude of the paranoia and the siege mentality that prevailed among the elite that I engaged with when I visited there. And so I, it occurred to me that, you know, witnessed my talking point that I was supposed to recite that both the United States and North Korea were stuck on our respective narratives. And that the only way those narratives could change is in my opinion was if the bigger partner meaning the United States changed it. So I was a supporter, said so on CNN of President Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore. I thought that was a good idea. I do think though that he didn't take advantage of the tremendous leverage he had just by virtue of agreeing to meet with Kim Jong-un. This is something the North Koreans have lost it for, for decades, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un's father and his grandfather Kim Il-sung have all wanted a face-to-face personal meeting across the table with the President of the United States. It's a huge thing for them. And that became very clear to me when I was there. So I supported that. I don't think he took advantage of it though. And I wish the question I wish he'd asked Kim Jong-un and maybe he'd get to do over, he can ask them, what is it that would take to make you feel sufficiently secure that you don't need nuclear weapons? It'd be very interesting to hear straight from the horse's mouth what the answer to that question is. Now we might not like it, you know, probably, you know, withdraw all your troops or something. We've been there 69 years, so you might ask, well, how long, how much longer we gotta be there? But anyway, it would have been really interesting. And it seems to me logical that if you're gonna map out a negotiating strategy, it would be good to know what is it that your interlocutor wants. You know, I don't think we actually know that. Just for fun, about five or six weeks ago on CNN, I said, you know, maybe we need to rethink our approach to North Korea. You know, a lot of people think about these issues are not real comfortable with the fact that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. But the reality is they have them. And the reality is they've been responsible with them. North Korea, I believe, has lately been attempting to portray or demonstrate responsible behavior. We haven't had any nuclear tests recently. We haven't underground. We haven't had any missile tests. They've toned down the rhetoric. They're getting along better with the South Koreans. They returned 55 sets of remains from the Korean War. They released two hostages, one of their favorite techniques for extracting leverage. And most importantly, in my view, great symbolism, which is important to the North Koreans, that was the absence or a mission of any long-range missiles in their parade, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers' Party. So the North Koreans, I believe, are attempting to portray responsible behavior. Now, why have they done that? Why have they moderated their behavior? Well, my view is there's nothing to do with the tweets. It has everything to do with the fact that I believe the North Koreans have achieved whatever it is they think they need, which we wouldn't measure the same way, but whatever it is they think they need for nuclear deterrence, which in the end is all about psychology. And so now they can come to the table not as a supplicant, which has always been the case in the past whenever we had negotiated with the North Koreans about nuclear weapons. So perhaps we need to rethink if they can demonstrate responsible behavior about denuclearization. I actually think the answer to that question actually lies in soul. For my money, President Moon is maybe the most astute president in the history of the Republic. He's managed his two portfolios very astutely, both in Pyongyang and in Washington. And I think if the South Koreans, the Republic of Korea, can persuade the North that they are not interested in invading or overturning the regime, which I don't believe they are, that might give the North Koreans sufficient security that they could get to the point where they don't need nuclear weapons. So I think the answer to that question, the question I pose rhetorically lies in soul. Chen, when they ask you another question about another easy challenge, which you also write about in the book, also connected to nuclear issues, which is Iran, where the Trump administration has embarked on a strategy which is less connected to engagement and we're connected to trying to build up pressure, in this instance, less multilaterally and more driven by the United States. So talk a little bit about how you see this unfolding, its impact on Iran. Well, I thought we made a mistake by withdrawing from what's called the JCPOA, the Joint Conferences of Planet Bash. Yeah, it had its imperfections. What I would have preferred if I were king, which I obviously not, would be to use that agreement as a basis for getting after some of this other bad behavior that nobody likes on the part of the Iranians. There are nefarious activities in the region, support the Hezbollah and the Houthis, et cetera, et cetera. Rather than backing out of this agreement in the interest of, I guess, what I've heard the president say, he wants a, quote, better deal. But somehow we're going to extract a better deal, which I guess means reforming all of Iran's bad behavior, meaning missiles activity in the theater and their nuclear activity, but do it with a whole lot less leverage than we were able to bring to bear thanks to great diplomacy by bringing together a international coalition of countries who agreed to enforce sanctions against Iran. A lot of those countries now don't want to help us, like China, like India, the name too, and plus the other. And by the way, it wasn't just, it wasn't a bilateral agreement between us and Iran, there are five other countries involved. So to me, it just seemed like we gave away leverage that we could have exerted. And the other thing about it is, to me at least, what we did plays to the hardliner