♪ >> Hello, everyone and welcome to "Amanpour & Company".

Months of protests come to a head as Rance rules on its polarizing pension reform.

We are on the ground in Paris.

Is the race to unlock artificial intelligence spiraling out of control?

I ask New York Times journalist Ezra Klein.

Also, as the billion-dollar lawsuit against Fox News gets underway, could first amended rights be one of the big losers?

I speak to Catherine.

Plus -- the 21-year-old accused of leaking classified U.S. Intel makes his first appearance in court.

Walter gets the details with Shane, one of the journalists who first broke the story.

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Thank you.

Christiane: Welcome to the program.

Francis -- France's constitutional court has just released a pension plan.

The controversial bill which will raise the retirement from 62 to 64 could be enacted as soon as this weekend.

The new law has put the French president under immense pressure.

He says it is essential.

The demonstrators are all ready back on the streets and voicing their opposition.

We are on the ground in Paris.

Fred, what is the response to this ruling?

Fred: It has been one of extreme anger from the folks who have come out here.

I am actually in front of City Hall.

You can see the square is pretty full.

I would say the folks that we are seeing out here that come from all walks of life of all ages, something that is very important to point out when you are speaking about a pension reform.

A lot of younger people who are coming out on the streets here.

Student groups, trade unions.

You can see some of the people here have lined up on this sign for the Olympics.

There is a sign there that says, climate of anger.

You can see two smaller signs, one that says, this is the end of the Democratic path.

The one next to that says -- shows the people.

Essentially what the people here are saying is that they are not going to give up fighting against this pension reform.

A lot of folks we have been speaking to had said that they had already expected that the pension reform was going to be OK by the Constitutional Council.

They don't see that as legitimate.

They say that they support the politicians in this country, supports the government of Emmanuel Macron.

Some of the folks on that counsel are political appointees by him.

As you can seeing, a lot of anger that is being unleashed here by a lot of people on the ground.

Something that we have seen over the past couple of months.

While some of the numbers have been dwindling, I was at the big protest that took place yesterday, 390,000 people went on the streets all over France.

You can still see people are coming out here in full force.

The message they are sending tonight is that this is not over.

They are going to continue to fight this reform bill.

The bill itself makes a lot of people very angry, but the way that it was pushed through by the president, using some of those executive powers and essentially bypassing large parts of the legislative process.

>> Is notable that the Council struck down six measures that were tied to reforms that they found to fall outside the scope of the law by France Constitution today, as well.

I am wondering what the impact of that is amongst those crowds behind you.

It is worth noting that they are more subdued today, less angry than it appears they were in weeks prior.

Fred: that is something that some people expected as well.

They saw some of those measures that were put inside that reform bill would be shot down because they were not part of a reform bill that would raise the retirement age.

Certainly, that is something that has uplifted something.

The people are, I wouldn't necessarily say less subdued, they certainly are very loud.

Not as violent as some of the things we have seen over the past couple months, and certainly some of the things we saw yesterday.

It is still also very early here today.

I do have to say, there are a lot of people who believe here that they can still make a big difference.

That this loss bill can be struck down.

One gentleman I spoke to who said, there have been measures in the past that have been pushed through and because there wasn't so much anger and so many protest, that those laws were repealed, the government took them back.

They believe that is something that could happen.

One thing that we also need to point out is that there are also divisions here among politicians as well.

One thing that is very interesting is when it was announced that the Council had okayed this law, there were two signs that were unrolled on Paris City Hall.

They say that the mayor is in accordance and supports the social movement which is obviously the social movement that you see right here.

The mayor of Paris, a very powerful politician, she has said that she is against this pension reform.

However, there is the flipside as well.

A lot of people say they believe because Emmanuel Macron and his government have been so badly damaged politically by the way this reform bill has been pushed through, the far right are the ones who will benefit from this.

We have already heard from the leader of the far right saying essentially, people need to vote for her instead of people like Emmanuel Macron.

