04/22/14 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our guest on the show today is Trevor Tim from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
He sits on the board there with the likes of Glenn Greenwald, Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, holy, yeah, they do good work over there.
He also writes for the Guardian.
He's formerly, you guys know Trevor, he's formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, writes at the Guardian.
This one is called The Mentality of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Undergirds Today's Surveillance State.
One of them British newspaper written headlines there.
Welcome back to the show, Trevor.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And so I like the way, well, I like this article, and I like the way it starts out with the new movie 1971, which I haven't seen yet, but I can't wait.
And I guess people know that it was just, what, a month or six weeks ago, something like that, that the individuals, or at least some of them, who liberated the media Pennsylvania FBI papers in 1971 were revealed.
And then that led to the COINTELPRO revelations and eventually the church committee and all the rest of that.
And so there's so many important lessons to take from there.
But first of all, I guess the single most important lesson was the mendacity of J. Edgar Hoover as it was exposed in those leaks, and just what he was able to get away with, how far it was possible for the former head of the FBI to go.
Is that right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, if anybody has a chance to see the documentary 1971, I really encourage you to do so.
It's just an incredible, amazing story.
We think of J. Edgar Hoover these days as somebody who completely overstepped the bounds of the law, who was perhaps one of the most powerful men in the history of the country.
He ran the FBI for 50 years in almost complete secrecy, with no oversight.
Presidents themselves were afraid of him.
The media Pennsylvania files, when these burglars first broke into the FBI office, J. Edgar Hoover was still looked at as this stately figure in American life, beyond criticism.
And what it revealed was that the FBI had been conducting these mass surveillance programs, where they were spying and surveilling and harassing and trying to intimidate anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., African American college students across the country.
You know, the FBI's mission back then, it seemed, was to infiltrate any form of dissent in the country and disrupt it.
And they used all sorts of dirty tricks that went well beyond the law and the Constitution.
And without these burglars, we may have never found out about it.
Right.
Yeah.
And in fact, and we'll get back to the FBI and all this here in a second, but that goes to a recent article that you wrote beseeching people inside the national security state, inside the Senate, whoever, if they're able to go ahead and leak the torture report, since the government has made it so clear, executive and legislative, both that they never mean to release more than the executive summary.
And they're even going to let the CIA participate in blacking out what ought to be included or discluded from the executive summary.
Yeah, absolutely.
It just goes to show you time and time again, the American public only learn about what the government does behind closed doors.
And especially when they're engaged in wrongdoing or illegal acts.
The only way they ever find out about it is through leaks to journalists.
The same thing happened with the media, Pennsylvania burglars.
You know, they had to break the law to get this information to journalists for the American public to find out.
Now you will not find a single person willing to criticize these burglars today.
You know, this happened 40 years ago under Richard Nixon's administration.
And yet we know they broke the law.
Yet the same people will go after the likes of Edward Snowden for leaking information about the NSA that hopefully will lead to similar types of reforms that happened in the 1970s.
So it just goes to show you how time can kind of heal all wounds in this case.
And, you know, it's just the prime example of how, you know, our democracy needs leaks to survive.
Yeah, for sure.
And, you know, you know, I've spoken with Daniel Ellsberg, your fellow board member there at the Freedom of the Press Foundation for years and years about, you know, where he would beg people on the air, try to give him a chance every interview to directly address government employees and ask them that, come on, you have to do the right thing.
You got people out there willing to die for the Karzai regime in Afghanistan.
They're brave enough for that.
They ought to be brave enough to risk a few years in the pen in order to if it comes to that, in order to tell the truth to the American people about crimes that their government is committing in their name.
It's not like, you know, we're talking about things that are legitimately debatable here.
We're talking about the torture report.
We're talking about, for example, the Afghan war logs or the Iraq war logs, the State Department cables.
The people have a right to know this stuff.
And government employees who go on and just pretend like it doesn't matter or they refuse to take the risk themselves to actually do this, you know, for the American people, they're doing the wrong thing.
They're basically what government employees would call accessories.
If it was a private citizen doing it, helping to cover up for someone else's crime, you would be an accessory after the fact, Trevor, if you were helping Clapper tap my phone without a warrant, right?
And so, you know, it seems to me when they make it so clear that, no, we're never going to release the 6300 page report, then one of them, with or without authorization, has to.
And they all have, in fact, they can go right to your website and upload it in safety and anonymity.
They're real encrypted anonymity there.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, well, so we run this software program called SecureDrop, which is basically a whistleblower submission system, much like what Wikileaks pioneered five years ago, where you can upload documents in a much more safe and secure manner than, you know, getting documents to somebody through email or even through the physical mail.
And we don't actually operate it ourselves on our website, but there are half a dozen news organizations which we have installed it at, including The Intercept, because Greenwald's new publication, ProPublica, Forbes, The New Yorker.
