02/08/13 – John Knefel – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is John Neffel.
Writing at Alternet, meet the contractors turning America's police into a paramilitary force.
Oh, man.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I appreciate your journalism, but I also hate it because I just wish it wasn't true, but I know it is.
So, yeah, that's the deal.
We do have paramilitary police in America already, and you've got three profiles, or I should say profiles of three private companies who are making their ends in our homeland security budget here, well, arming up weapons and otherwise, our local cops for enslaving us with.
I guess let's go by company by company, as you do in the article here.
Can you tell us about L3?
Yeah, yeah.
L3 Communications is a good one to start with because I think that they really embody the sort of underlying principle of the article that I wrote, which is that there are fewer and fewer distinctions between foreign policy and domestic policy, and the kind of tools that the government has when implementing foreign policy in the name of fighting this so-called global war on terror are increasingly being used on domestic populations, and the companies who benefit from this state of endless war are similarly companies who benefit from hyper-paramilitarization of police forces, and L3 is a very good example of this.
So what I write in the piece is that L3 is everywhere, and when you go through their lineup, it does sort of feel like that.
Since they have many different divisions, one of the divisions makes night vision goggles, so anyone who saw Zero Dark Thirty is familiar with the JSOC goggles that kind of look like double binoculars.
It's like four columns coming off of soldiers' helmets, and they supply those both to the military and to SWAT teams for domestic policing.
So there's that.
L3 is also a major player in the drone market.
There's a human rights organization called Reprieve that's based in the U.K. that is, I believe, actually suing L3 for some of their involvement in drone manufacturing, and obviously, as I think probably many of your listeners are aware, the drone program is not going to stay only in the realm of foreign policy.
In many ways, it's already part of domestic policy.
It sounds like drones won't be over the skies in Seattle any time soon, although that was initially planned.
There was a huge public backlash, but we use drones to patrol the border with Mexico.
There was a drone used in a sort of strange arrest in the Midwest that involved cattle.
As the New York Times editorial board put it, it's not a question of if, but when the drones are coming to patrol U.S. skies.
So L3 is very much involved in that market, both abroad and potentially in the near future domestically.
A subsidiary of theirs recently was forced to pay 71 Iraqis millions in damages for torture that happened at Abu Ghraib.
It's the kind of organization that not only is it very much involved in the national security state, but one of their head officers, their chief financial officer, recently sat down with members of Goldman Sachs in what Goldman called in a press conference a, quote, fireside chat, which is sort of darkly comic.
That sounds right to me.
Ladies and gentlemen, here's why we need to have more war, right?
That could have come straight out of FDR's mouth.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the kind of thing that when you imagine financial titans and national security titans colluding with each other, you don't actually often think of them in the same room and then issuing a press release about it, because the optics of that are just so awful.
But the thing is that these kinds of organizations, these huge players are so powerful and also so isolated in many ways from the public at large that they either don't understand how bad it looks when they brag about meeting each other or they just don't care, more likely, because they know that the people who serve in government are not going to challenge the supremacy of either Goldman or a place like L3.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, of course, because it's all for the state's benefit, ultimately.
They're the number one contractor here.
They're the only reason that it's profitable for Goldman to invest in L3 in the first place.
So they're all in on it together.
But that, to me, is one of the only fun parts of the last decade, public policy wise, is that they've abolished the entire concept of a conflict of interest.
And maybe there's such a thing as outright bribery or something like that, but just a conflict of interest, the appearance of impropriety or something like that, they'd never even heard of that.
When was the last time you even heard the phrase conflict of interest?
I mean, it's been ten years.
Yeah, there's just, I mean, we've gone from the days of people sort of imagining a smoky back room to just openly colluding and really having no sense of shame about any of it.
Right.
Well, there's nothing shameful.
Hey, we're protecting the American people.
In fact, I'm going to get Eugene Jurek, he'll be on the show next week to talk about his new drug war movie.
And he kind of says this till the end, the economics of the drug war, but he shows the trade show, where all the companies that make all the technologies for the cops to use on the American people all show up and demonstrate all of their neat products to all the cops.
And there's not a guilty conscience in the room anywhere.
None of them know that they are welfare whores.
None of them know that they are the enemy of peace and liberty in America.
None of them think that they're bad people, but good because I'm making a good profit off of this at all.
They all think that, you know, thanks to them, any day now we're going to have a drug free America.
They're doing a great job.
Just, you know, this is the most high tech prison that we've ever been able to assemble.
