02/12/14 – Joshua Eaton – 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.
You know, I just got the idea the other day that maybe I could figure out how to reproduce PDF files, you know, like they do at Scribd where it's a regular HTML page, but you got a PDF embedded in the page.
And I was thinking if I could figure out how to do that for my own WordPress blog, then I could have a category called slash documents that could have all anything that Jason Leopold ever sued for or old, you know, torture documents from Vietnam War or anything I want, right?
And embed all the PDFs right there on the page for safekeeping for everyone for the future.
All the Snowden files, for example.
I bet you since it's 2014, that's actually possible.
All right.
Well, anyway, I got on the line right now.
Joshua Eaton, he's figured out how to do this amazing piece of work here.
I don't know if you're the software genius behind it, but I love this thing, this timeline of Edward Snowden's revelations at Al Jazeera America.
The address is too long to just say it, but if you just Google Al Jazeera NSA timeline, it'll come right up.
It's a great piece of work.
It's links to all the different NSA stories since last June the 5th and all the documents and all of that.
So welcome to the show, Joshua.
How are you doing?
Thank you so much.
And thank you for having me for the kind words about the timeline.
Yeah, well, no, I'm very happy to have you here.
And I think I screwed up and forgot to say Joshua Eaton.
That's your name.
Welcome to the show, Joshua Eaton, Al Jazeera.
And then also your website I have here is Joshua Eaton, E-A-T-O-N, Joshua Eaton dot net.
And yeah, this is great.
And also, I really appreciate the fact that you wrote this summary.
And this is brand new at America dot Al Jazeera dot com.
Dated the 11th of February.
What the NSA leaks proved about surveillance, an attempt, a valiant attempt, I think, to catch us up.
What happened?
I just got back from camping since June.
Tell me, what's all this Snowden hubbub about anyway?
And so I really appreciate this.
I hope people will post this on their Facebook page and share it, pass it around.
And that way, those of us who just, you know, not everybody can be Marcy Wheeler with 170 IQ and comprehend every last I and T of this information coming at us like this.
So it's really nice to have a good summary like this.
So thanks for doing it.
And again, it's what the NSA leaks proved about surveillance.
And now, if you could just please take us through it, if you want chronologically, or if you want to go, you know, information in motion or information at rest or whatever, whatever direction you want to take it, Joshua, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
First of all, I want to say that, you know, this is been a really huge story.
And the way it's been reported is, you know, Snowden released all these documents, probably tens of thousands of pages.
And Greenwald, other outlets have been putting out revelation after revelation after revelation for like eight months.
And all these different newspapers around the world in multiple languages.
And no one is really brought that all together in one place.
That's what the timeline does.
I, you know, we've tried to compile every single breaking revelation where something new from these documents that Snowden leaked is brought out into the public.
All of those, we've tried to put them all, every single one on the timeline, explain it in a way that hopefully makes it pretty understandable.
And then that's what I've tried to do with this article, this sort of summary article, too.
To me, some of the most shocking stuff, and there was even a lot that we had to leave out of the summary, because there's been so much.
Some of the most shocking stuff is, first of all, the espionage against diplomats, U.S. allies.
Now, the National Security Agency spokespeople, National Security Council spokespeople, they say, we're only interested in serious security threats.
But then, you know, come to find out they're spying on the European Union, spying on the UN, spying on Germany, France, diplomats, governments.
But also, you know, Britain.
In the G20 summit in London in 2009, they were spying on diplomats from Turkey and South Africa.
And now we know from these documents they were doing that so the U.S. could get a trade advantage against Turkey and South Africa, which I think to most people, you hear that and think, do we really need to be tipping the scales against a country like South Africa in our trade negotiations?
It just, I think, offends people's basic sense of fairness.
Well, and it does damage toward the long-term project of what they call free markets and democracy, which is pretty kind, but that's the so-called project of American hegemony.
And of course, just like, you know, burning Iraq to the ground, it makes a real bad commercial for, you know, the fairness that they claim to be about.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
And I think, you know, the final thing I'd say in the summary article is that there's a, you know, there's a line between, there's a line between maintaining security and trying to attain power and attain hegemony.
