 My name is Ian Wallace. I'm the Director of the Cyber Security Initiative here at New America. Our program has been going about five years. One of the things I'm most proud about that we do is to provide a platform within DC and indeed across the country for good people to do good things. And one of the manifestations of that is the last two years we have been running a Scholar in Residence program to provide a home for scholars working in our general area to come and do some writing and produce good work. Our current Scholar in Residence is Jen Daskell of American University. She's working on a book which you will see in a year or two. But our first Scholar in Residence was Alison Sanger whose book you're about to hear about. And if you want an indication of the benefits of academia and think tanks working together to produce sort of good scholarly work that is in the public interest and affects public policy, you can't really look for a better example than this. So I'm going to get out of the way. I want to introduce Amory Slaughter, New America's CEO, someone who's very comfortable at sitting at the intersection of academia and public policy and let her introduce what is a fantastic panel to discuss this really interesting book. So thank you very much. Can I one thing just to remind you we are live streaming this and recording this so this will be available for posterity. And we will be tweeting about it using the hashtag, hashtag whistleblowers. At UM Cyber is an account to look to if you want to see that. Wonderful. So we will get started and that does mean when you are going to ask a question because we're live streaming you have to turn on the microphone. The microphone does not help you at the end of the table hear me but it helps everybody who is online. So I've been tweeting about this for a week now and I will ask Allison how on earth she managed to time a book to land in the middle of a major whistleblower crisis already being called by at least somebody on my Twitter feed and my email Ukraine gate but and she can talk about that but it is hard to imagine something more timely and a chance really to hear from people who are in the midst of it. I mean David Sanger will leave us and rush back to the UN General Assembly probably talking to various people who are directly in it. And we are going to hear from Bunantine Greenhouse who will talk about being a whistleblower and Jamil Jaffer who's had experience on the hill and from the national security point of view. So let me introduce each of them briefly and then I will moderate a conversation and then we will turn it over to all of you. So Allison Stanger our author her book is out today right day one day two day two but just out so she is the Russell Lang 60 professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury you're you know rated in academia by how long the name is in front of your name and she there was the founding director of the Rowan Center for international affairs she's the author of this book she's also the author of a previous book called the nation under contract about the privatization of government through the increased use of contractors she we've heard of her connection here she's also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute where she hangs out with physicists and computer scientists and she is currently the technology and human values senior fellow at Harvard Safra Center for ethics so that political science cyber mathematics and ethics all appropriate for whistleblowing to my immediate left is David Sanger whom you all know from the front page of the New York Times generally in the right hand column but occasionally the left he's been a national security correspondent and senior writer in 36 year reporting career for the New York Times he's been on three teams that have won Pulitzer prizes most recently in 2017 for international reporting and his most recent book highly relevant to today's discussion is the perfect weapon war sabotage and fear in the cyber age and it's a wonderful wonderful is maybe not the right adjective but deeply compelling analysis of the really the differences between cyber conflict and conflict as we've known it so also the kind of cyber dimensions of a lot of this are are critically important for national security to Allison's left we are delighted to have can i call you professor i can professor bunnettine greenhouse a bunny greenhouse she is a professor at the northern virginia community college she's a professor of mathematics and she has to leave us to go and teach a class she's also a former chief contracting officer from the senior executive service who was responsible for contracting in the u.s army corps of engineers in 2005 she testified to a congressional panel she was a whistleblower she is a whistleblower she she alleged instances of waste fraud and abuse and as she will tell us her story she had been getting stellar reviews in her job once she blew the whistle a lot of that changed and so we will be hearing about that she has a degree in engineering from george washington university and a national resources strategy from the industrial college of the armed forces of the national defense university as well as a bachelor's degree in mathematics from southern university and on our far left uh jameel daffer geographically obviously not actually on the far left so jameel is the founder and executive director of the national security institute and also the assistant professor of law and director of the national security law and policy program that's all mouthful too uh at the antenin scalia law school at george mason university uh so he is also a visiting fellow at who at the hoover institution at stanford and vice president for strategy and partnerships at iron net cyber security that would be enough to bring you here but of particular interest i think today is that he served on the leadership team of the senate foreign relations committee as chief counsel and senior advisor and prior to that senior counsel of the house permanent select committee on intelligence the kind of committee that recedes reports from whistleblowers so we are delighted to have this panel and i'm going to open it up by getting allison to talk about the book and then i've got specific questions and then as i said we'll we can open it up we're going to the way i'd like to structure it is to talk about whistleblowing generally and then toward the end we'll jump into whistle blowing right now because otherwise we would just discuss the newspaper uh all morning all right so allison you started this book five years ago seven i remember reading an early book proposal so uh so so i do have to obviously you were not anticipating that in september of 2019 there would be a major whistleblowing scandal why did you write the book what how what is it that led you to this subject because really even the i mean we hear about whistleblowers but whistleblowing as a subject is not something people write about yeah well thanks so much for having me and thanks to our panelists for joining me on this on this day uh i wrote the book because as you mentioned i wrote this earlier book called one nation under contract about the privatization of government and in that book can you hear in the back can you hear me okay yeah in that book i noticed how the line between business and government was increasingly becoming blurred and we all know about the revolving bore as contractors became increasingly involved in in our foreign policy and so that struck me as a real problem because i realized business exists for different things than government you know government is supposed to uphold the common good business has to be attended to a bottom line so what happens when you mix that up and that line is blurred you can get some unintended consequences and i i go through those in the book and that's what led me to the question that took me to whistleblowers is i thought we are trusting our elites with so much i'm echoing that's why i'm hesitating moment momentarily how do we keep our elites honest in that context you know how do you provide some degree of oversight and that's how i think the topic of whistleblower is because that's effectively what whistleblowers do they help keep our elites honest i would argue that the lifeblood of democracy and they expose misconduct that the public should know about so they're not just leakers a leaker is not necessarily a whistleblower you have to really be exposing some sort of wrongdoing and usually the the person who's exposed is embarrassed and ashamed about it wants to keep it hidden that might strike us a little strange in the current situation but in my book which is an episodic history of whistleblowing in america that is the reaction you typically see is some degree of shame when when the matter is brought to light not necessarily the case in our current political battle so the thing i'd like to stress for you is is that if you look at the history of whistleblowing in america it really illuminates the current conflict in a very important way and shows you that this is not a partisan issue what's taking place right now