The Surveillance State is Built on Lies

At the heart of it, in every expression of executive power, right, and by executive we mean the White House here, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the DOJ, right, these guys exist as a part of the executive branch of government. In a real way they work for the White House. Now there are laws and regulations and policies that are supposed to say they're supposed to do this and they're supposed to say they're not supposed to do that. But when you look at federal regulations, when you look at policies as an employee of government, when you violate these policies, the worst thing that happens to you is you lose your job because there's no criminal penalty for the violation of these laws. And so it's very easy for people who exist in these structures, particularly the very top levels of these structures, to go look, we have a given set of lawful authorities. And these are defined very broadly to give us leeway to do whatever it is we think is proper and appropriate and just. Now take that proper and appropriate and just from the perspective of any given individual, right, any given president, and now intersect that with what's good for them politically. And that's where problems begin to arise. Now the safety measure that's supposed to protect us from this in the US system and in any democracy broadly is these people are supposed to be what are called public officials. That means we know their decisions. That means we know their policies. That means we know their programs and prerogatives and powers, like what they are doing, both in our name and what they're doing against us. And because they are transparent to us, we the people can then police their activities. We can go and disagree with this. We can protest it. We can campaign against it, right? We can try to become the president, do whatever. They are public officials and we are private citizens. They're not supposed to know anything about us, right? Because we in relative terms hold no power and they hold all the power. So they have to be under the tightest constraints. We need to be in the freest circumstances. And yet the rise of the state secrets doctrine, right, this whole classification system that goes all the way back to last century, about the middle of the last century, I believe is when it really started getting tested in court. And I think you know more about this in many cases than I do when you start talking about what happened in the FBI and the CIA and the NSA's sort of old dirty work in the 20th century, is they abused their powers repeatedly and continuously. They did active harm to domestic politics in the United States. The FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and trying to get Martin Luther King to kill himself before the Nobel Prize was going to be awarded. In fact, after MLK gave his I Have a Dream speech, two days later, the FBI classified him as the greatest national or I think it was the greatest national security threat in the United States. And yet this is the FBI. This is the group that everybody's applauding today saying, oh, these wonderful patriots and heroes. Now I'm not saying everybody in the FBI is bad. I'm not saying everybody at the CIA and the NSA is bad. I'm saying that you don't become a patriot based on where you work. Patriotism is not about loyalty to government. Patriotism in fact is not about loyalty to anything. Patriotism is a constant effort to do good for the people of your country. It's not about the government. It's not about the state. And this is, we'll get into loyalty later because I think one of the big criticisms against me that should be talked about is they go, look, this guy is disloyal. He broke an oath. He did whatever. Loyalty is a good thing when it's in the service of something good. But it is only good when it's in the service of something good. If you're loyal to a bad person, if you're loyal to a bad program, if you're loyal to a bad government, that loyalty is actively harmful. And I think that's overlooked. But yeah, when you get back into this whole thing about sort of where it came from, why it happened, how it could come out of just this small group, and then they could slowly kind of poison by implication, by complicity, by bringing them into the conspiracy, and then having them not say anything about it, a wider and wider body of people. And then once you've got enough people in on it, it's much easier to convince other people that it's legitimate because they can go, look, we've got 30 people who know about this, and none of them have objected to it. Why are you going to object to this? All of this derives from that original sin, which is in a democracy creating a system of government that is in fact a secret government, a body of secret law, a body of secret policy, that is far beyond what legitimate government secrets could be. This is not to say like government can have no secrecy at all. The government wants to investigate someone without having them respond, right? We're talking traditional law enforcement. Sure, you're not going to tell this mobster, hey, we're going to start investigating you. We the public don't need to know the names of every terrorist suspect out in the world, right? But we do need to know, again, the powers and programs, the policies that a government is asserting, at least the broad outlines of it, because otherwise how can we control it? How do we know if the government is applying its authorities that are supposed to be granted to it by us if we don't know what it is that they're doing? And so this is the main thing, and really the story behind the title, permanent record, is look, Joe, when you were a kid, you know, when I was a kid, when you were a teenager, right? Like, what's the worst thing you ever said? You know, did you say anything you weren't proud of? Did you do anything that you weren't proud of? Something that today in like the wokest of Twitter land, you would get in trouble for? I'm sure. And that's one of the horrible things about kids growing up today is that they do have all this stuff out there on social media forever, and they can be judged horribly by something they did when they were 13. It's exactly that. Our worst mistakes, our deepest shames, were forgotten, right? They were lost. They were ephemeral. Even the things we did get caught for, they were known for a time. Maybe they're still remembered by people who are closest to us, whether