Constitutional attorney and author John Whitehead discusses the US government’s authorization of drone aircraft for domestic law enforcement and surveillance (public and private); the estimated 30,000 drones of all shapes and sizes that will be in service by 2020; the fate of former Marine Brandon Raub, who was forcibly institutionalized for controversial Facebook postings; the many veterans being pestered by FBI and DHS for exercising their First Amendment rights; The Rutherford Institute’s model legislation for preserving civil liberties and slowing the drone invasion; and the chilling effect “weapons of compliance” have on protest-minded Americans.
Scott Horton Interviews John Whitehead
The Scott Horton Show
November 2, 2012
Transcript
Scott Horton: All right, y’all, welcome back to the show. I’m Scott Horton and this is my show. Our next guest is John Whitehead. He’s an attorney and author with the Rutherford Institute. You might remember we talked with him about the government’s kidnapping of that veteran for posting lyrics on his Facebook page a few weeks back. Welcome back to the show. How are you?
John Whitehead: Hey, thank you, I’m doing fine.
Scott Horton: By the way, what ever happened with that?
John Whitehead: What happened was we got him out in about a week. He was in there. A judge finally released him, said there was no grounds to keep Brandon Raub, and now we’re preparing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the agencies involved.
Scott Horton: Good times. All right. Well –
John Whitehead: So he’s ready to go and we’ve got a cadre of lawyers, and we kind of want to send the signal – what we found out after we got involved in that case is a lot of veterans were coming to us saying they had been contacted by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security for posting things on their website or their Facebook page, which is kind of dangerous since we have the First Amendment in America which says you have the right to free speech. And so we would like to slow the agencies down and get them to stop harassing veterans.
Scott Horton: They are just scared to death of their own Pretorius, right? [crosstalk] Give them a rifle and teach them to kill and then uh oh.
John Whitehead: They are. They’re scared to death of the [inaudible]. They’re doing a number of – y’all, again, starting in 2009 basically I first saw it is that veterans were dangerous, they have to be contained, but again we have a Constitution in America and that’s what we want to protect.
Scott Horton: Yeah. All right. So, now, I want to talk with you about the drones. And you guys I believe are leading this, spearheading this movement to submit model legislation to the 50 state governments –
John Whitehead: Yes.
Scott Horton: – to get the state governments to ban, to some degree, I don’t know, I’ll let you explain, the use of drones by civilian police agencies against us.
John Whitehead: Yes. Actually we’ve floated one to the Senate Judiciary Committee, model legislation, and then we sent it to all 50 states, to their state legislatures. It’s called the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act. But just a little background. The problem with drones, and President Obama signed the law into effect not too long ago which by 2015 which will allow drones to be flying over the country. The estimate by the FAA right now is about 30,000 drones will be crossing America by 2020. That’s a lot of drones.
If you go to our website, rutherford.org, it would be good to go and read the articles I’ve written on drones so you can get educated on them. I’m talking to your listeners here. Because you need to understand what drones are. They’re a new form of technology, but usually they’re aerial unmanned vehicles that are usually remote controlled by some troops or believe it or not college students on the ground, and they’ve been used in Afghanistan and Iraq as war weapons where a number of casualties have appeared.
But what the drones will be equipped with will be antipersonnel devices such as tasers, rubber bullets, lasers, things to repel basically protesters. They will have facial recognition software. This is all footnoted stuff, so I’m not making anything up here. Probably scanning devices that look– so they’ll be able to see through walls. So if you’re in your home they’ll be able to see you moving about in your home. So, again, they’ll have all these devices – [crosstalk]
Scott Horton: And, by the way, pardon me for interrupting, John, but I just wanted to say that that’s not magic or anything, it’s just sophisticated radar and computers interpreting numbers that they’re getting or whatever. That’s not – it may sound fanciful – “Oh, yeah, see through walls,” but it’s not Superman x-ray vision or something like that.
[crosstalk]
John Whitehead: No, they’ll be able to see images. In other words, they’ll be able to see what, you know – I think it will get to be quite sophisticated eventually. They’ll be able to see pretty clearly what you’re doing in your home. So what we did is we came up – and I actually talked to a few drone experts, the guys that actually own drones. I had a fellow this summer that actually came in and visited me for quite a while. He had drones in his car, two small ones, and he showed me how they operated and those kind of things, but that’s one of the problems is there’s going to be a lot of private individuals and corporations with drones. They’ll also be recording what they see in the sky. What you’re doing on the street. They’ll have infrared technology. That’s already been announced. They’ll be able to see people walking at night. So they’ll have a lot of capabilities.
