06/18/13 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scott wharton dot org.
Alright, Sheldon, welcome back to the show.
Yay, Sheldon Richman's on the line.
Hey, Sheldon, how's it going?
Hey, how are you?
I'm doing real good.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
Wait, I just said that.
I'm doing fine.
Glad to be back.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
What?
How are you doing?
Wait, okay.
Hey, so Sheldon Richman, he's the vice president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org and he's the editor of their magazine, The Future of Freedom, the July issue of which will have my piece on wars in it.
So subscribe to that if you want.
And now, Sheldon, where is my link?
Because I've got it right here.
It's your new piece for The Future of Freedom at fff.org.
Motives aside, the NSA should not spy on U.S.
Well, that's funny.
Why shouldn't motives be aside, first of all?
Actually, that was not spy on us, but they'd use all upper caps.
Oh, yeah.
All uppercase.
It looks like U.S.
On the U.S.
It's a pun.
I guess it's a pun.
Yeah, there you go.
It's not a good pun.
No, it's not.
That's how the U.S. government gets away with pretending that they're us, is they've got that silly little thing.
The government is us.
No, the government is the U.S.
Well, here's why I wrote this.
There's been plenty of very good, solid criticism of the programs that great hero Edward Snowden has revealed to us all.
So, that has allowed, though, the Chris Matthews of the world, and you know the type I mean when I say that, to say, oh, you people, you just think the government is something external to us, and it's a monster, and it hates us, and it's out to do us in.
And that's nonsense, and therefore, you know, Snowden isn't such a hero, and blah, blah, blah.
So, I wanted to find another way around this.
So, I used the old device of, you know, for argument's sake.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the people who have designed the program and who are executing the program have perfectly pure motives.
All they want to do is protect the security of the American people from, you know, terrorists, whether they're homegrown or from outside.
And let's leave aside U.S. foreign policy provoking enemies, which I don't believe, you know, I believe all that, but for the sake of argument.
So, let's give them their best case.
That's what I like to do, give the other side their best case.
Sure.
I mean, after all, there are a lot of patriots in the NSA, and in fact, probably 99% of government employees are not sociopaths.
It's all justified.
It's all rationalized.
It's all for the greater good and more good than harm and all kinds of different things they tell themselves.
Right.
So, if we can show that even under those strained assumptions, I think to some extent they're strained, I don't think everybody there is pure, but we can leave that aside.
If we can show that our case holds, even under those very, very favorable conditions, we have, I think, done quite a service, and we might convince some fence sitters who aren't quite sure about this.
You know, someone said, like, John Stossel.
I have to laugh at that.
So, I go ahead and try to show in this piece, it's a 700-word op-ed length piece, that even under those assumptions, the government should not be spying on us.
And one point I make is that no matter how sanely the people may be, they're not infallible.
In other words, they're still going to make mistakes.
We can't assume away fallibility.
That's stupid.
Now, that's ridiculous.
We can assume away evil, but we can't assume away fallibility.
So, there are going to be errors.
And I picked up a point from someone who's written not on this topic that I know of, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who has written really interesting books called The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
And one of the points he makes is that human beings are much more likely to see order in a random sequence than they are to see randomness in an orderly sequence.
It's just something about human beings.
We look for order, we look for patterns, even when they're not there.
So, imagine a patriot, a zealot, who's looking over people's data for some reason, looking for patterns.
That person may well find patterns that don't exist.
And that could, of course, result in a total, terrible disruption of somebody's life, if not destruction.
I mentioned the people that were falsely accused of setting off a bomb at the park at the Atlanta Olympics, and also the first guy implicated in the false leak in the anthrax letters back in 2001.
Those people went through hell.
Some people have committed suicide under similar conditions.
So, terrible mistakes can be made.
By the way, I also point out in the beginning that I think there's more to be feared from a patriotic zealot than from someone who's running these programs just for personal gain or for power lust.
Because the zealot, the person who really thinks he's out to protect the American people, he may be more concerned about limits on his powers, because he doesn't want terrorism to happen on his watch, does he?
So, he may be, you know, it's his very zeal that may lead to the problems I'm talking about.
And that's more to be feared, sincere patriotism, than someone who's just out to make a buck, or who just likes, you know, lording it over people.
So, I think that's an important distinction, too.
So, we have the problem of error, and I think that's a big part of it.
And, you know, I said you may think the chance of error in the case of any particular person may be very small, but it's big enough if you put yourself in the picture, right?
