11/25/15 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show, Trevor.
How are you doing, man?
Hey, great.
Thanks for having me.
Good to have you back on the show.
You know what, before we do the exploit and the terrorist attack stuff, let's talk a little bit about the Republicans and Russia column that you wrote a couple of weeks or so ago or a week ago.
Sure.
We ran it on Antiwar.com, and I remember thinking when I read it, wow, I really should have gone through one by one and done the work that Trevor did here, collecting these quotes of these nutcases.
These are the presidential candidates.
Audience, get ready.
I mean, go ahead, tell them, Trevor, what these kooks have to say about America's relationship with Russia.
And everyone, no need to mention, but I'll mention anyway, keep in mind, they still have thousands of hydrogen bombs, thousands of them.
Okay, I'm sorry.
So go ahead, Tim.
Trevor, you got two first names.
It's not my fault.
Go in whichever order you think is funniest, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, they're all pretty funny-slash-terrifying.
For the past month or so, all of these candidates have been trying to outdo each other for who would do what with Syria, and they've kind of run out of ideas.
The idea that they've all settled on is that there should be a no-fly zone.
The only problem is that Russian planes are regularly flying over Syria, also doing combat missions.
So then the question became, well, so are you saying that you're going to shoot down Russian planes and potentially start World War III?
And all of a sudden, all of these Republican candidates started coming out and saying, actually, yes, that's exactly what we would do.
Ben Carson said, you shoot them down, absolutely.
Whatever happens next, we deal with it.
That's an actual quote.
Whatever happens next, a.k.a. nuclear war.
Carly Fiorina said, I think we must be prepared to shoot down Russian planes.
Chris Christie said, call Putin and tell him, listen, we're going to enforce a no-fly zone, and then as soon as he flies into your territory, you take him down.
It's just on and on like this.
Pretty much every Republican candidate, save Rand Paul, is now for starting war with Russia over Syria, which at the same time, they could care less about the actual people of Syria.
They're just interested in dropping more bombs.
So it's quite alarming.
Beyond just the whole starting World War III with Russia part, the no-fly zone, as the former Joint Chiefs of Staff actually pointed out in Congress, but which nobody actually talks about ever, is that it requires 70,000 U.S. servicemen, and that if you're even going to do these safe zones they're talking about, that means thousands and thousands of ground troops.
And I shouldn't be just talking about Republicans here.
Hillary Clinton has called for a no-fly zone and essentially is calling for tens of thousands of troops to be deployed at or near Syria.
And, you know, it's really mind-boggling when you think about exactly what they're calling for here, yet they just kind of do it on the fly, kind of shoot from the hip style.
Yeah.
Well, there's so much ridiculousness here.
I don't even really know where to start.
But I guess maybe we start with the fact that the military doesn't want to do this, and that's why they're lugging around this giant poison pill.
The Air Force is telling Congress, yeah, no, we'd have to bring the whole Army with us.
And the Army is saying, we don't want to go.
I mean, come on.
They don't want to do this at all.
And it's thank goodness for the calm, patient restraint of our standing Army, keeping our civilians at bay.
Again, the ironies of living in an empire where they'll fight any war at any time, but really wants to fight directly for the al-Qaeda guys?
Can't we fight against them for a little while again or something like that instead, you know?
It's really funny that it's actually the military that is being like, no, actually, this is a really dumb idea.
We shouldn't do this.
And yet, you know, it's all the politicians, you know, pushing it day in and day out in the media.
It's completely amazing.
And then the other thing is, supposedly, America and Russia have the same enemy.
No one doubts that Russia is bombing the Islamic State and al-Nusra, which is al-Qaeda in Syria.
And so why in the world?
I mean, okay, if you're the average Joe living room, aren't you scratching your head wondering, what the hell is going on here that we want to get into a war with Russia over bombing the same side of the civil war that we're bombing?
Yeah, I mean, the problem is that, you know, the U.S. hates all sides.
And so what it wants to do is essentially insert itself into the middle of a civil war, yet fight both sides.
And so it just would be a never-ending quagmire that it's hard to describe how ridiculous it would be and how there is absolutely no plan to get us out.
And the idea is that these guys are willing to also throw into the mix the chance for a larger world war is beyond absurd.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I don't know if you saw the thing of Hillary Clinton's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, but I actually haven't had a chance to watch the whole thing yet.
But at the end, Fareed Zakaria has like a question and answer thing with her.
And he says, so this policy where we're going to back the moderate rebels and they're going to defeat al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and Assad's army and Hezbollah and Iran backed by Russia and then create a secular democratic government in Damascus.
