 of A.V. Holland, Executive Director of the World Affairs Council of Maine. I want to thank all of you for coming. We are honored to have Senator Collins speak with us tonight. And the council is thankful for the support of tonight's sponsors who helped to make this program possible. Our lead sponsor is People's United Bank. Our other sponsors are Bernstein-Sher, Pretty Flaherty, and Unum. Unum has sponsored a table for students and educators here tonight. So we are joined by students and faculty from the University of Southern Maine. We know that tonight's program is being recorded for both MPBN and Community Television Network. And we appreciate their rebroadcasting on both radio and TV. And when we do get to questions, I will bring a mic around so you can ask into the mic. Sam Ladd, Vice Chairman for Maine of People's United Bank, has supported us in making tonight's program happen. And I want to invite him up to introduce Senator Collins. We're going to hear a lot about cybersecurity tonight. I got a little bit worried when she went behind the curtain. I'm really happy to be here and happy that Susan could be with us today. Senator Susan Collins, as many of you know, is originally from Caribou and now lives in Bangalore and obviously Washington. She was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996. She's very well known for her work in facilitating bipartisan compromise on important issues. She's a true leader in the U.S. Senate and I know you all know that. Her record signifies legislative accomplishments in critical areas including homeland security, national defense, disaster response, education, business development, and health care. And as of last July, she cast her 5,000 consecutive roll call vote. The number is much larger now and she has never missed a roll call vote in her entire time in the U.S. Senate. Senator Collins is a member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and a member of the Appropriations Defense Committee. She has served as the ranking member or chairperson of Homeland Security Committee for 10 years. She joined Senator Joe Lieberman and wrote the Intellectual Reform and Terrorism Protection Act of 2004. That's a mouthful, but it created the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Most recently, she led the effort to combat the growing threat from cyber crime and espionage during her 10 years as the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She continues to advocate for the passage of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation which leaders such as General Keith Alexander believe is really necessary to protect the security of our communities and our economic prosperity. Susan spoke to us, Senator Susan Collins spoke to us a few years ago here and I'm very happy to have her once again speak to the world affairs council. Thank you so much Sam. I very much appreciate all that you did to get me here and thank you Gordon for for your invitation as well. It's also great to see my good friend and mentor Mert Henry here tonight. I told Mert that he was strategically located in case I get in trouble answering any of these questions. I just looked directly at Mert and he mouths the answer for me. You know, I am constantly impressed by the number of manors of all backgrounds and occupations and professions that care about international relations and joined together in this organization to better understand the world and America's role in it. And I think it's wonderful that we have the group of students here tonight. That's really important as well. Though I have a feeling that they've come armed with really tough questions and that their professors grading them on how tough the question is for me tonight. As Sam mentioned tonight I want to discuss a thread that strikes at our country every single day and that is the challenge of nearly constant cyber attacks. We live in an interconnected world driven by advances in technology that have truly changed the way that we live and our economy in very positive ways. But those same technologies have given terrorists criminals anarchists and rogue states new tools by which to attack us. These virtual threats have real world consequences. Cyber intrusions deprive us of intellectual capital and business trade secrets. Cyber thieves steal millions of dollars as well as our personal identities. And an attack on our critical infrastructure such as crippling our electrical grid could result in a devastating loss of life and severe economic damage. Given these consequences terrorist groups will undoubtedly seek to exploit vulnerabilities in our cyber defenses. As Sam mentioned I served for more than a dozen years as either the chairman or the ranking member of the senate homeland security committee. And of all the threats that our country has faced during those years there is none that concerns me more than the prospect of a massive cyber attack largely because our vulnerability is so great and our preparedness so inadequate. Cyber security requires far more attention from individuals from the private sector and from government. Secure computer systems are critical to our national security the operation of our critical infrastructure and our economy. Yet cyber intrusions and attacks are daily occurrences. If the crimes that I'm about to describe had been committed before our age of computers you might think that they were pages from Sherlock Holmes casebook on his nemesis doings and his vast nefarious crime network. Yet none of these crimes required elaborate disguises the dark of night brass knuckles or revolvers. They were all committed with nothing more than computer keystrokes and relentless ingenuity. Consider this sampling of recent events beginning in January the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inventory of dams across the United States was hacked. This database contains extremely sensitive information on some 8100 dams including 2500 that produce electricity. The database not only describes the role that each dam plays in our electrical grid but also an estimate of the level of death and destruction that would likely occur should the dam fail. The hacking is believed to have originated in