So what we did is we came up with a law basically saying that any information collected by a drone cannot be used against American citizens in a court of law. That would include private drones. What you will have is the police will actually be downloading what people have recorded on their own private drones.
And, again, like I say, if you go to our website and read some of the stuff that I’ve written on it.
They have a drone now, supposedly, the government, that is as small as a mosquito. They have a hummingbird drone. You can actually go on YouTube, and I would do this, go on YouTube and watch this hummingbird drone. It’s going to get so sophisticated that if you go out in your yard and there’s a hummingbird there, you won’t know the difference between the hummingbird and the drone. And they also have seagull drones.
So, these things are going to be very sophisticated. They’re going to be able to watch everything you’re doing. So the question is, should they be used against the American public, and we’re saying no. And then we’re saying, unless there’s a national emergency declared by the President of the United States, they can’t have antipersonnel weapons on them. In other words, dispersing crowds. I think that you’ll see them – [crosstalk]
Scott Horton: Okay, now, let me just play devil’s advocate here for a second, right?
John Whitehead: Sure.
Scott Horton: Because every county sheriff in America – and that’s, what, 18,000 of them or something? They’re going to have reasons they need these things.
John Whitehead: They’re going to want these drones.
Scott Horton: Right? And you and I could just sit here for like five minutes and think of a hundred excuses that they’re going to come up with.
John Whitehead: Oh, sure.
Scott Horton: For all of these things. Including using shotguns. I mean, come on, officer safety is the single highest principle in American society. If – you could get, you know, life in prison for killing a cop’s dog.
John Whitehead: Mhmm.
Scott Horton: So, you know, they’re better than soldiers. They’re better than demigods. Their lives have 10,000 times the value of a regular mundane, as Will Grigg says. So how in the world could you expect that the state legislatures are ever going to allow a cop to put his life in danger again when he could simply fly his remote-controlled plane over there and kill whoever it is he wants to kill?
John Whitehead: Yeah, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m going to be honest with you. I think there are a couple of state legislatures that have contacted us. They’re interested in passing these, but these I would say, they’re the exception to the rule. To get any kind of anti– what I would call anti-drone legislation passed, it’s going to take massive lobbying, citizens protests. So I don’t think you’re going to see much of it, no.
I think most people that I talk to don’t even know what a drone is. We’re not educated. It’s moving – the thing that I’m trying to tell people, this is moving so fast that it would be good to slow it down a bit and you know, again, the President of the United States signed a law into effect allowing drones to start flying over America by 2015 without any protections, civil liberties protections, in the legislation at all.
So there’s no, nothing protecting the American public. In fact, I’m arguing for a new Bill of Rights basically. Because the Fourth Amendment, which would usually be involved with police, says that if the police have some reasonable suspicion, and it’s not an emergency, that you’re doing something illegal, they need to get a warrant. Well with drones, warrants go out the window. Because they’re going to be flying over your house. And if they do have scanning abilities, and they will eventually have that, they’ll be able to see what you’re doing in your home. Should they be able to use that against you, let’s say two years later? I would say no.
So what we’re seeing with the technology is they’re bypassing the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment. And that’s why drones are something that, they’re so totally new, and I think they’re going to be awesome in their capabilities, that if we don’t get some kind of protection, I would say freedom as we have known it will be gone in another 15-20 years.
Scott Horton: Yeah. Well –
John Whitehead: Privacy. Privacy. Listen, I don’t how many people have gone through airport scanners, but they’re pretty intimate. If they can see you in your home having sex with your wife or whatever, we’ve reached an end point. And they can do that. They will be able to do that. Facial rec– they’ve already announced that they have facial recognition software, which drones will have, so they’ll be able to fly over a crowd, record everybody, know where you’ve been, whether you’ve gone to see a psychiatrist, if you’re walking in an office, they’re going to be watching all these things. So –
Scott Horton: Well, you know, here’s my thing about all this –
John Whitehead: But I go back again. The real issue I think here that I see is kind of – what human dignity’s all about is we have some private moments in our lives. But, you know, as people like Orwell wrote about, otherwise if you don’t have privacy, you’re not really a human being anymore. You’re just a part of the government, a part of the society, and you’re just a cog in the machine.
