So, we have been looking at the approach of partial equilibrium approximation and as a template set of equations or reactions I am sorry we could let us let us look at about three forward and reverse reaction pairs leading up to a fourth reaction which we deliberately take as a term molecular reaction so that it is slow the idea being that if you now have these bimolecular reactions happening relatively faster and they are forward and reverse reaction pairs then we can assume that because they are happening quite fast they could stay in equilibrium with each other which means their respective forward and reverse reaction rates would match and therefore the ratio of the rate constants of the forward and reverse reactions in each case would turn out to be the equilibrium constant based on pressure right and so we can write these equilibrium equations for each of those reactions and therefore we now are rewriting these and numbering them is 1, 2, 3 so what is going on with this here is here we are saying we recognize we recognize a2 b2 and a2b as stable species and ab and ab as intermediates right we are interested in we are interested in d over dt of concentration of a2b that is the final product whose rate of production we are interested in right now looking at the fourth reaction where this is being produced we could write this as concentration of a times concentration of I am sorry equals kf4 times concentration of a times concentration of ab times concentration of m right but we need to know what these are the concentration of a and concentration of ab which are intermediates okay in terms of concentrations of the stable species in the system namely a2b2 and a2b if we were to suppose that we do not have all these things right there is all too much detail all I want to think about is a2 plus b2 gives you a2b or maybe a2 plus half b2 gives a2b right I would I would like to write the rate equation as dc a2b divided by dt equal to k times small k times concentration of a2 times concentration of b2 to the half but there the powers that we are looking at one and half should really be orders and not molecularities because that is like the global reaction and we are not sure that we can actually use these stoichiometric coefficients in the global reaction for the orders right that needs to be empirically found and that is what we are trying to do with the detail reaction and here the detail reactions tell us that this is actually in terms of the intermediates which we do not want to deal with we want to now express the concentrations of the intermediates in terms of the concentrations of these stable species when we say stable species we mean both reactants and products because it is possible that the concentrations of these intermediates depend on the concentrations of products stable products as well as concentrations of stable reactants. So we shouldn't distinguish between products and reactants of at the stable level we should simply say stable species right so how do we find these is how is why we write out these three equilibrium equations and you see what happens here the intermediates are a b and a b and we have three equations so we strictly speaking if assuming that we are we are okay with dealing with a2 b2 and a b a2 b right is it possible for us to write a b and a b in terms of the stable concentrations right that is what we want to do having said that we are interested only in these two we are not really interested in concentration of b because that is not part of the final answer so is it possible for us to eliminate concentration of b in these equations and look for only expressions for concentrations of a and a b in terms of a2 b2 and a2 b is the rigmarole that we have to go through yeah so eliminating eliminating CB from equations 1 and 2 you can do this so you can now write this with in terms of concentrations of a and b as if you are now looking at only a and b do not worry about a b let it be there and then we have a and did I make a mistake which I might have made a mistake let me just check this a b plus a 2 yeah sure yes I understand what you mean yes you are right okay so you are right so strictly speaking what I need to do is to factor in okay let us do that thanks plus K F3 being produced in the forward reaction C C a b C a2 minus K F key K b3 C a C a2 b C a yeah I was wondering about it myself because it is not so simple it is not strictly speaking so simple you could you could do this but what you would find is this is equal to this because we are assuming equilibrium alright therefore it gets cancelled right so it is always good to go through the details and yeah therefore we are we are stuck with only this right if we if this were not to be cancelled then we understand that this is unknown but this is to be treated as known and this is to be treated as unknown and this is unknown and still we would be requiring concentration of a b and a to be expressed in terms of a 2 b 2 and a a 2 b this is the procedure that we are looking for so if you now eliminate C b from equations 1 and 2 I am sorry here yes that is what I was searching for right so yeah so we now have this so now so you can rearrange these things do not worry about a b showing up which is an unknown right but you try to eliminate C b what you get here is then C a b equal to k p 1 k p 2 C a 2 C b 2 the whole of the half you can work out the mathematics and you will you should we should be able to find that this is the case then using 3 right so we have used 1 and 2 equations let us go to the third equation we should be able to find there is a C a sitting there and a b is something there so we can plug this expression there and so we can find C C a equal to I am just giving the final answer k p 3 k p 1 k p 2 to the half C a 2 to the 3 halves C b 2 to the half divided by C a 2 b therefore right if you now use if you now write this equation as 4 right that means we are primarily interested in this expression because those two terms got cancelled so what happens is in 4 in 4 d C a 2 b divided by dt is equal to you would have a k f 4 coming in and therefore start with a small k f 4 then you have everything else showing up k p 3 k p 2 k p 1 C a 2 squared C b 2 C m that is still there let me just write this in the same line divided by C a to b so that is the answer for you I just worked it out for you so you know you know you are not supposed you should now know how to do these things right so look at what has happened we now got an answer based on the stable species which is a little more surprising than what you would have expected for a global reaction all right which is first of all it is going a square of a 2 so you might argue let me write the global reaction is instead of a 2 plus half b 2 gives a 2 b how might write this as twice a 2 plus b 2 gives twice a 2 b all right but then that would have meant that I need to have a 2 here which I do not okay and then you would be able to say I can put a square here and a power 1 there but the other two are extra that would have that you would have never figured out right unless you went through the details and if you went through the details as it is without the partial equilibrium approximation it would be a lot more horrendous when compared to having these algebraic equations replace your ODE's for the rates of the intermediates right. So so you now have a Cm which is sort of like saying it depends on the container what is the total number of moles that is there in the entire container because as the pressure increases this now goes as the whole thing will now go as p2 ppp to the p to the 3 because this is now going to have a contribution to the pressure this is going to have a corresponding contribution to the pressure and finally all the four of them should gang up and say it is going to go as p p3 right so this acts in bringing that up number on the one hand second what is the a2b showing up in the denominator of something that we went through last class self inhibiting reaction right the more a2b that you produce the less the rate at which you are producing it is what this really means and that is because a2b is actually participating in the reverse reaction as well so more it is getting produced it is also getting depleted all right. So all these things kind of come up in these expressions based on the approximations that we do so let me also give you a simple example which is a little bit more realistic here so example just like how we had the what should I say the hydrogen bromide example for the steady state approximation here let us suppose that we have H2 plus O2 gives and takes with the K1 here K2 for the reverse 2 H OH on the other hand and to H2 plus OH gives K3 H2 O plus H okay so here we find that D over DT of CH2 O equal to K3 CH2 COH and I do not like COH sitting there in this I would like to actually have H2 is already there I would like to express COH in terms of H2 O2 and maybe H2 O that is permissible right that is what I want to do so I use the equilibrium approximation I use the equilibrium approximation and say Kp 2 I should Kp 1 let me use the notation Kp 1, 2 equal to COH2 divided by CH2 CO2 right all right that is equal to K1 divided by K2 all right. Now keep in mind when you write Kp strictly speaking we should be writing POH2 divided by pH2 POH2 okay it just turns out that the molecularity is the same for both the forward and the reverse reaction and therefore the total pressure gets cancelled out and you can write in terms of concentrations directly if the molecularities are not the same for both the sides then you will get into trouble so a more direct thing to do is to probably write Kc instead of Kp but if you are insisting on Kp then there is a conversion between Kp and Kc that we have gone through that is that you need to factor in yeah. So if you now use this then what happens is from here you try to evaluate what your COH is so COH then is Kp 1, 2 CH2 CO2 all to the half is what we have and therefore the CH2O is K3 let us now get rid of Kp 1, 2 use K1 and K2 because they are like given information in the reaction scheme and you can say this is K1 divided by K2 to the half CH2 to the half goes with CH2 there and so it is like CH2 to the 3 halves and CO2 to the half remains so you have a CO2 to the half right so that is the final answer what it means is if you were having this as the reaction scheme like a three-step reaction scheme for production of hydro water right then the partial equilibrium approximation tells you that this is partial equilibrium tells you that the rate of production of water actually depends to three halves the power of CH2 and one half to the power of O2 okay these are now the orders with respect to H2 and O2 respectively together if you now look at the total order right three half plus one half is two so you can easily see that this is like a second order