narrative in Iran. What I was seeing happening, and what I see now from open source, is I believe there's a kind of a soft revolution underfoot in Iran, mostly fomented by young people who are frustrated by the corruption of the banking system, the financial system, and the corruption of the regime, which I think is on its beginning of the end. But what we did by playing, by withdrawing from the JCPOA is, I think, playing to the hardliners. So. Well, last question for me, and then I'll open it up to all of you, but last question for me is on Russia, another easy subject. And so one of the, and I'm sure there'll be lots of opportunities for follow-up, too. But one of the last and thorniest issues that you grappled with as Director of National Intelligence was Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections. What do you think we got right at the end of the last administration in dealing with those issues, and what do we get wrong? Well, I thought we recognized the issue. I will tell you that in my 50 plus years of intel, I've seen a lot of bad stuff, but nothing that disturbed me as much as what I saw the Russians do. And I should point out that all truth about this subject didn't reveal itself in one day. So it was a gradual thing as we saw, as we saw it collected more, understood better and better what the magnitude of what the Russians were doing. And it was a long history, the Russians interfering in the elections, theirs and other peoples. And we have records going back to the 50s and 60s, where the Russians did things to try to influence the outcome of elections, but never, never on a scale, magnitude, and multidimensional basis as they did in an election in 2016. And it was really, really disturbing to me. So an FAQ, I get, is frequently asked question. You know, why didn't the Obama administration do more earlier, gotta get it? And you can do the coulda woulda show this all day long. I think there were a couple factors and Bill would have the insight on this himself. But as I saw it, it appeared to me that first, there was a reluctance to make a big thing about what the Russians were doing, which would simply serve to amplify or magnify it even more. Then, I think a bigger factor in the minds of President Obama, and I'm surmising here, is that he didn't wanna be seen as putting his hand on the scale in favor of one candidate to the disfavor of the other against a backdrop of where candidate Trump was already alleging that the election would be rigged, particularly if he didn't win it. So all those factors kinda played into that. We had, speaking of discussions in the suit, endless discussions and meetings about what to do and when to do it and all that. Finally, it grew to the point where we had to say something. So Jay Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, and I went out with a public release on the 7th of October, which was, I thought, pretty forthcoming about what the Russians were doing and the fact that this was being directed at the highest levels of the Russian government, meaning one guy. Unfortunately, our sense of timing wasn't so good because that was the very same day that the Access Hollywood tapes came out, which kind of emasculated our message, as well as the dump of John Podesta's emails. So our message that we put out, which we intended to try to alert the electorate, and this was a month before the election kinda got buried. I was a big supporter of the sanctions that we did impose, closing the two duches, one in Maryland, particularly, is just a large intelligence collection operation and PNG 35 of Russian operatives here in the United States and imposing sanctions on certain individuals in the Russians. The problem, my problem with that, frankly, was a little late. That was done on the 29th of December, I wish it had been done before the election. And the other thing is that even with that round of sanctions, which I certainly supported, that I had anticipated that would just be phase one, and we were gonna pass off all this information about what the Russians are doing to the oncoming administration. I kind of assumed or hoped that there would be a phase two sanctions, et cetera. This, to me, what the Russians did, a profound threat because what they are bent on is undermining our fundamental system. And they had messages for everybody. And, of course, which they, using the tool, the enabler of social media and the magnitude of what they did. You only get some insight into the fidelity of what the information we had is read the two indictments that the Mueller investigation put out. One last July and I think the other one in February, the last one which indicted the 12 GRU members. Pretty specific. Pretty specific. That, to me, is a real threat, poses all kinds of challenges for the intelligence community, you know, how to handle this. And one of the great challenges for, I think this country, apart from, you know, technical bureaucratic administrative things that we can do to secure what I would call our voting apparatus, is how do you get people not to accept everything they see, read, or hear on the internet? That's a harder challenge. It really is. Thanks, Jim. I promise not to monopolize the conversation. So let me open it up to all of you. If you just raise your hand, wait for the microphone, and then please identify yourself, be brief and remember to end with a question mark. Yes, sir. It's right behind you. Voice of America, Russian Service. You started your time, Voice of America, Russian Service. You started your time as chief of national intelligence with, in the year when 11 Russian agents were arrested and then, and you ended your time when 35 diplomats slash agents were expelled. What is your opinion? What's the scale and depth of Russian intelligence operations in the United States now, in this very moment? And it's a bit too much to urge, but how many you calculate them with, like tens, thousands? I obviously don't know the answer to that question anymore, happily. Haven't had access to classified information. I'm sorry? Well, the Russians