Scott Horton: Right. Yeah.
John Whitehead: That’s all you are.
Scott Horton: Can’t even keep your secret journal without them knowing, right?
John Whitehead: If you can have a secret journal these days, I’m not sure about that. Especially, if you do it electronically, there’s no secrets anymore, because you know the National Security Agency now downloads 1.6 million pieces of information every day, puts it in files off the Internet. So privacy is the issue.
Scott Horton: All right, so the thing here is, like, why don’t they, John – why don’t the cops have Cobra and Apache helicopters and kill us with Hellfire missiles? Because they’ve had that technology for a long time. And, Lord knows, the cops love killing people. I mean, to have a Facebook feed is to see cops killing innocent people all day every day in America.
[crosstalk]
John Whitehead: I know good cops, but, uh, the thing is –
Scott Horton: Usually they don’t make the national news other than the Internet.
John Whitehead: The problem, you see, is –
Scott Horton: It’s the law. Wait. Hang on one second, now, because it was a rhetorical kind of thing. It’s the law. It’s the old law from back when there was such a thing as the Constitution or any semblance of the American people caring about it that doesn’t allow local cops to kill people with Apache helicopters. But that’s the whole thing is, without that old law, they can and they will. In fact, when the law’s been eroded away, we’ve seen where they use tanks against us all the time.
John Whitehead: Oh, sure.
Scott Horton: They haven’t gone as far as Cobra helicopters yet, but the point being that if they can fly a full-scale drone war over Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia all day long, then they can sure as hell do it in our towns.
John Whitehead: They sure can. Here’s the thing, though. [crosstalk]
Scott Horton: And only our Bill of Rights, and only the American people being just demented in their jealousy over keeping it, it can protect us at this point. Otherwise, it’s just on. Because the technology, as you said, it’s so supersophisticated, it’s coming so fast, it can’t be uninvented. It can’t be undone.
John Whitehead: No, it can’t be undone.
Scott Horton: Only the old law can stop them.
John Whitehead: Yeah, I think the key here is that the older forms of oppression, which – if you want to call it that, hitting people over the head – with drones you won’t need that anymore because you’re going to have weapons of compliance. You’re going to have tasers, things that will not kill people but it will cripple people. It will put them out of business. It doesn’t get as much bad press as, say, shooting somebody with a gun. It’s going to change.
In other words, you’re going to see technology doing – there’s not going to be a human face behind it. So you can’t run up and say that, “That guy should be fired,” because it’s going to be a machine doing it.
Again, if you go on YouTube, they actually have a creature now that walks on four legs. They call it a drone. It can come to your front door now and knock, and it’s a police kind of vehicle – animal, it looks like a bear – and it can arrest you now. It can taser you.
Weapons of compliance, I think, like tasers, sound cannons, the things we’re starting to see used here in America, which were tested overseas first, by the way, in Afghanistan and Iraq, are being used here by the local police. It was tested militarily, now by the police here.
You won’t get the same kind of outrage, I don’t think, as just watching – the Rodney King – if you remember the Rodney King thing where they beat him up and you saw the footage. You won’t see any of that. You’ll sure see someone tasered, that’s it. By a drone.
Scott Horton: Right. Yeah, you know I saw a thing, John, one time, years and years ago, must have been 1996 or something. It was just really the dawn of the less than lethal police type technology, and it was on the Discovery Channel or something. And it was unique in that they really showed intelligent people saying intelligent things about, what does this mean for the future when you don’t have Kent State massacres that shock the conscience of the whole country. [crosstalk]
John Whitehead: Bad public relations –
Scott Horton: You just have a bunch of people blasted with a sound cannon until they go home. And so nobody, the sympathy for the protester that, you know, was engendered on the part of the regular people being awakened to what’s going on here, “Stop, what’s that sound” and all that, that’s all deadened now. And the same protest can be contained without escalating it to the point that you create new protesters. That kind of thing. And how they can come in and, you know, do small EMP bombs when they do a SWAT raid, turn out your lights first, and how they’re working on the science of making SWAT raids so efficient that no one could ever even have a chance to resist them like a Davidian ever again. And how just – man, they’re damn good at it. They’ve had so much practice this whole time now.