If you're the one, if you're the one who is the subject of the error, then the odds don't look, even small, the odds don't look, they don't make you very comfortable.
So, you know, I don't want to be in a position where they could be poring over, you know, my record of telephone calls or web browsing or whatever the heck it is, and somebody notices a pattern which, in fact, doesn't really exist.
And some articles, you know, other people writing about this have pointed out how much they can get out of the data.
You know, they don't need the content of phone calls.
It's very, you can end up piecing together a picture of somebody just through the phone numbers called, the time and the date, the length of time, and stuff like that.
By the way, I agree with Bruce Schneier, or I think he was the one that pointed this out, that this should not be called metadata.
That's a way to make us feel a little better.
Metadata, it would be data about data.
That's what that word meta means.
This is real data about us.
What time I called you, how long our phone call lasted, you know, where I was, because they can tell by the cell tower where I was, where you were, how often I've called you.
That is, I agree, that it should not be considered metadata.
That's data about you.
That's an important point.
About you and me.
And then the second point I make, aside from error, is the fact, and I picked this up from an article by Julian Sanchez, which I think was very good on this, but it changes a population to know they're constantly under surveillance.
It cows you.
It changes you subtly, psychologically.
You just need to read 1984 or any of these great dystopian books to see the psychological change.
These are novels, obviously, but they're based on real observations, and people who have lived in the Soviet Union, like Ayn Rand and other people, could talk about what that means.
When you have this sort of constant feeling there's someone looking over your shoulder, that will change you.
It will change the society, and we don't want to live in a society of that nature.
So this is the point I'm trying to make.
Well, you know, that's how I live and have for a long time.
I've always assumed that every Google search goes on my permanent record, that, you know, whatever phone calls I make.
I feel bad that my very kind of nonpolitical, plain old friends in life, that they all have this association with me, and I have this weird thing about me that in my other life I'm a political activist type or whatever, but in some way I'm kind of implicating them in being a friend of mine.
And I know that that's true, and sometimes I warn them that, like, you know, maybe I'm not trying to make too big of a deal out of myself.
In fact, I think they probably aren't very interested in what I do, frankly, because how important is it really?
But I've lived like this for decades.
I mean, I assume that every email I've ever sent is saved on a government computer somewhere, you know?
And it does suck, and it's not quite living in Soviet totalitarian slavery because I'm not really afraid that they're coming for me at any time now, right?
Just that they're watching me all the time, you know what I mean?
Well, I'd just like to say to Mr. Clapper, if he's listening in, that I'm proud to have Scott Horton's phone number on my log.
Well, there you go.
Thanks very much.
Well, and it's nice to know that somewhere they're keeping a separate backup archive of all of my interviews, or at least certainly all the ones that go overseas, you know, where on the other line it's Eritrea, like coming up when we talked to Thomas Mountain in a minute.
But now I want to say something, a couple of things that you mentioned here I want to pick up on.
First of all, I want to start at the end about, yeah, more on the psychology of totalitarianism.
My wife is from the Soviet Union, as you know.
She grew up in Ukraine, well, until she was 9 or 11 or something like that, anyway.
So she spent her childhood, if not her teenagerhood, in the Soviet Union.
And when she was a little girl, she wasn't even allowed to have friends at all.
And nobody was.
And nobody was really friends with anybody.
Because when it came down to it, it's really every man for himself or every very small family unit for himself versus everybody else.
Because anybody could turn you in for anything.
And maybe because they got in trouble for something else that they shouldn't be in trouble for, but now their only chance is to try to get you in trouble for something.
Or maybe it's just a race for, you know, everybody in the neighborhood has to kind of be, they don't want to be the last one to have ever given the government information or something like that.
And so, or just, you know, so people could just, anything a little kid says out of context could be picked up, repeated, and that could be enough to get your mom and dad taken away.
And so little kids aren't allowed to have friends.
You know, that's how it was in Ukraine in the 1970s.
And I remember reading about Romania where even to this day people use plain brown book covers whenever they take books out in public anywhere.
Because it's none of your damn business what book I'm looking at.
Even if it's nothing, right?
Even if it's just a silly little novel.
Because these are things that people store up to use against you later if they have to.
Because that's what it's like to live in totalitarianism.
Well, I think this is absolutely right.
We need to get over this American exceptionalism.
I think there's an idea that, oh, well, we're different.
