 Hello, welcome to New America. I'm Fuzz Hogan, managing editor here at New America, which means I edit the new digital magazine, Weekly WONK. Check it out at weeklywonk.org. But I'm actually here to welcome you to this event. The Obama administration and the press leak investigations and surveillance in post-911 America. If you haven't had a chance to see this report, which I have, it may mean want to rename the group that wrote it, Community Protect Sources, because it's all about protecting sources. But those of us who've done the job of investigating reporting know the sources are our lifeblood. And if they come for the sources, we better speak. And so also, if you're familiar with the court cases against sources, it's a bleak picture up to an including US Attorney in Chicago, who was a hero to investigative journalists in Chicago, Pat Fitzgerald, who'd put a lot of guys away, who investigative journalists were investigating. But when he came here to prosecute Scooter Libby, sort of blankly asserted that journalists who get leaked information are witnesses to a crime, which puts us in the target in the crosshairs. So thanks for coming. It's a great report. If you haven't read it yet, please do. These fellows will give a sort of fine discussion for it. And we're pretty excited to have them. And before I introduce the moderator, one bit of business. It's being webcast and also on C-SPAN. So if you have a question when the question time comes, please be sure to wait for the mic and speak into the mic. And now your moderator, Kurt Wimmer, the US Chair of Cummingson and Burling's Privacy and Data Security Privacy Practice, a pretty smart guy in First Amendment Law. He gave us a briefing yesterday, which was very helpful. In his past, he was general counsel at Canet and is representing a 70-member media coalition advocating for a federal shield bill. Thanks for coming. And Kurt, take it away. Thanks. Thank you, Fuzz. Let me just say it's a great honor to be here along with these experts. I think I'm the only person on this panel I've never heard of. So let me give you just a brief. This is one of those panels where everyone needs no introduction, but we do it anyway. But I'll do it briefly. To my left is Len Downey, Jr. He's the Wild Family Professor of Journalism at the Cronkite School at Arizona State. Very well known to this audience, of course, as Vice President-at-Large of The Washington Post, where he was executive editor from 1991 to 2008 and spent 44 years, surprisingly enough, in the Washington Post newsroom. To Len's left is, my apologies, Joel Simon. Joel Simon is executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is the organization that published this exceptional report that we'll be talking about today. Since his appointment as executive director of CPJ in 2006, Joel has led the organization through a period of expansion, including launching the Global Campaign Against Impunity, establishing a journalist assistance program, and spearheading CPJ's efforts to defend press freedom in the digital space. And finally, to Joel's left is Rajiv Chandrasekharan, also very well known to this audience from his longstanding work at The Washington Post. He's currently senior correspondent and associate editor at The Washington Post, also the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a best-selling book which became the basis for the movie The Green Zone with Matt Damon and a terrific piece of work, both in film and on paper. He's also been the Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, and he's been journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. So today, I'd like to start off with asking Len if he would give a sort of an overview of the report that we're here to discuss. I'll do that. I wanted to say quickly at the outset because the question of reporters being subpoenaed was brought up just yesterday or the day before James Ryzen at the New York Times lost his appellate court case to not have them be forced to testify about a story that's in the report when you find his name, James Ryzen. You'll see that it was up to the point of this appellate court decision, which now has gone against him. So that case will probably go to the Supreme Court, which will be a major, major test of the relationships between reporters and their sources. What rights do reporters have to not be forced to give away their sources? And the shield law plays into that. If there were a shield law, that case might be different than it is now. But there is no shield law. So that could be a very, very important Supreme Court case in a year or so, however long it takes. I was asked to do this report by the Committee to Protect Journalists because I'd written a couple pieces for the Outlook section of the Washington Post late last year and in May of this year about the Obama administration's war on leaks, the very aggressive way in which they've been going after government officials who provide information to reporters, particularly classified information, but not exclusively. And so that was asked by the committee to explore the whole relationship between the Obama administration and the press in the context of the kinds of work that the Committee to Protect Journalists does worldwide about relationships between governments and the press and the protections of the press's right to work. And I was very surprised by what I found because it went way beyond the war on leaks into a lot of other areas in which I found this administration to be remarkably controlling. And I'll tell you about how that happened. The report and my findings are based on several dozen interviews with reporters and news executives and government transparency advocates and current and former government officials, plus research that I did and that Sarah Rapsky of the Committee to Protect Journalists did in all the leaks investigations, which I think those are the most complete accounts of those that anybody else has come up with, doing both the Bush and Obama administration so we could make comparisons. And the Patriot Act, the FISA law and court and the national security agencies communication surveillance programs. In summary, in one sentence summary of that big long report is that the Obama administration's aggressive war on leaks and its determined efforts to control information that the news media needs to hold the government accountable for its actions are without equal since the Nixon administration and in direct conflict with President Obama's often stated goal of making his administration the most transparent in American history. Parathetically I should add I'm old enough that I was one of the reporters, one of the editors on the Watergate story in the early 1970s so I make that comparison with knowledge. There are six components to what I found. The first is the chilling effects of these unprecedented number of leaks investigations and prosecutions along with the concerns about the NSA surveillance programs. Obama administration officials and employees are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Every single journalist I talked to said that's the case for their sources in government, whether or not they deal in classified information but especially if it involves classified information. Six government employees and two government contractors including Edward Snowden of course have been prosecuted since 2009 for leaks of alleged classified information to the press and it's been done, these prosecutions have been done under a 1917 espionage act that was enacted during World War I to punish people spying for foreign entities and here we have reporters, we have government officials talking to reporters who are prosecuted under that act. There are only three such prosecutions in the 90 years from 1917 until 2009 when they began during the Obama administration. In several of these investigations probably the most frightening thing for government officials. The Justice Department and the FBI were successful in secretly subpoenaing and seizing telephone and email traffic between government officials and reporters for news organizations that included the New York Times, Fox News and the Associated Press. There were revisions made by the Justice Department and the guidelines for such subpoenas after an outcry from the news media over those cases but they still allow the Attorney General to refuse to notify news media about subpoenas of their communication records and also still contain an exception for any leaked information that the government considers potentially harmful to national security. That is a very big loophole that you could drive a very large truck through. The journalist's shield legislation endorsed by the president and recently approved by a Senate committee also has a similarly broad exception for national security information although it would require a judge to make a final decision about it rather than leaving it to the Attorney General. Congressional passage of such a seal law is still very much in doubt and also in doubt is how it would define a journalist to be covered by the law and this in the digital age obviously the definition of what a journalist is very broad. Anybody could commit journalism of one kind or another and there's a concern that Joel may talk about that by defining who a journalist is could lead to government licensing a journalist or saying you're a journalist but you're not a journalist depending upon what action the government wants to take. Washington reporters told me they worry about compromising their sources when their contacts with them could be traced through surveillance and investigations of phone and email records and as a result they said many many sources will no longer talk to them at all and we're not just talking about these eight investigations there have been lots of other investigations that have not led to prosecutions in which there have routinely been lie detector tests given to government officials who are suspected of talking with the press and reporters naturally do not want to get their sources in trouble. Number two is the insider threat program and the aftermath of private mannings leaks of documents to WikiLeaks in the news media President