is really something that's just the tip of an iceberg and in my book i chronicle the extraordinary way the intelligence community has been behaving in recent years under the trump administration but also the extraordinary way in which the white house is behaving given currently current national security norms so i think my book illustrates how the intelligence community has been violating their norms and even the law by leaking classified information because they're concerned about the system itself they are concerned that the president of the united states is not upholding his oath to preserve protect and defend the constitution in the united states which both intelligence community employees and the president swear the same oath so that's what's really at stake here and it's very easy to look at this and say this is this is a partisan issue and and obviously you're hearing a lot of that it really isn't a partisan issue if our system itself is at stake and so i think by looking at the history of whistleblowing america you can see that this is something that is very unusual the situation we obviously don't want it to continue we don't want a whistleblowing intelligence community a leaking intelligence community we don't want we don't we also don't want a president who's violating all the norms of foreign policy and it's you know our best aspiration should be to return things to normal as soon as possible but in order to do that you've got to acknowledge that this is not politics as usual this is not a normal situation and it needs to be put right and thankfully i think a whistleblower this most recent whistleblower has really shown a light on some very important issues for american democracy could i one more thing i know please one more thing i just wanted to say is and you can read about it in the atlanta today if you're interested whistleblowing is really an america's dna we we we had the first whistleblower protection law and it predates our constitution it was a promulgate in 1778 in response to corruption of the first commodore of the us navy esek hopkins who was essentially defying george washington's orders to engage the british in the in the revolutionary revolutionary war in order to serve his own economic interests and what were his economic interests well he was involved in the slave trade as were most rhod island elites which is where he came from and so congress responded they removed him from office they protected the whistleblowers they paid their legal fees they insisted that all the information be made available to the public and that's the reason we know about this story today many countries around the world have looked to the united states for leadership on this issue and it's nice in my view to see us returning to it not just because of my book but because of i care about my country so i want to i want to push a little on on what i think is the audacity of the claim you're making because you and then make sure i get it right you are really saying that the ability to blow the whistle and to be protected if you blow the whistle is essential to our democracy you are saying it's a pillar of democracy because it gives rise to a sort of a system of mutual accountability among government peers but also up and down like you can blow the whistle on somebody above you you can blow the whistle on somebody who's who's same place but you are you're not saying it's sort of a a nice to have you're saying it's a need to have is that is that right yes and i don't mean to oversimplify this because obviously the national security whistleblowing is the most difficult because in order to blow the whistle you've got to essentially violate the law to do so for a higher cause and even though there are inspector generals that are supposed to protect whistleblowers when you look at the law the whistleblower protection enhancement act of 1989 and 2012 explicitly excludes all national security employees so if you're looking for a good reform issue for congress this is one to try to work on some way together that we can navigate that space because you need to keep classified information but to run a effective foreign policy right so we will definitely have reactions on the national security side but let me let me turn to bunny and and and ask you to talk about your experience as a whistleblower at least from the way allison describes your case in her book you were not protected uh and so i'd love to hear from you sort of the chilling effect of that in terms of your own career but also those who worked with you and what that means if you're not protected yeah i am bunny greenhouse and i am a whistleblower i did not like that term when it was first introduced to me by my attorney i said i'm not a whistleblower you know i'm not doing anything wrong i'm absolutely trying to do my job i was brought to the u.s army corps of engineers by its new commander to revolutionize contracting you know at the core it had been an old boys net network for over a hundred years where uh contracting the the contractors who were selected for jobs was not necessarily on their expertise and the uh and how they were going to save money for our government and so on it was on uh oftentimes the military and some of the civilians that were in government uh if they the military did not make a general officer they knew that this revolving door would bring them greater jobs when they got on the outside and so they wanted that to stop and so they brought me in i took an oath of office that i would conduct the business of contracting with the highest degree of of integrity ethics uh with beyond reproach and with preferential treatment toward none and that preferential treatment toward none was what brought me to the forefront in 2003 during the iraq war uh whereas i found out later that it had already been decided that halliburton was going to be and kbr were going to be the contractors for whatever they had decided was going to happen in the iraq war things that never materialized and um and so when i found that out it was really after i had gone forward with finding those conflicts of interest uh kbr had written the contingency plan which is like an economic analysis so they had defined what was going to go on to uh to settle the destruction you know that may have gone on with the oil fields and they had written the budget and everything that was going to happen so actually they had written their own contract and decided the money that they were going to get and the army and defense and the core of engineers had decided that it was going to be classified and if it's going to be non-competitive as you hear the no-bid contracts it was going to be competitive non-competitive and it was going to be awarded for five years well i was the competition advocate i was looking out for small businesses and every and fairness in the business of contracting and no way was that going to happen without my writing my reservations so it happened that when the acquisition plan came to me and the final contract they had the five years on there um and so after i had protested so much when the final document hit my desk it had a two year option two years base and three year options but knowing the environment those options never would have been uh looked into and evaluated so i decided to write above my signature what my reservations were and so that then branded me as a whistleblower uh knowing that most people who are branded as whistleblowers they try to go to their internal to their up their chain of command first and let them know the law and what we are up against because i was the only one as the principal assistant responsible for contracting who could go to prison for those billions of dollars that i was about to award the the legal people couldn't go uh and no one else none of the general officers that were there they would say well she never told us anything and we were military so we didn't know what we were doing and she was the cause in fact that was the first remedy they offered me they brought me in and said we won't take your uh scs rank we won't take your one-star general protocol we won't take your top secret clearance if you will leave now and i'm saying leaving now for what i'm just doing my job if you will leave now but the whole thing was to use me as a scapegoat to say she never told us anything we were military so we were just doing the things that we thought we knew what to do so it was a very um it was i i thank god in a sense for being chosen you know for this i didn't know when i didn't know when i came in and took the oath of office that i took that i was going to have to stand up for the things that i believed in remember whistleblowers come into organizations with values they have values from their roots and i had values from my roots even from the point of not telling white lies my mother introduced that to me with a switch just to say that in Louisiana in her house in their house if you told a white lie you were gonna you have to go out and determine your switch you know for the punishment and my mother explained to me that a white lie was an intentional it was an