It somehow won't change us.
We're different from other people.
That's nonsense.
And, you know, that's simplistic in all this.
Somehow it's different if it's here.
And I just disagree.
I just think as people generally come to think they're being, and of course even before the revelations, I think a lot of people just assumed that.
They would have been called paranoid the day before Snowden's disclosures, right?
The day before earlier disclosures.
They would have been called crazy, fringe people.
And now we find out it's actually happening.
And it does change us, and we're not exceptions.
And it can't be healthy for society.
It's just appalling that some people see this as a close call.
I saw some email today from someone who said it's a gray area.
Heck, it's not gray.
It couldn't be any blacker than anything else.
It's just amazing that we find people who even self-identify as libertarians trying to find good things to say about this.
Yeah, it is absolutely ridiculous.
And, you know, and here's the thing, too.
And everybody already knows this, too, that with the laws as they existed in 2001 and with the number of cops and intelligence agents and contractors and everybody else, military guys they had in 2001, they had all the power and ability they needed to prevent the September 11th attack, so much so that to this day, among very reasonable people, it is still extremely suspicious that, you know, maybe these guys really did turn a blind eye and let this thing happen, because how many blinking red lights can you ignore in a row?
Jeez.
But now they want to make us believe that we have to give up every last shred of the Bill of Rights in order to be safe, when, after all, we never really were in danger, right?
I mean, if you worked in those towers that day, which, again, speaking of my wife, she had an office in those towers, and thank goodness she was sick and out of town living with her parents, very ill at the time, or she'd have been dead.
I didn't know that.
But those were the only people who were in danger, not the whole country, you know what I mean?
20 guys sneaking in here, training in our flight schools and hijacking our planes because they didn't have any.
Right.
To use that popular phrase, there was no existential threat.
It's true.
It was a horrific crime, terrible, terrible crime.
I mean, no doubt about that.
But I do emphasize the word crime.
There was no danger of it bringing down the country, of leading to a takeover, certainly no overthrow of the government.
Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing, but the point is none of that was in doubt.
None of that was in doubt.
Right.
It was just a horrendous crime, a horrendous act of mass murder.
And that's very different from, I would say different from an act of war or certainly an existential threat to a society.
Absolutely.
And, in fact, look, and Will Grigg, I'm just lucky that I was reading Will Grigg in the New American magazine.
He was the best thing that ever happened to the dumb birchers, and then they got rid of them because of how dumb they are.
But he was – I was reading in the New American, and he was explaining in the fall of 2001 that, first of all, did they turn a blind eye to this because, boy, it sure looks like they could have stopped it.
And, second of all, you know what the purpose of terrorism is.
It's to provoke a reaction out of you, preferably an emotional, illogical overreaction to make you do something dumb and hurt yourself, you know, like a judo type of a thing, man.
You swing, I grab your fist and fling you into the wall kind of deal.
And so that was the only existential threat is that the Republicans would use it as an excuse to spend $6 trillion they didn't have, inflate a bubble in order to make it seem free.
Right.
I mean, another part of the motive might have been to – and this would have been very wishful thinking – to provoke the American public to turn on their own government and say, you know, cut out this foreign meddling.
But that takes a level of understanding that most people don't have.
They don't pay attention.
Right.
No, Will Grigg wrote that back then, and that was part and parcel of it all along, was to provoke a security clampdown that the American people will resent so much that we end up turning against our government and saying things to them like, well, just take the bases out of Saudi Arabia then.
Right.
Because we would rather be free and not have a base in Saudi Arabia.
Because it doesn't work that way, right?
If the U.S. puts sanctions on Iran, they're hoping the Iranians will turn on the government, on the Iranian government, right, the U.S. officials are.
That's just like they did with Iraq during the sanctions.
Right.
But they don't do that.
They rally around their own government against the foreign enemy.
Of course.
Same as Americans.
I mean, George Bush presided over the September 11th attack, was the greatest executive security failure in American history right there, and he had a 90 percent approval rating out of it.
Right.
You know, just because he'd been on the job nine months, that doesn't mean he should have been doing his job yet, right?
How many places have you worked where you were supposed to already be performing your duties after only nine months on the job?
Well, they've been given a briefing paper called Al-Qaeda intent on hitting targets within the United States.
And they talk about airplanes going into buildings being used as missiles.
When is Condoleezza Rice going to be facing trial?
