10/04/13 – Michael Boldin – The Scott Horton Show

Fact.
The new NSA data center in Utah requires 1.7 million gallons of water every single day to operate.
Billions of Fourth Amendment violations need massive computers and the water to cool them.
That water is being supplied by the state of Utah.
Fact.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution which requires your state to help the feds violate your rights.
Our message to Utah?
Turn.
It.
Off.
No water equals no NSA data center.
Visit offnow.org.
That was awesome.
The new 10th Amendment Center commercial in its new time.
That's right, the Scott Horton Show now sponsored by the 10th Amendment Center.
And here's its founder and dear leader, Michael Bolden.
Welcome to the show.
Awesome to be here, Scott.
Really happy to finally be able to sponsor the show.
Well, thanks very much, because the show sure as hell appreciates it as much as the show can possibly appreciate a thing.
And we sure as hell appreciate the show.
So we started this new campaign, as you just heard in that ad.
That's the first time I've actually heard it aired anywhere.
So I'm really excited about it over at offnow.org.
We want to find ways that we can effectively push back against the NSA instead of waiting for Congress to stop them or the NSA to decide to be good guys or the executive branch of the courts or whatever to stop them.
We want to find ways that we can actually resist them, cause them so many problems that it makes it difficult for them to pull off what they do.
And you are actually the first person I know.
I know I mentioned in an email, but I want everyone to know you were the first one that I thought of for this sponsorship as we're building our campaign to get the word out on this.
So again, very excited, and thanks for asking me to be on and to talk about it today.
Cool.
Well, hey, I'm flattered and honored and all that.
I think that's great.
And I sure do appreciate having you all.
And look, I just love the whole idea of the Tenth Amendment Center and all that you guys have accomplished.
Of course, there's just the headline from last week about Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signing a nullification of the National Defense Authorization Act.
So let's talk about that.
This is not just, you know, hey, a libertarian has an idea.
There's some real momentum to work with here.
This Tenth Amendment Center project of yours, Michael, is not no big deal.
Well, I mean, it's pretty awesome what's happening.
This bill, Assembly Bill 351, we worked relentlessly on this with a wide coalition.
This was a group of people that probably would normally hate each other, consider each other political enemies in every respect of the word.
People like 99% Coalition, Occupy Groups, CARE, Tea Party, Republican Groups, ACLU, Tenth Amendment Center, Oath Keepers, Libertarian Party, all set aside their differences.
They have regular meetings in private, conference calls, strategy sessions, and worked relentlessly for about 15 months to lobby, starting at a local level in southern and northern California, on local communities to pass resolutions supporting this action.
And then when the bill was introduced by a Republican in the Assembly, Tim Donnelly, to work to lobby, to show up at Assembly committee hearings, and on and on and on.
And it passed 71 to 1 in the Assembly, 37 to 0 in the state Senate.
I actually thought Jerry Brown was going to veto it because it was taking a stance against the federal government.
What it does is it creates a state policy that the state of California will not put any resources or participate in any way in the implementation, not only of indefinite detention under NDAA, but as the wording of the bill says, any federal law which purports to authorize indefinite detention.
So it's future-proof, and it's a very strong first step by saying, hey, we're going to say no to this, to rendering that law null and void.
And as we've seen in the past, people like Rosa Parks have proven that when you say no, you can create a movement and change the world.
Right.
Well, and especially when anybody can tell you that that's wrong.
What do you mean, the military arrest people and hold them without trial for the rest of their lives?
This is America.
Right?
I mean, who could argue with that other than Lindsey Graham or somebody?
Well, there are a few, and they like that kind of power, and they don't want people to know that they can actually do something about it.
They want us to waste all of our time calling Congress in the hope that federal employees are going to limit federal power, and that just never happens.
I think the only way that you can actually get something effective done is to resist, to say no, to use your horrible state government like here in California, which doesn't ever do really anything good, but find a way to pressure it to work with a coalition of people that might normally not be your friend and get it to do something good and to stand in between and protect a little liberty once in a while.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think historically there have been a few occasions and some pretty important things where the national government has been better on individual liberty than the state governments, and so people just tend to think of it that way, where like if a local cop kills somebody, especially maybe a racial minority or something, the idea immediately is to appeal to the national government justice department to have the civil rights division review it, something like that, rather than we're going to really ride herd on our local district attorney and make sure that if there's an indictable case of murder of one of us by one of the cops, that they are indicted and that the case is seen through.
And where it seems to me, which what the hell do I know, Michael, you tell me, but it seems to me like really people have a lot more power on that local level or even the state level than they have at the national level.
They might have got lucky here or there one time with the Miranda decision or something like that.