John Whitehead: Yeah, and the FBI is very good at – now when they’re expecting big protests they sweep in the cities, any peace activist they move into their homes, they go through their trash under new FBI rules. Plus, like the weapons of compliance, they’ve developed a new taser shotgun which you can shoot at a long distance and knock somebody down and semi-electrocute them. And then now they’ve developed a new, what they’re calling I think paintball pepperspray bullets that they can shoot from a long distance. So all these, these are weapons of compliance. There won’t be a human face. There won’t be anybody to blame. So the public relations debacle will be occasional, but you don’t have a policeman this time to blame. Not with the technology, no.
[crosstalk]
Scott Horton: Yeah. And not that anybody wants to see –
John Whitehead: So I don’t – If people say what’s the future look like –
Scott Horton: – anybody shot at Kent State either, but.
John Whitehead: The future doesn’t look real rosy. When you have a president sign a bill into law allowing drones to fly over America by 2015 but puts no protections in for the Constitution, and he taught the Constitution, is a little troublesome.
Scott Horton: Yeah. Well, you know, here in Austin, Texas, I believe, as far as we know, anyway – as far as I know – it was the first time the police used a drone on an actual raid, and it was a drug raid, I believe, and what they said was, “Well, the guy lives on a hill. And so what we are supposed to do? Not use a drone?” So, I mean, that’s it. That’s heralding the whole thing. That’s like the entire world changed to me, like that day Hezbollah flew a drone over Israel. Like, yeah? We just turned the page of history, I think.
John Whitehead: Well you know the United Nations has condemned tasers as torture, but Americans have gotten used to it. With the Occupy people – I mean you had 80-year-old women getting pepper sprayed and tasered. And that was okay. People – as long as Americans put up with this stuff, and they are, you’re going to get it. It’s just going to get worse. I mean, think about Martin Luther King. What would have happened to Martin Luther King on some of his marches when they only had attack dogs, if they had drones, tasers, pepper spray, sound cannons today – [crosstalk]
Scott Horton: Retinal recognition.
John Whitehead: – they probably would have dispersed it.
Scott Horton: Yeah.
John Whitehead: They would have dispersed it. I mean, what do you do when a sound cannon’s breaking your eardrums? If you don’t get away from it, you’ll go deaf. L-R-A-D, they call it LRADs. I have a new book, by the way, coming out in April which goes through all these weapons. There are so many.
Scott Horton: You know, I know a guy, John, who, he went out to protest when, about, it was the same time as Kent State in a different place, about when it came out about the secret bombing of Cambodia.
John Whitehead: Yeah.
Scott Horton: And at the protest, a bunch of guys in suits with mirror sunglasses came out and started taking pictures of everybody. And this was the first and last protest that this friend of mine ever went to, because, you know, hey, he had other priorities in life than being followed around by the DoD or whoever these goons were, and so that was just it. He was immediately chilled that quickly. At this point, hey, the cameras are already up on the street corners everywhere and whatever. He wouldn’t have even showed up in the first place.
[crosstalk]
John Whitehead: Oh, yeah.
Scott Horton: He wouldn’t have been surprised by a camera at all. He would have just taken it for granted.
John Whitehead: I live in a small town near Charlottesville,Virginia. There’s surveillance cameras everywhere.
But here’s another thing you have to look into this. There is a drone caucus in our Congress. I mean, they’re basically controlled by the large corporations that are making money off of this. And, again, I’ve written on this on our website, rutherford.org, you should read it, but what we’re facing here I think with the drone thing is the corporate state. It’s a fusion of the corporations. The corporations are making a lot – Boeing, the large aircraft industries, are making a lot of money off of the drones, and their bottom line is money, but when the state gets involved, their bottom line should be civil liberties and the Constitution, but that’s all getting overwritten right now.
Scott Horton: Right. And of course – [crosstalk]
John Whitehead: And I don’t want to – you know, I don’t want people to get pessimistic, and I’m not pessimistic, but it would be great to see Americans get educated on this subject, to speak out on it, to go to their state legislatures and say, “Hey, are you going to protect us against these things?” But people are caught up in what, politics now, or the next celebrity thing on television, and the drones are coming. I mean, they’re only a couple years away from being all over the sky.
Scott Horton: Well, and it’ll be the same economic model as with all the military equipment, the M16s and M4 machine guns and the tanks and everything that all the police get in America already. They funnel it through the DoD, right?
John Whitehead: Yeah.