And I think a lot of, and this is not, you know, this isn't all interpretation.
If you read, there's a big New York Times article back in December where they actually published a list of the NSA's strategic missions for 2007.
These are what the NSA sees as their priorities.
And, you know, there were things on there that we would expect to be on there and that we would want to be on there, many of us.
But things like counter-proliferation and trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that are floating around, anti-terrorism, anti-human trafficking, drug trafficking, these sorts of things that they're monitoring.
There are also things on there right beside those serious security threats.
Things on there like maintaining a steady flow of energy and fossil fuels to the United States, monitoring other countries' technological developments to make sure that they're not developing technology that gives them some sort of economic advantage.
I mean, that's basically economic espionage, corporate espionage.
And, you know, there are more glaring examples.
Something that was left out of the Palo Alto Zero piece, there's a second piece I published today on the NSA monitoring climate conferences, which is a big thing that's happened.
And we know about that both from the Snowden leaks and from the Wikileaks cables, the diplomatic cables that were published by Wikileaks.
And one of the things that has come out of that, this was reported in the Australian press, I think it was the Sydney Morning Herald, is that the Australian intelligence agency, the worst handing glove with the NSA, likely helped an Australian firm, a coal firm, in trade negotiations with Japan and was passing intelligence to them, to this private company.
Yeah, well, and as you say, that certainly is far from their mission of, you know, certainly if anybody criticized them for any of this stuff, the answer is, oh, yeah, terrorist attacks, blood on your hands.
Is that what you want?
And that's supposed to shut down all discussion of this.
But like you say, you look at their actual list and, jeez, 2007, you'd have thought they might have been busy in Iraq or something like that.
Yeah, they got time to go screw around with any old corrupt interests that happens to have a friend as a senator, you know, come on.
Yeah, and, you know, they were monitoring Australia with the help of the NSA was monitoring the Bali climate conference in 2007.
This is a UN climate conference.
And it was just a total fishing expedition.
Of course, now, I'm sorry, we're about to have to go take this break.
But when we get back, I want to talk about what Edward Snowden said in that interview with German television, where he talked about, oh, yeah, if there's information at Siemens, you know, if it's useful, go ahead and take it.
And I don't know if he really specified who they turn around and give it to then instead.
But anyway, we'll talk about that.
And of course, Clapper called him a liar straight out on TV a couple days later in front of Congress.
So he was lying.
He's a liar, too.
So I don't know.
But anyway, we'll be right back with Joshua Eaton.
After this, america.aljazeera.com.
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Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, I'll sky here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking about Joshua Eaton.
He put together this great timeline.
You can find on my Facebook page or Twitter page if you want.
Slash Scott Horton show.
You'll find a link there.
This great timeline that he did for America Al Jazeera dot com.
All the Snowden revelations, all the documents, links to all the documents and all the news stories about all the documents that have been published.
As he mentioned, they've been published in different newspapers all over the world.
Somebody's got to keep a list in one place somewhere.
Well, it's him, Josh Weed.
Thank goodness I got his email address.
He's also got this brand new piece.
What the NSA leaks proved about surveillance.
Now, here's the thing.
We're short on time and we got a wrap up about industrial espionage.
Snowden v.
Clapper on the subject of stealing secrets from Siemens.
What's Siemens?
But then also we got to talk about, you know, at least the most important revelations about what they're collecting about us, what they're doing, changing really the entire nature of our society and the people's relationship with our government here in the United States of America.
Yeah, so so German television asked Snowden if you if you watch the whole interview, it's all online in English.
Ask Snowden if the NSA wants some information from a company and the interviewer used Siemens as an example.
Do they take it?
Are there specific examples of this?
Snowden said, I don't want to I don't want to take it out of the hands of the journalist to have the documents now.
I don't want to say anything that they haven't put out.
And he said that for legal reasons.
But then he said, you know, I can say that, you know, if the NSA wanted something from Siemens that helped American interests, they would just go they would just go take it.
And I think if you if you read between the lines, it's pretty obvious that Snowden knows there's more in the documents about economic espionage that hasn't come out yet.
Yeah, sure.
Seemed like that.
And then, of course, so they say that that's just an outright lie.