reaction that we are looking at all right but the the division between the fuel and the oxidizer is not equal that is the that is a lesson that we learned from these things all right let us now do some chemical explosions based on what we have learned okay so this is the last topic that we would like to cover under chemical kinetics before we proceed on further with other things in combustion so so let us let us consider the following schematic reaction mechanism 1 x gives you r with reaction rate constant okay 1 2 r gives you alpha r with a rate constant K2 3 r gives you K3 P plus r 4 r goes to S and 5 r K5 goes to X now this is obviously looking a bit strange if it is not looking strange then you must be a genius right what we mean by a schematic reaction mechanism here is this reaction scheme is focusing only on the intermediates that means there are hidden stuff around that are stable on either side which we are not worried about okay why so because you can now clearly see that this is a chain in its initiation step right because this is the birth of an intermediate or is the intermediate that we are looking at or becoming alpha r for alpha greater than 1 means we are now branching more and more okay so this is like some intermediate giving rise to more intermediate right so this is chain branching of course alpha less than 1 would mean chain termination kind of reactions right but they do not they do not really show up like high up in the list okay they are kind of the end and r gives P plus r P is like a stable product like let us say we are interested in this finally okay but then what is what is happening you start with our you have something else and then you also have r so as far as intermediates is concerned it is neutral that means it is a chain propagation yeah so you have a chain chain propagation step in reality you would have a bunch of steps like this okay so each of these kinds of things could be like a bunch it is not just one okay r going to s is schematically representing chain termination at a surface whereas r going to x means chain termination at in the gas phase in the gas phase x is any molecule right so you could have started with any x giving rise to intermediates and r could go back to any x okay so in that sense this is not strictly like a reverse of that because x could be anything yeah but we are we are we are making a distinction on the way the intermediates are getting terminated either at the surface around anywhere or in the gas phase by colliding with other molecules around and disappearing and becoming some stable stable species so note that we make a distinction between termination at the surface at a surface it does at a surface and termination in the gas phase why why would you want to make the distinction how does it matter a termination means the intermediates disappear right how does it matter which way they disappear what are we looking looking at so whenever we were doing things in the past I asked you to keep an eye out on distinctions between unimolecular reactions to bimolecular reactions in a scheme or bimolecular to termolecular reactions in a scheme and so on and the reason was to look at the pressure dependence of the rates of these reactions okay or the differences in the pressure dependence of the rates of these reactions and so as you change the pressure from low pressure to intermediate pressure to high pressure the importance of these different reactions becomes different right. So effectively we were looking at what is it going to be in terms of pressure similarly looking at the termination either at a surface or in the gas phase is going to be dependent upon pressure because a surface termination is relatively independent of pressure a surface is a hard surface it is not going to it is not going to change its packing depending upon the pressure okay whereas a gas phase is going to actually get more and more packed give it with less and less mean free parts for the collision between the molecules as you increase the pressure. So what you would expect is as you increase the pressure the termination via the gas phase is going to be more and more predominant when compared to the termination via the surface okay. So this is this distinction is going to enable us to tell us how things are going to change with pressure right as the reason why we want to make this distinction so there is another way of distinguishing things as far as particularly intermediates is concerned okay. So the term molecular by molecular and so on is for any species it does not have to be intermediates but here we are specifically talking about termination for intermediates in two different parts and they are dependent pressure in different ways okay that is what we want to try to explore okay. So then let us look at how to write the reaction rates for these now I am going to write these things in such a way that we care only about concentrations of the intermediates we will not worry about concentrations of stable species okay they are not showing up in the schematic reaction reaction mechanism anyway okay there are still stable react species around which are which we are not simply bothered about because when we looked at a reaction mechanism before to characterize it as a chain initiation branching or propagation or termination we were primarily looking only at the intermediates okay we just disregard at the presence of these stable species you are always looking for our intermediates being created more of them created than what was being consumed or the same amount is created and we did not even distinguish between the intermediates like it could be OH on one side and H on the other side does not matter they are all very active radicals anyway right so they are going to kind of propagate the reactions if one of them got killed and the other one got produced right so this is the way we were looking at it and of obviously they were reacting with stable things like H2 or O2 and so on which we did not really worry about and these are all there so since they are they are hidden we cannot write real equations exactly depending upon their concentrations so we are going to write equations that are sort of functionally correct but not accurate right so that is what we will end up doing so let us say the first equation so the the rate equations for these these are one let us say we call this omega i for the chain initiation step all we are going to write is dcr over dt because we do not want to be worrying about the fact that it depends on the concentration of x okay we could write k1cx for example okay let me not worry about it okay I am just going to keep this as omega i right second omega let us now call this chain branching so we will call this omega b that is equal to dcr over dt as well for this reaction here this would be written as k2 strictly speaking I should write a-1 k2cr times other things which are hidden right so I since I do not know what those are I am simply going to write this as equal to fb times alpha-1cr alpha is a parameter here parameter fb is like it is going to take care of k2 dot dot dot dot is like concentrations of stable species okay which does not enter the picture so essentially what you are saying is let us let us deal with f rather than case because the f will couch things that are not really important what we what we want to explicitly keep a cr okay and so this is a production step so we will call this as omega p the third step this is dcp over dt this is equal to fpcr okay here the intermediates are neither getting produced nor consumed on the whole but so if you could say that this is this is basically fp is of the order of the same as k3 you do not but you could have something hidden right so we just write f instead of k and for let us call the surface termination reaction rate so we have a negative dcr over dt there and that is fscr we do not know what else is there other than or on the left hand side so we just write fs instead of k4 and similarly let us call this omega g for gas phase termination reaction rate this is again minus dcr over dt equal to fgcr all right okay. So we have explained what the fs are there and I also told you what the why this is a schematic here so the rate of production of the intermediates then the net rate of production of intermediates intermediates dcr over dt from all the reactions equal to omega i plus fv times alpha minus 1cr minus fscr minus fgcr the third reaction did not have a net rate of production of intermediates at all because it is a propagation reaction yeah therefore we have only four reactions that are contributing here two of them where things are produced if alpha is greater than 1 that is if alpha is less than 1 this would mean consumption anyway and obviously here the radicals are getting consumed yeah and keep noting that these things depend on concentration of cr because it is like chain branching or termination but omega i does not depend on concentration of cr because it is starting from things that are pre-existing that is they are not intermediates fine we now apply the steady state approximation right or if you want to be quite precise we should say quasi steady state approximation that means dcr over dt the net rate of production is approximately equal to 0 for bulk of the time when reactions are proceeding right. So this implies we now say that omega i plus fb alpha minus 1cr minus fscr minus fgcr is approximately equal to 0 from which we can try to find out the concentration of the intermediate so this implies cr is equal to omega i divided by fb alpha minus 1 minus fs plus fg okay. So the steady state approximation did this for us you go back and think about what we did what it means is we want to get algebraic equations that govern the concentrations of intermediates right so that we can evaluate the concentrations of the intermediates in terms of the concentrations of the stable species and then plug those expressions in the rate equation for the production of products that is what you are finally interested in right. So what we should then say then we are interested in dcp by dt that is a products it is kind of like this is kind of like life you know we should be interested in the in producing products but we keep going going talking about intermediates like in most of our lives that we just caught and get caught up in intermediates right so let us not lose sight of our goal our goal is actually dcp over dt right fp times cr of course in life money is one of the biggest intermediates that distracts us right yeah where I am losing you because let us admit that by swapping the denominator I do not like negative signs for concentrations right. So we say fs plus fg minus fb times alpha minus 1 happy you need to keep me happy as well do not get negative concentrations you know right your your your advisers are not