Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall remembers how members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They clasped one another’s hands and spontaneously broke out singing, “God Bless America.”

It was a moving moment of patriotic bipartisanship. “It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor,” he recalled, and politics were momentarily subsumed by love of nation.

Then it was time to investigate and bring those responsible to justice.

“For many of us who were policymakers, it was time to take a crash course in understanding the tools of terrorism, trying to penetrate who al-Qaida was, who was this figure, Osama bin Laden – and then how do we respond?”

But the government went into overdrive, the Colorado Democrat believed, and put civil liberties at risk. He recalled other decisions in American history – such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II – that were made in panic and secrecy.  

“It became clear to me that bin Laden’s motive was to create greater suspicion in the world, to incent us to build higher and higher walls,” he told a sold-out crowd at CEMEX Auditorium on Thursday night. His talk was part of Stanford “Security Conundrum” lecture series co-sponsored by CISAC, the Hoover Institution, the Law School, Stanford in Government and Continuing Studies.

“And in an interesting way, it led me to look at civil liberties and civil rights, which are the biggest, baddest weapons that we have,” he said in conversation with Philip Taubman, a CISAC consulting professor and a former reporter at The New York Times.

Taubman is one of the organizers of the special series has brought together nationally prominent experts this academic year to explore the critical issues raised by the National Security Agency's activities, including their impact on security, privacy and civil liberties.

On April 10, the speaker will be Judge Reggie Barnett Walton, former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will close the series before the end of the academic year.

Udall told the audience that in the powerful wake of fear that swept the nation following the 9/11 attacks, the House was presented with the Patriot Act “to strengthen and broaden our capacity to surveil those who might do us harm.”

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Udall was a congressman from 1999 to 2009 and then senator from 2009 until losing his seat in the mid-term elections last year. He had been a one-term congressman when the Bush administration put the Patriot Act to a vote on Oct. 24, 2001.

He was one of only 66 House members to vote against the act. It would then also pass through the Senate the following day.

Udall called his no-vote an unpopular one and a lonely period of his political life. But he believed the Act had been hastily drafted without due process and that some of the law’s provisions could lead to violations of privacy and freedoms.

“I was very conscious of what Ben Franklin famously said. He said that a society that trades essential liberties for short-term security deserves neither,” Udall said. “And I believed that we were strong enough to stand behind the civil liberties included in the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment – including the explicit right to privacy – and that we would outlast these adversaries that were in front of us by hewing to those principles, not abandoning those principles.”

Udall also voted against the Obama administration’s four-year extension of three key provision of the act in 2011, which included roving wiretaps, searches of business records and conducting surveillance of those suspected of terrorist-related activities.

He would then gain notoriety for his vocal opposition to NSA surveillance programs in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures of June 2013. He became one of the staunchest critics of the U.S. spy agency for conducting massive, warrantless data grabs on millions of Americans without their knowledge.

Udall said the NSA gathers more than 700 million data sets from phone calls each day.

“I was told, don’t worry Mark, this is metadata. We just collect it; we don’t do anything with it,” Udall said. “But I realized that it wasn’t just metadata, that it was how that metadata was being used and the fact that it was a secret program and under a secret interpretation of the law.”

Udall said the metadata can be manipulated for form a pattern of an individual’s behavior, of his religious and political beliefs, his medical issues, his likes and dislikes.

“We haven’t done anything with this data and that’s all well and good,” he said. “But history shows us that the government will overreach, particularly when it operates in secret. The Fourth Amendment was put in place for a reason.”

He also worries the metadata program has undercut the trust in the intelligence community.

“I want to be clear: We need to gather intelligence,” he said. “There are forces at play in the world that would do us great harm. But again, we ought to gather that intelligence in ways that fit with what the public understands.”

Udall called on the audience to push for transparency reforms to the FISA court – which oversees requests by the NSA and FBI to issue surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents. From 1999 to 2012, the court has granted nearly 34,000 warrants; only 12 have been denied.

Udall believes that privacy, which is implicit in the Bill of Rights, is essential to all other American freedoms that are protected by law.

“This has long-term and important ramifications about how we look at ourselves as Americans,” he said. “We all need to be in the mix; we all need to be having these discussions to be ever-vigilant and protect these fundamental freedoms.”

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall gained notoriety for his vocal opposition to National Security Agency surveillance programs in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures of June 2013.

Before losing his seat in the mid-term elections last year, the senior senator from Colorado had become one of the staunchest critics of the U.S. spy agency for conducting massive, warrantless data grabs on millions of Americans without their knowledge.