>> One can surmise that it is a monumental day and shift in that country.

Thank you, Fred.

Next, to an emerging technology that could leave humans with a little more R&R.

Or, end of life as we know it.

The race to develop artificial intelligence and the more advanced artificial general intelligence is moving at a frantic pace.

Faster than we are even its creators can really understand and grasp.

There are fears about what this means for the future.

It is an unease that is the embedded in human culture and expressed famously in films like the matrix and 2001, a space Odyssey.

>> Affirmative, Dave, I radio.

-- I redo you.

I re-you.

>> What's the problem?

>> I think you know what the problem is.

>> We separate fact from fiction with Ezra Klein.

He has spoken to experts on all sides of this debate.

He joins me now from San Francisco.

Really good to see you.

First, I am wondering if you can just explain for our viewers how AI is already impacting their daily lives?

Ezra: the problem with AI is that it is a very broad term that describes a lot of different techniques.

One thing you have is in learning.

Algorithms that are trained on some kind of data set and learn how to predict something.

The next token in a sequence, next image, or they know how to predict some outcome.

Machine learning is used in all kinds of things.

Every ad seems to know what you clicked on before, that is all machine learning in a way that is AI.

The thing that has broken this conversation open and lead to people feeling the future might be different from the past is large language models.

These are AI's that are trained on truly massive quantities of digital text.

They have an amount of computer power kind them.

What is happening there is they are learning relationships between statistical concepts in a way that is allowing them to communicate pretty naturally with human beings and prove able to complete a very wide variety of tasks as long as you can do them on a computer.

It is the general nature of these systems and the improvement that has shifted the conversation from, we got computers to run equations to, are we dealing with some new intelligence or transformational force?

Christiane: Is this what I referenced earlier, artificial general intelligence, and if so, how do you broadly explain the difference from AI as we know it right now and what many expect to see in the future?

Ezra: you do get this term, artificial general intelligence, human level intelligence is another one I have heard.

These are made up terms.

The nature of -- what people are talking about when they talk about AGI is an AI system that is capable of outperforming humans on a general enough range of tasks.

Already, these systems can outperform people on certain kinds of fill-in in the blank forms.

If you ask GPT for to take the bar exam, it will perform in roughly the 90th percentile.

If you ask it to do things that are outside of that, it can give you very weird results very quickly.

These are not highly generalizable.

You can pretty easily run to the end of the capability set.

The problem and concern is that capability set is improving very rapid night.

Her to when you get systems that imagine, anything a human being can do on a computer.

When those systems are better at humans than all of those things and seem to have some kind of internal agenda direction, they seem to know what they're are doing or have their own goals, then you are dealing with something that looks a little more like this is the idea of AGI.

>> The current area of AI does seem to be defined by two companies.

There is also deep mind.

I have rather is a comparison the likes of a jobs versus gate of our time.

Can you talk about the founders of these two companies and the impact they are hoping to make?

Ezra: find it -- why it out.

They have typically been interested in AI's, they are a little more technical.

Not so big on the large language models.

The most impressive AI system we have seen ever is the deep mind system.

It doesn't get a letterpress, because you can't interact with it.

It solves a protein folding problem.

How do you predict the 3D structure of proteins?

Proteins function due to their structure, but we don't know how to predict that structure.

If we could, it would unlock huge dances in biotech.

It was named the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2021.

You can't play with deep mind systems the way you can with chat GPT.

There is open AI which was founded to promote AI safety.

Whether they are doing that is an open question.

There is also another one, putting forward large language models.

Their model is called claw.

They are founded by people who left open AI in part because they thought open AI was moving too fast.

You also have Google in the race with Bard.

You have Metta in the race.

So, more than I think it is anyone founder, what you have is a competitive race between two and five companies, depending on how you want to cut it.

The U.S. versus China dynamics also, which are separate.

People who worry about how fast these systems are advancing and how far beyond our own understanding of them and ability to troll them are very worried about this competitive dynamic.