going to like you maybe when you get them right so you want to you want to have a positive quantity there okay so ffp cr then is fp omega i divided by fs plus fg minus fb times alpha minus 1 okay I pointed out this for you earlier in the context of let us say the hpr reaction or example or I do not remember what but let me do this once again and this this becomes very intuitive for us what is happening in this expression for you is these are this is a this this division I am sorry this difference here is basically telling you the competition between termination and production okay which is being compared with omega i that is the initiation okay. In other words the rate of production of your final products depends on what is the interplay between the rate of production and rate of consumption of the intermediates for a given rate of initiation of the intermediates once you have intermediates initiated and left into the pool then the dynamics of how they are produced further by chain propagation chain branching steps versus chain termination steps okay that ratio is what determines your rate of production of products you see so it is sort of like telling us the entire physics of what is going on right just the expression looking at the expression fine if you did not worry about all that stuff and you now said this is the expression when you look at it what would you worry about again I am trying to kind of ingrain certain traits in you you now look at an expression and the and the moment you have a square root there you should be worried about whether the stuff inside the square root is going to become negative right. So similarly when you see a logarithm logarithmic expression you have to look at whether the argument is going to actually become negative or 0 and so on so these are all like things that got to be wired in your head similarly and though these are like the square roots and logarithms do not happen all the time but ratios do happen most many times right and the moment you see a ratio and you see the denominator you have to start looking at is this denominator going to become 0 right we are always afraid of infinity okay so we have to start looking at when would this denominator ever become 0 yeah so for alpha less than 1 the denominator is always positive right and what is meant by alpha less than 1 when you now have alpha less than 1 I first of all told you that this reaction should not belong in that place there it should be somewhere but below because it is beginning to actually annihilate itself the intermediates are actually consuming themselves right but that is not what we are talking about for the reactions being up there we are now talking about the alpha typically greater than 1 that is what chain branching is all about right. So when you now have alpha greater than 1 okay for alpha greater than 1 then you have a positive quantity here and a positive quantity there and it is possible that they become equal oh we have a problem right so f s plus fg equal to fb times alpha minus 1 implies denominator denominator goes to 0 and dcp over dt goes to infinity right this is what we are talking about as chemical explosion it is basically saying that once you have produced your intermediates okay at whatever finite non-zero rate so long as the intermediates are producing themselves more and more and consuming themselves at the surface or in the gas phase in such a way that the rate of production rate of the production matches the rate of the consumption right you are now going to be continuing to produce products like crazy the rate of production of products is just going to go on and on very high so that means you are going to produce a lot of products so the intermediates are actually playing a sustained role in a continuous production of products at a very infinite level infinite rate right so this is essentially the basis of chemical explosion and then what you are going to do is to say well let me begin to distinguish between fs and fg as we change the pressure okay so at low pressure we now expect that fs should predominate over fg and at high pressure we expect that fg should predominate over fs all right so this is what we are going to be doing as p increases as p increases fs decreases relatively right but fg is not too large right at for low p because you do not you do not have a vigorous gas phase termination at low pressure that is together fs plus fg decreases as p increases okay so you now have a limit you now reach a limit okay so we reach a limit that means we are looking for as you change the pressure how is this going to change relative to this such that at some limit you might equate equate right so we reach a limit where the radical generation just exceeds determination right so let us suppose that we start out with a very very low pressure all right and we now found that from there as you increase the p okay the termination actually comes down in this low pressure range because fg is not very active yet because the pressure does not increase a lot but fg is something very very small at this at this at this pressure so you now actually having a situation where the termination is coming down but the generation is going up and therefore you now reach a point where the generation just exceeds the termination and the moment when you say just that means this is just beginning to equal that so far this was higher this was lower this is now increased so it is getting to this and therefore you now have an explosion limit okay for starting so it is a termination starting from starting from some low p for a given t get you fix the other thermodynamic variable and you get this so this is this is what you would call as a first explosion limit okay and then as you now look at this dynamics we do not care which is higher which is lower all we are looking for is when things match all right so when this keeps on going as you change your pressure if this catches up again then you again have an equality which is bad right so as pressure increases further right fd increases fd increases okay which implies fs plus fd increases okay and here the termination catches up with the generation then this this this is what will lead to the second explosion limit all right we will stop here and pick up from here in the next class.


All right, if I could have your attention, please. Thank you so much for coming. This is a great crowd on a Friday afternoon, the day before the holiday weekend, which is a testament, I think, to Assistant Attorney General Carlin. I'm going to do not much more than turn it over to professors at trade and John Carlin. Again, thanks so much for coming and with no further ado. Thank you, Chris. Thank you all for coming out on a beautiful Friday afternoon for this. The zero thing to say, possibly fitting, is that this is being recorded, not live streamed, but from this moment onward, a record is being preserved and will be sent to the Harvard Law School Library for indexing and also put on the web for everyone else. So be aware of that. So delighted, John, that you're willing to join us today for a chat. I guess, first, let me just say quickly, I'm Jonathan Citrin. I teach internet law here at Harvard Law School. I am also a member of the Board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a member of something called the NSA Advisory Board. So I have been somewhat immersed in some of these issues from what you'd call multiple perspectives.  Is that right? Yes, and it's great to be back on campus. When I was a student here, there was not a keen interest in national security law, nor was it in the 90s an available curriculum or a set of courses. And so I came back here a little while ago. I'd say five years ago or six years and was shocked at the number of courses and at the amount of interest in this field, which really has developed since that time. And when you were here, did you know you wanted to be a prosecutor?  Looking around and seeing some familiar faces. So when I was here, and I think the programs that you have in place now that allow you to pursue an interest in public interest or in federal government work are fantastic. When I was here, they weren't as well developed. And so I was in the first class of what's called the Heyman Fellowship and was very thankful that it arrived just in time for me. And I did know I was interested in going into federal government work and particularly that I was interested in prosecution. When I was a student here, I did the Harvard Defenders Clinic. Show of hands, is anyone doing that here? Now, interesting. Maybe no overlap with national security law. And became very interested there in some of the criminal justice issues. And that was because you were interested in defense work? Or you thought it'd be good to see that angle before going into prosecution? Now I was interested in criminal law, in a criminal justice system, and particularly I knew that I very much wanted to be in a courtroom. And try cases. And I was certain that I'd be going back to New York to do it. It's been around 15 years, and I never made it back to New York. So just give us a quick thumbnail sketch of what you did after graduating then. So after graduating, I went into the Department of Justice through the Honors Program. And Phil Hyman was very helpful at the time. I know he's still teaching here. I just met with him at suggesting, hey, if you want to get into court quickly, and you're interested in these types of issues, you might want to consider the criminal tax division. So I applied to criminal tax, at which point I had not taken tax. So I took that second semester of my third year and joined the criminal tax division. And I went on a series of details. So these are assignments where you're ostensibly on the books of the criminal tax division, but you end up working at other places in the Department of Justice. And I went to the DC US Attorney's Office and prosecuted domestic violence cases, and particularly cases involving children. And then went to Tucson, Arizona, which at that point, they had closed the border down in San Diego. Tucson was a sleepy office. The New York City of that area of Arizona. Well, it forced me to learn to drive. Yeah. And so I hadn't been out to that region before.  And I was the only one who came back. They're still there. Yeah, OK. Just to be clear, it was the question on everyone's mind. Rattle snake.  