Good morning, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and get us started and feel free, for those of you who are in the room, to please move up. There are a few seats up front. It makes it feel like an experience. I'm going to go ahead and just get us started on this amazing morning and day we have planned. I am Paul Butler. I'm the President and Chief Transformation Officer here at New America. We describe New America as a think-and-action tank. So we're engaged in both the policy and the practice. And we're responding to demographic, technological, and social change around the world. We focus our work in five areas, education, democracy, technology, family well-being, and global security. And so that last one you'll hear a lot more about today. On behalf of Ann Marie Slaughter, our CEO, and all of the staff here at New America, welcome to the Future Security Forum. This is our ninth forum, co-organized with Arizona State University, who you will meet shortly and be seeing throughout the day. This is our premier event with ASU. And so we're glad to be here again. We are working together with ASU on a full range of security issues facing the U.S. and the world. And how do we do that? We produce new and original research that promotes transparency and understanding of America's counterterrorism warfare. We report on the origins, and we have reported and continue to report on the origins of the future of proxy warfare, including much work on the Wagner Group. We report on the impact of climate change and the study of the future of security as it relates to our climate around the world. And we're working with many, many different techniques to do this work. One of the things that we do across all of the work of New America is fellows and fellowships. And so we are very proud to be working with ASU to support fellows on their groundbreaking research and writing. Two of those were delighted to support and just call out Kamiyarkidia, who's working on the colonial origins of global mental health. Fascinating work. We're very excited about that. And Philip Bennett, who's working on a biography of the journalist Anthony Shadeed. Also important work, which you all will see shortly. We're also supporting major books. And all of the staff and fellows across both ASU and New America are partnering on a number of publications. One I wanted to call out came out last year. It's a book with Oxford University Press. It's called Understanding the New Proxy Wars. So you will hear more about some of that work through the day. It was written and edited by members of ASU and New America. We've also helped push US combatant commands to provide better reporting of US strikes in their death toll in Somalia and beyond. And we work closely with ASU and the Future Security Initiative, which you'll be hearing about today. And we wanna thank in particular our partners at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, who have partnered with us in many prior years. And finally, as you all are experiencing today, both here in the room and online, we convene. Through events and gatherings like this, with experts like those assembled here, we bring critical discussions of the future of security to the general public, not just here in DC and in Arizona, but literally around the country and around the world. So with that, it's my pleasure to introduce James O'Brien, who's the Senior Vice President of University Affairs and the Chief of Staff to the President at ASU. He's been a longtime partner and supporter of New America and I'm delighted to introduce you to him by video. Thank you for joining us. Good morning. Welcome to the Future Security Forum. I'm James O'Brien, Senior Vice President of University Affairs at Arizona State University. This is the ninth annual convening of the Future Security Forum by ASU and New America. The impact of this event is really quite extensive. We've had more than 3,000 participants attendees in the event over the years and more than 23,000 participants in live streaming broadcasts. Additionally, the content that you see today and content from the past is incorporated into ASU's master's degree in global security so that the learnings, the ideas, the innovations that may arise from the discussions and the presentations today can carry on and be brought into the teaching and learning environment that ASU brings to the forum. The kind of content that you will be able to see today and I think benefit from involves speakers and participants from really all sectors of our society who are interested in or participate in question, addressing questions of national security, whether that's the U.S. military, the United States government, industry, think tanks. So it's just a broad base of talent integrated into these discussions and from which we hope to draw new ideas and new energy. The forum now is part of a larger undertaking, also initiated by ASU and New America and that is the Future Security Initiative, which will be an expansion of the kinds of work, the kinds of ways that the work will manifest itself. And so we're gonna build on the prior nine years here and do more and incorporate more ideas and more people into these kinds of undertakings. So great success in the past, I think a great event today. And as we move forward, at ASU, we just wanna celebrate the tremendous energy, the tremendous opportunity that these kinds of convenings offer. The ASU, New America relationship in many ways is a continuing experiment. How do you take the nation's largest public university and have it work with and collaborate and integrate with New America and Washington DC? That has, I think as this forum suggests, produced tremendous value and impact for the benefit of the country, I think there's more to come. I think today's activities are an example of that. And it's really with great pleasure that ASU is able to work with New America to produce this event and enjoy what you learn here today, enjoy the discussions. And we all look forward then to taking the ideas, the best of the ideas and putting them into practice. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm gonna introduce now our first panel. We have Heela Rasul Ayub, who is the director of our Planetary Politics Initiative at New America. She's gonna moderate the panel. It is the title of the panels, What Systemic Shifts Will Shape the Future of Conflict. We're gonna particularly focus on climate change and also migration issues. Thank you, Peter, and welcome everyone. And welcome to this panel discussion on the nexus of climate change, migration and conflict. Climate change is rapidly remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equatorial zones to the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of the crucial environmental niche that best supports life. By later the century, three to six billion people between one-third and a half of humanity could be trapped outside of that zone facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates. Unless emissions are sharply curtailed and mass migration is accommodated. So because we have 30 minutes for discussion and 15 minutes for audience questions, I wanna just dive right into it. It gives me a great pleasure to introduce this illustrious panel from across several time zones and climate zones. We are joined from Baghdad by Ambassador Farid Yasin, climate envoy of the Republic of Iraq, former ambassador to the United States. From Texas, I'm happy to introduce Jeff Godel, a former New America fellow. Jeff's latest book, very scary title, is a New York Times bestseller. The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He is the author of six previous books including The Water Will Come, Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and The Remaking of the Civilized World. And from Geneva, it gives me great pleasure to be joined by Director General-Elect Amy Pope for the International Organization of Migration. DG-Elect Pope is currently the deputy director general for management and reform of IOM. Prior to joining IOM, she served as senior advisor on migration to President Biden. And in the Obama administration, she served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy homeland security advisor. And so with that, I will just jump into my first question for Ambassador Yasin. In a country like Iraq, which is the fifth most climate vulnerable country to climate breakdown, not only is climate-induced water scarcity exacerbating conflicts, but some of the origins of the water scarcity are from previous rounds of conflict, which has led to a great deal of instability to say the least and weakened institutions. As we see greater migration from rural areas facing acute scarcity, what is the absorbent of capacity of these urban centers to take in these new migrants internally within Iraq and to temper any rising communal conflict? Over to you, Ambassador Yasin. So, John, my microphone. Thank you for asking this question that goes right to the problem. So, first off, in Iraq, urban centers and like in many parts of the world are already operating at above capacity in terms of infrastructure, whether it's roads, whether it's water facilities, whether it's electricity. So Baghdad now is, I don't know, multiple times the population that it was designed to accommodate. So this is something that we have to take into account. What really helps in terms of handling migrants and refugees, if you will, in a country like Iraq is that we have very powerful cultural solidarity networks, whether they're family-oriented or client or religious. They really help and remove a lot of the tensions on this. But the truth is, we won't be able to accommodate more of these waves as they become more frequent. Our climate change, the migrations that we're seeing right now in Iraq are not really due to climate change. They're really due to lack of water, droughts. But these droughts are induced essentially by upstream damming in upstream countries. We've lost some, like, 40% of our water inflow over the last 10, 20 years. We also have to do a lot better in terms of water management. But this is an issue that we will have to be dealing with and dealing with more appropriately. I think the answer for Iraq's problems, as it is for other countries, is to develop and revive our countryside to develop a network of, you know, climate resilient villages, towns that can accommodate lack of water through technology. We're very fortunate to be living in the 21st century. And there are examples of new technologies that are making it possible to develop agriculture in extremely arid areas. There are some technologies, for example, that have reduced the water intake of olive plantations by 96%, sorry, 94%. So instead of having the need for 100 liters, you need only six. I mean, these are things that can change the overall conditions. But of course, you have to prepare for that. And you have to prepare for that by developing the appropriate infrastructure, by developing the right culture, and by getting your populations ready. Nonetheless, you know, water scarcity is not the only thing that will accrue from climate change. As was very well expressed in the book you just mentioned, the heat will kill you first. And I can tell you that the heat is no joking matter. Two weeks ago, three weeks ago, we had five successive days of 50 plus temperate degrees in Baghdad. It's nothing to joke about. We have to be ready. Thank you, Ambassador Yassine. And kind of on your point on adaptive technologies and the need for them, especially, given that we're unlikely to get ahead on mitigation measures. I'd like to turn to Jeff.  But until that happens, the heat is exposing deep fissures of inequity and injustice. Not everybody has access or can afford adaptive technologies like air conditioning or some of the technologies that Ambassador Yassine just mentioned. You also delve deep into the idea that he is predatory from a migration and security point of view. It preys on the most vulnerable first. So how do we reduce the impulse to flee within these places that are most vulnerable and the people that are most vulnerable? And how do we democratize access to adaptive technologies? Thank you. Those are really excellent questions and very complex questions about, you know, let me start with the idea that I think that, you know, for too long in the climate discussion, there's been this binary between, you know, mitigation or adaptation. And we haven't been able to have both conversations kind of at the same time. People think have thought before the talking about adaptation takes away from the political inertia and energy towards mitigation. And if you talk about mitigation, that will take away from any kind of political momentum for adaptation. First of all, so I think we need to really reframe the larger conversation because obviously what's driving, you know, these migration problems that we talk about. In my book, I talk about heat as a kind of force of planetary chaos. And so we need to like turn down the thermostat, right? And that's the number one thing that we can't forget about, which is reducing fossil fuel emissions as quickly as possible, much faster than what we're doing. But then, you know, we also have to think and talk about adaptation. And, you know, that gets into technology for sure, like Ambassador Yasin was talking about. But it's also, you know, deeply political. And it's about this divide between, you know, the wealthy and the vulnerable. And that is, I see that here in Texas. I live in Austin, you know, there's, it's been a summer of brutal extreme heat. And you can see, you know, the outdoor workers, people who are working on the streets, farm workers, you know, incredibly vulnerable to these outdoor conditions. And then there's, you know, the knowledge workers and others who are sitting inside their air conditioned offices and, you know, just think that it's like a little bit higher of an electricity bill. So how do you, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with this separation? And, you know, we have a governor in Texas who for political reasons decided to pass legislation making it illegal for any city or county in Texas to pass laws requiring water breaks and shade breaks rest for outdoor workers. I mean, it's, you know, climate has been politicized in a very powerful way here. So, you know, the answer to these questions is technological. Yes, we can figure out ways to develop cheaper air conditioning better access to air conditioning for people who can't afford it. We can subsidize electricity rates to make it cheaper for people who do have AC to run them. We can think about cooling technologies. There's a lot of technological solutions to some of these problems, but it's also, you know, a deeply political problem. It's a deeply political problem, you know, in the most straightforward sense, but also in, you know, just like money in the sense of we see that in the international climate negotiations with the Green Climate Fund and things like that. So it's a, to me, when we think about, you know, how we're going to deal with this gap, we have to think first about politics. Thanks, Jeff, and on politics, I'd like to turn it over to Director General-elect Amy Pope. You know, IOM as an agency, as an organization that works very much directly on the ground with the populations most affected. In my previous work in development, I've worked very closely with IOM and they've always been on the forefront acknowledging the impacts that climate change over time, and then as well as immediate climate-induced disasters have on populations in the displacement of people. But it's also a very political question. And given your, where you sit in some of the, not necessarily aversion to delving into politics, but acknowledging the impact that climate has on politics and that politics has on acknowledging climate, how