have the most aggressive intelligence operation in the United States and have had for some time. And so, the way I looked at it is, any Russian that was connected with the embassy here had at least a secondary intelligence collection mission. That's the way I look at it. So I have no doubt that the Russians, since I left, are still as aggressive as they always have been in planning people in this country by some means under, you know, non-official cover and are aggressively collecting intelligence wherever they can in their DNA. Yes, sir. Mike's right behind you. Just to your right. Here you go. Hi, my name is Ray McGovern. I'm part of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Thanks for this book. It's very, very interesting. I'd like to refer to the Russian problem, but first there's an analogy that I see here. You were in charge of imagery analysis before Iraq. You confessed to having been shocked that no weapons of mass destruction were found. And then to your credit, you admit, as you say here, that the blame is due to intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help, help the administration make war at Iraq, that we found what wasn't really there. Okay, now fast forward to this time two years ago. Your superiors were hell bent on finding ways to blame Trump's victory on the Russians. Do you think that your efforts were guilty of the same sin here? Do you think that you've found a lot of things that weren't really there? Because that's what our conclusion is, especially from the technical end, there was no hacking on the DNC. It was leak. And you know that if you've talked to NSA. Well, I have talked to NSA a lot. And I also know what we briefed to then President-elect Trump on the 6th of January. And in my mind, I spent a lot of time in the SIG and business, the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever. The intelligence community assessment that we rendered that day that was asked to us by President Obama in early December made no call whatsoever on to what extent the Russians influenced the outcome of the election. The administration, the team then, the President-elect team wanted to say that, that we said that the Russian interference had no impact whatsoever on the election. And I attempted, we all did, to try to correct that misapprehension as they were writing a press release before we left the room. However, as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms by which they reached it, to me it stretches credulity to think that they didn't have profound impact on the outcome of the election. Well, that's what the New York Times says. And let me just say this, that we have two former technical directors from NSA in our movement here, veteran intelligence professionals for Sandy. We also have forensics, okay? Now the President himself, your President, President Obama said two days before he left town, the conclusions of the intelligence community, this is 10 days after you briefed him, with respect to how WikiLeaks got the DNC emails are inconclusive, end quote. Now why would he say that if you had said it was inconclusive? I can't explain what he said or why, but I will tell you that we are pretty sure we know or knew at the time how WikiLeaks got those emails. I'm not gonna go into the technical details here about why we believe that. We are too. It was a leak onto a thumb drive, gotten to Julian Assange, really simple. If you knew it and the NSA has that information, you have a duty, you have a duty to confess to that as well as confess to what? Confess to the fact that you've been distorting the evidence. No, I don't confess to that. The intelligence community assessment was without evidence. Hey, Ray. I do not confess to that. Yeah, I don't wanna, I just simply don't agree with your conclusion. I appreciate your question, but I didn't want this to look like Jim Acosta in the White House grabbing microphones away, so thank you for the question. Yes, ma'am. Hi, my name is Allie Girard and I'm with Amnesty International, we're a global human rights movement with seven million members. We've been campaigning on behalf of Edward Snowden for many years. We think he's a hero and we think his courage sparked a global debate about mass surveillance that's very important. Now in March 2013, you told the US Congress that the NSA may have unwittingly spied on the American people, but just a few months later, Edward Snowden revealed that that was not true. So at Amnesty International, we're shocked that this many years after 9-11, there hasn't been any prosecutions for torture or unlawful drone strikes, but Edward Snowden is the one who's facing time behind bars. So I want to know from you, after those revelations came out that you probably committed perjury and lied to the US Congress and American people, how on earth did you keep your job, sir? So first of all, I could almost understand what Edward and except what Edward Snowden did if his only concern and all he exposed was so-called domestic surveillance. However, he exposed so much else without absolutely nothing to do with domestic surveillance, seriously damaging our foreign intelligence collection capabilities. And if you're a taxpayer in this country and looking at the crowd, I think most of you are, you're gonna be paying for recovery from the damage he has done to our foreign intelligence capabilities for years. I can give you specific examples while I won't prolong a conversation. With respect to the infamous exchange I had with Senator Wyden in March of 2013, this was at the end of a worldwide threat hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. And Senator Wyden asked the question, and if you go look at the YouTube video, you won't see the meandering preamble in which he used the phrase dossiers, which now famous for a different reason. So the fact is, the honest answer to your allegation is, I made a big mistake, but I did not lie. And the reason is, I simply didn't think about what Senator Wyden was asking about. What Senator Wyden was asking about in his meandering question was, of