02/26/13 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is Trevor Tim from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that's EFF.org.
He specializes in surveillance, free speech, and government transparency issues.
And he's the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Let's start with that.
Tell us all about the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Welcome back to the show.
Well, thanks for having me back.
Yeah, so we started the Freedom of the Press Foundation about two months ago now.
This came out of the idea that WikiLeaks, you know, about two years ago when I started releasing State Department cables, were cut off from Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to get any sort of donation money, which was 95% of their revenue, because they started publishing this classified information.
Yet, as you well know, you know, they never actually committed a crime when they did this.
Newspapers publish classified information all the time.
And so we saw this as kind of an end around the First Amendment, where a couple of congressmen were upset and decided to unofficially pressure these companies to cut them off.
So what we did was set up the Freedom of the Press Foundation to, number one, take donations to WikiLeaks or any other group this would happen to in the future.
We want to prevent this precedent from ever happening again.
And number two, we want to crowdsource other transparency journalism organizations that do good work trying to bust through the government's extreme secrecy system, because, you know, at this point, secrecy is at an all-time high.
You know, the government's classifying 92 million documents a year, and virtually the whole foreign policy and national security realm is deemed secret.
And so, you know, we have three other projects right now that we're crowdfunding for.
You can go to PressFreedomFoundation.org.
One of them is to identify every victim of every drone strike that's happened in Yemen and Pakistan.
Another is to send a reporter to Guantanamo Bay with truth out.
And then the third is to map Pentagon defense spending that's often decided upon under secret circumstances, and we never really know where the money goes.
Well, awesome.
First of all, man, that sounds like a really great project, and I'm very happy to hear that it's going well so far, but I wonder, can't they just end run you the same way they're doing PayPal, and just say, or I mean, the same way they're doing WikiLeaks, and just tell PayPal, hey, here's another one to add to your blacklist?
Well, I think at this point, the hysteria over WikiLeaks has died down, and, you know, during 2010, when they released this information, I think a lot of people were making rash decisions without actually thinking them through and actually doing the legal research that was necessary.
And now that things have calmed down, I think it's much easier for them to understand that this is actually not an illegal practice, and plus, we're not just taking donations to WikiLeaks.
We have a much broader mission, and that's transparency in government and the funding investigative journalism, and there's nothing more American than freedom of the press.
And so, you know, our standing is, you know, they wouldn't be cutting off WikiLeaks.
They would literally be cutting off the freedom of the press, and, you know, we haven't had any trouble since, and I don't think, going forward, we should have either.
Okay.
Great.
Well, that sounds really good.
And can you tell us some of the other organizations that you're involved with?
At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we're funding WikiLeaks, this go-around, so every two months, we switch out the organization.
We've kept WikiLeaks on for the second bundle, and last bundle we raised actually almost $200,000, so it was really great.
And this time around, we're funding the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, which is a great UK organization that does amazing reporting in Yemen and Pakistan on drone strikes, and we're funding their Naming the Dead project, so each of these organizations, you can fund individual projects, so you know exactly where your money's going.
That's great.
And one of the other groups is Truthout, which is great investigative reporting, and they're sending their lead investigative reporter, Jason Leopold, to Guantanamo Bay to report on all the secrecy issues going on there.
As I'm sure you've covered on your show, there's been just absolute chaos down there with secret government censors cutting off the media, and the attorney-client room has an eavesdropping bug in it, and the judge seems to have at least partially lost control of his courtroom, and so Jason's going down there, and we're funding that.
And then finally, the Center for Public Integrity, which does a lot of work with PBS Frontline and other organizations, they've been around for years now, they're doing this project where they're, number one, trying to map where every defense dollar goes, given that we have the largest defense budget in the world, and also what the decision-makers on the Armed Services Committee and the Finance Committee and everybody that decides the defense budget, where the lobbying dollars are coming from, and who's benefiting from all of these bloated projects that often go over budget, and we never really seem to know where the money ends up.
Great.
Well, those sound like all great projects, and I know, of course, Jason Leopold is a friend of the show, and Chris Wood and the others at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, they're friends of the show, too.
All these people do great work, so, yeah, I'm really excited about that.
I think that's great.
Everybody, please go check out the Freedom of the Press Foundation at pressfreedomfoundation.org.
That's the site there.
Good times.
Okay, so now let's move on to talk about drones.
