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Joshua Alvarez
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American deterrence, though traditionally centered on the nuclear triad, is becoming ever more integrated and dependent on other technologies in space and the cyber world, Admiral Cecil D. Haney, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told a Stanford audience.

Haney, appointed to lead USSTRATCOM by President Barack Obama last year, made a daylong visit to Stanford on Tuesday, holding seminars and private meetings with faculty, scholars and students at the Hoover Institution and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. His seminar at CISAC focused on strategic deterrence in the 21st century.

Admiral Haney has made it USSTRATCOM’s goal, in accordance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the 2010 START Treaty, to reduce America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. But he sees a world where maintaining a deterrent is still necessary.

“As we work to continue our nation’s goal of reducing the role of our nation’s nuclear weapons, we find other nations not only modernizing their strategic capabilities but also promoting them,” he said. Russia, Iran, and China attracted particular concern. Haney declined to estimate how much the U.S. can reduce its stockpile without hurting its deterrent posture.

While the nuclear triad is still the foundation of American deterrence, space and cyberspace technology are now fully integrated with nuclear platforms, making cyber and space security indispensable.

“Deterrence is more than just the triad,” said Haney. “We are highly dependent on space capabilities, more so than ever before. Space is fully integrated in our joint military operations as well as in our commercial and civil infrastructure. But space today is contested, congested, and competitive.” 

Haney said there are more than 20,000 softball-sized objects orbiting Earth.

 

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“Only about 1,000 of those objects are satellites, the rest is debris, increasing threats to our operational satellites as they travel at speeds exceeding 17,000 mph,” he said. The Joint Space Operation Center receives an average of 30 collision alerts per day.

Damage to some of our satellites could have devastating impacts on our economy, communications and infrastructure. Rival nations also pose space security challenges.

According to the U.S. government, China recently tested an anti-satellite missile. This follows a 2007 test when China successfully destroyed one of its satellites, and consequently created a cloud of debris that still poses a threat to international satellites.

“Keeping assured access to the space domain is a full-time job,” Haney said.

Likewise cybersecurity. America’s increasing reliance on cyberspace for both military and civilian purposes has created security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by both state and non-state actors. Haney cited the recent attacks on J.P. Morgan and Sony, Russia and China’s attacks on regional rivals, and non-state terror groups.

“We have benefited enormously from advanced computer capabilities, but it has opened up threat access to our critical infrastructure,“ Haney said. “As we confront terrorist groups we all know that they are not only using cyber for recruiting and messaging – but also to seek weapons of mass destruction.”

In a Q&A session after his talk during the CISAC seminar, a variety of concerns were raised about the USSTRACOM mission, including triad modernization, the ongoing personnel issues that have been in the news, and missile defense.

FSI Senior Fellow Scott Sagan asked about the recent spate of personnel problems at U.S. nuclear silos. Haney said a full review of personnel and procedures, ordered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, was completed and changes have been enacted.

“We are trying to positively reinforce our workforce and I am getting a lot of positive feedback from operators,” Haney said. “We are having monthly conversations that include operational officers. When I visit sites I don’t just meet with commanders, I have meals with smaller groups of lower-ranking personnel.”

Haney previously served as commander of the Pacific Fleet. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has personal experience with America’s nuclear deterrent as he served in submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, which, in addition to land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and strategic bombers, make up part of the United States’ nuclear triad.

USSTRATCOM is one of nine unified commands that have control of forces from all four branches of the U.S. military. The command’s well-known responsibility is command and control of America’s nuclear arsenal, a role it inherited from the Cold War-era Strategic Air Command. Since its establishment in 1992, USSTRATCOM has been assigned additional responsibilities, most notably cyberspace and outer space.

 

You can listen to the audio of his presentation here.

 

Joshua Alvarez was a CISAC Honors Student during the 2011-2012 academic year.