intentional way of deceiving someone and so uh i learned from then so i remember many times in the court of engineers that they didn't trust me because they never knew what i was going to say in our meetings um they would have times when they were roasting people in a sense i guess you'd call it and so when i knew when i knew what the the situation was i would bring some clarity to it so then i was told can't trust her you know because you never know what she's going to because i was destroying their roasting you know of a person nobody would ever do it for me but still i could not sit there and know something and not explain or bring some clarity about it so i became the skunk in the park and literally that's the way i was treated i was moved out of my office of a very nice office over there and put in a cubicle um where i was totally out of any kind of management of decision making and so on especially with contracting and they had placed a military colonel in as the the acting principal assistant responsible for contracting who was not prepared at that time that they moved me out of my office Katrina came along i'm from Louisiana when very much i was needed to be there to help make those decisions but can you believe Halliburton was the one who got most of the contracts to help prepare the way of getting New Orleans and Katrina back into the right so being a whistleblower is not easy it is a loyalty to the truth and it's uh it's it's um truth without fear i was brought up in my life you know not to fear to bring forth what it is that i knew and i could contribute without any reservations without any regard to what it was going to do for me so whistleblowing is a sacrifice of self and your ideals and the things that you know that it's not going to come to a good end for your personal goals but what are you going to do you've got to stand in front of the mirror the next day and that night and say what did i do in my work today so it only takes one person to change and make a difference in an organization by just doing the right thing because you know it's the right thing to do regardless of the consequences and that had been my life regardless of the consequences you know giving aside self sacrificing self for truth what better goal is that when you know the truth and you know it's going to be for the best interests of the public and that's what my my whole thing was i believe that integrity in government is not an option that it's an obligation and there are not many people who will stand up for that you know these days there are not many people who don't believe that there are alternative truths truth is truth and let's get to explaining that truth and when it comes to that much money that i was in charge of and overseeing i was not going to have my grandchildren read about me going to prison you know for abuse or in government contracting so you i made a choice and and we are grateful it is you underline a couple of of points i mean one i think where you start where you say you know you didn't want to be a whistleblower it's not a word that people apply to themselves eagerly but you also point out that it is a government underlaw and you were underlaw and part of your response was because that that accountability would land on you if you didn't raise it right and i remember secretary romsfeld saying that at the same time the air force was having a problem darlin drillian you know was the person there then and i believe she went to prison for about nine months you know for some activities that went on there and i remember reading in the paper that secretary romsfeld said that the air force did not have any adult supervision i was trying to be that adult and where where i was so disappointed that instead of the administration saying well bunny greenhouse is doing the right thing you know to bring before to the forefront those conflicts of interest because once you do a contingency plan or an economic analysis you don't follow through doing the follow-on contracting right you know because you have excluded yourself you know from that unless we can mitigate you know that conflicts of those conflicts of interest and i had to bring those things to the forefront and let them know that so in the final analysis it came out with um because i wrote what i wrote on the contract and really was sending it up to the department of the army because they had the final word you know and they were the executive agent you know for the the contract i thought that they would have called me to say what are you talking about what do you want us to do about this but nobody did i was the spunk in the park and i was thinking all over and nobody wanted to sit beside me so therefore it went forth you know as it was but because i had raised that it forced them to go into a competition within a year's time within the year's time even though they call me from texas and say why are you coming out here what role do you think you're going to play i was still the principal assistant responsible for contracting and i was going to be there to see what was the conduct of that business as long as it was on my watch thank you yes thank so david let me come to you uh on the first place that we're now in the national security sphere certainly uh bunny your story uh and allison raised that um and you joked where you said you know is there a difference she said we want whistleblowers we don't want leakers you said you know why let me ask you do you make any distinction they're all sources right from where you sit they start with sources do you make any distinction between somebody who you think is leaking maybe to hurt a rival all the different reasons people leak and somebody who is trying to uphold what they think needs to be done that's a great question um and uh so first of all congratulations to allison i mean anybody here anybody can write a book you know i've written a few and marie's written a few allison's written uh some before but no one else i know can write a book and then arrange for a whistleblower crisis in the middle and anyone at this table who thinks that's coincidental you don't know allison okay so i'm i'm i'm fully in the conspiracy theory mode here of how it is that the first whistleblower scandal who engaged the president of the united states in 50 years happens to happen on the week and allison's book comes out yeah i mean as they tell you in journalism school if it doesn't look like a coincidence it probably isn't so um it's a really good question and marie and and you and i have talked about this over the years and we had differences of opinion which we can replay if anybody wants them about wiki leaks and our decisions to go to go publish that and that's covered in in the book as well uh in a really interesting piece so here's a framework in which i would put it the whistleblower protection as allison said goes back deep in our history and it goes back because people recognize there has to be a venting system to bring sunshine into government i would say that the whistleblower protection act and those that went before it are just one piece of the ways that that happens and the overall architecture of how that happens is called the first amendment right and um as uh bill keller a former executive editor of the times used to say and was executive editor during the wiki leaks discussions are going on oh yeah there is a reason the first amendment is first that too was not a coincidence okay so within that structure what does that mean as we have come to interpret the first amendment since the pentagon papers which was a really interesting moment in leakage rather than whistleblowing right as we've come to interpret it the government of the united states does not have the authority to go to any publication the new york times the washington post a blogger cnn and say you are prohibited from publishing x piece of information and even this whistleblower event that we've seen unfold at rapid speed in the past week has unfolded in rapid speed only because we had members of congress at first leaking and then saying publicly something strange here we were supposed to get a whistleblower account it didn't happen it didn't get delivered we were told it was being blocked so they're about whistleblowing they were leaking right they were leaking about whistleblowers and that is a critical fact because none of what you've seen happen including this morning's release of the transcript would have happened without the intense journalistic pressure that was put on this government to go to it if they had kept it all within the channel they would have been in a long struggle with congress the transcript would have been turned over it would have been required to be kept confidential right and the view of people who work in journalism in the united states or many people who work in journalism and certainly in this city is some issues of national security are far far too important to entrust to the government of the united states all right okay and and that you that you start off by entrusting it to our system now if you are a member of the government and you are concerned about