11/12/15 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

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My email address is scott at scotthorton.org Alright, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hey, guess what?
For the first time in way too long, I got Marcy Wheeler on the line.
Empty Wheel is what they call her on the internet.
Emptywheel.net is the website.
It's not just her, there's a couple other guys.
Adam's really good on other legality stuff and then the other guy's really good on Iran issues.
It's a great little blog there, man.
Emptywheel.net Hi, Marcy, how are you?
It has been too long, hasn't it?
Yes, it has.
Very happy to hear your voice again.
So, tell me about this thing that I guess just came out today here on your site.
How to make peaceful protesters of America's torture school look like terrorists.
First of all, which torture school?
Because there are a couple of different ones.
It's hard to keep these straight.
I was talking about School of the Americas down in Fort Benning.
For about 20 some years, there have been people who go and protest it because Latin Americans who get trained there go on to murder priests and torture their dissidents.
So, lots of really honorable Americans want to shut the thing down.
This really has been a controversy and really protesting it is a tradition, right?
You get Martin Sheen and all these people come out every year.
They have for 20 years or something, right?
Right.
This should be a no-brainer.
Let's shut the thing down and stop exporting our bad habits.
You're a terrorist.
You are a terrorist for saying that our government school where they train terrorists should be shut down.
That's what the FBI is saying?
They opened an investigation in 2000 and they basically said, this thing won't go away, so let's investigate them.
But they opened up the investigation in counter-terrorism preparedness.
It's not a terrorism investigation like some of the codes that showed up on anti-war's FBI file, but it is related to terrorism which is something else we can go back to.
But what they did because normally what they were doing is they would just go out and they'd hang out with the local cops and the local cops would take care of it and they would hide all of these military police behind the walls so in case anything bad happened then this swarm of MPs would come out and they would take down the nuns and priests who were protesting the torture school.
But what the file shows in addition to the arrest records of a lot of people kind of increasing the punishment of the people who would deliberately get arrested as part of civil disobedience there is that recurrently they found things to invoke to say this is a potential terrorist event and kind of ratchet up the pressure.
So one of the ones I'm most interested in is in 2003 they said golly we have completely unsubstantiated rumors that anarchists from the anti-free trade protest might come to Fort Benning, Georgia and protest with these priests and nuns and other peaceniks and that was their excuse that year to kind of ratchet up the pressure.
There in 2009 and 2008 there was an investigation of a bunch of people in Minnesota and Chicago and actually one in Grand Rapids who had ties to Palestinians among others and also some socialists, some FARC people in Columbia but not terrorists and they were investigated for a long time and the group had ID'd the FBI one of the two FBI informants who had been hanging out for years with them and those informants were present in 2009 at least and that was the excuse for the FBI to be there and so it's stuff like that it's a testament to the fact that in any large grouping of people exercising their First Amendment rights, whether it's Black Lives Matter who by the way Oregon is surveilling their tweets Oregon is surveilling the tweets of people who use the hashtag Black Lives Matter and live in Oregon so they're being surveilled but when groups of them come together as we saw in Ferguson and in Baltimore the FBI finds some reason to invoke terrorism and then start flying surveillance planes overhead and so it seems like we're to the point where any time a group gets together they can say oh terrorism let's get out the informants oh terrorism let's get out the stingrays oh terrorism let's bring out the planes and so that's what happens.
The stingrays That's another one.
That's where the cops in a plane or with their own tower preempt and mimic the local cell phone towers and grab all of our information and even listen to us, right?
Right.
So now this is a very important thing like you're saying it's not just oh boo hoo they called me some name it means that they get to lower the threshold for quote unquote legitimate or lawful action against you whether it's at the protest or investigating you, maybe in trying to intimidate you and chill your speech in the first place, these kinds of things.
Yeah, although this protest has gone on so long they're really good at A. they're peaceful and the local people know they're peaceful and for the most part they get along.
I mean I think it was pretty touchy in 2003 because it became an Iraq protest 2003-2004 but they're there every year and so every year for this 10 year period they were basically going here's what goes on and here's the school we're going to use to deploy from and don't use this apartment complex anymore, use this apartment complex.
So it became kind of a process I think in 2006 or so the protesters got the 11th circuit to say they couldn't use hand wands anymore to search for weapons.