Scott Horton: That way you don’t have a bunch of messy democratic process about whether the state governments are going to buy it. You have the Pentagon buy all the weapons from those big contractors that you named, and then the Pentagon passes them out to the cities for almost free, or maybe even for free, to them, and so – [crosstalk]
John Whitehead: Yeah, the fellow that [studied with?] me this summer –
Scott Horton: I mean, if you were a Raytheon lobbyist, that would be the model that you would pursue, right?
John Whitehead: Yeah, the drone guy that came by this summer, he just went out in his car and said, “Here, here’s my drones.” He pulled them out, he folded them out. They were the size of a large bird. And he put them up in the air and he showed me his little video camera on the ground and it was looking me right in the face. So they’re going to be everywhere. I think the thing is, a lot of private entities, larger corporations, smaller corporations, are going to be using drones too. So they’re going to be everywhere. So get ready for it, okay? That’s all I’m saying.
Scott Horton: Well, there’s going to be people, you know, vigilantes, arming their own drones and fighting dogfights up there too, you know?
John Whitehead: Yeah, and that’s a problem, because they crash. And when they crash they’re going to make some bad medicine on the ground. They’re – I actually have talked to some drone people who think they can hack into basic drone technology the government will have. What will happen, I don’t know.
But again, we’re not protected. No one’s protecting us here. That’s why we need some kind of civil liberties laws, and I think – another thing that most people don’t know, 24 universities right now are moving forward to giving degrees in drone technology. And that’s all supported by corporate money. So, you’re going to have universities across the country creating drone people to put more drones in the air, so.
Scott Horton: Well, this is what [crosstalk] Chalmers Johnson meant when he said –
John Whitehead: And this is not a small thing. I keep telling your listeners –
Scott Horton: – you either give up your empire or –
John Whitehead: – this is not small.
Scott Horton: – you live under it. You know? You order your entire society around making weapons of enslavement for Fallujans, guess what, then your neighborhood ends up looking a lot like theirs before too long, you know?
John Whitehead: Yeah, and the thing is, there are going to be some mistakes, there are going to be people who are going to be shot, tasered. The message I think we’re getting sent is if you want to exercise your First Amendment rights, stay home. It’d be better to stay home or you’re going to get harassed. Again, the police can back off now and not look like bad guys.
Scott Horton: Hey, John, let me ask you about this court decision. I think – I don’t think it was the Supreme Court but a federal appeals court or something that ruled about, it’s perfectly okay for cops to plant hidden secret cameras on private property – how much is the change in that compared to the previous precedent?
John Whitehead: Well, let me tell you in general what I’m seeing with the courts. I mean, at the Rutherford Institute, we’ve got many, many court cases going on. What I’m finding is, most of the judges out there are very pro surveillance generally. Whether it’s the TSA scanners or whatever. So, the courts, I used to think of them as courts of justice. They’re more like courts of order now. Even our present Supreme Court is very pro governmental bodies.
It’s going to be very difficult – again, you know, if groups like the ACLU would work with us and others, I think we could make some headway, but it’s going to be very, very difficult getting through the courts. The courts are going to be very pro-surveillance now. ‘Cause there’s this fear of the terrorist out there, all five of them running around the country. If there are five of them.
Scott Horton: Right. Yeah, in North America? Please. (laughs)
John Whitehead: I mean, I’ve talked to a few security people in Washington D.C. and I’ve asked them, “How many credible terrorists do you think there are in America,” and they hold up one hand, maybe five. These are NSA people.
Scott Horton: What, you mean outside of the U.S. government? Okay, yeah, then.
John Whitehead: No, inside. Inside the country.
Scott Horton: (laughs) (inaudible)
John Whitehead: They don’t think there are many – no, the terrorist thing is a good thing to use to sell drone technology, lasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, whatever they want to do, or go arrest Brandon Raub for Facebook posts because he could be a terrorist because he thinks the government faked 9/11. He’s a terrorist. So “terrorist” is loosely defined these days.
Scott Horton: Yeah. [crosstalk, inaudible]
John Whitehead: So everybody’s a terrorist if you disagree with the government.
Scott Horton: Anyone the government doesn’t like. It’s like an anti– [crosstalk, inaudible] anybody the Israel lobby doesn’t like.
