12/06/13 – Mike Maharrey – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org for the new and improved website.
It ain't finished yet, but it's getting better all the time.
Check out the new front page there, scotthorton.org.
All right, so our next guest on the show is Michael Meharry from the 10th Amendment Center and turnitoff.org.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
I'm doing outstanding.
Nice bump music.
Oh, you like that?
Good.
Yeah, it's difficult for me.
It's been out of rotation for a while.
I've put it back in.
Yeah, it's nice to hear a little edgy music on the radio.
Yeah, there you go.
All right, so hey, answer me this.
Why would you extremists from the 10th Amendment Center have a problem with a national security agency program called FASCIA?
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It's amazing.
It seems like every single day something else comes out about what this entity is doing.
And I mean it's almost kind of scary that all of this information keeps coming out because they think it's going to make people numb after a while.
It's like, oh yeah, it's the NSA doing this or that again.
When you really stop and think about it, it's absolutely disgusting that they are spying on virtually everybody in the entire world.
Who does that?
Well, you know, the federal government does that.
So I think it's time to stop it.
Well, the thing of it too is, you know, I guess the part of my brain that's seen TV a lot before or whatever comes up with these arguments about, well, you know, got to keep the dangerous world at bay and all of that.
And after all, the NSA is as intrusive as they might be.
Even if they got a little drug, a little drone that looks like a mosquito on your window sill, they don't really have any police power over you, really.
You know, they just, the worst they could do is, I guess if you were an agent of a foreign power, turn it over to the FBI or something like that.
But really, they're just accidentally surveilling all of us as they surveil everyone else.
And yet they already kind of debunked that because they showed that the NSA is turning over whatever they feel like about any crimes that they discover to federal, state, and local police.
And then with the instructions that you're going to lie about how you found out about this, just go ahead and pull the guy over and pretend it's a coincidence that his trunk is full of drugs that day or whatever it is.
Exactly.
And, you know, that just goes to the whole, what does this have to do with the war on terror?
Not that the war on terror is legitimate in any sense.
I mean, that's a whole different issue.
But, you know, supposedly the mission, if we believe all the BS, the mission is that they're going to protect us from the terrorists.
What does some guy with a little weed in his car have to do with terrorists?
You know, it's appalling, but you're right.
And essentially the NSA is just one branch of the warfare state.
And it's a branch that hands out information and allows the warfare state to take action, whether it be your local police or your state police or the CIA or some Marine Corps division or whatever it is.
So it's definitely all part of a bigger picture.
I mean, if you think about it, from what we know of it so far from these Snowden leaks anyway, it seems like it must be kind of a limited operation.
We've got the NSA vacuuming up everything.
They're not sharing all of it.
I don't know how they pick and choose what they give to the DEA or to the Texas Rangers or whatever they do.
But just think of it if they decided to flip the switch or, you know, in other words, have Dianne Feinstein pass an edict saying that, oh, yeah, by the way, local sheriff's departments come and scoop up whatever you want about all the people who live in your county and see if you can come up with some ways to tax them.
You know what I mean?
That would put us all in prison.
People, you know, some people that aren't particularly astute about what's going on in the world might listen to that and say, oh, no, no, that will never happen.
And yet we have no idea what they're really doing behind the scenes.
I mean, we're only seeing the very tip of the iceberg from even what we're getting from Snowden.
And from that we know that, you know, these guys have spot on their girlfriends.
They've spot on their girlfriends.
What's to stop them from handing it over, you know, like you said, to the sheriff's department or, you know, somebody's got a political grudge against somebody else or somebody says, you know, that Mike Maharry over there at the Tenth Amendment Center, he's a little bit of a troublemaker.
Let's see what we can dig up on him.
Of course, we're not going to find much because I don't have time to get into any kind of trouble.
But, you know, I mean, it's the possibilities of this are really pretty astounding when you get down to it.
All right.
Now, here's the thing about the Tenth Amendment Center that I like.
That unlike me, you don't just sit around complaining about it like this.
I mean, we had to start off the show with complaints because it's important.
We've got to set the context for what we're talking about here.
I mean, they have permanent records of everyone's cell phone.
Come on.
Whoever takes the battery out of their cell phone on any kind of top secret anything you never do ever.
Hell, I got an iPhone.
