05/20/14 – Mike Maharrey – The Scott Horton Show

Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, the Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org, etc, etc.
Alright, next up is Michael Meharry from the Tenth Amendment Center.
Welcome back to the show.
How the hell are you?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing great.
How are you?
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Tell us the good news.
Hey, pretty exciting stuff in the fight against the NSA.
Kind of quieted down over the last couple of, or a few weeks, because most of the state legislative sessions have kind of died off and closed up for the summer, but several are still in session.
Yesterday, the California Senate passed the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, which would prohibit material support from the state to the NSA, and not only did they pass it, they passed it overwhelmingly, 29 to 1.
And so we'll move on to the House, and that's as far as it'll go.
29 to 1?
29 to 1.
How did you pull that off?
Hey, California, man.
I think this shows the power of a bipartisan bill where you've got both of the sponsors, a Republican and a Democrat, engaged and working to get the bill passed.
This is what happens.
I mean, and really, how can you oppose stopping NSA spy, right?
Unless you're a cop.
Yeah, I don't know.
Unless you work at the telecom and that's your paycheck, or you work for the state and that's your paycheck.
No, I'm with you.
Exactly.
Well, man, I mean, that is just incredible.
I guess, well, I have all this cognitive dissonance because I've never known democracy to work this well when it comes to people trying to tell the government to stop doing something.
And I know that in this case, it's not telling the California government to stop doing something that they are doing, but maybe even more controversially, it's asking them to stand up to the federal government and say no to them.
And this is the kind of thing that I'm just not used to seeing happen in America.
And yet it's almost, I think, changed my mind about the possibility of the efficacy of participation in American politics.
I'm much more just to call the score on the way to hell kind of guy.
But what if Mike Meharry and them got a plan for how we could, you know, arrest or slide down this slippery slope?
Maybe it's really not too late, Mike.
What?
Well, you know, I'm kind of like this, and I'm kind of with you, too, on the whole, you know, the whole politics thing.
In fact, we're having our primary elections here in Kentucky today, and, you know, people keep giving me, oh, yeah, have you voted, have you voted, and, you know, it's just so hard for me to endorse any of these people.
But I look at this kind of action, like the California legislature took, and the action that we're pushing through the Off Now Coalition, I look at it almost as institutionalized civil disobedience, if that makes any sense.
You know, it's not passing the law.
It's basically getting these legislators to stand up, like you said, to this federal bully and say, you know what?
We're not going to do what you tell us to do, because what you're telling us to do is wrong.
And I think on an issue like this, when you're talking about, you know, spying on virtually everybody in the world, it's really, really difficult, and we were kind of joking about it a second ago, but it's a fact.
Unless you are somehow drawing a paycheck from this, or you are part of the police state and you like having the power that it affords, your average person is absolutely against this.
So I think that's the part of the dynamic that makes it work.
It might not work on every issue, it might not work on any other issue, but when you have something that is so hideous, and people look at it and say, this is so freaking ridiculous, we have this entity that's spying on us, why wouldn't you stand up and say, hey, we're going to do whatever we can to make it stop?
So, you know, I'm excited about it.
I'm excited about the strides that we've taken with the Off Now Coalition this year.
Even though we didn't get 20 bills passed, we've shined light on this issue.
We've gotten some really good newspaper coverage of this issue, and we're getting it in people's mind that you can stand up, that you can face this bully and fight it, and that you don't have to just, you know, mindlessly submit.
And I think that's an important mindset.
Yeah, it is.
It's, you know, even without exactly succeeding, continuing the fight on as many fronts as possible and making it known to, you know, the rest of the people out there that, yeah, no, really, the consensus is against this, and we're with you, and you're with us, and here's what we can do about it, and never mind what TV says you're supposed to think about it.
You know, you can see in front of your face, this is what your neighbors, this is what the American people really think about this.
And so that comes, that's in terms of the lawsuits, that's in terms of even if you can only get one house in 25 states to pass the damn thing, and you can't get it, you know, actually passed into law anywhere, whatever, just continuing that fight, having all of the different computer geniuses, you know, competing with each other to come up with the best new, you know, cryptographic technology, and the kind of stuff that is very user-friendly so that regular non-computer geniuses like you and I can use, or you may be a computer genius, I sure as hell ain't.
I know.
