11/02/16 – Liza Goitein – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Introducing Liza Goitein, and she is the author of this new piece for the Brennan Center.
It's a study, The New Era of Secret Law.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Liza?
I'm doing well.
Thanks very much.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important thingamajig you got here, and I apologize I didn't have time to read it all.
I tried, but things came up.
But anyway, I get it, though, I think.
I'm starting to.
So go ahead and tell us, first of all, and taking into account as you do in the article here that we're having this conversation in the United States of America, the oldest constitutional republic, so-called democracy, representative democracy, on the face of the planet Earth.
So what's secret about law in our society?
I'm so glad you asked.
The law is a lot more than I think people generally think of it as being.
I think the general concept of law is statutes that are passed by Congress, and we take for granted that those are public.
But in fact, the law is actually a lot broader than that.
We have a lot of rules and regulations that agencies have to follow.
There are a lot of legal interpretations that become a definitive part of the law that are passed by agencies, by courts.
And these things, they all have the force of law.
They're binding on agency officials.
They set standards for future conduct.
And increasingly, a lot of those are being withheld from the public on national security grounds.
And that creates a large body of secret law in this country.
And is it almost entirely national security questions that are secret law?
Well, there are many reasons why the law might be kept secret.
Sometimes the government agencies sort of pretend that it doesn't really have the force of law, that maybe it's just legal advice.
And so then they'll say, well, it's a deliberative document, so we don't have to make it public.
That's not really true, because the agencies don't treat these as deliberate documents.
They treat them as law, and that's really what they are.
But what we focused on in this report was the national security justification, which, yes, I think that's the driving force behind most of the secret law that we're seeing in this modern era.
I called the report the new era of secret law, because there have been a couple times in this country in the past that the law has not been readily available to the public.
And those were situations where the secrecy was sort of unintentional.
In the 1800s, there were problems with printing and distribution of the laws, and so there wasn't necessarily a lot of access.
But those problems were solved, and they weren't intentional concealment.
And then we saw the same thing toward the beginning of the 20th century, when agencies started issuing rules that had the force of law.
And this was new.
This was the administrative state sort of coming into being.
And the systems just weren't in place to make those public.
And again, that was fixed.
Congress came in, passed laws saying, okay, you have to make this stuff public.
So we're now in the third major era of secret law, and this one is different, because this one is intentional.
And the intent is to keep certain rules and binding legal interpretation secret from the public and the outside world for national security reasons.
And that can be an extremely broad brush that allows a very large amount of secrecy.
Right.
Okay, now, obviously, the big examples that come to mind are the torture and the spying, as you have right here at the beginning of your study in the executive summary.
But I'm curious about, I don't know, Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton era, and what sort of...
I know Bill Clinton had an extraordinary rendition program to capture al Qaeda suspects and send them off to Syria or to Egypt to be tortured to death.
I wonder whether there were secret memos and this kind of thing was already going on then before George W. Bush, or how did that work, Dina?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, what I saw from looking at some of the numbers, and we submitted a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests to get some information about secret law.
That's very hard to do, by the way, because agencies don't keep lists of the laws that they have secret.
And so there are various ways you have to try to piece this together.
But certainly if you look at presidential directives, for example, and presidential directives are a kind of order that is issued by the president, and these orders have the force of law, and they can be on extremely important issues that affect private interests.
For example, there are presidential directives that detail the procedures that need to be followed when an American is taken hostage abroad, for example.
And there's a presidential order that prohibits retaliatory actions against whistleblowers and intelligence agencies.
So, you know, these are extremely important things.
And what you see when you look back is that really every president to issue executive orders in the sort of national security era, which is sort of the post, really the post-World War II era, has kept most of them secret at the time that they were issued.
There's been some variation.
I actually was very surprised to find that the Obama administration was more secretive in terms of the initial rate of public disclosure of these presidential directives as compared to, say, George W. Bush.
But in general, for all of these administrations, the majority of these directives have been secret.
So yes, this is a problem that's been going on for a while.
And there were certainly areas where we saw spikes and where we saw changes.
And I would say one of the most interesting ones to me is that there really is such a thing as secret legislation.
And what that is, is these reports that the intelligence committees prepare that are classified, that accompany bills that they pass.
And there's language in some of these bills that incorporates this classified language by reference and gives it the status of law.
So we actually have classified statutes, and that practice has been dramatically on the rise in the last couple of Congresses.
