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Hello, hello, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. Welcome to all the
new subscribers. Hope you're doing well. This is The Truth About Edward Snowden.
So let's use the way, way back machine to go back to the 18th century and start talking
about Edward Snowden.
The guy named James Otis, he fought at the time what we call the writs of assistance.
This is where the British soldiers, basically there were general warrants. They allowed
British soldiers to raid and search homes based on no suspicion of criminal activity;
just felt like ambling in basically. It was like everybody was on parole. Any soldier
could violate the sanctity of anyone's person or home at will and this was, as you could
imagine, quite generally loathed by I guess what my ancestors probably call the colonists.
The writs of assistance were extreme violations of basic privacy and property rights of Americans
and the American Revolutionaries, oh, how they hated them. Otis put a court case forward
and he said, "Look, specific warrants describing the people, places or things to be searched
and sworn by an affirmation are legitimate and legal," what's called a search warrant.
You got to go to a judge and say, "Here's why we want to go and search, and here's the
probable cause, and here are the reasons, and here's the evidence," and so on. But general
warrants, those which do not require any specific information are targeting. All these warrants
that enable the government to search at will are illegal. Tragically, he lost his case.
Ah, but who was sitting in the audience but the founder of a brewery I believe, John Adams.
Otis' argument formed the basis for the 14th Amendment to the Massachusetts Declarations
of Rights which was written by Adams which in turn inspired the Fourth Amendment to one
US Constitution.
Fourth Amendment, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. No warrants
shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing
the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized." So you can't just go
into someone's house and start searching. You have to have some sort of proof that something
was stolen and it was seen. The bicycle was stolen, it was seen in the backyard, and therefore
you can go and look for it.
The Fourth Amendment was intended to create a constitutional buffer between US citizens
and the intimidating power of law enforcement. It has three components.
First, it establishes the privacy interest by recognizing the right of US Citizens to
be secured in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.
Second, it protects this privacy and interest by prohibiting searches and seizures that
are unreasonable or not authorized by a warrant based upon probably cause.
Third, it states that no warrant may be issued to a law enforcement officer unless that warrant
describes with particularity the place to be searched and the persons or things to be
seized. This is very, very important and has a huge effect on the Snowden case.
Ah, remember the good old days when we had a small government and lot of privacy? The
only way that you can think of the good old days as the good old days is you simply refuse
to visit them objectively. So they're in a pseudo war with France. There was this Alien
and Sedition Acts of 1798 were passed by the Federalist Congress. It made it illegal to
criticize the federal government official or any federal government officials even if
the criticism was true with the exception of Jefferson, I believe, who was a vice president
but didn't want to be protected or wasn't to be protected by this fundamentally democratic
thing.
In the 1920s, there was a predecessor to the NSA called the Cipher Bureau also known as
the Black Chamber. So the Black Chamber's mission was to monitor international telegraph
that threats the National Security. Do you see how much things changed? The chamber approached
Western Union, the nation's largest telegraph company, hoping to gain access to the messages
travelling as telegraph lines. Just as rising as today, Western Union was more than happy
to comply giving the chamber secret access to its customers' private communications.
Now, I don't blame the company too too much when faced with the awesome power and might
and terror apparatus with the federal government. It's not that hard cave.
During World War II, Project SHAMROCK gave the Armed Forces Security Agency, which became
the NSA, daily access to the communication records of Western Union, RCA Global, and
ITT. SHAMROCK was legal during World War II. Ah, but shockingly the government program
did not design to work during the war, did not stop when the war ended. Do you remember
how -- what is it? 1917, the income tax was introduced as a temporary war measure, soon
to have its 100th year anniversary and have gone up many, many, many dozens of times in
rates since the beginning. SHAMROCK was legal during World War II but did not stop until
the war, continuing until 1975, the next -- probably we'll get to that in a sec. At the height
of this program, it collected and analyzed its over 150,000 messages a month with no
search warrants or court oversight. Ah, the good old days when privacy was assured.