You know, these kinds of things, keeping the fight up on every single front, you know, if nothing else, it just shows what a fraud the Congress is and how, what a waste of time it would be to rely on them.
I mean, they need to see that, politically speaking, they only have one choice, and that is to get good on this.
To make them see that, I think we've got to do it your way.
I mean, this is what's happening here, is you've got Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature in California who are saying, well, listen, I mean, what are we going to do, cross these people when they're demanding this?
We can't.
We have to do it, right?
Because, I mean, I'm not one to believe in, you know, politicians having souls or morals or principles or caring at all.
They are doing this because you and the people that you're working with in this coalition are making them do the right thing.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, you hit on something, I think it's really important, when you start mentioning that it gets people, you know, the computer folks and these other people engaged and active because it shines a light on this issue, and I think it's very important, you know, for people to understand that this, to us, isn't just a political movement.
You're absolutely right in the fact that this is the kind of thing to make the real change.
It has to happen on more than just a political level.
It has to happen with individuals engaging in the system and doing things to be able to thwart what's going on.
And, you know, Michael Bolden, the Executive Director at the Tenth Amendment Center and I were having a conversation about this when I was in L.A. a few weeks ago, and we were talking about the fact that the movements that we're seeing that are being successful are ones where people in general can be defined.
And with the NSA thing, you know, at first I was like, well, how do you do that with NSA spying?
He says, well, you know, it's getting people to start to change their online habits and it's getting people to think about technologies that can maybe thwart this kind of spying.
In fact, I saw this other day.
There's a dude, and I can't remember where he is, but he has developed a series of masks and he's basically made them out of his own face.
You can buy these things and wear them and they're real realistic looking, but basically they're designed to thwart the facial recognition software.
So basically, everybody would look like this dude.
That's a great idea.
I mean, there are ways that we can individually block and stop and avoid the NSA spying through the advancement of technology and through our own actions.
And where you really see this is in the whole drug war and weed.
I mean, part of the reason that the nullification of the federal marijuana laws is working is because you've got a bunch of people out there that are basically saying, screw it.
I'm going to use this for medication.
I'm going to use it for recreation.
And you get enough people doing this and the law becomes very powerless in the face of masses of people just refusing to comply.
Right.
Yeah.
In fact, I've even read where judges have said that, you know, we don't even care if you have this kind of preponderance of the evidence showing that you're innocent and maybe should be set free because at some point the finality of the judicial process is so important that screw you, innocent guy, you got to stay in prison.
That's how much their authority means to them that, listen, we said you were guilty and we can't go back on that.
Now, that's not usually the case.
But I've seen cases like that.
That's the terminology they use, the finality where.
So in other words, I'm agreeing with you that they get really worried.
It becomes very bad public relations when no matter how many people they put in prison, people and businesses and even states just absolutely defy their war on drugs and go ahead and do what they're going to do anyway.
It brings the finality of their decisions quite into question in the minds of regular people everywhere.
And so I think they very quickly then realize, oh, geez, we better really, you know, quit cracking down, at least on grandma and the doctors and these kinds of things, because it's making us look bad and it's making them look heroic, you know, exactly.
You know, I came up with this analogy the other day, and actually I wrote an article about it that I'll probably publish over at the Tenth Amendment Center at some point.
But I was thinking about these big events like Mardi Gras.
I've never been to Mardi Gras myself, but when I lived down in Florida and Tampa, they have this thing called the Gasparilla Festival, and it's basically Mardi Gras with pirates.
And you get 100,000, 200,000, 250,000 people that come into downtown Tampa for this event.
And, you know, everybody's got open containers of alcohol, you know, there's people smoking weed out in public, there's women flashing their breasts, there's all this stuff going on that if you did it on a normal Tuesday night in downtown Tampa, you'd end up in the Hillsborough County Jail.
But when you have that many people down there that are down there with the express intent of breaking the law, the cops just stand there and watch.
They're not going to try.
You can't arrest 150,000 people that have an open container or cite them.
It's absolutely impossible.
The masses of people overwhelm the law.
And it occurred to me that law is not really based on enforcement, it's really based on our consent.
And when enough people begin to withdraw their consent, the law collapses on itself.
And this is kind of the concept of nullification.