much is IOM investing in activities that address adaptation measures? And if there are any specific initiatives or programs that IOM is planning to implement to promote climate resilient migration both within countries and internationally, we'd love to hear more about that. Thank you, Hila. And I also just want to say thank you to New America and ASU for even raising this issue. It's one that frankly I think is not getting enough attention given how significant the impact will be on hundreds of millions of people into the future. I was actually just in Kenya for the Africa Climate Summit. And when I was there, in addition to engaging with the government officials, I also made a trip out to Dadaab, which many of you will know is one of the world's largest and longest standing refugee camps where over 100,000 people have come over the last about two years because of the drought in Somalia. And those people are joining hundreds of thousands of people who are already displaced and are unable to go home because frankly, they don't have a way to live at home. Right. And when we talk about Somalia, we're talking about conflict. Obviously, they've had a long history of conflict and continued threats as a result of al-Shabaab. But when you layer that on top of the inability of communities to make a living and many communities are agricultural or pastoral, so they are literally depending on the land to feed themselves and their children, you immediately see how climate change is becoming a threat multiplier. So it is first and foremost, if you cannot make a living, if you have no future at home, moving is the most human adaptation strategy that now exists. Right. And if you add in communities that have been facing conflict, especially for a prolonged period of time, you can see how climate is actually destabilizing and preventing more durable solutions in those communities. So from my point of view, number one is just building awareness about what's happening. And for a lot of these communities, there is no low-cost air conditioning solution. They have very little. They're living in very basic circumstances. So building awareness of what we're seeing right now on the ground and how that will impact communities across the world, that's key. Two is driving the political consensus that this is happening. So I was in Africa, in Kenya, because we are helping to facilitate what's known as the Kampala Declaration, which is basically an acknowledgement by African member states of the impact of climate on human mobility. Because that consensus doesn't yet exist. Everybody sees it. One of the ministers said to me, well, but it's obvious. It's obvious, but there's still this unwillingness to acknowledge. And the reason why that's so important is because then that allows us to build climate change and climate adaptation into national planning, into resource mobilization, into strategic thinking. So for me, there's an awareness raising. There's a political consensus driving. And then there's on the ground. What is our direct response and our ability to provide more stability for communities that are impacted? So there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to happen. And we are so far behind where we need to be given the real threat this poses to existing communities. And then the destabilizing follow on impact it will have as a result. Thank you. And I particularly appreciate that that last point, because I think for those of us who work in this space, we take it for granted that there is consensus, but there is in fact, not that consensus that is necessary. In fact, there are powers that be that are shifting the consensus to the other side. So on that, and Ambassador, I guess, you do get very political in your role as you should, but, you know, I think we think. We think about measures and we think about these large scale COP convenience and the like, but a lot of the agreements that we have to come to must be done at the regional level. You alluded earlier to the lower flow rate of the rivers in Iraq due to some of your regional neighbors, Turkey and Iran in particular. Can you share a little more with us about how Iraq is engaging with those regional neighbors on the urgency of shared water resources and how that figures into other regional considerations. Thank you. This is a critical issue. You know, oil is precious, but water is even more precious because it's vital for a life. And so in every country has to take into account the requirements of its own population even before looking at the requirements of downstream countries. But, you know, there are historic presidents. One has to take into account Iraq would be nothing without its two rivers. My slogan is, you know, Iraq land of the two rivers. Let's keep it that way. Let's keep them flowing. And so I think there are examples that we could we could emulate in terms of wise management, equitable management of of water that have been implemented. I can think, for example, of the Mekong Delta authority or the way the European Union handles their rivers that cross go through several countries. But the real issue that I want to raise here is that in fact there is even though action has to be local, but the resources that are needed are such a magnitude that this has to be a global global collective efforts. There is so much need and the issue is really down falls down to equity. The countries that will be most vulnerable to climate change have done in the end of the calculations very little to raise the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is where it is because of history, because of the fact that, you know, the industrial revolution has been going on for actually more than a century. And so we need to focus on this aspect of equity and to force a consensus to get the countries of the world all to chip in together as they can according to their resources and also according to the needs of the countries that will be most at need. One of the things that I'd like to point out here is that we're all trying to talk about achieving the Paris consensus, which is, you know, capping the increase of average temperatures to 1.5. But that's an average, you know, there are countries that will get less, there are countries that will get a lot more, really a lot more. And my concern as an Iraqi climate envoy is that Iraq is going to be, is both likely to be one of those countries where the temperature rise is going to be way more than 1.5 degrees. And that's going to be also the case of our neighboring countries. And so how do we deal with it? Well, we have to get our act together to what we need to do, but then we will require the help of the international community as much as they can in terms of technology, in terms of resources, and perhaps in terms of a little more water from our neighboring countries. Thank you, Ambassador Yasina. And to that point on, you know, the impact of increased carbon emissions does not stay within borders. And so we are seeing the impact of it on the more vulnerable countries, most vulnerable communities. And so this, it brings me to a point that you made, Jeff, in your book. As a lawyer, I really appreciated your examination of the science of extreme event attribution, especially as we go into the next cop and ongoing discussions around loss and damage funds. What will it take for the international community to accept attribution and attach monetary value to it? Particularly, what special interests playing a very significant role in these discussions? Yeah, that's a great point. I think I don't know what it will take to, you know, gain recognition of the power of this attribution science and how that will exactly play out. But I think it's one of the most important developments in climate science right now and actually in kind of climate politics right now.  Well, now attribution science, which is, I have a chapter about it in my book, it's basically a kind of modeling that looks at extreme events and asks, would this have happened without the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere or not? And I write about a German scientist named Friedrich Auto, who is on the forefront of this.  And what they've done is, it's not that they look at every event and say, aha, you know, this was caused by climate change, they're able to discern that some events are climate driven, like the heat wave in the 1921, they've said virtually could not have happened without the elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Then they looked at the Pakistani floods last year and they basically said, no, this was within the range of sort of natural events and we don't see CO2 as a driver. But what's really important about this is it begins to change the political dynamics because you can now look at this and say, look, what do you do in the global north or UX on mobile or, you know, caused this in the same way that, you know, there's not an exact comparison, but it's a fair enough comparison of smoking and tobacco, you know, we now can attribute these events. And so once we can attribute these events with some degree of actual, what's close to factual certainty, that changes the political direction in a big way. And it recalculates this big question that's at the heart of what we're talking about about mitigation, adaptation, and security, which is what do the rich, you know, who are causing the problem, owe to, you know, the people who are in the refugee camps and that Amy is talking about, and what does justice and equity mean in this world now? And this attribution science is changing that in a dramatic way. Thank you, Jeff. And then for Director General Elect Pope, you know, I threw out some very dramatic numbers earlier at the top of this conversation. And while that might resonate for some, I think it's too far removed from people's day-to-day realities. But as I mentioned earlier, IOM has been doing excellent work on documenting and researching and seeing what is happening in Texas is between climate change, disasters, and conflict and migration. So, you know, there are conversations within these cops, the UNFCCC, among others, but they seem so high-level. How is the IOM working with these other organizations to create a coordinated and effective, responsive strategy that deals with the day of people's lives and brings it down a few levels? So, I wish I could say that it was fully coordinated and effective. I think because we're not fully at the point where we have appreciated the threat, the response is actually not where it needs to be.  And the truth is part of my priorities coming into the organization is to engage with our sister agencies as well as those other entities that are collecting the data on which communities are going to be most impacted by climate disaster, drought, flood, sea level rise to start and then identify which vulnerabilities exist in those communities. So, for example, if you are completely dependent on farming and we project that you're actually not going to be able to farm, what are we doing now to engage? Right now, that's not happening. There is not a concerted effort globally to approach the problem set that way. And so that means that the solutions are lacking and they're very ad hoc. So, we have really great solutions, you know, working with a community in South Sudan who has been displaced by flooding to help them do better water management. But we do not have across the board a strategic approach where we're systematically applying the data, overlaying it with vulnerability of communities and then coming up with interventions on the adaptation side. So that's where the work needs to happen. And that's why the awareness raising is so critical to the future. Thank you so much. And I think we are almost at time, but before we go to audience questions, one thing that I like to do with panels, I always acknowledge that when we have such a gathering of great minds and experiences, I like to give people the opportunity to ask one another questions. And so I'll turn it over to you while if you have any questions for one another. Well, at the risk of betraying my age, I'd like to make a comment. So most of the models that looking at our evolution as a species under the impact of climate change take 2050 as a target for net zero or 2040. 2050 is to me not that far off. I started working on climate change issues in 1996. That's 27 years ago. 2050 is 27 years from now. So this is real. It's no joke. It's something I don't know if I'll be there, but you, sir, I hope I'm pretty sure you will be. And so this is about the livelihoods of all the people or actually a great chunk of the people who are attending this workshop. This is about you. It's not about strangers. This is something that engages us all and we have to address it because we'll have to live with it. Hopefully. Yeah, I'll just add one thing to that, which is, you know, the reason I gave my book, the as you described scary title of the heat will kill you first is because I really wanted, I think that the discussion about climate and impacts has been kind of marooned in this sort of middle future for too long and dominated by scenarios and I think it's about scenarios and future people that will be impacted and future water flows and future projections of heat and all that. And, you know, I think that I mean, in my book, I really wanted to underscore that this is happening now that these impacts are real. They, you know, heat can, you can go for a walk on a hot day in Baghdad or in Phoenix. And if you're not prepared, you can die in two hours. And this is not hypothetical. This is not some risk that's far in the future. This is a risk that is playing out around us right now in real time that all of us are dealing with. And, you know, I just the attempt in my book was to is to do exactly what the investor talked about, which is shift this conversation to today, not to 2050. The other angle where we are thinking a little bit differently about this is starting to understand and appreciate how migration can actually be one of the climate adaptation strategies. So if people no longer have the opportunity to make a living because of climate factors that have completely eroded their economic opportunities at home, how do we build strategies that enable them to take opportunities that may be elsewhere. In some cases, that's going to be within a country. So we've seen a lot of natural rural to urban migration, but it's important that we start to do planning around that. And then when we think about the demographic changes that we expect to see in the worlds much more broadly, can we think about how do we enable communities that cannot adapt at home to take the jobs that might be elsewhere. So again, thinking about not just how do we avoid a mass migration? How do we do migration that's going to work in the face of a changing climate? Thank you all. And I think then we can turn it over to audience questions. I think we'll have some questions coming from our virtual audience as well as the mic in the room. So we'll give it a minute for questions coming through. Question for Ambassador Yasin. This is Peter Bergen. Can you sort of assess, obviously there's great wealth disparities in the Middle East. The Saudis, the Qataris, the Emiratis have a lot of resources. How are they doing compared to say the Yemenis or other countries without many resources that are equally affected? Well, both the Emirati and the Saudis and I've observed their attitude during the climate change negotiations. In the very beginning they like many people working in the oil industry where dubious were deniers if you will and in fact tried to not scuttle but delay discussions and in fact I remember their chief negotiator and offered the fossil of the year award by organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in a climate activists. The attitude that you feel that you sense from the chief negotiators from Saudi Arabia, from the Emirates is completely different. It's very responsible and there is a concerted effort on their part to try to use their resources to develop technologies that will help to the greatest degree mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. They're doing a lot of effort, for example, on carbon capture use and storage. Whether that will be a silver bullet, I don't know but it's certainly something that needs to be pursued and worked on. One of my pet ideas is to try to talk about countries around the Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf, call it what you will is to see whether we can develop a common stand in these negotiations because in fact one of the reasons why I think Saudi Arabia is moving in the direction that it did is because they are confronted to heat and you mentioned, Jeff mentioned heat in Texas. I think I heard that the municipality of Riyadh just passed a law forbidding people from working outdoors between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.  