05/29/14 – Jacob Hornberger – The Scott Horton Show

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, there's no way to 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, but the offnow 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.
Okay guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm going to continue playing that Edward Snowden interview for as, I don't know if we'll be able to get through it all.
We've got quite a few segments to go here, so we may very well be able to get through it all.
And then I've got plenty of things to say about it at the end of that.
But for right now, I want to go to Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future of Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
Of course, as you guys know, they put out the journal, The Future of Freedom, which you can subscribe to there at their site.
And yes, they bribed me to say that, but I would have said it anyway, so it's okay.
No conflict of interest there.
Welcome back to the show, Jacob.
How are you doing?
Hey, great.
I'm doing fine.
It's great to be back.
Always an honor to be back.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And I've got to tell you, when I was watching this Snowden thing earlier, I thought of you.
And I don't know if you and I have even spoken about the NSA thing.
I've had so many interviews now, they all kind of blur together.
But I was so reminded of the kinds of things that you say about the founders and patriotism and the public spirit and all these kinds of things as I was watching him.
And I guess I'm old and cynical enough now that I don't really connect libertarianism with Americanism much anymore.
But I kind of wish I did, because it makes for great schtick.
And I know it's completely synonymous to you.
So I don't know.
Tell us, what do you think about – and believe me, I want to get to your great article here, too.
This is very important and we're going to talk about it.
Just in general, have you seen this interview with Snowden or otherwise, based on whatever else you know about him?
What do you think about Edward Snowden, Jacob?
Well, I have seen the interview, and it was extremely impressive.
I mean his presentation was just extremely impressive.
It's almost shocking that a 30-year-old man who doesn't even have a high school degree can express himself so eloquently and so clearly.
And he clearly understands the issues, especially on patriotism, that he's able to do what libertarians are able to do.
Now he's clearly no libertarian, but he's able to draw that distinction between patriotism as far as love of country, and then this false, fake form of patriotism that state issues call love of government.
And we understand as libertarians that the real genuine patriot is the one that stands with his country, and especially when his government is in the wrong, that he takes a stand against the wrongdoing of his government.
As compared to this fake form of patriotism that says you should be supporting your government right or wrong, you should never be questioning anything your government is doing, you should be deferring to authority, they're the experts, they're the ones in charge of your life.
And so it's very, very interesting to see him making that distinction, and causing Americans, hopefully, to think about that distinction, because it's vitally important.
They've done such a thorough job, I don't know how effective it is, but they've done such a thorough job of trying to impeach his character rather than discussing the substance of what he's revealed.
It seems like, in a way, it's a diversion to talk too much about who he is and why he did what he did, but on the other hand, even him being able to speak for himself like this on NBC News is hardly enough to really counteract the smearing.
Those of us who really respect him, I think, have got to keep up that argument all the time, because this nonsense about, oh look, a former KGB agent says that he's just sure that Snowden must be talking with the FSB, and this kind of crap doesn't stop coming.
That's their first priority, is not to talk about America's KGB is worse than the KGB ever was when it comes to internal surveillance on the American people, but just to try to scandalize Snowden and make him some bad guy for doing what he did means that they're our defenders.
It's not him defending us or warning us about them, it's they're the ones protecting us from him, the traitor who puts us all in danger.
So, as silly as it is, I mean, it sounds completely ridiculous, but then again, liberals and conservatives like believing ridiculous things, Jacob.
Well, but that's standard Washington policy.
I mean, it's standard national security state policy.
You can go back decades that whenever somebody discloses wrongdoing to the government, the first thing, the first reaction is, go dig up dirt on the guy so that we can smear him and destroy his credibility on a personal basis.
And that way that distracts people's attention away from the substantive issue that is being disclosed.
I mean, that's just standard tactics that they use.
So I don't think it should surprise us that this is their motus.
And so they're going after him on a personal basis.
But what's fascinating is that nothing sticks.
I mean, this guy is clearly operating out of principle because he truly believed that something was wrong here.
He's willing to sacrifice the rest of his life from not being able to come back to his country, possibly prison if they're able to capture him, possibly assassination, because clearly that's a possibility here on the part of the national security state.
And yet they try to smear him.
They say he's a Chinese spy, a Russian spy.
I'm sure they're digging into every single part of his personal life.
I mean, I've been willing to bet that the first thing they did was went through all the NSA records to see what phone calls and emails they had recorded on this guy in order to dig up dirt on him.
And so I don't think that should surprise us because that's what COINTELPRO is all about, spying on people, recording them, trying to get ways to smear them.
And then when they do stand up against the government, they come up with all the evidence.
