Remarks by Secretary Michael Chertoff to the American Society of Newspaper Editors

Release Date: January 18, 2007

Washington, D.C.
American Society of Newspaper Editors

Secretary Chertoff: That was really a nice way of telling everybody that I have never succeeded in holding a job for an extended period of time.

I also do want to thank Andy for being understanding about my need to change the topic at the last moment, but it was my judgment that to talk either generally or specifically subpoenas to journalists or leaks would run the risk of being interpreted as a comment on an ongoing trial, and as a former judge, I'm very sensitive about not doing that or interfering with that process.

So I've changed the topic, to some extent, but I still think it is one that is very, very pertinent to how you do your job and how I do my job and how we do our job and the government, particularly as it relates to homeland security and national security.

How we relate to each other institutionally is really a function of the roles and responsibilities that we respectively see for ourselves in society. My principal responsibility and the responsibility of my department is to do everything we can, within reason and in a balanced way, to protect the lives and security of Americans, and hopefully to do it in a way that doesn't sacrifice either our fundamental liberties or our way of life.

You also have a role involving protecting American values, and it involves reporting and analyzing the news for Americans so that they can be informed and make judgments about how their democracy works.

Both of these roles are critical to the health and survival of society. We all need to have the government protect us, because if we are attacked and if there's a loss of life, it's going to be visited upon all of us and our families as well. But at the same time, we need the media to keep the public informed about what we do, and also to make sure there is a check on government, because our government doesn't have all the answers, and it's useful to be reminded sometimes of the limits of what we should be doing and where we are perhaps falling somewhat short.

I also want to say, from a personal standpoint, I have an appreciation for the press, because in one of my brief periods of time holding a job -- I was in private practice -- I used to represent the press. I represented a number of news organizations and reporters. I did it in cases involving information from sources and other kinds of investigations. And I dealt to some extent with First Amendment matters also when I was a judge, although I don't think it was ever one that dealt directly with the press. But I think I've at least had some opportunity to see this from both sides of the problem.

Well, let's talk in general about what my department does, and then I'm going to talk about two particular issues where I think we intersect with the press. And it's important that we come to a common understanding of what we need to do in our respective roles.

Obviously we have a whole range of responsibilities relating to homeland security, security with respect to a man-made emergency or attack, and security with respect to a natural disaster and attack. That means we have among our jobs keeping dangerous people either out of the country or out of our critical infrastructure; keeping dangerous cargo and things out of the country like chemical, biological and radiological weapons; protecting our critical infrastructure, but in a way that doesn't burden our economy overly much; having an emergency response system and a culture of preparedness that prepares us to deal with any kind of an unforeseen or foreseeable emergency. And finally, of course, we have our own institutional obligation to build a new department out of 22 agencies.

Every one of these functions involves communication with the American public. Obviously, communication in terms of what we do in screening, when we did the change of regime in the transportation area on aircraft, after August of this past year, where we had the aborted plot to blow up airliners going to the U.S., it was important for us to communicate, first of all, why we did it and what we were doing. And the ability to do that had a real operational significance. And this is one of my main messages.

Often people think about the relationship between the press and government as a contest, where the press is there to try to get the government, and the government is there to try to evade the press. But a huge part of what we do is literally just sharing information with clarity and precision so people can make life decisions that are important to them. And that's an area where we have a common interest. We both want to have accurate information out. It's not even necessarily an issue of an area of agreement or disagreement. It's just a question of precision and knowing what the facts are, and then communicating those facts concisely in a very dynamic environment and in an environment in which there are a lot of competing voices, sometimes voices which have their own facts, and remind us of that old saw, people are entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts. So that's one of the big challenges for us.

So when I look at what we have to face as we deal with these kinds of emergencies, I want to focus on a couple of areas where we have recurrent challenges working together. One has to do with the general issue of threats: How do we view threats? How do we communicate among ourselves about threats? And how do we communicate with you and how do you communicate to the public about threats? And the second is this issue of emergencies: What do we do when there's an actual emergency, and how does that relate to our way of communicating with each other and communicating with the public?

Well, let me talk a little bit about threats. We get a lot of threat information. Every single morning I wake up and I get a book full of information about threats. And it really varies in terms of specificity and quality. One of the catch phrases I often find that we use when we communicate with the press is we talk about whether a threat is specific or credible.