we like them or dislike them, but they were people connected to us. Now, we're forced to live in a real way naked before power. Whether we're talking about Facebook, whether we're talking about Google, whether we're talking about the government of any country, they know everything about us, or much about us, rather. And we know very little about them, and we're not allowed to know more. Everything that we do now lasts forever, not because we want to remember, but because we're not allowed to forget. Just carrying a phone in your pocket is enough for your movements to be memorialized, because every cell phone tower that you pass is keeping a record of that. And AT&T keeps those records going back to 2008, under a program called Hemisphere. If you search for Hemisphere in AT&T, you'll get a story in The Daily Beast about it. AT&T keeps your phone records going back to 1983. If any of your listeners were born after 1983, right, born after me, or it might be 1987, excuse me, 1987. If they were born after 1987, and they're an AT&T customer, or their calls cross AT&T's network, AT&T has every phone call they ever made, rather, the record that it happened, not necessarily the contents on the phone call. And so, I mean, let me turn this around for you, Joe, because I feel like I've just been given a speech. When you look at this stuff, right, when you look at what's happening with government, when you look at what's happening with the Trump White House, the Obama White House, the Bush White House, you could see this trend happening. When you look at what's happening with Facebook, when you look at what's happening with Google, when you look at the fact that you go to every restaurant today, and you see people look at phones, you know, you get on a bus, you get on a subway, you know, you see somebody sitting next to you in traffic, you see people looking at phones. These devices are connected all the time. Now people are getting Alexa, right, now people have OK Google, they have, you know, Siri on their phones, they're in their house, they've always got these connected microphones. Where do you think this leads? And what is it that gives you sort of trust in the system of faith, in the system of light? How, just so we can start a conversation here, what strikes you about this? Well, it's completely alien, and it's new. This is something that's unprecedented. We don't have a long human history of being completely connected via technology. This is something we're navigating right now for the first time. And it's probably the most powerful thing that the human race has ever seen in terms of the distribution of information. There's nothing that even comes close to it in all of human history, and we're figuring it out as we go along. And what you exposed is that not only are we figuring out as we go along, but that to cover their ass, these cell phone companies and cahoots with the government have made it legal for them to gather up all of your phone calls, all of your text messages, all of your emails, and store them somewhere so that retroactively, if you ever say anything they don't like or do something they don't like, they can go back, find that, and use it against you. And we don't know who they are. We don't know why they're doing it. And we didn't know they could do it until you exposed it. The connection of human beings via technology is both amazing and powerful and incredible in terms of our access to knowledge, but terrifying in terms of the government's ability to track our movements, track your phone calls, track everything. And under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and protecting us from sleeper cells, protecting us from attacks, look, if they really are protecting us from these attacks, that's great. But there's no provision in the Constitution that allows any of this. And this is where it gets really squirrely because they're making up the rules as they go along. And they're making up these rules the way you're describing it. It's a step by step. This has happened to sort of protect their ass and keep themselves from being implicated in what has been a violation of our rights and our privacy and the Fourth Amendment. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that everybody needs to understand when you look at these things, and the reason we talked about before when I got this information, why I didn't just put it on the Internet and people criticize me for this, they go, I didn't share enough information because the journalists are gatekeeping, right? They've got a big archive and they haven't published everything from it. And I told them not to publish everything. Why did you do that? Why did you do that? Because, so again, it gets back to legitimate secrets and illegitimate secrets. Some spying, from my perspective, career spy is okay, right? Agreed. If you have hacked a terrorist's phone, and you're getting some information about that, useful. Agreed. If you're spying on a Russian general in charge of a rocket division, useful, right? But there are lines and degrees in that where it's not useful. Now, the examples that I just gave you, these are targeted. This is where you're spying on an individual. They're no named person that is being monitored for specific reason that is related. Hopefully from a warrant. Right. Well, even for foreign intelligence, in some indications, you don't need a warrant strictly. Although I think they should have warrants for all of these investigations because they established a court for precisely this reason, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, right? And there's not a judge in the world who wouldn't stamp a warrant saying, hey, spy on Abu Jihad over here, right? And if you want to spy on another guy, Boris Badinov of the rocket division, right, that's okay. They're going to go with that. But then you look at these edge cases in the archive that I provided to journalists. There have been stories that have come down where they've spied on journalists, right? They've spied on human rights groups. And these kinds of things, I think people miss. I'm going to throw up some slides here. So forgive me if this gets weird and I put up the wrong ones. But since I came forward, this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the government says authorized these programs 15 different times was overruled by the first open courts to look at the program. These are federal courts here, right, that said, no, actually, these