I couldn't even take the battery out unless I smash it with a hammer.
So, in other words, they have a permanent record of all of our associations going back as long as they felt like.
Everywhere we've been and who else was there this whole time and all they have to do to be interested in it is to scratch their head and think about it.
And then all I got to do is type a couple of keys and up comes whatever they want.
I mean, you talk about intrusive this fascia thing.
This is probably as far as I could tell.
This is the biggest story out of this.
Remember, they denied that they had location information.
Dianne Feinstein tripped up and said, yeah, all we're doing is collecting your location and some other stuff.
And they said, no, no, she was speaking extemporaneously.
Uh-huh.
All that metadata that they're getting includes where you were ever when you got up from your living room and went to the bathroom is apparently in this data.
They're just keeping all of it.
I mean, holy crap, man.
Yeah, and you know, it's amazing.
You get this pushback from people and they'll say, well, you know, if you're not doing anything wrong, what does it really matter?
And they forget about the fact that we live in a society that has literally thousands and thousands of laws.
I can guarantee you that probably everybody that's listening to this show right now or that will listen to it later has broken one or more laws today without even realizing it.
So you've got this potential that they can track virtually every place that you've been and everything that you've said and every website that you've visited and everything.
There is a likelihood that you have violated some law along the line.
And who's to say that that couldn't be used against you again for political purposes or, you know, who knows?
Yeah, or like you said, a personal grudge.
I mean, everybody knows they've written up stories like this all the time where more than half the 911 calls are just people angry at each other trying to get each other in trouble with the cops over, you know, the guy borrowed my wheelbarrow and brought it back a little bit bent kind of stuff.
And just, you know, so people like that have government jobs, too.
You know what I mean?
Hell, we all know what world we're living in, who our neighbors are sometimes, you know?
Oh, we know that all the NSA people are good, upstanding, would never.
They would never abuse the power that they have.
They passed a background check.
Oh, it's just absurd.
The arguments that you get back are amusing.
But, you know, it's interesting.
And in all seriousness, I'm hearing less of this type of, you know, I don't have to worry about it if I'm not doing something wrong.
I'm seeing a lot more people that are normally not really politically aware, not really engaged in this kind of thing, kind of perking up their ears and voicing some concern about this stuff.
So, you know, maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe that's a positive that's coming out of this that people that might normally say, oh, it's no big deal, are starting to kind of go, oh, maybe this is not quite what we're thinking.
Right.
And I think that's one of the things.
And Greenwald has explained that he's sympathetic to the idea that people want him to come out with as much as he can, as fast as he possibly can.
And he's saying he is.
But as fast as he possibly can is like this.
He's got to report it well because of all of the different drawbacks, particularly for the government trying to claim that what he's doing is something other than journalism, but somehow just laundering intelligence materials or whatever they can to try to pretend that his journalism is a crime and that kind of thing.
But it seems like one of the benefits, maybe deliberately or maybe a side benefit of the slow leak is that it keeps proving them liars over and over and over again.
Exactly.
Okay, well, we confess to this, but not that.
And then, blam, they get smacked down again and again.
Right.
And, you know, Greenwald has talked about tens of thousands of articles.
The guy from The Guardian that Russ Berger, the editor of The Guardian, testified before the House of Commons in the UK that they published that at The Guardian, which had the lion's share so far, they published one percent of the Snowden documents so far.
And maybe a lot of those won't be published because they have things that Greenwald has decided aren't really newsworthy, but are instead just would get people in trouble in a bad way, like, you know, information that could help the Chinese crack down on their own people better, but doesn't really serve any public interest, that kind of argument.
But, again, you know, they lied and said, no, we're not keeping your location.
We don't care where you are.
Oh, yeah, oh, you got us again and again and again.
There's so many of these.
But anyway, I got diverted off onto that when I was trying to ask you about what the Tenth Amendment Center is doing about it, because I think it's not just important that you guys have a history of success on some very important issues, but you set an example for other people to do entirely different things, too.
But to do something when you prove that you can actually get things done on an activist basis to oppose these very worst abuses, you know, there's no end to people knocking on my door trying to get me to give money to beg the local government to be more environmental or whatever crap, you know, but this is important activism.
This is stuff that absolutely needs done.
And at the Tenth Amendment Center, you guys are doing it.