So then the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 after it was learned
that President Nixon had used federal resources including the FBI's COINTELPRO to spy on his
political opponents such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "I Had a Dream..." that my dreams
would be monitored by the government.
So FISA created a secret court. Ooh, there's nothing like a secret court for the fine administration
of justice, and the secret court authorized warrants to surveille foreign nationals inside
the US. Now, there are some criticisms that the FISA court was rubber stamping warrant
request based upon the tiny amount of information that we have which is there were 18,000 warrant
requests in the first 26 years of this court's existence. It denied -- ooh, let me see if
I have enough fingers and thumbs -- it denied -- I do, five! It denied five of those requests.
That could be considered a rubber stamp.
Let's talk about ECHELON. This is in the 1970s under a system code name ECHELON. The NSA
and its junior partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada operate a network
of massive, highly automated interception stations covering the globe amongst them.
Any of the partners can ask for -- and if the other partners intercept its own domestic
communications, right? So if you want to track someone in the US and you're the American
government, all you do is you ask Canada to track someone in the US because the US is
a foreigner to Canada and vice-versa. Therefore, you can say, "Well, we don't spy our own citizens.
We ask our neighbors to do that." Much, much different.
ECHELON was carried out without any official acknowledgement of its existence because remember,
robust debate is essential to a democracy. Let alone any democratic oversight or public
or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose.
The extensiveness of the ECHELON global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War
activity. Ah, yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget -- far from being greatly
reduced or eliminated -- was increased, and the network has grown in both power and reach.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Now, it's not just about spying on people. Let's talk about some commercial -- spying
or espionage. German security experts discovered several years ago that the ECHELON was engaged
in heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German firms as the wind generator
manufacturer, Enercon. So in '98, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention,
enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at far cheaper rates than before.
Tragically, when the company tried to market its invention in the US, it was confronted
by its American rival, Kenetech, which announced it had already patented a near-identical piece
of technology. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale of its
equipment in the US because we live in such a free market paradise. In a rare public disclosure,
an NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television
to reveal how he had stolen Enercon's secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link
lines that ran between Enercon's research lab and its production units some 12 miles
away. Detailed plans of the company's invention but then passed on to Kenetech.
Trade spying in 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie based in Blagnac
Cedex, France also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided by
information covertly collected by NSA and the CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped
on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the US in 1995 over auto parts trade.
So the US has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it backdoor
access to encryption programs claiming that this was to serve the needs of law enforcement
agencies. Oh, yes, it's always law enforcement.
A report released by the European Parliament in May 1999 asserted that Washington's plans
for controlling encryption software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and
everything to do with US industrial espionage. If a European company does really well, the
government doesn't collect taxes from it. But if an American company does well, the
American government collects taxes from it so it has an incentive to promote the interest
of the American companies.
Code breaking, the NSA has dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to *** code
books from foreign facilities in the US and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications
clerks abroad and buy their code secrets according to veteran intelligence officials. By the
way, if you've made it this far, since I always get this question at least about a hundred
times, all the sources are in the low bar, to the video, or the notes to the podcast.
For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company, Crypto AG -- not a bad name for a
punk band -- sold the world's most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. The purchasing
nations -- there are about a 120 who bought this technology -- including prime US intelligence
target such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia, they were confident that their communications
were protected and so they sent messages from their capitals to their embassies, to military
missions, trade offices and espionage dens around the world via telex, radio, and fax
-- ask your parents -- all the while because there is a secret agreement between the company
and the NSA.
These governments might as well have been hand delivering the messages to Washington
uncoded. Their Crypto AG machines have been rigged before being sold to them so that when
they used them the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted
along with the enciphered message. So you're getting the encrypted message plus the decryption
key was being sent to Washington. NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they
could the morning newspaper, which I think even back then was covering this trial.