Well, yeah, you mentioned Obama's transparency there.
And he ran for president on the theme that he was going to have the most transparent government ever.
And he really did follow up on that and live up to that when it comes to everything but national security, right?
If you want papers out of the Health and Human Services Department, no problem.
Yeah, well, you are correct up to a point.
I overstated it, right?
But he did make it easier, right?
It's not so much that.
It's that we have seen a change in recent years as a result, I would say, of Edward Snowden's disclosures.
And those disclosures have forced a really unprecedented degree of transparency, still not enough, I would say, but within the intelligence community on certain things.
And so, for example, we are seeing FISA court opinions.
Those are the opinions from the secret foreign intelligence court.
Those opinions are now routinely, when they're issued, reviewed for declassification and made public, usually in redacted form, but with enough of it unredacted that you can kind of make sense of it.
Whereas we used to never see those at all before Snowden, right?
We used to never see those at all.
But one of the things that we found, one of the questions I had is how many of the pre-Snowden opinions, significant pre-Snowden opinions, which are presumably still in force, are still secret?
I mean, we're seeing more transparency sort of in a forward-looking way, but how much of this body of secret law still exists from pre-Snowden?
And what I found was that most of the significant pre-Snowden opinions remain secret today, and that includes about 30 significant opinions.
So that's a lot of secret foreign intelligence surveillance law.
And as we learned through Snowden, foreign intelligence surveillance can affect Americans quite directly.
Absolutely.
And that was the thing was, we might have guessed, in fact, I think we knew from previous whistleblowers like Benny and just from the work of James Bamford that, yes, they pass these general warrants, the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, they pass these general warrants on all of us.
They're getting, we knew this before Snowden, 80% of landline calls, 100% of all cell phone calls and this and that kind of thing.
But we hadn't seen them yet.
And it's fun for me to just think back three and a half years when that first story hit in The Guardian, read the entire Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order here, ordering Verizon to pull the metadata on all of their customers and turn it over to the national government.
That was just absolutely huge.
I think we're a little bit desensitized to that now.
But boy, oh boy, what a scandal.
Why they're breaking the law.
It says right in the Bill of Rights.
They can't do that.
Well, and one of the things, I'm glad you named that example because that example illustrates so much of what is wrong with secret law because that was authorized, that practice, the bulk collection of American phone records was authorized by a secret opinion of the FISA court.
That opinion had the force of law.
That is the interpretation of the Patriot Act that was in that opinion basically became part of the statute.
And that's how, that's sort of how court opinions work in this country.
And everything that's wrong with secret law was illustrated by that opinion.
The opinion, you know, with all due deference and respect to the judges involved, the legal reasoning, once it became public, and it took a while because initially the court didn't even put its legal, its reasoning in writing, but when it finally did, it was really criticized for being very poor quality.
Including by the author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, who wrote the thing said, I never wrote it to say that.
That's pretty definitive right there, right?
Right.
So secret law tends to be of poor quality because it doesn't get vetted.
It doesn't have input from all sides.
It also subverted the democratic process, right?
Because once it became public, it was pretty clear that that wasn't the will of the people and it wasn't the will of the lawmakers.
And the Patriot Act had been renewed repeatedly while this was going on, but as soon as the opinion was made public or as soon as the court's rulings were made public, that changed because then people could see how the law was being interpreted and they could say that's not what we meant, that's not what we intended, and then the law was changed.
It also undermined the rule of law.
As you said, this is not legal, what was being done.
The bulk collection of American phone records was not legal, right?
And so it was secret law that enabled this sort of end run around the law.
Well, and by the way, I mean, and that itself was an official federal court opinion that struck the dragnet down and said you can't do that.
Once some people were able to prove standing because of the Snowden documents and took it to court, the Fourth Amendment won.
And that's another issue that you just raised.
Before that, nobody could prove standing, nobody could get into court, and so secret law, again, it impedes checks and balances.
You can't get the court to review what the executive branch is doing if the law is secret.
You can't, Congress can't even really do its job of performing oversight because most members of Congress simply did not have access to these opinions, even though they were in theory provided, they were locked up in a SCIF, which is a secure room, and you had to have cleared staff to go in there, and basically the executive branch made it almost impossible for Congress to know what was going on.
Well, now, so I'm sorry, I'm skipping around here, but to go back to you mentioned World War II and the national security state era, it all really began with the National Security Act of 1947, which gives the press, which does a lot of things, including gives the president the authority to write things called findings that are secret orders to the CIA.