Is that still what we're doing here?
What do you think?
And she laughs and goes, oh, well, when you put it like that.
But of course, that's the policy.
Gee, dammit, that they've been pursuing here for, you know, four and a half years straight.
That's exactly what they said they're doing.
And for him, like, oh, come on, that's not fair for read to say it all in one sentence like that, where it sounds ridiculous.
And then so but then she at least pretended to back down a bit and say, no, well, we have to prioritize and at least focus on the Islamic State and, you know, maybe get back to Assad later, that kind of thing.
But, you know, I just thought it was funny that, you know, when you when you quote the Republicans saying, whatever happens next, we deal with it.
That could be her presidential campaign slogan as well, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's why it's just amazing that both parties are kind of throwing out these nonsense, quote unquote, solutions and that, you know, barely anybody gives them a second thought and the media doesn't analyze them at all.
And so people are like, oh, yeah, no fly zone.
That sounds great.
Until you take 30 seconds to figure out what that actually means, which is potentially a total disaster.
Well, what's funny is the reporters on TV are too stupid to even be confused.
You know, like there's no cognitive dissonance when they're reporting the story of, you know, as you're describing an America fighting on both sides of a civil war.
They don't even think it sounds weird or anything.
You know, I think these these I don't know if it's the reporters or just the politicians or the people.
But there is this notion that no fly zones are forced by magic.
And as soon as you declare one by saying it out loud, then magically all the planes in the country will stop flying.
And you don't have to worry about a thing.
I mean, the thing with the no fly zone and why it takes 70,000 servicemen, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress, is because you have to take out the entire country's Air Force.
You bought with missiles and, you know, Syria with a significant Air Force, it's going to take a while.
And who knows if it'll actually work.
But, you know, you basically have to go to war with that country and hope that they don't fight back.
And so it's an incredibly dangerous proposition, especially in this area where there are more than just Syria flying combat missions, you know, namely Russia.
So, yeah.
And the Turks, specifically the Turks.
I know you said, hey, right back after this with Trevor Tim from The Guardian, Republican presidential candidates would jump straight into war with Russia.
When we get back, we're going to talk about how they're going to be spying on you worse and more than ever in the name of the Paris attack.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Wrapping up for the week here.
Hey, it's Thanksgiving, man.
Wrapping up early for the week with Trevor Timm on the show, writing for The Guardian.
And we were talking about the Republicans want to get us in a nuclear war over stuff that they don't even know the first thing about, for Christ's sake.
But now, Paris is being used to justify agendas that had nothing to do with the attack, is one.
And then, I thought I had another one here, too, by you, Trevor, along the same lines.
Anyway, so let's talk about that.
First of all, how many of the Paris attackers, Trevor, were refugees?
Zero.
It's incredible.
I mean, so, this is the thing, that, you know, we've had this entire debate for almost two weeks now.
A hysterical debate that's been driven by fear over whether we should ban Syrian refugees.
The other debate that we've been having is over whether we should ban encryption.
Because, you know, a day after the attack, dozens of intelligence officials came out and blamed encryption for the intelligence agencies missing this and going dark, as they like to say.
And that, you know, encryption, which is kind of the bedrock of privacy for billions of people at this point who use the Internet.
Encryption is what Senator Feinstein called, actually, the Achilles heel of the Internet.
And the thing is, that with both of these debates, they are entirely based off of rumor and entirely not grounded in reality.
So, from what we know, at least all the evidence we have so far, there's no evidence that any of the Paris attackers used encryption.
In fact, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that they used all sorts of services that were able to be spied on by the government, including unencrypted SMS text messages, which is about the easiest thing to wiretap possible.
They were posting and meeting each other on Facebook.
You know, they even bragged in ISIS's English language glossy magazine that they were in Europe and going to attack.
So the idea that the intelligence agencies are going dark was, you know, just made up out of thin air, at least in this particular case.
And yet the whole debate has been, well, we need a law to ban encryption.
And, you know, the same thing can be said for refugees.
We have taken in 750,000 refugees since 9-11.
There has not been one terrorist attack completed by any of them.
And yet there is this hysteria surrounding accepting refugees who are fleeing from the exact people that we say are our enemies.
And at the same time, you know, the terrorist attackers in Paris were not Syrian nor refugees.
Yet we somehow think that by banning them we're solving this problem when it is just completely pulled out of thin air and is just, again, part of this whole fear and hysteria MO that happens after all these attacks.
And unfortunately, it's been fueled rather than tamped down by the media.
Yeah.
All right.