But for the most part, really, you'd have just rolling the dice, a way better chance of influencing your state or your local government than the national government to actually intervene to protect you.
In fact, look at what we're talking about here.
The National Security Agency, big brother himself.
Sure.
I mean, think about it.
New Mexico didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan, and it didn't run raids in Panama or wage war against Colombia for a few decades.
It hasn't been doing that, and neither has South Carolina.
There's bad stuff that happens on a state level, but I often would say that a lot of that actually, while I do believe in individual responsibility, so that local cop who killed someone, they've done a horrible moral wrong committed an atrocity.
But if you really follow the money, a lot of the problems with local police, you can actually trace back to the federal government.
DHS grant, asset forfeiture.
There's a whole organization, Institute for Justice, that follows the policing for profit, the fact that when the local police help the feds enforce things like the unconstitutional drug war, for example, they get millions and millions of dollars for playing part in that, and they don't really have to do this, and that really kind of leads into our whole project against NSA.
As the ad was saying, places like the new Utah data center, well, they really require a lot of water to operate.
There's some physical limitations.
Without being able to cool those supercomputers, those supercomputers can't stay on and store the data and do all the processing needed to spy on every human being on Earth.
Well, that water is being supplied by the state of Utah, and Utah does not have to participate in that.
This is based off the legal doctrine known as anti-commandeering, and it's a very rare thing to find the so-called legal experts all across the political spectrum, left, right, and middle, all agreeing on something.
But this is one of them.
It's the principle that the federal government cannot require state or local governments to actually carry out their laws, their regulations, their plans, whatever it may be, and it's been backed up in a ton of court cases all the way back from the 1840s where the federal government couldn't require the state to carry out federal slavery laws in the 1842 Prigg case all the way up to 2012.
There's been three modern cases.
I mean, if you want to get into that stuff, we can talk about it, but the principle is there.
They can't force you to do this, and whether it's Utah providing the water to the new NSA data center or the state of Texas, San Antonio is actually the provider of the electricity for the massive new one opening up in Texas.
Simply turn the power off, turn the water off.
Sure, the feds might find a way to do it themselves, but we know that from their own documents going back to 2006, the NSA is extremely worried about a shortage in resources.
They've put out information that said, hey, they can't continue their so-called critical mission if they don't find new resources in places like Utah and Texas.
Well, so I was going to say, but supremacy clause, but I think you're telling me that the courts already agree with you that the states have the right to stand.
You're telling me the federal courts have ruled that the states have the right to stand up against the federal government in what context?
Because obviously there are a lot of contexts where they don't, apparently.
Well, in any context at all, they don't have to participate with the federal government.
The courts never rule that the state can actually physically interpose and block the federal government from doing something like arresting a federal agent, even though I think in principle that would be, you know, that's not necessarily incorrect because these people are committing crimes, although those NSA agents, they're criminals, really.
But in every situation this has come up.
It's the 1842 Prigg case.
The Supreme Court ruled that the states didn't have to carry out federal slavery laws for the feds.
In 1992, the New York case, the city of New York did not have to enact federal waste removal regulations.
In 1997, that's the Prince case for Sheriff Mack.
The locals didn't have to carry out federal gun control measures.
And in the 2012, the civilian case, that's Obamacare.
The states did not have to implement, I think it was Medicaid expansion, even under the threat of losing federal funding.
So over and over and over, and it doesn't matter if it's someone from ThinkProgress or the Cato Institute who are both talking about this exact principle on C-SPAN, they all agree that no one has to participate.
And I think this is a great model that should be used not only against NSA and NDAA indefinite detention, but should be used against war.
I know, Scott, you and I, we've talked in interviews in the past about this defend-the-guard legislation where the state should stop handing over the National Guard troops to the federal government to invade other countries.
It should be used against the drug war and everything in between.
Right.
Well, and I actually haven't been keeping up with that well enough at all.
The real movement was up in Maine to try to really do something about that.
Were they successful, do you know?
No, and we really try to put the word out on there, but I think when you're talking about resisting military actions like this, it takes a really strong left-right coalition, and unfortunately I don't see much from the left, at least the mainstream left, opposing military action overseas in Libya and things like that.
It's hard with Democrats in power, of course.
Yeah, it's a weird thing.
Back to what you were saying before about the coalition that came together in California on the NDAA thing, you know, no offense, but I think it was a little bit overstated about these groups should hate each other.