I think one thing we were reminiscing in the course of this panel was there is some focus on adaptive measures and mitigation measures but we are also going into a new great competition over a battle of resources for renewable energies themselves and so this is creating a new kind of geopolitical tension and geopolitical competition primarily between the U.S. and China but among others and so I would like to pose this question to all three panelists. How do you see this impacting those communities that currently house those resources? Well, I'll say something about this. I think this is going to have a profound impact on geopolitics as the kind of power structures developed around the world by this wealth of fossil fuels and we can argue about the timing and we can argue about this pace of the decline but clearly this transition away from fossil fuels is happening and will continue to happen and there will be sort of winners and losers in this endgame but the endgame is happening right and so we can argue about this. We can argue about this and we can argue about this for the next kind of oil and so we have the rare minerals that are needed for batteries. We have things like lithium that were never considered valuable 20 years ago who cared about lithium and so places like Greenland for example and a lot of ice and some fishing villages and just like not a part of the sort of geopolitical strategy map in any powerful way now all of a sudden is in the middle of this mad goal brush for rare minerals and things and that gives them a lot of leverage and a lot of power and is shifting the sort of larger geopolitical positions about where the future lies you know what impact will this have in the Middle East as you know oil declines in value and obviously there's all kinds of ways of propping up value and prices but in the long run you know this is going to change and as you mentioned that Saudis and others know this but it's still going to be a great geopolitical shift as we in the decade or two as we move forward. For sure it will my advice to countries that are fortunate enough to have resources is to pay attention to what happened to countries with oil the oil curse is a reality so they really should formulate their thinking in terms of long term planning look as far ahead as they can think of their and get the best international lawyers they can to work with them. We have one question from our virtual audience and this is to all panelists how to persuade convinced national governments that need to address mitigate climate change that it is now and immediate I actually think that ties to mobility and migration is actually a really concrete example of how climate is impacting communities right if you are in many places around the world you're seeing people who are displaced by climate there are many many senior officials in other parts of the world who are concerned about mass migration and what the destabilizing impact that might have on their communities for me talking about and seeing the evidence of people moving is one of our best ways to demonstrate that this is happening people are leaving because they have no other choice and so tying it to what we're seeing on the ground making clear what the connection is driving the political consensus around that that's all part of persuading national governments that this is no joke I mean it also helps by the way that people in places like Arizona felt it firsthand people in places like Switzerland where I am felt it firsthand and so that is part of the lived experience if you will well what I'll say is that what we're doing right now is part of what we need to do we have to wear it various awareness as Amy has said and a lot of people are doing excellent work to make people aware of what's happening Jeff's book was mentioned I really urge you all to read it but there have been some remarkable pieces of reporting by journalists across the globe one I will mention in particular is a piece by Alyssa Rubin and colleagues of the New York Times who went and followed with technical equipment that you could do on a print paper but you could do it online where they took instruments that could measure the body temperature of an Iraqi worker in Basra going out to work very early in the morning before because he wanted to get his job done before temperatures would be to unlivable compare that to the life of one of his neighbors not two distant neighbors, a Kuwaiti university professor who lives in a protected environment with an appropriate infrastructure these are things that can make people sense how direct this threat is in terms of impacting our lives to be a worker under noon temperatures in Texas or in Iraq or in Arizona is not something to be envied and I think this is something we have to factor in I have to say Jeff in your book you do mention this a great deal and what I appreciated most about your book is that it started off with stories of families that look like mine young families, healthy families in the US with the means to adapt to the heat and yet they are being affected too and so I think for so long so many people in positions of power and for who can influence those in positions of power have felt fairly inoculated because it's always those people in Bangladesh who are facing flooding and are going to be underwater and those poor people in the Horn of Africa facing droughts in the immediate term but we are seeing the impacts of it coming to life in a real way and so how can we catalyze on this moment to shift public opinion in a way that can influence large scale policy decision making that goes to this question of 15 years ago I had a conversation with Al Gore about the risks and consequences of climate change and he talked about everybody having their oh shit moment where they realized the scope and scale of what we are really talking about here and I think over the years I've talked to many people and it's true many of us have had our oh shit moments I asked President Obama a couple of years ago when I was traveling in Alaska with him there were some changes in the coral reefs in Hawaii that he used to swim and snorkel among when he was a kid and seeing them bleached out and changing and that was one of the things that really woke him up but I've put aside this notion that we're going to have some kind of collective awakening this is going to be trench warfare two steps forward one step back we have one political party that essentially thinks that climate change is a hoax and to the point of security and migration that we've been talking about we would like to think that as we get educated and smarter about this we'll see people in motion understand the risks and consequences of that understand how the threat to security and deal with it in a kind of rational way in fact in Texas what we see is razor blades in the Rio Grande and more calls for armed border patrols it can also work in the opposite direction which is one of the great dangers that I think we face now especially with migration using that as an excuse to divide and to build walls how do we broaden the security question to be not just about you and your family but about us and the world that's an excellent point if I may avail on our panelists to take just one more question from our live audience yes hello this is Andres Martinez the editorial director of future tense another ASU New America collaboration this conversation has been great and it's very close to home we've mentioned Arizona I lived there now and survived the 31 consecutive days of 110 plus degrees that is Fahrenheit so just to clarify I've been really struck Jeff to hear you talk about the tension between adaptation and mitigation and the sense that the politics doesn't allow to talk about both and I what feels like a lifetime ago I think we had you at your first New America talk about geoengineering of all things and so question for you and for the others is are we in a place that you feel we can still explore and deploy technology to serve as part of the answer to this looming crisis or present crisis really politics where as you said some people want to say this is a hoax other people perhaps want to say we need to change our behaviors I some days I worry that there's actually no space to really at least look at technology as part of the answer but really eager to hear your thoughts on that thank you thanks so I think when we talk about broadly about technology that's a very broad subject you brought up geoengineering which is the sort of Frankenstein of technologies which for people who don't know about this what we're talking about is you know basically some nation or even individual putting a fleet of aircraft into the sky that distributes particles that act as sort of a solar shade kind of in some sense creating an artificial volcano which would help reflect away some sunlight and cool the earth it's a really bad idea that it has some kind of political inevitability as temperatures get hotter and hotter which is a whole other subject that I don't think it's worth going into right now but I do think technology you know it can be a huge is obviously a huge tool in dealing with this whether it's you know when I was writing my C level rise book in Lagos I'm reporting in Lagos you know they were I wrote about a Dutch Nigerian architect who built a community center floating in the sort of water slums of Lagos that just out of sort of you know oil drums and spare wood it was this beautiful structure that changed the relationship of the community with the with each other and was a great example of the kind of technology that sort of anti is not technology is not always Elon Musk and you know Tesla's and things like that and here in Texas you know we see technology happening and you know changing things at a big rate you know Texas is the home of fossil fuels it's the nation home of oil and gas in America and yet during the seat wave 30% of the power on the grid was coming from basically solar and you know Texas leads the nation in in in solar energy which nobody talks about and this is happening right these technology technological changes are happening there's technology to deal with water shortages as the ambassador mentioned you know more efficient systems of all ways all kinds of redesigning systems are built more green spaces all kinds of things like this but ultimately you know I feel with the technology discussion is it plays into the idea that there's a kind of silver bullet for this problem that we just need to figure out the right gizmos deployed in the right places and everything will be fixed and it's not and you know the reason why this conversation is so important is because it's really political and it's about you know who gets these gizmos first and where the money flows and what the relationship is of you know these questions about justice and equity that we've talked about that's where the difficult part of this transition is stuck right now thank you so much and I'm a little biased I think there is a silver there potentially is a silver bullet and it's fusion but even if we achieve it if we ever will we'll have to work together to deploy it throughout the world that doesn't mean that we don't need to mitigate as much as possible reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible but there are things that we could do to see whether we can come up with a silver bullet and I think we need to do all of the above to ensure the future of that kind don't want to be too dramatic but that's what it's all about well we hope to continue these conversations here at New America and elsewhere but I think to both of your points justice and equity and human rights really have to be centered in these conversations I know that we are over time and we have to keep the agenda moving but I really do want to express my heartfelt appreciation for all of your time I know that calling in from across different time zones and with your very busy schedules isn't always easy but appreciate the time that you've made for this all important conversation thank you all thank you thank you very much for this important thing thank you here is Lillian Corral who is the Vice President of Technology and Democracy here at New America and we're going to consider what will the future of AI accountability look like so I'm going to hand it over to Lillian and she will introduce one of our keynotes thank you hello everyone hi Alan hi it's my great pleasure today to have this wonderful conversation thank you for joining us with us today is Alan Davidson the Assistant Secretary for the Department of Commerce for communication and information and he's also the head administrator of the NTIA Alan a little bit about you just for this audience although you know everybody knows who you are but Alan has over 20 years of experience at the intersection of public interest advocacy and technology and the law obviously now as the administrator of NTIA you oversee a lot of the issues that are at the forefront of discussion in the American public debate AI being one of the most important ones that we'll be talking about today but other critical ones like our internet infrastructure and so on which we care a lot about at the Open Technology Institute at New America prior to being at NTIA Alan was the senior advisor for the Mozilla Foundation which is a global nonprofit that also promotes openness, innovation and participation on the internet and then obviously Alan has a long history of being here at New America where you know he was once the director of the Open Technology Institute and also vice president of technology policies so thank you again for joining us Oh it's so great to be back here, thank you So today is an interesting day to talk about AI I know it's somewhere in DC there is also a strong cohort of individuals leaders in the industry having an important conversation as well on the future of AI and AI governance as part of Leader Schumer's Insights Forum Can we start the conversation here just talking a little bit about how you at NTIA think about balancing the need to police AI and optimize AI obviously a lot of the debate is sort of this what feels like extreme polarization around is it really great for our society or will it lead to our extinction how do you kind of set the tone or kind of lay the ground for your own thinking around this Excellent question Well actually let me first by the way start by saying it is really truly great to be back here back at New America, back at this forum and I have to say congratulations to the leaders who have been I very vividly remember I think it was the first forum that we did in this partnership between New America and ASU and admiring the quality of the conversation I felt in some ways it was sort of the best of what this community can bring to furthering our thinking on the