Can my local sheriff have me assassinated with a drone at this point, or how far down that road are we?
Well, hopefully your local sheriff won't be trying to assassinate you with a drone, but local sheriffs across the country are now trying to acquire surveillance drones.
You know, DHS is actually now spending millions of dollars to give these smaller drones and predator drones, but still drones with huge capabilities to spy on you, to all sorts of local police departments around the country.
Here in San Francisco in the Bay Area, we're involved in a controversy right now with Alameda County, which is the county that serves Oakland and Berkeley, is now trying to acquire two surveillance drones.
They cost about $50,000 to $100,000, and they're getting them with free Department of Homeland Security money.
And what these things can do is, you know, obviously they have the high-definition cameras that can, you know, see you from very far away, but they also have infrared and heat sensors that can see through walls, you know, they can be equipped with facial recognition technology, radar, they could potentially lock onto the GPS to your cell phone and follow you around.
You know, there's technology that can be attached that can intercept your cell phone and text messages.
So there's a huge worry on the surveillance side with these drones, and unfortunately there's no rules of the road that really tell the police what they can and can't do with these.
So when the technology gets there, they could potentially follow you around as soon as you step outside of your house 24 hours, seven days a week.
And so what we're trying to do is get local government and state governments to pass privacy legislation to protect people from this unwanted surveillance.
Man, you know, it's funny, I mean, what you're talking about is absolutely impossible, and yet it's now possible, right, where they're saying the Gorgon Stare, or at least they want or they think it's, they're right within the ability to track everyone in a city at the same time, right?
Or you just need a few drones and you need the software to do the differentiation between who's who and keep track, but you don't even need really that many different cameras.
You just need the computer power and the right, you know, algorithms or whatever for choosing targets.
Right, yeah, the Gorgon Stare that you mentioned is particularly crazy.
That's a military drone, for folks who don't know, that basically, you know, is very high up in the altitude and can see an entire city at the same time that it can actually zoom in in like a dozen different instances and zoom in on individual people.
So right now, we're not talking about that type of drone in the U.S., but that's where we could be headed if we don't get privacy legislation in place right now.
So the drones that the police want to use are much smaller, probably like three or four feet in diameter, and they usually fly for about an hour at a time.
But this technology is advancing so rapidly that these little machines will be able to fly for hours or days at a time soon, too.
You know, like Lockheed Martin, for example, they have a drone called the Stalker, which weighs 13 pounds, and it's well within the FAA's weight limit and all the other specs.
But this actually can be recharged from the ground by a laser.
And so they tested it for 48 hours, and it wouldn't, it kept recharging and it kept flying, and they think that they can actually fly it indefinitely.
And so this is the type of technology we're looking at, you know, in the next two to five and ten years, where we have little drones flying around for hours or days at a time.
And if we don't get a hold on things, there could be, who knows, how many Gorgon Stairs, you know, flying above the U.S. in 2025.
Oh, man.
You know, the thing of it is, well, here's what we're up against, right?
You got the people who are single-minded and determined, like those who populate the EFF and, you know, want to fight about these kinds of things, and you have, you know, people like the listeners to this show who are regular folks but are very interested in this kind of thing and might even try to help, you know, any activism that you guys are doing along these lines.
But then there's the lobbyists that represent the manufacturers, and there's the cops that will never run out of excuses to use them, and for that matter, there's the local TV news that will never tire of being the sock puppets of the local cops and saying whatever the local cops want them to say.
And so, you know, right now in your town, a little kid is missing, right?
They can start this morning and say, look, what are you going to do?
You don't want to go and find the missing child?
And that's it.
You know, name the drone Amber or something else.
And it's on.
How are we ever going to stop this thing?
Well, it's true, you know, that their number one justification for using drones is the search for missing children.
You know, there are legitimate uses for drones, and I think that could potentially be one of them.
But, you know, obviously, we can put strict privacy controls in place where they could potentially look for missing children but not be doing surveillance on everybody else, and that's what they want.
And the good news is that this issue, more than any other issue I've probably worked on at EFF, has really galvanized the public, both on the left and the right.
I mean, I was at an Alameda County Sheriff's hearing two weeks ago where the room was just packed with people.
There was cameras everywhere.
People were really paying attention.
And when we got done speaking, the line for citizen speakers went out the door, and it was all people against this.