In reality, there is a spectrum. We know, for example, that if you overhear a drunk in a bar talking about an attack that's going to happen involving the Martians landing on the Capitol, that is perhaps specific, because it tells us where and when; it's not particularly credible. On the other hand, we might get a threat from a very credible source, but it's very vague. It could be a credible source that says al Qaeda is going to attack the homeland in the next year. Well, it doesn't tell us when, it doesn't tell us where, and, in some instances, because it's non-specific, it raises a doubt about if. And somewhere between those poles are a whole matrix of different possible situations.

Now, the reason I raise this is because when we get a threat, we have to communicate about it in different ways. We have to communicate about it internally, for purposes of investigation; we have to communicate to a limited audience, in terms of our obligation with our partners and state and local government; and then we have to communicate sometimes to the public at large. And those are different decisions that have to be made. For example, internally, even a threat that is comparatively vague and comparatively not credible still has to be run down and investigated. So the FBI, for example, or law enforcement authorities need to communicate the threat and say, be on the lookout for this, or go check this out to see if there's any reality to that.

That is not something that, in my view, is right for public consumption. If all those things were to be put out into the public domain and reported, a couple things would happen. Either we would have a crying wolf syndrome, in which serious, really specific and imminent threats would be drowned out by the volume of what I call noise, and therefore people wouldn't take them seriously, or, perhaps worse, people would be in a constant state of hyperanxiety, and perhaps we would be accused of deliberately fostering that for political purposes.

So that's an element of threat where we do not make it public, we do not expect it to be made public, and, therefore, we're dismayed when it becomes public because we think that it's really merely an internal communication in order to let us, in fact, get to the ground truth. This is similar, by the way, to assuming your own editorial process -- when you get a first draft of something, before the editor drills down into it and maybe sends it back for further work. I don't know how you would feel if the reporter simultaneously posted it on the web so that your editing, essentially, was jumped by having the reporter's piece out there.

The second level of a situation is where we communicate to a larger group of partners, state and local government officials, even industry. And here again the threshold is a little bit higher, but it's not quite as high as disseminating to the public at large. And here the challenge is it's very likely that this information is going to get out, because it's been communicated to a lot of people, it's not highly classified, so it's something which people may feel a little bit casual about. But there is a big issue about context, and I'll give you a couple of examples.

In the last six months we had an instance where we disseminated in a relevant community about a threat posted on an Internet message board calling for a denial of service attack against the banking and financial sector. In our communication we indicated we didn't think the threat was credible; we see a lot of things on the Internet. But it was, you know, somewhat specific. We also thought that there was a reasonable prospect that people would encounter it on their own, and we wanted to get the message out to the relative sector of the economy about how we judged it so they would be alert to it, but they wouldn't overplay it.

In fact, this was put out and disseminated in the news media and got spiked-up and took a fair amount of effort, frankly, to put back into perspective. Similarly, last October there was a threat to football stadiums, NFL football stadiums, posted on a message board. We were in the process of analyzing the threat. As part of that process of investigating it, it was disseminated within a narrow community; it was somehow put out into the public domain and one news organization -- cable, not print media -- and this may, frankly, be more of an issue for cable than it is for print -- treated it as if it was the second September 11th, with hyperventilated graphics and then also a lot of "experts" being called in, many of whom had no knowledge of the facts and were simply invited to speculate at length and with great seriousness about what the significance of this might be. One news organization did that. Others chose to be a little bit more muted; they mentioned it, but they didn't overstate it.

What this is about, I think, is context. And this is an issue where we have to have more discussion. The fact that we don't put something out publicly, because it's at that early stage of analysis or examination, is not an effort to hide something. It's an effort to get to some kind of sense of what we think is specific and credible so we can make a judgment about whether this reaches the threshold to be disseminated publicly.

When you get that information in your possession, it seems to me you have to make a similar judgment. And you need to understand why we're making the judgments we're making, why the context is important. I think you need to perform a similar decision yourselves, because if you put everything out over the transom, what you are doing, in effect, is you're either de-sensitizing your audience, or you're over-sensitizing your audience, and those have negative effects. And I think part of your responsibility is to judge that. I mean, part of the purpose of the news -- in a sense, the core function of the news -- is to inform people of things they need to know in order to make decisions that they have to make.

So I think as we go forward this is really an invitation to have further discussion abut how we analyze things, why we put them out the way that we do. We do run programs where we bring journalists in to try to talk about the way we see things. And I think that that -- if we can come to an understanding of our language, and then you can come to a judgment about what is appropriate in terms of either not putting something out, or perhaps putting it out, but putting it in context, both in your verbal context, but also in your presentation -- is it the front page, or is it page A3; how do you lead with a story; who do you consult and what kinds of speculative comments do you put in the story -- these are all very important in terms of how we deal with this ever increasing challenge, because we're going to have threats, that's going to be part of our environment for the foreseeable future.