That's why they compile a lot of this stuff on people to do this type of thing.
So they can go back on you.
Oh, now the Hornburgers really made us angry.
Let's see what we can dig up.
And you know, he talks about in that interview where Brian Williams hands him the phone.
Sorry for the spoiler, everybody.
Brian Williams hands him a cell phone and says, so if I Google the sports score, what can you know about me based on that?
And he goes on and on and on about your psychological profile and your pattern of life and everything else.
Just from one simple innocuous web search, it amounts to a total profile.
I mean, when I was a kid, there was like the mythical FBI file.
Like, boy, if you're too good at being a government critic, you might get an FBI file.
In fact, I knew a lady who had been the girlfriend of a guy who grew some weed in California.
And she had an FBI file that she had foiled that was an inch and a half thick.
And clearly had FBI agents following her to the grocery store and all around and to her friend's house and to her family and whatever.
Paying way too much attention, way out of what could be considered proportional or reasonable for being the hippie girlfriend of some guy growing pot.
And yet now they have a file that's a thousand times greater than that on each and every one of us.
They don't need to compile it and keep it in a manila folder, right?
All they got to do is type in the name Hornberger and enter.
And it compiles everything in the world they've got about you, which is beyond your imagination in the first place.
All into one place right there at a keystroke.
So talk about COINTELPRO.
The only thing stopping, if anything is stopping, a total war against individual American people who are political but outside the political class, so to speak.
It would be some dusty old law that's probably already been reinterpreted in secret, right?
Well, right.
And you bring up an interesting point.
I forget where the article I read, but it was just recently where they said that you can go back to this stuff in the Spanish-American War when the U.S. government would not permit the Philippines to gain its independence.
After it was independent from Spain, the U.S. government said, well, no, we're just going to replace the Spanish Empire.
This is now the advent of the American Empire, and you now come under our dominion and control.
And so you had this vicious war of independence against the U.S. in the Philippines.
And I read that the U.S. had 70,000 index cards on suspected subversives within the Philippine community.
Now, obviously, this is back in 1901 or so, long before computers.
But even then, they understood.
I mean, imagine 70,000 index cards, one for all these suspected subversives.
And so this is the nature of government, that they try to compile as much information on everybody as they can in order to keep the problem of dissent, criticism of government, questioning what the government's doing.
They don't want anybody questioning.
No regime does.
The Chinese regime, Putin's regime, North Korea regime, Cuba, England.
They don't want people questioning them.
What's the best way to keep that questioning from taking place?
We have information on you.
All right, we've got to stop right there, Jacob.
I'm sorry, but you're damn right about that.
It's Jacob Hornberger from FFF.org, and we'll be right back in a second.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I'm talking with Jacob Hornberger.
He's the founder and the president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
We've been talking a little bit about the background of surveillance states and Edward Snowden.
And now to the new article.
Pull out the impeachment papers.
Oh, I love it when anybody says that about any president or anybody that works for any president.
Yes, indeed.
The impeachment papers.
And this is in regards to a specific reference.
Not a general suspicion or gut feeling or outstanding question.
But a specific reason to believe, I should say, that we are going to find out very soon that there has been one hell of a COINTELPRO operation going on in the United States of America.
You want to talk a little bit more about that?
Well, we don't know that for sure yet.
But Glenn Greenwald certainly sent out some tantalizing questions and indications in that regard.
He said that he's going to be releasing a list of names this summer, that this is going to be his biggest story yet.
A list of names of American citizens who have been spied on by the NSA.
And then he asked what seemed to be rhetorical questions.
Is it have people been spied on because of their political views or because they actually are terrorists?
And then he said this is going to be a story that's going to light up the sky like fireworks or something.
And so we don't really know what he's suggesting there.
But what I'm saying in this article is that if the situation is such that President Obama and the NSA have in fact been using the NSA to target people like it was done during the COINTELPRO programs...
...where they were targeting innocent civilians with secret spy apparatuses and stuff...
...that if that's a repeat of that, then clearly that would constitute a high crime and misdemeanor under the provisions of the Constitution they call for impeachment.
And we ought to keep in mind that impeachment is just a process that the framers said exists.
That you don't have to wait until the next election if you're dissatisfied.
That if your high officials commit a high crime or misdemeanor, then it's certainly possible for the elected representatives to put them on trial and if convicted, remove them from office.
It's not a criminal offense.
It's just, hey, you no longer serve in this position.
So time will tell.
We don't know where that is.
But what I suggest in my article is that if President Obama and the NSA have been engaged in a COINTELPRO operation, that they ought to come clean about it before Greenwald does this.
Because if they wait until afterward, it doesn't have any meaning to it.
