06/23/14 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest up today is Trevor Tim.
He is the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Sits on the board of directors there with the likes of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Daniel Ellsberg, and the like.
He also writes for The Guardian.
You can find quite a good archive of articles from the past few months there.
And this latest one, well, it's a British written title.
I'm sure it's not Trevor's fault.
Congress wants NSA reform after all.
Obama and the Senate need to pass.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Trevor?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
And yeah, I can't be blamed for the titles.
Yeah, yeah.
No, we kind of have a running inside joke at antiwar.com about the shoddiness of all titles of all articles published by all British papers at all times with no exceptions.
It's just absolutely the worst.
It's like their teeth or something.
It's just out of control.
Anyway, they're a former empire.
They're headline writers.
Gotta get it together.
Anyway, but no, what an important story.
Holy crap.
Is it really right?
The thing that you say happened here?
The House of Representatives passed anti-NSA bill, if I may define it generally, that was not some half-baked sellout.
Yeah, you know, this is really an amazing and surprising vote.
I mean, you know, I think there's good news and bad news of it.
You know, first, the good news, the House passed like a terrible, terrible quote unquote reform bill, the USA Freedom Act a few weeks ago, which, you know, you guys covered really well, which is basically, you know, there was this great reform bill that was called the USA Freedom Act.
And then it was rewritten in secret by the NSA lawyers in the White House just before it went to the floor for a vote.
So even, you know, half of the bill's co-sponsors who really thought that they were going to reign in the NSA voted against it.
And so that was kind of the benchmark from which we were now dealing with NSA reform.
You know, we had for the past few weeks thought that, you know, this bill was just going to get rammed through the Senate.
But then all of a sudden, last week, there was this appropriations bill, you know, a spending bill for the Pentagon that the Congress has to pass every year.
And, you know, through the ingenuity of a few House members, there was three amendments to this appropriations bill that would basically bar the Defense Department from spending any money on searching for Americans' records in the NSA's massive database.
It would bar them from trying to weaken or stick in a backdoor into, you know, common technology products that we all use.
And then it would hopefully stop them from meddling in encryption standards, which, again, we all use on the Internet, too.
And these passed somehow got through and were allowed to be voted on and were passed by the House in huge majorities.
You know, a lot of people still voted against it.
But the amount of support, I think, was was quite overwhelming and surprising to a lot of NSA supporters.
Yeah.
So they're making excuses saying, well, we didn't have time to prepare to oppose it.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
When it when it turns out that people are just voting on what they think is right, you know, they don't want people being spied on wholesale and they don't want the NSA trying to sabotage and destroy our tech products and our encryption.
So now it's got to get passed by the Senate.
Wait, I'm sorry.
I let you really say, you know, what was good about this thing.
Would it really stop?
Right.
Well, so that was that's what's good about it.
And what's bad about it is like what you just mentioned.
We actually have to get the Senate to pass it, which is, as you know, close to impossible when we're talking about any bill, let alone a bill that will reign in the national security state.
And so, you know, they're going to vote on their their appropriations bill this week or next week.
And there's an open question as to whether they will even allow these amendments to come up for a vote.
You know, likely now that they know that everybody cares about them and everybody wants them, they'll probably shut them down somehow.
They probably won't even let them come to the floor.
Of course, there's still a chance.
And you should definitely call your senator.
It's the only way that we can really make our voices be heard in this debate is by imploring them to get these to the floor and get a vote to them.
But, you know, hopefully in the long run, this will change the debate.
So when the Senate has to then vote on the USA Freedom Act later this year, that may be that they will keep these provisions in that are actually very strong and not watered down like the House did three weeks ago.
Yeah, well, and of course, there's always the conference committee hurdle.
They like to stick bad stuff back into a lot to keep our eyes open there.
But yeah, no, I think you're right that the most important part is the change in the debate and the next step from here.
You know, the Amash bill got killed a year ago.
Well, now.
So here it's passed in the House or it's equivalent, basically.
Right.
So, you know, it's a little bit of progress.
We'll take it now.
I know you got to go quick and we've got, what, four or five minutes left.
And I was hoping that you could tell me about this very important court decision.
I read a piece at, I think, Wired by Jennifer Granick explaining.
And it's so important.
I know it's comical.
I'll try to give you time.
It's this third party doctrine that says once you give your information to anyone, then you no longer can expect that the government can't have it for some crazy reason.
That was a court decision from back who knows when in the 1970s, some armed robbery case or something like that.
Right.
But then now something's happened where a judge has sided with reason against that insanity.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
So, you know, there's this case that is that is always cited by the NSA and any government agency whenever they want any sorts of records from us, whether it's our phone call records, like who we call, who calls us, how long the call is, when.
And then most recently location, you know, our cell phone emits a GPS signal and a signal to the cell phone towers that pings back every seven or 15 seconds that gives our exact location 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is, you know, incredibly invasive information for the government to know.
And they think they can use this case.
Smith v.
Maryland, which was just about one guy, which the the cops, which they already had good reason to believe he was a suspect in a crime.
And they wanted just his who he called and who called him for a 30 day period.
And they were able to get this without a warrant.
The government has turned this into the fact that they can now get all sorts of data on everybody with no probable cause, no nothing for as long as they want.
They've really kind of warped this reasoning beyond recognition.
And which is why you've seen the master villains the NSA has been doing.
So a court in Florida, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals actually ruled in a very influential case two weeks ago that actually, no, if the cops want to collect our location information from a cell phone tower for weeks or months at a time so they can follow our every movement, no matter where we are, whether we're in our home or going to work or going to meet friends or doing anything that we so please, then they need a probable cause warrant, which is what, you know, a host of civil liberties groups have been arguing for years.
And this is the same, basically the judges are poking holes in the same justification that the NSA uses to do their mass surveillance.
So this could have huge implications down the line.
You know, telephone companies start demanding a warrant all over the country, then, you know, this would have a giant effect on people's privacy rights and may have to force the government to rework how they, you know, conduct this mass surveillance that everyone has such a big problem with.
Right.
Yeah.
It's interesting the way, you know, the different precedents can be made to play off each other and whatever.
I don't know if if the solicitor general tried to make a pen register type case back when the Supreme Court was, I mean, argument back when the Supreme Court was ruling on the GPS thing recently.
But then that's what this court did.
Right.
They cited the GPS case that said putting a GPS on a car amounts to a search and amounts to the kind of thing that you would need permission from a judge to do first.
And then this court has gone and applied that to something where, like you were just saying, there's really no difference in the reasoning here.
If they can't get your tower data, then why should they be able to get the list of people that you call?
It's the same unreasonable search.
The original ruling back in the 1970s got this all wrong.
And then, of course, like you're saying, the complete bastardization of it, by the way, they've reinterpreted it and reinterpreted it to apply to everyone all the time forever.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this case has been right for review for years now, you know.
And this will really kind of nuke their entire justification.
Right.
Or at least one of their major justifications for what they're getting away with doing to us.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they took this case from the 70s that that, you know, was pre technology, pre cell phone and basically applied it to every part of our lives, even though it was really only about this one specific little issue in person.
And now, you know, it's just been completely blown out of proportion.
So it's been all thanks so much for doing the show again, Trevor.
I sure appreciate it.
That's Trevor Tim everybody.
He's at the Guardian and at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Thank you.
Hey, all sky here.
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