Now, this is a bit more controversial, Microsoft denies this but I thought I'd put forward
this case. In September -- this is a new meaning to Windows -- in September '99, it was revealed
the NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special keys into Windows software in all
versions from 95 OSR2 onwards.
An American computer scientist in North Carolina had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction
code and found the smoking gun -- Microsoft's developers that failed to remove the debugging
symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the
labels for two keys where one was called key; the other was called NSA key. Microsoft again
denies this.
Fernandez presented his findings at the conference at which some Windows developers were also
in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software,
but they refused to talk about what the key did or why it had been put there without the
users' knowledge. Fernandez says that the NSA's backdoor in the world's most commonly
used operating system makes it orders of magnitude easy for the US government to access your
computer.
According to the recent Snowden leaks, the level of collusion between Microsoft Corporation
and the NSA is really quite astonishing. Microsoft allows the NSA to skirt encryption protocols
on Outlook, Skype video, and cloud services as such as SkyDrive and data captured by the
NSA was routinely passed on to both the FBI and the CIA.
In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation, the DAS, the
intelligence arm with the French Defense Ministry had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted
that the NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According
to the DAS report, "It would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported,
not at least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept Microsoft MS-DOS
operating system by the same administration." Bill "open" Gates -- the report stated that
there has been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about
the existence of spy programs on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill
Gates' development teams."
The Pentagon, said the report, was Microsoft's biggest client in the world and actually for
years there has been a Microsoft liaison office at the NSA buildings.
Now, you probably heard about this recently. Police departments, they use this automated
license plate recognition cameras to track where you're going. The cameras record the
movement of all passing vehicles and store the information in a centralized database.
Police in real time can find vehicles on a hotlist to issue tickets for expired registration
or unpaid parking tickets, cars that have been towed from home driveways, Walmart parking
lots, and even outside the church during services for alleged non-payments of as little as $50.
Today it showed that in most jurisdictions, 99% of the vehicles recorded have done nothing
wrong. Maryland, for instance, tracked 85 million licensed plates in 2012 and of the
0.2% flagged as violation, 97% of them had expired registrations. So it's a revenue gathering
tool. Only 0.005% of the total rates pointed to a serious crime. Even if a "hit" is registered,
it does not mean that the vehicle is actually being driven by a criminal as the database
information is frequently wrong, something that has led to fatal mistakes in the UK where
licensed plate cameras are even more widely used. US law enforcement agencies have already
placed any limits on the use of this information. The Scarsdale police department says, "The
use is only limited by the officer's imagination."
So let's look at some of the laws surrounding Snowden's revelations. There's a thing called
the Third-Party Doctrine. The Third-Party Doctrine is a legal principle that in effect
you lose your Fourth Amendment right when you relinquish information to a third party.
This ruling said that by giving data such as phone numbers to a third party such as
a phone company, you'd given up any expectation of privacy in that data. That ruling was made
in 1979 but is now used to suggest you've given up an expectation of privacy in lots
of data you give to online services. There is a, to me at least, bit of a difference
between an expectation of privacy and turning a whole bunch of stuff over to the government.
When the Fourth Amendment was drafted, of course, the vast majority of people's private
activities occurred inside the homes. So it made sense to make the home the focus of Fourth
Amendment protections, but as people began conducting more and more of their lives outside
of the home with telephones, email, credit cards, and so forth using the four walls of
the home as a boundary for the Fourth Amendment protection made less and less sense.
Now, just by the common law, a law that is sort of private and evolves based upon circumstances
tends to keep step with changing technology but government law generally doesn't. Whatever
is surrounded by force like government laws and ethics and so on, regulations, they tend
to get frozen in time.
Precisely, the Supreme Court recognized this in the famous 1967 case of Katz versus the
United States which held that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping of public payphones
because the Fourth Amendment protects people not places. So they said you could not wiretap
public payphones. So save us, Supreme Court, oh, dear. Well, maybe not. The Supreme Court
effectively says there's no way to challenge warrant as wiretapping.