But I wonder now, is the document going to, you know, tell us the name of the office with three letters for its title and everything where their responsibility is laundering this intelligence to American corporations?
That'd be hilarious.
Wouldn't surprise me.
I mean, why not?
If the whole thing is secret, you go ahead and do it that way.
You know, James Clapper is the last person to be calling anyone a liar.
Yeah, that's pretty well established.
He even admits that that's the case.
So we'll take his word at that.
If nothing else.
Yeah.
And, you know, Snowden wasn't under oath before Congress either.
So.
All right.
Well, all right.
So now I don't know.
I don't want to just have the same conversation we've had on the show 100 times with 100 different people about, oh, it's just metadata and whatever.
I think people do realize that that's a big deal.
But I don't know, maybe a better way to approach it is what's left out?
I mean, you know, the obvious electronic footprints that we leave would be, you know, any time we use a debit card, something like that.
Obviously, any of the bills we pay, those will all be in the database, all of our financial stuff, anything like that.
Our bank accounts are all open season.
Right.
And then there's emails, web searches, URLs, our metadata, our location data, you know, email content versus I don't know, just headers or whatever they might claim.
Can you tell us is there are there any real limits on what they're collecting about us all?
Well, you know, a lot of this information they're collecting, a lot of what's come out, the information they're collecting from phone apps, the text they're collecting, text messages they're collecting, cell phone location data they're collecting.
We don't know.
We don't know if they're collecting that information in inside the United States.
There's some suspicion that there might be, but a lot of this, a lot of this, according to the documents, they're not collecting it in the United States.
So, for example, the spying they're doing on Google data from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo data centers, they're only collecting that outside the US.
The problem is, and this is a big loophole that they've driven through, they're legally allowed to assume that if they collect data outside the US, it's not from US citizens.
You know, not only are there a lot of US citizens living, traveling outside the United States, but data doesn't have borders in the way that it used to.
So, if I'm sitting in Boston, where I live, I send an email to family members I have in Georgia.
You know, that's completely inside the United States.
But if we're both using Gmail, that email may be handled by a data center that's outside the United States, right?
Because of the way that these companies weight their networks.
Yeah, I mean, I would assume that their servers in Indonesia might as well be just a mirror of their server in California, just to make sure, right?
I mean, why wouldn't they have it like that?
In fact, they would have to have it like that, right?
It's precisely right.
And in order to ensure that they always have connectivity and that everything is handled as fast as possible, they sort of shift around which servers in which places handle what.
So, you know, just because you're sending information between two people who are both in the United States doesn't mean it doesn't travel outside the United States on its way.
Right.
And we talked to a guy from ACLU last week who talked about the corporate store, where once anybody gets their grubby mitts on anything from the collection store under whatever pretext, and there are a million pretexts, once it's in the corporate store, which is virtually everything anyway, then they all have open access to it.
So there might as well be no FISA court at all.
At that point, it sounds like just a general warrant for everybody's everything, no?
Yeah, I mean, they all, you know, and a lot of these companies are working hand-in-glove with the National Security Agency, the FBI, other, even often foreign governments.
So that's sort of a given.
But, you know, the other thing is the NSA, with the way they interpret these laws and the kind of doublespeak that happens, right?
If they siphon everything, which they're doing, siphon everything out of these huge fiber optic backbones and store it, they don't count that as collecting it.
It's only collecting it if they analyze it or disseminate it to other agencies.
So it's not collecting it if they just make a copy of everything.
It's only collecting it if they do something with that copy.
I mean, I think that's, you know, that's using the English language in a way that no one else on Earth uses it.
Right.
Well, you know, it's the same with what they consider foreign, you know, foreign data is made data that's collected abroad, no matter where it originated.
Right.
So there's a lot of sort of doublespeak around the way they interpret the laws.
Right.
Now, there are a couple of articles that were really important in the last couple of weeks or just the last week here.
Obviously, the Greenwald, Scahill piece about really how sloppy they are using NSA data to target people in the drone war from Pakistan to Somalia to Yemen and wherever else.
But then also Matthew Harwood from the ACLU wrote a great piece, I believe also at Al Jazeera America dot Al Jazeera dot com about the case of Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer from Washington state who I've actually interviewed before.