China though one of the problems with all of these attacks is the attribution figuring out from where they came. In two skillful operations beginning last December criminals in more than two dozen countries stole more than 45 million dollars from ATM machines around the world. This heist combined the talents of sophisticated computer experts and the boldness of common street criminals. It started with the infiltration of the computer systems of debit card processing companies and ended up with criminals emptying out street corner ATMs into bulging backpacks. Even the world's most respected and tech savvy companies are not immune. Hackers were able to penetrate Sony's PlayStation network stealing the personal information of more than 80 million users and costing the company more than 170 million dollars in damages. In a more recent example just last month an Algerian known as BX1 was extradited from Thailand to face charges here for developing and marketing a computer virus known as spy eye. This virus openly advertised on internet websites popular with cyber criminals is designed to take over home computers and reveal passwords pin numbers and all other information that safeguards our personal finances. Most alarming of all is the recent report that nearly 40 Pentagon weapons systems and almost 30 other defense technologies were compromised by cyber intrusions again most likely originating in China. Early this year the cyber security firm Mandiant linked a secret Chinese military unit to years of cyber attacks against American defense contractors and government agencies and the details are truly alarming as is the scope of the operation. The worrisome truth is that we have not adopted safeguards that come even close to the stakes if we cannot protect our most sensitive information about hydroelectric dams or military technology knowing in advance that they are prime targets. How can we respond to government sponsored military trained hackers who can attack anywhere at any time. We must face this sobering fact the internet is under constant attack on all fronts from unfriendly nation states, terrorist groups, transnational criminal gangs, hacktivists and other persistent hackers. Cyber attacks from every corner of the world are also a threat to our economic edge in this global economy. The rampant cyber theft targeting the United States by countries like Russia, China and Iran has led to what General Keith Alexander the head of the National Security Agency and of Cyber Command has called the greatest transfer of wealth in our history. He estimates that American companies have lost 250 billion dollars a year through intellectual property 114 billion to theft through cyber crime and another 274 billion dollars in downtime caused by these thefts. General Alexander gives one case of a company that lost a billion dollars in R&D that it had developed that took 20 years for the company to develop but that was stolen overnight. Other experts have warned that the cost of cyber espionage is easily billions of dollars and millions of jobs. Whether a business makes music medicine or military hardware the research and development that result from hard work creativity and investment are at risk of theft by nation states and cyber criminals. The computer security company Norton peg b annual cost of cyber crime to businesses and individuals at 114 billion dollars that's the number that was cited by General Alexander as well. To put that huge number into perspective that's bigger than Apple. That's right all of the revenue generated by the sale of those Macs iPhones iPads sold last year by Apple doesn't equal what cyber criminals have ripped off. Experts have also repeatedly warned that the computer systems that run our critical infrastructure our electrical grid our gas pipelines our water treatment plants our financial networks our transportation systems are vulnerable to a major cyber attack. In fact several natural gas pipeline companies have already reported that they have detected intrusions targeting their industrial control systems. 85 percent of essential infrastructure in this country is owned or operated by the private sector. Are these operators of these critical national assets prepared for a sophisticated cyber attack? The evidence strongly indicates that they are not. For example a study that was done in 2011 on cyber threats to critical infrastructure found that 40 percent of those surveyed were not taking even the most basic precautions to protect their systems such as changing the default passwords that came with their industrial controls or their administrative computers. The owners and operators of our nation's critical infrastructure reported nearly 200 cyber intrusions in 2011. It's much higher than that because those are only the ones that were reported. Despite this obvious and looming threat Washington continues to debate whether or not cyber security legislation is needed. The fact is societies throughout history have adopted safety standards to protect the physical structures of everyday life from homes and businesses to power plants and dams. And the reason we do this is obvious if our home has faulty electrical wiring that could cause a fire we pose a threat not just to ourselves but also to our neighbors. We need to bring this age-old approach to our collective safety in the physical world to the world of cyberspace. We live in an increasingly wired world that we need to bring up to code. So last year former Senator Joe Lieberman and I introduced a bipartisan cyber security bill. It would have forged a strong public and private partnership to secure those critical systems on which a cyber attack shouldn't occur would cause either mass casualties, evacuations, disruptions to life-sustaining services, or catastrophic damages to our economy or national security. In other words we're not after trying to control every little company everywhere or computers in people's homes. We were aimed at trying to improve the security of critical national assets which if attacked would cause catastrophic consequences for our country. Think how badly we do as a country when we just lose electricity for a few days. Think if there were a