The court basically says that any harm is speculative and thus there can't be any standing
at all. "We decline to abandon our usual reluctance to endorse standing theories that rest on
speculation about the decisions of independent actors." Does that clear it up for you? "We
need to only assume that the government is doing its job to find out about and combat
terrorism in order to conclude that there is a high probability that the government
will intercept at least some electronic communications to which at least some of the plaintiffs or
parties. The majority is wrong when it describes the harm threatened plaintiffs as speculative."
So just trust the government. I'm not sure when one B. Spears was elevated to a seat
at the Supreme Court but, I guess, she did.
Now, I'll follow a couple of internet activists and refer to this as the Patriot Act because
the word "patriot" has some moral value that's co-opted by a fundamentally Darth Vader-ish
evil piece of legislation. The Patriot Act includes the requirement to obtain a US court
order of 72 hours after surveillance has taken place for US citizens. So you can do it. You
got to get the court order afterwards. Former citizens can be subject to surveillance for
up to one year without any court subversion.
Now, of course, the reality is that with IP masking, proxy service and so on, you could
pretend you're anywhere in the world. Knowing who's a domestic and who's a foreign citizen,
particularly when you're trying to find people who are doing wrong and want to hide from
the government or doing things which are considered illegal by the government not always the same
as doing wrong, so the idea that you can easily figure out who is domestic and who is foreign
is a ridiculous notion that is only believable to people who have no understanding of computers.
The court which overseas FISA is called FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court),
but it is, according to a former NSA analyst, more or less "rubber stamping surveillance
and basically a kangaroo court," as we talked about before.
The NSA wasted millions of dollars on a system called Trailblazer which was supposed to analyze
data carried on communications network. Despite having Trailblazer and using it, the NSA didn't
discover the 9/11 plot although Trailblazer was tracking 20 trillion communications transactions
of Americans that didn't get any of the analytical results.
In a December 2012 interview, retired US Intelligence Officer William Binney explained how much
worse surveillance had become under Obama. "Information is not filtered anymore, just
stored." If government wants to get you it will just pull out the data. That same central
government will define what's right or wrong. If your position is something the government
doesn't like, you become the target. That's why I always try and do things the government
likes.
Let's talk about what -- just look at that. What is it? Nineteen minutes in. Hey, we're
getting to Snowden. NSA PRISM secretly collects two things: one, foreign online communications,
email, chat, voice over IP, telex, fax -- you name it. Metadata on millions of phone calls,
so GPS locations and who you're calling at the time and so on, but they say not the content
of the calls. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen.
Major technology companies have been required to provide backdoor access to the NSA. The
details have not been revealed because remember, President Obama welcomes a vigorous public
debate but will not release the information that might enable it.
In 2008, Yahoo! fought back saying the court orders were unconstitutional. The court ordered
Yahoo! to comply. In 2008, Congress gives the DOJ authority to make reluctant companies
comply by force. All government is compliance by force. Remember, there's a lot of backdoor
software. All phones can be backdoor converted into listening devices even when you're not
talking. They can install software without asking the user and phones they can also be
told to only pretend to turn off and still be listening to your environment.
The US government without obtaining proper court warrants before, during, or after has
obtained hundreds of millions of phone lines of Americans who have no connection to any
terrorism whatsoever.
Snowden offered information on how the NSA has newly developed program, this PRISM thing,
supposedly targeting suspect terrorist but in the process also sweeping up huge amounts
of data about ordinary Americans. It's done through a variety of US companies including
Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, and Apple. The information can then be locked
away for a long time and easily accessed in the future. A huge $2 billion facility was
recently built in Bluffdale, Utah by the Obama administration.
Snowden also talked about another program called Boundless Informant which tracks a
billion pieces of intelligence data around the world. In March 2013 alone, the NSA collected
97 billion pieces of information from computer networks worldwide, and 3 billion of those
pieces came from US-based network. On the plus side, 96.8 billion pieces of that information
were LOLCats. This contradicts the NSA's recent assurances to congress that it cannot exactly
track all the surveillance it performs on American communications with the rest of the
world.