They say, oh, okay, well, we're sorry we did it.
Well, that's no real remorse.
If you know you've done something wrong, now's the time to come clean with the American people.
So we'll just have to wait and see.
But I'm saying dust off the impeachment papers just in case.
You know, the forms that they use and so forth.
Yeah, well I sure like the sound of that and it's good to get out front on this.
I support the impeachment of the entire presidency, but maybe that's just me.
But yeah, so here's the thing about this.
I absolutely agree with you, but at the same time, it seems to me like it's just as impeachable.
What they've done in pretending that relevant means anything, when relevant doesn't mean anything.
Or pretending that imminent means, eh, might possibly happen at some point, when that's not what imminent means.
And these kinds of things, they're breaking the law, basically.
Anybody in some private businessman, well, at least that they wanted to persecute, who tried something like that, they'd nail them to the wall.
Or anybody else, you know, for trying games like that.
And when the author of the Patriot Act says, well, that's not what relevant means in Section 215, guys.
Then they're breaking the law.
Never mind the fact that even if you got every damn lawyer in the DOJ to agree about it, it's still in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.
We've already caught them on 10 zillion counts of violating Amendment 4 that forbids them from doing this stuff.
So can't we just impeach them and remove them for that?
Absolutely.
And look at all the other law breaking.
We had the telecom scandal where the administration specifically asked the CEOs of the telecoms to break the law and sell their customers' privacy down the river.
They had to end up getting a vote from Congress to grant them immunity from prosecution, just like they did in Chile and Argentina and those other amnesty laws.
We got all the torture laws that have been violated.
So, yeah, certainly there's been a lot of law breaking.
And this is one of the things that I'm disappointed with with respect to the Snowden interview and the Snowden position is that, you know, he's clearly no libertarian.
He can't bring himself to a higher level that says a free society has no NSA at all.
He keeps talking in terms of that he's working to improve the NSA and he wants to make it a better operation and so forth.
That's just nonsense.
Well, and he even says, yeah, if the American people decide that they want it this way, then fine.
But no, not fine.
The Fourth Amendment forbids it.
The national government does not have the authority to do this ever.
I don't care if the Martians are coming.
They don't have the authority, period.
Exactly.
And you can't sell out fundamental rights even though the majority wants to do it.
That's the whole idea of the Bill of Rights.
You know, we don't put religion up to the majority vote.
Why should we put our privacy up to majority vote?
I actually like it better, though, that he's more of a statist and a conservative or a liberal or whatever the hell he is on that because it makes it more the case that he's one of them.
And yet it's still right from even that point of view that they have gone so far beyond their charter that he felt it was necessary to sacrifice his entire future and maybe his life in order to tell us the truth about it.
And that, to me, makes it even better.
It's like some right-wing Nazi like Dana Rohrabacher being pro-POT.
It makes it a lot easier for other conservatives to finally oppose the drug war because they got a little bit of right-wing cover, that sort of thing.
You know what I mean?
Oh, it gives him tremendous credibility that he's one of them, he's participating in the system, and he has this crisis of conscience, no doubt about it.
What we have to do as libertarians is take the vision of the American people to a higher level to where we don't want to reform the NSA.
We don't want to make it better, as Snowden and others want to do.
We want to get rid of it because it has no place in a free society.
This is part of the national security state apparatus.
The whole apparatus needs to go.
It came into existence as an alien form of government, a totalitarian-type form of government because supposedly to fight the Cold War.
I would question even that.
But Cold War is over, and it should have gone out of existence along with NATO and the embargo against Cuba and all this other Cold War stuff because it is a massive infringement on the freedom and privacy of the people.
And I think that's the big thing that we bring as libertarians to the table here, is raising people's vision to a higher level of here, dismantle the thing, get rid of it, abolish it, along with the rest of the national security apparatus, the foreign bases, the big standing army, the CIA.
All of these things, Scott, are antithetical to a free society, and that's the message that we libertarians bring.
Well, you know, back to the speculation about the big fireworks show coming, the crescendo or whatever, building up to in the next couple of months, I guess, Greenwald said.
Well, and I guess, I mean, the part that you quote, he asked this rhetorical question, are they targeting political critics and dissidents?
Okay, so, yeah, right?
But then, so, what is he talking about?
It sounds like, well, geez, if they're going after Occupy, and if they're going after Ron Paulians, if they're going after, well, you know, leftists and libertarians and or even right-wingers who are outside the political class and yet want to somehow participate in politics in America, which is against the rules.
If, I mean, it sounds like he's not just talking about, well, I guess, if they're doing that, then that means, it sort of implies that, you know, they must probably be going after all Muslims, too, right?
