05/28/14 – Nadia Kayyali – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Edited by libertarian purist Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom brings you the best of our movement.
Featuring articles by Richman, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, and many more, The Future of Freedom stands for peace and liberty and against our criminal world empire and Leviathan State.
Subscribe today, it's just $25 per year for the back pocket size print edition, $15 per year to read it online.
That's The Future of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
Peace and freedom, thank you.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And another quick bit from Barack Obama's speech this morning, well I guess earlier this afternoon at West Point, reaffirming American exceptionalism, the president said, that's why we are putting in place new restrictions on how America, that is the U.S. government, collects and uses intelligence, because we will have fewer partners and be less effective if a perception takes hold that we are conducting surveillance against ordinary citizens.
So, well, isn't that interesting?
And now, to introduce our next guest on the show, it's Nadia Khayali, I'm sorry, I should have asked how to pronounce your name correctly before bringing you on here.
Welcome to the show, Nadia, how are you doing?
I'm good, thanks for having me on.
Did I say it right?
Pretty close, pretty close, it's Khayali.
Khayali, okay, I'll put a line over the A so I remember for later.
Okay, so this great article that you have here, this is very important everybody, I hope you'll go and find this, it's at EFF.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I hope you'll go and do your part to make this viral.
It's a very important piece, how the NSA is transforming law enforcement.
And really great piece, really frightening piece here.
And what you say here is, and you're referring to some of the new, I guess, documents that have been released over the last year, but also this new trove of documents that was released to coincide with the release of Glenn Greenwald's book, which was just published a couple weeks ago there.
And then you say here, right here in paragraph one, that NSA surveillance has become a part of day-to-day law enforcement fabric, the day-to-day law enforcement fabric in the United States.
Well, how is that possible?
I thought they were just hunting for terrorists.
Well, you know, that is the common justification that we are given when the conversation turns to NSA surveillance, right?
Constantly we're told that the degree of NSA surveillance that we are being subjected to is necessary to fight terrorism.
But these new documents, as well as some other leaks, and really even just a close examination of statements of NSA officials themselves makes it clear that it is not just about counterterrorism, it's about surveillance in general.
And I think it's something that everybody really needs to think about.
All right, now, I like the way you set it up, too, that if you've been imagining the NSA as, you know, something distant with analysts looking at this metadata and whatever, it does make it seem, and I think you're right, you paint a great picture there, the false picture that everybody really does believe in, is that, well, you know, maybe they really are collecting everything, but it's not like they're looking at my stuff, right?
Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people think.
And, you know, it's understandable, we have heard so much about NSA surveillance, especially in the last year, and as you probably know, EFF has been doing this work since before these Snowden disclosures, but people have heard so much, I think it's easier to just think, well, that's something far away, something that doesn't affect me.
Right, because otherwise all the TV characters would be really concerned, and they don't seem to mind, so I guess it's all right.
That's where I learned my consensus, is the sitcom stars.
What they're concerned with, you know, is what I'm concerned with.
Well, and actually, you know what, it's stupid and silly, but I think that's actually really something, right?
If all the fictional characters on TV just couldn't believe this NSA stuff and kept talking about it all the time or whatever, that would really matter.
That would really move the American people, you know, six feet our way.
But, no, anyway.
Same thing for the Iraq War, they just never talk about it.
They just pretend it's not part of the real world that we live in, the TV world that we watch.
So, now, okay, if I'm a cop, if I'm a Texas Ranger, or I'm a Department of Public Safety here in Texas, or I'm a Travis County Sheriff or something, what access do I have to NSA data?
Well, that is actually a really good question, and it's one that I'm hoping to do more investigation into, and we'll see what sort of disclosures we're going to be seeing in the next couple of months.
But one of the things that we do know is that the NSA, there's been some court orders that have allowed the NSA to share unminimized data with different law enforcement agencies.
So we know that the NSA can share unminimized data with the FBI, with the CIA, and we also know that the NSA can share unminimized data with the National Counterterrorism Center.
So, you know, when people think of surveillance, they're thinking mostly of the NSA, maybe a little bit of the CIA and the FBI, but the fact is there's actually a huge intelligence, it's actually called the intelligence community.