hard policy issues in front of us so I just say congratulations to to Peter, to our colleagues at ASU and for the continuation of the forum and it's an honor to be here today for me So terrific question and I think the answer is going to be yes and both right like that the truth is that I think the administration is committed to the idea that responsible innovation in AI is going to bring enormous benefits to humanity, to people at the same time we know that there are very real risks and that those risks need to be dealt with and need to be dealt with today real risk that we are seeing today if we're going to realize that promise of AI and I think just unpacked that the president said it himself very clearly he said we have to be clear eyed about and vigilant about the threats emerging technologies can pose but there will be enormous enormous potential upsides as well and I think that encapsulates our approach right you know the rise of these machine learning techniques has been pretty incredible it's been coming and building for years I think many of us have been surprised by how fast some of the most recent developments have been and we see this is going to transform our society in many many ways and the benefits are very clear you look at something like medicine disease detection drug discovery access to healthcare information by sets of people who might never have had that access all of that is not just on the horizon it's happening now because of these techniques and that's just one area precision agriculture climate change all these things will benefit from these new machine learning tools at the same time we see real risk right and it's long-term risk and it's also immediate risk and that we need to address that risk if we're going to realize those promises but do you think that some of this notion that it will lead to our you know extinction does that sort of obfuscate or kind of make it difficult to really address the concerns and the regulations that need to be in place well it's a great question because I think we see really what should be best thought of as a spectrum of risk right and in some ways it might be easy to try to bifurcate it between the ends of the spectrum there are longer-term risks and we've heard pretty clearly from fairly senior people in the field about their worries about some of those longer-term risks and I think we've taken an approach in the administration to say we need to address those their real national security concerns, safety concerns and we should look at those in the long-term but I think we benefit also from bifurcating that and saying but there are also, that should not hide the fact that there are immediate risks too and it's a different track the immediate risk category and I think we are seeing real potential harms to privacy, to security concerns about human rights and civil rights concerns about civic discourse and those do need bias bias in these systems and equity and those do need to be addressed you may have already answered it in that remark but are there specific issues with how NTIA and the administration are thinking about the concerns around the large language models is there a nature or already some framework that you're thinking about in terms of categorizing these issues or risks it's interesting because for those of us who have been following this space for a while it's not even clear that the large language models are going to be the most impactful or economically consequential developments in this space but they really captured the public's imagination and they're being used already today my kids are using chat GPT I hope it's not on all their homework but they're using it and so it behooves us to be thinking in a clear way about what those risks are and that work has already begun and it's been in progress from the administration point of view OSTP the Office of Science Technology policy put out a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights we have worked with companies talk more about it to get commitments from them to address some of the harms that we're seeing today and I do think that there are these really immediate questions that need to be answered about the large language models and how they're being used and how they're impacting our society and I'll just say at NTIA we're thinking a lot about accountability in that space that's a piece that we've we launched a project about a year ago we talked more about it but to think about how we make sure that models are accountable and do what they say they're going to do yeah I mean it's interesting you talk about your kids using it I mean the large right now it has captured the public imagination and being a long time native Angelina I mean we're seeing the real dynamic so early on in the development of the technology that real conflict between the use of AI and then what it's doing to you know like the creative economies an example right I mean the Hollywood strike is very much centered around issues and how AI will impact the ability of a whole industry which is you know one of the reasons why our country I think has been so economically and globally powerful on a cultural level how do I know that the use of it and copyright laws are definitely not within your purview but how do you just getting your thinking on how does NTIA and commerce more broadly think about the use balancing kind of these large sets and the use of them and helping that innovative industry and economy grow and at the same time how do we protect the rights of creators that are you know whose work is being absorbed by these models and then being used to generate new content at you know at literally no or very little benefit to the original creator I think it's a great example of the kinds of dislocations that are coming and the pace of it is what is probably in some ways quite surprising I will say there this is a very hard set of issues around intellectual property and particularly large language models but also just generally in the training of models and what models produce the question of who owns what a model produces the question of can an AI own a patent or what does that look like I think there are people who are thinking about these hard legal and policy questions right now I'll just say at the commerce department our colleagues at the patent and trademark office have launched a number of inquiries both on the copyright side and the patent questions that are really interesting and to also think about how we promote in the United States more innovation how we provide the kind of intellectual property of uses and I think this question about artists is quite a real one we're seeing it play out right now and I think that will have to in some ways that will have to be resolved I don't have a great comment on the actual conflict that's going on right now in Hollywood other than to say I think it's a very good example of the kinds of dislocations that were or changes that we're going to see and we need to think about how across the board these new tools are going to affect work in some ways in bursty ways ten years ago I think many of us probably would be included predicted that driverless autonomous systems would be here within a decade and that we might not need truck drivers would our kids learn to drive even that has been slow to come turns out some of these problems are harder than we think we've made amazing progress but we're not there yet and so it's sometimes difficult to predict but there's a burstiness a non-linearity to these steps forward that I think is part of what's unsettling here yes I love that example of the autonomous technology because yes four or five years ago we thought we were seeing cars on the road at any time now and we know that the progress is made but then there's definitely a plateau in terms of the development but also then is the infrastructure really ready to support it and is our policy infrastructure ready to support it so that's a good question about then kind of jumping ahead to how you see your own policymaking especially I know that you've had increase yourself at NTIA about AI governance what are you hearing sort of one give us an update on where you see your agency's role in policymaking over the next year and then also what are you hearing from the inquiries that you've made to civil society and others about how we should be governing the space well it's terrific it's an interesting time to be working in this area and I'd say you know NTIA our statutory mandate by law our role is to serve the president's principal advisor on telecommunications and information policy what does that mean we are basically policy advisors so we think we're not regulators we're not here to regulate but we don't think necessarily about what the law says today we think about what the law ought to say and so we have been engaged in this project across the board of thinking how should we as an administration respond to these new developments which have been coming for a while how do we engage internationally we haven't even touched on the fact that there's a giant giant issues internationally to think about national security issues a strong desire to make sure that innovation happens here in the U.S and with our trusted partners around the world and that we're building AI in ways that promote our foreign policy goals as well I think all of that for us has been it's going to be a far-flung enterprise for the administration there are a number of big things that the administration is working on at MTI I mentioned one of the interesting things we started on we started on this about a year ago before all of the chat it takes a while to do some of these projects we embarked on a project on AI accountability and really thinking about this is just one example of an area but AI accountability this question of how do you make sure that models are actually behaving the way they say they're behaving a key step to making sure that we can put rules in place or guardrails in place is being able to understand what a machine learning model what an artificial intelligence system does and it's a lot like financial audits if you think about financial audits and financial systems if you're going to represent that you've done X, Y, or Z financially there are a whole set of rules around that there's a policy backstop there are standards for accounting and so we embarked on an inquiry to say what would it look like to create that kind of ecosystem for AI so that we would know what the standards are that people should be measuring against and then like figure out how you actually do that measurement we put out a request for comment in the spring we got over 1400 comments which for us our little agency is a ton we touched an herb we're very interested in this question we got a lot of comments back and I'll just say I think there's a keen interest in putting tools in place so people know how to figure out what accountability looks like and then making sure that we think about where we might need policy backstops to make sure that when companies or developers could be private sector, public sector when anybody represents something about how their AI system is working we've got tools to measure whether that's true that's just one example of a kind of full spectrum approach to these issues one of the things obviously that we really care about is the connection with public interest policy and technology right it's not just about advancing open technology but it's really about ensuring that it's serving the public interest and while a lot of these technologies tend to feel like a benefit society we know that they're obviously we've talked about the risks and so as you're engaging the public more broadly how do we actually engage the resident citizens of the U.S. whom are interacting with AI the conversation right now gets really focused on generative AI but the reality is that AI tools AI supported tools have been around in our mix for at least you know obviously for decades but you know definitely in cities and we see the issues with it whether it's you know the bias around any image based technologies so how do you I mean how do we are there things that make you optimistic are there challenges you see to having a more broad based conversation where the public can really be engaged and the concern is that they're not one of the fourth you know like a general public is not really part of the 1400 that get to you know that get to give their input to NTIA and it does seem like this is a different kind of technological moment that does require more public input and debate absolutely so I think it's essential that we have an inclusive conversation so that we are building systems that reflect these real impacts on society and if we we develop at our peril without that input and I think it's going to ultimately be it's important for developers it's important for us if we're going to meet our goals of society we've got to have that equitable conversation so how do we do it I think part of it starts with good storytelling with good narratives to help draw people into this debate you mentioned and I think people are seeing it and feeling it you mentioned some of these other advances we've had you know machine learning in our lives for a while facial recognition is a terrific example and I have to say it is quite surprising to me as an observer how far and how fast we have moved to bring these tools into everyday life you know there have been as a great example the stories about local police departments using facial recognition tools and improperly arresting people right taking people into custody taking them out of their lives the biggest thing that the state can do is deprive you of your freedom and we're doing it based on a set of tools that we know that we know we've shown our bias against people of color right that don't work as well the pace of that change the pace of that adoption just shows how much we need to do to first of all educate and inform people to understand the limits of these tools and put good guardrails in place but I think those stories help us bring people in and even though as you say large language models aren't necessarily the longest running or most impactful thing I think we have to lean into this moment this is a teachable moment for us this is our society's moment people have stepped up everybody I know is talking about chat GPT you know this winter and spring admittedly I run with a set of really nerdy people but you know I think a lot of people were talking about it and we have to use those moments to bring people in the majority of the comments we got those 1400 comments were individuals people worried about their jobs people worried about their security and privacy and I think we can bring people in and if there's anything that's encouraging here it's that we're actually a bit earlier in this discussion I mean I feel this way than we were in some of the previous generations of technology so there has been some there has been some conversation in communities across the U.S. around like facial recognition technology that has been somewhat contentious that in fact a couple years ago forced a couple companies to stop using to stop allowing police departments to use the technology how do when we think about the public when we think about public interest and equity how do we incentivize I mean are we in any position to really incentivize companies to take that view in mind first and to really focus on serving the public good and equity not just assume that it's a benefit to society but to actually really center a lot of their development around these kinds of values and principles the truth is and this is what will help us it is good for businesses and developers more broadly to be thinking about these issues up front the success of their products and of their companies is going to depend on their ability to get