Even before the Snowden leaks, Udall had warned on the Senate floor in 2011 that the Patriot Act was being interpreted in a way to allow domestic surveillance activities that many members of Congress and the American public do not understand.

"Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out," he told fellow senators before he introduced amendments to the Patriot Act that would have secured tougher privacy mechanisms. The act was renewed without the amendments.

Udall – who served on the Senate's Intelligence and Armed Services committees – will be in conversation with Center for International Security and Cooperation Co-Director Amy Zegart Thursday, April 2, at 7:30 p.m. in CEMEX Auditorium as part of Stanford's Security Conundrum lecture series. The event is open to the public but an RSVP is required by 5 p.m. April 1.

The special series has brought together nationally prominent experts this academic year to explore the critical issues raised by the NSA's activities, including their impact on security, privacy and civil liberties. The series ends April 10 with a public conversation with Judge Reggie Barnett Walton, former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 empowered the FISA court to oversee government requests for surveillance of foreign intelligence agencies. During its existence, the court has granted more than 30,000 warrants; it has denied only 11.

Walton, in conversation with Stanford Law School Professor Jenny Martinez, will explain the role that the secretive institution attempts to play in maintaining the balance between civil liberties and national security.

"We're delighted to end the Security Conundrum series with a view from Congress and the courts," said Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "Holding serious campus-wide conversations about issues of national importance is an essential part of the Stanford experience."

Zegart said CISAC and Hoover would conduct a similar series on international cybersecurity challenges in the coming academic year.

Udall, the third speaker in the series, also advocated for the declassification of the Senate Intelligence Committee's study on the CIA's enhanced interrogation program. The post-9/11 program allowed the government to ship suspected terrorists to secret overseas prisons and subject them to waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA who has defended the government surveillance programs, kicked off the Security Conundrum series in October. In that talk, he said the metadata collection "is something we would never have done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10. But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11. No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No – it as a logical response to the needs of the moment."

The second speaker in the series, journalist Barton Gellman, gave a detailed account of his relationship with former NSA contractor Snowden and how he worked with him to reveal the details of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance programs.

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

The PRISM program allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from the tech companies to a wide range of digital information, including audio, video chats, photographs, emails and stored data, that enables analysts to track foreign targets. The program does not require individual warrants, but instead operates under the broad authorization of the FISA court.

"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 the people needed to know about."

Julie Cordua, executive director of Thorn, a non-profit organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, spoke passionately on the topic child exploitation and sexual abuse imagery for the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series U.S Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights on February 4, 2015.

Cordua addressed the Stanford audience about the importance of technology for acting as the “digital defenders of children." She provided a chilling account of child sexual exploitation, first describing the problem and then going on to challenge preconceived notions about it. For example, she highlighted that in order to tackle the issue, it must first be understood that it concerns a highly vulnerable population; most child victims of sexual exploitation come from extremely abusive backgrounds and many have been sexually abused by one or more parents.

Cordua emphasized that technology innovations have contributed to a proliferation of child exploitation and sexual abuse imagery through the use of encrypted networks that make it extremely difficult to hunt down perpetrators and find victims. Cordua feels that while technology is intensifying the problem, technology is also the solution.  Examples she gave were the development of algorithms that aim to track perpetrators and their victims and advertisements that encourage pedophiles to seek help.

Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, queried Cordua on Thorn’s relationship with the government and private sector, as well as on Thorn’s approach for testing the efficacy of their programs. Cordua responded that Thorn does not apply for government funds so as to maintain independence over their projects but that they actively cultivate strong relationships with politicians and law enforcers. In relation to evaluation metrics, Cordua acknowledged that metrics are especially difficult in such a cryptic field as it is nearly impossible to know what numbers they are dealing with from the onset. Questions from the audience included effective strategies for changing the conversation of pedophilia in the public sphere, the emotional stamina required for pursuing such work, and strategies for connecting with and providing a safe platform for victims of child sexual exploitation.

Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights

The United States has thrust itself and the world into the era of cyber warfare, Kim Zetter, an award-winning cybersecurity journalist for WIRED magazine, told a Stanford audience. Zetter discussed her book “Countdown to Zero Day,” which details the discovery and unraveling of Stuxnet, the world’s first cyber weapon. 

Stuxnet was the name given to a highly complex digital malware that targeted, and physically damaged, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program from 2007 until its cover was blown in 2010 by computer security researchers. The malware targeted the computer systems controlling physical infrastructure such as centrifuges and gas valves.

Reports following its discovery attributed the creation and deployment of Stuxnet to the United States and Israel. The New York Times quoted anonymous U.S. officials claiming responsibility for Stuxnet. 