And, you know, we are very encouraging of Wikileaks, because as you just said, you know, this stuff often just does not see the light of day without it.
You know, the government naturally recoils when people demand that they release information showing that they have engaged in wrongdoing.
So it's like pulling teeth, getting that to them to release it officially.
And so we have to, unfortunately, get it through these unofficial channels, and that now requires a very brave and courageous person to put their job and life on the line to get the American public this information, much like Edward Snowden did, because as we've seen, the government will go to extreme lengths to plug leaks.
You know, just this week, there was this crazy policy that was implemented by the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.
He said that any intelligence employee, which involves like 17 agencies and who knows how many tens of thousands of people, they are not allowed to talk to reporters, even about unclassified information related to their job.
So you could talk to, if you're one of these employees, you could talk to your neighbor about what you do in your job in unclassified settings, but if your neighbor is a reporter, you are then banned from doing so, and you could potentially be fired or lose your security clearance for doing so.
And this is just going to hurt the American public in so many ways when it comes to learning about what their government is doing.
But oftentimes, these employees, they're filling in the gaps of information, you know, being much more truthful than the official line on who knows how many subjects.
And it just goes to show you how much we need people to step forward and be brave and be courageous to get us this type of information when it's going to be available to us less and less.
Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?
These are the people who say for any individual citizen to want to maintain their privacy is basically suspicious, that if you don't have anything to hide, then what are you so worried about?
And yet, boy, are they just wearing their guilt all over their sleeve when it comes to their secrecy, when they're supposed to be our servants and accountable to us and to the laws passed by our democratic representatives and all this who we that they teach us in junior high.
And yet, they, you know, they will go to the most ridiculous lengths, actually, I think is the only way to describe that.
I mean, I don't know.
I can't imagine Trevor that that'll last that can't last not in America, where we're the rule like that.
But then again, I can't really imagine them revoking it either.
So I don't know.
It's kind of a conundrum we're in where, you know, the government wants to hold on to information as tightly as possible.
But technology and people's mindset have really changed the point where people demand transparency and technology makes it easier.
And so hopefully, the government will learn eventually, I mean, it hasn't yet, but that they are going to need to be transparent, because they're going to get transparency either way.
Yep.
All right.
Now, back to your article here about the mentality of J. Edgar Hoover, not just the mentality, but his agency to their role in this, I've thought over the last almost a year now, since the Snowden revelations came out that the FBI agents, you know, they must be kind of either snickering to each other, or maybe kind of nervously laughing that the NSA is getting all this attention.
Because hey, that's where Snowden was a contractor, he didn't get the goods on the FBI.
But they're the MIT there.
They are the mirror image of the National Security Agency when it comes to spying on Americans.
And I've been thinking about this for the last nine months, I've been picturing an FBI spook with his trench coat, with his hands in his pockets, whistling like nothing to see here kind of thing.
Everybody just keep on.
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm just over here, you know, tricking people into doing terrorist attacks.
You know, pay no mind to me.
But they've got a hell of a lot of power when it comes to scooping up our data, don't they?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, they, I've imagined the same scenario over and over again, the last nine months, you know, the NSA gets all the attention.
I mean, rightly, the NSA has been doing some absolutely incredible types of surveillance, not just the Americans, but not just the American public, but the rest of the world.
But it's the FBI that really is the agency that will affect American civil liberties when it comes down to it.
The FBI has many more powers to look into Americans than the NSA ever will, despite what the NSA can do now.
And you know, we always forget that when you look at the court orders that Edward Snowden released, it's not just the NSA that's named, it's also the FBI.
The FBI is doing the NSA's dirty work.
So whenever you hear about the NSA colluding with a company, whether it's a tech company or a telecommunications company, and this company says, No, actually, we didn't we didn't do we didn't give anything to the NSA.
That's because they actually gave it to the FBI.
The FBI acts as the NSA's go between to all these all these American companies.
So these American companies can have plausible deniability when reporters come to them and ask them what their relationship with the NSA is.
And so you know, the FBI is doing just as much as the NSA does.
But they're actually doing more because they have more power.
You know, they have they're the ones that have the power to wiretap people in the United States.
They're the ones that are asking for a new wiretapping law that will give them a backdoor into all of our internet service providers like Google and Facebook.
They're the ones that are asking judges for more authority to actually hack people to get information from them.
And they're the ones that have continually showed that there is this culture of abuse going on in the system.
You know, people like to point out that the NSA has not been found to have systematically abused the power.
So the NSA has had national security letters for, you know, over a dozen years now.
And there has been government report after government report, saying they have been systematically abusing these national security lawyers to get all sorts of information on people they never should have gotten.
And the problems are never fixed.