And the second area is emergencies. Here, it's the same set of issues, but much more is at stake. And let me take the example of a pandemic flu. If we were to get a pandemic flu, an outbreak, let's say, with respect to domestic fowl in the United States, that could potentially be a huge news story, and no one is going to suggest that that story not be reported. But the question is then going to be, once you've reported the news, people are going to be looking to the media to know, what should they do? If you go to the Center for Disease Control or the Department of Agriculture, they can tell you what is safe and what is not safe. And it may very well be, for example, that washing fowl with gloves on your hands and then cooking it thoroughly eliminates any risk of transmission of a disease.

I am quite positive you can find an "expert" somewhere to tell you something different. In fact, it's been my observation you can get an expert to tell you anything you want to hear. And I will tell you that when I was a civilian, and I was a lawyer, I was not infrequently called by reporters asking for my take on something, and then I was sometimes told, well, okay, I don't think we're going to use that, because it's not really what I'm looking for, leading me to believe that some of your reporters are well aware of the fact that they can find someone to say whatever they want to hear and put in the article.

Where this becomes really important is in matters of life and death, because if the news media features experts who are going to be putting out information that says, for example, "If you look at a chicken, you're dead," you could destroy the poultry industry. And if you get into a very dynamic environment where people are worried about their families -- let's assume we had, God forbid, a radiological device dispersed and they wanted to know, do I shelter in place, do I want to leave my home -- they would need to get a very accurate understanding of what the relative risks are. And going out and beginning to troll for views that are, shall we say, a little bit off the beaten path, could actually result in a major loss of life.

I think everybody recognizes this is an issue. And part of the question is, of course, what is the authoritative source of information? You know, do we trust the Center for Disease Control, do we trust the Department of Agriculture? And I think it's important that relationships be developed well in advance of something, so that that level of trust is built up.

One of the things that we're doing -- and this is part of my way forward, my suggestion for the way forward -- is we are bringing reporters and editors in, sometimes for tabletop exercises, sometimes in order to explain, show something about what our planning is and what our assumptions are so you can get comfortable with what is going to be authoritative and what is not authoritative going into an event.

Sometimes, frankly -- and this is my observation when I was in law enforcement -- you could find a cop in the street -- if you had a major murder or a major homicide, you could find a cop in the street, even a fairly senior cop, to give you an opinion on almost any crime -- often without any knowledge of facts.

And it was tempting, because they had a uniform, they seem authoritative, but many of them really had no clue and just couldn't resist the temptation to ventilate their opinions.

I think we owe you clarity about who is an authoritative source. I think we ourselves have realized, in part, as part of our after-action on Katrina and some other things that have happened, that we have to be very straight on what is authoritative. And I think we need to build those relationships and that understanding and debate that ahead of time, because if we wind up without having that common understanding before an emergency, we could find ourselves making judgments about what we tell people that will have really serious, life-altering consequences that can't be taken back. And they will have real operational consequences.

So this is my way of inviting you to continue to participate in what we are starting to do now, which is a series of dialogues with the major media about how we would manage an emergency in a crisis. We owe you information that's accurate, to the extent we have it. And of course, we don't always have accurate information. We need to try to be precise when we're not certain. And that's, I think -- we owe that to you and to ourselves. And you need to resist the temptation to just get something fast that may not be accurate, because often those who are most willing to talk quickly are those who know the least, or the least responsible.

I recognize, again, this is probably more a TV issue than a newspaper issue, although there may be some crossover here. But I think it's also a newspaper issue, as well.

Let me conclude by saying this is a little bit of a different pitch than the normal Washington government media interaction, which presumes that we are adversaries and that the value of the media isn't challenging the government. I'm not suggesting you renounce your skepticism. But what I am suggesting is there is a domain where there are facts about matters of public health and things of that sort. And we need to have an ability to get those facts out in emergencies and talk about them in a dispassionate and accurate way without letting opinion get in the way of that, because to me, the core function of the media, even, dare I say more important than promoting democracy, is conveying to the individual person the kind of information they need in order to do things like save their lives and protect the lives of their families.

And so I think as we -- although not perhaps glamorous, I can tell you that in terms of public service, I don't think there's any higher public service than us figuring out how to communicate on these very important issues to the American public.

So with that, I guess I'll take some questions.

Wow, a room of writers and no questions. Yes, could you just help me -- what news organization you're from.

Question: I'm from a law firm, so it will be easier.

Secretary Chertoff: How could you let lawyers be in here?