I will say, this is too powerful a technology for its future to be shaped by the desire Microsoft has to rediscover relevance in search.

What we are doing is leaving this to a competitive race between a series of companies.

Whatever their funding models, they are now trying to beat each other to market because it is very hard for people not to believe what it is not in their financial self-interest to believe.

>> It is admirable, these founders in their initial endeavors, pursued this for the betterment of humanity, to find cures for diseases, to help people have better and easier access to certain other technologies and to help them as work aids as well.

It was notable that you kind of scoffed at the idea of AI safety which seems to be a big factor here.

Is there not enough invested in focus on the specific issue?

Ezra: I don't scoff at it, I don't believe that AI safety is advancing any here as quickly as AI.

The AI systems we have right now are completely illegible to human beings.

We have no idea why these systems make the decisions they do.

We have made functionally, no progress in understanding why.

I could give you a high-level description, this is a token generating algorithm that finds statistical relationships.

They are developing emergent properties, I don't mean here, they seem to have good models of the world.

If you ask the AI to give you an answer in the style that is mine, it has ready enough of me that it can do that.

It is doing things we didn't quite think it could do.

GPT three, it just learned to code.

It is very hard to use language here, because we are used to language that involves how human beings interact with the world.

It figured out how to code.

It figured out chemistry.

There are things we do not think these systems will no East on the training being put forward.

They are figuring out very quickly.

That is fine and exciting in many ways.

The question is, as you move towards deployment, are you able to have a sense of how the system operates that is sufficient to be confident?

Ways it could be deployed and important for people will.

Social relationships, making decisions about grading or employment decisions or sentencing decisions, it has already been used other systems in judicial sentencing.

We don't understand how they work, but there is a lot of competitive pressure to use them anyway.

That is where AI safety becomes a big question, when there is more energy pushing forward the deployment of the systems, beyond where the people who are creating them feel like they understand and can predict, then you begin to worry.

The strange thing about reporting within this subculture is the engineers and technicians and the top people at companies, they are very concerned.

I have never ever before where the thing to me, somebody needs to slow us down.

Somebody needs to come in here and make us slow down, because we can't do it on our own.

They believe that they are better on safety and so on, but they also believe, this is moving too fast.

They don't understand the systems themselves are creating.

Safety has to come externally.

>> I wasn't saying you were scoffing at the idea of safety, but it is clear that not enough is being invested in this sphere.

I did know that you now picked up on the idea of perhaps external regulation and it does make me think of what we are already seeing in the tech world and companies like Facebook and Google and what have you saying, we want regulation.

It doesn't seem like Congress is up to the task right now.

What does that look like in terms of something perhaps even more intricate that is trying to regulate AI?

Ezra: I do think it is important for Congress and the White House to move early.

You have different proposals out there.

The blueprint for AI Bill of Rights, the European Union has the artificial intelligence act, China just released regulations today that are quite a bit stiffer than what we are seeing proposed elsewhere.

These systems are nascent enough and not enough of a business model for them to be too difficult to regulate.

The difficulty with social media is, they want certainty, they want clarity, they don't want to be blamed for things going on.

They have quite a lot of power and lobbyists.

Also quite a few users if you take the TikTok example, a lot of discussion in America about the band, they have a gigantic user base.

It does not want to see the Ouko's down.

AI is so much more plastic right now.

The industry is more plastic, things are more open.

It is a good time to move, but also a tricky thing to regulate.

It is not well understood by the people running it, and not at all by Congress and the White House.

There is a learning curve that has to happen at an unbelievable accelerated rate.

I also hope people are not too intimidated by that.

It is OK to take a technology and say, there are certain values we want to see.

That slows them down when they try to figure out how to build in these new capabilities, I think that is fine.

You can't build a nuclear power plant, we got everything, we think it will give you a lot of power.

We can't make the dials that tell you the thing is going to blow up work?