Now, most of this data that comes around worldwide does come from Middle Eastern countries but
Snowden says, "We hack everybody everywhere. We make no distinction between us and the
others. We do not have the tools and I have maps where people are scrutinized most. We
collect more digital communications from Americans than we do from Russians."
Snowden reveals his fear of an Orwellian world, "Where everything I do and say is recorded,
whether there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."
This is called the chilling effect, when you believe that everything that you're doing
that involves any kind of digital communication is being stored, tracked, and monitored and
analyzing could be used against you. It puts a chilling effect which the government is
never against.
A former East German Stasi -- and this was their sort of Gestapo there, NKVD -- Officer
says, "It is the height of naiveté to think that once collected this information won't
be used. This is the nature of secret government organizations."
Now, of course, remember, Snowden had sworn an oath to protect the constitution. So we'll
have an examination of the legality of what the government is doing, but let's just drop
in to three other whistleblowers who've been saying some of the same stuff years but came
forward to support everything that Snowden said.
US Today has published an extraordinary interview with three former NSA employees who praised
Edward Snowden's leaks, corroborates some of his claims and warn about unlawful government
acts. They say, "His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security. What Snowden
discovered is material evidence of an institutional crime." We'll get to that. As a systems administrator,
Snowden "could go on the network or go to any file or any system and change it or add
to it or whatever" just to make sure because he would be responsible to get it back and
up and running if, in fact, it failed. So that meant he had access to go in and put
anything. That's why he said I think, "I can even target the President or a judge." If
you knew their phone numbers or attributes, you could insert them into the target list
which would be distributed worldwide, and then it would be collected. Yeah, that's right.
As a super user, he could do that. It's a lot of power.
The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth. Of course, it is. Who watches
the watchers? While you can't have anybody watch the watchers, which is why the very
idea of government is so dangerous.
Congressional overseers "have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing.
They're totally dependent on the agency's briefing them on programs telling them what
they are doing."
Lawmakers, "No one really understands what the NSA does and how it operates," even when
they get briefings they still don't understand, even if they're told the truth which is not
often.
Edward Snowden decided to work with intelligence contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, in order
to obtain information about US surveillance programs. The NSA leaker told the South China
Morning Post, "my position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to listening machines
all over the world the NSA has hacked. That is why I accepted that position about three
months ago," he said. He said that he could not live with what the NSA was doing.
He's been charged with the unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence and is wanted in
the US for a variety of counts that could result in decades in prison if convicted.
He narrowly missed the charge of treason which has the death penalty. He was charged in June
with three felonies: theft of government property and two charges under the Espionage Act of
1917, unauthorized communication of National Defense information and conveying classified
communications information to unauthorized persons or people.
He's the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Statute under the Obama administration
more than double the other presidents combined.
Well, is he a whistleblower? Well, the Associated Press has told all of its member agencies
to refer to Snowden as a "leaker" not a whistleblower because we have freedom of the press. It's
very important.
The Whistleblower Act in the US provides protection for government employees who report dishonest
or illegal activities occurring in a government agency, right? If you find dishonest or illegal
activities, you are protected from repercussions.
Now, the government says PRISM is legal and authorized by the FISA and Patriot Act. Two
lawsuits are currently challenging this reading charging that this program violates the constitutional
protections as well as federal laws specifically breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom
of association and due process rights. The Patriot Act is a law than in many ways over
reaches constitutionally protected rights of US citizens. In Section 215 in this Act,
the government is required to provide facts to show that the information they are gathering
"shall specify the records concerned as sort for an authorized investigation conducted
in accordance with subsection A2, to protect against international terrorism or clandestine
intelligence services."