And actually, we've seen that across the country.
So in Seattle, actually, the mayor just ordered the police to dismantle their drone program because the local government there was actually worried that the city council was going to start losing seats because they hadn't passed a binding drone ordinance that would protect people's privacy.
So he just unilaterally told the police to send their drones back to the manufacturer.
I think at this time, there's over 20 states that have introduced drone legislation in the last month or two since the new legislatures have taken session.
And we've actually been seeing new legislation being introduced every day.
I mean, yesterday, California actually did.
The day before that, it was Illinois.
The day before that, it was Oklahoma.
So this is actually an issue that, a privacy issue, where we can win.
And it has really been sort of this catalyst that gets people to really tell their representatives, and the representatives are actually responding.
So that's been good to see.
Yeah.
Wow.
You're blowing me away with this stuff.
I guess I just assumed, and I have heard a little bit of pushback here, and I think I heard about the Seattle drones being canceled and all that.
But I guess I sort of just consider that the last gasp of a little bit of liberty on its way out the door anyway, because, you know, it was 15 years ago, it was the cameras going up everywhere.
I can't believe it was 15 years ago now, but I remember when they first started putting the poles up for the cameras all around Austin and telling people, yeah, you see those towers?
They're going to have cameras on them, because they have the exact same towers down in Houston that already have cameras on them.
So I'm telling you, that's what they're for.
And people said to me, no way, they're not going to, they would never put cameras all over the roads.
And then when they did, obviously they never held a vote on it.
They never, you know, there was no democracy that chose.
It was just the cops and the city police in every city, in every county in America put cameras up, and there was no outcry at all.
Nobody bucked at all.
They're just, they're all there right now.
There are 10,000 of them in every city.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I just figured this would just be like that, you know?
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong though.
And I think maybe the difference is in this respect that, you know, it's much easier for people to see and feel a drone that's flying above them and imagine it.
And you know, it's been in all the movies and people really have this visceral reaction to it.
Whereas cameras, they're sometimes hard to see.
And it's true.
They probably got those through on, you know, in situations where there were no public hearings.
And you know, in this situation, local governments are trying that as well.
And the only difference is that, you know, I think we were more prepared this time around where, you know, we were filing public records requests immediately and FOIA lawsuits with the FAA immediately.
And, you know, even in Alameda County right here, they tried to actually sneak through drone funding without a public hearing.
We found out less than 24 hours beforehand.
We called a press conference with the ACLU and they actually took it off the schedule last second.
And so we actually forced them to have a public hearing.
And now they're going to probably have to have another one before they even consider doing this Trump funding.
And, you know, like I said, you know, we're seeing that all over the country.
And it's great to see that citizens are prepared this time around to really react and force these things out into the public before they become law.
Well, I guess part of it is just that EFF and EFF's footprint has grown this much.
And, of course, with all the social networking nowadays and whatever, it's kind of a whole new ballgame.
You know, they're messing with a whole different population than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
Yeah, I think that's the case.
Like when, you know, it happened in one community, one small community, and they can spread the word nationally very fast, then everybody else can check in with their police stations and their local governments before they can do the same.
And so I think that's really helped.
All right.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Trevor Tim from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
So tell me about CISPA, the return of CISPA.
Yeah, well, this is the next big legislation going through Congress right now.
It's a cybersecurity bill or supposedly a cybersecurity bill, but doesn't really do much to protect cybersecurity.
What it does do is allow government to do what they call information sharing with companies.
And unfortunately, what this may end up meaning is that companies have a much easier time handing over large swaths of your personal information, including perhaps the content of your emails to the government without any warrant or anything, any sort of judicial process whatsoever.
And so all they would have to do is claim that there is some big cybersecurity purpose for this information to go to the government.
And obviously, what we're worried about is privacy on the Internet going to the wayside because of another, quote unquote, security issue.
And the real problem with this bill is that, you know, obviously, we've been hearing a lot about cybersecurity problems lately with Chinese hackers breaking into the New York Times and the Washington Post and the government warning about all of these trade secrets being stolen from all these corporations.
But this bill actually really doesn't do much to solve cybersecurity.
The crazy part is that cybersecurity is actually a very simple fix where a lot of times these huge attacks we hear about that are really sophisticated, quote unquote, are started because somebody downloads an email attachment or they have a really simple password on their computer.