And they're secret because the theory goes that, yeah, they're going to break the law.
They work for the president.
They can break the law whenever they want to, unless I guess it's a law specifically delineating what the CIA is allowed to do, supposedly they're not supposed to break those.
But otherwise, that's why it's a secret finding anyway, is we want you to sell drugs and murder people, innocent people, entrap innocent bankers on drunk driving charges, or whatever it is, that's from the Snowden movie, or whatever it is, in order to get the government's dirty work done.
Is that any different?
That's the same kind of secret law?
Well, but what's interesting about that is that Congress later amended the National Security Act to say, you can't do that totally in secret, even if you're doing a covert operation.
And the law defines covert operations pretty narrowly.
It cannot include just routine intelligence gathering activities.
But the amended law said, if you're going to do these covert activities and you issue a finding, you have to report that to what's called the Gang of Eight, it's eight key members of Congress.
And that requirement has been honored in the breach.
I mean, that's one thing we've seen, is that sometimes the administration will instead report just to a gang of four.
There's no basis for that anywhere in the statute.
Sometimes the administration will take something that's not a covert action under the definition in the statute, that's a routine intelligence gathering exercise, and will report that only to the Gang of Eight, when it should be reported to the full intelligence committees.
So there are various ways in which secret law is perpetuated, exacerbated, and these mechanisms are really one of them.
Yeah, and the Gang of Eight, that's the House Speaker and Minority Leader, Majority Leader and Minority Leader of the Senate and the chairs and the co-chairs of the intelligence committees.
The chairs and the ranking members.
And when you say gang of four, that means none of the minority members get anything, only the Majority Leader, the Speaker.
No, no, no.
That just means the intel committees, not the leadership.
Oh, okay.
So then that's, in those cases, even the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate are frozen out, only the Majority and the Minority Leaders of the committees themselves.
That's right, and there's, and the executive branch takes the position that the members of Congress, these members, are not allowed to disclose anything they've learned to the other members.
Now there's no, again, there's no basis for that in the statute.
In fact, the statute says it is the duty of the intelligence committees to keep other members of the House informed as they believe appropriate.
But unfortunately, we've seen members of Congress really acquiesce to this invented requirement and the gangs of four, the gangs of eight, when they learn something from the executive branch in that context, their lips are sealed.
And if their lips are sealed, they can't do much about it.
There's not much that four members of Congress can do if they're not allowed to bring anybody else in on the secret.
Mm-hmm.
I'd say that they can just do like Mike Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers and just get up there on the House floor and tell everybody, because in the Constitution, I'm assuming the Constitution means anything, they're protected from arrest unless they commit an actual crime, right?
To protect them.
They're protected from arrest, but I don't blame them for being a little wary of doing that because they'll lose their committee chairs and their positions and a bunch of perks.
And their clearance.
And they'll become toxic in the body.
I mean, there really needs to be a cultural shift in order for this to change.
And there needs to be a cultural shift, well, I would say a rule shift as well.
It should be expressed in the rules that members of the gangs of four and eight can share information with other members to the extent they believe it necessary in order for Congress to do its job.
So that's really what needs to happen rather than forcing a member to take the floor and to read classified information into the record in public.
I think that that is a preferable approach would be to just make it routine that members of the intelligence committees can share with other members of Congress as necessary.
Because Congress has a constitutional role to perform, and it cannot perform that role if it doesn't have access to executive branch information.
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All right, so let's talk about David Addington and Alberto Gonzalez and George W. Bush and them for a minute here, because as you point out in the article here, in the Bush years, they basically, well, there's a few different arguments that they invoked to basically say that the president can do anything and no one can stop him because he's, well, a few different things, one of them being he's the commander in chief.
But I wonder how, you know, really how far out the Bush administration torture memos, Judge Bybee and all the John Yoo and all these guys that put these memos together.
How far out of bounds are those compared to how they were in the Clinton years, for example?
I mean, is it really did they change the role of the Office of Legal Counsel in being able to rewrite law so badly that they could break it this way or not?
That's pretty much how it works, too, in the Clinton years and Obama years, too.
That's that's it.
Well, I would say that I learned a lot about the Office of Legal Counsel in researching this memo.
I thought I knew a lot, but I now know more.
And one of the things that I learned is that the cultural dynamics within the office are extremely interesting because the office has always prided itself on neutrality and integrity and being faithful to the best interpretation of the law.
