02/19/14 – Kade Crockford – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
What a strange top of the hour break that was.
Alright, so our next guest on the show today is Cade Crawford.
She keeps this blog PrivacySOS.org.
PrivacySOS.org.
And you can follow her on Twitter all day, every day, at 1Cade.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
I'm pretty good, how are you?
I'm doing great.
I'm sorry, I meant to say also you are the Director of the Program for Technology and Liberty at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
So that's pretty good.
What exactly is that, by the way?
Well, basically that's a fancy way of saying I fight government surveillance for a living.
And the project, you know, we don't want to come off as techno-phobes, basically.
Obviously I use technology every day to get the word out, to organize.
So the technology for liberty construct is basically to say, you know, we need to ensure that technology works for us and not against us.
Right.
And now do you focus mostly on propaganda or you're a lawyer and you sue all day too, or what?
I'm not a lawyer.
I work with a really great team of lawyers.
I actually have a really sweet gig because I work with lobbyists, I work with lawyers, but I am neither a lobbyist nor a lawyer.
So I do a lot of research and writing and public speaking and talking to the press and sort of, you know, can stick lawyers and lobbyists on problems, basically, which is really fun.
Good, good.
Yeah, I mean, that's what we need.
I'll tell you, I learned this lesson watching 2020 when I was seven or something.
Boy, you have to have people who get up in the morning and their job all day is suing the government to hold them to account for these kinds of things, because if they don't do it, it doesn't get done.
And there's story after story of that one individual lawyer that did the work, that filed the suit, that made the difference in this minor case and that major one.
And so that kind of work has got to be done.
So that's why I've always been a fan of the ACLU, because anybody deserves to be sued.
It's the U.S. government.
Yeah, and just in case your listeners haven't heard, we actually just won something yesterday in court, which is always satisfying, because typically we lose a lot in the surveillance world.
The highest court in Massachusetts yesterday, the Supreme Judicial Court, ruled that cops need to get a warrant to track your phone location over a two-week period.
So that's exciting.
A little bit more privacy than we had yesterday.
Oh, good.
Now, it doesn't say you don't need a warrant until the 14th day or anything, does it?
Well, so this is the thing.
The case in question dealt with the cops tracking someone's cell site location information for two weeks without a warrant, and so the justices ruled on that two-week period.
They also, though, suggested that any kind of location tracking through someone's cell phone might demand a warrant.
But as it stands, the law now says that if they want to get two weeks' worth of information, they need to get a warrant.
That's why the legislature needs to step in and fill in the details.
We think that even one piece of data should require a warrant.
Yeah, of course.
Well, that's what the Bill of Rights of Massachusetts says, right?
Yeah, well, actually, interestingly enough, this decision pertains to our state constitution, not the federal constitution.
The judges said, you know, under Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which is the equivalent of our state constitution, that, yeah, we have a right to privacy and not to be tracked by the government over a long period of time through our cell phones.
So, yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
This is playing out in courts nationwide where courts are finding that their state constitutions might actually be more protective than what the Supreme Court has said the federal constitution grants us.
Well, most of them are written that way, where the federal Bill of Rights is, at least the way it's written, it's a list of restrictions against what they're allowed to do.
I know the Texas Bill of Rights is a list of mandates that the state of Texas must protect your right of free speech, your right of free association, your right to bear arms, your right to a speedy trial, et cetera, like that.
Yeah, the state constitutions are all pretty different.
I mean, here in Massachusetts, ours tacks pretty closely to the federal constitution, in part because they were written around the same time, and, in fact, some of the same people were involved in writing them.
In fact, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is actually based off of the Fourteenth Amendment to our state constitution here in Massachusetts.
They were both written by John Adams.
Well, there you go.
Chicken-egg thing solved there.
That's interesting.
So then that ought to be able to be cited, at least in Massachusetts, on cases of other GPS tracking devices of any kind or any of that sort of stuff, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's certainly what we're going to argue.
And, look, this is how the law works.
So the legislature creates statutes.
Then the police and law enforcement do what they want out in the field, depending on how prosecutors interpret those statutes.
And then organizations like the ACLU paint in the butts to the government, come along and say, wait a second, what you've done here violates either the state constitution, the federal constitution, or actually a statute.