So, you know, recommend tell them about how powerful this movement can be against the National Security Agency.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And I think the first important lesson that we have is that we can't depend on Washington, D.C. to rein in its own power.
It's never happened.
When it gets power, it keeps it and it lets it grow more.
You know, and like I mentioned earlier, it's part of the warfare state.
And really what we have in Washington, D.C. and Congress is we have what I call the bipartisan war machine, with the exception of a few principled folks that are up there on Capitol Hill.
Most of them pretty much walk in lockstep when it comes to this whole idea of national security and aggressive foreign policy and all of these horrible things that our government does in our name, so to speak.
So we have tried to come up with a different approach.
Forget what they're doing in D.C.
Let's see what we can do at the state and local level to thwart what's going on in Washington, D.C.
So we started putting our heads together and we coalitioned with a number of other groups and we started trying to come up with ideas.
What is the Achilles heel of the NSA?
What do they need?
What can we do to kind of block and hinder and impede what they're trying to do?
And it's a pretty cool coalition, too.
You know, it's not just the Tenth Amendment.
We've got the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, who's on board a big partner.
And we've got AntiWar.com, who's joined the coalition.
And Tangerine Boland's group is involved.
And so some really cool people have gotten in on this and thrown their brains into this whole idea.
Essentially what we've decided is we're going to come up with a state-level and local-level campaign, grassroots activism in each state to try to block what the NSA is doing.
And kind of the first step of this process is this Fourth Amendment Protection Act.
And it's a piece of legislation and it essentially does four things.
I'm going to outline them really quick.
Number one thing it does is it prohibits the state from any material support of the NSA.
Okay, what's material support?
We've got this data center in Utah that's sucking up data.
And we know that when this thing is fully operational, it's going to use 1.7 million gallons of water every single day, which is pretty significant in a state like Utah.
You know, it's not like there's a lot of water there to start with.
Right.
You know, even from an environmental standpoint, this is a travesty.
But the interesting thing about this is that the city of Bluffdale, Utah, has a contract with the NSA to supply them water.
Well, the state government has control over its political subdivisions, which are the local and city governments.
So the state government can say, you are not allowed to provide material support to the NSA.
And it will either invalidate the contract or, at worst, make it so they can't renew it when it comes up again here in a few years.
So you've got this data center with these computers that are sucking up data.
It needs all this water to cool it.
We're saying, turn the water off.
And then let them try to figure out how to cool their computers on their own.
All right, but now wait a minute, because this sounds like something that would be so cool if it happened in my imagination.
But you're telling me that this is a real thing, really?
And you know what?
Yes, I'm bribed in the sense that the Tenth Amendment Center helped support this show.
But obviously, the only reason why that's true is because of how bent we are in the same direction on all this stuff anyway.
So I'm not just playing a show.
It's not a conflict of interest.
It's an alignment of them.
But I mean, really?
Because I have trouble believing in anything, honestly.
Man, I never did move to New Hampshire or any of those things.
You're telling me that you could really, not just you've got this great idea, wouldn't it be nice, but you can really find a way to make the government of Utah turn off the water to the new NSA treasure trove facility there?
We think we've got a good shot of doing it, because first off, at the grassroots level, like I said, when you start talking to people, nobody wants to be spied on.
And as we develop this coalition, we find that there's all these different interests.
Like I said, you've got the environmental interest.
You've got people on the left that are traditionally concerned about civil liberties and blocking the kind of imperialist war machine.
But then you've got people on the right, and maybe it's just because they don't like Obama.
But for whatever reason, they're not real big on this stuff either.
So at this point, we've got a coalition of people that spans the political spectrum.
We've already talked to state representatives in the state of Utah, and we've got people that have said that they're willing to run this bill in this state.
So you know what?
We're going to go for it and see what happens.
And that's not the only thing that the bill does.
There's actually three other pieces to the puzzle.
Number two thing that's going to happen is it would prohibit the state from using any of this shared data that we already talked about that's gathered without a warrant, without probable cause.
It would be inadmissible in state court.
In fact, we've got a legislator in the state of Kansas that's already filed a bill that just has this one piece, the data sharing piece of it.
And he's already got this bill pre-filed.
So they're running with that in Kansas.