And they have a lot of institutional norms sort of in that direction.
But the reason they have those norms is because there is a tremendous amount of pressure on these Department of Justice attorneys, which is what they are, to please their clients.
And their clients are the president and the agencies that come to them for advice.
So they do they have a lot of incentives to get to yes.
And so they have these norms in there to try to control that.
But the truth of the matter is, in every administration, those pressures are there and you're going to see opinions perhaps skewing a little toward what the executive branch wants to do.
And, you know, that's that's to be expected.
This is not an independent branch of government.
It's not an independent agency, even if it's within the Department of Justice.
And so I guess that's not entirely surprising.
What changed with you and with the torture memo is that the quality of the legal reasoning became so flagrantly bad that the veneer of legal integrity just could no longer be maintained to the point that a political appointee, Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of OLC for a period of time, read these memos and said, we can't we can't have these.
They can't govern what we're doing.
They're they're that bad.
And he withdrew two of those memos and he almost precipitated a constitutional crisis over the surveillance memos because he said, well, we can't we can't do this either.
And that led to the famous bedside hospital bedside story with John Ashcroft, which I won't go into.
But anyway, and so they were they were bad to they were different.
I think there has always been a tendency for OLC to want to be helpful.
At the same time, it's trying to stay sort of straight and true.
But things took a took a real turn.
Now, is it really the case that they were the reasoning was that bad because it had to be that bad?
I mean, these memos say, hey, listen, if you murder somebody, we know that you were trying to prevent a greater harm.
And so it's OK.
So in other words, the the actual constitutional law in the United States of America does not allow any such thing.
And so they had to basically beat the law into shape in in such a ham handed manner to make it say that.
Or is it just that Bybee and you are really lousy lawyers and that maybe if they if Addington himself had just written them, that maybe they would have been tight enough that they could have stood?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think there's there is a constitutional argument to be made that torture is legal.
And I don't think there's a constitutional argument to be made that warrantless surveillance of Americans communications, Americans, international communications is legal.
Neither of those things is legal under the Constitution or the statutes that existed at the time.
So I don't I think that the best I think the memos could have been written better.
But if they reached that conclusion, I think that they would still illustrate one of the main problems with secret law, which is that it tends to be bad law.
And, you know, for all that, Jack Goldsmith withdrew those memos.
I am sorry to say that they were replaced within the Justice Department by memos that were better written that, you know, stopped short of some of the most egregious techniques of waterboarding.
For example, there was a freeze put on waterboarding, but essentially the memos that came afterwards were better written, but still allowed torture and still allowed some kinds of warrantless surveillance in certain ways.
And so I don't think I don't think that that story in any way change.
It wasn't just John, you and Jay body.
It was secret law.
Secret law has a poisonous effect on the quality of legal reasoning, on fidelity to the rule of law and on the democratic process.
Now, what about Obama's order to the Department of Justice to not prosecute any of the principles from the previous administration or any of their lawyers or even?
I mean, I don't know exactly what it said about the CIA officers, but they obviously ran a deliberate fake half investigation under John Durham was his name, where he narrowed the whole thing down to the question of two murders by CIA officers where they tortured guys to death.
And then he ended up deciding to not even go further with the preliminary investigation of that.
And it was all over.
And the whole thing was clearly scripted by Obama and Holder.
Is that secret or is there a order right there in Obama's hand or, you know, with his signature that says, look forward, not back.
And the the name of the clause where the president promises to enforce the law in good faith, that that is suspended.
Yeah, the take care clause.
Exactly.
That the that the take care clause is null and void.
And that George W. Bush and his officers are above the law.
Where can I read that?
Well, you packed a lot into that question.
So I will say that there were two categories of crimes that were committed with the torture that happened.
And one was the torture that was authorized by the Department of Justice memos, and the other was torture that went beyond what was in the Department of Justice memos.
And and what I'll say is that if you are going to confer the status of law on a document, the way that OLC opinions have been interpreted and the way that they are used, then it becomes very difficult to prosecute someone who relied on an OLC opinion.
And so the decision was made in the in the first instance not to prosecute anybody who relied on these opinions and only look to look at instances that went beyond what the opinions allowed.
This again, this is one of the problems with secret law, right?
It allows the evasion of the published law.
Right.
Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything in the is there anything in the plain old law that says, hey, as long as the government tells you to do it, you can commit any crime?