In fact, one just became a judge. And then returned to the DC area, actually did do a criminal tax case, including trying one in the Boston courthouse. And then went permanently to the DC US Attorney's Office, where I did what are traditionally local crimes, but are through a federal office in DC, including homicides and sex offense and domestic violence related homicides. And then moved to the federal side of the house, did fraud and public corruption cases, defense contractor, fraud, and began specializing in an area of computer hacking and intellectual property crimes. Growth industry, I understand. Yes, apparently so. You can get tenure with it. I've heard. Good for one train only. One train only. No pun intended. So it has a terrible name, too, the CHIP program. But there were no short shorts and the like. And I went from there to the old reference. For those following along on Wikipedia, that was CHIPS with Ponch and John. Yes. And the person who's fault it was was at that point, the US Attorney out in San Francisco, Bob Mueller, who later became the director of FBI, did the first CHIP program. And presumably, knowing him had no idea that there was a television show with that name. But I went from there to Maine Justice to coordinate that program nationally on technology issues. And then, in every step along the way, except the switch to the US Attorney's Office, I'm doing these different things on details. And then I went over to the FBI to be counseled to Bob Mueller when he was director and then later as chief of staff. And from there. So what year would that have been around just so we're straight? 2007. 2007. And I was at the FBI from 2007 to 2011, so four years with him. And his tenure got unexpectedly extended in 2011. And so I left right after he got confirmed to do the extra two years. The statute was fast, and he could do the extra two years. And went to the National Security Division, which did not exist. It's a brand new division. First new litigating division of the department in about 50 years. And it was created in 2006. Got it. Wonderful. So I know you have a few remarks you want to give. So we're going to hear from John. And then John and I are going to talk a little bit. And then we're going to open it up for questions and comments. I've been given to understand that there is a question tool here. Do you want to talk about that? We have masks in the corner. Not exactly, but we do have. You can visit if you like. If you don't, you can still ask a question in the old fashioned way. And I don't know if a hashtag has been established, but we'll let the collectivity decide on that. A final logistical note, is it only me or is it like 90 degrees in here? I thought you were sweating me. No, exactly. We're going to break them. So we're going to, if you see me on my phone, it means we're talking to the authorities to see if this beautifully overbuilt structure, with great thanks to Justice Kagan, can be having some air conditioning. The facilities have improved a little bit since I was here. It doesn't seem fair. For instance, you don't keep public interest in the closet anymore, because the space that was allotted was in the previous, in the 90s. I did have a student, a prospective student, come to me at one point recently who said, OK, I know that Harvard Law School does public interest, but how is it in corporate law? I was like, wow, that is a flip. So times have indeed evolved. All right, I'm going to cede the floor to you for a bit. You can stand at the podium or stay where you are. I'm good here. Go to town. What I thought I'd do is just give an overview of the National Security Division, what it is, how it was created, and what's a top priority now. So as I said, the National Security Division was created in 2006. And it was one of the later 9-11 related reforms. And it came out of a commission called the WMD Commission. You may be wondering what it had to do with weapons of mass destruction. And so are we. But it was a good recommendation, buried in that report. Judge Silverman was one of the chairs and was very familiar with the workings of the Department of Justice. And it was really a common sense reform. And so far as prior to the creation of the division, the terrorist prosecutors reported through one chain in the criminal division. The counterintelligence or counter-espionage prosecutors reported through a different chain. And the intelligence lawyers reported through yet a third chain. And so there were three different chains. And the people responsible for each of those sections had many other responsibilities on their plate at the time. And so the idea was, pre-9-11, there had been a wall. Most of you have heard about where there were certain legal and cultural prohibitions to the sharing of law enforcement information with intelligence agencies and vice versa, intel agencies to law enforcement. And so certain legal reforms were put in place to allow the sharing of that information. And you put this reform more in the context of a cultural reform. The idea is you should have the criminal prosecutors and the intelligence lawyers sitting side by side under one chain reporting to one official who would see this full scope of the activity to ensure that information was shared and that people work together day in and day out on what we sometimes call an all tools approach. And the idea there is that the criminal justice system is a tool that you can use to disrupt the threat. But you should be focused on what the threats are. Who are the threat actors? Who are the terrorists and what do they want to do? Who are the nation state actors and what do they want to do? And then look to see what are the legally available tools to prevent them from doing what it is that they want to do. And so the criminal justice system might be one tool to do that, but it might be a treasury designation. It might be a commerce designation or use of related sanctions provisions. It might be prosecution by another country outside of the United States, a European partner. It might be state department diplomatic efforts that prevent the threat. It might be a regulatory or civil reform that we should be looking into the available intelligence, be driven by that intelligence to prioritize resources against the threat and then work to stop the threat. And I think our structure, in addition to that, allowed for a one point of contact between the Department of Justice and all of the 16 elements of the intelligence community and also allowed for the Department of Justice to sit at the table in a more concentrated way during National Security Council deliberations where a person in my chair often sits. They call the process it's three tiers usually and there's some tiers below in National Security Council but it'll be assistant secretary level meetings, the names have changed, but interagency policy councils, deputy committee meetings and those will be the relevant deputy secretaries in theory and principles meeting, which essentially is a cabinet meeting but in the space of those who are in the national security space and then they sometimes call those national security council meetings when they're chaired by the president. So with this position, the assistant attorney general for national security usually attends those meetings at the deputy level, alternating with the deputy attorney general and then we staff as appropriate other aspects of the national security council and that's where a lot of the interagency, if you're gonna do an all tools approach, you need to make sure that all the relevant agencies are discussing and sharing information and deciding what the best policy is to prevent a threat and with our structure, we're able to more regularly participate in those conversations and thus weigh in not just with our legal voice, whether something is or is not permissible, but in the policy arena too, whether something is or is not desirable and I think it's also helpful in so far as the intelligence community and Department of Defense speak what can seem like a different language if you are trained in a lawyer and Department of Justice, acronyms and just ways of speaking about what it is that they do and it's helpful to have folks at the department who are used to that and have an understanding of what it means and vice versa as you guys are slowly being warped into speaking. Lawyers speak in a certain way as well and that's true at the Department of Justice and so being sure you'd be able to translate what it is that the lawyers are saying in a way that's going to reach the operators' ears and so National Security Division is serving as a one-stop shop on those types of issues and I'll give a little overview of what we're doing. First priority is going to be preventing a terrorist attack inside the United States and that and against United States persons overseas. That is and will remain a top priority and right now it's very much again in the news and that may mean by overseeing the prosecution of those cases, can't really take a significant step on a international terrorism prosecution under the relevant statutes without getting permission from the National Security Division and the reason for that was a desire to have uniformity and to make sure you are doing that balance to make sure that the criminal system is the right way to be proceeding in the case and that you're protecting intelligent sources and methods. But in addition to prosecution, I also have a group that I wanted to highlight given what's going on lately. A couple weeks ago I was with the president in New York for the UN related meetings where the president chaired a security council meeting that had a unanimous resolution on combating the foreign terrorist fighter threat. It's a threat that they're over at this point. 