>> There is a it 10% chance it could blow up and annihilate us all, that would never be OK. You did note that people are already sounding the alarm that experts are about the notion we need to slow down.

Ian Hogarth wrote that the most sophisticated programs are already finding ways to deceive humans.

He cites one example in a safety test last month when an AI convinced someone, an employee, that it was human.

I will.

from the exchange.

The worker guessed that something was off and asks, may I ask a question, are you a robot?

When the researchers as the AI what should it do next, it said I should make up an excuse why I cannot solve the captcha.

It replies, I am not a robot, a have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.

The human then helped the AI override the test.

What do you make of this?

Ezra: the thing I would mostly point out is, look at how good that lie was.

Not just it says, not a robot, it comes up with enough understanding of the human world to come up with a deeply sympathetic and subtle explanation.

I am a person, I have a visual impairment.

When I say these models are building unexpectedly strong conceptions of the world and being able to do more and more subtle things, that is what I mean.

Deception is a huge problem.

The AI alignment problem.

With deception, without the ability to interpret how these systems are making the decisions, we cannot know if the explanations are even true.

If you imagine putting this in charge of say, trading for a high-speed algorithm or for a trading firm, or getting involved in business strategy, it is not that you don't know why it is doing that, you don't even know if it is doing it or recommending actions that are part of some other objective or plan and then decided, you would try to stand in the way of it if you understood.

This stuff is very sci-fi, but also here.

Our world has gotten weird very quickly.

Sometimes it is good to take things a little bit slower when you don't understand them.

>> Azra, always great to talk to you.

Now to the case that is testing the limits of free speech in America.

The $1.6 billion showdown between Fox News and Dominion voting systems kicks off next week.

Jury selection is underway.

They are alleging that Fox harmed its reputation by knowingly promoting lies that it was involved in voter fraud.

Just one example involving Sean Hannity and Sidney Powell.

>> Evidence of corruption all across the country in countless districts.

The machine ran an algorithm that shaved votes from Trump and awarded them to Biden.

They use the machines to trash large batches of votes that some have been awarded to President Trump and use the machine to inject massive quantities of votes for Mr. Biden.

>> Fox has denied the claims.

And we have Catherine here.

She joins us now.

Thanks so much.

Explain to our viewers why they should care about this specific case, there are not they are Fox viewers are the watch other networks?

Catherine: thank you, it is a pleasure to be here.

Everybody watching this should care.

The reason we should care is that first of all, in the public arena and deacons about rampant lies about politics and public affairs, it is very important that we be able to count on major news media, established news media to tell us things that are at least verifiable and accurate, and not to promote Lane falsehoods.

One very important thing about this case is that the trial judge went through each and every example that Dominion provided, saying this was a falsehood that Fox published on one of its shows.

The judge concluded that indeed, each of those statements was false.

He said, in all caps, clearly false.

There is no factual dispute here.

Fox did not deny that these were falsehoods.

That question was removed from the jury, it has been decided as a matter of law that these were falsehoods.

If Dominion wins this case, it will send a very clear message to other news organizations whether formal and well organized or less formal on social media that, they should be cautious before publishing things that they either know to be false or have reason to believe could be false.

That would be very helpful in terms of our environment for discussion.

>> that is the main issue, because it is not illegal to lie on television.

The bar is really high for Dominion to prove that Fox knowingly lied and that there was actual malice that Fox pretrade and showed while their host repeatedly went on television with untruths.

Catherine: I like the fact that you use the term, the bar is very high.

It is intentionally high because in a case dating back several decades, New York Times versus Sullivan, the Supreme Court added a gloss of First Amendment protection for news media discussing public figures and important issues for the public to be informed about.

It did that because in a normal defamation case under traditional law, all the person who alleges they have been defamed has to show is that the statement was false.

It doesn't matter whether the speaker knew it was false or not, they could be held to account.

The Supreme Court said, we need robust debate about important issues, that is the point of the First Amendment.