 

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CISAC's Scott Sagan is the chair of a new project by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, called the New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology and War.  The project convenes an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners (political scientists, philosophers, ethicists, lawyers, physicians, historians, soldiers, and statesmen) in a series of small workshops to explore the intricate linkage between the advancement of military technology and the moral and ethical considerations of the deployment of such capabilities in war and in postwar settings.

The project will produce a multidisciplinary Dædalus issue that will inform the debate surrounding the acceptable use of modern instruments of war and will provide a useful teaching tool for both universities and military service academies.

You can read more about the project on the AAA&S website here.

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Due to the overwhelming response to this event and our seating limitations, registration is now closed.

 

Admiral Cecil D. Haney, a native of Washington, D.C. is a 1978 graduate of the United States Naval Academy.

His career as a submariner includes assignments aboard USS John C. Calhoun (SSBN 630), USS Frank Cable (AS 40), USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN 709), USS Asheville (SSN 758), and Submarine Squadron 8, culminating in command of USS Honolulu (SSN 718).

Subsequent fleet command assignments include Submarine Squadron 1 from June 2002 to July 2004, and Submarine Group 2 from October 2006 to March 2008.

Admiral Haney's shore duty tours include administrative assistant for enlisted affairs at Naval Reactors; congressional appropriations liaison officer for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Comptroller); Deputy Chief of Staff of Plans, Policies and Requirements, U.S. Pacific Fleet (N5N8); Director, Submarine Warfare Division (N87); Director, Naval Warfare Integration Group (N00X); Deputy Commander, U.S. Strategic Command and recently Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Admiral Haney holds Master's degrees in Engineering Acoustics and System Technology from the Naval Post Graduate School, and a Master's degree in National Security Strategy from the National Defense University.

Admiral Haney's decorations include the Navy Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Defense Superior Service Medal (two awards), Legion of Merit (four awards), Navy Commendation Medal (three awards), Navy Achievement Medal (two awards), and various campaign and unit awards. In addition, he was the 1998 Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Leadership Award recipient.

Encina Hall, 2nd floor 

Admiral Cecil D. Haney Commander Speaker USSTRATCOM
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Clifton B. Parker
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Stanford University today launched the Stanford Cyber Initiative to apply broad campus expertise to the diverse challenges and opportunities that cybersecurity, cyberspace and networked information pose to humanity.                                                      

Information security has an expanding and deepening role in virtually every facet of our personal, social, governmental and economic lives. Yet the Internet is decentralized and vulnerable to malicious use. How does society protect its core values in the face of the promise and perils of digital information? And, how does society adapt to changing technologies?

These are the type of questions that Stanford researchers will study, thanks to the jumpstart given by a $15 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Stanford's initiative will be highly interdisciplinary in building a new policy framework for cyber issues. It will draw on the campus' experience with multidisciplinary, university-wide initiatives to focus on the core themes of trustworthiness, governance and the emergence of unexpected impacts of technological change over time.

"Our increasing reliance on technology, combined with the unpredictable vulnerabilities of networked information, pose future challenges for all of society," said Stanford President John Hennessy. "We share the Hewlett Foundation’s goal to seek a robust understanding of how new technologies affect us all at the most fundamental human levels. Stanford has a long history of fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to find thoughtful and enlightened answers to these paramount questions." 

Building on Stanford strengths

The Stanford Cyber Initiative will build upon the university's already extensive inquiry and research into Internet security. In doing so, Stanford has drawn on connections with industry and government by establishing, for example, a "cyber boot camp" for U.S. congressional staff (a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies/Hoover Institution collaboration,) a conference on the "ethics of data in civil society" and an ongoing "security conundrum" speaker series on cyber issues.

The initiative will work with Stanford’s existing research hubs addressing cyber issues, including those in the Computer Security Lab in the Department of Computer Science, the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Hoover Institution and the Law School's Center for Internet and Society. FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law will also play a key role in the initiative.

The initiative will launch immediately and develop faculty seminars and conferences, organize working groups of faculty and students to tackle policy-relevant problems in information security, and provide support for internal research awards, teaching and curriculum development. Collaborations with industry and government are a vital part of the initiative.