I guess maybe the Occupy and the Tea Party might think that they should hate each other or something, but basically the groups that you all listed off were the out-groups on the left and the right, and nobody really horrible, the communists and the Nazis or anything like that, but just the people on the left and the right who I would term the good left and the right, the kind of people who can form a coalition against indefinite detention, against spying, against war, for peace and the Bill of Rights, to put it simply, with libertarianism as the real center rather than, you know, Obama-style conservative Democrats and McCain-style liberal Republicans as the center, but with people like you and me as the center, forging the coalition between the Mother Jones-ans and the World Net Dalians that like, hey, we all don't want to live in a nightmarish totalitarian future, do we?
No.
Of course not.
Come on.
We can do this.
We can realign, and that's really what you're doing is you're not just, you're actually realigning left and right, and you're realigning up and down in this country, too, and getting back to actual federalism as compared to what we call federalism now, which is nationalism.
Well, what's cool is to see how that grassroots coalition played out in the state legislature, because you don't have necessarily just the extremes or the outliers in the California Assembly and Senate, and the guy who introduced it is considered the most extreme anti-immigrant Tea Party guy.
He's what was a Minuteman guy, and a lot of the people on the left can't stand him.
They think he's a horrible guy, and then the guy who sponsored it in the Senate, Mark Leno, is the far-left guy, but it wasn't just those two guys on the extreme supposedly supporting it.
It was everyone in the middle, too.
They were making jokes like, hey, you're going to lose your job, Senator Leno, by supporting a bill by this guy Donnelly, but they all came together and recognized that, look, this kind of stuff, indefinite detention, this is kidnapping, really.
This is a crime.
It's unconstitutional.
They shouldn't be doing it, and everybody supported it except one.
I don't know who that was, though.
Well, what's funny is the Supreme Court, we actually have a history here in America.
It's not ancient.
It's only a couple hundred years, but we got some, and a lot of stuff has happened, and the courts have ruled on this before, and they said, no, everybody gets a civilian trial unless the civilian courts aren't even open for business because the war's so bad.
Otherwise, bring them before me, and I'll decide, say the judges.
Yeah, I just don't trust those guys anyway.
Well, I don't either, but I trust them a lot better than a colonel to decide, you know, no habeas corpus whatsoever.
Of course, the way it works now in Guantanamo, they get rid of habeas corpus, they go before the judge, the judge says, yeah, you make a pretty good case, okay, you're free to go, and then the military and the president still refuse to release them anyway.
Yeah, and I actually saw from Tangerine Bull, and she had written a report about the case where Judge Forrest actually ruled that it was unconstitutional, and then it was overturned in the next level of the court, but she had questioned some of the federal attorneys on this after she issued an injunction blocking indefinite detention.
She specifically asked the federal attorneys, hey, are you guys doing this in defiance of my order, my injunction?
And they refused to answer.
So that tells me that even when the courts tell them not to do something, they don't care.
I mean, just like you were saying, they don't care, they're going to do what they want.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, we kind of assume that it's been since Padilla or Al-Mahri or somebody where a U.S. person was abducted and held by the military this way or whatever, but then again, it's all secret, so we don't really know that.
No, and they don't want us to know, and that's part of why they treat us all as enemies.
That's why the NSA is spying on their enemies, everybody.
And that's why we really want to push back hard with this new campaign over at offnow.org.
There was a really interesting press release that I found that was reported on by the Baltimore Sun back in 2006, and this kind of formed the basis for our project.
And there was a point in time in 2006 where at Fort Meade, I think it is their headquarters in Maryland, they maxed out the power grid in Baltimore.
They actually put out information to the local media that said, hey, if we don't find new places for power, we're in big trouble.
As I mentioned before, they refer to it as their critical mission.
They can't continue it or expand it.
So there is a serious issue there.
They went to Texas specifically with the San Antonio data center that's opening because Texas has an independent power grid.
They went to Utah specifically because of cheap resources.
They're expanding in Colorado, in Augusta, Georgia.
In Georgia, the city of Augusta is providing the waste treatment, the sewage treatment, the water, the electricity.
It's a lot of openings.
It's a lot of places to hit them.
Yeah, think about that.
I mean, the NSA obviously needs electricity, and they're not getting it from solar yet.
So in the meantime, let's say some state legislator there in Texas for the next session introduced our model legislation, which you find over at offnow.org, nullifyNSA.com.
It's technically the same URL, but we'll figure that out later on.
Let's say someone introduces the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, which would ban the state from providing that electricity.
What's the federal government going to do?
What's the NSA going to do?
They're going to have a real problem on their hand, even if they're able to sue the state and somehow overturn all these Supreme Court decisions on anti-commandeering.
Well, this is going to cause a lot of disruptions and issues for the NSA, and I'd like to see that happen not only in Texas, but in Utah, in Georgia, in Tennessee, in Maryland, in Hawaii, Colorado, at Yakima, Washington, all over the country this stuff is happening.