Zetter began reporting on the cyber weapon in 2010.

“When the first news came out, I didn’t think much of it,” Zetter told a CISAC seminar on Monday. The title of her book refers to a “zero-day attack," which exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer application or operating system.

“Watching the Symantec researchers unravel Stuxnet, I knew what fascinated me was the process and brilliance of the researchers. The detective story is what pulled me in.” 

Zetter’s book follows computer security researchers from around the world as they discover and disassemble Stuxnet over the course of months, much longer than any time spent on typical malware. The realization that Stuxnet was the world’s first cyber weapon sent shock waves throughout the tech community, yet did not create as much of a stir in mainstream society. 

“It’s funny because a lot of people still don’t know Stuxnet or haven’t even heard of it,” Zetter said. “The recent vandalization of Sony seems to have finally gotten people’s attention. It was not a case of true cyber warefare, but I'm glad that my book came out right before it happened because its perception as a nation-state attack has led to interest in all nation-state attacks, including Stuxnet. The Snowden leaks also put cyber warfare on the map.” 

“Countdown to Zero” also places Stuxnet in political context. The first version of Stuxnet was built and unleashed by the Bush administration in 2007, according to Zetter. Iran accelerated its enrichment process in 2008, leading to fears it would have enough uranium to build a bomb by 2010. President Barack Obama inherited the program; he not only continued it,but accelerated it. Another, more aggressive version of Stuxnet was unleashed in June 2009 and again in 2010. Obama gave the order to unleash Stuxnet while publicly demanding Iran to open itself up to negotiations. 

The effectiveness of the world’s first cyber weapon remains a subject of debate. The most optimistic assessment of Stuxnet is that it delayed and slowed Iran’s uranium development enough to dissuade Israel from unilaterally striking the country, and it afforded time for intelligence and diplomatic efforts. Stuxnet contributed to dissension and frustration among the upper ranks of Iran’s government (the head of Iran’s nuclear program was replaced) and bought time for harsh economic sanctions to impact the Iranian public.

“Stuxnet actually had very little effect on Iran’s nuclear program,” said Zetter. “It was premature, it could have had a much bigger effect had the attackers waited.” Iran still made a net gain in their uranium stockpile while being attacked and they are updating their centrifuges, which would make Stuxnet obsolete.

The more unsettling parts of Zetter’s book catalog security vulnerabilities in America’s public infrastructure, which could easily be victim to a Stuxnet-style attack, and consider the implications of the era Stuxnet heralded. For example, in 2001 hackers attacked California ISO, a nonprofit corporation that manages the transmission system for moving electricity throughout most of California. More recently, Zetter writes, in 2011 a security research team “penetrated the remote-access system for a Southern California water plant and was able to take control of equipment the facility used for adding chemicals to drinking water.”

The Obama administration has publicly announced that shoring up infrastructure security is a top priority. Zetter finds this ironic, because unleashing Stuxnet has opened the U.S. up to attacks using the same malware.

“When you launch a cyber weapon, you don’t just send the weapon to your enemies, you send the intellectual property that created it and the ability to launch the weapon back against you,” writes Zetter. “Marcus Ranum, one of the early innovators of the computer firewall, called Stuxnet ‘a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house.’”

More broadly, Stuxnet heralded an era of cyber warfare that could prove to be more destructive than the nuclear era. For Zetter there is also irony to the use of cyber weapons to combat nuclear weapons. She quotes Kennette Benedict, the executive director of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” pointing out, “that the first acknowledged military use of cyber warfare is ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. A new age of mass destruction will begin in an effort to close a chapter from the first age of mass destruction.” 

Zetter has similar fears.

“The U.S. lost the moral high ground from where it could tell other countries to not use digital weapons to resolve disputes,” Zetter said. “No one has been killed by a cyber attack, but I think it’s only a matter of time.”

Joshua Alvarez was a 2012 CISAC Honors Student. 

Understanding the nature of violent conflict in the world's most dangerous flashpoints may help find ways to peace and stability, according to a Stanford expert.

Once a soldier, now a scholar, Joe Felter knows better than most the intrinsic meaning of war and conflict – he served on the front lines in the U.S. Special Forces in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines.

Today, the senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperationand research fellow at the Hoover Institution is on a different kind of mission: building knowledge on the subject of politically motivated conflict.

For example, how are the most casualties suffered and under what conditions? Are there patterns to why rebels are surrendering? And how do armed battles affect development and education in local communities?