Because I don't remember reading that.
No, no.
But on the other hand, if the Department of Justice issues legal a legal opinion saying this is legal, then if that same Department of Justice turns around and prosecutes you for doing what was said to be legal in that opinion.
Yeah.
I mean, that's not such a great situation either.
Now, that's perfectly fine.
I mean, if we're talking about American guards at Japanese concentration camps or whatever, throw them in prison.
Just following orders isn't good enough to do something like that.
Well, I certainly agree with you that.
Yes, I would certainly agree to torture somebody to death, you know?
Yeah.
No, I would certainly agree with you that following orders should not be a shield against immunity.
But if you have the Department of Justice saying that the law means X and then prosecuting you on the theory that the law means Y, that's not OK either.
So neither of those outcomes is OK.
Right.
So this is why secret law is a problem.
We need to have the law open and public so it can be tested and changed if it's wrong.
And it can be challenged, like these interpretations of torture should have been challenged.
But the other issue, though, is that for the people who went beyond what the memos allowed, nobody out there in these secret prison sites was following any sorts of procedures that would enable an investigation, that would enable the collection of evidence, for example, because it was in a lawless zone.
And it is very hard to prosecute things that happen in a lawless zone where there is no sort of rule of law, there is no preservation of evidence or anything like that.
So, again, that is one of the problems with having secret prison sites, secret detention sites where people can be tortured, is that once you change your mind and say, wait a minute, I don't think that was a great idea, it becomes pretty hard to mount the evidence for a prosecution, which, you know, in this country, you have to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt.
And everyone covered their tracks.
So, you know, we dug ourselves into a fine mess with the torture memos and the policy of torture.
So we're sort of moving away from secret law and going more generally to some of the post 9-11 abuses.
But that's fine.
Well, I mean, because it's under the cover of the secret law.
I mean, that's the point, right?
I mean, there is a memo that said you can torture people to death if you want.
And we know you meant well.
And so they did.
And they got away with it.
Right.
Well, the memo actually said you can't torture people to death.
The memo said, you know, you can do X, Y and Z.
But we should not be surprised that some people took that as license to be a little more aggressive.
Well, there's one that certainly says that if they die, it's OK, because we know you were trying to prevent a greater harm from a terrorist attack.
So I don't think it said go ahead and murder them if you feel like it.
But it said, don't worry, you'll never get in trouble if you murder somebody here.
Well, there were two things.
There were general analyses of the law on torture.
And, yes, those analyses basically said you could, in theory, this in theory could happen and it might be OK for this reason.
But then there were also specific techniques that were approved.
And, you know, people were not supposed to go beyond those techniques.
OK.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that's good.
That's important to clarify there.
Yeah.
But but don't get me wrong.
Those techniques were torture.
The techniques that were approved by the Department of Justice were illegal.
And yet there was a Department of Justice memo that said these are legal.
And because that memo was secret, nobody was able or those memos.
Nobody was able to correct this digression from the actual law and from the Constitution.
All right.
So now, overall, I guess the courts pretty much defer to the executive branch and Congress on on questions of national security.
Right.
So it's really up to us to control the House and have the House repeal or put a stop to these kind of practices.
Is that it?
Yeah, I wish Congress had had more of an appetite for for reigning in the executive branch when it goes too far on these issues.
As I said before, Congress itself has been making some secret law.
So I think, you know, what I'm hoping is that the problem can become that people will become familiar enough with a problem and upset enough about the problem that there will be pressure placed on.
It's not the next president, maybe the president after that, but hopefully the next administration can make some changes.
The easiest way to solve this problem by far is through an executive order.
Legislation might be necessary, but I honestly think that it's going to be it's hard to get Congress to step into the national security fray because they are scared.
Yeah, they don't want to take responsibility.
Nope.
And so but you know, I shouldn't I should not tar them all with the same brush.
There are some brave members of Congress who I think would like to do something about this kind of problem.
And, you know, maybe they just need a little a little public support, I think, to commit some of the other members to stick their necks out a little bit, too.
Or maybe for them to for the winds to change so that it's not sticking their neck out to tell the executive branch you can't keep your laws secret.
Yeah, you know, that makes a lot of sense because we're probably a super majority of the House and the Senate are lawyers.
And at least some of them have this belief in the rule of law as opposed to just, you know, being fat and bald and powerful.
Right.
They like have an actual theory that, you know, the Constitution matters.
