[00:00.00]Chairman Rogers, thanks for joining us.
[00:01.71]Thanks for having me.
[00:02.31]As you know, the president is reviewing NSA surveillance policy.
[00:05.56]Whatever changes are going to happen are coming out later this month.
[00:09.05]If he were seeking your counsel, what is the most profound thing you think he needs to address?
[00:17.27]Part of the problem with where we're at is that we're fighting perception about what people think is happening vs. what's actually happening.
[00:25.37]And so that's been our biggest challenge on the education piece.
[00:29.77]So, I think the first round, we all want to agree that these programs have kept Americans safe.
[00:35.51]They have kept our allies safe.
[00:37.27]There are multiple levels of oversight that no other intelligence service in the world has, 
[00:44.92]like the United States intelligence oversight, between the courts and the Congress and the inspector general, and then the FBI, the Department of Justice.
[00:53.89]I mean, you name it. It has it all.
[00:55.21]So I think what we can do is have some confidence-builders for the American people to look at this and understand, 
[01:01.19]ah, one person can't run off and listen your phone call or read your e-mail.
[01:06.49]None of that is happening.
[01:07.36]So, are you saying the president needs to maybe bring more transparency, do exactly what's being done, who is doing it, and what the safeguards are?
[01:16.49]I think that would be incredibly helpful for the president to do that.
[01:20.63]But isn't there then a tension between that and how much you want to divulge or he wants to divulge?
[01:26.13]Well, absolutely.
[01:26.88]I do think that we can talk about some of the oversight that we have on certain aspects of the program, 
[01:32.14]certainly the business records portion, the metadata on business record -- phone records. 
[01:38.02]That certainly, I think...
[01:39.33]That is the sort of bulk collection of phone records, who you called, when you called, and the length of the call, that kind of thing?
[01:45.53]With the exception, we don't know who you are or where you live. 
[01:48.57]Right? It's just a bunch of phone numbers that we use as a foreign nexus to terrorism.
[01:53.77]So, a foreigner in Afghanistan or Pakistan that we assume is a -- 
[01:58.51]and have good credibility that is a terrorist has a phone number of a U.S. number, you want to be able to make that nexus.
[02:06.61]That is really what that database is.
[02:08.25]Do you think that the balance, 
[02:10.30]though, between protecting the security of this country against terrorist threat and the sort of affirmative protection of civil liberties has gotten out of whack?
[02:20.75]I don't think we're out of whack.
[02:22.25]We could always improve. I would never say never in that regard.
[02:25.96]In the metadata collection, there has been no willful use to misuse the privacy of just your phone numbers, not even your name.
[02:36.26]Yes. There seems to be no limit really on what data they can collect.
[02:39.61]And even the president said, we have to ask at some point whether the technology has outpaced the laws and protections that are in place.
[02:49.48]Well, I think the technology is keeping up with our adversaries' interests to do harm to the United States and to use systems to communicate.
[02:58.27]And here's what I think is a big part of it. And we constantly review this, by the way.
[03:02.74]We want to be able to make sure our laws are consistent with technology and where we are in 2013 vs. 1947, when the National Security Act was written.
[03:12.09]But you think about where we are.
[03:13.64]So, in today, in the networks in the United States of America, over 80 percent of them are private networks, which means the NSA doesn't monitor them.
[03:22.05]There is no wholesale monitoring. They're not reading your e-mails. They're not listening to your phone calls. That's simply not happening.
[03:28.56]The Europeans are extremely upset with the Snowden revelations about the degree to which they're being surveilled.
[03:36.83]Right.
[03:37.17]Well, first of all, the hypocrisy in this debate has been shocking to me from our European allies.
[03:44.19]As I have often said, it's good to remind ourselves that espionage is a French word, after all.
[03:49.19]And so, when you look at the intelligence services of our allies in the European Union, they are alive and well and aggressive.
[03:56.29]And some notion that the information that we have been collecting over time hasn't benefited our allies is just simply not true -- 
[04:04.98]some 54 different attacks thwarted just by our business record metadata collection.
[04:10.39]And another program that we use to collect information has been shared with our allies and stopped terrorist attacks in Germany.
[04:19.99]And you know that to be the case?
[04:23.30]I absolutely know that to be the case.
[04:24.88]And here's the good news. Now so do they. 
[04:27.43]And so, sometimes, the politicians were saying this and not realizing that something else was going on in sharing information and cooperation.
[04:36.04]As the big U.S. Internet giants just said this week, I mean, Yahoo!
[04:41.54]and Google and Facebook, the perception in Europe now is that doing business with our companies isn't safe, and they can't trust us, and it's hurting their business.
[04:54.00]Is this something the president has to do something to address, to redress, and what could he do?
[05:00.44]I think we lost the P.R. war in the front, but it's really important to understand that, again, France just passed a law to make it easier to go after servers in their own country.
[05:09.25]All of the European Union now is saying, well, maybe we should have servers only stationed in our country. 
[05:15.27]Well, guess what? That means that their standard of oversight, their standard of protection is very different than ours.
[05:21.91]And we do have multiple layers of oversight that they don't have.
[05:26.27]Coming back to the U.S., the PEN writers group did a survey of 250 professional writers. It just came out this week.
[05:35.01]And a quarter of these writers said they feel inhibited.
[05:40.12]They are censoring themselves in what they discuss in e-mail, and the research they do, especially if it involves anything overseas.
[05:47.33]Does that -- as someone who has always believed individual liberties, does that concern you?
[05:53.63]Yes, the attitude certainly does.
[05:55.92]And I -- you know, that's mortifying to me that they would feel that that would be an issue that the government would be interested in, candidly.
[06:07.42]Even they're engaged into some issue that may be even questionable, 
[06:12.31]if it's a political issue, and you are expressing yourself, you need to feel comfortable that you can do that in the United States.
[06:17.89]That -- we should never lose that.
[06:19.16]Some members of Congress, at least on the Senate side, feel that they have been misled about -- 
[06:25.97]by the head of the NSA, by the director of national intelligence about how much data is being collected on Americans, metadata, whatever you want to call it.
[06:36.27]Do you feel that there's been any either misleading, willful or otherwise, about the extent of that?
[06:44.26]I know, as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, we have had this information. We have been briefed on it.
[06:50.06]We have had opportunities to ask questions on it.
[06:52.01]I supported these programs. We had some differences. We worked them out. Were there problems that we found?
[06:56.97]Yes. But we worked with them in the appropriate channels, classified channels to fix them, like you would expect us to do as members of the Oversight Committee.
[07:05.56]But, at the end of the day, I supported them when nobody knew about them. And I support them now.
[07:10.16]Chairman Mike Rogers, thank you.
[07:11.91]Yes. Thank you.