And we ask a judge to say, look, is this a legitimate exercise of state power?
In this case, the judge said no.
The issues that we're dealing with now, though, are incredibly complicated, because in the vast majority of cases, statutes don't actually provide any protection for us with these new surveillance technologies, with the new kinds of communications technologies we use.
And that's part of the reason why courts are the ones making these laws, because state legislatures, for the most part, and certainly the federal government, are not stepping up to the plate to pass new privacy protections that take into account the ways that we actually communicate today and the ways in which the government spies on us.
Right.
Well, and of course we know from all the Snowden documents that, you know, just like the local cops you refer to there who go and do what they want, unless maybe they get reined in kind of after the fact, the NSA, they don't care about the law.
They're blatantly breaking the law.
They cite Section 215, but they might as well be citing Section whatever they want, because it's not in there to say that they can do what they're doing.
That's absolutely right.
And, you know, that's part of the reason why it's so critical for us to have whistleblowers.
I mean, you know, we might never have known the extent to which the NSA was violating everybody's privacy, violating the law, had Edward Snowden not blown the whistle.
So, you know, to those people who say that the system works perfectly well, just fine, and that people like Snowden are traitors for telling the public about what's really going on behind closed doors, I think that the fact is that they would rather those government agencies continue to break the law and lie to the public than have to face the music about that stuff.
Well, and after all, I mean, it's so easy to imagine, you know, a near term future where crisis A, B and C happens, right?
I don't know, a Lindbergh baby goes missing and then another terrorist attack.
And all of a sudden, all these powers that have been amassed in secret on the national level all just become shared with the state and local police, where the entire intelligence apparatus is turned against the American people full scale.
And our local cops, you know, basically through their fusion centers or some new apparatus, basically simply become part of one giant national police force.
And the Bill of Rights will be gone forever.
I mean, it really, you don't have to be into science fiction or the worst doomsayer to just figure.
I mean, they're the ones who made that color-coded thing that said, if we ever get to red again, you can just forget it.
The Bill of Rights will be gone forever then.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the threat is very real that these national surveillance dragnets are going to trickle down to the state and local level.
But there's also another threat which I think has gone largely unnoticed by pretty much everybody in the country but I talk about quite a bit, which is that the federal government over the past 13 years has been funding to the tune of billions of dollars a massive expansion of surveillance technology acquisition at the state and local level.
And what this does is create basically an army of data collectors who essentially work in service of the federal government.
It's not simply that the NSA's data is going to trickle down to your local keystone cops.
It's also that those cops are collecting license plate reader data, fingerprint information, biometric data, you know, information from surveillance cameras which are all over cities, information from fare cards on public transit systems, and all of that data which is collected by state and local governments is going to be sucked up by the federal intelligence apparatus.
So it's actually working in both ways.
You know, if you think about it, the NSA has how many employees?
I don't know, 30,000 employees.
There are something like 30,000 FBI agents across the country.
That's not that many people.
There are a million cops, right?
So actually the cops are the ones who can serve the federal government in the sense of acting as the feds' eyes and ears on the ground in our communities.
You know, the FBI and the NSA, even if they have, you know, a couple informants and protest movements or whatever, they don't have the kind of reach that police departments do nationwide until I'm actually quite concerned about the opposite trend as well.
All right.
Yeah, well, we've already seen it happening in both directions, of course, too.
Hold it right there.
It's Cade Crockford from PrivacySOS.org and the ACLU of Massachusetts.
We're talking about the lawless surveillance state in America.
Be right back.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Trita Parsi's coming up in a minute to talk about the Iran talks.
Making progress.
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And the Iran talks, Trita, coming up in just a few minutes.
I'm on the line with Cade Crockford.
She keeps this great website at PrivacySOS.org.
And also you can find her on Twitter, 1Cade, the word, not the digit.
1Cade.
And she's from the ACLU of Massachusetts.
We're talking about surveillance, etc., like that.
And it turns out that I am a malicious foreign actor because last night I went to the Pirate Bay and I downloaded, well, it was pretty good for a cam, of the new RoboCop.
And it is so terrible, no one better ever see that movie.
It's just terrible.
Don't watch it.