The rule of law matters.
The separation of powers matters.
Yeah.
And I think they get mad when they don't get to see the law when it comes up.
I mean, I think that the fact matter is often they're thinking about other things entirely and they're not focused on this.
But when it turns out that something big has happened and that that thing was justified by a secret legal interpretation that they not never got to see.
Yeah, I think they react to that.
I think they're not pleased with that circumstance.
But that has to that needs to translate into kind of standing up for their prerogatives.
It is interesting.
I mean, you said, you know, these are lawyers.
They you know, they should care about things like this.
And the truth of the matter is, nobody thinks secret law is a good idea.
And, you know, I am out in the public writing and speaking about a lot of civil liberties issues.
And I often hear, but national security, but we have to stay safe.
But I don't care about my privacy and things like that.
Secret law is one of the few issues that when I talk about it, people say that's terrible.
That's unjustified.
That can't happen in the United States of America.
Nobody has said to me, well, we kind of have to have secret law.
So, you know, that that makes me optimistic that maybe members of Congress, maybe the next administration, maybe even the courts can be emboldened to take some action on this issue.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, Jacob Hornberger from the Future Freedom Foundation is always saying, you know, listen, we can repeal everything since 1945 or where there's no reason to believe.
Just because we've had a CIA and just because we've had this massive military state and just because we've had this system where our old constitutional republic is sort of just window dressing on this massive national security state that still the national security state is the artificial thing that's been grafted onto our republic.
And there's no reason to jettison the old system of rule of law, constitutional rule of law.
It's the national security state that needs abolition.
And then we can have the USA back.
And I mean, I mean, I wasn't born until the 70s and the national security state sure had been around for a long time by then.
But but still, I see the wisdom in what he's saying.
Why is it that we, you know, supposedly have to tolerate this indefinitely?
We shouldn't have to.
I would agree with you.
I mean, I don't I think I would put it this way.
I'm all for national security.
I would like to have a secure nation.
I believe that some having some national security, you know, we need to have some authorities.
We need to have agents, you know, institutions that focus on those issues.
That's important.
Something that sticks out to me is during one of the debates, Clinton said something about, you know, 17 intelligence agencies have looked at this and concluded X.
And I was live tweeting and I can't remember who tweeted.
Why are there 17 intelligence agencies?
And I think I tweeted back and said, I don't think the moderator is going to ask that question.
But that's that's really I think there needs to be a right sizing.
I would put it that way of the national security establishment.
And I think there needs to be a smarter approach to these issues.
Blanket surveillance is not going to make us safer.
Poking holes in the Constitution is not going to make us more secure.
You know, the way to go about national security is to target our our efforts at the threat and not to sort of spread all of our surveillance and counterterrorism efforts liberally around the world and around.
You know, so that every American is having their telephone records collected and that, you know, foreigners overseas can automatically be surveilled just because they're foreigners overseas.
I mean, this doesn't make sense as a security strategy, let alone from a perspective of the Constitution or civil liberties.
Yeah.
Well, I hope that, you know, some kind of percentage of the masses of America kind of got the message in the Snowden film about that.
One of the subplots is about thin thread, basically, where we had this program that was so good at surveilling Al Qaeda guys and leaving everybody else alone or at least encrypting their data and saving it off to the side.
And isn't that.
But that was all ditch.
It was it was made in-house for free by a guy who worked there.
And I guess it was Drake's project.
Right.
And then they went ahead and went with the zillion dollar contract for the software that picks up an ocean worth of data and drowns in it and nobody can find anything.
It doesn't even work.
Liberty was keeping us safer than violating all of our rights ever could.
Yeah.
But I think, you know, you see this with people walking around with their with their smartphones.
Data is an addiction and institutions and agencies are not immune from the addiction to data.
And, you know, as intelligence agencies became able to technologically and legally to collect more and more and more and more there, I think, is a sense that that is their mission, that their mission is to collect everything.
And that's not their mission.
Their mission is to try to keep us safe.
And it turns out collecting everything doesn't keep us safe.
But I think that sort of leap has not been made.
And there's still this sense of, oh, if we can just collect a bit more, then we'll have everything we need.
And unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
So.
There you have it.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
I won't keep you any longer here, but everybody, please check out Liza Goitein's great report here.
The New Era of Secret Law.
It's at Brennan Center dot org.
Brennan Center dot org.
Thank you very much, Liza.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
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Scott Horton here.
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