If you get 45 states, you know, 30 states that are saying, you know, we're not going to cooperate with you NSA as long as you're operating in this manner.
Well, at some point, that overwhelms the system itself.
And that's kind of the whole principle behind nullification.
Get enough people, get enough states that are refusing to comply and watch the law collapse on its own.
All right.
When we get back from this break, we're going to talk more with Michael Meharry about how you can get involved and make this happen.
We have a very, I don't know, very, we have a short window of opportunity here provided by Edward Snowden.
We've got to get it done, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
And announcing not conflict of interest.
You hear ads for the 10th Amendment Center and offnow.org on this show all along, but I'm just playing the ads because I like them and I really believe in this stuff.
So rest assured, you know, and it's true.
And as you guys know, and I'm always full disclosure on here, I always explain, you know, CNI, that I run ads for Council for the National Interest and for the Future Freedom Foundation on this show.
And I interview Phil Giraldi and Sheldon Richman on this show, but it's not much of a conflict because as you guys know, I'd be interviewing all these guys anyway.
So as soon as you hear me contradicting my stated principles, then call me out.
But for now, I think all my commercialism is perfectly kosher.
The 10th Amendment Center, offnow.org is their project.
It's a coalition.
It's not just them.
It's a coalition working to nullify the National Security Agency's violation of the law, the real law, the Constitution that chartered the U.S. government in the first place and the Fourth Amendment, which bans this kind of thing.
So I guess what I'd like to ask you, Michael Meharry from the 10th Amendment Center, offnow.org, to talk about now would be, first of all, the coalition involved in this, so it'll make people either feel good or feel bad about who they're joining up with, but I hope good.
And then secondly, I would like to hear you talk about all of your various successes along these lines, the NSA project and the partial successes count.
I want to hear them.
And then we'll talk about how people can really get involved and not just hear a commercial on the show every day or not just maybe fire off an email, but actually, I don't know, go meet with their congressman about this or whatever it is that you're recommending.
There's all kinds of resources here at offnow.org.
And I want you to talk about all that too.
So please, sir, the floor is yours.
Cool.
Well, the coalition, you know, it's pretty cool because it's a multi-organization coalition that spans the political spectrum.
The primary partner with this is the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a great organization based in Washington, D.C. that focuses specifically on civil liberties issues, and they have been absolutely invaluable.
And, you know, they're considered more, I guess, progressive.
Antiwar.com is a coalition partner, Revolution Truth.
We've got a couple of state organizations, Libertas in Utah, We Texans, and obviously Texas, Occupy Eugene, Downside D.C. is a coalition partner.
So you can see we've got some folks that are on the left, we've got some folks on the right, we've got some libertarians, all working together with the singular goal of stopping NSA spying.
And it's kind of cool because, you know, a lot of these folks, we may get together, and if we had big, long conversations, we might disagree on more than we even agree with.
We work very well together as a team on this specific issue because we're all very passionate about it.
And I think it goes to show that when you work together, you can accomplish stuff.
And I wish more people would be able to set aside differences on certain issues so that they can actually accomplish something that's positive.
And that's really what we're working to do.
Hey, listen, our opponents do that all the time, of course.
They call it bipartisanship when they agree how badly to screw us.
And this is just the other side of that, is, you know, the coalitions of the opposed.
We're against your wars, we're against your violations of our Bill of Rights, we're against the radical excesses of our state, beyond its charter.
Exactly.
It's exactly right.
And, you know, this coalition came together in November of last year, so it hasn't even been a year.
This was our first legislative session, and I think California is probably going to end up being the biggest success.
This is the piece of legislation, as far as the big-picture legislation, that's gone the farthest.
And I am pretty confident that this is going to end up passing the Assembly and get signed into law.
I really am.
I just see that momentum.
So that's pretty exciting.
We've also had some success on some bills that are more limited in nature that deal with data sharing and would specifically deal with warrantless data that's gathered and making it inadmissible in court.
We had this law passed in Utah.
It's been signed into law already, recently passed in Minnesota.
In the state of Missouri, they're going to have a public vote in November in their general election to change their state constitution and make electronic data part of the span of things that are protected from searches and seizures, so it would specifically name electronic data along with papers and houses and all of the things that are already in there.
These are clear, positive wins.
I mentioned, too, just the light that's been shined upon this issue.