It's impossible that every while as customary to the US has made calls related to international
terrorism or clandestine intelligence services, so this is a violation of the law. Even if
you take the broad reach of the Patriot Act, what the NSA is doing and has been doing for
years is clearly illegal. Again, I'm not a legal expert and the sources for all of these
are in the low bar. This is just what people say.
Now, is the US going kind of nutty? Are they empire on steroids? Well, let's look at what
the allies do to leakers, whistleblowers, or people who release government information.
In the UK, the US's closest military and intelligence ally, the maximum penalty for public disclosure
for intelligence and security information is two, count in two years. Oh, poor, Manning.
Since Britain's Official Secrecy Act of 1989 entered into force, ten public servants with
authorized access to confidential info have been prosecuted under the Act. Of those, the
longest sentence -- one year in prison -- was served by Steven Hayden, a Navy Petty Officer
who pled guilty to selling security and intelligence info to the Sun Tabloid concerning a plot
by Saddam Hussein to launch anthrax attacks in the UK. In the US, that offense would be
prosecuted under the Espionage Act, the same law being used to prosecute Bradley Manning
which brings a possible life sentence.
Recently, Luxembourg's long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker announced his
resignation this week over a spying scandal involving illegal phone taps alongside a number
of other highly corrupt activities. Illegal phone taps -- one tiny, tiny sliver of a percentage
point of what PRISM is doing and Luxembourg's Prime Minister had to resign.
So a survey of the laws and practices of 20 European countries found that in at least
13 countries things are even more relaxed. A disclosure of classified information to
the public would not result in any penalty in the absence of a showing of harm. Ten countries
require the government to prove either actual or probable harm in order for any penalty
to be imposed and additional three countries allow the lack of harm to be raised as a defense
or mitigating circumstance. Under US law, the mere fact of a leak is sufficient cause
for prosecution. In practice, a few lower courts have required some showing of harm,
but the harm can be minimal and speculative, and the interpretation has not been confirmed
by the Supreme Court. The Obama administration continues to assert that the prosecution is
not required to establish harm at least concerning disclosure of classified documents.
Ah, what has America been doing to its fine European allies? Well, US Intelligence Services
spying on the European Union Mission New York and its embassy in Washington according to
the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by one E. Snowden.
One document lists 30 embassies and missions describing them as targets. It details an
extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target from bugs implanted in
electronic communications gear to taps in the cables, to the collection of transmissions
with specialized antennae.
According to Snowden's revelations in the German Magazine, Der Spiegel, the NSA snoops
through approximately 20 to 60 million German phone connections and ten million internet
data sets a day. According to the Snowden report, all in all, the NSA combs through
around half a billion German phone calls, emails, and text messages on a monthly basis.
Snowden's disclosures of massive surveillance that was technically legal should have been
disclosed at least to members of Congress, and certainly was information of high public
interest. Attempts at internal disclosure had previously failed. The congressional oversight
committees had been informed that the PRISM program and at least two Congress members
reported that their efforts to prompt an effective investigation were stymied, went nowhere.
Both senators had warned for years that the government secretly claimed broader surveillance
powers than a plain reading of the laws permitted but said they were barred from elaborating
because of laws protecting classified information.
The Attorney-General's office should use one of the modern 150 laws on the books that criminalize
the disclosure of specific and well-defined categories of information including intelligence
sources, codes, and methods, identities of covert agents and technological data about
nuclear data. Moreover, to comply with the First Amendment, courts should interpret such
laws, some of which expressly so state to require both a likelihood and an intent to
cause significant harm.
Two Democrats on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence report that the National Security
Agency provided inaccurate and misleading information about the government's extensive
surveillance operations. So the NSA's response when questioned wasn't in tune with what Senators
Wyden and Udall had been told of the programs. "We were disappointed to see that this fact
sheet contains inaccurate statement about how the Section 702 authority has been interpreted
by the US government. In our judgment, this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays
protections for Americans' privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually
are."