And by the way, you know, as long as we're getting into this a little bit, I just want to say my favorite footnote on this stuff is Press for Truth, the movie which my wife did help make in the first place, and then the follow-ups, it's the Rich Blea podcasts.
He was one of the CIA guys helping George Tenet keep the FBI from some of the Al-Qaeda dudes in the country.
And these guys have put together the Rich Blea podcasts, part one and two.
One of them's video, one of them's audio.
But they interview Richard Clark, and they get as close as anybody in terms of actual journalism, really showing how the CIA prevented the rest of their government from clamping down on at least some of these guys, and that they lied to Dick Clark, the head of anti-terrorism in the White House, about it.
That Tenet lied to his face about it over and over in the months leading up to the attack.
And I'm not on final conclusions there, but I am saying that's the best journalism on the issue of whether they let it happen or not, I think.
And this was a matter of protecting one's turf, is that it?
The CIA didn't want to let the FBI get in on the action?
Honestly, this is the part where my imagination kicks in.
I think Dick Cheney told them, we're letting one through.
But I'm just making that up.
I can't prove that.
But I think that George Tenet is a good little soldier like Colin Powell, willing to go along with anything, and even that.
But I can't prove that.
I don't know.
You had a guest on some time ago who's written several books on this.
You'll know the name, and I can't think of it right now.
Who's written, what is it, A Thousand Years of Revenge?
Yeah, Peter Lance.
Yeah, yeah.
I remember that interview very well.
He went on for quite some time about all that they knew, and turf protecting, and all that stuff.
And you know what?
I haven't read all of his books, but A Thousand Years for Revenge is a masterpiece.
And yeah, it's written basically, most of his sources are like the street-level FBI cops, the ones who really wanted to stop it.
Not the bosses and the executives who care only about themselves, but the real cops who actually care about the job that they're doing.
And they're the ones that he was talking to the most.
And so he's got just a lot of really, really great stuff in there.
But anyway.
My hunch runs in the direction, more in the direction of bureaucratic bumbling.
Well, and this goes to the Able Danger thing, too, right?
And back to our subject of the NSA here.
It wasn't the NSA, but it was another part of the military, I guess, I think.
Or maybe it was DIA in conjunction with NSA, running this Able Danger program that was basically illegally data-mining people in the United States, I suppose.
I don't know exactly how illegal the program itself was, but then it was the DOD lawyers said that you cannot notify.
The FBI prevented the DOD employees from notifying the FBI that we have identified a cell of real-ass al-Qaeda in America.
They're centered around this guy, Mohammed Atta, living in Brooklyn, etc.
Now, so what their argument is now, Sheldon, is that, oh, too bad for the bureaucratic snafu there, but hell yeah for the data-mining.
See?
They could have stopped Mohammed Atta.
This is how you find the bad guys.
This is how you find the needle in the haystack.
You've got to build a haystack to search through.
And so that means that, yeah, they have to check up on you and me just to make sure that we're not part of Atta's cell.
Yeah, but what about the counter-argument that the bigger the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle?
Right.
Well, that's certainly Bamford's argument that he made on the show last week.
But this also gets into the thing about, I wonder how many false positives they got on al-Qaeda cells.
And I haven't read everything that there is about Able Danger, and I guess I should.
But, you know, like you said about people seeing patterns where there are none, you know, it's also people designing software to see patterns where there are none too.
And to me, it's just conspiracy theory.
That's really what, if you look at Gareth Porter's journalism about the night raids in Afghanistan, I'm not saying Gareth is the conspiracy theorist.
I'm saying he's reporting on the conspiracy theorists that call themselves the Joint Special Operations Command.
And they go through this thing with this guy's phone call, this guy's phone call, this guy's phone, so kill them all.
And that's all they've got.
They really have no idea who they're killing or why.
And they're just making up stuff.
They have no idea why somebody's phone number might be saved.
You know, what it might mean or why it might have been called.
But that's good enough for them.
And, you know, I can almost hear them now going, can't you see?
Wake up to the pattern, man.
This guy, this guy, this guy are all the Taliban.
You know, it's all so clear now.
Especially if it's being done by a computer algorithm because then it starts to remind us of the great movie War Games, right, where the big computer, the Whopper, was basically, you know, they wanted to take the human element out of it because of human frailty.
So they had the computer decide when to go to War Games or Soviet Union and nobody could override it.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's the whole thing.
People trust the computer, too.