John Whitehead: [inaudible] anyone it doesn’t like, they can put you out of business. People ask me about my home life. I’m very dull. (laughs) I go home and do what I do. But I think more people are going to get like that. But, again I go back, that what they’re doing is they’re trying to discourage people from getting active, out in the streets, protest. That’s why you have all these weapons of compliance – tasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and they’re developing the technology at such a rapid rate they’re going to be able to do many things long distance. And with the drones they’re going to be on top of us. That’s all coming, folks. [crosstalk] If you believe it or not.
Scott Horton: All right. Well, hey, listen. [crosstalk] I don’t ever [inaudible] do, but –
John Whitehead: It’s like a sci-fi movie, by the way.
Scott Horton: John, I really appreciate the fact that you’re coming up with this model legislation and maybe people can participate in this. I mean, after all, if you’re going to have influence you’re much more likely – I mean a regular person in the audience – if you’re going to have influence, you’re much more likely to have it at the state level than the federal level anyway, so –
[crosstalk]
John Whitehead: I agree. I tell people –
Scott Horton: – why not ask your state house and senate members about this, and, you know, ask them, “Hey, we’re really talking about how you are going to live your life too here. You know, this is important.”
John Whitehead: And your children’s lives. You got grandkids, you know, your own children. I tell people to act locally, think nationally. Act locally. Because even our hometown here, we’re going to pester our local government to pass some anti-drone legislation, or controlling drone legislation, let’s put it that way. So you could get your local government – you can go on our website and pull the legislation down. It’s solid stuff. You can use it. Just go to your local city council and say, “Hey, this is something you need to look at. Pass it. Protect us. That’s your job.”
Scott Horton: Right. Well, you know, I’m not usually much in favor of seeking political solutions to any of these kinds of things. However, I guess it takes all kinds and all different ways of confronting these issues, and, really, what’s the good of convincing everybody to oppose these things if nobody’s going to do a thing about it? You might as well try to get a law passed, you know?
John Whitehead: I agree. I mean, Martin Luther King got the civil rights law passed, something we use in every lawsuit here, basically. So some legislation is very protective. This drone stuff would slow them down for a while. I don’t think anything can slow down the drone technology. It’s moving too fast, and the government – I mean, the government has bought into it already. It’s a law. 2015, they’re going to be everywhere. There’s like 130 police, I think, the last I looked, agencies that already have licenses to use drones, and they’ve used them already. There were some spotted in Chicago at the last big protest there a couple months ago.
So, they’re already here, folks. The question is, should we be protected from them? I think we should, yeah. So we need good civil liberties legislation. They shouldn’t be using anything against us in a court of law because there’s no – the police have no business watching what we do in our homes, or watching me walk down the street with my wife at nighttime. It’s nobody’s business where I’m going, what I’m doing.
Scott Horton: Yeah, well –
John Whitehead: So that’s the issue.
Scott Horton: I’m sorry to end the interview this way, but I’m pessimistic. I’m using my awesome Cassandra powers here, and we are doomed. There is no way the American people care at all. You know, they put cameras up on every corner in every town in America. And, you know, in Austin, it was not a surprise, or it wasn’t even hidden at all. The first thing they did was they got cameras up on every entrance to town by road, all of them, first, the perimeter of the city. And then they filled in the gap. And they did it in every town in America. There was never a referendum anywhere, ever. They never asked anyone, anywhere, ever. They just said, “You know what? We, the 18,000 governments of America, are putting cameras up wherever we feel like, and you’re not going to do a damn thing about it,” and the American people all rolled right over. And that was it!
John Whitehead: Yeah.
Scott Horton: There never even was a discussion. There still hasn’t been a discussion about it.
John Whitehead: Well, it’s Edward R. Murrow’s great statement, “A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.” We’re sheep. So you’re going to have wolves.
Scott Horton: There you go. All right, well, listen. I appreciate that you’re fighting. I think this is a great idea, if only just to get people’s attention that, you know, the way it’s supposed to work anyway is that you’re free and these people are your servants (laughs), that kind of thing.
John Whitehead: Yeah. We don’t – and I feel we’re moving into what I call a slavery mode where they assume we’re just slaves and we’re all going to go along with whatever they do to protect us. But the question is, who’s going to protect us from the protectors? That’s the question.
Scott Horton: All right. Well I guess this is the Rutherford Institute’s what we got. Thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it, John.
John Whitehead: Hey, thank you, sir. God bless.
Scott Horton: All right, everybody, that’s John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute. That’s rutherford.org. And they’re working on model legislation for your state’s government to at least somewhat protect us from the oncoming generation of domestic drones.
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