Lawmakers rejected the NSA's claim that "any inadvertently acquired communications of or
concerning a US person must be promptly destroyed if it's neither relevant to the authorized
purpose nor evidence of a crime. We believe that this statement is somewhat misleading,"
replied the senators; in that it implies that the NSA has the ability to determine how many
American communications it has collected on Section 702, or that the law does not allow
the NSA to deliberately search for the records of particular Americans. In fact, the Intelligence
community has told us repeatedly that it is not reasonably possible to identify the number
of people located in the US whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority
of the FISA Amendments Act."
I mean, the internet, digital communications, cell phones, you name it, they are the greatest
tool for totalitarian surveillance that any government has ever dreamed of throughout
human history. No government in history has ever had as much access to detailed information
about all of the citizens as the governments that exist right now. You know the tragedy
if it is -- NSA would never have been able to make sense of the massive amounts of data
it was collecting without the maturation of open source software tools such as Hadoop.
Of course, there are tools that programmers created and refined and shared and grew usually
voluntarily to deal with the operational problems of handling big data. This is where we really
get to the meat of the matter. Let me just zoom a little bit here and talk to you just
for a minute or so about what this fundamentally means.
So look, the government would never have invented this stuff. The government doesn't really
invent anything. The government just co-ops stuff that the market creates, so all of these
electronic communications, surveillance equipment to the internet fundamentally. Well, the internet
was developed -- is a Cold War bypassed technology for the phone lines but it wasn't commercialized
until a free market came along and improved and so on.
The free market breeds all of this stuff and cell phones and GPS tracking. All of this
stuff is popularized and put out to consumers by the free market. When you have a government,
you have something which hoovers up all of the virtues and values of the free market
and turns them into some pretty black evil monitoring devices. Whenever you have the
government as the center of society combined with an incredible technological drive in
the free market, you end up with a freedom fueling fascism. This is really tragic and
really can't be avoided.
Now, the other thing that's important is that there's a reason why you're supposed to get
some sort of warrant before going in and doing searches because that means you actually have
to do some proactive legwork. If you just go to all this data, what do you do? Well,
you sit back and wait for a request to come in. Of course, most of the things you're going
to pursue are political in nature or revenue generating in nature such as going after people
who haven't paid for their licenses for their car or something like that.
It makes people pretty passive. It gets rid of proactive police work. It just makes you
sit on a whole bunch of data, come through it once in a while based upon various requests,
and maybe try to look for a pattern here or there but not actually get out into the world,
train people to go undercover, train people to become double agents and all that kind
of stuff. You just end up sitting on a bunch of data and getting lazy. There's a reason
why you need law enforcement to focus because you really want them to be proactive in trying
to figure things out rather than just trying to drink from the sea of data.
All of this stuff is really important. The government is one of the oldest forms of social
organization known to man going all the way back to the Stone Age, going all the way back
to primitive tribes where you had the tribal leader, the chieftain, who was the most violent
usually although one most willing to use violence, that was the alpha male. You had the beta
males who were willing to be the enforcers and then you'd have everyone under their control
and you had what Ayn Rand used to call the "witch doctor" who was the propagandist, which
is sort of switch between the mainstream media and religious institutions depending on what
is needed in the moment.
This form, this hierarchical pyramidical form of social organization is -- you can see it
in chimpanzees. It's really primitive. It's really old. Unfortunately, when you feed this
primitive ancient method of social -- dare I even say organization of social hierarchy
-- with all the tools that freedom and volunteerism and property rights and trade developed, then
you are really swelling. What used to be a bloodstone used to crush people's heads into
a literal death star. You are feeding fascism with technology and so this is one of the
reasons why I fundamentally question the need for a government of style and structure for
a violent hierarchy and a violent monopoly of the initiation of the use of force at the
very center of society. It's only going to get more dangerous as technology develops
further.
I hope that you will mull upon that. Thank you so much for listening. Have yourselves
a wonderful day.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio reminding you to donate if you like at fdrurl.com/donate.
Thank you so much.