12,000 foreign fighters in the Syria, Iraq region, they come from countries throughout the world and it's the type of problem that to stop it is gonna take an international coalition and in terms of even numbers alone I wouldn't say that the United States is at the top of that threat pyramid and so many of our partners abroad are very concerned about this threat and wondering what they can do to prevent it. One of those tasks, there's a side meeting that I went to of 29 countries represented by the folks that handle terrorism related issues called the Global Counterterrorism Forum and consistent with the all tools approach I was discussing, we worked through that forum to see what are best practices that both balance civil rights and civil liberties on the one hand and work within a rule of law but on the other hand provide effective tools to use the legal systems of our respective country partners to prosecute would be foreign terrorist fighters and so we adopted a second memorandum there of best practices and in the security council resolution also demanded that countries work to put those practices into their respective laws and so that's part of that all tools approach is building that infrastructure in other countries and working with them, learning lessons from them as well. So those are two priority initiatives on the terrorism side of the house. A third that you've heard discussed is the countering violent extremism and there the idea is that its success would be catching some of these individuals before they hit either the criminal justice system and certainly before they committed terrorist act and in over 80% of these cases according to one study there have been someone who's in a position to watch someone getting radicalized and in a type of position where they could intervene and in those cases to encourage those people to take steps to intervene it within the community before it ever hits the criminal justice system. On the intel side of the house there's a couple of different programs. One is the counter proliferation or export control programs consistent with the all tools approach this is the idea of let's work as a nation to put in regulations with our international partners that prevent the sale in particular of weapons of mass destruction technology to either rogue regimes or terrorist groups and we both work with them in terms of doing the legal vetting for instance treasury designations but also when someone violates the relevant export control regime or designation to bring appropriate criminal charges. One area I wanted to highlight for this group in the Berkman Center is when it comes to national security cyber threats by which I mean threats from terrorist groups or nation states we're trying to apply a similar approach to what we've done in terrorism by which I mean on the terrorist arena in every US attorney's office across the country there are prosecutors specially trained on handling sensitive sources and methods and the FBI has issued an edict that says you shall share your intelligence files with those prosecutors it may be in 95% of those cases it doesn't result in a criminal charge but you wanna have that option available for when you need it and you also may need to use the criminal justice system to obtain evidence or take certain investigative steps. On the cyber side of the house when it came to nation state actors and terrorist groups we were not applying the same approach and when you consider how technology has changed and that the division was first founded up really focused on that terrorism threat I think it makes sense that it wasn't the key focus when they first started but with my background and having worked with the FBI as it transformed to try to meet the cyber threat it was a noticeable gap when I came back over to the national security division so we've tried to apply a similar model in that we created a network of people trained on the bits and the bytes and the particularities of seizing electric evidence on the one hand, electronic evidence on the other hand on the one hand and on the other hand those who were used to handling sensitive sources and methods and familiar with reviewing the intelligence picture that new network which also has a terrible acronym NISCUS, the national security cyber specialist I think not as bad as CHIPS but maybe also less memorable It's a small program, MNISCUS MNISCUS, yes you're getting on the train and so we just started launch that program in 2012 and simultaneously the FBI then issued a similar like they had in terrorism that said what was formally on the intel side of the house now is going to be shared with these prosecutors and someone who used to do these cases criminally I remember when I was at the FBI there was a literal locked door or it was not a wall, it was a locked door but when it turned out to be a nation state actor and I was working the case it went to an FBI squad on the other side of that door that was different than the squad I worked with and I never saw it again which was fine because there was enough to do on the criminal side but I think didn't long term make sense and so with that new approach of looking to see whether there is a criminal option in some of these cases I think it led directly to the case that some of you may be familiar with in Pittsburgh were for the first time we brought criminal charges against five members of the People's Liberation Army unit 61398 for economic espionage that really cut across American industry from nuclear to solar to steel and that was activity that was really espionage, economic espionage but really was theft and what they were doing was stealing information for profit that was clearly being stolen for use by economic competitors with the private companies here in the United States I think for too long we had essentially decriminalized that activity because we weren't looking to see whether or not we could bring criminal cases so while that's the first case I don't think it'll be the last in this regard some folks thought you could never figure out who was behind the keyboard and we've shown that you can they're not the easiest cases but when the facts and evidence lead to someone behind the keyboard we're gonna bring charges and that was part of an all tools approach to try to change the behavior of the actors and ultimately hope create a norm that says it's not acceptable to steal information from private companies for economic gain and that's a similar approach it took years to establish the norm that we applied in the counter proliferation regime and now it's accepted among our partner countries that too is a norm that you don't violate and if you do it can lead to criminal sanctions I think I'll stop there and open it up to questions Great, thank you so much John a lot of what you focused on was the walls locked doors and lack of same between law enforcement and intelligence sides of the house and I just wanted to ask a couple questions to elucidate that a little further one example might be you could see the stereotypical intelligence gathering side of the government in a place where it's getting a lot of information about an adversary and learning a ton and maybe there's prosecutable stuff happening but it feels like no, no, let's leave our sources intact if we do something as noisy as launching a prosecution I mean it's even same on the law enforcement side when do you spring a trap if you're gonna spring it so I'm curious do you see conflict between those who might see the intelligence value of just listening and being aware and being in there versus when you want to actually spring the so-called trap which might sever the intelligence but then bring somebody into the courtroom Yes, absolutely and that's I hadn't realized it was a yes-no question there is absolutely a tension between the two and day in, day out that's the work of many of the attorneys in the national security division who stands as I was describing as a bridge between the world of law enforcement and criminal justice and the intelligence community and they're not, there is no easy answer they're very fact specific decisions and they rely on having a sense of what that overall intelligence picture is about the nature of the threat and when, where and how can you use the criminal justice system to achieve your strategical of diminishing the threat and they're very, so that's a lot of And just walk us through how would a real conflict and a difference of opinion that just can't be resolved by talking it through where does the rubber meet the road? Does it get escalated up to, I don't know some kind of decision maker who thinks that's real Let me divide it out a little bit so the decision as to whether or not there's sufficient evidence to bring a criminal charge and whether you've met your ethical obligations and your obligations under the US Attorney's Manual that is the Attorney General's decision I think it's important that the Department of Justice stay independent in making that analysis and there's been a long historical tradition of the independence of the Department of Justice on those criminal justice decisions but that's different deciding that you have sufficient evidence is different than necessarily using the tool and it can come up in different contexts one for individuals located outside the United States there'll be particularly terrorists there'll be often a National Security Council group that meets and it has all of the relevant agencies from Department of Defense to State to Treasury in the world that we live in to others and we'll share the information what's the complete portrait that we have of this individual or group and then sometimes we'll literally go around the table to see who has what option that they could suggest and so someone might say with a good relationship with ex-country in Europe and we think we've talked to them and they may have an available charge and at Justice we may say we have in these days you call it an Article 3 option but a criminal option that we could bring to the table or we don't as is sometimes the case and then with all of the armed with that information through the National Security Council process decide as to how to affect that operation and I think you've seen in some of the successes that we've had it's multiple prongs of the government even to bring someone back to a criminal justice system so it might be saw recently the conviction of the spokesman for Al Qaeda who was with Bin Laden right after 9-11 in New York that took years and years to accomplish and work of intelligence community in order to track the individual state department to work with countries to see where he was and how we could obtain him law enforcement to bring him back to the United States and prosecutors once he arrived in the United States to prosecute him within nine months of having arrived here through the criminal justice system and you've seen it also with Al Libby in Libya being captured by members of the military and brought to the U.S. courtroom and Abu Qatala one of the allegedly one of the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack who's facing pending charges in the District of Columbia so in those instances you can see how it's multiple prongs even when what you're choosing is the criminal justice system. Now something else you mentioned and your answer was years and years these things don't happen overnight I guess on television the commercial break represents years and years of development and when we come back it's in court Right exactly. Which means that there may be a pipeline of cases only now starting to happen that are fruit of this era you're talking about about increased sharing and cooperation between law enforcement intelligence and I wonder how if I put on the Harvard Defenders hat for a second if I'm defending somebody for which an indictment has been brought there's gonna be a trial there's I'd wanna know all right what evidence is there against the client where has it come from and where can I probe for either a substantive lack of evidence or some misstep in the development that represents like a Miranda rule some other kind of exclusionary thing I can invoke and all of that would point to to the extent that in a criminal case what's being brought to bear as evidence either at trial or in the path of developing what was needed to get the