ahead of these issues privacy, security the impact of bias in the models that they choose and I think we need to do more work to lift that up I don't want to be naive about the work that it takes to make sure that people understand that but I talked to leaders in the developer community I think in board rooms across the country people are starting to ask the hard questions as they did with cyber security before how are we getting ahead of these issues you know are we actually doing the right thing and making sure that this isn't going to come back to haunt us in terms of our reputation or in terms of our liability I think there will be more to do the starting point is that public attention that drives developers, companies and others to really think we've got to get ahead of this and that's partly why it's important to talk about it I think these accountability frameworks that we are trying to put in place in government starting with tools that show people how they can measure their risk and then moving to ultimately I think these commitments, codes of conduct, ultimately are there going to be rules on the books that actually people have to obey and that will be the path making sure that companies are thinking about this and it strikes me it's important to say I think in New America one of the opportunities here is also to just create more dialogue between industry and civil society to really ensure that because I think the conversation is happening perhaps in the board rooms but sustaining it I think is going to require a lot of convening and constant dialogue over the next 5, 10 years of development so that we're working in essence in concert to make sure that whatever harms are emerging we can identify them quickly and address them and have some level of accountability but also create more more perspective and trust the problems are really hard I mean that's part of the challenge for us some of these are very obvious some of them are harder and so I do think and the solutions are not so easy either so we're early days but this is the part where we really need thought leaders and honestly it's going to be groups like New America who can step up and represent the broad views of the public and also have this dialogue with developers, with companies, with the technical community because we need it and I think a lot of people are asking the question what does good look like they don't even know and that's where we can help and by we I mean us well I have a couple more questions I wanted to get out of the way before we open it up for audience questions but you've been around this industry for a long time, is there something that strikes you as different in terms of how we're approaching this moment versus other ways of development you know what gives you a little bit of I mean these are really hard problems that we don't, there's so much of our own that it's hard to it's going to take a while but what gives you hope and confidence in this well I think the biggest thing is that we're engaging region relatively early so I have been in the sort of technology and policy space particularly around the internet and I think if you compare this to the early days of web 2.0 cloud computing social networking even the development of the internet I'd argue we've done more here than we did in any of those places we've learned some of the lessons part of it is that the developer community has learned like I I look at I used to have this great chart of when did each company hire its first policy person you know Microsoft it was like employee number 20,000 Google it was like employee number 3000 you know Twitter it was like number 400 right if you look at these relatively small companies doing some of this very impactful work they're hiring policy people they're bringing them they're getting themselves to Washington they're part of this dialogue that's happening on Capitol Hill right now and I think there's they're engaging earlier which is great I think also we have a much more sophisticated set of civil society players than we've ever had before New America and others out there really digging in hard on you know how do we how do we make sure we're represented here and I look at I have been involved in teaching over the years and I look at the next generation of computer science students this is what they want to be engaged in not just the development of AI but they care about the impact of what they're building and that to me is the biggest reason for hope we've created we're and we're building a generation and it's partly what they care about of young people who really want to make sure they understand the implications of what they're building so that that is the biggest reason for hope that we're early on but it's it's going to be hard work and a lot to do I would not be doing my job if I didn't mention to that point that yeah you know New America has an amazing program public interest technology program with universities across the US that's focused just on that trying to build the next generation of technologists who have the the rounded perspective to really think about the implication and the ethics that go along to building these powerful tools I think the one and it is extremely encouraging I think probably the one thing that we need to worry about a little bit here is that we don't really have the luxury of time and that is a little bit different than it felt 15 years ago let's say or 20 years ago in the internet space the internet was relatively new when I started working that's there were you know we would measure like it was 40 million people online now there's 5 billion people online the pace of change and the uptick in these technologies is very hot is fast and so we need to be figuring these issues out now so there's a sense of urgency as well so I'm glad we're engaging early but we also need to be engaging early I'll just say the administrations we're working on this right at the highest levels we've worked on this set of commitments from companies we're engaging with our international partners to make sure that we're bringing that we're working with them about global solutions and we are actually you know thinking about what does the legislative world look like just today you know Senator Schumer is convening this very high level group of CEOs that's exactly what they we should be doing right thinking educating ourselves and thinking what are the rules we need to put in place well that is a great opportunity to talk about something we you know we've been advocating for for a really long time which is you know some comprehensive federal privacy legislation that really sets us up to address not just the existing technologies that have been out there that amass and use all of America's data but also the new technologies and a lot of these LLMs in particular like it feels like the time the time says we need to act and there's some urgency around this moment that's been building up but there is a little bit of just inaction so what I mean I don't know what you think about you know our inability to get some comprehensive federal privacy legislation at the door as the Europeans have been able to do and and more generally with the kind of urgency we have there are so many there are still foundational pieces of legislation that we don't have in this country around around technology policy that that need to be advanced I mean how quickly do you know it's a complicated question but how quickly what will it take for us to really take these kinds of actions on it's a great question and I think partly because it tells us something about how we as a society are able to react to some of the technologies I do I will say it is surprising for those of us who have been in this space for a while that we don't have a comprehensive federal privacy law in this country if you had asked many of us not to date myself but 20 years ago if you had said 2023 there will not be a federal privacy law privacy law in the books I think people said that can't be right these two this can be too important we know these things are going to affect people and and we know by the way the poll the data shows us that the public wants these rules as well right and so well the administration has said the president has said we need to be doing more in this space we would really benefit from a federal comprehensive federal privacy law partly because it is the right thing to do to protect consumers and have a baseline that everybody's protected but partly also for our global leadership I mean I work with a lot of people talk to a lot of other leaders around the world thinking about this question of how we can address these hard issues and it's hard when the US itself doesn't even have a baseline privacy law and how do we think about our leadership moving forward so I'm hopeful that with the right incentives we can move quickly I do believe that there's a strong sense that the moment is upon us we have to act we're starting to act and there's going to be a lot more to come in the coming months and years I would love to open it up for questions from the audience if that's okay with you yeah thank you Alan it's good I mean I think we're all happy that somebody is well informed and as long with your deep background is effectively the point person on AI on the commercial side in this country but I wanted to I you may not be responsible for some of this but I wanted to get your thoughts on this question which is we saw essentially the news media business essentially more or less get destroyed by the fact that social media companies were sort of giving away this product for free and no business can survive if the products are being given away for free and so picking up on what Lillian said and one of the reasons we have a very prosperous country is because of copyright and patents and so if you look at the large language models I mean essentially they've hoovered up 170,000 books the authors involved have and that's just one example in terms of creative content so I mean this seems like a very big problem Alan you said time is sort of running out because this thing is moving very quickly so what are the safeguards that realistically could be put in place for content creators whether they're writers or artists or any other form of content creator including developers themselves right? It's a terrific question it's a hard problem I think the problem this is one where I suspect that law will play a major role and have to fairly quickly and when I say that I'm also I mean not just you know new legislation but the interpretation of our existing laws and I think there's a lot of work being done at the copyright office I talked with Pat in trademark office of commerce to try to get ahead of that and think about it hearings on Capitol Hill but I suspect we're going to see litigation and that litigation will give us some insight pretty quickly about what the how our current legal structure will work and then we'll have to go from there I'd also say there's an international dimension to this right? You know math does not stop at the border you know innovation in AI is happening all around the world and part of what we're so keen to do as an administration is yes work domestically think about also the companies that are leading here and getting commitments from them but also then work with our partners we're going to start with the G7 there's a big effort the Hiroshima process that's been kicked off by Japan to come up with codes of conduct around AI and then move out from there Indian government's been a big leader in the global partnership on AI we're very keen to be working with the UK they have a big safety summit coming up so I think you'll see more and more of these international efforts to try and get ahead of these big problems I'm getting the Peters today Hey I'm Pete Singer great to see you again and thanks for a wonderful talk I wondered if you could speak about your own personal but maybe the administration's view of the effect of this on jobs not merely in an economic sense but in a political and societal sense there was there's a variety of contention on how many jobs will be either replaced or redefined or reduced because of this and you know we've got estimates all over the place but what I was struck by recently was there was a poll that came out about two months ago and the way it was labeled in the media was only 14% of Americans worry that they'll lose their jobs to AI and robotics only so one out of seven people in the room and then there was a Gallup poll that came out earlier this week that said actually now it's up to 21% so can you speak to what your view on this is and how the administration is thinking about it particularly in terms of there's very clear social anxiety that also has real potential security effects I think a starting point for us has to be to engage in that conversation and to really understand that there will be impacts but also you know try to be clear-eyed about where they'll be and how we might mitigate risk the biggest thing is starting by understanding that there's going to be a lot of benefit and that that benefit in and itself will create economic opportunity I just think about for example the use of not perfect example but I was speaking to the head of a local private school here about how they were handling the rising use of chat GPT and he said well this is just like a calculator we are going to have to change the way we assess people it's not the end of education it's not something that he was planning to ban in their school it was something that they were going to embrace and think about how it was going to have to change the way they do evaluation students use the calculator today on their math tests in high school we still learn arithmetic the point is there are going to be these benefits in unexpected ways there's a different view of many of these things and not to be you know to be dismissive of concerns because they're real but you know there's data out there that also shows there's a tremendous amount of job creation that comes with these new technologies and so figuring out how we make that pivot to help people respond and also to recognize you know our predictions are not necessarily so good we talked about you know driverless cars a little while ago you know ten years ago we might have said oh my gosh we need to embark on a massive project to rescue the trucking industry that's not here yet it might be here we need to be really clear about it we need to prepare for it but right now it's very hard to find enough truck drivers and it's going to take a little while we think for some of these things to happen so I do think there's a level of preparation being ready for this and then also trying to make sure we're benefiting from the upside the last thing I'll say because I think this is such an awesome question I was just down visiting Miami Dade College down in in Miami it is a giant college system I say this with it's an ASU like college system just massive in its scale I think they have a hundred thousand matriculated students and I went they invited me to see their AI lab and I'm like you don't even really have a PhD program what is this AI lab like right and I went and I was kind of blown away because their approach is we're not here to train PhDs in creating frontier models our well but what we do think is that every business in America is going to need somebody who knows how to use you know machine learning who knows how to use chat GPT who knows how these basic tools work and we are going to be the place that trains people with an associate degree to go out there and be a user and a smart business leader on the use of AI and I think it's brilliant because the fact is we need to stop thinking about the frontier models as the only thing and the job dislocations the only thing we need to be thinking how do we train a next generation