You know, these reports came out in three straight years, like 2008, 2009, 2010.
And it's just amazing that they're given this, this oversight, free power, and they can continue to abuse them and not face any repercussions for it.
Right?
Well, and of course, you know, it's such a red herring, as you're well aware, I know.
It's such a red herring of them to say that, oh, well, you know, we have a couple of instances of abuse of the NSA, even just as far as that goes, where, okay, one guy spied on his girlfriend twice, or however they want to characterize it, the entire thing is illegal.
And I don't care what Congress says.
It's the Fourth Amendment that says it's illegal.
And in fact, the Congress, the guy that wrote the Patriot Act says that they're basically just lying about what section 215 says, section 215 does not say that you can do that.
And you're in violation of law by pretending that it does and doing it anyway, these general warrants.
And so these specific instances of abuse are beside the point.
Barack Obama is just as guilty of violating the Fourth Amendment as George Bush.
Yeah, I mean, I shouldn't, you know, when I said that about NSA, I shouldn't, I should definitely say that I don't believe that the NSA has an abuse of powers.
Its power itself is definitely an abuse, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And no, I'm sorry, because I wasn't trying to correct you.
I just wanted to point that out about how they say that.
It's an excellent point.
Sure.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, this whole thing, in fact, this is what I want to ask you, too, is the national security letter, that means a cop writes himself a warrant and goes and serves it, does whatever he wants, as long as he can call it a business record or whatever it is.
But then I wonder, well, wait a minute.
I'm not sure the numbers of all the different sections that do this, that and the other thing.
Would that be the same business record section, section 215?
And so then does that mean that there's such a thing as a general national security letter where the FBI can just go, FISA court or not or whatever, they can just go and do mass collection just like the NSA of many, many people based on one NSL?
Well, that's the problem.
You know, we don't really know the full scope of what they're doing with section 215.
You know, we do know that with national security letters, before they have tried this, you know, there was a situation in 2006, 2007, where they basically took one national security letter and got thousands of people's hotel records in Las Vegas.
And, you know, they could be using section 215 as essentially a super national security letter.
It's entirely possible, unfortunately, and many things are possible beyond what is in the plain language of the statute, as we've learned over the past year.
And that's why it's so important that Congress clarify what's going on with this law, because it's clear that the NSA and the FBI think they can just go behind closed doors and do whatever they want with it, no matter what it says.
And, you know, that's a real problem, not just for people's privacy, but for democracy, given the fact that we're supposed to be a country that passes public laws based on public opinion, whereas in this situation, it's been the complete opposite.
There's so much more going on here, too.
Let me make sure I've given you a chance to talk about the FBI's role in the spying as much as possible, as much as you need here, too, before.
I mean, it's in your article, so it's not too far afield, but there's so much going on about biometric surveillance.
And I don't know if you saw the thing in The Atlantic about the Gorgon Stare over Compton, California, and all these kinds of things that I want to get into with you here, also.
Yeah, I mean, the FBI just has so many tools in its tool belt now.
You know, there was a Supreme Court case called U.S. v.
Jones that got decided two years ago, which said the FBI couldn't attach a GPS tracker to somebody's car without a warrant.
So what they've done since then is basically make all their surveillance secret.
They won't release anything via Freedom of Information Act, and they have all sorts of tools, like drones, that they've been using.
They won't tell us how many they're using for surveillance.
The EFF just released this new information that they received, saying the FBI has this new next-generation facial recognition program that will have as many as 52 million photographs in it next year, which includes millions of people who have never committed a crime.
You know, we've seen them use what are called stingray devices, which are basically fake cell phone towers, which will suck up, you know, thousands of people's cell phone activity within a given area, and will be able to pinpoint you inside your home, potentially.
They've been giving those out to the local cops, too, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
This isn't just the FBI.
These are local cops are getting grants for this all over the country, and they're using them in secrecy, you know, sometimes not even telling judges what they're doing.
And judges are obviously getting angry at this, because they're just completely keeping everything secret so that they can resist oversight, which is, again, the pattern that we've seen come back again and again.
They're basically taking the NSA's tactics of doing all this stuff in secret and applying it domestically, and, you know, the people who are really going to lose are the ordinary law-abiding citizens, whose civil liberties get violated while the government goes on these phishing expeditions with, you know, everybody's picture, a drone flying overhead, a stingray sucking up everybody's information, or the FBI trying to get the encryption keys from an email service like LavaBit that could expose everybody to surveillance.
And it's really high time the FBI get reined in, just as the NSA hopefully will be soon.
Yeah, I'll tell you what, man.
It's funny, you know, there's this piece in Tom Dispatch today by Todd Miller about the border security state, which I'm sure you're well aware it's what the ACLU calls the Constitution Free Zone is now 100 miles, which is two-thirds of the American people are within 100 miles of either the sea or Canada or Mexico.