the leakage of classified data which is a real concern and i'll we can go into how we we deal with that then your view is somewhat different you flip it on its edge and you say who elected you to go decide what should be published and what shouldn't be published right and that's the most frequent line that you get in that dance which used to happen to me infrequently and now happens very frequently when you go to the government and you say we are preparing to publish a story on x and we're here to discuss with you your concern your national security concerns so that we can make a judgment about what might actually be damaging the national security but the judgment is entirely ours you can express your concerns we did this with your colleagues in the state department during wiki weeks but at the end of the day the only one with authority to make the decision is us now government officials hate hearing that and they usually come back and say who elected you and we say well you know you're really going to take this up with james madison and and others and we realize that's a difficult conversation to have these days um but that's the core of it now the whistleblower protection was created so that people were not stuck in the awful choice between coming to the new york times or why supposed to the wall street journal or someone else and sitting there without without any other records so bunny made a really hard choice okay and the hard choice she made she didn't want to become a whistleblower but she decided to go in and follow the process she could have made another choice instead of being called a whistleblower she could have been called something she would have disliked even more could be called a leaker go to a reporter and say hey holla Burton is being given a sweetheart deal here and we are being told not to go do this now by sticking within the system as we just heard she paid a price pretty big price if you had come to us you would have paid probably an even bigger price because then there would have been a charge of an effort that they could prosecute you for violating something that was classified it's our overall view amary that just because something is classified is not necessarily even a brief reason not to go publish it because things are wildly over classified as you know i do okay when wiki leaks came out not to replay our old argument one day i was asked by a very senior person in your building to come by right after wiki leaks happened and just explain how this happened so i gathered up a bunch of the wiki leaks documents which you'll recall the ones we were publishing where the state department cables they were the lowest level of classification but they were classified and i walked them over to your building and i sat down with this official and i said i would guess between 15 and 20 percent of the documents we went through in the 250 000 cables were newspaper articles that had appeared in china or portugal or britain or someplace that somebody thought somebody ought to read in washington and so they put it into the cable system and they stamped secret on it and pushed it on through even though you could google it that day and my question to this official which has never been answered by subsequent officials as well is how are we supposed to respect the system that would classify an article that was published yesterday in the times of london or the china daily news or whatever and the answer i got back was well nobody's ever gotten fired for over-classifying lots of people have gotten fired for under-classifying right so the incentive in the system is to classify everything now let's spin it forward to this morning if you haven't read it yet go back and read the it's not really a transcript but the summary of the president's discussion with the president of ukraine and ask yourself because you'll see struck out on it last night was secret no foreign meaning not for foreign dissemination low level level classification almost exactly it was in the wiki league stuff then ask yourself the question what is it in this document that required it to be classified to begin with and the answer is absolutely nothing except that you discover that the president united states is asking the president the newly elected leader of another country to go launch an investigation against the man he thinks is going to run against him for president united states everything else in it is niceties don't we get along we get nothing you haven't heard similar things in public speeches and that's the dilemma we face when it comes on the whistleblowing side so yeah sometimes we get sources who are self-interested sometimes we get sources who like bunny have discovered a real piece of wrongdoing but don't believe the system will react for them right okay sometimes we get sources who are out to do no good and we are certainly trying to figure out what the motivations are our sources are and we're frequently wrong in that but you judge it by the importance of the information not by the stamp that somebody put on it all right so let me come to you jimela to talk to talk about this from the from congressional perspective and part part of it i would love to have your reflection on the leaker whistleblower distinction in terms of so one way to think about it yes the leakers are endangering the government from the government's point of view whistleblowers are from the point of view as the way allison puts it are holding the government to the standards we should be held by so i'd love to hear your thoughts on that but i'd also to the extent you've seen whistleblower complaints that come through the proper channels how do you try to distinguish between the disgruntled employee right that's always the first thing the management says oh no you know this didn't happen this employee got a bad performance review and doesn't like it so how do you how do you then think about and evaluate the actual content of the whistleblowing complaint look i mean it's a really it's a really important point and really important questions particularly as we're as we're debating this in public with the most recent whistleblower issue i think there's a critically important distinction between a leaker and a whistleblower and while david may love leakers the reality is that leakers are violating the law and whistleblower aren't right let's just take the sort of paradigmatic leaker who some a lot of people call a whistleblower right edward snowden and let's take bunny right edward snowden released a tremendous amount of highly classified information some of which arguably created a very very healthy public debate and led to actual legislation so we can argue about that right but the bulk 99 percent of whatever so released had nothing to do with public debate had no impact on american privacy and civil liberties but was simply details about how the nsa and other government agencies conduct surveillance of foreign officials and foreign entities and in many ways out of those capabilities to our worst enemies edward snowden who released information through the press through the free press uh although through the foreign press also uh ran he didn't like bunny sign his name to a document put his concerns in public tell his bosses tell the inspector general go through the process go to the congressional committees he didn't do anything's bunny did to the contrary he ran he ran to russia where he lives today or the protection of glamor Putin who anybody i think anybody but maybe the president can can agree is a is a inveterate opponent to the united states our foreign policy in our interest in the world um and so that's that's a leaker right now we can argue about daniel ellsworth a lot of other leakers we can debate the barrett's in the upside but edward snowden to me is the case in point of a person who by the law who ran and didn't stand in facebook daniel ellsworth his credit didn't run off to russia didn't run off anywhere daniel ellsworth stayed in the face of music bunny put her complaints in writing she followed the law and and we could all debate what the merits of the whistleblowing were whatever right but what can't be disputed is edward snowden and bunny are two very different people david might write both stories right but there's a difference and we've also changed the way we think about journalists i think david is right look ultimately the newspapers are making the judgment call about whether a publisher or not and if you remember you go back to the terrorist surveillance program i was outed in 2005 uh by the new york times right in a hotly debated issue between the bush administration of the new york times they had that story for years they held that story for the better part of the year maybe year and a half for national security reasons for national security reasons at the world or what the government told us for national security meetings reasons at the time different different distinctions all right with the government's over national reasons and which which the paper respected the editorial board sat and discussed it and held back for year and a half and they even released it