Moderator: What's the one most important thing that you want to say, the most important message that you want to leave the group with today?

Ari Schwartz: The most important piece is trying to figure out the optimistic way to look at this situation we find ourselves in. We discussed the way that the Internet functioned during the crisis and how can we build on that. Another example is in the context of the anthrax threat. It was difficult to deliver mail to federal buildings. In fact, Congress still isn't accepting its mail today. But also we know that traditionally constituent services have been very poorly managed. Traditional mail, electronic mail, and telephone calls are all treated differently. They go through different systems and people. Is there a way that we can use this crisis to reevaluate these kinds of constituent management systems and create something that treats all different media in a similar light so that it goes to the right person at the right time? We have a chance to completely reevaluate the system and take away some threats. Obviously there are costs to that. But if we're spending all this money irradiating mail, perhaps we can streamline the entire system and save money down the road.

John Sennett: Security is a pain in the neck. It's time-consuming. It's tiresome. It doesn't contribute to productivity. It's just downright annoying. I've got about six passwords and I have to change them every week. I can never remember them. But we have to find ways to go about our daily lives and make a living and get business done and enjoy living in America and still be safe. We have to put on our thinking caps in the next decade or two to find ways to utilize technology to make our lives safer without fraying the Bill of Rights. We have to be safe enough to meet current and reasonably anticipated threats and the only way we're going to do that is to utilize security intelligently and comprehensively.

Julie Leeper: We need to continue to move forward and make government information useful and accessible. But we have to keep our eye on stewardship. We should not take the easy way out and just say security's too hard; we don't have the budget; we don't have the money. If that's the case, then we cannot move forward in a balanced way. When we can't deliver physical mail to a building, send e-mail. We can do that in secure methods and there are technologies like encryption that can enable us to be stewards. We need to encourage leaders not to take the easy way out, to listen to security officers, to strike compromises that balance risks.

Alex Roberts: When the farmer kicks over the ant hill, the ants all come scurrying out and scurry around for a certain period of time; then they go back to their business. When we have a huge crisis like 9/11, society comes out and posts police officers in front of every governmental building for a while and then slowly people go back to business. And why is that? Because a lot of times how we react as a society and as individuals is not sustainable. We have to come up with, and put in place, sustainable measures that don't fall away as the months from crisis go on. We have to think about how to keep this going. How will we sustain this effort so that it really makes a difference three years from now when the next crisis comes along?

Debra Cohn: I wanted to quote two Boston lawyers who were writing about "recent inventions and business methods that gave them pause." They wrote that "instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the housetops." This quote was written in the 1880s, and the reason I read it is that while concerns about privacy and security are very vivid to us right now, the concerns are not new. My message is look to what has given us great guidance -- the Constitution and other statutes. If we wanted the greatest privacy in the world, we'd sit in our homes, lock all the doors, never go out, and we wouldn't talk to anybody. But that's not how we want to live. We need a balance that reflects the traditions of democracy and security that are already embedded in our Constitution.