And within those regions, the Border Patrol Police have, you know, that much more leeway to violate people's rights and including with electronic surveillance and all this kind of stuff.
But at the core of his essay is an electronics expo, a border security gadget expo.
And the point of that, at least I'm trying to make, is not so much about the corruption of it, but just sort of the dirty snowball rolling downhill kind of thing, where there's just no talking businessmen out of this market with, if the U.S. government is clamping down, in this case, on the border like this, then any gadget you can think of to help hunt and track and trap Mexicans, you could get a government contract.
You know, you should get some investors and you should work on this.
And there's no morality to it.
There's no national interest to it, where it's just a businessman saying, well, I've got a gadget that'll do facial recognition.
I've got a gadget that will, you know, serve as an electronic fence and with my fancy sensors and this and that.
And it's just that the border homeland security state, just like the national security state and the rest of it's just there with its own industrial complex, its own built-in set of conflicts of interest, its own unions full of employees who want their overtime pay, and all these things.
And it's just almost to imagine our old culture and our old bill of rights being able to stop it now.
It's just, it's going so fast.
There's so many people who mean well, who are just, they get up in the morning, they do their work, which is going to the expo to try to sell their Lockheed products to Uncle Sam.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the border issues about civil liberties are incredibly serious.
Those are some that often lie under the radar.
The fact that you can be stopped and the Fourth Amendment doesn't seem to apply when you're going through airports is, you know, a huge problem for a lot of people, especially people of Muslim descent who are stopped all the time in airports, detained for hours despite being accused of no wrongdoing or having absolutely no evidence of wrongdoing.
You know, there was a great on the media segment about this a few weeks ago where they dedicated their whole program to stories of people who have had this happen to them.
And, you know, unfortunately, there probably won't be any change unless people really start contacting their member of Congress or forcing their member of Congress out of office who support these policies and we can get new policies in place so that American civil liberties are protected both inside the country and on the borders.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's the thing is, ultimately, there are 300 million of us.
And there's only so many who either work for the Homeland Security State or an associated company or have any direct interest in this.
And virtually all the rest of us are their victims.
And so when it comes down to numbers and political power, if we can get our priorities straight, free people ought to be able to win on this and be able to succeed in pushing back, you know, at least the worst of this stuff, at least for a time.
You know, I shouldn't be I shouldn't push hopelessness on people.
I don't mean to, Trevor, but I am scared.
I mean, honestly, you know, did you see the new Robocop movie?
It's terrible.
It's so bad.
And they took all of the great satire and humor and and dystopianism and everything out of it.
And yet they have the they show you what total information aware total information awareness on a city level, at least, can look like in practice.
You know, basically, every video camera is tied into the central database to all the biometric data, to all of the other databases that show whose telephones have ever called each other.
And so who is associated with each other in any of these ways?
And they're showing it's only barely in the future kind of thing as far as the software and the computer power to really be able to do it that well.
And then it's just like I always joked is coming true.
Did you see in the news where they're going to the IRS is already buying the license plate data?
The IRS is getting tied in to this total information awareness down to your neighborhood enforcement level, where sooner or later, if we don't do something to turn it around, you literally have that motorcycle cop pulling you over for being behind on your federal taxes.
You know, it's becoming like that.
And that's going to be.
And again, you know, it's just I don't even mean to make it sound so purposeful, because, you know, again, I think it's just kind of it's like a white lie.
It's just the conflict of interest.
The basic the dirty snowball rolling downhill.
So many people's livelihoods depend on continuing to make it more and more and more this way.
And they're the people who have most of the power and authority in the first place.
And so, so far, they seem to be getting their way.
It's gotten a lot further than I think some of us ever thought it would, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, but I think, fortunately, we are in a unique moment here where we actually have a chance to really create some major change and get us back to the First and Fourth Amendment principles that so many people hold dear, you know, given the fact that Edward Stone has made surveillance a national issue and has really forced a lot of members of Congress on the record about this.
And you know, there's an election coming up in a few months.
And people are going to have the option or ability to make this an election issue.
And if they can do that, then we have a real chance to force a little change here.
Right.
Yeah, I think this window of time is really important as long as these revelations continue to be published.
This is our chance to really make a change.
And you're doing such great work along these lines.
I really appreciate it.
And I really appreciate your time on the show as always, Trevor.
Thanks.
It's always fun.
And sorry for keeping you over here.
We got to go, everybody.
That's Trevor Tim.
He's at theguardian.com and at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Bye.
Hey, y'all.
Sky here.
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Phone records, financial and location data, prism, tempora, x-key score, boundless informant.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now, here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The off now project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place in state after state.
I've lost count more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
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