The Stanford Cyber Initiative includes roles for faculty and students across a wide swath of research disciplines – computer science, law, the social sciences, engineering, political science and education, among others. And it will also enlist Stanford alumni who are leaders in the policy and technology fields.

For those seeking to participate, information is available on the Stanford Cyber Initiative website

A central hub

"We are deeply grateful to the Hewlett Foundation for recognizing Stanford's ongoing work and future potential in this area. With the help of their generous grant, this initiative will grow into a central presence on campus that more broadly comprehends the possibilities and perils of networked information," said Stanford law Professor George Triantis, who will chair the steering committee for the initiative.

The committee currently includes professors Jeremy Bailenson (communications,) Stephen Barley (management science and engineering,) Ian Morris (classics and history,) John Mitchell (computer science and electrical engineering,) Dan Boneh (computer science and electrical engineering,) Amy Zegart (Hoover Institution and CISAC) and Barbara van Schewick (law).

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Stanford law professor, is one of the founders of the initiative. 

"The Stanford initiative will create vast opportunities to advance knowledge about the future of cyberspace and cybersecurity," Cuéllar said. "Faculty and students will expand existing research efforts and conversations with the goal of building a safer, better world that balances humanity's concerns with the promise of new technologies."

Cuéllar noted that crucial areas of examination include how to resolve trust and security problems endemic to networked information technologies, how to govern the Internet in a world where people often disagree about what they value, and how to anticipate unexpected developments in information technologies that could affect national security, intellectual property, civil liberties and society.

Ann Arvin, Stanford's vice provost and dean of research, said, "Our scholars and students will examine pressing questions about how can we ensure security and protect privacy while continuing to foster an open, innovative and entrepreneurial culture and society. We want to better understand the short- and long-term consequences and implications of the pervasiveness of digital technology in our lives."

In exploring this conundrum, the initiative will encourage collaborative focus across disciplines on the challenges of trustworthiness – for example, can individuals trust that information technologies will deliver on their promise and also avoid the hazards of deliberately hostile or antisocial actions? 

A central goal is to create a policy framework that can generate lasting solutions not only to existing problems but also to problems that may emerge in the future.  

'Profound implications'

The new program is supported through the Hewlett Foundation's Cyber Initiative, which has now committed $65 million over the next five years to the study of cybersecurity, the largest amount given to date by a private donor to this topic.

"Choices we are making today about Internet governance and security have profound implications for the future," said Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer, a former dean of the Stanford Law School. "To make those choices well, it is imperative that they be made with some sense of what lies ahead and, still more important, of where we want to go."

The other universities receiving Hewlett grants of $15 million each – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley – will take a complementary approach in setting up the new centers based on their particular strengths and expertise.

 

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Journalist Barton Gellman had left his job at The Washington Post and was working on a book about surveillance and privacy in America when he was contacted last year by someone using the code-name VERAX, or “truth teller” in Latin.

So began one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of modern American journalism – and government surveillance. In the spring of 2013, Gellman began having remote, encrypted exchanges with someone who clearly had inside knowledge of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance programs. 

“He was trying to figure out whether he could trust me and ... I was trying to figure out if he was for real,” Gellman told a packed Stanford audience Monday night.

Last December, he traveled to Moscow to put a face to the code-name and determine whether the information he was providing was accurate.

“All extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and he was providing that.," Gellman said of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "I was convinced fairly early on that I was dealing with something fairly serious.”

So Gellman went back to The Washington Post, where he had been on teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the power and influence of Vice President Dick Cheney during the Bush administration.

“I went there because I trusted them and because I wanted their resources and their advice,” he told the audience of some 600 people at the CEMEX Auditorium on Monday. The Washington Post would go on to win the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, shared with The Guardian US, for their reporting on the Snowden materials and the NSA.

Gellman today is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a visiting professional specialist and author-in-residence at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency and is currently working on a book about the Snowden affair.

Snowden’s explosive disclosures about the National Security Agency’s intelligence-collection operations have ignited an intense debate about the appropriate balance between security and liberty in America.