You know, it inspires so much confidence that, well, you know, this.
I remember there were some pranksters who even tricked CNN into doing a report about how their Windows 95 computer had found O.J. Simpson guilty of murder.
And CNN came out and they just, they didn't ask how it worked or any kind of technical jargon or anything.
They just basically had some computer screens up with O.J.'s face on it and it said guilty.
And CNN reported this like, hey, the computer says.
And obviously computers are smarter at weighing evidences and stuff like that than us fallible organic, you know, mushy creatures, us humans.
Right.
And in the 19th century, there was this computer that apparently could beat every chess player.
And it turned out there was there was just a little guy in the cabinet underneath.
And he was really good at chess.
Because those data, often the numbers have to be, you know, fine tuned.
Right.
The human will take the numbers afterwards and say, I have a hunch that this analysis isn't quite right.
So let's just let's just tweak it a bit.
Now, there's going to be human intervention, too.
And now now you go back to human fallibility.
So we don't want to trust either one, either the cold computer or the fallible human with with mass data, because lives will be ruined.
And you're right.
We don't we won't hear about the false positives because, you know, first of all, all the secrecy.
I mean, the company telecoms, normally I'm not even allowed to say they've been, you know, subpoenaed or been ordered to turn over records.
It's all secrecy.
I had to laugh myself because I saw a quote from Obama, I guess, from yesterday with his Charlie Rose interview where he said, we believe in transparency.
That's why we set up FISA.
I mean, I my comment on Facebook was, is he auditioning to host The Daily Show?
I mean, come on.
He he insults our intelligence, you know, every day with this.
Right.
Well, you know, did you see the the profile of James Bamford in The New Yorker?
No.
Oh, it's great.
It's on my Facebook page.
You should check it out.
But one of the things that he says in there is, you know, one of the reasons that the NSA I think it was in there.
Pretty sure it's in there.
Or he says the NSA is so intent on sweeping up everything.
Part of that is because the CIA won't tell them where to look.
The CIA and the NSA, they still don't work together well.
And the CIA won't say, hey, we found out this.
And so what you need to do is look over here.
They just don't even talk to each other that way because they hate each other because they're all just a bunch of cops, which means they're the worst people in America and they hate each other as much as we hate them.
And and so, you know, just like in the lead up to 9-11, like Michael Shoyer told the story, George Tenet, in Shoyer's words, George Tenet did not have the moral courage to go to the NSA and say, give me the intercepts or I'll blast you off into the sun or whatever it is.
And so the NSA kept the intercepts and the CIA had to build their own listening station in Madagascar to listen to al-Qaeda in Yemen.
And they could only get half the conversation, not both sides of it, only the Yemen half of the conversation, not the Afghan side of the conversation, because the NSA wouldn't give it to the CIA.
So, I mean, that's these guys are the ones in charge of keeping us safe.
Thank goodness we have no real enemies in the world.
Sheldon, we'd be screwed.
Well, this is this is why, you know, traditional police work, which which ought to work fine, doesn't doesn't work right.
You get a tip about a particular person up to no good.
Then that's targeted.
You can look for that, see what that person's activities are, you know, get a court order, court warrant and then do that.
Instead, if they have all these bureaucratic, you know, jealousies that prevent that from happening, then they turn and say, well, we've got to do this, you know, vacuum up all this data on people that we have no suspicion of whatsoever.
And then other people say, well, I guess we're going to do it because we want to be safe.
You know, they they set up the conditions where they have to become intrusive to do what they could do otherwise, except they don't want to do it otherwise, because that means sharing information.
It's a pretty rotten system all around.
Right.
And, of course, all in the context of a war that America started anyway.
And all we got to do to end it is knock it off.
Well, that would go.
Yeah, that would go a long way to defusing any threat.
I mean, we need to keep the threat in perspective anyway.
Right.
It's the number of Americans killed by non-terrorists way outweighs the number of Americans killed by terrorists.
You know, I saw a thing from the ThinkProgress liberals saying more people have been killed by toddlers with guns in America since the Sandy Hook shooting, the Newtown shooting, than have died in terrorist attacks.
And that's not that doesn't include the ones killed by adults with guns.
All right.
Anyway, we've got to go.
Thanks, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
Anytime.
Bye bye.
And nobody get me wrong.
Both Sheldon and I are perfect on the gun issue, especially him.
We'll be right back.
Thomas Mountain on Africa after this.
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Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.