And just these little things allow these hackers to gain access to large networks and then they can do their dirty work from there.
But you know, it's just simple training with companies or having critical infrastructure unplug their systems from the regular Internet would solve a vast majority of these problems.
Yet Congress's solution is to kind of destroy online privacy along the way while not really doing much to actually solve the real problem.
Right.
But create a lot of headaches for everybody else.
And it's, you know, really, it's that chilling effect right where sort of like with the drones, right?
Even if they're not after you, they might be as long as you hear that buzz.
You know, it might as well be looking at you.
So the FBI might not be digging through your emails today or or, you know, scrutinizing what you searched for on Google today.
But then again, they might be and you wouldn't know that they were, you know, and so that's just going to show everybody's behavior regardless.
Right.
I mean, sort of like with the cameras, if you even get lost and go around the block a few times, there's a possibility that someone's going to think that's a problem.
Someone watching that camera is going to wonder, why is this car gone around the block a couple of times?
You could be picking a fight.
You might as well be surveilled, I guess is what I'm getting at.
Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of just a symptom for, you know, the larger degree that we've been seeing over the last few years where the government is trying to get at your personal information from all angles.
I mean, obviously, drones is the newest iteration, Cisco is another.
You know, we have a phone location tracking down where the police can get your information without a warrant.
You know, obviously emails are protected less than phone calls and physical letters are.
And so they're kind of just trying to attack privacy from every angle these days.
And, you know, it's just up to us to stay vigilant.
And hopefully we're going to win on this drone battle, or we are winning so far.
And, you know, we've got to keep fighting and, you know, CISPA is this next iteration of this huge problem that hopefully we'll be able to beat back as well.
But we'll see within the next couple of months.
I think, you know, debate's going to start on it in a couple of weeks.
And that'll really be telling us to where this bill is going to go within the next congressional session.
All right.
And then can you fill us in, too, about the recent revelations about Gmail?
Is Google just giving up people's Gmail without any judicial check kind of thing?
Well, I mean, I think Google's actually done a fairly good job of protecting users' privacy.
So, you know, email, the content of your email, if it's older than six months old, the Justice Department thinks that it can get that without a warrant.
And so what Google's actually been doing is demanding a warrant, even though the law doesn't require it.
Google's argument is the Fourth Amendment requires it, even if the law doesn't.
So we're going to require it, and the Justice Department actually hasn't been putting back on them.
And so that's good news.
The bad news is that, you know, with Google's transparency report, they kind of, they showed that, again, U.S. surveillance is on the rise, like it has been for as long as they've been doing these transparency reports.
And the government does go after a lot of information without a warrant, information like who you're sending emails to and who you're getting emails from and what time of day you're sending them and who your contacts are, all this sort of non-content information that, you know, is not the actual body of the email, but everything else.
And unfortunately, no fault of Google's that the law doesn't really protect this information, and they can get it without a warrant.
You know, this is another case of technology, you know, outpacing the law where, you know, Congress hasn't really shown any interest in updating our privacy laws to protect our information in the digital age.
So we're in a situation where Google kind of has to hand over this information, even if they don't want to.
So the headline, then, that almost 14,000 government requests for Gmail data, that's not necessarily that Google gave in every single time, but that was just the number of requests that they had to deal with, and they're the ones who are telling us.
And I got the story all backwards.
Is that right?
Yeah, exactly.
And the good thing is, you know, we would love for every company to issue these transparency reports that Google did.
Google didn't have to do this.
They're actually one of the only companies that does.
And this is actually the first step in combating this type of surveillance, because we just need information on it.
You know, the government is so secretive these days.
We have no idea how many times they're trying to get this information.
So if every company comes out with these transparency reports, and we know exactly how much surveillance the government is conducting, that's really huge in helping us go to Congress and be able to say, look, this is a huge problem, because, you know, the problem with all this secrecy is that we just don't have any information to go on.
And then, so, you know, Congress really has no way of deciding what to do and what not to do.
And so, you know, these transparency reports, sometimes they're very startling when you find out how much surveillance is going on.
But in the end, that's actually a good thing.
All right, everybody.
That is Trevor Timm from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and from, well, let me get the web address correct here, PressFreedomFoundation.org.
PressFreedomFoundation.org.
Thanks so much for your time, Trevor.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Always great to be on.
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