Number three thing we've got, we've got 166 universities in the United States that have partnerships with the NSA.
They call them Centers for Academic Excellence, which I think is a lovely Orwellian term.
And essentially, they are recruiting grounds and research facilities for the NSA, 166 of them.
Well, the state government can say to their universities, you know what, you're not going to have these partnerships with the NSA.
And they have the funding strings that they can force that issue on the state universities.
And then the fourth piece of the puzzle is it would prohibit any corporations in that state that are doing business with the NSA from being able to bid on any state or local contracts.
And the really cool thing about this, it sounds radical and crazy for everyone to talk about these radicals.
But the truth of the matter is we've done a lot of research, and this stands on very firm legal footing.
There's a legal doctrine.
They call it the anti-commandeering doctrine.
I don't want to bore your audience with a bunch of legalese.
But essentially, even the courts have held that the federal government cannot force state governments to assist or to help or to do anything to implement or execute federal acts or federal programs.
So this is an established court doctrine that the state cannot be forced to help the NSA, at least from a legal standpoint.
Now, you know, they could roll tanks into Utah and take the water, I guess.
Then we have a whole other issue.
But the idea is to do this not just in Utah, but in many states across the United States.
You know, Texas is an incessant issue, but to do this in Texas, to do this in Arizona, to do this in all of the different states.
So it's not just one state, but a bunch of states working together.
And if one piece of the puzzle maybe doesn't fit, we've got all these other pieces that are working together.
On top of that, we're also looking at some other activism-type things that aren't really legislative, organizing grassroots folks, organizing people on campus, students that don't want their university to be part of a spy program, getting them active on their campuses, doing some stuff through outing corporations that are doing business with them and kind of embarrassing them and saying, hey, you know what, you're making money off spying on your fellow citizens.
So it's really a broad-based, multi-year, multi-pronged strategy that we're looking at that we think at least has some hope of having some impact.
And we have seen how state refusal to cooperate with the federal government has opened some doors in terms of marijuana legalization, medical marijuana.
We're seeing some action in some other areas of legislation.
So we think that it's going to work.
And it also actually worked back during the early 1800s with the Fugitive Slave Act, a piece of history that fell down the Orwellian wormhole.
But northern abolitionists defied the federal government and refused to implement the Fugitive Slave Act.
And it was really very effective.
It was so effective, in fact, that South Carolina complained about it when they seceded.
They called it northern nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act.
So we have a blueprint where we've seen this work.
So we're going to apply it here and see if we can make it happen.
It sure sounds like, well, it's the most important thing other than the wars.
And it really, as you said, it's part of the militarism.
It's just the domestic blowback.
As Chalmers Johnson used to put it, you give up your empire or you live under it.
Exactly.
Fair warning, but that was a long time ago.
Now here we are living under it.
But, you know, I do think it's possible.
And I think the mood is really shifting.
As you said, part of it is partisan politics and all that.
But, of course, this week it's big news that the Pew Survey, and they always look at the anti-war mood and they always smear it as isolationism, that even their spokespeople and their writers at the Pew Charitable Trust were forced by circumstance to differentiate and admit that, no, really, there's no such thing as isolationism.
The people of America, in their majority, the highest numbers ever, want more international engagement on a private, voluntary level, business and any other thing like that, foreign trade and all that.
And they're more against federal government involvement in regime change and wars and intervention overseas than ever before, both of those things at the very same time.
And I don't know how long we can hold that, but, man, that's the realignment I'm looking for.
Absolutely.
You know, it kind of takes living through George Bush and Barack Obama to bring us to this point where people are really willing to say, like, man, wouldn't it be great if we could get the judge and Nader to stump for Paul and Kucinich and these kinds of ideas, well, that was mine, but realigning the different political factions around what our government has made the most important subjects, the foreign violence and then the domestic police state blowback that the rest of us have to suffer.
Seems like it's finally getting through to people, you know?
And that's really what we're all about.
I mean, ultimately, at our core, what we're trying to do at the Tenth Amendment Centers, we want to decentralize.
We want to make the federal behemoth as little as we possibly can, and then we want the people to control what's going on at the state and local governments, because I don't trust state and local governments either.
I mean, all governments trample on our rights, but ultimately, if we can get less centralization, that opens the door for more voluntary private exchanges like you were talking about, and that's really the endgame that we're looking for.