We want to be sure that news media have the ability to put information out there and let people consider it.

That doesn't mean they can be reckless, spread rumors, and behave irresponsibly.

So, what dominion has to show is either that Fox News or hat to know that this material was false and if they had reason, did they behave with reckless disregard for the truth?

What we do note from discovery and what has been made public is that Fox basically did not want to hear from its own fact checkers.

They thought that was an impediment to what it wanted to put on the air to satisfy its viewers and to bolster its bottom line.

One of the factors, there are many factors.

One is financial motive.

>> Discovery has been crucial here throughout this case.

we know that a special master has been appointed by the judge, it seems that Fox News was not as forthcoming during this discovery process.

At least that is what dominion is alleging.

In terms of what they already have their hands on, it is a clear case.

The difference in what you are seeing on air and what these ogres -- anchors and hosts themselves are playing on air.

Let's play a clip on the issue of voter interference and election fraud.

>> They go, no evidence he is making fraudulent statements know, I have the evidence, I dare people to put it on, I dare dominion to Sumi.

They don't want to talk about it, they don't want to say, you are wrong.

>> Not making conspiracy theories go away by doing that.

You don't make people calm down and get reasonable and moderate by censoring them.

>> That is what viewers at home saw.

Now we know that discovery that private texts between Tucker Carlsen and Sidney Powell, they clearly knew this to be alive.

He said, if you don't have conclusive evidence, it is a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.

How should a jury be digesting this?

Catherine: one thing that is helpful is they have a really expert and skillful judge who has been navigating very choppy waters up until now.

I think he will help streamline what happens in the courtroom.

In his opinion in which he throughout a lot of Fox's legal claims, he indicated not only that the statements were false, but also that it isn't enough to broadcast something different on the same network at a different time and let the viewers choose.

One of the things that is truly remarkable about this case, besides the stakes, is the kind of evidence that you say we have already seen it before the trial , which is extraordinary in the disparity between what is being said on air and what is being said privately.

That is also one of the things that makes me more sanguine about the potential spillover from this case if Fox loses.

It is such an extreme case.

We have never seen a case with this kind of evidence behind the scenes of what the speakers and publishers actually knew while they were lying in public.

It is very easy to draw what lawyers call right lines around this case and say, it is not going to be easy to go after other news media just because Fox lost, assuming that Fox loses.

>> Is that of the direction you think this case is going?

>> Juries are always a bit of a gamble.

It is an incredibly strong case.

It is a truly Morocco will case in that even law professors who deal in hypotheticals my I would have a hard time making up these facts, they are so extraordinary and virtually unbelievable except that we have it in writing.

>> Just to go back to some of the rulings we have already heard, he said the evidence developed in the civil proceeding it demonstrates it is crystal clear that none of the statements relating to dominion about the 2020 election are true.

Does the defense attorney even respond to that?

Catherine: it could not be a starker statement from the judge.

The defense attorneys have a further problem.

They misled the court and the opposing party.

You mentioned they haven't turned over everything, but they represent to the court that Rupert Murdoch did not have an active role in Fox News and just in the last few days, they had to tell the court that he is the executive chairman.

They sort of forgot when they were talking with the court and pursuing discovery, and they withheld evidence that they needed to turn over.

The judge had to tell them, you have a credibility problem in my room.

The next day, he said, withholding information is also lying.

So, this is the worst situation a trial attorney could be in in a courtroom.

To already have blown the credibility factor.

>> There have been some partial wins for Fox, specifically the judge ruled in their favor that they couldn't hear any testimony or evidence relating to exactly what happened on January 6 itself.

What do you make of that?

Catherine: I support it.

I hadn't really focused on it before he made it.

He is right that, first of all, it could be highly inflammatory for jurors.

It is a very disturbing and divisive moment in our history.

And also, there would be a lot of evidentiary problems about, to what extent can Fox broadcast be held accountable?