indictment and get to trial if that's coming from the intelligence side of the house what's your sense of how much that fact is and should be disclosed and made vulnerable to probing by the defense or is it sort of just look here's the evidence we can't tell you exactly where it came from how do you think through those issues so I think there's a carefully tailored set of statutes in this regard and the floor is obviously constitutional and you need to preserve the rights of individuals to have a fair trial and be able to effectively confront the evidence against them and the answer sometimes is that we are unable to do that while protecting the sensitive sources and methods and so we do not have a criminal justice system option in that case but often and not always because that really is the answer at times it will be through a variety of legal mechanisms so one would be the CEPA Classified Information Procedures Act and that provides a mechanism to provide the defense the information bless you that they need with court supervision in order to effectively amount effectively put on a defense while at the same time working to protect as you can those sensitive sources and methods that are not necessary to mount that the defense and provides a mechanism for a judge to review that information and make appropriate rulings as they do with other discovery issues you also have portions of the FISA Act that provide for notice and ex parte in camera litigation to review whether or not the evidence was obtained originally in a lawful manner and whether there's appropriate constitutional challenge to how it was obtained and sometimes you could sometimes it will result in a ruling and the judge will say you know ex sensitive source or method that intelligence community has classified needs to be shared in order to bring the case and sometimes they'll decide it's worth it given me despite the loss of the as you put it and despite the loss then being able to gain intelligence that way and sometimes we can't now the headline from which we could rip that people may have seen forget if it was the post of the times had an article in particular about the drug enforcement agency and parallel construction I'm not sure any of us quite well understands the term and so maybe we should just play word association if I say DEA parallel construction what does it make you think of the criminal division not national security division not my table well I was just doing word association I could talk about it in general yeah without reference to the DEA or on the criminal side but it may be that this is true outside of the context of national security law and was true when I was a criminal prosecutor as well when you might want to protect for instance a confidential informant and when I was starting out that was a particular problem in DC because you were seeing a lot of cooperating witnesses get targeted for violence in their neighborhoods and a lot of families were afraid to come forward unless you could figure out a way to protect them against retaliation for participating in the criminal justice system and so what you would look to see in those instances and others is what led you towards the evidence that you are going to use or against a criminal defendant in trial if you reconstruct how you got there how was it if you obtained certain evidence for other purposes or other intelligence for other purposes was it really relevant to you bringing your criminal case and the idea being that if you're predicated on a particular piece of information then it probably is going to trigger discovery and notice issues and it needs to be a right to challenge it if you built your case without that information then you won't so that's a pretty common phenomenon throughout the criminal law and it obviously would have some applicability in national security so another way to look or another time it comes up all the time that some of you folks may be familiar with is when the civil and criminal systems overlap and so it may be in the context of a civil investigation somebody provided information that would be compelled because they had to provide it in the civil context if you were doing that as kind of a pretext for a criminal for the criminal investigation wouldn't be able to use that information in your criminal case and you'd have to show that the evidence that you got in your criminal case was not derived from the information that was obtained in that civil case uh... one last question on law enforcement and intel and then i think we should throw it open and that is uh... i guess in the law enforcement context we tend to know the tools at the disposal of police departments and the fb i whether through television or otherwise we we know how they go about what they do and we also tend to know the contours of protection uh... that uh... the supreme court might articulate or the legislature might pass for this will test my recollection of first year criminal law but the difference in protection level among glove compartment under the seat and trunk my recollection is if you've got something terrible you don't want the police to see the trunk is where it should go that's where you have the best this news you can use uh... from this am i right about that that uh... that used to be the uh... the case law that was most protective of the trunk because it was out of the reach of the person right right not anymore well it depends on what type of uh... evidence that i think when it comes to digital evidence such as a cell phone there's been a recent uh... yes yes yes so i thought you were gonna say well since the introduction of the hatchback it got very complicated but um... i guess that's an example though of the fact that the rule the court articulates is done in a public opinion and allows advisors the crooks as well as advisors to innocent people to say what i just said without fear of eating and abetting or uh... whatever it may be the fact that it's known what the contours of the tool set are and the legal limits are can help the bad folks and i'm wondering given that there are no doubt a lot of people uh... in the wake of the snowden leaks and such feeling like there was a whole scope to surveillance that had not been publicly disclosed or talked about there was just run wide and wiggling his ears every so often uh... what's your sense structurally about the propriety how much the either legal limits that have been articulated are being absorbed how much of those legal limits be publicized and known and how much of the tool kit be known or is keeping the tool itself for the activity itself uh... a secret something really important for the kind of work you're doing uh... so it's a good question there's a lot uh... there's a lot in there so let's start with what's clearly the most important part of your question what's on television and and i think it's an important point here and then when i was trying jury trials uh... there was a show that is still on the air but i'm not popular is now csi and there was a period of time where we talked about the csi effect actually when i how many of you uh... i guess he's retired so i'd allen dershowitz for my uh... criminal is emeritus emeritus i think he always called himself and that the pleasure of working for uh... for a bit but he would always uh... say that before you did a trial that the best thing to do would be to watch tv at night and see what's on tv because that's that's what's gonna be on the minds of your jurors and that's how you should be presenting your case and there was a phenomenon later where uh... believed in the truth of his words called the csi effect where when you'd be presenting to juries they had such a false expectation as to what it is that the police could do and what the available tools and techniques were that if you did not you had to address it and many uh... prosecutors started addressing it directly in the opening statement say this is not csi and you are not going to see a video reconstruction of the crime at the end of this uh... at the end of this trial and so i think right now we're in a similar at just uh... if you do a quick popular cultural survey of how the nsa in the intelligence community are portrayed ranging from homeland to the good wife to uh... enemy of the state enemy of the state damages uh... pretty much every show predates but yes but in almost every one of these shows is there is a the government knows absolutely everything and is listening to all content all the time and be without any supervision cian is a are operating as operators inside the united states and using that information against us persons constantly and you'll see that in polling uh... data and believe it or not it's uh... the overwhelming majority people think that is currently the case that you can be that you can without legal regulation that people looking at us person content uh... all the time and uh... and to about half the people are okay with that uh... so there's it's still a split issue but that's what everyone assumes is happening which ever side of the issue that you're on so that i can uh... tell you from my experience there are those out there consider you don't know what you don't know but uh... that's not it's not the case and so i think there is a very the intelligence regime and national security regime is set up uh... to do intelligence first and i'm giving you some sense of the fact there's always an argument whether you want to use it at all in the criminal system because they want to keep gathering the intelligence and will reveal how uh... they're gathering every time it's used publicly in any context or another giving people some indication of what you know and how you know it so their incentives tend to be direction with an understanding at the end of the day that like everyone working in the system they want to prevent uh... the attack but there's still an institutional uh... bias towards keeping it on the uh... criminal side of the house if you're going to use it you have to provide uh... appropriate uh... notice and allow it to be litigated and the mere fact sometimes that you're able to know what you know even if you don't say how you know it indicates uh... how it is that you know it and so it damages the ability to do intelligence collection it's a constant balancing act i do agree that whenever possible we should try to make as clear as we can what the legal framework or parameters are that becomes particularly difficult in complex technical uh... opinions and because they're so integrally intertwined with the technology that's being used and how it's being used in the legal reasoning that it's hard to to explain how the judge reached what they did without exposing the technique that has been uh... that's a difficult and will be continually difficult issue and it's a policy trade-off at the