In a special series this academic year at Stanford University, nationally prominent experts are exploring the critical issues raised by the NSA’s activities, including their impact on our security, privacy and civil liberties.

Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, launched the “Security Conundrum” series in October with its first speaker, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA who defended the government surveillance programs. The metadata collection “is something we would have never done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10,” Hayden told Zegart during their conversation on Oct.  8. “But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11. No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No – it was a logical response to the needs of the moment.”

Zegart, in introducing Gellman, said: “Tonight, we move from inside the NSA to inside the newsroom, which played a key role in revealing the NSA’s secret activities over the past year.”

All Photos by Rod Searcey

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In the second lecture in the “Security Conundrum” series, Gellman was in conversation with Philip Taubman, former correspondent and Washington and Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times and a consulting professor with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Taubman teaches the class Need to Know: The Tension Between a Free Press and National Security Decision Making.

Gellman recounted his dealings with Snowden and described how he and his editors weighed the Snowden materials. Few questions are more difficult for American journalists than determining how far a free press can venture in disclosing national security secrets without imperiling the nation’s security.

“I asked him very bluntly, `Why are you doing this?’” Gellman said of Snowden.

“He gave me very persuasive and consistent answers about his motives. Whatever you think of what he did or whether or not I should have published these stories, I would claim to you that all the evidence supports his claim that he had come across a dangerous accumulation of state power that we, the people, needed to know about.”

One of the first Snowden revelations, Gellman said, was the top-secret PRISM surveillance program, in which the NSA is allowed to tap into the servers of nine large U.S. Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype. Snowden believed the extent of mass data collection about American citizens was far greater than what the public knew.

The Post reported that PRISM allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from the Silicon Valley firms to a wide range of digital information, including audio, video chats, photographs, emails and stored data that enable analysts to track foreign targets. The program does not require individual warrants, but instead operates under the broader authorization of the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

 

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The FISA Court had also been ordering a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers’ telephone calls.

Gellman said Snowden asked for a guarantee the Post would publish the full text of a PowerPoint presentation that he had obtained describing the PRISM program. Gellman told him that his editors would not make any guarantees about what they would publish and in the end the paper only reproduced several slides so as not to harm national security.

Taubman asked Gellman what gives any journalist the right to publish classified documents and not hand those papers back to the NSA.

“I’m not accountable to anyone for my decisions about what is in the interest or not in the interest of the national security of the United States,” Gellman said. “What happens is the government tries to keep information a secret and I try to find it out – and then when that spillage happens, well, then we talk.”

In the case of PRISM, he sent emails to two “quite senior people” in the government and told them this was the type of email he only sends once every several years, when he is onto a big story they would want to know about. But he didn’t want to do anything over email, so when the senior officials called, Gellman gave them the title of the document about which he was going to write.

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That started the negotiations with the government and The Washington Post. In the end, the paper only published several of the government’s PowerPoint slides that explained the PRISM program because they were concerned about harming national security.

“We had no interest in doing that; we only had an interest in writing about the public policy question on a program that had secretly expanded in ways that almost no one knew about,” Gellman said. “To the extent that it involves drawing new boundaries allowing the government to spy on its citizens and the citizens never get to know that – that is quite relevant to know when you’re trying to decide whether you like what your government is doing.”

In a statement responding to the PRISM revelations by the Post, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said information collection under the program “is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

Clapper called the Snowden leaks about the legal program “reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

Gellman said Snowden has turned down million-dollar book and movie deals and lives in  “ascetic” asylum in Russia. Snowden told NBC News earlier this year that he was on his way from Hong Kong to Latin America, via Moscow, when his passport was confiscated and that Russia then granted him a one-year asylum.

“He is fascinating to me because he’s an unusual figure,” Gellman told Taubman, who had asked him what Snowden was like. He said the 31-year-old former systems administrator for the CIA did something most Americans would not: He gave up his personal freedom and changed the course of his life to make public the government surveillance programs that he believes are a danger to the American people.