So it's an institution, it's been there forever and it's just a matter and also to the FBI's credit they did at times repeat warnings that they're not supposed to be surveilling First Amendment activities although they would stop cars and they for a while were wanding people and so on.
But again even for something that is a yearly event that has a long long history of being peaceful, it took until 2009 and I need to go back and read the FBI's investigations guidelines because in 2009 they're like well per the DIOG, per the FBI investigations guideline, it's time to shut this down and so they finally did in 2009 but it took them 10 years of an active investigation every year they came in and 10 years I mean I guess the thing that most concerns me is they would occasionally put the word out to Miami for the FTAA thing and I think pretty much everyone in the country was doing that.
But to, you know, let's call up Pittsburgh.
There was a guy in Pittsburgh who got busted for some crime and let's get all the evidence there and it's this notion that you're going to do a network analysis of these protesters or they would get there were two years where they would get an informant who would say here's a nun that you should definitely look out for because you know everyone knows nuns are dangerous.
It's that kind of thing that is just it's just really unfortunate and stupid.
Yeah well and you know when you call somebody a government agent call somebody a terrorist then you know they could go much further than this if it comes down to it and I guess you know that's the most important point of all this is the one you made about the way the government considers any organized political action that takes place outside of the two parties.
You want to participate in politics outside of the two parties.
You have so much as a protest on the street and whoa hey what are you doing trying to terrorize us into changing our policies?
Oh my god.
And you know they even it's almost like South Park or something where they convince themselves of this nonsense that a bunch of hippies and Hollywood actresses and stuff are well I don't know how much they really convince themselves.
Seems like they do a bit and if they can deploy these kind it could lead to the situation where as they already have it written in the law right Marcy that they could put us in military prison or in Guantanamo Bay or something under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and everyone since then.
Well it's a bad precedent.
You know I think that I think I'm more worried about what local cops are going to do because they're more likely to kill you sooner.
There's a lot less visibility on what they do and I mean but that's sort of the thing is that you've got this Cooties theory of policing which says if anybody has any tie to something we consider terroristic whether it's anarchists or people who work with Palestinians or what have you then the entire larger group becomes tainted.
Two and three hops and all that.
And then you get to have a law enforcement presence where you otherwise shouldn't have it.
Right.
Hang on one sec.
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Head over to MPVEngineering.com Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton's show and I'm talking with Marcy Wheeler.
She writes at EmptyWheel.net.
I hope you're reading.
And well we're talking about the FBI going out of bounds in their investigations of peaceful protesters at the School of the Americas torture school there and where we left off we were talking about you said you're more afraid of the local cops than the feds at this point because they I guess have incorporated this same federal kind of conspiracy theory by computer form of policing.
The cooties theory of policing I think you called it.
Where the computer says that this number has an association with this number blah blah.
We're talking about only data on a page.
No knowledge whatsoever by the cops about what they're looking at or what any of these relations mean except they can use their imaginations to fill in the gaps to mean whatever they want and of course they always err on the side against our rights and for their power and then I guess you were saying too that the locals are far less transparent and accountable when it comes to how they implement these kinds of procedures and rules and technologies.
Yeah I mean that's the point is when you're sharing all this information and local cops are going to be privy to it you know I don't trust the DEA at all.
I trust the FBI somewhat more only because it's got a better level of accountability but you know you've got however many different jurisdictions and lower training levels and local tensions and I think that you know so when you're giving this mandate and saying oh there's terrorists out there I think that's where it's really likely to be abused to be especially abused and this is you know if you're Muslim it's going to be abused I guarantee it.
If you are Latino and they think you have ties to the drug war it's going to be abused I guarantee you know but just generally if you're somebody who's a peace protester or somebody who you know Occupy Wall Street or what have you I just think it's it is it's in that process where things get shared with localities you know and even the big ones like NYPD is one of the worst and they were during the Occupy Wall Street protests finding one person who a Muslim who changed his name and therefore according to NYPD rules was a suspect for terrorism and then he had cooties and then the rest of Occupy Wall Street had cooties and I think that's the kind of thing that happens far too often.
And then it's nobody's fault because hey it was the computer said so it's really hard to hold anybody accountable.
You've got to connect the dots you've got to you know it's this chaneous notion where you've got to do everything you can to defend against having something happen and very little concern about what the presence of the cops does and how you know and how it changes and makes it more likely there will be violence and so on and so forth.