programs are unlawful. They're likely unconstitutional. When you start looking at the facts, you see, even within the context of the very loose restrictions and laws that apply to the NSA and surveillance, they say they broke their own laws 2,776 times in a single year. And then you asked about that thing that motivates me, like why I came forward. We had been trying as a country before I came forward to prove the existence of these programs legally. Because this is our means of last sort of recourse in our system, right? We got the executive, we got the legislature, we got the judiciary, right? So Congress makes the laws, the executive is supposed to carry them out, the courts are supposed to play a referee. The executive had broken the laws. Congress was turning a blind eye to the laws. And the courts were, and this is just months before I came forward, going, well, it does appear that the ACLU and Amnesty International, like all of these human rights groups and non-governmental organizations, had established that, you know, these programs are likely unlawful. They likely exist. They're simply classified. But the government responded with this argument that you just saw, saying that, well, it's a state secret if they do exist. You, the plaintiffs, don't have hard concrete evidence that they do exist. And the government is saying legally, you have no right to discover evidence from the government, right? Documents demand documents or demand an answer from the government as to whether things these as to whether or not these things exist. Because the government's just going to give its standard with a global response, we can neither confirm nor deny that these things exist, which leaves you out in the cold, which leaves the courts out in the cold, the courts go, look, the government could be breaking the law here. Look, they could be violating the Constitution here. But because you can't prove it, and because the government doesn't want to play ball, and the government says, if we were doing this, it would be legal, and it would be necessary for national security or whatever, the court can't presume to know national security better than the executive, because the courts aren't elected. And so this leads to this fundamentally broken system where, okay, the only way to have the courts review the legality of the programs is to establish the programs exist. But the programs are classified, so you can't establish they exist, unless you have evidence. But providing that evidence to courts, to journalists, to anyone is a felony, right? That's punishable by 10 years per count under the Espionage Act. And the government has charged every source of public interest journalism, who's really made a significant difference in these kind of cases, since Daniel Ellsberg, really going back to that, under the same Espionage Act, it's always the same law. And this is there's no distinction to government between whether you've sold information to a foreign government for private benefit, right? Or whether you provide an information only to journalists for the public interest. And then that's a fundamentally harmful thing, I think. When you look at things that have come in the wake of this, we're talking about the post 2013 court rulings that found what the government was doing was unlawful. You see the courts saying actually that leaks or air quotes leaks can actually be beneficial. Leak is used in the governance and this, you know, this is from a federal court, these are not exactly my biggest supporters, they're recognizing that although leak implies harm, it implies something that's broken, it's actually helpful. It's a leak that's letting in daylight in this context, that is the only thing that allows the system to operate in a context where one year before I came forward, we had the NSA saying this kind of stuff didn't happen. We had, hang on, this famous exchange, which more than anything made me realize this was a point of no return because I've told you this, you've heard this, but if you haven't seen it, you might not believe me, right? Maybe I'm a sketchy guy, whatever. One of those senators I told you that objected to this stuff that was doing the lassie barks for all those years, Ron Wyden, was confronting the most senior spy in the United States, General James Clapper, who was then the director of national intelligence, right? There's no guy higher than him, the buck stops with him when it comes to intelligence. He's testifying under oath in front of Congress, right? But more broadly, in front of the public, this is televised, and Ron Wyden asked him a very specific question about a program, mind you, that Ron Wyden knows exists because he has security clearance, he sits on the intelligence committee, and he knows there's domestic mass surveillance, and this is how it goes. This is how the top spy responds under oath. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? No, sir. It does not. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly. So that was a lie. Wyden knew it was a lie. Clapper knew it was a lie. He actually admitted it was a lie after I came forward three months later, but he said it was the least untruthful thing he could think of to say in the context of being in the hot seat there. But what does it mean for a democracy when you can lie under oath to Congress, and the congressman even knows you're lying to them, but they're afraid to correct you? And Wyden, by the way, wasn't a surprise. Wyden gave him those questions 24 hours in advance, and he wrote a letter afterwards asking for Clapper to amend his testimony, not even at a press conference, but just to say this was incorrect, whatever, so he could go through the legal process and show his fellow congressman that there was a problem and that they needed to do it. But all of that was refused to us. All of it was denied to us. And here I am, sitting at the NSA, next to my buddies who I've talked to about these programs. I've gone, look at this, and they're laughing at it. I'm laughing at it. And it's not that we go, oh, ha, ha, ha, he's getting away with it. It's like, what are you going to do? These guys are, they're bullshitters. The system is built on lies that even many people, many experts who have studied this know are lies. But if you can't prove they are lies, how do you move beyond that? And that's really a question that has never been more relevant than I think it is today under the current White House.