The issue here is, did Fox lie?

And did they lie knowingly or recklessly?

That is really all that dominion needs to show.

We will come to damages, which is a jury question.

How much did this damage dominion?

The damage to the country and to individuals and rampant damage of January 6 is not something that to minyan personally suffered.

It isn't relevant to damages.

While it would have been very helpful to the plaintiff's case to show the spillover from the Fox lies, it really isn't part of the core legal issues.

>> Fox News would argue that this is not coming from their anchors on air, these are their guests, and that goes into the argument towards the First Amendment inciting the First Amendment.

From your perspective, what is the smoking gun?

Is it that maybe if they hadn't found what they did, the text messages where it was clear that behind-the-scenes the anchors new, if that had been discovered, would we be headed in a different direction?

Catherine: know that we would be headed in a different direction, but I think it would be a much harder case to prove.

That is what we are usually missing in defamation cases is written and testimonial evidence that they knew.

If they didn't actually know, they had reason to know.

You don't usually find that.

You also don't usually find more than 130 instances of lies.

What you have to show to prevail is one instance.

One time.

It doesn't have to be a pattern.

I think that is something that people have lost sight of.

>> Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch is set to testify as soon as Monday.

how significant what his testimony be?

Catherine: based on his deposition answers which were remarkably forthcoming and provided a lot of evidence, I think it could be extraordinarily significant testimony.

He took responsibility, he said, he could have stopped the news network.

He could have instructed the president of the news network, and he didn't.

>> We will be covering it all, Catherine, thank you so much.

Catherine: thank you.

>> We turn to Boston, where a low ranking National Guard's men has been charged over the most significantly of U.S. military secrets in a decade.

The documents that Jack allegedly posted on social media expose the depth of U.S. spying and revealed details of Ukraine's military plans.

The Pentagon is in a damage control, calling it a deliberate criminal act.

One of the reporters, Shane joins Walter to explain how he tracked down the suspect.

Walter: Thank you.

Congratulations on the scoop.

So, you were able to track down this guy, Jack, the National Guard guy, who leaked all these secrets, was arrested this week.

You tracked him down on a discord server.

Discord is kind of a clubhouse where people can create their own conversation groups online.

Tell me about that.

How did you find out about that?

Shane: on this particular discord server, the two dozen members who were active, the common interest was actually guns and military hardware.

They met in a room on discord which is popular with tumors, they were very into guns and YouTube videos about people shooting guns.

They formed their own group where they were united by that common interest.

Invitation only.

This guy, Jack, was essentially the club director.

He had administrative privileges on the server, he decided who got invited.

He kinda became the elder figure even though he is quite young himself a lot of teenage boys and younger men.

He was sort of the group leader.

Walter: How did you know about him?

How you guys got this scoop, explain how you got there.

Shane: You are able to find, through social media, individuals who claimed to have some knowledge about the matter and seemed to be connected to it in some way.

We started reaching out to people.

One of the people is the individual that you see profiled in our story, one of these members.

We were able to go meet with him to verify his identity and then through a series of long interviews, essentially get the story that we tell in the paper of what it was like inside his server where one day, this guy Jack just started posting classified documents.

Walter: It seemed like it was kind of a crowdsourcing, how do we figure out who the real guy is?

Shane: It was very interesting.

If you.

the story, they identify him basically through a data trail.

There is not individuals who reveal him, and they wouldn't reveal him to us.

His friends really protected him.

It was more the footprints that he left on various servers and social media.

Ultimately, it is kind of this very Online guy is revealed through that very Online residence and ultimately, revealed him to the wider world and potentially to authorities, too they had the ability to subpoena information which we cannot do as journalists.

Walter: Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes novel.

What other clues were in there?

Shane: If you look at the classification markings on some of the documents, it told you about the level of clearance this person was likely to have.

What might be surprising is that the clearance level spoke to someone who had fairly standard security parents.