of workers to use these tools across the board whether it's radiologists you know scanning scans or you know people using chat GPT and small businesses across the country and that's the retooling that we need to do and start getting ahead of it and that's how we're thinking about it. Florida is a great model it's the largest that southeast Florida region is the largest producer of Latino engineers in the country this question you know makes me ask can you describe what efforts or maybe if they're not already in place what kinds of investments we can be making to really up the digital readiness especially of kids it just seems like part of the I think what you're describing is sort of the augmenting capabilities and potential of AI but as we know a lot of our children especially children of color poor children have just the least access to a lot of technology and even just basic tools to be successful in today's economy so how is a country do I mean what I'd love to see is a country where we're starting to invest early on and really equipping our kids to be all kids to be successful in this moment but how do you from your vantage point and in the collaborations across the federal government where do you see the opportunities to do more of that well it starts with you know the investments that we've been making in STEM education across the country steam education across the country we really do need more investment and more help for people and for diverse communities to be starting at a very young age learning about these tools and the tools that they'll need to be able to succeed in a very STEM oriented world I think we also need better digital literacy and media literacy and there's a lot of work that's been done on that so a lot of it some great work here done here in New America but that's got to be very real and you see groups shout out to Common Sense Media a great example who put out tool kits and are thinking about this how do we embrace this make sure that we're teaching digital literacy and digital media work part of our efforts even at commerce at NTIA as we think about building out broadband infrastructure we've been given big grants to do work on digital equity and our view of digital equity is it's got to include thinking about the workforce of the future helping communities that have been left behind and particularly vulnerable communities making sure they have the tools to thrive online so there's a lot of investment that's going on right now and like I said with the Miami data example we need to take a very expansive view of this this isn't just about it will be partly about investing in those frontier models in those PhDs who are creating the newest technologies the big NSF investments in those academic leadership centers but it's also about how do we reach a very broad cross-section of America and make them understand they're going to be part of this revolution too I often say no child should graduate high school without digital literacy training that is the new civics curriculum of this country and we should figure out how to make that happen Alan this has been a delightful conversation I don't know if we have any more questions from the audience but I think with that we just thank you for your time and thank you for the conversation I will say this is it is a moment of great opportunity but also some peril and I think there really is a big global conversation going on are these going to be technologies of openness are used by closed societies are they going to be technologies of freedom or of control and how do we create more equitable outcomes as we embrace this new machine learning revolution so I'll just say thank you for the conversation the thing that does give me hope is conversations like this and the engagement of leaders like we have here today so thank you Michael Garcia who is a share of the Mike Cyberfellow at New America and has a new report coming out on the cyber security risks of extended reality that will be released fairly soon so you know my name is Daniel Rothen where I co-direct the Future Security Initiative and thanks so much for being here with us Hi I'm Michael Garcia and I'm a fellow in the share of the Mike and cyber initiative in 2007 the first iPhone was released and 4G connections rolled out a year later with wide scale adoption of smartphones and access to 4G mobile apps took off it was unthinkable back then that we'd use a cell phone to get someone's car translate a menu into different languages in real time and FaceTime someone from across the world would have literally no lag time yet the subsequent implications of these apps were not thought of until the incident started happening few if any raised the long arms about foreign interference and elections by manipulating social media the sale of American data to unregulated data brokers that could then be bought by law enforcement agencies was one of dystopian future and a proliferation of virtual currency starting with Bitcoin in 2009 helped give rise to devastating ransomware attacks all of which brought on by the onset of 4G applications with deployment of 5G towers at the United States 5G cable phones and other devices will increasingly proliferate but the true benefits of 5G will be those taking advantage of reduced up and down data streams primarily virtual reality and augmented reality applications or VR and AR for short an increased adoption of 5G devices in the United States will spur widespread use of AR and VR primarily known as extended reality applications or XR for short and it will become accessible through a single or set of metaverses by this I mean a collection of virtual ecosystems that will allow users to interact with each other and their surroundings in a creative and collaborative manner in virtual spaces or physical environments that are digitally manipulated by static or mobile devices in other words one does not need a VR headset to access the metaverse but one simply only needs access to a cell phone and the internet the global XR market could be anywhere from $496 billion in 2025 which would be an increase from $46.4 billion from 2019 the EU estimates that could create anywhere between 440,000 jobs to 860,000 jobs by 2025 indeed one prediction estimates that the world could see 23 million jobs created all these numbers may seem a bit fantastical admittedly it becomes a bit more realistic given the amount of users who could be using XR applications today Americans from 16 64 years old then average 7 hours a day online you're doing it right now if that trend holds or more likely expands one aspect projects that the metaverse will increase the data usage of each internet user by 20 times importantly XR applications must be thought beyond video games or form of communication rather than just seeing a technology that's currently being used or when they will be used in various industries for example since 2017 Hawaii utility in Australia has used VR to allow users to walk through a virtual model of the treatment plan hoping to identify more design problems than traditional walkthroughs US Army course engineers are identifying AR, VR solutions to help a flood risk management infrastructure but more consequentially is how militaries will use XR technologies and metaverses US military has used XR technology for decades starting the 50s when the Air Force used simulations to replicate cockpit experiences for pilots since then the importance of XR technology across all US military branches has only grown just one point US Army has created a synthetic training environment to help training soldiers in realistic battlefields highlighting these use cases is important to detail the significance of the cybersecurity implications that could arise if a bad actor successfully exploits vulnerabilities within these systems VR headsets for examples will introduce a host of new vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to record audio and steal sensitive information which the actors could also exploit XR software to achieve their goals by taking over a user's VR headset to look at their screen, to turn on the microphone and install a virus on their computer and others but one of the more unique outcomes that a bad actor could achieve is by physically manipulating a user this has honestly been dubbed the human joystick phenomenon in fact one study found that nearly 90% of subjects could have their movements controlled by addition of content to their VR screen one could imagine the consequences that could happen in a military context moreover bad actors don't need to exploit a headset or an XR software to achieve their goals but they can potentially a data hosting provider like a mass service provider and launch additional ransomware attacks that would equip the data that is necessary needed for the XR application to function lastly all these examples of various aspects of users and organization privacy an issue that we've been grappling with for decades the United States must also contend with how other governments are developing policies to incentivize or regulate their XR market which could impact how they're used within the United States European Union for example has created a strategy to detail how it will incentivize its XR market on one hand while simultaneously initiating processes to decide how to regulate this market on the other South Korea and Japan with millions of dollars by government services to their citizens and the Metaverse but more consequential is how China views Metaverse China has created a five-year plan that details how it will become a global leader in supplying the XR technology supply chain and this plan it notes that they will develop dedicated processing chips for VR, near-eye displays and other key devices China has also taken a prominent role in developing international standards primarily through the UN's focus group on the Metaverse through this working group the UN is analyzing the technical requirements of the Metaverse for the international community China has represented that nearly each of the 10 sub-working groups and recently held the focus group second form in Shanghai this past July as an aside the United States is upset in this focus group lastly and maybe most concerning the People's Liberation Army is looking to build the battle verse to assist in military training simulating war scenarios, testing new weapons the panel is going to be led by Sarah Levinson who Sarah Levinson Moriarty who is a fellow at New America she was instrumental in getting the Levinson Act passed which was named after her father who was the longest held American hostage in Iran and who died in captivity so I'm going to hand it over to Sarah and she will introduce the panel Thank you Peter and thanks everyone for joining us what I think is a really important discussion and I'm sure everybody here will agree Do we have Cindy? We do Okay So virtually we will have Cindy Lercher who is joining us from the Foley Foundation she's the director of research hostage advocacy and government affairs I have a little handy note to myself so I'm going to put the phone away afterwards don't worry I'm happy to introduce Roger Carstens who is the presidential envoy for hostage affairs there's Cindy, I see her now we also have Ali Soufan who's the chief executive officer at the Soufan Center and he's also a former supervisory special agent at the FBI and then we have Elizabeth Whalen who's the sister of Paul Whalen who's currently held in Russia against as well Thank you all for joining us I am going to pass it over to Cindy for a moment I know she wanted to talk a little bit more about the Foley Foundation's annual report bringing Americans home Thank you very much Sarah and and first we'd like to give a special to Peter Bergen and Sarah, Levinson Moriarty both former Foley Board members I might add we're just so grateful for you leading the discussion today as well as our panelists and our audience for joining today just to give a quick little introduction to the Foley Foundation we are named after James Wright Foley who was a freelance conflict journalist who reported often in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria Jim was kidnapped on Thanksgiving Day in 2012 then held captive by the Islamic State until his public and brutal murder on August 19, 2014 The Foley Foundation began three weeks after Jim's murder and since then our president and founder Diane Foley has been advocating for the freedom and health of hostage in Robson and promoting journalist safety around the world What brings us here today is our fifth annual bringing Americans home report Our reports consist of over 250 interviews with hostages, wrongful detainees and their families as well as interviews with current former U.S. officials across what we like to call the U.S. Hostage Enterprise that was stood up by Executive Order 13698 Presidential Policy Directive 30 also known as PPD 30 that was back in 2015 which all was later codified by the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage Taking Accountability Act in 2020 This year's reports findings which can be found on the Foley website are based off of two Foley data sets which consist of 215 hostage and 207 wrongful detainee cases going back to 2001 However, this year's results focus primarily on 2022 up to July 31st of this year I should first begin by defining a hostage versus a wrongful detainee which we adhere to the U.S. Government and how they distinguish between the two cases specifically a hostage is an individual kidnapped by a terrorist organization criminal and militant group as well as pirates However, we do exclude criminal cases in our data set wrongful detainees however are individuals held by foreign governments i.e. state actors However, we do at Foley recognize the strong similarities between hostages and wrongful detainees such that both groups are targeted for being Americans and both are held for the purpose to try to effect change in U.S. policy forced concessions and or request a prisoner swap At the time their report was written there were 59 U.S. nationals held hostage and wrongfully detained overseas and over 90% of those cases were wrongful detentions and it's been consistent that way 40 of those cases 79% were U.S. nationals that were held in China Iran, Russia, and Venezuela However, 14 other countries either detained or wrongfully held a U.S. national in 2022 and 23 while we have seen historic levels of U.S. nationals wrongfully detained by foreign governments over the past decade specifically 175% increased in the number of wrongful detention incidents and a 580% increase of the number of U.S. nationals who continue to be held year after year However, there has been which is very good a 31% decrease since the publication of last year's report of U.S. nationals held abroad This is due to 25 releases that at least public releases that occurred from 2022 up to July 31st of this year in the year 2022 also contained the highest number of wrongful detainees released overall within our database that begins in 2001 However, while there have been significant number of releases, it's important to note that the number of U.S. nationals who continue to be held remain at historic high levels. At the same time the number of U.S. nationals held hostage by terrorist organizations militant groups and pirates have fluctuated over the past two decades overall there's been a general downward trend since 2016 since 2022 there have been 9 U.S. hostages released which occurred in Yemen Afghanistan, Niger and Burkina Faso groups responsible for holding these Americans were the Houthis, the Taliban the Kani network and JNIM While there have been several successes over the past year or so I'd like to end with a very stark reminder that we continue to still see Americans held hostage in wrongfully detained overseas currently the Foley Foundation is