But I'll tell you the one valuable thing in there is they show total information awareness at play, in effect, on the local level, what it would be like to have a complete London-style CCTV network across your entire city where it's all facial recognition and gait recognition and iris scans and whatever, cross-referenced with a complete database of every wanted criminal and all of their known associates and anywhere that they could possibly be and whatever.
And then, of course, you have the RoboCop who is unstoppable, who goes out and puts it all together, which they didn't really show that part.
It was a terrible movie.
Anyway, point being, they do show what it would be like to have cops, local cops in your town, with total unlimited access to everything that you do, that all of us do all day every day.
And then I think on your website you quote what I thought was very notable at the time as well, something that Edward Snowden said about the real point here isn't that they're watching all of us all the time It's that if they ever decide they don't like you 30 years from now, they have a permanent record on you that is so thorough, it's better than your own memory of your own life in every way.
So, in other words, it changes the entire meaning of what it means to be a person in this society and how your behavior is going to play out because you're obviously, unless you're really into the martyrdom thing, you're going to try to stay somewhere within the straight and narrow and not get your car pulled by these guys who know everything, or can.
Yeah, I mean that's absolutely true.
I think foolishly a lot of people don't worry about the massive collection by either private companies or the government of all sorts of private information about us, very sensitive details about our lives, that as you said, if you were to plumb through these databases, you would probably discover things about yourself that you didn't even know or that you didn't remember because we don't keep records of ourselves in the same way that the government does today.
And obviously we don't do that because who cares?
Why would we want to do that?
It's creepy and unnecessary.
And you know what?
Sometimes forgetting is important in life.
There are things that I would rather not remember that I've done and said and whatever.
But the government does not forget so easily.
Look, you know, one of the major reasons why this is such a problem is because even if, for example, your party is in power today, right, if you're a Democrat and you therefore don't care if the Obama administration is amassing huge quantities of data about you and your kids and everybody you know, what happens when Rick Van Torm is the president and starts keeping databases of everybody who's had an abortion and starts posting FBI agents outside their homes and following them around?
The fact that this information exists means that anybody down the line could use it against you in any way they want to.
Rules, look, anytime you hear anyone in government or who works for one of these private surveillance companies that are massively profiteering off of hits to our privacy, anytime you hear these people say, look, what we need are rules about who can access this information and when, you know that they're full of it.
Because the collection and warehousing of massive quantities of data about innocent people is itself abusive.
Full stop.
It doesn't matter what kinds of protections you put in place after the fact.
You know, if the data is there, somebody's going to abuse it, whether it's a part of policy to abuse that information or whether it's a so-called rogue actor or bad apple.
You know, police officers routinely kill people and don't get punished.
So what on earth makes anyone think that there's anything, that any internal policies at police departments nationwide are going to stop police from abusing access to information that they possess about us?
I mean, it's just ludicrous.
The fact that police officers all throughout the country, it's almost impossible for them to go to jail if they kill someone.
You know, this is the most abusive you can get, essentially, taking someone's life unjustifiably.
And they're almost never punished for this.
So the notion that there would be any kind of real punishment if they get caught misusing your data, I mean, it just boggles the mind.
Right.
Yeah, no chance.
Well, and, you know, it reminds me of this conversation of something that I saw on Bill Maher, where he was interviewing Glenn Greenwald, and, you know, he didn't really give him a chance to respond.
I guess he gave him a chance to respond.
He didn't respond specifically enough on one of the things that Maher brought up.
But he brought up too many different things to answer, really, for Glenn to answer.
He didn't really let him answer the one thing, which was, it's crazy.
It's, you know, bat-ass crazy of Edward Snowden to say that, yeah, they have a map of your every association of your whole life, etc.
But I think that if he had allowed Greenwald to answer that, I'm pretty sure you're familiar with the conversation I'm talking about recently here.
Yeah.
That he would have said what Snowden was referring to was your location data of your cell phone.
Everybody's always got their cell phone.
So, in other words, it really is, if they just, you know, overlay their data with the map of the town, they know whose living room you sat in for 15 minutes four years ago, and they always will.
And they have a map of who else was in that living room too, whose car you ever rode in, or anything else like that.
And they can make out of that information, that data, whatever the hell they want.