Answers to these and other questions are found in the Empirical Studies of Conflict project database, which is led by Felter and Jacob Shapiro, his former Stanford political science classmate, now a professor at Princeton University. The effort focuses on insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. Launched last year, it currently covers the Philippines, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Mexico, the Israeli-occupied territories, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews.

Since 2009, Felter has collaborated with colleagues at Princeton, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions in developing the database. Today, they are advising policymakers and military leaders on how best to curb conflict, reduce civilian casualties and promote prosperity. Felter and his colleagues have outlined some of their work in this Foreign Affairs article published in January 2015.

Felter's research on Filipino insurgencies, for instance, has produced significant results. The senior officials there have invited him to brief their military on battlefield trends and counterinsurgency strategy, as Felter and his colleagues have interviewed thousands of combatants as part of the project.

What do they learn about the insurgent mindset? One Islamic militant chief talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men's belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side. Others included a Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money to help the poor and a young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.

Pathways to peace

In the case of the Philippines, Felter had access to more than 100,000 individual reports of conflict episodes dating back to 1975 and more than 13,000 interview transcripts from rebels who were captured or had surrendered over the last 30 years. That information was coded in detail and compiled as part of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project database. The Philippines is home to some of the most protracted Muslim separatist and communist insurgencies in the world, and that is precisely why the government is interested in learning how to thwart it.

L.A. Cicero

Crystal Lee, a Stanford senior and history major, has been Joe Felter’s research assistant since her freshman year.

"For me, it's kind of validating all the thousands and thousands of hours that went into all our coding," said Felter, adding that the information will help the Philippines government find ways to ease the costs and human suffering in the conflicts it faces.

It has been a transformational journey for Felter, who retired in 2012 from the U.S. Army as a colonel following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer with missions and deployments across Asia, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010-11, he commanded the International Security and Assistance Force Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan.

"I spent a long time in the military deployed to environments where you could appreciate that what you were doing was having an impact," Felter said.

In higher education now, his vantage point is different from what it was on the front lines. Today, both perspective and policy are two of his main goals.

"Since I transitioned to academia, I haven't lost my commitment to trying to help practitioners in the field to better understand conflict – by using data," Felter said.

Stanford senior Crystal Lee, a history major, has been working with Felter as a research assistant since her freshman year, helping him code and compile the datasets.

"It's been really interesting for me to think about the implications that this type of data analysis has on governments and broader policy work," said Lee, who also has analyzed and reconstructed hundreds of interviews with former rebels for Felter's upcoming book.

She said that a romantic notion exists in Silicon Valley that if one uses a huge database, one can wave a magic wand and believe that so-called "big data" will solve everything. "But it's a really messy field and we've had to use best practices to make sense of the increasingly complicated picture of counterinsurgency and terrorism," she said.

Study at the local level

Felter pointed out that to truly comprehend the nature of counterinsurgency in places like the Philippines, Iraq or Afghanistan, one must realize that its roots are in local communities.

"You need to study it at the local level to really understand it," Felter said. "And the Philippines is like a petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time."

The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012 to make sure it's accurate and cleaned of any potentially sensitive details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter's ongoing book projects and dozens of working papers and journal articles.

Roots of research

A Stanford alum, Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his doctoral dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency.

John Tronco

Stanford scholar Joe Felter with members of the First Scout Ranger Regiment, Philippine Army. His research in the Philippines helps inform the Empirical Studies of Conflict database.

After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisers – Stanford political science Professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.

"This comprehensive conflict dataset is going to be the holy grail of micro-level conflict data," Felter said. "It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before."

The network is expanding. A dozen young scholars who were supported by funding for the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project as postdoctoral fellows have now been placed in tenure-track positions at universities.

"What's unique about ESOC is that we're trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we've studied," said Jake Shapiro, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and the project's co-director.

On Iraq, for example, the website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources and other types of research on Iraq, he said.

Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to the database for help. Insurgencies cost human lives and dollars, enough so that the United States and the international community are now focused on rebuilding social and political orders in those troubled countries.

As Felter put it, "We are devoted to learning from all those experiences and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all live more peacefully and safely in the future."

Research highlights

The Empirical Studies of Conflict project includes the following scholarly advances:

• Research on insurgent compensation paid during the U.S. Iraq conflict shows that pay was not based on risk factors.
• Findings show rebel violence will decrease when projects are secure and valued by community members and when implementation is conditional on the behavior of non-combatants.
• A journal article describes the preference for "certainty" in the relationship between violence and economic risk in wartime Afghanistan.

Media Contact

Beth Duff-Brown, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488,bethduff@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu