10/31/13 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott, and this is my show, scotthorton.org is the website.
Keep all my interview archives there, more than 3,000 of them now, at scotthorton.org.
And our first guest on the show today is Trevor Tim.
He is an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but that's not all.
He's also the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and he keeps the renowned Twitter feed, At Drones, keeping track of all of the drone news, as well as his own personal feed, At Trevor Tim.
That's Tim with two M's there.
Welcome back to the show.
Trevor, how are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
Good.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Lots of complicated things to talk about.
Thank goodness we have access to such experts on the show today.
So I guess if it's okay with you, before we even get into the newest revelations, I want to make sure that we talk, first of all, about the latest reforms, because yesterday I meant to talk about that with Marcy, and we never did get to it because there's so much other stuff to talk about.
So I was hoping that you could brief us on the different House and Senate, this, that, the other thing.
I guess Amash is probably trying to do the right thing, but then they say that Senator Feinstein has her own ideas, which is sure to be some kind of modified limited hangout sort of a situation there.
I don't know.
Could you please update us on all of that, and what hope we have, if there's any bills that we can rally behind to really try to roll back the NSA abuses?
Yeah, well, actually, just as we went on air, Senator Feinstein released her quote-unquote NSA reform bill in full.
So first, an ironic note, this bill was supposed to bring more transparency to the NSA.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which she chairs, marked it up completely in secret, so nobody could see what amendments they were trying to add to it first, and they just released it now.
The bill kind of paints this, a little veneer of transparency over what the NSA has been doing.
It doesn't go nearly far enough.
But worse, it actually codifies the mass phone record surveillance program that the administration has secretly been authorizing under the Patriot Act for the past six years.
So this bill makes it explicit that that surveillance, which is, again, the NSA collecting every phone call record in America, who you call, who calls you, what time you call them, for how long, and sometimes the location, they will now explicitly be able to do that under the law if this bill passes, which is obviously not an NSA reform bill.
It's just an NSA strengthening bill.
And so we are strongly against this bill.
There are other good bills that do much more in the way of NSA reform.
The best or the most high-profile is the Jim Sensenbrenner-Patrick Leahy bill.
Jim Sensenbrenner, of course, is actually the author of the Patriot Act.
And he has since said that the NSA has gone way too far, and this bill is meant to rein in their capabilities.
It does a lot more for transparency.
It allows somebody else to argue in the FISA court, which, obviously, the government's been making one-sided arguments to the secret court for years.
So, obviously, the judges are going to agree with whatever the government says.
And this bill, at least, attempts to end this mass phone record spying program.
Unfortunately, we know that the government will twist and distort all sorts of definitions of words to make them mean something that they don't mean ordinarily, so we hope that they actually strengthen the language of the stop bulk spying part of the bill.
But it's definitely a very good step forward and much, much better than the Feinstein bill, which everyone should immediately call their senator to oppose.
Are you guys at EFF, that's EFF.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are you in contact with Amash's office and the House members about getting that perfect, best you can, anyway?
Yeah, yeah, we're trying to convince them to move it forward.
The good news is that that bill has a good chance of passing the House.
You know, it has over 70 co-sponsors right now, and a few of the co-sponsors actually already have voted against the Amash amendment that came up in the House a few months ago, which would have ended this program.
And so they've actually flipped sides, they're now on the good guy's side, and so it looks like if everybody votes the same way, and these people switch, then it would end up passing.
Well, man, that's really something else, I guess, I've been saying on the show the last couple of days, just my imagination, I suppose, and maybe with more revelations coming, as Glenn Greenwald keeps promising, certainly yesterday's were huge, you know, maybe the pressure can be kept up, but it seems like our window for having, you know, the disorganized masses mad enough to organize themselves enough to actually insist and really do something about it and force the Congress to roll this thing back.
It's a very short window of time where we can achieve that kind of thing, but we saw it happen with Syria six weeks ago, where the people just yelled, hell no, and you could just hear it all over the planet Earth, the Americans yelling, hell no, and it stopped the war.
So it can be done, but people really got to insist, and they also have to, I guess, you know, be like Trevor Tim and be sure to say, and we don't want some, you know, Feinstein, you know, pretended reform, we're watching you, you can't trick us with that, we want the good guys bill here.
Can be done.
It's not, you know, some great democracy like in social studies class or something, but it can be done.