It doesn't mean that they're right about what it all means, but it means that it's there for them to begin, you know, weaving conspiracy theories out of, for sure.
Yeah, no question.
And look, I mean, you know, a lot of people will say, well, first of all, I think it's really critical to get down to brass tacks on why this is a problem.
Information is power.
Knowledge is power.
Knowledge is power.
This is an axiom that any adult who's ever, you know, understood any basic, you know, concept about human and social interactions can understand.
If I know, if I'm in the same room with you and I know that there's a ticking time bomb and you don't, that means I'm going to live and you're going to die.
Knowledge is power, right?
I mean, at a very basic level.
And if I, you know, if I know private information about your life and you don't know that I know it, I can manipulate you.
I can control you without your knowledge.
This is a basic fact of human interactions about, you know, about society.
So, you know, at a very basic level, knowledge is power.
Now, you know, do we want to give government agencies and private surveillance contractors access to troves of data about our personal lives?
Do we want to, in other words, give them power to manipulate us and to control us?
Does that mean that they will use that information to manipulate us and control us?
Not necessarily.
You know, a lot of people who say, I have nothing to hide, I don't care, they're probably right.
The government's never actually going to use this information against them to either lock them up or to, you know, target them for some sort of specialized repression.
But what they're missing is that they don't necessarily want to live in a society in which that kind of spying is possible.
Because what that means is that you don't have the civil rights movement.
What that means is that you don't have movements that give gay people equal rights to straight people.
What that means is that you're essentially saying you don't care about people's rights to protest, to challenge the government, but you think it's perfectly acceptable for the government to be keeping tabs on dissidents, to be interfering with their political work.
What you're essentially saying is you don't mind living in an authoritarian society.
And to those people, you know, I think that what they're going to find is that as this kind of surveillance state ratchets up, and depending on who we have in office in the next 10 or 20 years, they're going to live to regret it.
All right, now let me ask you this.
You've got to be honest with me.
You really think judges are going to save us from this madness?
I mean, look how far we've already gone.
It's fair to say, isn't it, that the Bill of Rights already is a dead letter in the 21st century, and we have to come up with something else, the free people of this planet, to, you know, if we can't roll this power back, to come up with a way to protect ourselves from it or work around it?
No, I don't think judges are going to save us any more than I think Lyndon Johnson saved black people when he signed the Civil Rights Act.
I mean, you know, this is going to be something that's going to require a mass movement.
It's going to require, you know, people from all over the country, from all different walks of life, at every level of, you know, the economic spectrum, every race, color, creed, sexual identity, whatever, to say to each other, to their friends, to their families, to their communities, to their police departments, to their elected representatives, to their courts, that we're not going to put up with this anymore.
You know, social movements take time.
So, look, people who may or may not be familiar with what happened when those brave anti-war activists in the 1970s robbed an FBI office, blowing open the FBI's COINTELPRO program, this counterintelligence program that had been directed at black organizers, black people, civil rights workers, anti-war dissidents in the 1960s and 70s, when they blew open COINTELPRO in 1972, it wasn't for years until we saw the first reforms.
So, this is something that takes time.
You know, Snowden's revelations began in June.
It's been a little over six months from then, and we've already seen a bunch of changes, if not in the structure of the government, then at least in terms of public opinion about these issues.
So, I think, you know, I actually do have hope.
I don't necessarily think that this is a done deal.
You know, anything that human beings create, we can undo.
And I really don't think that there's any reason for us to roll over and accept this kind of dystopian surveillance state as a fait accompli.
Right.
Yeah, we certainly have a window of opportunity here to make the difference.
That's for sure.
And, you know, I don't know, the numbers vary depending on who you ask, but it sure seems like the stories are going to keep coming.
And it's not like a drip of, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a one-two punch.
One-two, one-two, one-two for seven months, going on eight months now of these leaks, just smashing the state on the chin.
So, it seems like, you know, we really are making progress in public opinion and even in D.C. opinion, I think, from what I can tell from here.
So, I think you're right.
I think it's working, and I think you're a big part of that.
And I thank you for that and your time on the show today, Cade.
Well, thanks for having me, Scott.
Take care.
All right, everybody, that is Cade Crockford.
She writes at PrivacySOS.org, PrivacySOS.org, and she tweets at one Cade.
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