Check it out.
All the drug users and pushers in America will surely be gone once we lock them all up in here.
And it's all as above board and legit as it could possibly be as far as the people involved are concerned.
And that's not us.
Well, and there's like, like you're saying, there's a complete normalization of what, you know, really should be somewhat radical policies, but because they've just become so ever present and you hear so few voices questioning whether or not the police should be armed to the teeth with actual weapons and also with surveillance technology, most people just kind of accept it because there is not a vigorous debate in most establishment news organizations about this because to question the benevolence of the police or to question the benevolence of the national security state is to somehow be unpatriotic or to say that there's something insidious about trying to keep Americans free or whatever it is.
And I think a lot of that is really rooted in the toxic idea of American exceptionalism.
And because America is, you know, we're told this wonderful place that can do no wrong, by definition, what could be the downside of arming the police and of dismantling the, you know, the Fourth Amendment that prohibits lawful search?
Because we're not, you know, we're told we're not an authoritarian state.
How could it be we're a democracy?
And so there's very little questioning of security creep in the police force.
Okay, and now, just real quick now, can you go through, you talk about license plate readers.
You mentioned the night vision.
Are these, was it L3 that are doing the retina scanners?
Boy, there's something I look forward to, you know, stopping by the National Guard base at the end of my street, get my retina scanned every day like a fallugin.
I'm just so looking forward to that.
The retina, it's actually an iris.
And I'm not entirely sure what the, if there's a difference between the two.
Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.
That is a company called BI2 Technologies.
And as I say in the piece, their story is very interesting, and I think very illustrative of how this sort of security creep works, because when they started out in 2005, their first two projects were building databases to help locate missing children and to identify seniors with Alzheimer's.
And so you think to yourself, well, okay, I guess I'm in favor of that.
Who wouldn't want to find missing children?
But, you know, what inevitably happens, and I think in many cases what's baked into the cake, is that once you create these kinds of technologies, they just become more and more ever-present.
So BI2 now is, in the next year, going to maintain a federal database in coordination with the FBI of the irises of, I'm not sure what the number is, but they're going to have biometric data on prisoners in 47 states.
And it's the kind of thing where, you know, you go from, at the beginning, it sounds like a relatively banal procedure, and now you have just another very effective way for police departments to get biometric data.
And the thing is, this is not limited to police stations or federal prisons.
You know, we're not talking about, like, huge iron lung-sized machines.
The BI2 actually made a new product called Morris that's an iPhone-based iris scanner.
So police officers can scan the iris of a suspect in the field.
And, you know, we're given assurances that, by BI2 and by police department officials, that none of those scans are collected or are held unless there's, you know, reason for them to be.
But it's the idea that we should just accept that and trust that these officials aren't actually, you know, keeping records of this data, I think, doesn't make any sense.
I think that we need to be extremely skeptical about any claims that databases like this aren't being created.
So the thing that BI2 loves to do is say, well, this is a noninvasive procedure.
There's no touching of anything.
There's no harmful lasers.
So they say that it's less likely for disease to get spread, something like that.
And they also say that because of the nature of scanning somebody's eye, they have to, quote, opt in.
That's, I think, at best, that's misleading, because when you're a prisoner, you don't really have the, you know, opting in if you're in state custody doesn't really mean opting in.
You're in custody, so you're forced, essentially, to do what your captors want you to do.
Right, and, of course, being a prisoner doesn't necessarily mean you've been convicted of anything, just that they put their hands on you, that's all.
Absolutely, and I personally, when I was arrested the first time I was arrested for covering Occupy Wall Street, I was, when I was processed, they were going to scan my iris, but it is a voluntary procedure, but most people don't know that, and they don't tell you that.
I think it's also quite insidious.
So the way that it worked for me in Lower Manhattan was, upon intake, they said, we're going to scan your iris, and I said, no, I decline.
And they said, okay, so they threw us in a cell, and they held us for quite a long time, and before we were going to see the arraignment judge, the Department of Corrections said, okay, we need to scan your iris before you can see the judge.
And the reason that they gave is so that they could match our scan to the first scan to make sure that they were releasing the right arrestee, and since we hadn't been scanned the first time, there was no, there was nothing to check it against.
So that really, again, that gives lie to the claim that this is just a very banal, benevolent system.
Well, and you say in your article, too, that they get you from four feet away, so you don't have to necessarily know that they're taking the picture of your eyeball at all, right?