But so, you know, let me play the government's advocate here for a second and say, but geez, we sure could imagine bad people planning bad acts behind a cloak of encryption.
And what if the cops can't protect us after all?
You're saying there's no evidence that, OK, in this case, that these particular murderers plan their attack behind a wall of encryption.
But geez, it seems like any terrorist who wasn't an idiot would.
And so what about my feeling of safety, Trevor?
Well, you know, it's a good it's it's a good question, because the government pretends like just by saying the word encryption, all of a sudden there's this force field that, you know, turns up around groups of terrorists where they are impenetrable.
And we know nothing of what's going on when actually that's not the case at all.
There are still plenty of ways to conduct surveillance on actual terrorists, including their cell phone location information.
So we know where they are 24 hours a day, all of their metadata for all the conversations they're having, even if they're encrypted.
So we'll know who they're talking to, when they're talking to them and for how long.
And they also you know, encryption doesn't stop the government in all cases from seeing what they're talking about.
If they are actually high value targets, the government has plenty of powers to hack into cell phones and computers and see what the suspects are talking about.
And all the encryption in the world is not going to help you if the government can't or if the government can hack into your phone.
What the encryption does is prevent the types of mass surveillance that have been going on that we've heard about through the Snowden revelations over the past couple of years, where the government collects hundreds of millions of people's communications, you know, people that are completely innocent of a crime, and puts them all on a database and is able to search them without any sort of evidence of wrongdoing.
And so encryption is really kind of the bedrock of our privacy in the digital age.
And so, you know, it's probably to no one's surprise that of course now the government wants to outlaw it.
Yeah, and now so but here's the other side of the question.
Can the internet exist without encryption, or with encryption that can be broken at will by national governments like ours?
Well, it certainly couldn't exist at all without encryption in general.
That's the problem with the debate is that people like Senator Feinstein have no idea what she's talking about when she says the encryption is the Achilles heel of the internet.
The internet would not exist.
We would not be able to buy anything online.
We would not be able to shop.
We would not be able to do any sort of banking.
The e-commerce would cease to exist without encryption.
And the argument goes that, well, the government needs to be able to see everything that people are doing.
The problem is that even if you trust the government 100 percent here, you know, what we're doing is basically carving a vulnerability into everything we do.
So what I mean by that is there are, as you know, everybody who's paid attention to the news knows, been constant data breaches going on, whether it's Target or JPMorgan Chase or the Ashley Madison hack, where hackers and criminals and foreign governments are breaking into servers and stealing large quantities of people's information, whether it's financial information, personal information or otherwise.
People's privacy are being violated by these third-party groups that we have no idea who they are.
And so what the government is saying is that, yeah, give us the key because you can trust us.
Number one, you can.
But number two, even if you can trust them, all of these hacker criminals and other governments around the world will be able to find and steal that same key and be able to unlock everybody's communications all at once and do God knows what with all the information once they get it.
So the government is not only proposing to violate people's privacy, they're also proposing to weaken their security.
And I think that's the real key here is that they're saying, well, let's improve security by weakening everybody's security.
And it just doesn't compute.
Yeah, I think I read – oh, it might have been Hayden or one of them NSA guys saying when it comes to the foreign governments fighting with each other and the security of their systems, even as the NSA said, if it was a soccer game, the score would be 280 to 270 or whatever kind of thing where there's a lot of great offense and very weak defense.
It's very hard to keep determined hackers out of networks.
I knew another computer security guy who just said there's no such thing as computer security.
There's only the best we can do all day every day until it's not good enough.
And this is what they want to pull the rug out from under.
Yeah, exactly.
This is why this makes absolutely no sense.
You're absolutely right.
There's all this offense and no defense.
And so the way that you prevent people from hacking into servers and stealing millions of people's information is not having access to that information to begin with.
So, for example, if you have an iPhone, now iMessages, when you text people iPhone to iPhone, they're end-to-end encrypted.
So that means that only the person who you're talking to and on your phone can unlock that message.
Apple can't even unlock it, even if they wanted to.
So because they don't have the key and because they don't store the message, that means there's actually nothing to steal.
So if somebody wanted to get everybody, every iPhone user's text messages, they would have to break into every single person's phone one at a time.
So hundreds of millions of phones, it would take several lifetimes to do.
And so they've effectively prevented hackers from ever doing that by designing their systems so that there is no key for them to have.
And so this is what we should be encouraging everybody to do.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what the government wants to be illegal.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Trevor Tim from The Guardian.
And this one is called, Paris is being used to justify agendas that had nothing to do with the attack.
Thanks very much, Trevor.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Appreciate it.
See y'all.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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