“He described himself to me once as an indoor cat,” Gellman said. “He lives in a virtual world; there’s not a whole lot of difference for Snowden whether he’s living in Moscow or Hawaii – he’s is what I would call a net native. He has an ascetic personality; he doesn’t have or want very much stuff.”

Gellman added: “He is sort of Zen-like in his confidence that he has done the right thing.”

***

The Security Conundrum series is co-sponsored by CISAC, Hoover, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government and the Stanford Law School.

Other nationally prominent speakers will include Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

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National Security Agency Director Admiral Michael Rogers told a Stanford University audience during a rare visit to Silicon Valley that his greatest concern today is that the nation is not yet prepared to defend against a major cyber terrorist attack.

He said the growing rift among the signals intelligence agency, tech companies and civil liberties organizations over the shifting boundaries of privacy rights and secret surveillance is weakening the nation’s resolve.

“We have yet to be able to come to a broad policy and legal consensus about how we deal with some of the legal issues in cyber now,” said Rogers, who took over the leadership of the embattled intelligence agency in April.

The admiral, wearing military dress, spoke to some 300 Stanford students, faculty and tech executives in an event sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Hoover Institution.

Watch the Rogers talk in this video:

 

His wide-ranging talk on Monday – in which he appealed to Stanford students to consider a career at the intelligence agency – came on the eve of a hearing by a federal appeals court investigating whether the NSA’s surveillance program violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches. The Justice Department argues that collecting phone data is of overriding importance to national security.

The NSA, whose mission is to prevent foreign adversaries from getting their hands on classified national security data, has come under fire since NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed last year the extent of the government’s electronic surveillance programs. The former CIA system administrator leaked documents to journalists that revealed global surveillance programs with the cooperation of some telecommunications companies and European governments.

One of those journalists was Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, who received dozens of top-secret documents from Snowden when he traveled to Moscow to meet him. Gellman, who shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his reporting on the Snowden materials and the NSA, will address a Stanford audience on Nov. 17th as part of the university’s “Security Conundrum” lecture series.

Rogers indicated that until a consensus is reached on government surveillance, the United Sates is vulnerable to attack.

“Is it going to take a crisis to wake us up and say, `Man, how did we get here?’” he asked. “I don’t want to be at the end of another 9/11 commission asking how we got here.”

Rogers said the government is backing a bill known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which would allow tech firms and the U.S. government to share cyber threats captured through Internet data. The bill was introduced to the Senate in July but has not yet been voted on by the full Senate. Opponents of the bill say it would only give the NSA enhanced spying powers.

 

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Rogers called the proposed legislation critical. “Without it, cyber becomes a huge cost for us as a nation.”

Rogers said he knows Americans’ trust in their government is dismal.

“We have a fairly limited faith in Washington and there is incredible frustration over the mechanisms of our government, whether it be the legal framework, the courts, the Congress,” he said. “It’s hard to achieve a political consensus when we’re losing faith in many of the mechanisms.”

And still, he called on Stanford students – namely the engineering and computer science majors who were in the audience – to come work for him. While acknowledging that the NSA could not match the salaries of Google, Yahoo and Facebook, he said they could do something worthwhile for their nation.

“If we’re going to make this about money – we don’t stand a chance,” Rogers said.

But, he added, “We’ll give you an opportunity to dedicate yourself to something that is bigger than you: service to the nation.”

Rogers said young recruits would be given great responsibility at an early stage in their careers. And, they’d get to play real-world spy games. “We’re going to give you the opportunity to do stuff you can’t legally do anywhere else,” he said.

Not all students in the audience were ready to sign up.

Photo by Rod Searcey

Thu-an Pham, a sophomore who has yet to declare her major, said after listening to the talk that she’s concerned that NSA surveillance is curbing innovation.

"I'm worried about the impact of surveillance on the culture of innovation,” she said. “Glenn Greenwald gave a recent TED Talk on the importance of privacy. He showed that people alter their behavior to conform to norms and expectations if they suspect they are under surveillance, which stifles individuality and free-thinking.”