deliberate attack to take out the entire electrical grid for the entire East Coast. We worked with our Senate colleagues, our House counterparts, the administration and the private sector to craft a bill that relied upon the expertise and experience and the innovation of the private sector plus government and rather than mandating specific standards our bill would have simply encouraged the owners of critical infrastructure to voluntarily adopt best practices similar to the way that plumbing and electrical codes are developed in consultation with the experienced experts who actually work in those trades. It would have included privacy protections, it would have granted some limited immunity to companies that did adopt these standards to give them an incentive to do so and it's important to know that nothing in our bill, and I'm going to look at the students now, would have regulated the design or the architect of the internet or given anyone in government the authority to close down the internet. So we were very careful to be sensitive to those communications and privacy concerns but despite our hard work to find common ground the Senate twice failed to pass cybersecurity legislation in the last Congress for fear that it would be imposing too much regulation. Well since that time President Obama has unilaterally issued an executive order regulate regarding cyber security without any clear direction from Congress and without any authorization from Congress. So to me this is yet another example of Congress's failure to act because of gridlock and an inability to deal with a very serious issue. This is how former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former NSA and CIA Chief Michael Hayden who both served in President Bush's administration described the challenge. They said the following, we carried the burden of knowing that 9-11 might have been a burden with the intelligence that existed at the time. We do not want to be in the same position again when a cyber 9-11 hits. It's not a question of whether this will happen. It is a question of when. So here we have administration officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations warning us that we must act and yet we have not done so. It wasn't until after the devastating attacks of September 11th, 2001 that we learned of the many early warnings that went unheeded. When a major cyber attack occurs the ignored warnings will be even more glaring because our nation's vulnerability has already been demonstrated by the daily attempts often successful to penetrate our computer systems. This time all of the dots have already been connected. We know that attacks are occurring in our cyber systems every day. This time the warnings are loud and clear and we must heed them. The fact is that foreign terrorist groups operating overseas are already using our technology against us. They can use the internet to indoctrinate and to teach others to conduct attacks. The Fort Hood terrorist attack is a perfect example. Major Hassan was radicalized and converted to an extremist Islamic ideology through the internet. He was inspired to kill his fellow soldiers. Foreign terrorists can coordinate their operational activities via our communications networks. They can use technological advances to conceal their activities and that brings me to the second topic that I would like to touch on tonight and that is the recent disclosures related to the NSA activities with telecommunications and internet companies. You may have heard a bit about that in the past couple of weeks. By the way the nickname for the NSA is no such agency which tells you something about its secret work. Its real name is the National Security Agency. First let me say that as a member of the senate I believe that my primary obligation is to protect the life and liberties of the American people and to protect the rights and freedoms that are preserved in our constitution. I also recognize the ongoing threat that we face from foreign terrorists and believe that congress has a responsibility within the confines of the constitution and our laws to grant our intelligence military and law enforcement agencies the authorities that they need to detect deter and disrupt terrorist plots but to do so with rigorous safeguards and careful oversight. Some describe these dual responsibilities in competitive terms. You often hear people in Washington or the pundits on tv talking about striking the right balance between security and liberty. I don't view them as being in conflict or in competition. I view them as being complementary. They can and must exist together. Working within the system of checks and balances envisioned by our founding fathers. I believe that both goals can be accomplished but doing so does require constant vigilance by congress, by the courts and by the people. Let me discuss the critical role of congress. After the september 11th attacks congress recognized that our laws had not kept pace with advances in technology. We recognized that foreign terrorists were able in fact to use our laws against us. The patriot act was designed to address issues that had been percolating for years. Many of us recognize the need for constant review and oversight however and that's why we insisted on including a sunset provision requiring congress to read salmon the law periodically. It's also why when Senator Joe Lieberman and I drafted the intelligence reform and terrorism prevention act in 2004 that we insisted on including a privacy and civil liberties board as part of the law. Later congress decided that it was appropriate for our intelligence agencies to monitor foreign terrorists operating overseas when their communications were being carried over US communication systems. Now judicial scrutiny is a critical part of these laws. There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the foreign intelligence surveillance act known as FISA. These judicial checks ensure that the activities comply with the constitution and laws and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties. For this very purpose congress created a new court known as the foreign intelligence surveillance court usually referred to as the FISA court. The court prohibits NSA from indiscriminately sifting through telephone records acquired under surveillance programs. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion based on specific facts that the particular basis for the query is linked to a foreign terrorist organization. And I can tell you this authority is used very carefully and very conservatively. Along with judicial review and constraints congressional oversight is particularly important when some executive branch activities must remain secret to protect our national security. Yet here is an area where improvements are needed until the last two weeks the details of the NSA collection programs were fully known only to the House and Senate leadership, the previous members of the Intelligence Committees and very few other members. By that I mean although I now serve on the Intelligence Committee I've only been on it since January and had not been briefed on it. I had received a monthly highly classified thread briefing in my former capacity as the leader of the Homeland Security Committee and I'd also visited the NSA personally to learn more about its computer security programs. So there were ample opportunities for officials to brief me on these collection programs as well. They did not do so and I could not ask about a metadata program that I did not know existed. One reporter said well why didn't you ask about it? It's very hard to ask about a program that you are unaware of the existence of. Expanding the number of members with access to detailed briefings would help ensure more oversight and accountability and is a change I believe that we should make. Now during the past two weeks I've been at this point fully briefed on the NSA collection programs that were revealed by Edward Snowden the 29 year old high school dropout an IT contractor reportedly earning 120,000 dollars a year. I have concluded based on these briefings that his disclosures did tremendous harm to our national security and that he is no whistleblower. There were avenues he could have pursued within the NSA if he had concerns. He could have quit. To me it is shocking that an individual with so little experience had access to such highly classified information and that represents a stunning security lapse. Nevertheless Mr. Snowden's revelations many of which I want to tell you are not accurate such as his claim that he could wiretap the calls of any American or read the emails of any Americans that is simply false. But his revelations have raised concerns about whether or not the government is infringing upon the privacy rights of our citizens. And while I cannot give you a great number of details due to the classified nature of the programs let me provide you with some information. By the way one of the harmful aspects of these disclosures is the terrorists are smart. They will change how they communicate. First of all there is no sweeping collection of the content of telephone calls. Think of this collection as having the telephone numbers and the duration of the calls. Access to this database requires what is known as a dirty number. That means a telephone number of a foreign terrorist operating overseas whose surveillance has been approved by the FISA court that I described earlier. What is most important to know is that this system has been responsible for the detection and the thwarting of what General Keith Alexander referred to as dozens and dozens of terrorist plots both here and overseas. I have strongly encouraged the administration to reveal the actual number of disrupted terrorist plots as well as identifying more of the actual plots beyond the two that the administration has revealed to date. I personally don't see the harm in revealing the aggregate number. I can understand that revealing some of the specific plots might compromise sources or methods but I hope and I've urged the administration to tell the American people just how many plots were thwarted because at least in part of this program to date they have not done so but they are considering doing so. As Congress and the administration and the American people learn more about this program however there do remain questions that must be asked and issues that we must address but in doing so I want to repeat what I said earlier and that is we must not assume that there is a tradeoff between liberty and security. Security ensures our freedom. During the past decade the American people have lost a great deal of confidence in their government. Thus when a person like Edward Snowden steals and reveals highly classified information and distorts the facts gives out false information it gives rise to concerns that government officials may indeed be invading our privacy or infringing on our rights. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, the belated admissions about the Benghazi attacks, even the inability of Washington to address the unsustainable national debt all contribute to a loss of faith in government and I think that's why when we have a disclosure like this one people tend to believe that there is a big brother program that is infringing on their rights listening to their phone calls and reading their emails and the polls show that the younger people especially are likely to believe that that is true. That to me is indicative of a loss of faith in our government that is pervasive in our society today and is in some ways deserved. That is why I will continue to press the administration to reveal as many facts about this collection program as it possibly can without further compromising the effectiveness of the program and sources and methods and it's also why that I will continue to work hard each and every day to do my own small part to try to restore people's faith in their government. Thank you very much and I'd be glad to answer your questions. Thank you. Thank you Senator. Thank you very much Senator Susan Collins. We'd also like to thank UNUM for donating these seats and the World Affairs Council and the sponsors and Amy for making this event possible. So you mentioned that we'd ask a tough question. My name is Mohammed immigrated from Somalia and I'm a citizen now able to take advantage of all the