course, the limited metadata business records to left any storage program maintained by NSA. This was directly put in place by previous administrations, the administration, as a direct result of 9-11, where you have a foreign communicant who's plotting a terrorist attack, potentially talking to somebody in the United States. So NSA had this limited database that they maintained, which simply had the to number, the from number, and the length of the call, no content. I didn't think of that. This was governed by section 215 of the Patriot Act. I didn't even think about that was on the subject of hearing. And I just made a mistake. What I thought about was section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs collection on non-U.S. persons overseas. And so, of course, for the aforementioned reasons I explained about the changes in technology, that yes, without doing so, without intending to, that there could be U.S. persons data intercepted under the provisions of section 702. That's what I was thinking about. That's not what Senator Wyden was asking about. Even if I had been on the same page with Senator Wyden, I'd have still been in a bad place because at the time that program was classified. I've been trotting up the hill for 20 or 25 years. I've answered probably hundreds, maybe thousands of questions in either open or closed sessions, either orally and already. And I've always tried to be straight and truthful about it. But gee, just for change of pace, I think I'll lie on this one question and do it on live television in front of one of my oversight committees. No, not really. So yeah, I made a mistake and I have acknowledged it and I explain it in the book. But I didn't lie. The larger issue, the big takeaway, big lesson of Edward Snowden is yes, the US intelligence community needs to be more transparent. There's no question about it. For as long as I've been an intelligence, there has always been an aura of suspicion and mystery about everything and anything the intelligence community does. That's just inherent because if the intelligence community were completely 100% transparent, we wouldn't have an intelligence community. We wouldn't be collecting any intelligence. So you'll always have that issue of protecting valuable secret sources and methods and trade-trath and techniques. But at the same time, trying to be as open and public about what the intelligence community does. So I, as a result of that, set about declassifying a lot of documents, mainly pertaining to the operation of the unique thing, the only unique in the world, the only United States operates, which is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which passes judgment on collection activities that could affect or impact US persons. So there is this dilemma that we alluded to before about trying to keep the nation safe and secure and protecting civil rights and privacy. And the overall lesson out of all that was, should have been more transparent. I think had the program in question been explained at the time, particularly in the aftermath of 9-11, could probably could have got legislation big enough to drive a truck through to allow it. What was done to replace section 215 of the Patriot Act was the USA Freedom Act, which was, I think, passed in 2015. So the, and the only real change there was instead of NSA having access to about 30% of all landline phone calls in the United States, which was the case under the 215 program. Now they have access to probably 75 or 80%, except that the difference is that the metadata in question is held by the providers, the commercial providers, not by NSA. Thanks, Jim. Yes, sir. Right, right, the gentleman in the back there. Yeah, just behind. Greg Thielman, a board member of the Arms Control Association. General Clapper, I have more of a process question because I don't disagree with your conclusions about Russian meddling. What I'm still curious about, even after reading your book, is why the judgment was three intelligence agencies rather than a national intelligence assessment or something that would include, for example, INR where I used to work. We made a deliberate decision because of the sensitivity of the data and those arms of the intelligence community that have a counterintelligence mission that we decided to limit it because we only had a month. So it wasn't treated as a full-up national intelligence assessment where everybody with all 16 components of the intelligence committee would pass judgment on it. That was a deliberate decision that we made and I agreed with. You can fault that, but that was a rationale. Thanks. Yes, sir. Thank you very much. My name is Yurt Arrozcan. I'm the US representative for CHP, the main opposition party in Turkey. Just looking at the past few years, the rapprochement between Erdogan and Putin in your official capacity, did you have a feeling that even though Turkey is a NATO partner, Erdogan's government has acted as a proper partner in terms of intelligence sharing, because when we look at the role that Erdogan has played, especially in Syria, helping Jihadis there against Assad or helping Iran evade sanctions, the US sanctions by almost $40 billion, which as you know was a court case in New York, there's still a pending US Treasury. I mean, did you have a feeling that Erdogan's government has acted as a proper NATO partner when it comes to intelligence work with the US? Thank you. Question is just about whether Erdogan's Turkey has acted as an effective proper intelligence partner for the United States over the last couple years? Well, I think over time, looking back, it's varied depending on who is in charge of their intelligence apparatus. It's kind of gone up and down. I don't know if I can make it. It would appear they're cooperating right now, particularly with respect to the journalist, but it hasn't always been thus, depending on the political situation in Turkey. But over history, Turkey has, for example, in the heyday of the Cold War, hosted extensive sighing collection by the United States on their soil, and they allowed