Right.
And, of course, the Tenth Amendment Center, people should know that you guys actually have some really important victories in the past.
Can you talk about that?
Well, you know, I think the biggest win that we've seen in this type of movement is what I mentioned earlier.
It's the whole war on drugs and marijuana.
We had 1990s California basically said, you know what?
We want to have medical marijuana in this state, and the federal government said, you can't do that.
It's against federal law.
And we had the court case, and they arrested this poor woman Rach, and that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
And, of course, the federal employees at the court said, oh, yeah, that's perfectly okay for the federal government to continue this war on drugs.
And so did California back down?
No.
It just kept growing.
And then next thing you know, now today we have 21 states with medical marijuana.
We've got two states with complete legalization of marijuana.
And, you know, really at this point the federal government can't do a whole lot about it.
I mean, you know, they can do some raids and stuff, and they will.
They did it in Colorado the other day.
But the funny thing about the Colorado raids is it was the biggest drug raid in the history of Colorado since they had legalized medical marijuana, and they hit 12 dispensaries in Denver.
You know how many dispensaries there are in Denver?
There's 400.
They hit 12, and it cost like millions of dollars, and it was this huge big deal.
There is no way at this point that the federal government can shut this down.
If the states and the people in the states decide, you know what, we're not going to follow this, then there's really not a whole lot that the federal government can do about it.
And this is, I think, probably the greatest victory that we've seen in this movement.
But we're working on this.
We want to push this ahead too in other areas, you know, indefinite detention.
We've got the president and the Congress basically saying, oh, yeah, they can come, they can come throw a hood over you and drag you off to some unknown who knows where, and, you know, who knows, you may end up in Somalia or something in some concrete cell.
Yeah, no, they really did pass that, didn't they?
That's not just something that you're saying.
They really did pass a law, the Congress that the president signed, that said that, oh, yeah, Americans can be subject to the Guantanamo treatment.
You're exactly right.
I'm sorry, because when you refer to it like that, it sounds almost unbelievable, so I've got to make sure people are snapping to and paying attention here that, yeah, he just said that they did that, and no, he's not wrong about it.
They really did do that.
I like to use the hyperbole for the visual, but it's true.
And we even have a federal judge up in New York that looked at the language in this NDAA bill, the 2012 NDAA, and she looked at the language and she said, yep, this is overbroad.
And she essentially ruled and said that this could apply.
You know, you've got a journalist who's interviewing some guy over in Yemen, and some guy somewhere here in the Pentagon decides that this guy in Yemen is an associated force with al-Qaeda.
Well, all of a sudden this journalist is now part of the associated force, and he's subject to the rules of war sitting in his office in New York City writing a story.
And so I'm not making this up.
I mean, we even have a federal judge that has.
Sure, and a lot of people have heard of it, but I like to try to highlight the part of the thing where it's so run-of-the-mill now.
There's so many outrages that people get kind of burned out and they sort of forget that, oh, yeah, that NDAA thing.
But now tell us quickly, we're almost out of time.
You've got 30 seconds to tell us about what you all have done about that, and it really is something.
Well, we've got a bill, another piece of state-level legislation that essentially says, you know what?
This state is not going to cooperate with indefinite detention.
You're not going to use our National Guard to do it.
You're not going to use our police.
And California passed this bill just recently.
Alaska's passed this bill, and Virginia's passed this bill.
So we've got three states that have essentially said, you know what?
We don't accept this as valid in our state.
And I really think you're going to see more passed in this upcoming legislative session.
So we want people to think locally, think at their state government, and take action there.
Don't call Congress.
Work through your state legislature.
Great.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time, Michael.
Appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
All right, everybody.
That's Michael Meharry from the Tenth Amendment Center, offnow.org.
Participate.
Join the coalition.
Help these guys to turn off the water to the NSA computer warehouse in Utah.
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Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my— Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
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Fact.
The new NSA data center in Utah requires 1.7 million gallons of water every single day to operate.
Billions of Fourth Amendment violations need massive computers and the water to cool them.
That water is being supplied by the state of Utah.
Fact.
Fact.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution which requires your state to help the feds violate your rights.
Our message to Utah?
Turn.
It.
Off.
No water equals no NSA data center.
Visit offnow.org.
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