Question: (Inaudible).

Question: I would like to know what you learned about communications from Katrina that would benefit us here.

Secretary Chertoff: I learned, first of all, that it is -- my getting information is -- there's nothing more important than that, that without good information and real-time information, it is simply impossible to make good decisions.

That's not to say that good information cures everything, because you've got to have planning and you've got to have capabilities in place well in advance of a catastrophe. But if you have those things, you don't have information, they're useless. And that puts us also in the position of not being able to communicate effectively with the media, which further compounds the problem.

I will also tell you though, in fairness, I learned that the media, if they get information wrong, can have a real operational impact. In the first couple of days, Tuesday and Wednesday of that week, as the city flooded up, there were an unbelievable number of stories about helicopters being shot out of the air and rampant violence and body -- I remember reading a particular story, a graphic story -- and I'm not blaming the media for this, by the way, it was a doctor, I think, who said he had seen bodies stacked like cordwood in the Superdome. It was like -- like an abattoir. And it turned out those were urban legends. They had a real impact. Our ability to get bus drivers to get on buses and drive down -- because they were civilian bus drivers -- and drive into New Orleans was dramatically affected by people who were afraid to do it because they believed there was open warfare.

So the second part of what I learned was it's important that the media also get it right. And it's an article of faith by everybody that the first report from the battlefield is almost always wrong. So all of us have to begin with a skepticism about the first report. But that's also in tension with the fact that we need information quickly.

I can tell you I spent a lot of time looking at this -- I'll speak from our standpoint. And one of the things we've done is we've adapted, to some extent, a system the military has built up over time for managing information, which requires a very clear set of protocols about what you do when you first get raw information, who gets to see it, how much time you have to validate, who gets to make the decision that it's valid or invalid, and then what the process for dissemination is. This is all within the government.

This is designed to make sure that you don't get -- you're not treated like a mushroom kept in the dark as things are going on, which was, to some extent, frankly, some of what happened in Katrina, from my standpoint. But it's also designed not to flood the decision-maker with 10 conflicting reports and no way to adjudicate. So we've got to nail that down.

I presume you all have gone through a similar process looking at this afterwards as well. One thing I would say from my observation is, as an editor, you've got to distinguish between different kinds of information on the battlefield or in the emergency. Obviously, the most reliable is that which you visually see with your own eyes. If you have a video of something you can see, that's quite reliable -- one of the reasons we've put some investments into literally getting video teams that we can send into emergencies so we can get that.

But the next level, which is not quite so reliable, is eyewitness accounts. When I look back on some of the stuff I saw, it wasn't -- people would say, well, you saw this on TV, and you didn't actually see it on TV. You saw a person on TV telling you what that person had seen. And even assuming good faith, we all know that eyewitnesses under stress are not the most reliable reporters.

So that's a long-winded answer. But I think, to sum up, we have done a lot of work to do a better job of getting information. I think the media, in fairness, has to apply the same discipline and maybe help the viewer understand what is really reliable and what's more questionable. And again, I think actually exercising this together is a useful thing, although it's run against the grain of the adversarial relationship that people think we're supposed to have.

Question: Good to see you. My question -- I'm going to ask you a question in your capacity as a former judge on the one circuit in the country that has recognized a federal common-law reporter's privilege, and a First Amendment privilege. So we commend you for that, and your circuit for that. But -- and I know you can't talk about specifics -- but I wonder if you could just give us a sense, as a former judge, your views of the ability of judges to engage in the kind of balancing that the Third Circuit engages in when a reporter is subpoenaed, the need for the information, the importance of the information, the exhaustion of sources. Do you think that is something that judges are capable of doing from a judicial standpoint?

Secretary Chertoff: Well, I think they're going to do it, so hopefully they are capable of doing it. You know, I'll tell you one example, again, because I'm being very careful to steer away from the existing litigation of an issue -- I wasn't on the circuit, I actually argued for a position the press probably disagrees with, and I lost. This had to do with speaking to jurors about their deliberations in the jury room after a trial. I tried Crazy Eddie Antar for securities fraud in 1992 or '93 -- I think it was '92. He was convicted. There was a lot of interest in the case. I think the general rule is courts differ about whether they allow jurors to talk about, like, how was the coffee, what did you think of the lawyers. But in this case, there was a real desire on the part of the reporters to talk about the deliberations.

And the judge, the district judge ordered the jurors not to talk to the reporters -- the analogy being what happens to grand jurors. And it was ultimately reversed by the Third Circuit, I think largely because there was no rule basis for it. But that's a case where I guess the position I took -- and I think there's a lot of merit to -- is there would be real institutional damage if jurors began to feel their deliberations would be aired publicly, and that it might influence what goes on in the jury room.