We have a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah that has kind of caught wind of what we're doing and got curious and did some reporting on the water contract that the city of Bluffville, Utah, has with the NSA, and he revealed how the NSA got a sweetheart deal on how they're paying less for water than the average water customer there in that city.
Yeah, I read that.
Yeah.
That would not have happened if we hadn't formed this coalition and started saying, hey, we're going to try to deal with this at the state and local level.
Same dude got even more curious, did some public records requests, and forced the NSA to reveal exactly how much water they were using and how much they planned to use, something that they did not want to reveal.
We had a really good reporter that was working for Vice Magazine that has done some really good reporting on the tech companies and their opposition to any type of NSA reform and raised some really good questions there.
This is the first year.
We look for this to move ahead.
We expect more legislation to be introduced next year.
We're also looking at, especially in Utah, where the bill was actually referred to what they call an interim study committee, so they didn't kill it.
This summer, there's going to have to be at least one public hearing on this issue.
I think it's going to get a lot of press, and we're planning on doing some activism type stuff, working with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee folks and organizing grassroots people there that are going to do some rallies and raise that public consciousness.
We have some plans in the work of doing some stuff to really shine the light on these tech companies and make them squirm a little bit for their support of NSA spying.
A lot of stuff that we look to happen going forward, but we definitely need help.
We need people on the ground.
We need people that are willing to get their hands dirty and do some activism.
If you want to do that, you can go over to offnow.org, and there's a place that says Get Involved.
You click on it, and you'll just find some short questions that you can answer, and we'll get you plugged in, in your state, and give you the tools and resources that you need to help move this ball forward, because it has to be a movement of the people.
It can't be a movement of politicians.
Well, now elaborate about that.
What kind of thing are you talking about there?
What they can do?
What you can do?
Well, the main thing that we need...
Or what you have them do when they click that.
What's the plan?
The main thing that we need people to do is we need people to take this piece of legislation, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act.
We need them to contact their state senator and their state representative and ask them to introduce this piece of legislation.
In states where it's already been introduced, and there's actually maps on the thing, so you can actually click on your state and see what's going on in your state.
In states where it's already been introduced and where it failed this year, talk to your state senator and your state representative and say, Hey, I want you to support this next year.
That public pressure has got to be brought to bear.
We also need people that are willing to help at the local level do things like write op-eds or organize rallies, do these things on the ground within the specific states.
There's only so much that we can do from a national level.
We need people organized on the ground in the states so that when legislation's introduced, they can actually organize people, make the phone calls, send the emails.
It's not complicated work.
It's just work that has to be done that you need people to do it.
Especially people who are already members of groups, you know, Iowans for this, that, or the other thing, whoever you are.
People like that, they're already networked in, they already are interested in doing that kind of work, and they already can claim, I represent my group, it's this many people, and we're a conservative group, or we're a liberal group, and typically we're interested in these kind of issues, but by God on this, we're serious as hell, we want to see you do the right thing here, and, you know, for a society where most people really don't participate all that much, that kind of thing can be pretty impressive to some politicians about, you know, it might even give them a false impression that they really better get on board for this or else.
Well, you know, that's interesting that you say that.
I was talking to a state representative in Kentucky, this has been a while back, but this really struck me.
We were just talking about the impact of grassroots pressure, and he actually told me that he has gone through entire legislative sessions and never gotten one phone call or one email from a constituent on a specific issue.
That just blew my mind.
He said that very rarely do they get their constituents calling them and asking them to support specific pieces of legislation.
Now, imagine somebody that's in that environment, basically used to just kind of rolling around, doing whatever they want to do, you know, kind of telling the party line or whatever.
Right, and then here comes a riot.
Exactly.
They get a hundred phone calls or 67,000 emails.
It does, it blows their mind, and they become very concerned because you may, you hit the nail on the head.
These guys, most of them, they're not going to do it for some moral position.
They're not going to do it because they're great people.
They're going to do it because they want to keep their job, they want to stay in office, or they want to move on to the next office.
And if they think there's a bunch of people that might not vote for them if they don't do what they want, that's when they start to listen.
Offnow.org, that's where you find Michael Meharry and Michael Bolden and the Tenth Amendment Center and the Off Now Coalition.
Nullify the NSA.
Thank you, Michael.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, man.
See you tomorrow, guys.