Yeah and again it's all data and ignorance no real knowledge and Gareth Porter has shown for years and years back in 2011 he did a award winning report about Afghanistan and this is how McChrystal and Petraeus would target all the people that they'd kill in their drone strikes and their night raids and whatever and it was all just based on this phone number was associated with this phone number was associated with this phone number and it was a total failure all they did basically was kill innocent people.
And then I guess the Snowden documents and intercept reporting later confirmed all of that.
They're more than happy to pretend that they have perfect knowledge when in fact they have the barest of information.
Well it's they haven't tested this two degrees of cooties theory.
And they haven't I mean one of my favorite not favorite it was a horrible example but there was a targeted killing in Yemen that got that it happened to have some stringers for American press outlets so therefore people who were immediately had an outlet here in the states were like this is exactly who this guy was.
Did he talk to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?
Yeah.
Was he considered a member of our community?
Yeah.
Is he the person that we would go to if we ever wanted to establish some kind of peace and get beyond war?
Absolutely.
And those are the people who get killed because those are the people who are considered the key people in the network.
If they're the ones that are the nexus between people who talk with Al-Qaeda and people who are considered upstanding citizens they're the ones who are going to look really interesting in a network analysis and so therefore they're going to be the ones who get the drone.
Great example and I bet it could go wrong a hundred other ways but that is a perfect example of how wrong it can go.
All right now I'm sorry in the last few minutes here can you talk to me a little bit about I heard that one of the courts said hey stop collecting all the Americans phone data NSA which didn't they already have to do that?
Because oh no I guess not.
But then another court said nah forget it go ahead.
So for three more weeks the old Dragnet is still operational until basically midnight November 28 to 29.
And that's when we switch from Patriot to Freedom.
Ouch!
Oh Scott don't.
That was horrible.
Yeah I guess that's what they want us to think.
And so there have been two main court decisions.
One is a circuit court the second circuit which is New York basically said this program doesn't abide by the law.
Here's what the law says you can do and you guys have gone so far beyond the law that it's just not right.
Now they ruled that last year or this year right before USA Freedom Act passed and kind of kept their hands off the constitutional question and then the ACLU came back and said could you also tell us whether it's unconstitutional?
And they said no we don't really feel like doing that.
So in that in New York it is that program is illegal although it's legal until the 29th because of the way the court decided it.
But the court hasn't decided whether it's unconstitutional or not.
In the DC district which is the lower court level, the first level of court, a judge by the name of Richard Leon way back in December of 2013 said whoa this is unconstitutional and that got appealed up to the DC circuit and they said we don't think these people have standing which is the way everything gets punted on surveillance issues.
It was kind of a dumb decision but that's what they said and they're circuit judges whether or not.
So they punted it back to Leon to say is there anything more to do with this?
And Leon said to the plaintiffs one of whom is Larry Clayman they said go get somebody who has unquestioned standing.
So go get somebody from a different phone company who works with a different phone company.
So he did that and Leon said last week for this one person, JJ Little who's a lawyer in California I enjoin I'm going to stop the dragnet.
They can no longer collect your phone records.
And the government was sort of like yeah buzz off.
I mean they were very contemptuous but the net effect is a day later they got the DC circuit to issue an emergency stay there's going to be briefing on Friday and Monday and we'll see whether JJ Little, one lawyer in California gets to have his phone records protected which the government says is going to shut down the entire dragnet and they're engaging in such bad faith at this point that I just wish judges would make fun of them but judges aren't going to make fun of them on the technical issues.
But you know it's just nonsensical.
It's what they're saying is largely nonsensical but they're saying that so as to say oh my gosh if you protect JJ Little then everyone else in the United States will go unprotected and therefore you can't make us protect JJ Little.
So that's kind of what the government is arguing.
Not all that convincingly to me but then you know I know a lot about this dragnet and these judges don't.
I wish you were the judge.
That'd be better.
All that stuff would have been struck down a long time ago.
I know and then I'd also strike down all laws with euphemistic Orwellian names like freedom and patriot as a general rule.
That should be a constitutional amendment against those.
Hey thanks Marcy very much.
You're the best.
Alright take care.
That is the great Marcy Wheeler.
She writes at EmptyWheel.net and boy she's good on all of this surveillance stuff especially.
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