But even in the areas that there aren't actual physical NSA locations, you can still get this type of legislation introduced on a state or a local level because the NSA is now funneling through the DEA's Special Operations Division.
It's called SOD.
All this warrantless information for the investigation and prosecution of day-to-day crimes, primarily drug war stuff that they shouldn't be involved in in the first place, and the local and state legislation would ban local and state law enforcement from being able to use that type of information.
Whether they follow it or not is another story, but it's at least a first step like what happened here in California against NDAA and other indefinite detention with the signing of AB 351.
It really creates momentum.
It empowers people that they can actually do something.
And again, Rosa Parks shows us they know can change things.
Man, you know, Mike, I've got to say I think that's the most important place where we have to push back is the National Security Agency funneling this information to domestic police agencies, federal and state.
And this is where, you know, this is the line, man.
This is the Rubicon.
This is where we could get way, way out of control here, where the entire NSA apparatus is turned against the American people as individuals.
No more predicates for crimes anymore.
A giant fishing expedition on every single one of us in order to haul us into criminal court.
That is what we have not been faced with yet, but that is, as you're saying, so far they're laundering it through the DEA, special operations, this and that.
But imagine if that was just wholesale, where the NSA, the state and local police, and the FBI, all the domestic police agencies, the IRS, everybody where all of their computers are integrated and the orders are going from the top down.
The camera on your highway reading your license plate is turning you into the IRS, that kind of thing.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, man, this could get really wicked really quickly.
Well, this kind of stuff is actually already happening in some limited use.
So, for example, here in Los Angeles there's a great coalition led by a guy named Hamid Khan called the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and one of the big things that they're pushing back on is suspicious activity reporting.
Basically, what you're saying, they're getting information back and forth with the FBI, DHS, and probably NSA and the DEA, and it's basically anything, anywhere.
It could be the camera on your vehicle on the highway, or if you're sitting on a bus people are supposed to report you doing something wrong with your camera that they'll take a picture and send it in.
I mean, it's crazy type stuff that is happening.
They probably do trial run here in L.A. or something and want to roll it out to the rest of the country.
But, yeah, you're right.
This is where it can go absolutely nuts if people don't resist.
And I'm not talking about resisting by making just a phone call about a bill, but eventually it's going to have to come down to people taking actions like turning the power off that it seems like a serious confrontation in order to stop these people.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Neil Postman wrote in his book Technopoly that in America it's the complete surrender of culture to technology and that any gadget that can be invented will be invented and will be implemented as soon as it's cheap enough to be implemented.
Witness, for example, the cameras everywhere where they never held a single vote.
They just put them up as soon as it was cheap enough to put them up.
That kind of thing.
But it seems to me like there's actually quite a bit of reason for hope that the kind of, you know, we sort of swing back and forth and it seems like we're swinging back toward Jeffersonianism a little bit here in American culture and a little bit of pushback and a little bit of the philosophy of liberty pushing through.
They're like, man, are we really going to give up what we believed anyway, even if it was a lie, what we believed was this great free society and move into East German style thing without a fight at all just because they can do it?
You know, but it seems, I don't know.
Anyway, I'm trying to say that I'm optimistic.
I think the Tenth Amendment Center itself is a reason to be optimistic in a way that it's, you know, they do have unlimited technology, but we also have human spirits and stuff, so it's not over yet.
Yeah, yeah, love of liberty and that coalition that came together, that really does give me hope.
It actually can bring me to tears a little bit when thinking about it because this is what our real political enemies want us to treat our neighbors like our enemies.
And when we resist that pressure, we can actually get things done.
We can move forward, and hopefully that'll be an example for people around the rest of the country.
All right, now, so talk for one minute about how people can get involved in this thing.
Offnow.org, offnow.org, offnow.org.
We're running campaigns to get legislation introduced.
We've got commitments from legislators in three states already.
We just started to introduce the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, but you can go get the model legislation, learn how this all plays out, find which corporations are partnering with the NSA, find out who maybe you should start boycotting, for example.
And, of course, financially, if you want to contribute, help us run more ads and things like that.
All those links are there on the website.
That's great.
Again, offnow.org.
And, again, for people who are just tuning in, it's Michael Bolden from the Tenth Amendment Center, nullifyNSA.com, offnow.org, and they need your help to push this thing, model legislation to get your state to push back, to push up against the national government, and they're the newest sponsor of this show.
Isn't that great news?
So please go and check out offnow.org, and thank you, Michael Bolden, for your time on the show and for your cooperation.
Awesome.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks.
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