And well, basically, it's the story of a government conspiracy theory, right, where they get their conclusion.
And boy, it sure seems like it must be right.
And in that case, they didn't back off claiming he must have been involved in the Madrid bombing until the Spanish police declared to the whole world in all bold letters.
The fingerprints do not match.
Knock it off.
And then finally, they knocked it off.
But they were willing to nail this guy to the wall because they were just sure that they were right.
And when the computer is spitting out, hey, look, this guy's cell phone is associated with this guy's cell phone, et cetera, et cetera.
And you you have, as we can see in the Greenwald piece there, you have the same confirmation bias going.
Yep.
You know what?
His cell phone is really that other guy's cell phone.
And it looks like maybe he's holding a rifle.
And so signature strike his ass.
And but meanwhile, the whole thing is they're basically wrong, right?
They're calling raw data intelligence, but it's not intelligent at all.
It's just information.
And they're not intelligent at all.
And they outsource all their decision making to a damn PC.
And so they kill innocent people all day.
That's what they do with it overseas.
Soon enough.
That's how we'll be living here, where they're so sure that they're right.
But just like in Afghanistan, it's they're killing the wrong people there or they're arresting the wrong people, raiding the wrong people, observing the wrong people, chasing the wrong trails.
Yeah.
And, you know, this was mentioned briefly in the Greenwald and Scahill piece, which is really excellent.
But, yeah, I've been thinking about this for a while, but I almost think it's more people people act like it's reassuring that they're only collecting metadata.
They're not collecting content.
Actually, I think that's more dangerous.
I think it's more frightening that they're only collecting metadata and they're not collecting content because, you know, if so, I'm I'm I've been involved with a lot of activism, right?
If I know, let's say I know two activists who are considering some sort of violent protest, right?
And I call them to talk them out of it and it doesn't work and they go ahead with it anyway.
If you're only collecting the metadata on that, right, you know, calling them to try to talk them out of it and calling them as a co-conspirator basically look like the same thing.
Right.
Yeah, that was what we talked about with Ryan Devereux was on the show.
He contributed to that Greenwald Scahill piece.
And that question came up that, hey, if it's all the the cell phones that you're tracking, why not actually tap the phone and see what they're saying on it and see if it's who you think it is.
Right.
You would think that they would do that.
But no, you're right.
It's just they just have these connections, which, you know, links, which, you know, can mean anything to anybody if you want them to.
And, you know, the really frightening part is a lot of these links aren't even made.
It's not a person looking at the link.
It's a computer algorithm looking at the link.
Oh, man.
It's a computer algorithm.
All right, listen, I'm so sorry that we're out of time for this interview, but thanks so much for your journalism and for your time on the show.
I hope we can talk again soon and catch up on all these revelations here because it's a lot.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right, everybody.
That is Joshua Eaton.
He's at america.aljazeera.com, also at joshuaeaton.net.
That's E-A-T-O-N, joshuaeaton.net.
This piece at Al Jazeera is what the NSA leaks proved about surveillance.
And also just search Al Jazeera NSA timeline and you'll come up with the great timeline that Joshua helped put together there as well.
They got all the revelations in one place for you.
Don't worry about things you can't control.
Isn't that what they always say?
But it's about impossible to avoid worrying about what's going on these days.
The government has used the war on guns, the war on drugs, and the war on terrorism to tear our Bill of Rights to shreds.
But you can fight back.
The 10th Amendment Center has proven it, racking up major victories.
For example, when the U.S. government claimed authority in the NDAA to have the military kidnap and detain Americans without trial, the nullifiers got a law passed in California declaring the state's refusal to ever participate in any such thing.
Their latest project is offnow.org, nullifying the National Security Agency.
They've already gotten model legislation introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas, meant to limit the power of the NSA to spy on Americans in those states.
We'd be fools to wait around for the U.S. Congress or courts to roll back, big brother.
Our best chance is nullification and interposition on the state level.
Go to offnow.org.
Print out that model legislation and get to work nullifying the NSA.
The hero Edward Snowden has risked everything to give us this chance.
Let's take it.offnow.org.
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AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.
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