It's 17 different agencies, and it turns out that there's actually a web of information sharing that allows this information eventually, potentially to be filtered down to local law enforcement.
And that's, you know, I didn't talk about it as much in this article, but a couple of months ago I wrote an article about fusion centers.
Now you mentioned, you know, Travis County Sheriff Wright, a local police officer.
Those types of law enforcement do have access to fusion centers.
That's the entire point of these fusion centers that are connecting local law enforcement with federal law enforcement.
So it is potential, and I'm not going to say that it's happening because we haven't seen the proof of that yet, but it is potential that unminimized NSA data, that's data that still has all of the personal identifying information, like your name, your social security, these things that can actually identify people, it's possible that law enforcement's getting access to that.
And that's incredibly concerning, and it's something that hasn't been talked about enough.
Well, and it's the kind of thing where there are no real protections on the state law level in any of the 50 states about how that kind of stuff can be abused once it's handed over to them from the feds, because it's all brand new stuff, right?
It's all making it up as they go along.
Well, you know, you're definitely correct that the legal protections vary incredibly from state to state, and that, you know, what happens is that it becomes this sort of jurisdictional nightmare where, you know, I'm here in California, and California is a good example.
We do have constitutional privacy protections in the California state constitution.
Here in San Francisco, we actually have—we're one of the few cities that has specific protections on intelligence gathering, the way that the San Francisco Police Department can gather intelligence information.
And yet, you know, if there is this data that is being filtered through these local federal collaborations, the fusion centers, we don't really know, you know, what laws apply and how do they apply.
And, you know, even more importantly than that, how do you enforce your rights, especially if there's not a private right of action, you know, if you can't go to court and sue the government, or if you don't even know what information is being collected, which, you know, I think obviously that's a major concern.
So you're right that it's a very confusing legal environment here when it comes to an individual like you or me trying to figure out and trying to protect our rights and our privacy.
Well, and, you know, I mean, there's just this story that came out about how the fusion center in Boston was keeping their close eye on Occupy during the plotting of the Boston Marathon attack, because that's how they got their priorities set up.
And to try to, you know, give them the benefit of the doubt, or, you know, to not be too harsh on them or the other cops in America, the truth of the matter is that there never really were more than a score of al-Qaeda guys in the country in the first place.
So they've got a whole, you know, terror war overseas, where actually al-Qaeda works for America now in Syria and Libya, but anyway, well, in Syria anyway.
But as far as here, there is no terrorism here.
The closest thing you have to terrorism might be, you know, like white supremacists plotting abortion clinic bombings and stuff like that.
But even that is so few and far between.
Somebody like Tsarnaev or Zazi or any of the very few actual terrorists who have been recruited by al-Qaeda or the Taliban to try to carry out attacks in this country have been so few.
There's basically nothing for these cops to do all day, but sit around trying to come up.
And again, I'm trying to be fair to them, like, you know, put myself in their position.
They don't really have anything else to do all day except make up broader definitions of terrorism.
So maybe if there are some left-wing groups that, well, they don't seem to want to participate in the Democratic Party.
They just want to occupy the city hall all day.
Maybe we can call that terrorism.
It's not quite blowing up the Oklahoma building or anything, but hey, it'll give our cops something to do between now and lunchtime, that kind of thing.
And so they go, and now we got to take this break.
But anyway, we'll get back to that on the other side of this break.
Talking with Nadia Khayy...
I don't have it in front of me, damn it.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here for CashIntoCoins.com.
So you want to buy some bitcoins?
CashIntoCoins.com makes it fast, easy, and safe to get bitcoins.
Just deposit the money into their account at any of the major banks they support, and then just email them a picture of the receipt and your bitcoin address, and you get your bitcoins.
Almost always the same day it clears.
In a tough, competitive new market, CashIntoCoins.com has the advantage.
A great system and great customer service to keep you coming back.
That's CashIntoCoins.com.
Just click the link in the right margin at ScottHorton.org.
Oy, finally.
All right, y'all.
Thanks for hanging on through the break.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And my apologies, Nadia, for getting your name wrong there on the way out to the break.
I'm talking with Nadia Khayyali from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF.org.