over the objections of the administration the administration wanted to kept kept the secret even at that point and we could debate about whether the whether the objections were real and whether it had a measurable impact on on on our surveillance capabilities and the like um but what is clear is there has been a long history of dialogue between the press and the government about what is classified what's not whether it's probably classified whether it's over classified or not and i i agree i agree with david that um there is a tremendous amount of overclassification that's a problem that shouldn't be a justification for leaking it shouldn't be a justification for violating the law it's a it's a justification for changing the way we do classification and not overclassifying um but i think in the in the final analysis the reason we have these whistleblower protection laws and the reason we have a what i agree with uh with allison is a very long history of protecting uh people who out government waste fraud and abuse and allow congress to get involved in that process is because that isn't the core of our values that's an important value just as a free precedent what's also the core values is respecting decisions by the government to properly classify properly classified information government needs to have secrets that's okay uh it has been true also since since the dawn of our of our modern american government um and the question where that tension plays out and the more the the sort of the moral compass of the press and when they make those judgments and how they make those judgments in a lot of ways the way the press has changed with the with the evolution of the blogosphere and twitter and and the president's use of twitter it has changed the way we think about journalism and let's be clear jillian assange is not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination he's not it's the idea somehow that the whistleblower protection laws or our first amendment on five of jillian assange is ridiculous we can debate that issue uh we can debate whether people should have published his his materials um but you know these are important it's good that we're having this conversation and it's good that allison's book is out today i mean if any there's a producer or a book writer who hasn't looked at this book or hasn't picked it up yet go get it have her on your show i mean this is i mean you know this is going to even put up on the screen and say look we got a book right about this thing right now about the history of this uh in the middle of a whistleblower scandal um but and and i think allison's right and david's right that uh but for this whistleblower we might have not heard about this issue for a long time not clear that that wouldn't have led to the right results right in buddy's case there was an investigation there was a debate we followed these issues without it getting out leaked out publicly without it being that class federation being revealed in the in the in the press immediately um the debate may not come out the way anybody wanted it to or you know there may have been there may have been challenges the result but the debate was had in congress um and now we're going to see by the way by the way it's it's worth noting and i'll and i'll stop here that a republican led senate mitch mcconnell right and people have you know derisely referred to as moscow mitch is the one who hotlined to the floor resolution last night require an instructed president to deliver to the congress a full copy of the whistleblower complaint that's astounding to think about it hotline to the floor it didn't have to do that he could have fought it he could have tried stave it off he's done that in a number of other issues right he didn't he hotline to the floor and that demonstrates that there is a strong set of values in the government on the hill in the administration yeah and again i know there's a lot of concern about the president i've expressed them myself but he did put that he did put that transcript or the summary out there and now he's gonna we're gonna we're gonna have it out we have that debate about whether pages two and three of that thing right where the where zeolinsky says i want to buy javelin's and the president says yeah javelin's though you know i don't know that's how it's other thing and so we're gonna we're gonna learn the public's gonna have a chance and congress have chance to debate is that a quid pro quo right what was going on there you know all right whistleblower wouldn't be there so we're gonna hold that for a second i'm gonna let i'm gonna turn to all of you soon to let you ask your questions but i want to come back to allison the so let's assume we're talking about real whistle whistleblowers uh bunny greenhouse whistleblowers your argument is that from the very beginning we we the united states have protected whistleblowers because we've recognized that this is a critical way of holding ourselves accountable of of blowing the whistle on elit misbehavior or government misbehavior not always the same thing um but how many whistleblowers have actually been protected because i mean bunny's story is not a story of being protected it's a story of being basically hounded out of office so you're you've reviewed all these different whistleblowers is do we talk about whistleblower protection or do we actually protect whistleblowers that's that's the question i'm glad you're asking it because even though we have this tradition we also behave hypocritically i call it in my book the paradox of whistleblowing in america in that we celebrate whistleblowing i thought it was so interesting in the snow debate that some of the biggest uh uh disagreements were over whether snow could really be called a whistleblower or not and that's perhaps why mitch McConnell did what he did because we we believe in whistleblowers in theory in practice is another matter you know when the dust clears they're often punished they lose everything they sacrifice enormously and in fact i can't even think of an example in the government realm where that is not the case so so let's think a little bit about how we want to do better in the future bunny go ahead one there's not not one general whistleblower law it differs for the different communities exactly and the ones in the intelligence community they have a very limited way that they can disclose you know anything and if someone like the inspector general uh becomes silenced or compromised that puts a chill on the rest of the people in that community as to whether they're going to come forth they can just briefly take on one issue that my friend jamal raised which has to with snow and who i would never go out to go defend for a moment and you're absolutely right the difference between him and daniel elsberg is elsberg stayed around in the end he didn't have to suffer a penalty uh but that wasn't clear at the time we stick around i've been through a lot of leak investigations most notably out of the revelation of olympic games which was the us cyber program against iran but that's not the only one and i'm blessed in that i've got a whole new york times legal department behind me that says to the u.s government you want to go do this one in court bring it on guys what is what the lawyers of the new york times is why they're not making more money someplace else because they want to take on these kind of cases and bless them because that's how you go create new law here but one thing you said about snow snowden justified what he did on the basis that the united states was violating privacy in ways that i didn't find terribly persuasive but his doc what the documents he released while many of them i'm sure did reveal us techniques operations and so forth also triggered some pretty fundamental debates right um why was the nsa on autopilot listening into angela merkel's cell phone something that the president reversed as soon as he read about it yeah okay reversed ish we should talk we should talk about that we should debate the surreal fantasy world is like that's a great but it's a really it's an interesting one um the nsa had been collecting but not looking at call records not the actual content of the call but call records of every phone call everybody in this room made domestically and overseas so they could go into that later on now what we learned later was they had considered ending the program because it was a waste of money and they weren't getting it out of it right but there was an effort even within the nsa they kill it up before this happened but after it was revealed the president no longer authorized that and they came up with an alternative means by which um the the telephone providers are collecting the material and the nsa version can go in and and and get it so they brought he brought about change so it's entirely possible that you could have violated your own um conducted criminal activity and actually gotten something done yeah i mean look nobody nobody nobody can debate that sometimes you know leakers uh the results of leaking result in in positive change or positive debate or or the political