Obama ordered the establishment of a pervasive insider threat program throughout the government not many people know about this. Employees of all federal departments and agencies have been ordered to monitor and report and I quote any suspected insider threat activity which includes communications with the press. Stephen Aftergood the director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists who's one of the leading government transparency advocates in Washington told me that this has created internal surveillance heightened the degree of paranoia in government and made people conscious of contacts with the public advocates in the press. The third issue the Obama administration centralized messages control. All incoming administrations want to try to control the message for political advantage but senior administration officials of this administration have what they call unauthorized contacts with the press are discouraged. Instead they make clear that they and the president do not want any kinds of leaks to the news media and not just those including classified information. Routine inquiries from reporters are most often referred to public affairs officials who reporters have found to be unresponsive, hostile and even abusive. If they fail to discourage stories that they don't think they would like they sometimes refuse to provide reporters public information that we all have a right to. The government transparency that President Obama has repeatedly promised has turned out to be a sophisticated public relations strategy honed during his two presidential campaigns of creating government websites and social media operations to dispense of the public large amounts of favorable information and images generated by his administration while restricting the government's exposure to accountability probing by the press. Those websites are full of government created contact photos of Obama taken by the White House press photographer when all other photographers are banned from most White House activities. Administration produce videos and even a faux newscast is one of my favorites called West Wing Week about administration activities that are closed to journalists and then the White House presents its supposed news coverage of those same events. And ubiquitous posts by Obama aides on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media to promote administration views. Frank says now the former CNN reporter and anchor and now director of the School of Public Media excuse me of media and public affairs at GW University told me that the administration is using social media to end run the news media completely. Open dialogue with the public without filters is good. He said and I agree with that but if used for propaganda purposes and to avoid contact with journalists it's a slippery slope. The fourth issue is the excessive classification of government information. Part of the problem reporters have they call somebody up to ask them a normal routine question expecting a routine answer and it turns out the information is classified even though there seems to be no good reason for it. The Obama administration has recently taken credit for declassifying and posting on a new intelligence community website some of the previously secret documents explaining the NSA's communication surveillance program. But it did so only after revelations by the press in stories based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The administration has not acted on a December 2012 report to the president by a congressionally authorized public interest declassification board which recommended many specific steps to take the carry out the president's professed aim to reduce all this over classification which would free government officials to discuss more of the public's business with the press. The fifth issue is the failure to improve the Freedom of Information Act process. The Obama administration also has made little progress on another one of the president's first promises in fact a directive that he issued on his first day in office in January 2009 to improve government responsiveness to FOIA requests. Reporters and government transparency advocates have found that too many government departments and agencies still reject far too many FOIA requests or delay forever in responding to them or demand expensive sex of fees to fulfill them. An associated press survey earlier this year found that the number of FOIA requests from the press that were turned down in the grounds of national security or internal administration deliberations another huge loophole had actually increased during the Obama administration. More than 80 prominent organizations that advocate for increased government transparency just met here last week in Washington to work on new recommendations to the Obama administration for how to finally make FOIA work better for the press and the public. But I've talked to some of their leaders and they're very worried about whether the administration will even listen to their recommendations. The fifth issue, the treatment of whistleblowers. President Obama also has said he supports encouraging and protecting government whistleblowers who reveal bureaucratic waste fraud and abuse. But he and his administration draw a disturbing distinction between that and revelations to the press about government policies and actions for which they punish leaks with investigations, firings and prosecutions. President Obama signed the Whistleblower Act of 2012 along with a policy directive aimed at protecting from retaliation all government whistleblowers including intelligence agency employees. But at the very same time his administration won an appellate court decision in August that takes away from many federal employees in designated national security sensitive positions the right to appeal personnel actions by their agencies which of course could include retaliation for whistleblowing. That and the prosecutions of some whistleblowers as spies under the 1917 Espionage Act for providing information to the press leaves the president's real position on whistleblowing very unclear to me. And lastly the international implications which was a great interest obviously to the community to protect journalists. In addition to the threat posed to the work of foreign journalists by NSA surveillance which of course they're not supposed to spy on American reporters or Americans but they can spy on the communications of non-American citizens obviously including foreign reporters or foreign sources for American reporters. The Obama administration's press policies provide a questionable example for other countries at a time when this administration has been outspokenly advocating for press internet freedom in the rest of the world. President Obama's faced with many challenges during his remaining time in office obviously we've just been through one of them. The outcome of which will shape his legacy. One objective he could accomplish without outside opposition is fulfilling his very first promise to make his administration the most transparent in history beginning by opening its closed doors to the scrutiny by a free press. That's the summary. Lynn, thank you so much, you're welcome. I'd like to invite anyone who is tweeting about our discussion to use the hashtag Obama and the press. And thanks again for the summary. It's really a terrific work and it seems to me that this pulls together a number of disparate threads into a fabric that really discloses a lot about the overall thrust of the administration. Let me start by asking for many years there seemed to be a detente between government and the press in that we recognized that the government had secrets to keep and could try as hard as they would to keep them. We would try as hard as we could to get them and the ones that were newsworthy and relevant and should be published we would. It seems in your report you're now talking about an administration that has stepped over a line between those two areas in essentially chilling the ability of any of its members to speak to the press. Two historical things, three historical things to say about that. First of all the Pentagon paper's decision by the Supreme Court which made a prior restraint virtually impossible in the United States unique in all of the world. And therefore if you're an administration you're faced with the fact you can't stop us from publishing something in advance. You can only punish us and our sources afterwards and that's important to keep in mind. Secondly is 9-11. A lot of attitudes changed after 9-11 and including the whole balance between exactly what you were talking about between revelations of government activity and national security and that balance. I live with that balance obviously during the Bush administration when we published stories including the CI secret prison stories that required a lot of conversations with administration officials about whether we're gonna publish that story and if so what details it would contain. Those conversations were useful and they do continue during this administration but in a somewhat different atmosphere as the report explains. And the third historical thing is that when Obama administration came into office they were put under great pressure by the intelligence agencies who were upset by the previous stories our secret prison stories and New York Times NSA surveillance stories. They put a lot of pressure in the Obama administration to do something about it. Some of these investigations had begun under Bush but not produced prosecutions under pressure from the intelligence agency then I should say when both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill and the intelligence committees also put great pressure in administration. But also I believe that the president himself he's not really spoken about this but I believe the president himself also has a rather he actually said something he said some things about he does not want secrets revealed or to put our boys at risk. Well, not all of these are really about that but at the same time I think he has a strong bent towards secrecy himself. So Rajiv, Joel, what do you think of the explanation that's pretty compelling? He