tracking at least 60 of those cases and of the current hostage and wrongful detention cases, 6 U.S. nationals have been held for over 10 years which is an hour to 14 years thank you very much And I think that is a great place to kind of start the conversation and think about it. I think there's a lot of details and statistics that are in the report and I want to get into the nitty gritty and a little bit of the meat behind it Before we do, I do think it's important to acknowledge the death of Governor Bill Richardson the funeral is tomorrow and so I wanted to take a moment given the success over the past year and I know that there was a close partnership with Governor Richardson and a lot of the people on this stage, I wanted to give everyone a moment just to say a few words about his impact on the hostage ecosystem as a whole I'll go ahead and start by me. Bill Richardson was a great American he spent pretty much a good part of his life trying to free Americans around the world with their hostages wrongfully detained I consider him a strong partner, gave me a lot of advice especially when I was just starting out and I can go back to my time trying to work the Venezuela portfolio there was a time when the United States government just was not gaining traction in Venezuela and Governor Richardson was able to get a meeting with the Venezuelans, flew down to talk to President Maduro and it kind of highlights how in a way this is a team sport and there are times when the United States government can't get the job done for various reasons and yet we're able to work with titans of foreign policy like Bill Richardson who can still try to get the job done so he'll be missed, he was a good friend and ally and my heart goes out to not only his family but also the Richardson Center and Mickey Bergman and the team I second everything Roger said I mean Ambassador Richardson was the trusted third party before there were any third parties he definitely will be missed and it's going to be very difficult to have somebody fill his shoes and I'll just add in that we really appreciated the help that he offered early on when we couldn't get any traction with the Trump administration and it was good to have somebody down in D.C. going around and knocking on doors for us thanks Elizabeth it's a tremendous loss and I think for most families that worked with Governor Richardson he was almost a center of gravity in this space he was a champion, a leader a trailblazer for decades focusing on hostage and wrongful detention cases and truly my heart goes out to the family and to Mickey during this time and he'll be missed greatly thanks Cindy so great let's jump into a bit of the meat of it Roger if you could just level set a little bit for people how do wrongful detention cases come to your desk someone finds out that their family member is being held how did they get to you and how has the Levenson Act helped to enable you to do your job fantastic first question so first off I wouldn't mind thinking New America Foundation and my former boss Peter for hosting this New York State University also for their part in putting this together and to thank my fellow panelists up here this is a team effort it's not just the government it's people like Sarah, Elizabeth and Ali who actually do a lot of the hard work behind the scenes to pull this all together in a way you're all included in that except for Colonel Liam Collins you are not included in that and Liam you'll see how war boots just in case I have to quickly escape the stage and X Phil all the way back to the State Department looking forward to your panel anyway, so wrongful detention has come to us in numerous ways I've had mothers send me an email saying Roger I got your email from so and so my son is being held in Country X the details are such would you please look into that and that's actually a good thing we take that seriously in other words we have a hunger to get Americans out and so however it gets to us that's a good thing so if we take that we go to the consular affairs and reach out to the embassy of the country in question and start gathering all the facts that we possibly can't because at the end of the day we want to build a file with the facts of the case take the Levenson Act criteria and apply that criteria over those facts to see if it's strong enough to send to the Secretary of State for recommendation but we also get them from embassies you might have an embassy a consular officer see that someone's been arrested in a certain country and it's wrong about this case they'll dig into it a little bit and eventually we'll get a cable coming to the Department of State in Washington saying embassies such and such believe this case to be that of a wrongful attention and again it's not a done deal yet at that point we still start gathering information journalists by reporting something I would say a Catherine Swadon gave a wonderful interview I want to say it was in the Houston Chronicle many years ago I read an interview with this grieving mother and was like we've got to figure out whether this case belongs in our desk or not so they come in various ways but once it hits the State Department it's really the starting point is really SPIHA and consular affairs taking a look at the case and then starting to do all the queries whether it's going to the CIA the embassy talking to reporters talking to the families we're essentially trying to vacuum up any bit of information that allows us to build the facts of the case and when the facts of the case are there then as I said we apply the Levenson Act criteria on the top to see if it feels wrongful and that maybe gets to maybe the crux of your question the Levenson Act has been seismic for various reasons in that it codified what we do it's actually put it into law it's allowed us to garner resources it's allowed us to write a report to Congress that falsely explains what we've done but I would say the most important part to my mind is that it gives us criteria with which to evaluate these cases before the Levenson Act came out I think we were just kind of winging it we would try to get a sense of whether someone was held purely because they were an American citizen and a country was leveraging us and now we can take a look at that criteria and actually take a look at some of these cases and bring them on board and I would argue that one of the reasons that we've seen an uptake in 2020 in the Mount of Wrongful Detentions is because we now have criteria and as you probably know and I'll end on this when the criteria came out we sent a cable out all over the world and every single U.S. Embassy and every single consulate had to relook every single arrest and that was like thousands upon thousands of people I said I know you've probably seen all your cases before but take the criteria, apply it to the facts and let's see if we've missed something so I can't thank you enough and for members on Capitol Hill and everyone else who put that legislation together but again it's an example of the partnership of working with family members members on Capitol Hill, their staffs and such to bring something together that has been of great value to this enterprise Thanks Roger and I ask the other panelists to forgive me because I'm going to ask the second question to you as well because I think it's at the top of everyone's mind right now is the Iran deal that's happening Oh good, no comment That was easy I wanted to ask you just a bit because there's a lot of people out there who might be saying things to the effect of this incentivizes hostage taking and I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that in this kind of setting and then Ali I have a follow up question but how do you see this deal coming about and what do you say to those naysayers about whether this incentivizes through I think on the deal itself these are things that we hope for and I can't really say much at all because it's something that we want to wait until it's all over and then we're going to be very open and engaging with members of the public press Congress etc but in terms of your question the United States has made some trades in the last two and a half years the Secretary of State and the President have together worked to make some very hard decisions to bring Americans back and yet in some of these trades that have gone down range we've just not seen the bump up in numbers and we're still going to run the math but I would say anecdotally right now despite the fact that we've I can think of five people that we've traded during the Biden administration we've just not seen uptick and if anything I might say that the number of wrongful detainees is actually going down so you think that if you made a trade that would incentivize everyone and everyone would be out there trying to grab what we could to use this leverage against us and the data is just not showing that and I do want to get a bit into deterrence on top of that afterward but Ali I wanted to give you a chance to speak from your perspective as a third party intermediary how you see the Iran deal and how important adversaries or partners in other countries might be helping us and how we should be thinking about that I think as an outside third party I just care about the people who are going to be released and their families so towards the end everything is going to be political we're in a political year people will have different view of anything that happens based on their partisan lens and to the most part the American people understand the importance of having these folks back with their loved ones and their families so if a government official can say third party no comment other one I said but third parties play a very important role and they play an important role in trying to help the government sometimes go around bureaucracy sometimes open channels and it's difficult for governments to open reach out into regions that's difficult for the US government to automatically reach out to or operationally reach out to and dealing with other partners and government partners overseas in explaining the USCVU in order to kind of like grease the wheels for Roger and others to get involved I think it's extremely important for third party to be very well trusted by all players especially the US government have the knowledge because sometimes third party can complicate a case more than it need to be complicated sometimes for reasons that has to do let's say you know I want to say promotion or whatever it might also you know create some difficulties in moving forward and solving a case so I think from the report the Foley Foundation just put out we had about 25 cases this year that were solved 17 of them were from the 2 different ways 2 different categories here you have the hostages and you have the wrongfully detained from the wrongfully detained I think we had 25 cases 17 of them were just diplomatic efforts of state department and the US government and Roger 12 of them were third party and government so there is definitely a big space for trusted third parties they have to be trusted in order to get involved and I think they can help the families and they also can help the US government reach to a good conclusion in bringing those folks back to their loved ones Elizabeth I want to ask you a bit about your own experience so your brother has been held since 2018 you've seen over 2 administrations how these kind of cases are being handled what's your perspective on what we can be doing better how should we be thinking about this and how has the hostage diplomacy as a foreign policy grown from what you've seen since 2018 well it has been it's almost been 5 years since Paul was wrongfully detained I don't like the term wrongfully detained by a foreign government who wants something for him and that's hostage taking so I tend to refer to it as state sponsored hostage taking rather than wrongful detention because I think wrongful detention is too soft of a term to describe what's going on and I would say I'd like to speak just for a second as part of this response to this whole business about does giving some kind of trade or whatever incentivize further hostage taking and I'd like to point out very particularly my brother's case because Paul was arrested no trade was made for him but then Trevor Reed and Brittany Griner were both taken so the Russians were incentivized by their own minds as to what they thought it had nothing to do with anything that we have or have not done in response so what a hostile foreign government decides to do and why they decide to hold Americans there are a myriad of reasons but it very rarely in my opinion from what I've seen in five years has anything to do with a trade that went before now I will say though in Russia's case that we have seen them try to play the US government with their trades in other words release Brittany Griner and not Paul because they knew of the partisan chaos that that would cause back here and so one of the things that I have been doing recently is pushing to make sure that Paul is not left behind for a third time you know we have another case and I feel for any family in this situation and any detainee but I want to see Paul home and so my job you know when I'm here in DC is to go to the NSC the State Department and such and say thank you for all the work you're doing because we have seen a huge upturn particularly after the Levinson Act has passed and in this administration of people really caring and trying to do as much as they can but you can't say that every stone is being left unturned if there are some stones that still need to be turned over if there are some boulders that we've gently pushed against but we haven't done anything more with and so I have to come down as a family member representing Paul who can't be here and ask the government to push over those boulders to do what it takes to actually get my brother home it is no good to go 80% this other 20% that would result in a win is what is necessary and I look for a winning mentality from any administration Thanks Elizabeth and Cindy I'm going to ask you to speak for a minute just to build on that some of the big boulders that we see what information from the report could we take and really push maybe if we had to prioritize one or two of the findings in the report that we should be encouraging Congress and new legislation to build on the Levenson Act what would you say we should be thinking about? To build I think it's great everything that Elizabeth just said because she represents a family's voice and the work that we do at the Foley Foundation may come alongside family members so we understand so we work with them days after their loved one is either kidnapped or picked up in a foreign government and so we understand we understand the challenges families face as they try to navigate the DC in hostage enterprise most families don't even know what the hostage recovery fusion cell is the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs they're just not aware but the Levenson Act has been and I agree it's been a linchpin to the hostage enterprise but the biggest challenge and I would say this even for wrongful detainee families and for the audience I think it's important to know the only one that has the authority to make the determination for wrongful detention is the Secretary of State so some of these families to be able to get that wrongful detention determination to be able to get access to Ambassador Carson's office there is is an enormous challenge and I think the largest challenge and one of the biggest takeaways is to identify the fact that there's a gap between how the State Department might view a case versus how a family views their case and a family can have a lot of information a lot of intelligence but it's unclear whether or not that internal process in the State Department before it reaches