reconnaissance missions to stage in and out of Turkey. So historically, they've been cooperative, but it varies according to the current situation. Thanks. Yes, ma'am. Microphone's on its way. Thank you, reporter from Voice America. I have a question about China. We talk about North Korea, Iran, and Russia. So given China's rising tension with the United States, so what is the biggest threat China could pose to the United States from the intelligence point of view? China could what? The biggest threat that China could pose to the United States from the intelligence point of view? Well, I think broader than intelligence is, I think a long term, I think short term our greatest threat is Russia, particularly as long as Vladimir Putin is in office because of I think what I view as his personal animus towards the United States and all we stand for. But I think a long term, our greatest threat is China. A number of reasons for that. One is just that they're gonna overtake us as the world's largest economy. One third of the world's billionaires are in China. They were embarked on a very aggressive military modernization program, which is keyed exactly to what they view as our strengths. So C4I space, aggressive counter space program, which is done in recognition of our dependence on space. Then the other element of China is their scientific and technical prowess and how they've organized themselves to acquire technology, either through theft or on their own. And this is all centrally controlled and you can read it in their five-year plan and all the kinds of technologies they're at. So I think now, some would argue that the fact that our two economies, unlike the case with Russia, our two economies are inextricably bounded. That serves to perhaps temper or moderate China's behavior. I mean, we could do a lot of bad things to each other economically if we wanted to. But I think China's growing power, which we're gonna transcend on a long-term basis, we're gonna transcend Russia. Thanks, Jim. I think we have time for just a couple more questions. Sir. Hello, sir. My name is Ben and I wanted to point out I'm a former analyst at the NSA, including during your tenure. And one of the things that has been so frustrating for me during my time there and beyond is just the complete lack of understanding that some people have about how complicated the signals intelligence system is. And really, and it frustrates me so much because protecting the privacy and identity of Americans is so sacrosanct and built into the culture of NSA right now. And the systems are so complicated if people understood how difficult it would be to violate that, the amount of audits internally at the analyst level that are going on and how difficult it is to even do proper work against terrorists. Yeah, let me just jump in here because one fact to what I recall from when I was serving as DNI was the hundreds of compliance officers the NSA has who are there only to ensure compliance with all of the many, many technical rules and regulations and demands to, yes, glean the intelligence, but do everything possible to avoid compromising to worries and privacy. But I do have a question. The other thing I was going to say is how frustrating it is that given all these controls and the respect for the constitution and trying to protect Americans that our adversaries don't have that, right? It's not an even playing field. Russia is not building in those protections. Turkey is not building in those protections. That's why Snowden is so frustrating for me. Sorry, when I hear that it just makes my blood boil because people do not understand how much information he gave to our adversaries and how hurtful that was to a mission that is completely legitimate to protect us. So my question to you is, thank you for this, sorry for the passion, but my question is the thing that I've been most frustrated about lately is that we, I guess this meme has been trending that we seem to be living in a post-truth society where people no longer seem to believe facts. They seem to believe only what they want. I guess, do you have any thoughts on this? Is there any hope that we're going to get beyond this? Are we now living in a new reality where people just believe the version that they want? I think you, in my mind you've raised maybe the most important question that's been raised here this afternoon, and that is overarching over everything else is the assault, and Mike Hayden has been, I think, very articulate about this, the assault on truth. And those endeavors who depend on truth are empirical fact for their perpetuation. So I'm thinking of things like science. Academics. Law enforcement. The IC. Journalism. Who ideally are supposed to depend on empirical fact and truth. And those endeavors are all under assault. Not just in this country, but elsewhere. That is fundamentally dangerous to a democracy, this one or any other. And it's something we all have to be very concerned about. But how do we get back to, you know, fact, truth, empirical data? This is going to have to be the last question. Yes, sir. I didn't hear that. Last question, if I can correct me if I got it wrong was since about 2015, if you look at the challenge posed by China and you look at the number of breaches that have occurred, you know, what percentage would you ascribe to the Chinese government as opposed to rogue actors and individuals? I don't know. That's a take home question. I don't really have any, probably if I knew the answer, I couldn't recite it, so I'm sorry. Thanks. One of the chores as a moderator that I hate most is having to bring fascinating conversations to a close, but I need to do that now because Jim has very kindly agreed to go downstairs and sign books. And so I'd urge all of you to take advantage of that opportunity. But first I want to thank all of you for coming this evening and especially to thank Jim Clapper who I think has reminded us of why we were so fortunate for so many years as a country. To have his public service. So Jim, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.