is most certainly and I think the point Len makes particularly as an editor is overseeing the publication of some of these stories over time and you look back at the CIA Black Sight story you look back at the New York Times's reporting on warrantless wiretapping and the Bush administration's responses to those as well as the decisions and discussions that led up to the publications and stories but particularly how previous administrations have responded to stories they have not liked, they have thought have compromised in their view national security and yet in most other cases in previous administrations there have been expressions of disgust if you will, there have been perhaps some cursory investigations but nothing of the sort that we're seeing now and then when you look at some of the investigations that have taken place in recent years and you compare them to some of the previous stories it seems like it's penny anti stuff I mean going after Tom Drake at the NSA which you write about or even the Ryzen case in the grand scheme of things those, if you talk to national security experts those stories did not have a meaningful impact on American national security and yet those are some of the cases that are being pursued or have been pursued in recent years with particular vigour so there really has been a fundamental change in my view in the approach taken by the government in recent years compared to in the preceding decades on these things you could also argue in the two cases that Rajiv mentioned these were classic whistleblowers even by the president's own definition it was about whether or not the NSA surveillance program was too expensive and protected privacy it wasn't about the content of it whatsoever and an argument Drake makes were made was that the documents found in his home weren't actually classified documents and yet they still sort of went after they eventually, the case eventually fell apart but yes and what I wanted to do is sort of put the report I mean obviously it's I think it's made a very significant contribution we've seen the attention it's gotten and I think that you know when some of these obviously investigations people were aware of them people were aware of these policies but putting them all together suggests that this is not a haphazard response to certain particular events there's a systematic effort here to marginalize and undermine the work of the press and I think that's what the report really accomplishes and what I want to do is also talk about why we undertook it and what the significance of that is you know CPJ's been around since 1981 and we started out as a small group of US journalists focused mostly on the sort of life and liberty if you will of journalists around the world who work in repressive and dangerous environments and you know really you have to fear for their lives when they go out and do a story and the framework in which CPJ was founded was a recognition that we have journalists in this country have the unique protection of the First Amendment and so throughout our history particularly in our early years when we were a small fledgling organization we focused on those kinds of frontline reporting efforts but you know the recent events in this country and also our conversations with journalists covering this administration led us to conclude that the atmosphere was fundamentally different and that had an impact not only on the work of journalists here but potentially on journalists around the world for a number of reasons one is that you know one of our colleagues wrote you know the US press in some ways since the world's press it reports for the world so any erosion of press standards here has an impact on the information available to people everywhere in the world secondly the US media and the work of journalists inspires other journalists around the world and so they are threatened by an erosion in standards here and thirdly because governments take solace from any deterioration in press freedom standards in this country and it gives them potential cover to take repressive actions on their own so we saw this pattern and then we asked Len to carry this to do this report and we asked them to do it independently we provided some research support we helped edit obviously we reviewed it but these are Len's findings these are his independent findings and then we took the report and reviewed it both among our staff and at our board level and provided recommendations based on the report and those as well were done independently and that's how the process worked it's pretty remarkable this is an organization that normally devotes its resources and still does to investigating and seeking action to journalists murdered in the Philippines or journalists jailed in Zimbabwe and for CPJ to want to devote resources to shining a light on these issues and to thoughtfully investigate them is a remarkable step for an international press freedom organization It's really true and you know the Obama administration as have many administrations before it focuses a lot on trying to promote free expression in other countries what do you think that the types of issues that are cataloged here due to our credibility when it moves into other countries I mean I can think of a specific example I mean I remember we had been advocating for a very long time for President Obama to raise directly with Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey concern about that country's press freedom record Turkey is actually the world's leading jail-run journalist they jail more journalists in Turkey than they jail in any other country in the world and Turkey is a key strategic ally they have a very deep relationship with the United States' strategic relationship President Obama and Prime Minister Erdogan have established a personal rapport, a friendship and so we've been advocating for some time that President Obama intervened directly with Prime Minister Erdogan and raised concerns well they had a bilateral meeting back in May and I think the day before that meeting took place news about the seizure of the AP phone records broke now I don't know whether it was on the agenda for that discussion I had early indications that it might be but I'm reasonably confident it did not come up because if President Obama had raised that I think that he would have been very exposed I mean the same sort of thing happens with the NSA surveillance and the stated policy that President Obama had articulated that he was going to be more aggressive and challenging China on its government orchestrated hacking surveillance program whatever you want to call it I don't hear that so much anymore and I don't think that's a coincidence I should add that I don't know how many of you here work for the government or did work for the government the leaks investigations the constant pressure to stop leaks of any kind not just national security leaks the constant pressure to not talk to reporters at all but instead refer to the public affairs officers who then discourage the reporters from even writing stories and then just the presence of the NSA surveillance which so far there are no examples of American sources or reporters having been spied on through the this communication surveillance process but it's a very existence all those things combined have this tremendous chilling effect on government officials talking to the press since the report comes out I've been stopped by reporters in the Washington Post Newsroom when I visited for example who said oh I wish you'd talk to me too I've got like 12 other examples as it was that keep CPJ people and post people in your report but I mean this is their daily life their daily life is trying to get government officials to talk to them who are afraid to talk to them that's not the way it should be there certainly does seem to be a link between the NSA program the other sorts of government surveillance issues that have come up and reporters not feeling comfortable in sending an email to a government source let me ask the post had an exceptional story a few weeks ago about the effect of leak investigations on the whistleblowers and it was really sort of cataloged how going up against the mechanisms of the United States government as one person can destroy lives even for even for those for whom the prosecution fell apart and they've been fine do you think that some of these early prosecutions that didn't seem pointed toward true national security information that would damage the United States were really done to make a point and to say this is what can happen to you so don't talk to any we don't know about that motivation in terms of the Justice Department but we do know because they said so that the intelligence community was looking for that a previous director of national intelligence at the beginning of the administration told the New York Times on the record that this was his intention to get the Justice Department to prosecute some people so it would have a chilling effect on the others can we talk a little bit about the insider threat program your discussion of that was exceptional and you can imagine how the government would have some sort of a program after the disclosure that Chelsea Manning had taken the scope of documents that she had just to sort of get your arms around how documents are being handled it seems to have become something quite different right it yes it's the original presidential directive that set up the study that then produced the insider threat program which they started rolling out late last year did emphasize the national security aspects of it but then it was left up to each individual agency to decide how to carry it out and one of the news bureaus here in Washington the McClatchy news bureau did a very good job of surveying various government agencies to see how they were carrying this out and a number of them made clear that any kind of leaking to the press was the same as giving something to China and also that you're supposed to be monitoring your fellow employees this is the kind of 1984 thing monitoring your fellow employees to see if you see any signs of their leaking documents or being unstable or anything like that and you're