Absolutely.
I mean, especially with this issue.
For some reason, this issue is crossing partisan lines like no other issue that we've seen in the last few years.
You know, obviously Congress is bitterly divided over a ton of issues, but here we have, you know, almost equal number of Republican and Democrats going out to support the good bill.
And then we have also the Republicans and Democrats that hold leadership positions supporting the bad bill.
And so it's important that we get this grassroots swell of support, telling Congress exactly what they want, which bills to oppose, which bills to support, because, like, you're exactly right, as in the Syria situation showed, if there is this groundswell of support from both parties, we can actually put a stop to something.
And this is no better example.
I mean, that the coalition that stopped the Syria war is essentially the same coalition here that doesn't want this mass surveillance on the American public and much of the international world.
And so, you know, again, I urge everyone to call their senator immediately to first oppose the Feinstein bill and then see if we can get a good bill in through the Senate.
Well, not to go too far afield from the actual topic of the NSA spying and all of that.
I think that the political realignment that we're looking at here is just great.
And I hope people are inspired by it.
I mean, obviously, it's going to be difficult to change the two party system around to where it's us versus them and make it, you know, to, you know, that easy and obvious for people to understand who's on whose side.
But this is just like Syria, another one of these issues where it really is the ninety nine percent and not in a left wing activist kind of way, but really in the super majority of the population of the country kind of way.
It's us versus the political class and, you know, the Raytheon lobbyists, as that study showed Stephen Hadley and all these other guys who had direct profits to make.
They were out lobbying for the Syria war, but hardly anybody else.
Same kind of thing with the NSA spying.
The people are against all of this.
And so it really is us versus them.
Right.
The Democratic Republicans versus the war party and, you know, the bottoms of both parties versus the tops of them, that kind of thing.
And to me, especially to see well, and it's only because things are so bad that it comes to this.
But that's all right.
You know, people are are in the crisis.
They're breaking out of previous molds and finding themselves allies with people who they didn't know they could work with before.
And they might end up, I think, finding out that the least powerful parts of the left and right factions in America have a lot more in common with each other and on the most important issues and are good on the most important issues.
That's the point that they're good on no more wars and they're good on no more spying.
And they might even be for requiring the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment again, if you put it to them, you know.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I couldn't agree more.
You know, the leadership definitely is trying very desperately to hold on to power, both of the leadership in both the parties and also the leadership at the NSA and DNI.
But it's clear that the people have decided that they are against this type of surveillance.
And you know, it's important that the people in Congress respond to that pressure because they're the ones that, you know, ultimately give them their jobs.
And you know, it doesn't look like these stories are slowing down anytime soon.
So this may become an election issue very quickly for 2014.
Right.
I mean, that's the thing of it.
You know, I think I'm trying to remember what was the latest thing I read about Greenwald, but he was saying that he thinks he's about halfway done reporting these stories now and he still isn't to the best ones yet.
Yeah, I mean, he keeps saying there's more and more coming, as we saw yesterday with this unbelievable story that, you know, even though that the NSA has brought access to a lot of Google data through the PRISM program, through secret legal orders, they're actually breaking into Google systems overseas to intercept even more communications without Google ever knowing.
You know, so it seems this scandal knows no bounds.
And you know, hopefully each as each of these stories come out, that people will become more and more aware of what's going on and we can put a stop to it.
Yeah.
Hey, I want to get back to that in one second.
But first, real quick, I forgot I was going to ask you about the the Feinstein bill, the way it legalizes the metadata collection, the way they're doing it now under their claimed authority under the Patriot Act 215 section there.
Is that basically an admission of guilt that they've sort of been lying about what they believe the Patriot Act says they can do and getting away with it and that they really need this law to legalize what they're doing?
Because yeah, it sort of sounds like maybe they should go to prison then.
You know, absolutely.
I think that they know what they, you know, deep down, they probably know what they did was, you know, at the minimum, very dishonest to the American public, which, as I was saying before, even the author of the Patriot Act said that the Patriot Act did not authorize this master balance, yet they went ahead and did it with this with this law in secret anyways.
And so, you know, now that the American people know what happened and we have a government document proving it, all of these lawsuits sprouted up saying that, you know, to the government that this is illegal and this must be stopped.
You know, EFF has one, ACLU has one.
There's many more that have happened, you know, since this scandal sprouted up four months ago.
And so now they're scared and now they want to actually put it into a law, which is what they should have done in the first place if they wanted this to happen.
But you know, at least now we get to have this debate.
You know, six years ago when they first passed this law, the American public didn't have any say into whether their phone records were going to be collected by the NSA.
And this is a debate we should have had six years ago.
And you know, it's a shame that it took the leaks of Edward Snowden for the Intelligence Committee to come at least come partially clean about what they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, you know, as far as the debate, the debate is, hey, the Fourth Amendment says that you can't pass any laws that pretend to legalize this.
This is a boundary you can't cross any more than you can pass a law telling me what church I have to go to on Sunday morning.
So go to jail and or at least at the very least, stop it.
That's it.
Or, I guess, if you could get two thirds of both houses of Congress and three quarters of the states to repeal the Fourth Amendment, then you wouldn't have a Fourth Amendment anymore.
But other than that, the pretension of legality here that there's anything to debate at all is, you know, kind of fun to me, you know.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, at EFF, we strongly believe that the Fourth Amendment should protect your metadata as well as your content.
Unfortunately, there's still a debate going on in the courts about whether the judges agree with that.
And, you know, we've won a lot of battles, but we've also lost a lot of battles.
And this will probably come up in the Supreme Court eventually so they can decide once and for all.
But, you know, the important thing is that now the American public at least know what's going on and they can make a decision as to whether they like a certain type of surveillance.
I mean, obviously, I'm totally against this type of surveillance.
But, you know, if the American public ultimately decides that that's something that they want, and they vote on it the correct way, and if it violates the Constitution, they change the Constitution, that's what they want to do, then so be it.
But they should have that decision.
It shouldn't be made for them in secret by government officials that they never voted in in the first place.
Sure.
All right.
Now, so blow my mind with this Google story, because, I mean, what's Google?
It's just some little Internet company, right?
So the NSA is tapping their server.
Yeah.
So this is a story that was in the Washington Post yesterday, and it's honestly incredibly shocking.
I mean, so, you know, back up for a few months here, remember one of the first stories that came out was the PRISM Internet surveillance program, where the NSA using broad FISA orders was vacuuming up a certain amount of data from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, all the big Internet companies.
You know, all a lot of communications that any communications you make overseas to anyone coming to and from the U.S.
You know, it seems that, you know, they were gathering up information on tens of thousands of users, definitely not, you know, a majority of their users, but still a certain amount that we should be alarmed considering there's a Fourth Amendment that should protect against this stuff again.
But now we find out, even though the NSA has this free hand and secret hand to do this type of surveillance, it's not enough for them.
They actually decided to break into the communication links between the data setters of Google and Yahoo and start vacuuming up vast amounts of information without Google's knowledge, without anybody's knowledge, without telling the FISA court.
And again, this information has tons of identifiers of U.S. communications that the NSA apparently thinks the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to, even though it does.
And so, you know, Google was obviously furious about this, given that, you know, they were essentially sabotaged by the U.S. government and are demanding answers, which is great.
And unfortunately, the NSA hasn't given any yet.
I just saw a minute ago the General Counsel actually refused reporters' request to even justify their legal authority to do this.
So it remains to be seen what will happen because of this story, but it is quite shocking, and hopefully heads will eventually roll.
Well, I thought it was funny.
Well, I don't want to get too far off the point of how much data we're talking about, how important it all is.
But I thought it was funny that their talking point was, well, it's just not true that we're breaking into the servers.
And then, but of course, the accusation was that they're breaking into the spot right where it's leaving the server.
So.
Right, exactly.
Just yet another one of their word games where they deny something that you never asked them to deny and then refuse to deny that thing that you actually asked them about.
So here they were saying, no, we didn't break into their servers.
But like you said, the article talks about the communication links between the servers.
So they basically just siphon off the information as they come out of the servers or go into the servers.
They don't technically break into the servers themselves.
And, you know, this is the kind of, you know, misleading and misdirecting and that has become their M.O.
And it's about time that they started getting straight with the American people.
But it's because it's clear these stories aren't going to stop.
So they're going to have to come clean one way or another.
And, you know, we'll see what happens in the next few weeks as these stories keep coming out.
Well, I think they're in trouble because their PR department just can't keep up.