process moving forward the question is really whether all the stuff you remember the one there's one document that was so revealed that led to that program right was that that Verizon business order that's right bulk telephone work what about the other hundreds of thousands of pages that had nothing to do with americans nothing to do with our privacy civil liberties nothing to do with our rights over the constitution right they revealed that revealed not only who was targeted for american spells but our capabilities detailed technical discussions of our capabilities none of that's part of the public debate everyone wants to talk about Edward stoner's whistleblower wants to have the business records thing we can have that debate right right but let's talk about what the the traitorous nature of Edward stoner's behavior and i'd say it advisedly when i say Edward stoner's no question my mind a trader should be prosecuted both both were both were in the content both were in the material which which is what makes it such a fascinating case right because advocates on both sides can actually find something in that can you say one thing about about about about yes and then now about about this about this uh this um everybody this issue of uh of angla merkel right because since you raised it um listen if we are not if the nsa and the cia and all of our intelligence are not listening to angla merkel's phone calls and every other foreign leader allied or not fire of all other than those who are other than those who we made an agreement with to not do that like the uk allegedly right we should just shut it down i mean this is literally the job we want to know what our what our allies and our enemies are thinking why they're thinking that and what we can do to elevate our interests that is literally the goal of our nation and the goal of our intelligence community if we're not doing that then we're doing something wrong so of course we have a little more gone collection we should have we should never have limited that we should not end that the president by the way to the to be clear you know put in place a sort set of procedures then we will tell you about what we would do when we do those you did not end the surveillance of foreign leaders no he ended the surveillance of that foreign leader on that phone well all right because yeah right i mean let's just call it what it is right i mean look um and and on the phone records program we continued the phone record program until congress changed it and then kept the program a version of the program going until the present day which is now going to be debated in congress so look i yes these are issues of import that should can and should be discussed right but in the right way right that's why we have a process right it's not about running to the press and then run to moscow right if that's the plan then we've got real problems all right so allison uh i will just say i i was in germany with a group of germans uh when uh a very senior cia official made that argument of course we should be listing pure chancellor's cell phone it did not go over well yeah that was not the view you know how you don't explain what the germans is so the germans are actually the biggest beneficiary is the 215 metadata program the name of us we've stopped more terrorist attacks in germany than anywhere else the world of that program they came out publicly and pilloried it two weeks later they were at nsa the bnd was meeting with joe keith alexander saying please keep the program alive we need the data our politicians are happy happy i think we need the data okay so allison last word and i'll just just very quickly about the process because i'm a process person i make an argument in the book that we need to restore process we need to return to normal what's going on right now is not an admirable state of affairs but let's face the facts here you want to stay stick around and uh face the music you may suffer like bunny did because what you left out of her story is whistleblower protection didn't protect her you finally you finally had to file a title seven discrimination suit and that's what finally resolved it with the case of snowden people say why didn't you just complain up the chain well there you have to realize that nsa inspector general george lark was removed from his post in 2016 for retaliating against a whistleblower so i think it's pretty fair to say that if he had gone inside and not done what he did we wouldn't know these things and he was a contractor so he wouldn't have been covered yeah that's a that's a whole legal question too right because of his contractor status so so we've got a long way to go with whistleblower protection okay floor is open just introduce yourself and make sure you turn on your green screen right here mike nelson i was professor of internet studies at georgetown and so i wanted to talk a bit about the power of technology and not just for the the big cases but for the more fine grained cases um it seems that the internet culture is encouraging people to expose little incidents there's a famous website in india called ipaidabribe.com more than a hundred thousand people have reported a policeman or an official who asked for a bribe to excuse a speeding ticket or to get a passport and it does seem that the social media ethos is encouraging more whistleblowing 15 years ago it was the famous dog poop girl in the south korean subway where someone took a picture of this woman who didn't clean up after her dog and suddenly the whole world knew about this i'd be interested in hearing your your thoughts and any of your thoughts on how the social media paparazzi culture is actually encouraging more whistleblowing at the local small incident level yeah what's the i i would just say really briefly i'm not sure the example you cite is an example of a whistleblower because that's a shaming social shaming sort of thing and we do see a lot of that on social media i think with a lot of negative consequences you know but if you're breaking the law let's assume there's a dog poop law right was there i mean soon there is but i think it does raise the question of you know what is social monitoring where we're all monitoring each other all the time and saying whoop you know you parked illegally or you whatever the ways in which many of us break the law in small ways all the time versus whistleblowing i mean that does seem to me i call it mutually assured disclosure yes so you can take a picture of the house of representatives in his car the member of represent house of representatives speeding down yes i 66 for this reason i really root my definition of whistleblowing in the rule of law yeah and and that's important to do because otherwise it could expand to be anything you want it to be but a level i mean is it like felonies rather than misdemeanors no just illegality or misconduct violation of norms constitutional norms in the in the then that would be whistleblowing because if it's illegal cleaning up not in the it's not a government oh it's a government issue i see i don't know i don't know enough about the particular case but i guess the point i'm trying to make is that we don't want whistleblowing to be in the eye of the beholder in other words just because you think something is corrupt and immoral doesn't necessarily mean it is corrupt and immoral whistleblowing is not about differences in policy you don't get to you don't blow the whistle if you leak something because you disagree with a particular policy whistleblowers expose misconduct they expose corruption they expose the exploitation of public office per private gain okay so it's important which is why the transcript is sort of the classic case isn't it in my view yes well also why erud snowden isn't a whistleblower and he wasn't he wasn't exposing allow me corruption he wasn't exposing um uh people acting for private gain he's exposing what he thought in his opinion was illegal activity as it turns out by the way not only was it not illegal commerce reauthorized a version of that very program every court to have ever looked at the claim that stowed made about private civil liberties every court and there were dozens of them and every judge and there were dozens of them had held that the activity erud snowden revealed was a lawful so so that actually that actually isn't true because the u.s court of appeals overturned and congress responded and revised the patriot act no so to be to be so to be clear every judge to the point of the disclosure right and every that's what you're saying every judge right had held that it was lawful yeah right into a procedure it was lawful right and and to the extent that to the extent that one court and a court that's an outlier uh to be clear as other courts held the other way um uh did hold the aspects of the program were illegal and congress by always responding to the the revelations and they're understanding the program congress of course had been briefed that house and judiciary committee house and senate judiciary and intel committees have been fully breached on the program as had the leadership now whether they