They could just set up a camera on the street, and everybody who walks down the street gets their eyeball scanned like in Minority Report.
Exactly.
They can, it's not just irises.
The I2 can also do, they also have face scanning technology, so that's exactly right.
Oh, I misunderstood.
I was thinking they could even get your iris from four feet away.
You're saying that's just the facial biometrics.
Yeah.
For the iris, they say that the device has to be fairly close.
For face facial recognition technology, I think there, some people say that it can be three feet away.
Some reports say that it can be up to ten feet away.
But, you know, in terms of the specifics, the technology is going to change so quickly that what's four feet now, who's to say what that's going to be in a couple of years.
Right.
And, you know, the thing is, too, is with any technology to enslave us, like you say about, you know, the company that's putting the database together, they're saying, well, yeah, but don't you want us to look out for missing children and missing elderly?
You know, what if your parent had Alzheimer's disease and wandered off?
You would want to stop at nothing to find them and keep them safe, right?
And so I guess we ought to have a Reaper drone over every neighborhood because how can you argue against that?
I mean, they're always going to have some kind of excuse.
But the kind of thing that I'm picking up on from reading this article and so many others like it, John, is that all the excuses come after the fact.
The Raytheon lobbyist comes first and says, listen, I want to get rid of some of this hardware and I want you to pay me a hundred times what it's worth, and so let's make up some excuses.
And then they start talking about Alzheimer's and missing children.
Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely the case, that there is a huge, huge pool of money that the federal government will give out to contractors.
And so the race is to see which contractors can get that money.
And yeah, and then the explanations and the justifications often come after the fact.
I remember that movie.
Do you remember that movie, Demolition Man, with Wesley Snipes?
Is he still an actor?
I guess he's in jail.
Yeah, and that movie, oh, what's her name?
Sandra Bullock is the cop.
And they're looking for a guy who doesn't have a microchip in his hand.
And she says to Sylvester Stallone, you mean back from your era in the late 20th century, everybody didn't have a microchip in their hand, but how did you find anyone?
And then the big joke is he says, well, we went and looked for him, right?
But anyway, the point being, in her mindset, how in the world did a cop ever get by without being able to track every individual all day long, everywhere they go and everything they do?
How difficult, like you're saying, well, geez, this is the only method we have for making sure that you're the right guy that we're bringing before the judge.
We've got to do the iris scan.
Yeah, yeah.
It goes from, oh, my God, I can't believe this horrible dystopian science fiction future is being foisted on me, to, oh, yeah, that's how it's been since last week.
So that's just how it is.
Yeah, well, the argument that the police should be able to find anyone, that's what would bring me to the third company that I profiled called Harris Corporation.
And they're most famous for a technology that they have pioneered called Stingray.
And a Stingray is a device that masquerades as a cell phone tower and is able to pinpoint a cell phone user within, I believe it's two meters of where they are.
And so this Stingray device casts a kilometers wide net across, you know, what could be an entire neighborhood to, you know, to pinpoint.
And there's a famous or not as famous as it should be, but there's a prominent case called Rig Maiden where a police department went after, or maybe it must have been the FBI, went after somebody for tax fraud.
And so you think to yourself, well, if they're using this technology to go after someone for tax evasion, who else are they using it on?
And what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has said about this Stingray device is that it's the modern-day equivalent of British soldiers going from door to door and conducting searches with no reasonable suspicion because the net that this technology casts is so wide.
But, again, the kind of justification you hear for Stingrays is we need to be able to pinpoint somebody with pinpoint accuracy, and it's to the point where you can tell what floor or even what room of somebody's own house that they're in.
And the FBI initially argued before a federal judge that not only should they have the ability to use this technology, but they shouldn't even have to obtain a warrant before using it.
So, you know, what you have, the judge, you know, luckily ruled against the government in that case and said this is clearly activity where you need a warrant.
But, again, Stingray technology has been used extensively, and so now it's a situation of actually trying to change a practice that is, we don't even know how widespread it is, but a practice that certainly happens.
Yeah, well, you know, the British called it a writ of assistance, too.
You're only kicking in your door to help you out.
It's all right.
It's like a night raid in Afghanistan.
It's great.
Exactly, yeah.
It's all to liberate and to make us all safer.
Yeah, well, I'm sure feeling it.
Safer, that is.
All right, well, thanks very much, John.
I really appreciate your time on the show.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody, that's John Neffel with a K.
Find what he wrote here at alternet.org.
Meet the contractors turning America's police into a paramilitary force.
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