end of the day and as many of you may have studied there's a regime that's been in place for uh... since the church committee report for good reason to prevent potential uh... abuse of these authorities and it set up a really american approach to the problem and that involved all three branches of government what they did was they said look we get uh... since time immemorial that there are national security needs and there's certain information that we need to keep secret to protect how it is that we're collecting it make sure we can collect it in the future and to conduct oversight we're going to set up a regime involves the same judges that you appear before in criminal and civil cases the fiser court judges they're called a secret court but they're not secret and it wasn't secret before who those judges were uh... where they sat on their uh... day jobs and they are to look at information that's uh... classified and rule uh... you know pursuant to the statute as to whether or not you are with the method in which you're acquiring it it's particularly designed to protect the rights of u.s. persons is appropriate and then they set up a special uh... committees in the in the senate and the house the select committees intelligence committees where representative members from both parties would be kept currently fully informed and conduct oversight of that uh... system so you had the legislative you had uh... the court system on what almost every other country in the world treats as an executive branch function and i think what you're seeing now is a healthy and good debate about whether that contour was sufficient and you could have a process that you agree with and not always agree with the result and wanna uh... tinker around uh... the edges and say it reached x y or z wrong policy result but there has been a protective process in place since that church committee let me open it up uh... grab microphone here i can help wrangle feel free to say who you are since probably we know anyway i'm a one l here i was just working at the belfer center for the last two years over at the kennedy school one of the things i'm sort of interested in is based on the fact that he mentioned pushing against enforcement of indictments for cyber crime methods uh... difficulty of tracking things back it seems as though it's like these things are likely to be under enforcement to the future even if we do see more indictments in this climate a lot of people talked about hacking back of american companies basically doing self-protecting gathering information on their hackers even trying to destroy their attackers computers my question is regardless of what you think about the wisdom of allowing the sort of thing as a general policy a credible case were brought to your attention or the division's attention of american company hacking back against an attacker would this really be a priority for you to prosecute that's uh... an easier one for me to answer because national security division that would not be a nation state or a terrorist and so would not be not only not be a priority would be within the scope of the national security division so an easy non-answer uh... criminal divisions uh... problem i think the general issue that you raise is um... an important one and there clearly be some uh... serious policy concerns about opening up a wild west where people could take self-help remedies but within that vein there's something called active defense that sometimes means hacking back but sometimes means something else since a bunch of bright uh... scholars here something to look at which is right now on solo did active defense at the bar that was terrible there should be some foul points deducted the um... right now i think you've heard director combi and muller use slightly different uh... formulations for the fb i but the essence is every company has been hacked and you think you haven't been hacked is because you don't know yet and what they mean by that is if you're a major company your systems have been breached and can be breached but then there's a question as what occurs once they're inside your system and what type of steps can you take to make it more difficult for the adversary to get what it is that they want what you value the and there within the contours of a company's system i think there's room uh... for folks to do more than they're doing and that's where they're working in terms of uh... defense and also sometimes just like we do in the brick and mortar world to work with the government to put information there that's deliberately that the bad guy gets that then allows us to bring in action and even if we don't ultimately bring in action prevents them from getting something that would be of value to them great torts exam question which now i can't use of uh... putting the uh... plans to a car that in fact won't operate properly on the server so that then the nation state steels it builds it and everybody crashes if i could i know you have to put that that's a serious area where uh... for one of you uh... perhaps more to look at because that's as this world changes i think that's what companies are wrestling with now at what point are they triggering liability outside of the system for steps they take inside of it yes and i imagine the uh... uh... intel crim divide also becomes the intel civil divide the government our government becomes aware of a hacking at a major company do you tell that company again at the risk of uh... compromising what you know yes hi i'm lori i'm a neiman fellow and i'm a british journalist in the u k uh... they have recently announced plans for extremism disruption orders which sounds similar to some of the things you're talking about which uh... they are orders which will focus on uh... preventing the ideology of of extremism before it begins and specifically at a non-legal level so people haven't broken the law but they will be able to be for example preemptively banned from public speaking preemptively banned from uh... using the internet and since uh... clearly as you said information sharing is going on i was wondering what you thought uh... both in the u.s and international context about the ethics of this kind of approach when it comes to preventing people speaking about whatever their own politics may be particularly in the united states which has a much more rigorous stance on freedom of speech one thing that's good about being in a classroom setting and getting reporters questions is confidently not answering them in their entirety uh... but it's uh... the uh... would say is this as we look at talking earlier about the global uh... combating terrorist forum or gc to work with not just uh... the u k but a variety of different countries legal systems and obviously each uh... many countries have drawn different lines than we have while trying to protect uh... the same rights and liberties they do it in different ways and in the united states i don't think there's anyone that has quite the equivalent to our first uh... first amendment and the jurisprudence that follows from it so the way that we wrestle with the problem will inevitably be different than some of our counterparts what they're trying to do um... which would be how do you uh... take action it because before they commit the act director moeller tells a story about how when he was he was newly uh... sworn in as uh... director of the fb i uh... the next early his first week nine eleven he went after uh... september eleventh to brief uh... the president he walked through consistent with his training is yours as a prosecutor and said uh... here's the facts in the evidence here's what we know about the hijacker and did a presentation very tight and then uh... the response from the president was well that's well good but i'm not i'm not interested i mean i'm interested by and uh... primarily in holding them accountable after the fact i want to know what you're doing to prevent the next terrorist attack and so since then the fb is transformed to try to meet that challenge one thing we do in the united states system that sometimes uh... controversial in the attorney general just endorsed in a speech to europe use of undercover operations and in the undercover operation what the fb i will often do consistent with our system in values will say let's say we have someone who's talking the talk of violent extremism but we're not sure whether that's the uh... person who's going to take that act to actually provide material support to uh... particular terrorist group or commit a violent act uh... here at home or abroad and what they'll do is they'll provide that person the opportunity or suppose the opportunity to do it and see whether they take the steps to follow through on their talk if they do and that falls within our criminal justice system and if they don't it does not uh... within uh... uh... britain there were claims that britain had been using some of the intelligence it gathered either to propagandize to be able to uh... create fake information out there or it was credible about people they wanted to discredit or even simply leaking information about uh... enemies would be terrorists that they wanted to discredit within those terrorist communities within the u.s. context is there law around that are there uh... limits on on that kind of activity were it to be conducted by the u.s. uh... i'm trying to i'm not sure i'm totally tracking the activity that you're uh... but i'll say this in terms of countering violent extremism there's uh... an effort to a lot of the uh... it's very slick uh... propaganda campaigns being used through social media by some of these terrorist groups and talking to professionals in this field some of it looks like the same type of quality that we professionally produce and so part of the discussion internationally and here at home has been well how do you counter that type of messaging that makes it look like it's going to be you know a disney movie if you go over and join isle when that is not in fact what's occurring with when you get over to the syria iraq region in the u.s. there's a part of the state department that has worked on i think they're more interested in finding voices that can counter that narrative and figuring out a way to get them on to social media but those are those are truly the people uh... espousing no i was thinking much of the much more controversial example of here's somebody preaching hate but not that anybody's going to arrest or something uh... through our intelligence sources we come to something compromising about that person and then choose to feed it to a reporter or something that that kind of oh yeah if that's uh... you could not do that with uh... u.s. person as the target as a u.s. person is the target of uh... uh... a campaign to and the the natural inverse to that statement then should i infer