And it's, you know, that it's just not sophisticated enough to fool anybody anymore.
And people get, you know, even if they don't mind spying so much, sort of like with the Iraq war, they don't mind killing Arabs that much either.
But they do mind being lied to over and over and over again.
And so, you know, stop treating me with the to the Bill Clinton speak and just get to the point.
What did you really do to Google servers, guys?
You're already busted.
The documents are leaked.
The articles are being written, even in the Times.
So, you know, I personally resent it.
And I think that's probably a position a lot of Americans are coming from when these people swear that they only do this stuff to protect us anyway.
But then they treat us like we're their property instead of they're our servants.
So why should we believe that what they're doing is in our best interest when clearly they don't even care about us at all?
Yeah, absolutely.
They're using the same tricks that they were using 10 years ago when, you know, the Internet wasn't widespread and that people couldn't pour over their statements and then write rebuttals immediately showing all the holes and the tricks and the misdirections they were using.
You know, the same old tricks which they used to mislead the American public with in 2005 and 2006 just aren't going to work anymore.
And they have yet to figure that out.
And so, you know, hopefully they will soon.
But otherwise, you know, we're just going to continue to see them lying through their teeth and essentially being embarrassed in front of the whole nation.
All right, now, I asked Marcy, the great Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel, to speculate on the show yesterday.
What does she think is still coming out when Greenwald says, oh, no, the jaw dropping stuff we haven't even gotten to yet?
Tease, tease.
I said, so what do you think he's talking about?
And she said, well, I think he must be referring to this, you know, something like this is huge.
Google.
I mean, Google, come on.
I mean, look at everybody.
If the government is mirroring all of that, I mean, the Google is the NSA, only we don't mind them so much because they don't have police power.
Right.
They can't do anything to us.
But the NSA sure as hell can.
So that's a huge deal.
She made sure that we did not mistakenly misunderstand how huge the thing was.
It's huge.
This one.
But then she didn't seem to really have much beyond that.
So I'll ask you, what do you think?
Is this what he's talking about?
Did Barton Gellman get the scoop on the hugest revelation to come here or what could it possibly be that they're doing to us, Trevor, that is still yet to shock us more than the metadata and all of this?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.
And, you know, the only reason I hesitate to speculate is because so many unbelievable things have happened.
And you know, a lot of times the powers that be try to use this, you know, wrong information against you.
You know, we've seen people try to accuse Glenn Greenwald of misreporting things, even though it's clearly he didn't.
And but, you know, it's it's obvious that there's more to come out.
Even Glenn has said that, I think, since these stories have come out, you know, yesterday or the day before.
And it doesn't seem like it's slowing down.
So, you know, it's I think it's important for the NSA to realize that their secrets are going to come out eventually anyways.
And so it would be great if they can maybe, you know, have an upfront conversation with the American public about what they're doing instead of, you know, all of this obfuscating that they've been that we've been getting so used to and at this point mocking because it's so obvious.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, could you talk with us a little bit about this victory on the GPS?
Because I guess the last I understood, that's a court victory, I mean to say, the last I understood the GPS tracking, we were on a losing streak there in the courts who were saying basically the cops can just bug all our cars when they feel like.
Yeah, well, there's a real split right now within a bunch of courts, you know, the Supreme Court had a now famous opinion in U.S. v.
Jones two years ago where they said that police couldn't attach a GPS tracker to your car without a warrant.
Unfortunately, the ruling was kind of narrow, so they didn't decide anything one way or another on other type of GPS trackers, which are built into your phone, which the police don't actually have to physically put on your car, but they're just built into what's in your pocket all the time.
So a lot of times police now have decided, oh, we're just going to track your cell phone without a warrant, which obviously we've been fighting in court all over the country and so have many other organizations like the ACLU.
And so there's been decisions that have been coming down every couple of months going one way or the other.
And eventually this is going to have to go to the Supreme Court because it's just a vital issue where police are literally doing this millions of times a year.
And you know, our location information is very intimate and revealing information.
You know, if I have a map of everywhere you've gone for the past month, that's information that even your closest friends and family don't know and is very, very private and deserves to be protected by the Fourth Amendment.
You know, we're hoping that the court will soon agree with us.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's almost like sliders going through to another dimension or something, because if they can just track us all with GPS wherever we go, the state, that is, then we're living in an entirely different country than we thought we were or that we actually were just a few years ago.