paid attention or not to be able to issue but be clear stowed didn't reveal illegality stowed didn't reveal waste brought abuse stowed didn't reveal anything about people using personal private officer public officer private game so trader yes whistleblower now right so hold yeah hold because i want to get some other questions in here i i think it does raise a further question of what it is when you reveal something that at least may it may not have been illegal but many of us were completely horrified to find out that our government was doing that uh it maybe that's a separate category but i i really do want to get other uh voices in here please thank you my name is Connie Malone i am a new york state retired high school english teacher my question is to bunny when you signed the paper and wrote the caveat on top of your signature were you aware at that time that vice president dick cheney had ties to halberton did not know that that i don't think it would have played in my decisions anyway but i did not my my brother is elvin haze the professional basketball player used to be here and he wrote me on the morning that the story hit houston and said funny you're on one side of the page and cheney is on the other side i did not know you know that vice president cheney had been the ceo of halberton so it wasn't anything i i've never been a political animal and i i i did not it was nothing that had to do with the politics you know and the election and all that that was going on at the time because i was really kind of a dumb bunny on that you weren't dumb you were just honest and you found yourself you were certainly not and and and that's why that question you're just answering you said i like your answer that it's the law you know it's all about the rule of law and that this that determines the far federal acquisition regulation you know that they that's why they didn't they said she has to go she's too much of a stickler for the rules yep yep but you can't play with those rules when you're dealing in the billions of dollars you know and then none of them the lawyers or all of the other people the generals nobody could be punished you know for what i would have done they would have just picked up the hotline if i had done what they wanted to do and and their bunny greenhouse would have been you know so it's it's the law it it's the rules it's the law it's the consciousness that and values that a person has when he's in a job that says i'm going to do the right thing for the right reason regardless of the consequences and those consequences are usually the loss of top secret clearance you know the the loss of your position i was never one who cared about any power i just wanted to do the right thing for the right reason and i'm telling you each of you out here i'm going to have your challenge somewhere in life and you've got to make a decision what's important you know for me to hide under the fact that i didn't have the courage to do the right thing for the right reason i tell you i reflect many times every day of walking down through the halls of the core of engineers and people walking beside me looking straight ahead go get them money you know but never looking toward me because they didn't want to be identified with me it took sbs senior executive service had been chilled to the point where they say we don't want to be a bunny greenhouse and and then some of them criticized me because they said well if you will leave now you will keep your secret clearance you will keep everything you know just go now no that wasn't good enough for me to abort my career and go now for whatever secret uh plans that they had agendas that they had over the truth so if i had to sacrifice self for truth i did what i had to do thank you you effectively were david versus goliath yeah yeah and um it i i look up on it as a calling and i often thank god to say i thank you for choosing me because it brought out of me some things that i may not have known were there that i had the courage to stand up for truth you placed me in a job that i didn't know all that you had planned out there you know for me i thought it was just to go in and revolutionize contracting in the core and the and in in fact the all of the commanders and all didn't believe i could do it and i was doing it inch by inch with a smiling face and going out and visiting them where nobody else had been going to the field and i saw what was going on and i had open door policy where contractors and different people came in and told me what was going on and so then it gave me something to move on so to me i was too much i was too tall and um and that was a problem you know that she's tall and she's just overpowering and she's more powerful than the commander of the the chief of engineers i was not that didn't matter to me it mattered that uh the business of contracting was done right and i was writing all over the place every time i reviewed a document i wrote all over it and it was to tell the people in the field i want this change you know this is not in accordance to law thank you and that's what's so important about what you said it's law may i uh i love that let me go around and if there's time i'll come back over there at the very end um hello i my name is ryan madsen i'm an intern in the international security program um i was just wondering how expediency can come into play between whistleblowing and leaking as you said whistleblowing is a process but sometimes there are consequences when uh information comes out too late um so i was kind of wondering uh if there have been examples of when whistleblowing came a little too late uh and leaking would have been a better option in terms of the law or not the law but consequences david probably has a view you want to go first and i'll give you one sure that's a great question and i think it's really important here to to bring up what it is that edwards noden actually revealed and i think it's this that emergency measures that have been put in place after 9 11 that were absolutely justified because we had just been attacked on us soil became business as usual became standard operating procedure and the american people had no idea that was going on arguably that's something we need to know and if we had known it sooner who knows what the consequences would have been a slightly different answer i would give but i agree with everything that um allison has said here so the whistleblower law applies beautifully in cases like bunny and we've bunny's case here and we've heard really great examples uh and and in bunny's case uh really great courage in enforcing an existing law but that isn't that doesn't take up the totality of issues that need to get debated inside the united states sometimes it's a legal issue and if uh bunny flags the right thing it then ends up going to the justice department or someone and there's an investigation in the case of the whistle blower whose transcript the transcript released today that person followed the procedures it went to the justice department the justice department said we see no violation of the federal campaign finance law okay okay and therefore we are not going to prosecute and this was just within the past couple of weeks but when we look at that transcript we're saying wait a minute there's something much bigger going on here this isn't just a question of the narrow campaign finance law we have to make a judgment about whether or not our president is actually trading a political favor for a foreign policy good which the campaign finance law doesn't take a little back so frequently leaking happens when somebody either doesn't believe they're going to be protected by the whistleblower law or they believe that the subject that they are leaking about is vitally important but not covered by the whistleblowers law right so why do we write so much in the cyber realm in the territory that you're doing here at new america as some of which got reinforced but only a tiny fraction of by the snowden material why because we believe that the united states is using we meaning new york times journalists who covered this that the united states is using a new weapon that has tremendous power that it has not debated at all how it wants to go use and what kind of restriction should be on how we use it and therefore what kind of standards there might be for how it's used against us in the nuclear world we actually had this debate much more thoroughly than we've ever had it in the cyber world because we knew what nuclear weapons could do we saw it here ishima nagasaki and the government moved between the 1950s and the 1980s from saying nuclear weapons are just another bullet in the arsenal to use a line that eisenhower used to nuclear to nuclear weapons are something we would only really use as a matter of national survival we've never had that fundamental debate in cyber most of what we hear about us cyber operations that we go and publish would not be covered by the whistleblower law right somebody might say we don't think we should be attacking power stations because it's going to make us more vulnerable well that's an interesting