required to report that and you can get in trouble for not reporting something that somebody else is doing that you may find suspicious again that's I think unprecedented American history and since it's just now being rolled out we don't know what its effect is but it has to be further chilling and it seems to have a chilling impact already on just day to day routine business the sorts of work that journalists in this town do every single day that in many cases has nothing to do with top secret or even material classified at a lower level or anything to do with national security matters simply calling up an official in this administration in the White House or in a cabinet agency and wanting to have a discussion about a subject that perhaps a senior official has spoken about publicly the day before is the sort of thing that now routinely commonly government employees will refuse to engage not just on the record but even in many cases on background I can't even speak to you on background until it's cleared by the press office and in many cases the press office won't even authorize that they'll say we'll talk to you so it's created this chilling effect across the government and it has impeded the work of journalists to provide necessary accountability function to our government think back to we're talking about over classification as one of these problems and that is a problem rife throughout our government particularly in the parts of the government I cover the military intelligence community and one way that people at all levels are simply trying to in some ways defeat or impede freedom of information act request is now routine correspondence anodyne correspondence is slapped with the for official use only label and so when you're trying to get a document it may not be classified and even if it is classified in many cases it's not even all that sensitive they'll say oh we can't release it it's for official use only and what I want to do is bring that press person to my office show them my inbox and show them hundreds of emails from military officers all stamped for official use only saying would you like to come to this lunch with General Odierno next week for official use only because their email systems are all set to that as a default so again it's intended to impart impede the ability of people making legitimate FOIA requests of government and all this also comes back to you know there's a it's all about selective enforcement and there is a there is a a piece just reported the other day off of the senate intelligence committee getting in wake of the administration's rules on reporting the disclosure of the sensitive information that distinguishing between what is an authorized leak and what is an unauthorized leak and how many times in any given day to senior official sit and share material that is classified or that is otherwise sensitive but serves their own purposes for which there is no sanction I've been in the presence of numerous military senior officers who are showing the classified slides but because it is serving the military's purposes it's serving the administration's arguments they're willing to trot that stuff out when it is helpful to them but when they don't like it of course different rules this is all about government accountability the president has said repeatedly that he believes in government accountability that the press has a role in holding the government accountable and the distinctions are exactly that they don't allow the government to be held accountable the administration gets out its story its message and you're impeded from reporting other things that would hold them accountable it did seem to me that the report is almost like it's the tale of two scenarios one is the national security scenario and the other as you've described is the day-to-day business of government that's difficult to report on I was struck both by your quote and by Ann Compton's quote that this was the most difficult administration to cover the seven that she has covered which really is saying quite a lot things that were routine in other administrations access to beginnings and endings of meetings in the White House just who's attending those meetings just what the subject of the meeting is are now off limits unless you go to the White House website another British television news director here in Washington said that whenever he calls the White House to ask for something they simply say go to this website and see what we put up on the website that's what you can have you can have that video you can have those photographs you can have that information we're not talking to you interesting and your example about the EPA I've been quoting Ellen Weiss I mean how much of what the EPA does is classify right but try getting meaningful information out of that agency I also found that something that really did alarm journalists about the Jim Rosen case we've had both the James Ryzen and James Rosen cases in short order but about the Rosen case was the use of the term potential co-conspirator under the espionage act or as you pointed out activities that really are basic journalism right there was a technical legal reason for doing that but it still was very very alarming and while the administration repeatedly says and says in the new justice department guidelines we're not going to prosecute a journalist just for doing their job of reporting again that's their definition not ours and so it's still frightening the reporters that there are reporters who particularly work in the national security area who are worried about being vulnerable themselves still to investigation and prosecution who are taking extraordinary measures encryption of emails although we now know that the NSA is trying to solve that riddle as well encryption of emails secret secret rooms where they do their work and so on which is quite amazing I also should point out that in the Jim Ryzen case in the decision by the appellate court judge for the majority that said he still has to testify or go to jail also said that this crime could not have been committed without him in other words they're still treating him as a criminal as well so is this something that you see in terms of the types of news gathering techniques that have to be used are we sort of going back to meeting deep road in the basement of the Arlington parking garage and not using these electronic tools that have been so useful in the past decade you know I joke that this is forcing me to go back to being a lot more low tech a lot more face to face interviews a lot more notes taken ink on paper only for completely routine not very sensitive stuff and even in that case I'm not doing a whole lot of typing and putting stuff up on the cloud I'm not keeping my most sensitive contacts on my iPhone or in any sort of electronic space and I have colleagues who go even further working on machines that have no internet connection working in rooms that are sort of the journalists equivalent of a SCIF, a secure compartmentalized intelligence facility to prevent outsiders from trying to identify sources and this is all look there's nothing that I'm working on and I think for many of my colleagues that if the government were to learn the substance of the story that I'm building that's fine what I'm worried about is protecting the sources I'm worried about keeping people who are cooperating with me from getting hauled in front you know to court and into jail for in almost every case what is a legitimate well founded reason for communicating these are not people who are seeking to burn down the government house these are not people engaging in wholesale theft of information these are people talking about specific issues in a narrow circumscribed way because they either want to they believe policies fundamentally flawed they believe that there is a injustice that needs to be addressed we lose sight of this when we focus so much on manning or on Snowden the lion share of these cases don't involve individuals taking volumes reams of documents and then sharing them with the world it is more often an individual wanting to share a specific piece of information because they believe that there is a compelling public interest in doing so they're not doing this because they want to make money they're not doing this because they want to aid the enemy they're doing it because they want to help the United States and I would just add from an international perspective as Len pointed out if you're a journalist outside the United States if you're a non-US person you have no legal protection from NSA intervention in your communication we know or we don't know but it's certainly been reported based on Snowden leaks Der Spiegel did a piece that the NSA hacked into the internal email of Al Jazeera now you may argue Al Jazeera is a special case but nevertheless they did feel that this was within their prerogative to do this I've talked to editors for example the editor the guardian the US editor was talking about you know she's does not communicate using email with reporters just that it does not feel secure doing that and you know lots of journalists that I talked to outside the United States are taking extraordinary measures to ensure that they can communicate securely and I think there's a real question I mean one of the most essential things that elements of certainly public accountability journalism is depends on the ability of the journalist to be able to protect the identity of their confidential source and a lot of journalists just don't feel they can make that promise in this environment and journalists care about that which people don't often it was great to hear Rajiv talk about that because people don't often realize how much journalists do care about the welfare of their sources very true also from the international perspective it's been interesting to me to learn that many other countries have stronger protections for journalists in terms of not requiring them to testify in court cases for example then even we have on the state side where we do have protection in most of our states the US is definitely we have the First Amendment and probably the world's most protected environment is what you can say