opportunities that America has to offer. My question is a little bit off topic. It's immigration bill and the grassy amendment 1195. Now the amendment will directly impede on individuals on document individuals to become citizens of America. Now I know immigration is a very hot topic right now especially with undocumented individuals coming from the southern border but my question relates to the refugees and asylum seekers that live with in Portland me as well as Louson who have fled violence and persecution and conflict. Now my question to you is Senator Collins will you oppose this bill for to justly represent your constituents and the family members as well as in my hope future constituents of yours as well. Thank you. Thank you. Can everybody hear me or do I need to good because this seems to echo. First of all thank you Mohammed for for that question because we are debating the immigration bill on the senate floor right now so it's a very timely question indeed. The bill as it was reported out of the judiciary committee on which I do not serve is 1900 pages long and we are still going through it very carefully to make sure that we know what is in it. I do have some amendments but let me say this first of all I think we need comprehensive immigration reform and I hope very much at the end of the process of considering this bill on the senate floor which is expected to take two to three weeks that I will be able to vote yes on final passage I want to be able to vote for a comprehensive immigration bill but it would be full hearty for me to give you a commitment right now because I have no idea which of the hundreds of amendments that have been filed to the bill already are going to be adopted and it even could end up being a bill that you would not want me to vote for. So but let me say that we have 11 million undocumented individuals in this country and it is clearly not feasible nor would it be the right policy to try to round them up somehow and ship them back home that just would not work. I'm particularly sympathetic in cases where young children were brought into this country illegally by their parents. They've known no other country. There is American as all of us and the fact that they were brought in illegally by their parents they should not pay that price and that's referred to as the Dream Act which you may be familiar with. I do think however that individuals who come to this country illegally should not be treated the same as someone who evade the laws and that's why this bill has what is known as a path to citizenship in it that requires paying a fine making sure the person has a clean criminal record pays back taxes learns English has a job or is going to school and I think that those are appropriate hurdles on a path to citizenship because I don't think that it's fair to people who stood in line and followed the law and came in legally for them to all be treated the same but the final point that I would make is we do need to secure our borders. We can't be here a decade from now saying oops we now have 22 million people who came to this country illegally so border security has to be part of the immigration bill. We can't just focus on the people who are here illegally. Thank you. We might have time for just one or two more questions so please make them brief. Was there any progress made with Xi Jinping on cybersecurity when it with the meeting with Obama and then secondly for the is it reasonable to ask the NSA to give the total number of phone calls recorded and emails recorded per year? On your first question the president has put out a statement saying that he did press China hard on cybersecurity. When you look at the nations that are most involved in cyber intrusions and cyber attacks China appears to be number one followed by Russia followed by the Iranians. The Iranians however are increasing their capability by leaps and and bounds but China appears to be in a class of its own and also China appears to have a national policy to target our industrial secrets in particular. So I know that the president raised the issue but I do not know what the Chinese leader's response was. As far as disclosing the number of phone calls I wanted to distinguish between two things and that is the collection of telephone numbers versus content. The content cannot be accessed without a court order just as if you were a drug trafficker or a regular criminal the FBI would go to the court and get a warrant to allow for wiretapping. So those numbers I will tell you are extremely different from one another and I don't know the answer to whether or not they could be disclosed as far as what the national security implications would be. I wish however another fact that I would like to have disclosed is how few people have access to the database with the phone numbers in it that can be queried for a match if there's a phone call from a foreign terrorist to an American number and then by the way it goes to the FBI because then becomes a domestic matter and I will tell you that that number is very small but I just don't know. That's what the administration I think is trying to figure out right now is what can they disclose that won't cause further harm to our national security. When both Ron and Sally have a question who gets the answer? I happen to be sitting closer. I guess my big question is you talk about legislation as being part of the reason our cybersecurity is not what it should be but it seems like it's a much bigger question. I mean legislation is not going to solve the cybersecurity security. It is not going to solve the problem. I mean who's working on the solution? Well here's why I think legislation would help solve the problem although you're absolutely right that it's not going to make it go away is if we could have all of the operators and owners of our critical national assets in our infrastructure adopt the best cyber practices that would improve their defenses against attacks enormously and I'll tell you I talked to chief information officers of large corporations all the time and they tell me they have to fight to get money to improve cybersecurity. The chief information officers get it but the CEOs often say