Pham also said she’s concerned about the possibility of American officials “outsourcing illegal tasks to other governments.”

The National Journal reported last week that the NSA has given broad access to British intelligence to Americans’ telephone calls and Internet traffic, leading civil liberties activists to accuse the agency of trying to circumvent the Fourth Amendment.

Amy Zegart, CISAC’s co-director and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, moderated the one-hour talk and Q&A in Encina Hall.  

Zegart, an intelligence expert, noted tech firms are tightening encryption standards to prevent government spying on their customers.

Google and Yahoo are working on tools to encrypt their email systems and Apple and Google just announced its mobile operating systems would eventually be encrypted by default. Government officials have warned that the tech firms could be aiding criminals and terrorists with these tougher encryption standards; FBI Director James Comey suggested Silicon Valley build encryption with a backdoor for the U.S. government to spy on potential terrorists.

“Industry is very concerned about evidence of the NSA undermining encryption standards. If the NSA were to find a way through encryption standards, how do you weigh the right thing to do?” Zegart asked.

“Let there be no doubt that a fundamentally strong Internet is in the best interest of the nation,” Rogers replied. “When you find vulnerabilities, we are going to share them; the default mechanism is that we’re going to share the vulnerabilities.”

 

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CISAC Affiliate Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, asked Rogers to answer to disclosures by Snowden that the NSA secretly broke into communications on Yahoo and Google servers overseas.

“We do not use any foreign partners as a vehicle to overcome and bypass U.S. law,” Rogers replied. “When we partner with our Five Eyes teammates, we remind them that we have specific requirements that we must meet.”

The Five Eyes refers to an intelligence alliance of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand to share signals intelligence.

Rogers conceded the Department of Defense no longer drives technical innovation, so the government will have to increasingly rely on the brainpower of Silicon Valley. He pledged to visit every six months and build partnerships with tech firms.

But he emphasized that national security could not be left to the technologists.

“It is unrealistic to expect the private sector to withstand the actions of nation-states,” Rogers said. “I think it is also unrealistic to expect the government to deal with this all by itself. We have got to create those partnerships that enable us to actually share information and insight in a real-time basis.”

Former CISAC Honors Student Joshua Alvarez contributed to this story.

 

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Watch the live-streaming of the conference: "Intelligence Reform and Counterterrorism After a Decade: Are We Smarter and Safer?"

FSI's Tom Fingar will be a panelist and the keynote address will be given by James Clapper, director of national intelligence.

The conference is being held at the University of Texas at Austin's and sponsored by the Clements Center.

The panel can be watched live on CISAC's Facebook Page at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 16.

 

 

 


 
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The heated debate over the line between liberty and national security took center stage as Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, defended government surveillance programs at Stanford’s launch this week of “The Security Conundrum” speaker series.

If such surveillance methods were further restricted, “that smaller box, in my professional judgment, would make the job of the NSA harder and would probably make you less safe,” Hayden told a packed audience at the event co-sponsored in part by the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Hayden admitted to being “prickly” as he discussed privacy concerns over NSA’s collection and storage of phone and email metadata covering billions of calls and messages by American citizens. The surveillance programs, which were exposed last year by leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden, were only used after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, given “the totality of the circumstances,” Hayden explained.

Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. He then led the CIA from 2006 to 2009.

 

The metadata collection “is something we would have never done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10. But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11,” he said. “No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No, it was a logical response to the needs of the moment.”

Amy Zegart, CISAC’s co-director and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, led the conversation with the four-star general. She pointed out that a majority of Americans distrusts the NSA and believes the agency is lying.

Hayden stressed that the phone records were similar to billing statements – detailing who made the calls and when. “There is no content. It is not electronic surveillance. Not at all.”

 

zegart hayden CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart leaders a talk with former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden at the inaugural "Security Conundrum" speakers series on Oct. 8, 2014.

 

Though he understands why the operation is “theoretically frightening,” in reality, it’s designed to aid in the capture of terrorists within the United States, Hayden said.