debate that's worth happening having but certainly no one in the u.s. government is violating the law in the course of joy and so we have to remember that whistleblowing and leaking are not necessarily about the same thing do you want it now what about opportunistic leaking that is no way can be under the whistleblowing you know act whereas the person or the community or whatever wants certain things to get out but where they are can be anonymous you know in getting that out that happens every day bunny and sometimes it happens at the white house where they will call you in and say this is not for attribution but x y and you have to take that with the same amount of skepticism as you would take somebody who met you in a parking lot and look I mean I think I think what David has highlighted is exactly right right there's a question about whether we should be having and how important this debate is about cyber and I think you're right it's a critical debate the nation needs to have the question is how do we come to that debate right and you've argued I think forcefully and fairly that the way to come to that debate because the government's been doing it for a while is to have it out the press and to talk about what's happening and then Congress can think about it and debate it and the public can talk about it and debate it but the hard part is you're exactly also right it's not whistleblowing it's not what Alice has talked about right it's not this it's a debate over policy and debates over policy are important to have but how we come to debate is is is important it's not clear to me that where the government's doing something highly classified legitimately and properly classified right appropriately and there are debates about whether what we do in cyberspace should or shouldn't be classified and whether it has less of a deterrent effect if we classify everything right and those are good debates to have but you know Edward Snowden reveals this this phone records program it's hotly debated right Anne Marie says you know we were people were horrified when they found out what was going on and yet the Obama administration continue that program in its identical form every day after Snowden revealed it for better part of two years until congress said change it and when congress said change it congress didn't say oh we're so worried about the violation of america's private civil liberties shut it down they just put it in the hands of companies so let's be real clear about Edward Snowden's claim nsa is violating private civil liberties it's a disaster for the country i need to go out and leak it and then dump all other stuff and congress response was yeah but we're going to keep that thing alive and the minister's response is yeah we're going to keep that thing alive and at the end of the day to this day and maybe it ends at the end of this year but this day that program remains maybe somebody else's hands but that same clutch remains in place okay we got one last question and the um all right two we'll get you will give a do you both at the same time and then you all can close it out uh so sure thanks hold on anybody side of the day i'll be brief austin and i'm's um open technology institute do you see any issues kind of pivoting back to inspector generals and sort of the legitimate process for whistle blowing do you see any issues with the way that inspector generals are political appointees rather than uh insulated from partisan politics and do you see any opportunities for reform on that front okay great one question on inspector generals and partisanship alayna i'm alayna sorris i'm a research associate with the political reform program i'm just curious um over the history of whistleblowing that you've looked at and then the relationship with leaking the way that in the last couple years leaking in the white house has changed so much or the way that we're seeing it so frequently um i'm curious if you're seeing a general pattern or what your predictions perhaps to be although i know that's a turkey thing to ask about for the future of whistleblowing and if you think that this is a new precedent that was set into the trump administration because it's the trump administration or that might be something that we see more of in the future great all right first is going with your question first they're both great questions i think it's really important to see what's happened currently with with whistleblowing in its proper historical context and so when you do when you do that you really do get a sense and i try this is why i wrote the book of how we've been in crazy situations before not quite as crazy as now but it really looked grim on multiple occasions and we managed to write the ship get back on track typically the responses there's some kind of wild abuse then congress legislates to meet that abuse then there's a workaround and congress has got to respond again and so i think we're in one of those crazy moments now and my hope is we'll get back on track and congress will will respond social media may have changed that in some ways i'm hoping that's not the case with respect to the inspector generals yes this is a massive area for reform uh they they are not typically thought of as political appointees many of them now if you look at uh the data are in acting positions in fact the the icig right now the icig the yeah the hello the inspector general yes welcome to washington okay excuse me excuse me there's so many people revolving around that actually flipped that the director of national intelligence is acting right but if you look around the Trump administration a lot of people are acting and that has implications all of its own that's also happened in the inspector general community too and that's something we need to change because these are not partisan positions of the truth positions it you raised an important point the whistleblowing comes from the bottom up inspector generals from the top down right in other words as as yet another way of holding people accountable yeah anybody at least come from the top from the top as well as the bottom yeah so to give you to give you are the most delightful example of recent times we have at various moments withheld information because the government has asked us not to reveal information that would give you the technical capability of our spy satellites around well what their resolution is and so forth because that would obviously help an adversary and you know the average reader isn't going to know the difference between you know this resolution so there's not a really much of a news value in it so then three weeks ago while we're all off trying to finish up our summer vacation the president of the United States sitting in his briefing takes a cell phone photo of a highly classified photograph he has shown of an accident that happened on an Iranian missile launch pad tweets it out overnight a professor I believe in France sends his students working away on what the angle of the satellite must have been because there are some unidentified satellites that we know to be spy satellites what the distance was we knew from Google Earth what the size of the launch pad was and they do a bunch of calculations which immediately show you the precise resolution of what one of our keyhole satellites which are you know one of our most advanced satellites and in conversations with the intelligence community later on we have said to them you know don't expect to win the next time you ask us to hold back a piece of data that would reveal the resolution of satellites because your chief your commander-in-chief just declassified that piece of data intentionally or not and the location to make him a traitor look I think the president has the authority to declassify him if he wants to he's a title to do that it may have been stupid which it was it may have been it may have been catastrophic for an ash security which it was and he used by the way to troll the Iranians just the most embarrassing part of the whole thing it wasn't even substantive right and by the way prior presidents have declassified highly sensitive signals intelligence highly sensitive Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and and and president Bush during the lead up to Iraq war but they were very careful they had to abuse the intelligence community they made the decision advisedly they fuzzed up the pictures they only they only pulled out the specific tech cuts that were relevant to the conversation right and so so the answer is yes the president can do it the president was authorized to do it should he have absolutely not was it was it ridiculous of course it was ridiculous and reveal a lot about our capabilities beyond just the resolution that's horribly disconcerting our enemies are watching the Chinese the Russian song Zach would happen it's outrageous and to be fair president not paid the price for doing that in fact people don't think it's funny it's not funny it's ridiculous okay so thank you uh bunny has to go teach a class and we are at 130 and i'm i want i know she's got to get back in front of her class thank you all i mean we