I mean, I don't know if the Reagan era sounds like might as well be the Eisenhower era or something.
It was so long ago to people nowadays.
But to me, the idea that you could just well, hell, not even the Reagan era.
How about the Clinton years?
You just jump in your truck and go and get a slurpee and come back again.
And nobody noticed.
Right.
I mean, they started putting the cameras up in the 90s, but we didn't have to fear that the software linking them all was so sophisticated.
They could really use them to, you know, turn a turn the place into like downtown London or something.
It wasn't there yet, but now it's just you can't even go in and get a slurpee and come home without being on your permanent record.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's what we want to prevent, the fact that, you know, we use all these electronics that sometimes track us.
You know, we want the government to still get the proper authority that they've had to get for law enforcement investigations for 200 years, you know, just follow the Fourth Amendment.
It wasn't a problem, you know, back then.
It shouldn't be a problem now.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I know the FBI, the Justice Department had changed their guidelines, which I guess they just make up their own guidelines that said that now you can go ahead and go on a fishing expedition.
You don't need a predicate.
You don't need a crime that you're investigating.
You can just investigate people.
So go ahead and pick people to investigate.
And do you know if there was ever any check on that or that's still the official policy now?
And then what does that mean for state and local governments?
They get to just go ahead and go fishing on us all, too, all day.
Yeah, unfortunately, everyone seems to have different guidelines.
You know, they tell you to survey where they try to get a bunch of this information from state and local governments.
And they're all over the map.
You know, some actually do require a warrant, just a handful.
But others basically think they can get it whenever they want.
So this is why we really need clarity.
We need Congress to both pass a law and we need the courts to definitively rule on this so we know what the rules are and what aren't.
Right.
And then now, real quick, right at the end.
Could you give us an update on this TPP thing?
I know it's important, but I don't know enough about it all.
Unfortunately, I can't really because I've been so obsessed with NSA surveillance.
But you should definitely have my colleague, Myra Sutton, on again later this week because she's an expert on that and has been working on it for months and hopefully trying to put a stop to it.
OK, great.
You know, I should do that.
And what did you say her name was again?
Myra Sutton.
Myra Sutton.
Yeah, I saw that you guys have quite a bit of coverage there at EFF.
I was hoping that you were up to date on it, but I can't blame you because I sure as hell am not either.
Too many note leaks, you know.
But I do know it's important.
Can you give us basically just the most basic description of what it is and why it's important at all?
Well, you know, if you remember the SOPA battle from two years ago, where the U.S. government was trying to pass these draconian copyright rules that restricted free speech, this is essentially what the government's now trying to do with international agreements.
You know, it doesn't look exactly like SOPA, but what it's trying to do is really restrict fair use and ratchet up penalties on copyright holders, which are already very, very strict.
And, you know, we want to make sure that information can get to people easier.
We don't want it to be harder.
Right.
And what they're doing now is it's a trade deal.
So they're just trying to pass it through the fast track thing where Congress doesn't get to review any part of it.
They just vote up or down on it.
And since it's a trade deal, they're almost guaranteed to vote up on it.
It's the old treaty loophole to the Constitution that, well, not that it's really in the Constitution, doesn't legalize this loophole, but they act like it does, that they can make an international agreement.
Oh, you can't get your SOPA and your PIPA and your whatever the hell.
That's all right.
You just sign the exact same deal with the Brits and shake hands.
It's done.
Exactly.
I guess there's nothing they can't get away with.
I couldn't agree more.
Well, hopefully we're going to stop them.
But, yeah, they may think that, but it's not necessarily true.
Now, was there any more lies of the NSA that you could debunk in 40 seconds or something here on the show?
I know they were trying to discredit Glenn Greenwald saying he got something wrong.
That was just another case of semantics the other day about the European spying.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to keep up with their lies.
Like I said, their biggest lie in the last two days is that they did not break into Google and Yahoo's data centers, which is not what was alleged.
The story in the Washington Post alleged they were breaking into the communication links in between the data centers and getting siphoning off all the information that way.
So, again, you know, you just have to look at every statement they put out and go over with a fine tooth comb, read it a half a dozen times, and you'll see that they never actually deny what the Washington Post reported.
Right.
All right.
Thanks very much, Trevor.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
That's Trevor Tim from EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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