And oddly enough, if a newspaper were involved in a litigation, it would find -- with a jury trial -- it would find itself in a conflicted position because the newspaper might not welcome that intrusion to the jury room. So I guess this is a slightly off way of arguing. I think that these present very, very difficult challenges, but courts will decide them because that's how we resolve these challenges in our society.

Question: I'm with the Sunshine in Government Initiative. And I'm wondering, as I hear your talk, I take what you're saying to address authoritative interpretations that might come from high-level government officials. And there's also a lot of information that the government produces and creates and publishes that just happens on the run of the mill every day. And I'm wondering if you can take a moment to address the criticism that the government has on open government and on getting facts out to the public have really stepped away from being open and transparent and addressing the guarantees of the right to information under the Freedom of Information Act, other laws, and specifically your agency.

Secretary Chertoff: Well, of course, the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act, there's a whole series of laws that govern the release of information. There are also, to be perfectly honest, financial constraints. You have a budget. You put so many people into processing these requests, and usually there's a resistance to putting a huge amount of money into processing Freedom of Information requests, as opposed to funding Coast Guard or Border Patrol or things of that sort.

I will tell you, though, one observation I've had over time, which is the best way for me to keep a secret in government, is to give a speech about it. There's this thing called the Automated Targeting System which is a system that we use where we take information that you get from the airline -- a few fields of information -- we use it as a way of determining at the border people that we want to maybe ask a few more questions of. This program has been in existence for almost 10 years. It was explicitly discussed in the 9/11 Commission Report. There were recommendations that it should be expanded. We had a very highly publicized in Europe debate with the Europeans about how to implement it. I gave a series of speeches boasting about how we were really putting into it -- got very little attention.

Then we put out an obscure notice in the Federal Register and all of a sudden I started to see stories that said, "secret program revealed on automated targeting."  And I went to my press guys -- I said, secret? I must have given a dozen speeches about this. I practically took my clothes off to attract attention to it, and I got zero impact. So it really caused me to conclude that the best way to keep a secret is for me to give a speech about it, then it's not going to get noticed.

Question: I'm from the Denver Post, and I'm going to break protocol and ask you a news question. To what extent are the series of immigration raids around the country part of your strategy to build up recognition that there is an immigration crisis and the Congress needs to act?

Secretary Chertoff: It is part of my strategy to enforce the law and to take seriously what the law is and not to duck it because it's convenient or expedient, or because it will step on powerful toes. I have a very simple philosophy of doing my job which reflects the fact that I don't think I'm clever enough to keep a lot of contradictory impulses in my head at the same time. I am straightforward, as straightforward as I can be about what I intend to do. I tell everybody the same thing. I don't tailor it to different audiences. And if I say I'm going to do something, I carry through with it to the extent might be humanly possible. I think it's really important that the American public understand that we mean to enforce the law. And if we're given a responsibility then we're going to discharge it to the extent that we have the ability to do so.

I've made no secret about the fact that, as the President has said, we need a comprehensive program, that to try to solve a multi-decade-long immigration problem solely on the back of enforcement is putting a huge amount of pressure on our resources and our Border Patrol, and that it will be much more efficient to do it as part of a holistic approach. But until such time as that happens, I still have an obligation to enforce the law. And chips fall where they may, and this department intends to continue to do it.

Question: No political --

Secretary Chertoff: I'm not clever enough to do politics on this. To me, it's really simple. It's a consistent message. And when I was U.S. Attorney I did the same thing: if we have a law, we're going to enforce it, as long as it's constitutional. And we're not going to trim it because it's going to offend somebody or we're not going to expand it because it's going to help somebody. It has the virtue, though, of clarity. It has the virtue of hopefully giving people, the public, faith that the government is going to do what it says it's going to do. And it also clarifies the choices that we have because we get to see how the law actually works in practice. And I think those are good things to do not only with respect to immigration, but in everything that we do.

And the last thing I'm going to say is, as a kind of a tip for what's going to come, we're going to have a series of interesting debates and discussions in Congress. You have a new majority; they're going to ask questions about things that we're doing. I think that's great. I think we are at the point in this country we should debate these things. And what we should do is we should make sure the facts are clear, and we should make sure the choices are clear, and the consequences of decisions are clear. And that way when the public ultimately makes an informed decision, they accept the consequences and the responsibility. That, to me, is the way government ought to work. Part of your job is letting that happen and part of my job is encouraging that to happen.

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