“To listen to the content of the calls would violate the laws of the United States. It would violate the laws of physics,” he said. He challenged if anyone could offer “concrete evidence” of harm stemming from the phone data collection.

In defining the right to privacy, Hayden cited his philosophy behind the balancing act between security and liberty.

“Privacy is the line we continually negotiate for ourselves as unique creatures of God and as social animals,” he said. “There are some things that the community has the right to know – and there are other things that they clearly do not have the right to know.”

The debate is over where that line is drawn, between “what is mine” and “what is owed the collective,” he said.

Hayden noted that the phone and email metadata collection programs are only a small part of the larger issues the nation faces as it deals with increasingly adept enemies and the surveillance abilities of other nations.

 

“I’m just simply saying – who knows more about you? One of the least of your worries is the government,” he said, half-jokingly. He noted that Google knows more about Americans than does the U.S. government, and the Silicon Valley company uses that data for commercial purposes.

Addressing how tech companies are becoming more reluctant to cooperate with government requests for email communication data, Hayden said he didn’t have an answer about how to address the relationship.

There is a call for transparency of what the government is doing, but Hayden said “translucency” might be the better option, so as to not reveal all that the U.S. does for foreign intelligence.

“This is an enterprise that’s based on absolute secrecy,” he said of the NSA.

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“We have to give American people enough information to be at least tolerant, if not supportive, of what the American government is doing.”

But to achieve that, “it’s not transparency,” he said. “We actually have to be translucent … where you have the glass … and you get the broad patterns of movemen

The danger of not being able to target emails, Hayden said, would be that emails become a safe haven for enemies. “If we don’t’ do it, if you’re not going to let us do this stuff … over the long term, it puts your liberty at risk because bad stuff will happen.”

“The Security Conundrum” speaker series looks behind and beyond the headlines, examining the history and implementation of the NSA operations, the legal questions generated by them, the media’s role in revealing them, and the responsibility of Congress to oversee them.

Each guest speaker, in conversation with Stanford scholars, will probe the problems from different vantage points to explain the political, legal and technological contours of the NSA actions, as well as outline ways to preserve the nation’s security without sacrificing our freedoms.

On Nov. 17, journalist Barton Gellman will be the featured speaker. He is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on the 9/11 attacks and has led the Washington Post's coverage of the NSA. On April 10, Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, will take the stage as the speaker on April 10.

Along with FSI and CISAC, the series is also co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government, and the Stanford Law School.

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Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will join Stanford this academic year as a lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Carter, who has a PhD in theoretical physics, served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and is well known in academic and technology circles. 

"I am honored to join the remarkable team at Stanford, one of the country's top universities and a key center for technological and business innovation,” Carter said. “The regional context of Silicon Valley was also an important attraction for me: the creative – even unorthodox – approaches to solving challenges are a model for both the private and public sectors. All that combined with a motivated faculty and a dynamic student population made Stanford a great opportunity. And as a scientist, I was always encouraged as a student to use my knowledge for the public good, and I hope to inspire the same thinking in students here.”

At FSI, Carter will be the Payne Distinguished Visitor and will be responsible for delivering several lectures. He will also deliver the annual Drell Lecture, which is sponsored by FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

"Ash will bring to Stanford incomparable experience handling some of the most complex security issues facing the United States and the world,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “We are fortunate to have him at FSI, and know that he will make great contributions to the Institute's research and teaching missions."

"It is a true honor to have Secretary Carter join the Hoover Institution as a distinguished visiting fellow,” said Hoover Director John Raisian. “An expert on a broad range of foreign policy and defense matters, Ash brings a unique and worldly perspective, one that is in keeping with our mission statement of promoting ideas that define a free society. My colleagues and I look forward to having him join the fellowship."

Carter stepped down from his post at the Pentagon late last year after serving two years as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. As the agency’s second-ranking civilian, he oversaw a $600 billion budget and 2.4 million uniformed and civilian personnel. From 2009 to 2011 Carter was the Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

“Ash Carter is an extraordinary scholar statesman who thinks deeply, probes broadly, and transforms the organizations he leads,” said Amy Zegart, CISAC’s co-director. “We are thrilled to have him join the CISAC community.”