we don't want to spend money on that and that it's a constant struggle and that's why I think you need legislation is to and I think the incentive you give is limited immunity if they if they adopt these standards the best practices and then there's a breach that they can't be sued as long as they adopted the standards. The second thing that legislation would provide which I really think we need is for critical infrastructure I think we need a requirement for mandatory reporting to the government when there's been a major cyber intrusion and I think that's important because then the government can share with other vulnerable companies what happened and what the IP address is that they should block how the attack was done but what happens now is when a business has a breach they tend to try to cover it up and keep it quiet because they don't want their customers to know about it for fear that they'll lose business and so I think that mandatory reporting is really important I'm not talking for small businesses I'm talking for for critical infrastructure and I also the third reason we need legislation is we need to give specific authorization for agencies to share threat information and we need that threat information to go in both directions we need the private sector to share with government and we need government to share with the private sector I remember being at the department of homeland security computer center it's computer security center and I could watch in real time an attempted intrusion into a government agency system and because they could track it they were able to call that agency and tell them what was going on and they stopped it but it was just amazing to be able to see it in real time as far as who is working on it sorry I know I'm answering too long as as far as who is working on it cyber command within the department of defense is a new command that was set up that is working on it from both an offensive and defensive measure there are a host of computer security firms that sell their services and are working on it and and there are international organizations that are working on it as well because obviously this crosses national boundaries and again there's an attempt to come up with standards and a more cooperative sharing information sharing make it one last question thank you senator um my question revolves around Syria um clearly there's a ongoing humanitarian crisis uh i missed a civil war which is now spreading into a sectarian war pulling in hezbollah aran versus saudi arabia and so on and so forth but recent news at the united states and perhaps europe it will be arming syrian rebels i wanted your thoughts on that because in effect we would be arming some al-qaeda affiliates who are tied to the rebels and that could have serious implications for our troops in theater thank you you've asked an excellent question about syria and it is such a complex and difficult to issue um ironically early on if we had armed the opposition we would have been far better off because that was before they were infiltrated by elements of al-qaeda now virtually every experts believe that that infiltration has occurred i mean we do know who some of the good guys are but i think as we attempt to arm the opposition at this point that some of those weapons inevitably are going to fall into the hands of terrorists who will seek to do us harm syria is a disaster there have been 93,000 people killed there are more than a million refugees who have fled into jordan i'm worried about the stability of jordan as a result of this influx of refugees um russia is sending weapons to the Assad regime the Iranians are sending hezbollah fighters to fight the opposition so you've got proxies for major powers in the area and a destabilization of the entire middle east which is very frightening it is a very difficult problem i know from the intelligence briefings and i'm not disclosing classified information because the president has now released this affirmatively that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons including the nerve gas sarin against the opposition and the president said that that was a red line now if you say that something is a red line then you've got to be prepared to take action once that red line is crossed or else america's credibility in the world is worth nothing and what kind of a message would it send to iran and the north koreans if the president did nothing i think um i wonder whether he had a plan in mind when he drew that red line and uh i truly wonder whether he really had a plan in mind i don't think anybody is arguing for boots on the ground american boots on the ground and there is a contingent in the administration a small contingent and in the senate a contingent led by john mccain that believes that we should try to take out the aircraft of the syrian government now syria it's not libya it has stronger anti aircraft defenses the question is whether that could be done with cruise missiles and i probably should ask these questions he'd probably know the answer so it's always bad to be talking in front of experts you know but some people think you could do it with cruise missiles uh from afar and take out the anti aircraft defenses i don't know i do know that it appears that a certain middle east nation was able to do an intrusion into syria and take out some weapons deep hoax and come back out without getting shot down so maybe those wanted anti aircraft defenses aren't quite as good as as advertised but i i cannot pretend to have an answer to syria i just think it is a complete disaster and that if we were going to arm the rebels we would have been far better off doing it at the beginning when we knew who the the opposition groups were and now for the reasons that you articulated arming them is is dangerous and yet how can you not take action after that red line has been crossed and with 93,000 people massacred so it is a really tough tough situation i guess my prediction on syria is that the country's going to fracture and that we're going to see it break into different parts that will no longer be one country but i it's very hard to envision a good outcome thank you very much senator thank you