And man, they do such great work there, especially if you're one of these millionaire types or something.
Help support the EFF.
We would be absolutely doomed without them.
EFF.org.
And they don't just do journalism.
They sue the government all day for violating our rights and this kind of thing, too.
They're absolutely an indispensable organization.
And now, I'm sorry, Nadia, because I talked all the way up to that break, but I was going to try to get to a question there about whether you think that that's part of the problem here with the local police, you know, through the fusion centers and all of this, accessing all of this national government database and whatever.
It's sort of the self-licking ice cream cone, as the soldiers call it, of just a program finding a reason to exist.
And if there never were more than a couple of dozen Al-Qaeda guys in the country, then maybe we need to find some other terrorists around here.
Well, you know, I think it's certainly, as you were saying, sort of giving credit to these guys.
I think it's important to keep in mind local law enforcement, that, you know, they are, I think that they're well-intentioned, but that the fear of terrorism, it's such a visceral fear.
And having seen things like the Boston bombing, you know, I think that that sort of well-intentioned desire to keep people safe, I think it has gone far above and beyond what it really should do.
You know, we have so much information at this point that more intelligence gathering is not going to keep anybody safer.
And it has become this sort of self-perpetuating cycle.
And I think, you know, one of the really important things to keep in mind is all the federal money that goes into it.
It's not just through fusion centers.
There's also grants that are available to purchase drones, to purchase armored vehicles.
There's these urban area security initiative grants that local law enforcement can get.
And so it becomes this thing of everybody wants to get more technology.
They want to be involved.
They want to be doing something interesting.
And it's all sort of based on this initial, you know, well-founded desire to keep people safe.
So I think it's a really dangerous combination, sort of some good intentions, some money thrown in there, some excitement, you know, it's sort of sexy work to be doing, to be fighting the terrorists.
It's a really bad, really toxic combination.
And it's led to these things like focusing on Occupy, which is just ridiculous.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, terrorism has a specific definition.
I know they don't like being very specific about it, but it means, you know, an act, a terrorist act is one that is targeted against civilians in order to provoke a reaction out of the government, in order to usually to try to get them to overreact and hurt themselves by overreacting, something like this.
But anyway, it's violence directed against innocent people for a political cause.
And there just are not very many individuals.
I think there are no groups in America who advocate any such thing, except maybe some neo-Nazis or something that nobody pays any attention to.
But otherwise, you would have to be a guy like Faisal Shahzad, who was a happy American with a big house and a profession and a wife and a life, who went home to Pakistan and saw the aftermath of U.S. drone strikes on his family and home village back in Pakistan, where he was from, to come back here and want to do something.
Otherwise, line up all 300 million of us.
None of us are terrorists.
None of us.
The whole thing is a scam.
And you got every sheriff's department in America has got, like you're saying, they got a trunk full of M-16s, they got an armored personnel carrier now, they got itchy trigger fingers.
They're looking for somebody to do something.
They better find somebody doing something and call that terrorism then, since there are no al-Qaeda anywhere near here.
They're all working for Obama in Syria right now.
I certainly think the terrorist threat is overblown.
And not only that, I think there are varying opinions on how big the terrorist threat is.
I am of the opinion that it is incredibly minimal, as you are as well.
And that being said, we also have research and statements from various sources saying that actually, NSA surveillance really isn't helping very much.
We've heard this number that the bulk phone collection, that it's thwarted 54 terrorist attacks.
Well, these claims have been debunked.
There's been studies from the New America Foundation, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board issued a report saying they haven't identified a single instance where bulk collection made a difference.
We have senators saying that it's not making a difference.
It's just, you know, and I mean, we're talking about the one, we're talking about the NSA bulk surveillance of the phone records.
But if that's not making a difference, we're really not seeing a lot of examples of anything else making a huge difference either.
There's just too much data out there.
You know, I think it's really sad to see how people are just not, they're not using logic anymore.
They're just being driven by this primal fear, and it's really a problem.
And on that Frontline episode a couple of weeks ago, they said, the New York Times guys talked about their meeting in the White House where the NSA, I guess Hayden explained to them that, yeah, you know, we stopped a terrorist attack with this program.