you can absolutely say just about anything in terms of protection against being subpoenaed there are many other countries in the world that have stronger protections for journalists the US is definitely not a leader in that regard and at this point there is no federal protection in federal cases it's only state by state which in a very some state by state but if you're subject to a federal investigation your source is subject to a federal investigation there is not yet any shield law which can be very arbitrary in fact in the district you can get a subpoena issued by the superior court and have great protections because of DC's Free Flow of Information Act which is a good shield law if it's issued literally across the street from the federal courthouse you're looking at testifying or going to jail so it's a very sort of arbitrary situation yes it is and even though the justice department guidelines have been greatly strengthened and there are a lot of technical changes made in them that please media lawyers you still generally intent involved because there's enough leeway there for the attorney general's decision making and the national security exemption that they can still by and large do what they want to do well at the end of the day guidelines are in fact guidelines they can be they can be followed or they cannot be followed and it's not enforceable by the reporter you can't say to a court this subpoena needs to be quashed because they didn't follow the guidelines and so having a shield law it seems to me would be a step forward it would be why don't we talk about that for a moment I know Joel you've had concerns about the definition of journalist for example in a shield law which is something that is one of the reasons why we've never had a federal shield law is because it's it's difficult to define and it's become more difficult in the past ten years well I look at this from an international perspective I mean I don't look at this strictly from a US perspective and I look at this in the context of you know how radically technology has changed the way that journalism is conducted and you know I think that there's a there's a very pragmatic argument which is that journalists can't do their work if they can't protect their sources and a shield law will help them do that and a shield law will probably help you know most journalists who work for traditional or carry out traditional journalism except for the national security exemption which is a separate matter but in terms of CPJ's constituency in this country but even more so globally not all journalists will be covered not all journalists will be covered because a lot of people who are engaged in journalism in this day and age are doing it informally they're observers to newsworthy events and they're documenting that news those newsworthy events sometimes in a systematic way and then disseminating that information to the public or they're blogging about it but they're doing it informally or they're documenting events using video and so some of the journalists some of the people that we consider journalists in places like Syria or China or Vietnam or Cuba or places where people are using new techniques to engage in the practice of journalism certainly any definition of the shield law that is being contemplated in this country would exclude them so we are advocating our recommendation recognizing that a shield law would help many journalists is that the definition should be as broad as possible and to focus to the extent that it's possible on the news gathering process rather than on credentials or professional status or anything like that we think that would be the best approach so if a law did have the breadth that you're looking for CPJ would be okay with the concept of adding a shield law we're definitely okay with the concept and we're even frankly hedging a little bit because we think a shield law is useful we're just saying that we're going to monitor the debate and we're going to push right to the end for the broadest possible definition that's our position and the definitional one does seem to be difficult now because if anyone if literally anyone could be covered simply by starting a blog then it will be difficult to imagine how congress ever passed that law there's a bit of a pragmatic there's a pragmatic you're balancing the kind of philosophical approach to this issue and some people who I greatly admire say we shouldn't have a shield law at all because the first amendment is the shield law and the first amendment doesn't and I'm not necessarily you're deep into these issues but I'm just saying that's a view that's out there that's problematic if you have the issue a shield law is going to protect journalists we want journalists to be able to do their work but we also would like to see the broadest possible definition I think at one point we did have a hope that the first amendment would be enough but in this case sort of demonstrates it unfortunately doesn't Rajiv how much do these sorts of issues play into your decision about whether to grant confidentiality to a source does it make it less likely that you would you know say yes I'll keep you confidential or just become a more difficult nuanced negotiation about what the confidentiality really means I probably this will make you the lawyer shudder a little bit it may well make the post lawyer shudder I do you know I grant promises of confidentiality pretty liberally that's what we have traditionally done now we if anything the the pressure against it over the past 10 plus years it may be even longer than that and this is one Len would know well has been less traditionally in our newsroom about the threat of prosecution but more in terms of the desire for transparency with our readers wanting people to know as much as possible who is providing that information and in some ways this is a response to government officials often wanting to speak about routine matters on background as a senior administration official as opposed to coming out there with name attached and it is over the years created this climate in Washington that you know we can't even you know get the weather report from somebody with their name attached but on background they'll tell you it's going to be raining this afternoon and so our pushback has been sort of against that now enter in now this this new threat of not just threat the reality of investigations and prosecutions particularly in the world that I cover it certainly has come up with discussions with sources you know when it does come up on sensitive matters it's something that we talk out and but when I make an explicit promise of confidentiality it is just that and I will honor that it's not a written agreement but it is part of what I see as my professional load but even getting to that point requires jumping through a lot of hoops that we didn't have to before it's the old face-to-face meeting it's not these deals are not struck over email or phone calls the plant on the balcony if we need to meet not quite as convoluted as that but certainly adding a lot more a lot more complications in fact a lot more meetings with people at their homes or in coffee shops or bars as opposed to in offices communicating with people with their personally mail addresses not their government once because of the insider threat program it's not just the NSA that's the worry it's that any agency their systems texts are going through as part of the insider threat program looking at what emails were exchanged with the washpost.com and nytimes.com's domains and were any of those messages coming from people who were not in the public affairs shop and if not let's flag them for further scrutiny that stuff is happening routinely there's also two other elements very important elements here for the reader for the audience and that does their accuracy credibility. If you can't talk to the people that really know what's going on you're liable to find other sources on background who have access to grind and so on who will tell you things and you'll make mistakes and we've seen that happen increasingly in national security reporting law enforcement reporting when the authoritative people won't talk somebody else will and that can create accuracy problems and it can create a credibility problem for the medium involved and you may have an interest in making the media seem less credible by denying them accurate information but that's serious for the audience Len you've seen these sorts of issues in national security reporting across a variety of administrations you mentioned that this was the most secretive sense the Nixon administration how would you compare it to some of the ones in between say the Bush administration Bush administration as regime said they weren't our friends and they weren't eager to have some of the stories we published be published but by and large the access to sources was much greater than it is now they really succeeded in tightening up access to sources and secondly you could have productive conversations I think productive is the word I use in the report productive conversations sometimes including the president of the United States which happened on at least one occasion in several administrations about whether or not it was a good idea to publish the story about the accuracy of the story and about whether or not there was any sensitive information that really could harm human life for national security I don't recall ever in all my time I had 25 years as managing editor and executive editor of the post I don't recall us ever not publishing the story that an administration objected to what I do know out of these very productive conversations that we did withhold technical information, names of things countries of origin for things that would harm national security but would not deprive the reader of knowing what they needed to know about a government program or a government policy that they needed to know to hold the government accountable and if you cut off those conversations then you're left with whatever WikiLeaks puts up without talking to anybody including names of people who could be harmed and names appear in those diplomatic cables and things WikiLeaks put up that's the other side of this and also it emboldens people Edward Snowden does believe that he's performed an important public service and obviously you could argue in some ways based on the fact that we now have a national debate over NSA surveillance programs that we did not have before he leaked all that information but at the same time it makes them feel more heroic if you will otherwise Rajiv Chandrasekhar I'm not going to be able to get the information that wouldn't harm national security out through normal channels I'm just going to look at the front page of the post today on the top left column about the NSA's role in drone strikes and the fifth or sixth paragraph of that story says the post withheld technical details based on discussions with administration officials and intelligence community officials to avoid divulging sources and methods but at the same time the substance of the story was able to come out, was able to add to the national debate over the role of the NSA I always think of the Dana Priest series on black prisons as being a great example of that the issue was reported the specifics were kept confidential I assume under request from the government so the secrecy the government needed to maintain was maintained but the public was informed about the issue that's a good example to cite first of all it was not a leak like in Edward Snowden leak this was based on a long period of reporting by Dana in discovering that certain officials that she knew in the intelligence community were worried about something well what were they worried about well she would find a little bit from you, take it over to him find a little bit more, take it over to him then come back to you for some more it was reporting, it was not a leak as such and she was able to do that kind of reporting she was able to have enough access to that kind of reporting that we were able to put the whole picture together including the fact that there was a lot of other counter-terrorism cooperation going on with eastern European countries where these secret black sites were located that when the administration said please don't name those countries we knew why they were asking and we could reason about okay then we don't want to have this other cooperation cut off so therefore we published the stories and the only effect of them was at least it's been shown so far to me by the intelligence community was that they had to close those black sites bring those prisoners to Guantanamo which doesn't appear to harm national security at all but at the same time we've never named those eastern European countries even though they've been bandied about there have been investigations by the EU to name them and so on we've kept our promise not to name them so that's an important part of this David Sanger the national security reporter from the New York Times talks about the trust factor in this reporting can they trust your motives the news media's motives can you trust the government's motives in dealing with you that makes it possible to bring this information that needs to be brought to the American public in a way that's responsible you start to cut off those avenues David's very worried you start to cut off those avenues you're going to have a lot of irresponsible information out there Len's point about Dana's story on the black sites is incredibly important I think there's a perception out there that national security reporters sit around in their offices and wait for the phone to ring and somebody sort of here's your leak today it doesn't work that way if only and I think you know Snowden is the exception not the rule and people think oh you know hey get the thumb drive with all this stuff you know oh to be blessed with somebody like Snowden coming in with this stuff but in most cases you're building on small piece of information taking it learning more learning more and part of this is convincing people that it would be in the public interest to help provide some context to help explain something to add another piece to the puzzle and so it would be wrong to think that all these individuals are just sort of there ready to kind of hand the stuff out it often is a result of a thoughtful discussion and sources understanding what a journalist is trying to do and seeing what they're doing as being in the public interest coming back to what I made earlier I really do believe that for the vast majority of those people who the administration would call leakers these are people who are acting out of a sense of altruism out of a sense of a belief in our system and out of a desire to want to make the United States a better country it's not an artistic behavior even though one could point perhaps to some higher profile recent cases and say and try to use labels like that I think that that obscures the reality of what is happening in the lion's share of these interactions between journalists and sources you do see a strong thread of patriotism through many of the sources that you're describing certainly and then if they're investigated, persecuted, fired or prosecuted for it that they then wonder if their play patriotism was misplaced I was struck by something you reported about David Sanger from the New York Times that there was an email sent out from the White House to intelligence agencies saying please retain any emails to David Sanger and within the White House itself I would say that would pretty much dry up your sources and as he said people called him he would call somebody up and to ask him a question and they'd say David we love you but we just can't talk to you right now let's wait till this all blows over they know he's a responsible reporter they know how intelligent he is they know they would handle information carefully but they just can't talk to him I was also struck by an anecdote in the report about someone from the government calling you to apologize for a subpoena they hadn't told you I wonder if you could recount that right well this was quite some time ago and when Mueller was the FBI director and we had corresponded in Southeast Asia and so did I think the New York Times right in the same place there was an investigation going on that had nothing to do with the stories that we were publishing from there but didn't have that much to do with it but the fact that they had contacts with people that were being investigated by the FBI and without a complete violation of the Justice Department guidelines they secretly competed and seized their phone records and it was discovered by the FBI afterwards as in the previous administration during the Bush administration and Mueller called me and the editor of New York Times and first of all revealed that this had happened which we didn't know and then apologized for it because it was outside the Justice Department guidelines he regarded as being wrong people were disciplined for it and I thought that was the proper way to handle it it's been a pretty extraordinary story there's a lot of talk about subpoenas of phone records which is what you're talking about there and I was wondering about the Associated Press issue that the subpoenas seemed to cover a lot of phone lines including one in the capital itself did you have a sense that was narrowed or that if a judge had been involved there may have been a different result than tapping up to 100 journalists and they did it without notifying the AP in advance again in my experience before this administration quite often if the Justice Department was contemplating a subpoena in a criminal investigation or in a civil case or some other way in which they wanted to demand something from us they would call up and say we're contemplating this and we would have a negotiation and usually we were able to satisfy their law enforcement needs and our protection of our reporting techniques needs and work something out sometimes it took lots of negotiations painful negotiations but it would work out in this case they didn't notify the AP in advance if they had the AP would have said 100 different reporters it wasn't just phone lines it was switchboards and the AP phone in the capital why do you need that and let's narrow it down we don't want to cooperate with you at all we don't want our reporter's source discovered but let's narrow down what you're doing here because you're exposing all of our reporting to scrutiny by the government we don't think that's a good idea and if they couldn't have worked something out they probably would have gone to court and that's of course what the government didn't want even though the investigation by that time was years old they just didn't want to take the trouble to do that so they proceeded in a way no way to negotiate no way to go to a court and have a court decide whether or not this is a good idea well you've all been very patient and so I thought this would be a good a good moment to turn to the audience for questions let's see if we've got some in the back and then we'll move up the front I'm going to take Coach Barraga up here in the report you put Bob Schieffer saying it's gotten worse every administration it seems to track with sort of itself that way back when there were so few channels for an administration to get their own message out they sort of needed the post in the times so the posture of the administration was sort of had to be cooperative but now between echo chamber media and their ability as you mentioned to get their word out themselves you no longer have that leverage as an institution to sort of force that posture on them so the question is are you optimistic there's any other way to regain that leverage to change their posture to be more cooperative or is it sort of an inexorable curve down? I think it's inexorable unless they're confronted with it unless the public's confronted with it and unless they're an appeal to their better angels this is why I assume Joe asked me to do this report they're going to go to the administration with their recommendations for improvements this is a president who promised to have the most transparent administration in history he still has more than two years to carry that out and add that to his legacy he's really appealing to his better nature to do what you said you were going to do and he's repeatedly repeated this when he's confronted with some of these issues he says I really want a transparent administration I really want the press to be able to hold this accountable so I think by proving that that has not happened to him I'm hoping that he will take some steps otherwise the lesson for the next administration would be yeah let's see how much more sophisticated we can be in keeping the press at bay thank you thank you for bringing out this very important information Mr. Downey I think and I'm going to follow up I guess a little on other gentlemen's question or concern with the impact of how the federal whistleblower stuff is going to flow down to the state and local levels along with the increase in websites I guess we can thank Bill Gates for that I don't know but as newspapers newspapers become more difficult to hang on to and I don't know what's going to happen to the post when amazon.com takes over and you're reporting to some degree I think it's rather nice that you go talk to someone in person rather than via email you get a better picture a better story I hope you're not being followed but what impact is our websites now having on reporting the news and getting out accurate news with so many different websites and cable channels you name it all out there there's both good news and bad news on that front the bad news obviously is the disruption of the economic models that have supported legacy journalistic organizations and we're all struggling with that and by the way the post is not now owned by Amazon but by Jeff Bezos personally and therefore it's not a public company which gives him a great more financial leeway in trying to deal with that particular issue at the same time people that have started up both for-profit and non-profit all kinds of new news organizations in fact the founder of eBay has just announced he's going to start a new one with Glenn Green-Greenwall from the Edward Snowden papers and so that a lot of these new startups are competing in that space and they are even though they have much fewer resources some of them are doing really good work and this is another thing that I spent a lot of time studying and writing about they're fragile they need support some of them are stronger financially than others they're essentially they're public interest organizations if you will like NPR or public broadcasting and so they're future individual ones future are in doubt but as an aggregate they're going to be there and that's very helpful I think too and they also collaborate with traditional news organizations so the New York Times and newspapers around the country have published a number of things provided them by non-profit investigative reporting sites which is very useful to come back to the first part of your question with states yeah so some states are one of these non-profits is called Wisconsin Watch in Madison, Wisconsin and the state legislature try to legislate the amount of existence because their offices are inside the University of Wisconsin and some of the people who run it are from the University of Wisconsin faculty so somebody sneaked into it nobody's owned up to it yet sneaked into the state budget against state funds or university funds being used to work with them at all it finally after a big uproar was vetoed by the governor but it does show that individual states are trying to get involved in managing the news as well how long? I mean the shield law the expert is sitting next to me oh is that him? the movement on the senate side has been good so far we're past the senate judiciary committee we just need to get to the floor of the senate and the senate's got a lot going on of course so it's been a little bit difficult to get their attention on this one but we're optimistic that we should be able to get to the floor of the senate if not before the end of this year and early next year there is a house bill that's been introduced by Representative Ted Poe and Representative John Conyers that is moving ahead as well I think there will have to be hearings on that one so it may take a little longer but we've had some success in the past we passed the house twice in 2007-2009 so we're optimistic it actually is bipartisan and for many years our greatest champion was Representative Mike Pence Republican from Indiana who basically said look I'm not doing this because I love the media in fact sometimes I don't like you guys I really believe in protecting whistleblowers it's a constitutional issue so many conservatives see it as a constitutional issue as they should can I just go back and build upon some of Len's answers on these past two questions I don't want you to shudder here but there is there is a defense to be made of a group that everybody at least part of the political spectrum loves to hate which is the mainstream media yes there is a proliferation of news websites at the state local and even at the national level new ventures here and there citizen journalists and all of that is to be applauded but when you look at these cases New York Times Washington Post Chevon Gorbin Drake Wall Street Journal Fox News they're part of the mainstream media don't listen to what they have to how they brand themselves they are mainstream and large it's because these are organizations that have at least for the moment deep enough pocket so they can sustain the sort of investigative journalism this is not the leaks flowing in this is often the result of a lot of hard work it's stuff that takes time it takes money yes and so this while I think yes this that these issues do pose a threat to journalists writ large what we've seen thus far in my humble opinion I think the principal kind of threat still going forward is to the largest news organizations out there those that can that really devote resources to covering national security matters and such and so and you know the flip side of it for the administration any administration should be the track record of these large organizations I'd like to think and I know I have friends in the military and intelligence community that laugh when I say this thing who put you guys in charge of determining what the public should know but when presented with sensitive material particularly of national security nature the mainstream news organizations have almost always undertaken a thoughtful examination of how to publish when to publish what to publish I mean these were the issues Len agonized with time and time again as executive editor of the Washington Post and even when provided with the entire WikiLeaks trope we didn't go and put it all online we used it as a basis for journalism and then going out and asking people Washington Post through Bart Gelman in the receipt of material from Edward Snowden again the raw documents aren't just being pasted up willy nilly out there they're being used to engage in journalism and portions of it are being put up there and to do reporting based on them that only with somebody with the expertise of Bart and several other reporters that the Post can handle that way too oh and just on over classification I can't let this event go without noting I guess it was the Guardian and then eventually the Post was it last week or the week before had the stories about the NSA trying to crack this tour system and among the slides that were revealed I think in the Guardian report was this NSA deck about what tour is and how to defeat it all classified top secret, no foreign and two of those slides were actually material that the NSA essentially stole from the electronic frontier foundation their own descriptions of tour they slapped it in the frame of a NSA power point and then slapped top secret no foreign on it so again there are these own documents there are legitimate questions people talk about over classification questions to be asked about among the thousands of pages of documents that Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks were thousands of newspaper stories in various foreign countries that were then classified as secret when they were sent onto Washington it's just crazy where's our microphone okay why don't we go here and then here thank you in any kind of federal law you're probably going to get national security exceptions so in that particular field is it really going to help you maybe you'll get prior notice maybe you'll get judicial involvement but how much is it going to contribute in the national security field I don't see a shield law as fundamentally changing the game for national security reporting there it's an issue of both prosecutorial discretion but really it is an issue of how an administration at senior most levels chooses to address these issues and whether it wants to create a sort of chilling effect across the defense department and the intelligence community or whether it believes that in our system and for our system to be healthy every now and again you might get something on the front page of the post or the Times or some other newspaper that we really like but our country is strong enough resilient enough to move on from it and that some of those disclosures actually help to stimulate the national debate and that look the reality of it is that while the administration likes to talk about congress playing a great oversight role if there's among the key takeaways from the Snowden affair thus far is that congress really wasn't doing a whole lot of oversight over the NSA thank you first very good job of showing us we're closer to 1984 maybe than we are 2013 a little chilling in the afternoon we're not going to walk out of here tomorrow my question is this though we have President Obama and Len you kind of alluded to this I think maybe a very secretive person just in his personal life but he's president and now he's head of an administration which is very secret but how much of that how much of that is him leading and how much of that is him following in other words post 9-11 and post what the security feel and it doesn't matter in the end result I understand that the only reason that question would matter is for those of us who feel that it is wrong and needs to change it we first need to know where to focus that change on so is it more in the general belief of you know directors and that type of thing we think it's coming directly from the White House or just where would you assign the derivation it appears to me comes from a combination of those factors the post 9-11 world pressure from the intelligence community and in both parties particularly in 2012 when the president was running for re-election and the Republicans would treat every leak as though he was doing the leaking in order to get re-elected and so the response was to conduct investigations whether they should have been conducted or not but the second part of your question is what can you do about it he has the power to do it he has issued those directives he has the power to see that those directives are actually fulfilled and they haven't been yet so he can do it this gentleman across the aisle the microphone oh thank you I'm Jim Byrne I'm the original editor of Tax Notes Magazine we played a central role in wiping out Nixon on his income taxes back there when he you know crooked lawyer of his faked gift of his vice presidential papers to the witch coat and the Washington Post but the hero of it all was a leaker it was the IRS employee at Martinsburg West Virginia who mailed his tax returns to the Providence Journal who helped get him caught eventually so I have some of the historical background of that leaking business but my real question is where do things stand on these pieces of legislation to talk about on the SHIELD laws on the issue of the definition of who's a journalist I mean I favor the most broad definition possible where are those things well I'm with you in terms of a broad definition the problem is if it's so broad that it catches everyone then you're giving a privilege to everyone in the U.S. which is something that Congress wouldn't pass the way that it's set up now it's essentially a three tiered definition it started off as a one paragraph definition and as it became longer and longer as the process went on there were much more people who are really committing journalism so the first test is the straightforward one that you tend to see in state SHIELD laws are you do you work for, have a contract with or an agent for an entity that publishes a news website a mobile app, a newspaper a TV station and it's quite broad so I think most bloggers who have an entity when you think of blogs like Talking Points Memo or others Matt Drudge they'd be covered under that along with the Washington Post and the New York Times there's a second definition that says okay if you don't fall into that bucket you can be covered if you have engaged in journalism in the past that's one that was pointed out in the report if you worked as a journalist for one of these entities for one year in the past 20 years or contributed significantly to freelancer in the past five years you can be covered then there's a third bucket that says okay even if you're not covered under one and two if the judge decides in the interest of justice that you should be covered you will be so that's the way that the Senate bill has that structure the House bill is a much more straightforward structure that basically says if you're engaging in journalistic activities for financial livelihood you're covered that's something that has been a little bit controversial in the past because you have people who are doing it for non-profits and we need to find a way to cover them too but the three the sort of three bucket structure is in the Senate bill and we think that's the one that will end up on the floor yes I should have said this before but please say your affiliation as well since we're on c-span I'm Mark Sabolski I'm with it created an LLC called Great Teaching but I have a massive in journalism and I used to be a columnist in a small newspaper now that this report has been rolled out and it is a very important report I believe I mean how far have we come since the Pentagon papers some distance what are your plans to roll this out in terms of connecting directly with the public seems to me that the true test of whether this is going to reverberate into the White House and back is how the public is going to react to it because there is a national security issue that is lingering as it says since 2001 and I think you may get some push back against that so how are we going to know how this is going to resonate with the public well I mean first of all we've been very pleased that it has resonated I mean it's gotten a tremendous amount of attention more than we expected in the media itself I mean that's natural but we're seeing a lot of interest in the social media for example and a lot of discussion and a lot of engagement that is great that is really what we were hoping for and in terms of our strategy if you go to the last page we have our recommendations and as I mentioned those recommendations were developed by the CPJ staff and the board of directors in consultation with lots of other groups we sent the report and the recommendations to the president and in that letter in which we sent the recommendations for a meeting with our board and we are going to be following up on that request and we actually hope to have some sort of face to face dialogue about these issues with senior figures in the administration and we're not obviously we're not the only group that's out there that's working on these issues and so we're you know looking where we can to build coalitions build awareness and you know one of the things I said when we had the press conference is that I think that the challenges that the administration doesn't see this as a problem or they haven't seen it as a problem they saw the little flare up when there was a very considerable outcry after the confiscation of the AP phone records and they sort of feel well we've addressed that with the new justice department guidelines well what this report is saying is you're wrong this is a problem it's a very significant problem it has to do with your legacy it has to do with the kind of government that this country has and deserves and we are seeing a response from the public as a whole so you know that's the strategy you're right that the the over the overlying challenges the national security environment that's true here it's true in many other countries around the world and we're willing to engage with the government on that issue with the administration we know they have very significant challenges but national security in this country or any other country can never be used as a pretext to give the government authority to prevent people from getting the information they need and that's what we're going to push back with and I'm talking about it to the media regularly there have been lots and lots of appearances of various kinds and it's been well covered in the news media and look this is also an administration that wants the American people to well let me put it differently the president has said explicitly to the American people that the tide of war is receding he said we are entering a different period now than we have been in in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks so if you accept or not that perhaps the standards are different in a time of outright war or in the immediate aftermath of a nation getting attacked the way it did in 2001 this is the president who said look we are entering a different period so should not the way the administration addresses some of these matters also evolve Joel could you say a few words about the administration's reaction to the report there has been a little bit of a reaction they basically issued a statement affirming what they said to Len that we are committed to transparency and this is the most transparent administration that to me suggests that they are still very defensive we don't agree with that we don't agree that they are the most transparent administration we want to talk about it so there has been some reaction but I hope by looking for direct engagement we can actually sit down and discuss these issues and I am hopeful that the report itself and Len's ongoing outreach and media around the report will make the case to them that this is a critical issue that is not going away and that the best response is to sit down and engage and try to address some of these issues gentlemen in the blue shirt please take your affiliation good porcelain from radio France international as a foreign journalist I find your report interesting because the way you described the way the administration is ending the press reminds me a little bit of the way the African governments do with their own press and I am a little familiar with that part of the world so can you tell us something that give us a little bit of hope and is it going to be better under the next administration might it be Hillary Clinton as president or Ted Cruz I've heard it said that a pessimist is someone who says it couldn't possibly get any worse and an optimist is someone who says sure it can in terms of the administration's approach and techniques I think a lot really will depend on whether or not Obama reacts to this and decides that he is going to put more transparency into this and to set a different kind of example for the next administration whether it's Democratic or Republican but I think the main reason why I'm not hopeless at all is that the media will push back it is pushing back we'll continue to push back everybody in this report is on the record these reporters who have to deal with the White House every day when David Sanger says this is the most closed control freak administration in my experience he knows he's going to have to talk to him the next day so they clearly are pushing back the media is pushing back and I think that that will help the balance out in the long run so even if the next administration tries to be more controlling the media is still going to be very aggressive and we'll see how the balance works out but my appeal here in particular in this report and Joel's appeal is this president promised to be different and so far he hasn't been different in a good way and he's still got time to do it thank you very much please join me in thanking our wonderful speakers today and thanks to all of you