anything about no on u.s. because that's uh... it is different uh... a or expertise of the more on it on the u.s. person uh... protections thanks for your talk uh... i'm timothy edgram a visiting fellow at brown and i wanted to get back to the ns a for a second and ask you about vice accord and particularly about the vice accord opinions uh... because up until just a few years ago the only thing that was publicly known about the vice accords process was just this it raw number of this is the number of applications that have been sought and this is the number that have been granted but since snowden especially there's been an avalanche of declassified opinions a huge number really detailed opinions that the administration is released all sorts of detailed things about upstream collection internet metadata collection business records things like that that have been really quite a huge change and i guess uh... the question i want to ask you is how do you see this change affecting the work of the vice accord going forward especially since your attorneys kind of appear in front of the vice accord and have to deal with this uh... do you see this becoming routine do we expect opinions will be released on a regular basis after having been declassified with this kind of transparency continue or is this more of a one-off in response to a big crisis involving the stone revelations so i think that uh... director of national intelligence in general council for the uh... the d and i have spoken on this uh... issue to say that there will be a regularized process to look at the opinions and attempt to declassify the system with the conversation we had before that we should always try to get uh... out as best we can the legal architecture if you can do so in a way that doesn't jeopardize sensitive sources and methods probably more awareness now uh... when trying to write the opinion to try to do it in a way where you can segregate out the uh... the technical information that would reveal exactly how you're acquiring it or who it's being acquired from from the legal principle and as i was saying uh... and i know you're expert on uh... law and technology it can be very difficult in when it's when you're addressing a new type of technology because it is so integrally related to discussing those details so uh... and not sure there's a cure-all we're at the end of the day you don't come back to uh... a difficult decision about how much do you want to risk your ability to obtain the information versus the need to have the faith confidence of the american people and what it is you're doing real quick real quick i just i'm aware of the time i want to make sure we see uh... something on the question tool maybe if we do it just like a by sixty minutes get five to ten free would people find that a bonus they want and i feel like we're on a real substantive role here i should ask our guest if that works for you too or yeah got it so i'm gonna i'm gonna take a question from the question tool alright will there be a tangible consequence resulting from the indictment of the chinese military hackers that you mentioned before or is this largely a symbolic act uh... i'm waiting to be like symbolic act next question so i'll say a couple things uh... in in response to that because you get that question uh... fairly often one at the beginning of our uh... use of the criminal justice system against international narcotics kink pins uh... there were many who said why are you bringing criminal charges against these people they're not inside the united states you'll never see them here they've been here and they've been tried and many of them are incarcerated now uh... two with a counter-proliferation and get as i was saying at the beginning of the regime there were individuals who were uh... abroad not a very country was buying into the fact that this was uh... something against international norms subsequently uh... as recently as today uh... you just secured a conviction against an individual named alexa uh... and while the charges uh... he's someone who is known to be a proliferated proliferator i'm stumbling over that word today uh... but he and uh... which criminally charged for violating civil uh... regulations and he was obtained he knew he was under uh... indictment he knew the regulations applied and yet traveled uh... to estonia where he was picked up an extradited to the united states so when we use the criminal justice system with the intent of bringing them here with all the rights of due process of that entails to face their day in court and uh... three again not doing this is effectively decriminalizing the activity and sending the wrong message if we want to have an international norm as we move uh... forward and increasingly interconnected in digital world that is okay to uh... obtain information in this matter and so i think it was important not to decriminalize this activity and use our system when the facts and evidence show that there's somebody accountable at the other end of that keyboard is it a fair part of the calculus in figuring out probably the prudential more than legal limits of our own uh... activities either in offensive cyber stuff or in undertaking surveillance whether there's a symmetry to it with the chinese were doing this on our territory we try to arrest them for we would indict them is it how much does it factor in well that means we probably shouldn't do it ourselves or is there not that kind of symmetry at work at states do what states do and we have our own reasons and ours are noble and maybe other states are less noble i mean how does that calculus work question i know how you're able to read the computers that was the opposite of two hundred fifty five character limit so i'd say in this case uh... this is something that the president said uh... we do not and should not do which is we should not be targeting private companies and for the economic gain of our private companies one thing that's interesting in relation to that norm is every almost every country in the world openly acknowledges having an intelligence service and that they're doing so for uh... national security reasons that's been true and recognize an international law uh... for years there's no country in the world that openly acknowledges that they are stealing economic information for their economic uh... gain and so it to an extent uh... outside of perhaps the halls here uh... i'm not sure there's anyone is articulating that that should be a norm so we shouldn't do it and when we catch up by economic just to be clear you mean tactical economic to figure out what the sealed bid is on a Boeing uh... airliner bid and then to know to go a dollar less or something is that what you mean when you say economic yes private uh... economic game or uh... stealing uh... you're attempting to buy in in some of these instances you're trying to buy a technology and instead of purchasing it you steal the same technology and then you end up not completing that transaction stealing that technology for the purpose of financial gain is what you're saying we wouldn't do for the purposes of financial yes got it my name is no longer i teach information policy courses kennedy school uh... well uh... uh... uh... uh... So they do, by the change in that, they do engage actors and things like that. So my question is to you is whether you would further define what you use as legally available tools and whether that includes constitutional amendments of the 1st, 4th and the 5th amendments in that I recognize that all national security community members including officers and the defense department all swear to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies born at domestic. So when they have these conflicts, they're not only legally but ethical and maybe reach the Newenburg standards of behavior. After Snowden's disclosure along with WikiLeaks, it appears to be so. Many have crossed that line in terms of the legality particularly in the 4th amendment. You mentioned that success in national security was prevention of a crime. At what point does this lead to a pre-crime intervention and the use of information before a crime is actually committed to basically deny persons rights that they would otherwise be entitled to. So that's what I was going to add a little bit I think into the other question. So in our system when you're using the criminal justice system as a tool to prevent a terrorist act, we do not bring charges against someone for their views or beliefs. And so that's where I think the use of, you'll see in our system the use of undercover operations where you will use the undercover operation to see whether the individual who's indicated a desire, a belief in violent extremism or espouses views of a foreign terrorist organization but you put to them the question of are they going to take the actual step? Are they going to pull the trigger on what they think is a bazooka? Are they going to press a button on what they think is an explosive device? And it's when they take those concrete steps that we have available criminal charges and as you know as a former prosecutor that gets put to its burden of proof by judges and defense attorneys. And to date we have not had someone successfully employ the entrapment defense when confronted with that type of evidence. And I think that shows the care that the agents have used in using what needs to be a carefully monitored technique. On one just broader, I think that reasonable minds can and do differ over both the statutory interpretation of 215, the provision of the Patriot Act that was used to collect certain metadata telephone records and also over the constitutionality of it and that will ultimately be a decision for the courts to decide. But when under our system you've appropriately submitted the information to a FISA court judge pursuant to the statute, the judge has ruled and granted an order and then it goes to the operational agency or NSA to execute that order. I do think it's unfair to the professionals who have followed the system that we've set up sought to comply with it to brand them as somehow violating which I'm not saying you are doing but I have heard folks do, violating their oath to protect the constitution. They did what we asked them to do in terms of following the appropriate procedures and briefing the relevant committees. It's up to us and it's important debate to have whether we think those are sufficient protections but that's not a rogue actor acting with bad intent. That's someone trying to follow the laws as our congressmen and senators have written them the best they can and as the courts have interpreted them. Well, we end on a note that we could surely continue on at great length but thank you all for the extra ten minutes. I think it was actually well worth it. Thank you, John, for coming up and talking to us.