And they said, oh, yeah, what was that?
And he said, yeah, the guy was going to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch.
And never mind the fact that that was an FBI put up entrapment job in the first place, but just the fact that anyone was ever going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a freaking blowtorch.
And then the guy, I think it's the, I forget if it was the editor of the publisher of the New York Times, said he looked at the president and George W. Bush just smiled, like smirked at him.
I know, it's ridiculous that that's the best excuse we got, but that'll be good enough for you.
And then they agreed.
Well, you know, I think that's a really important point, talking about the FBI's role in terrorist plots.
There's a study, it's a couple years old, from the Brennan Center that's looking at the different terrorist plots that supposedly the FBI has spoiled.
And I think it's something like, I don't know the exact number, but I think it's something like out of 51 attacks that they looked at, maybe two of them weren't plots that involved entrapment from the FBI.
I mean, the FBI has this huge role in, I mean, basically, you know, they're acting as, they're going in, they're going to communities, or they're recruiting informants, and they are targeting, consistently they find people with mental health issues, or people with criminal records, or people who they can sort of bribe or scare into working for them.
And they are, just like you said, they're creating the plots themselves.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle.
And then invoking them as the reason that they need to spy on you and me.
Exactly.
Exactly.
By the way, Trevor Aronson, he did the real work on this.
He wrote a book about it, and he catalogs, there's 200 and something terrorism convictions, and he says no less than 50, 5-0, of them were outright entrapment jobs.
And there are a lot of bogus terrorism cases, but 50 of them are, you know, the informant coming and saying, I'll give you $20,000 to say you love Osama into this hidden microphone, you idiot.
And then the guy says, oh yeah, I love Osama, and then he goes away for life.
They frog march him on TV, make a big orange alert out of it, that kind of thing.
And that's Trevor Aronson from, the book is called The Terror Factory, and he also wrote up a great piece about it for Mother Jones Magazine as well.
But anyway, yeah, no less than 50 of these are outright entrapment cases.
You mentioned in your article here, and could you talk a little bit about this, the Special Operations Division of the DEA and the so-called parallel construction?
Yeah, so this is one of the more concerning things that's been happening with NSA surveillance, that these tips are getting passed to the DEA, and even the IRS actually is getting intelligence tips from the DEA's secret unit.
And so when you think about the NSA, you don't think that that information would somehow be getting its way to prosecutors, but it is.
And the really concerning thing is the source is getting cloaked.
So the idea of parallel construction is that they're finding some other way to say that they got the information.
They have some secret informant that they can't reveal the source to, or something like that.
So people don't actually ever even know that the information is coming from the NSA.
Otherwise the exclusionary rule would kick in, right?
The judge would have to say this evidence can't be used because it was obtained illegally in the trial.
But they just lie.
Right.
I mean, it depends on what exactly the information is and how it was collected.
But if it was collected by the NSA, we think, obviously, since we have lawsuits against the NSA, we think that there are concerns with the constitutionality of the information.
But it is really turning the idea of being able to confront your accusers, the idea of how our criminal justice system works, it is really turning that idea on its head, and it's something that we're incredibly concerned about.
Well, you guys are doing a good fight there.
I don't know.
Well, I'm certain we'd be much worse off without you.
Thank you so much for your time on the show and for all the work that all you guys do there at EFF.
Thank you, and thanks for having me on.
Appreciate it.
It's Nadia Kayali at EFF.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Now the NSA is transforming law enforcement.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
Support CNI at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
First, I want to take a second to thank all the show's listeners, sponsors, and supporters for helping make the show what it is.
I literally couldn't do it without you.
And now I want to tell you about the newest way to help support the show.
Whenever you shop at amazon.com, stop by scotthorton.org first.
And just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page.
That way, the show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
It won't cost you an extra cent.
And it's not just books.
Amazon.com sells just about everything in the world except cars, I think.
So whatever you need, they've got it.
Just click the Amazon logo on the right side of the page at scotthorton.org or go to scotthorton.org.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government-generated bubbles pop.
Which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all his stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at wallstreetwindow.com and get real-time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help.
Follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wallstreetwindow.com.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Or maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers, or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now, and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.