Carter joined the Defense Department from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was a professor and chair of the International Relations, Science, and Security faculty.

Carter’s connection with the technology business dates to his previous position as a senior partner at Global Technology Partners, where he advised major investment firms on technology and defense. He is currently working with several companies in Silicon Valley.

Carter earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history from Yale in 1976, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. He was a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford in 1979.

He was a physics instructor at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and M.I.T., and an experimental research associate at Brookhaven and Fermilab National Laboratories. From 1993 to 1996, Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, responsible for policy regarding the former Soviet states, strategic affairs, and nuclear weapons policy.

Carter recently joined the Markle Foundation to help lead the "Economic Future Initiative" to develop groundbreaking ideas for empowering Americans in today’s networked economic landscape.

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Clifton B. Parker
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A new Stanford speaker series, "The Security Conundrum," explores how America can strike the right balance between security and liberty in a dangerous world. Nationally prominent speakers will engage in candid conversations on thought-provoking topics and issues. 

In an age of terrorism and technology, fundamental questions have arisen about how a democratic society like the United States can find the right balance between security and liberty.

That's the puzzle behind a new Stanford speaker series, "The Security Conundrum," which kicks off at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 8 with Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA.

The event, "Inside the NSA," is free and open to the public. It will be held at the CEMEX Auditorium, 641 Knight Way on the Stanford campus.

As part of the speaker series during the academic year, other nationally prominent experts will visit Stanford, where they will dive deep into conversations with campus experts.

On Nov. 17, journalist Barton Gellman will be the featured speaker. He is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on the 9/11 attacks and has led the Washington Post's coverage of the NSA. On April 10, Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, will take the stage as the speaker. Also, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein has agreed to participate, though the date for her appearance has not yet been scheduled.

Hayden on the rise of NSA surveillance

In conversation with Stanford scholar Amy Zegart, Hayden will provide an insider's account about the origins and development of the NSA programs. After the 9/11 attacks, at the request of the White House, Hayden intensified and expanded NSA wiretapping operations of various communications between Americans and terrorist suspects abroad in hopes of detecting and preventing another terrorist attack.

Hayden was the first principal deputy director of national intelligence (2005-2006) and director of the National Security Agency (1999-2005). He is a retired U.S. Air Force four-star general and is now a principal of the Chertoff Group.

Zegart, co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said, "There is no better place to engage in this kind of multifaceted, open inquiry than a university."

She noted that there is "no better university" to explore such an issue than Stanford – with its home in Silicon Valley and faculty involved in national security issues. She described the institution as a "trusted convener on issues of national importance."

Zegart said that after the NSA's widespread efforts at mass surveillance were revealed last year, she and CISAC Consulting Professor Philip Taubman envisioned a campus conversation examining the relationship between secrecy, security and liberty in the digital age.

"These are thorny and complex questions with wide-ranging and often strongly held views," she added.

"The Security Conundrum" is co-sponsored by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Hoover Institution, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government and Stanford Law School.

The NSA and Silicon Valley

Each talk, Zegart said, will focus on a different issue and include a different expert. The idea is to go beyond the headlines to examine in depth NSA operations, legal issues, the media's role and the responsibility of Congress in overseeing intelligence gathering. Another topic is NSA's uneasy and evolving relationship with Silicon Valley.

The U.S. government's initial efforts in data collection – involving some Silicon Valley companies – were executed without a court order and after being revealed by the New York Times were subsequently placed under judicial review.

Over time, the NSA's efforts grew into the multidimensional programs exposed by Edward Snowden, including the collection and storage of phone and email metadata covering billions of calls and messages between American citizens.

Zegart said, "We designed 'The Security Conundrum' to be a speaker series rather than a one-off event so that each session could provide a deeper dive into one perspective at a time. I hope that each speaker in the series gets people talking and thinking about perspectives they might not have considered before."

 

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