the state office if they have all of that so it's really an opaque process for a lot of these families so one of the things that we would like to do and it builds off of our recommendations as well so help try to close that gap so it's less of a opaque process for the families so they know what they're fighting for what they're fighting against they really just don't know and you know it can take you know a few months to get the designation or it can take a couple of years and it would be it would just be advantageous and helpful for families so they can know what you know they want to put that right foot in front of them right they've made the left step they want to make the right step which which direction does that need to go and I think there's a lot of room within our U.S. government to be able to close that gap to help make that more of a transparent process for families Thanks Cindy and I think that there is work being done on the Hill in that regard and I'd love to give you a chance to respond but I'm conscious of time and I really want to get to deterrence because that's where my passion is right now because I think that it's great that we're bringing so many people home but we need to stop this practice so I wanted to ask both of you and and I'll have you guys weigh in in a second but the secretary had in 2021 been part of the Canada initiative the declaration against arbitrary detention and state to state relations what's happened since then what should we be looking to I know the secretary is very big on deterrence how should we be thinking about this both from a government non-government and private corporation perspective I'll try to be very tight on that by the way I should say thank you to Cynthia for that great report another wonderful report that you've put out and also to the Fully Foundation I see Ellen back there scribbling notes but thanks for all the work that you've done and this report is actually very important to us so thank you in terms of deterrence the secretary I think within the first 14 days of his time here he put his hand on my shoulder and said we've got to get this to where this problem goes away that we put it on the dustbin of history and this may take 10 to 15 years but we have to start it now and since then we have been working with the Canadians they're up to 74 signatures at this point you may or may not know but at the UN General Assembly in New York next week the Canadians are hosting a gathering to talk about the declaration the United States is co-hosting along with Costa Rica so the secretary has stayed right on top of this he's kept it front and center and I would say as I just want to make sure that everyone else has a chance to talk here we try to look at this very holistically I think right now something happens in the foreign policy arena and the United States feels they have to go for a deterrence effort they'll quickly reach in their bag of tricks and pull out sanctions and it's probably it might be an overused tool by this point we would like to take a look at this more broadly across the all elements of national power what you might call the dime bill diplomacy information military economic legal efforts economic financial informational aspects what can we do across the entire elements of US national power to start using tools to make a country not do this anymore to raise the price of this so that a country like Iran for example will say you know what we used to do this but now if we do it again the US is going to raise the cost but in a way that's not the entire answer this has to be a multilateral effort right now the Iranians are going to take hostages from the Swedes the Belgians the French the United States country X country Y country Z and then they'll make their separate deals with each we want to get it to the point where a country suffers one of their citizens being arbitrarily detained in Iran and 10, 20, 30 countries all band together and tell the Iranians you've done something wrong we believe this person is wrongfully detained and we're all getting together to use these tools across all elements of our national power to raise the cost of this if that's if we can successfully do that over the next 10 to 15 years we can take a practice which is essentially 4,500 years old and put that away Thanks Roger and I'm just going to weigh in here as an active moderator and say that I think there's a couple of things that you and I have talked about that would build on that and the US can lead the way in terms of making wrongful detention officially a crime as part of Title 18 or opening up the foreign sovereign immunities act to allow for private litigation against wrongful detention I also think from an American perspective we need to stop having people travel to these countries and build more awareness so the State Department has a website for do not travel to certain countries or the risk of wrongful detention but making more awareness of those risks so that people don't go to these countries Ali I know you had some thoughts on the declaration I wanted to give you a chance to add and I think we're wrapping up on Well I think the Canadian initiative is a very important step as Roger said there is I think 70 you know more than 74 questioners I think we need to have a common definition between all our partners and because what's what's happening like for example I'll give you an example instead of talking around it Jeff Whitkey was kidnapped in a Sahara region but he was kidnapped because they thought he was French and they know the French policy in giving concession but when they found he's an American they kept him for 7 years same thing with sister Sue Allen so every country even from our allies and partners and western partners have a different definitions in dealing with these things constraining the liberty of any individual is illegal according to international law and according to UN laws however they always define it as a hostage not wrongfully detained so states are using this states like Iran or Russia or China and many of the entities that's using the wrongfully detained just to use it to use that term for the sake of argument they are using it because they are they are trying to get something and those individuals or these countries are heavily sanctioned anyway and they are pariah states some of them anyway so just putting additional sanction on the regime is not going to you know effect the people who are making these decisions will probably effect the people so we need some kind of an international coordination with the international community in dealing with these two issues not only from a hostage perspective but also as a state nation states using detention as an international relation tool that they have so this is essential this is important to have something like this and hopefully that down the road can be an international loving act codified all these things in international and international treaties the other thing is prevention I think I would love to see for example if you're buying a ticket even online from any of the platforms something comes up that it explains to you the danger of going to that place and you have to say yes I agree or I read that and understand the complication of what you're going to put your family through and what you're going to put your country through so I think that can be something the travel industry and state department hopefully can work together on something like the third I think is pre-deployment to training journalists I think the Folly Foundation they have a course for journalists to you know independent journalists especially who go overseas also you know this pre-deployment training can be done with coordination sometimes of the US government or by independent third party experts for NGOs faith based organizations you know individuals you know groups of people who are more at risk students and so forth to go for research to these areas so they know what's going to happen if they get picked up they know what their families need to do they prepare themselves just in case so these these are things that you know can happen and I can see them happening but we definitely need to do it in order to create prevention and also to create deterrence Thanks and I'm going to go to you in a second I just want to say for the record that I've been trying to get in touch with the ad council I really think we need some public service announcements around this and I think when somebody goes to search for a location in Google you should get targeted ads as a result of travel to Iran or travel to Russia so that you see some of these risks and have more of that awareness as well as the hostage flag being up at passport agencies or I understand that congress is putting in the passport book some legislation to have information in your passport book about the risk of wrongful detention Elizabeth I know you have some thoughts on this I had wanted to throw another sort of entity in there that I think could play a part in helping with hostage-taking or wrongful detention. We tend to look to the government and to NGOs to solve these situations but we are letting corporations, large corporations who already operate globally and have contacts and connections in different countries we're letting them off the hook. They are allowed to not participate in helping bring Americans home and I feel very strongly about this because my brother was a corporate security director for Borg Warner Automotive and would travel around the world doing business for them and so he was not in Russia on business he was there to help a friend with a wedding but they had contacts and the ability to potentially help Paul in those early days and instead what they did was they made sure that their investors were protected and they eventually a few months later terminated him so that he was no longer an employee. He hadn't at that time there was no Robert Levenson act so it took him almost a year and a half to be declared wrongfully detained and it was just the biggest blow to him that not only was he the global security director but he had created a process for dealing with hostage-taking and kidnapping and his own corporation didn't apply it to him. Another case that I only know of of course as an observer is the Sit Go Corporation when the Sit Go 6 were taken and they did not do what needed to be done for their employees so we see on the other hand the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are doing what they can for Jason Rezaian and now for Evan Gershkovich they have a bully pulpit and they're definitely able to weigh in but is that at the expense of some of these other detainees like my brother for example so what I am looking for is for a way to whether it has to come from the government or how else to have a level of accountability from global corporations who might have connections and ways to help whether it's help the US government help the Svihar or whatever but that is considered only the that's the acceptable standard and not helping is considered unacceptable. Thanks Elizabeth and I think we brought a lot of information into a really small discussion I think we could talk all day about this but I know we're out of time so oh I got the hook okay okay good all right perfect then I can go over to Cindy I don't know Cindy if you want to weigh in on your perspective from everything that's just been said five more okay sure I'd be happy to I mean of course going last there's everybody had great great opinions on this it's it's challenging at the end of the day accountability is what matters having the world watching when you're committing crimes that does something you know and I agree I agree with sanctions right like you know there's sanction fatigue right and but at the same time you know if we look at the sanctions that we do have is do we have the ability to delist some of these individuals does that help in steps and negotiations or lead to future and further negotiations in addition to that you know along with what Ali was saying having that international attention having that broad definition so it impacts globally you know there's the international convention as to taking a passage that you know that was written in 79 that has not been updated to include hostages taken by foreign governments that would be a good tool to use last suggestion I'll be real brief here and this is kind of a long stretch here is the United Nations again what would happen if you had here's the word again if you do sanction somebody globally we do with the specially designated global terrorist lists we will designate you know a foreign terrorist individual here in the United States which restricts their travel and their funds but in addition to that the UN will come on top and also sanction that individual that meets their criteria and they usually and they typically do that within the first week up to a month when the US does designate and that restricts travel globally for the countries that do participate as well so that's just another look at that but again it's really difficult the challenge here with holding individuals responsible for state for state hostage taking essentially is how high up the chain you know what you know how how is the sanction effective you know if you can't hold the entire regime accountable but at the same time how effective are individual sanctions if it's difficult to be able to identify which individuals responsible for those human rights violations I would say they have to feel the direct impact yes can I give you some good news I would offer that when the President put out his executive order last summer President Biden he actually directed that we keep pushing on this deterrence effort so it's not even just the Secretary of State saying you will it's the President of the United States with all executive authority saying to the interagency figure this out and let's get a deterrence effort up and running and additionally he did give us a sanctioning authority within the sphere and we've so far used it against the Russian FSB their intelligence services and the Iranians IRGC IO so there is no ability within the Spihal realm to like throw a sanction down on an offending organization or person but the most important thing is everything that we're talking about we have an order and a director from the President to figure this out and make it happen yes and I think when those sanctions did come out I'm not sure who it was exactly but said that it's okay to build sanctions upon existing sanctions because it's about hostage taking it's about wrongful detention taking and so I think seeing more Levinson Act sanctions is something that's very much welcome and then building upon that I do want to allow for one or two questions out of the audience I'm told I have a time for that now so Peter so this is really first of all a comment about Roger Roger's I think one of the very few senior officials who was held over by the Trump administration from the Trump administration into the Biden administration precisely because he's been so effective and the families really wanted him to stay in that position so just wanted to thank you for all the work it was your leadership Peter I learned when I worked for you the other thing is I wanted to put a little meat on the bones because Ali had been talking about third parties and Ali was involved in an effort and I think it's all public now that involved David Bradley who's the former chairman of the board here at near America which is Theo Padnos an American journalist was taken by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria and held for I think at least two years and Ali and David Bradley were instrumental third parties in getting him out so Ali just if you could reflect a little bit on what you can say about that you know I think the way we were dealing with hostages and excuse