As best as they can, or all Arabs, things like that.
If they're going that far, where they're, I mean, because we know there are already stories about the military spying on anti-war groups way outside of the law on the West Coast, where they were doing, you know, protests at military bases and stuff, but still should have been the civilian authorities.
But they've been very happy to play fast and loose with the law the whole terror war long here.
And we know the way they talk, just how great of a threat that they consider, you know, even Ron Paulians, who Ron Paul's saying, you know, come on libertarians into the Republican Party and make it better and whatever, which is, you know, at least according to the story, allowable, right?
That's how the American system is supposed to work.
But, you know, I just don't know, man.
I mean, when Greenwald talks like this, it sounds to me like they really have been COINTELPRO in the hell out of all kinds of dissidents.
And then, but my fervent hope and prayer, Jacob, is that they've been spying on congressmen and senators and governors and lieutenant governors and Democrat and Republican private party leaders in the states and that kind of stuff, man.
I want to see a gigantic Madisonian intergovernmental fight, you know, about what all they've been up to there.
What do you think of the chances of that, that they've been spying on Dianne Feinstein?
I think there is a possibility, and I think there's a possibility of Ron Paul.
And you can see they have this mindset that goes from a real terrorist to all of a sudden a person questioning their policies, and they put them all in the same category.
They see them as enemies of the state.
And I think that if they've been spying on congressmen, they've been spying on people involved in politics, people in the libertarian movement, the leftist movement, I don't think there's any doubt that that's an impeachable offense.
I think it's COINTELPRO all over again.
And it will show people that reform never worked because, remember, those things were supposed to be ended with the church committee hearings and so forth.
And it will show people, get rid of your notion that you're going to reform these things.
The only solution is to get rid of them.
Well, you know, and I guess the reason I'm so excited about the possibility is because I fear that without something like that, if it's just that they're spying on us nobodies, then the free dumb act, as Marcy Wheeler calls it, is the best kind of reform we're going to get, whatever Mike Rogers wants, instead of anything real.
And there's a danger that we're going to end up, through the polls and through inaction, sort of accidentally ratify this program.
It seems like only by having just some crazy scandal about them spying on governors, potential presidential candidates and senators and things like that, only that could cause enough of an uproar within the state to really get some kind of change here.
Because I just fear we're going down the slippery slope so fast.
Without something like that, then the best we're going to have is really what Greenwald and Snowden have been saying, which is we need the nerds to make better cryptography.
And we need regular people to adopt it more and more and just make the courts and make the Congress and make the NSA obsolete by just outwitting them.
That'll be all we have left.
Yeah, that's not very much so as far as I'm concerned.
It's good.
I mean, it's advantageous.
Try to protect your own privacy.
But I say we've got to keep striving for that free society.
And that means a society in which people are free to live their lives without thinking about somebody's watching them, reading their emails, listening to their telephone calls.
Freedom is living life without thinking that government might be doing this to you.
And the only way to do that is to dismantle the agencies that have the capability to do that.
Because once you put your trust in them to quote, do the right thing, you know darn well they're going to be doing all their little secret stuff, especially if they know they can get away with it.
I mean, that's why I think you might be right that they've got files on congressmen and judges or whatever, because they never thought they'd get caught.
And when you have omnipotent power like that, you tend to do things that maybe you wouldn't have done ordinarily if you thought you might get caught at it.
Yeah.
Well, man, I sure hope that's true.
And this is why I like you so much is because you always just say like, hey, everybody, stop for a second and just accept the fact that it does not necessarily have to be this way.
They keep making all of this so damned inevitable, but it does not have to be this way.
We can be free.
And I know that there are people who think, oh, come on, a world without the National Security Agency, a world without the CIA.
But you know what happens is they hear you and they go now, but then they hear a hundred more things about the NSA and the CIA, and then they just can't take it anymore.
And they can't escape the fact of the seed that you planted in their mind that no, really, it's credibly possible to have a free society and and we'd be better off than with this massive set of departments up there hellbent on persecuting us in the name of protecting us.
And, you know, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more, but you say it so well.
And I believe in the power of your argument to win people over, even if they don't.
They can't stand to hear talk like that later on.
They'll know you're right and they'll come our way.
So thank you again for coming on the show, Jacob.
I sure appreciate my pleasure.
Always an honor and a pleasure.
Look forward to the next time.
All right, everybody, that's Jacob Hornberger, FFF.org, the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Pull out the impeachment papers.
Check out Scott Horton dot org slash speeches for some examples and email me Scott at Scott Horton dot org for more information.
See you there.
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Hey, I'll 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.