THESE VITAL SPEECHES

30
CICERO SPEECHWRITING AWARDS
like Anonymous, are all thrown in together
with aggressors like North Korea
and Iran, and with the Russians and
Chinese, who could do real damage
if they are so inclined. Each of those
actors has different capabilities and
different objectives when they engage in
Cyberspace, and all them of operate on
the same Internet.
It makes me long for the halcyon
days of the Cold War, when the world
essentially had two large, mutually-exclusive
communications networks. One
belonged to the United States, dominated
by the United States and our
Allies, and the other was dominated by
the Soviets and theirs. So we could be
reasonably sure that if we were listening
to someone on the Soviet network,
that person was not a U.S. citizen.
Today, the internet and telecommunications
networks are all interconnected
and global, and much of the
technology the infrastructure relies on
comes from the U.S. Our task, as an
Intelligence Community, is to find the
bad actors and to distinguish a terrorist
sending directions on how to build
a bomb or how to defeat TSA procedures,
from someone sending their
granddaughter a recipe for apple pie.
So we’re not just looking for a needle in
a haystack. We’re looking for thousands
of needles scattered over acres and
acres of haystacks.
It’s our job to provide insight into
the nature of cyber intrusions and give
warnings where we can, and that job
is extremely difficult in the absence of
international norms and standards.
We’re, to borrow a legal phrase, developing
a “body of case law,” to define
what constitutes a cyberwar, or act of
cyber terrorism, or cyber vandalism, or
cybercrime. And we’re learning as we
go, just as everyone else is.
And through it all, the IC holds civil
liberties and privacy as a top priority.
We’re going to make mistakes—and
some of those have been exposed—a
small percentage of the time. We’re going
to accidentally intercept someone’s
grandma’s apple pie recipe. But we’ve
shown that when we do, as soon as we
realize our mistake, we get rid of that
information, and we report ourselves
to the bodies that conduct oversight, in
all three branches of the government.
That’s important to me, personally,
because, by the way, I’m an American
citizen, and I care about my civil liberties
and privacy too.
Beyond that, when we can do so
without compromising our tradecraft,
we’ve been transparent with the public
about our mistakes. So we’ve published
about 5,000 pages of previously
classified documents on our Tumblr
website: “IC on the Record,” many of
which are pretty critical of our mistakes,
including classified court documents
that show the FISA court—the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
court that oversees sensitive surveillance
programs—is not a so-called
“rubber stamp.
Two years ago, I didn’t know what a
“Tumblr” was. Two weeks ago, Tumblr
featured our site, the IC’s site, as one of
a select few “Big in 2014” sites for their
end of year review. We were right up
there with “L’il Bub.” [laughter] Another
joke. [laughter] Sorry, I said I’ll
try to give you warning. [laughter] I’m
here to tell you, sharing the stage with
a famous cat—on the internet—that’s
how you know you’ve arrived. [laughter
and applause] That, and traveling
to North Korea.
So let me end with that point, and
I think we have some time for some
questions. Thanks.
WINNER: CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY, HEALTHCARE
“Health Is Everything”
By Tanya M. Barrientos for Risa Lavizzo-Mourey,
President & CEO, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Health is everything. How many
times in your life have you heard
someone express that idea? You’ll ask
a young couple “do want a girl or a
boy?” And they’ll say “it doesn’t matter,
as long as the baby’s healthy!” Or
at Thanksgiving, when you go around
the table listing what you’re grateful
for, there’s always that aunt who says
“as long as I have my health.”
Health is everything. We hear
people say it so often that most of the
time it just goes in one ear and out the
other. But what if we started thinking
about the concept of health a little
differently? What if instead of simply
hearing “health is everything,” we
started to focus on the fact that health
is every–thing.
Most of us still define health as not
being sick. But it’s so much more than
that. Health is every- thing. It’s the
bedrock of personal fulfillment. The
anchor of community well-being. It’s
about where, and how, we do our work.
How we socialize, what we teach our
children. And it’s about the way you
plan and build our towns, and neighborhoods,
and streets. When we open
our eyes to all the things that really
Delivered at Urban Land Institute 2015 Fall Meeting,
San Francisco, Calif., Oct. 6, 2015
influence health and well-being, the list
keeps getting longer and longer. Poverty.
Violence. Economic opportunity. Clean
air and water. Public transportation.
What are you adding to the list while
I’m talking? Stress? Diet? Exercise?
Sleep? Spirituality? See what I mean?
You’re having what I call the health-iseverything
light bulb moment.
Let me tell you when that light bulb
moment first happened to me: I trained
as a physician at Harvard and rotated
through a hospital in West Roxbury, a
few miles away. That is where I met a
patient that I will forever remember as
VSOTD.COM