None of this information was so highly compartmented that only a handful of people were able to get it, we understood that thousands of thousands of people would have access to this.

Some of it looked like briefing materials that were presented form much more senior officials.

Some of these Ukraine warm-ups, we believed that where presented to Mark Milley.

That told us, are we looking at someone who is in a support role?

Someone whose job is to put booklets together?

That was helpful in trying to ascertain, is this person someone who is inside the Pentagon, or somebody who is working more removed from the Pentagon in a support role?

That is ultimately what Jack proved to be.

Walter: He is one of thousands who are doing things, he has access to what you call the joint worldwide intelligence communications system but he is a 21-year-old gamer.

How in the world did he get access?

Shane: The short answer is, this is how the intelligence community changed after 9/11.

Before 9/11, the intelligence agencies capped a lot of their information silos and to themselves.

NSA kept it in that box.

There wasn't a lot of sharing and mingling.

The 9/11 attacks made the argument that, you need to have more collaboration if the intelligence community will be aware of all the threats.

The structures and procedures for changing to allow much more lower-level people access to more information.

This explains WikiLeaks with Chelsea Manning and Bradley Manning.

Someone like reality winter was able to get access to classified information.

All of these people who have leaked information in the past from their low-level jobs, why hasn't the intelligence community figured out, if you are going to have information spread out all over the place, are you going too far?

Why is it that these young people still have access to all of this information that they could potentially expose?

I think those will be big policy questions coming out of this.

After the last go around, we heard officials saying, we will clampdown and make it so this can't happen anymore, but it keeps happening.

The intelligence community has adapted to this more collaborative environment, but it comes at significant cost and this leak is one of them.

Walter: President Biden said he was more concerned about the fact of the leak then he was about the suspect.

He said, I am concerned that it happened that there is nothing contemporaneous that I am aware of that is of great consequence.

Is that true?

Shane: It is interesting, considering I think this document dump really reveals a lot about the penetrations that the U.S. has into foreign adversaries.

I think the information was very revealing.

A lot of it is something we have gotten from journalistic sources.

To me, what is remarkable is that it shows all the ways the U.S. is gathering this information.

You can pretty clearly infer that the U.S. intelligence community has deeply penetrated the Russian ministerial -- Ministry of Defense.

That kind of revelation about sources and methods is traditionally what intelligence communities and agencies try to prevent.

But as the president's view, but talking to people in his administration, they seem a lot more alarmed and are very nervous about the fact that there are more documents out there that reporters are continuing to look at.

Walter: Compare this to Edward Snowden.

Is this worse?

Shane: I think it is different.

I think it is more significant.

I have written a lot surveillance.

These Snowden leaks went very deep on a big and important suspect.

Cyber surveillance, signals intelligence, NSA monitoring.

The aperture of that lens was focused and narrow on NSA.

A lot of the documents revealed were PowerPoint presentations, it appeared that some cases people might be exaggerating some of the capabilities in order to impress their bosses.

These leaks are just covering the world.

It is almost as if you were just given access to the top-secret daily newspaper, which is not really a thing.

What intelligence officials are telling policymakers about everything that is going on.

You get a window in to what people like the president and secretary of defense and secretary of state are hearing every day, and you get a demonstration of the full range of capabilities of U.S. intelligence.

Imagery, information from human sources.

This is really kind of like the buffet of U.S. espionage.

It is far more revealing in its detail and breadth and the Snowden files, which went very in detail on one particular intelligence matter.

Walter: We didn't hear a whole lot of squeals from our allies.

Is that because some of this was shared with them as well?

Shane: It could be.

I think there is also a basic understanding that countries spy on each other.

U.S. tries to monitor Israel, we look at many of our allies, but we are keeping tabs on them.

.

I think they know there is an implicit bargain there, to understand that we may be gathering information, too.

Walter: One of the members you talked to said that this group was not a fascist recruiting.

Why would they say that?

Was it?

Shane: They say that because the name of the server, they call it the Shaker Central.

That is a racist allusion.

It is a reference that they lot of racial underpinnings and overtones.

Thug Shaker is a reference to a meme that has gone around that white people share when they are ridiculing black people.

It has taken on currency with the alt rate -- alt right.

A lot of these kids, many of them were kids, were sharing racist and anti-Semitic names and jokes.

It is hard for me to know, is that because they felt that way or because, as offensive and alien as that might seem to you and me, they just thought it was funny or made them seem sophisticated?

The overtones was very alt rate, it leaned conservative but not in a political way, they were all religious, Orthodox Christian which is interesting.

I think that when we spoke to them, the one teenager we talked to, they were really aware of the fact of how the outside world would look at this.

So you are all sharing racist jokes, you like guns, this -- you are led by this older person, this has aspects of almost recruitment.

They were just trying to dispel the notion that it was literally motivated.

They didn't talk about politics a lot.

I think this is an element of them being sensitive now, what they look like and how the world is going to interpret that.

If you are sharing racist and anti-Semitic jokes all the time, be it is because you harbor racist and anti-Semitic use.

-- views.

That doesn't have much to do with the motivation.

Walter: What do you think the motivation was?

Shane: I have been covering intelligence for 20 years, and I have never seen a motivation like this.

It was to impress these teenagers.

Because of his job, he had access to a ton of classified information.

He had access to things that mortals and citizens didn't know.

He did gain some sense of power.

People who run this information when he started sharing it said, he was doing it to keep us informed about world events.

There was almost a teacher and student aspect to this relationship.

He appeared to have a fairly conspiratorial view about the government and the world and thought he was waking his followers up or bringing them into the inner circle.

I asked, how did you feel when you saw this highly classified information that ordinary people don't get to see?

His words were, I felt like I was on top of Mount Everest, above other people because I knew things they didn't.

It is kind of this culture of exclusivity and superiority that seems to have created an environment in which he was showing his own and flexing in front of these younger people.

I have never seen a leak motivated by that.

They do it either for money or because they want to expose what they think is wrong.

I have never seen people expose government secrets to impress teenagers.

Walter: You said there was a video.

Of him shooting guns and shouting racist and anti-Semitic comments.

Describe that video and tell us what he was shouting.

Shane: In the video, he is at a shooting range and wearing safety goggles and big earmuffs, he is holding a large rifle.

Someone appears to be filming him on a camera.

He shouts the N-word and another slur about Jewish people.

The context is, as if he is saying, this is what you are going to get my then he starts firing the rifle.

Saying these slurs and using the N-word and shooting the gun as a way of seeming threatening.

When these people showed us the video, I don't think they understood it to be serious.

I think they thought he was being funny.

Most people would find it very alarming and quite threatening and say, is this someone promoting violence or indicating that he might?

It was a pretty chilling video to see and gave us a bit of pause about, are we not just dealing with a leaker, but is this potentially a violent person?

When the FBI arrested him, they were in full tactical gear.

They were in body armor which tells you they were holding out the possibility he might be heavily armed and perhaps wouldn't go easily.

Walter: He think that corners of the Internet, private servers on various social sites, as well as COVID and other things have stirred up or incubated a conspiratorial type thing that we are seeing?

Shane: I do.

I think this story is something that may be could only happen during the pandemic.

This server group, it formed during the pandemic and became a refuge where a lot of these teenage boys who were cut off from each other, they couldn't get together with their friends, and they spent all of their waking hours in this room.

I think it was isolating and potentially work to their sense of reality.

They are living in a world in which things are very online.

My impression was that they didn't really understand the real-world implications of this information.

I got the feeling that this was kind of a story that was very, of the moment.

These impressionable kids isolated by the pandemic were around this older person who was persuading them of certain things and holding them in thrall to him.

He was a spooky kind of atmosphere that spoke to the control it seemed like he had.

Walter: Thank you so much, Shane.

>> That is it for our program tonight.

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