05/29/15 – Trevor Timm – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I got Trevor Tim on the line.
He is the, whatchacallit, at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
He is the co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Greenwald, Ellsberg, Snowden, and others sit on the board there with him.
And he writes for The Guardian, did I already say that?
Can you tell the difference between Bush and Obama on the Patriot Act is the last one, but man, he writes all really great essays there at TheGuardian.co.uk, or I guess it's just TheGuardian.com now.
Okay, fine.
Welcome back to the show, Trevor.
How are you?
Hey, thanks for having me back.
Very happy to have you here.
Is it really right that Rand Paul successfully did a pseudo-filibuster kind of thing and killed Section 215 of the Patriot Act?
Or it's not over yet?
I mean, it's not over yet.
We will know finally on Sunday what's going to happen.
I mean, the act officially expires on Monday, June 1st.
And so that means that the Senate has until midnight on Sunday to pass something or not pass something.
And they're not even going to be back in session until like five o'clock.
So they're going to have a few hours to debate these bills.
They already debated last week and couldn't come to a decision on it.
I mean, Congress is obviously so dysfunctional that they can barely agree on naming post offices.
Thank God for gridlock.
Yeah.
At this point, it's finally coming back to help the American people in a sense that they can't agree to renew the Patriot Act.
They also can't agree on these watered down reforms.
So it's very possible on Monday the Patriot Act, at least Section 215, will have expired.
Man, all right.
And now that's the only part of it that's up for sunset at this point?
Well, there's two other parts that are up for sunset, kind of minor clauses.
There's something called the lone wolf provision, which has actually never been used, or at least the government claims it's never been used.
And then there's something called the roving wiretap provision, which essentially allows them to get a warrant for a person that has multiple devices that they're communicating on.
But then again, that also has been reinterpreted in secret, as Marcy Wheeler wrote about the other day.
So, you know, it's certainly, you know, the idea that the sky is falling and that the government is never going to be able to actually track terrorists is, you know, obviously absurd.
They have, you know, half a dozen other legal authorities to conduct surveillance.
Well, I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about them having the ability to continue violating all our rights.
And they can still have that?
Exactly.
It's just that they've been, you know, obviously in this last week, they've been, you know, trying to throw out all sorts of hypothetical scare scenarios to, you know, terrify people into thinking that they're actually losing something if this bill expires when they're actually not.
Right.
And, of course, the standard for tapping any suspected agent of a foreign power, including any agent of a terrorist group, a foreign terrorist group, and I don't know, I must assume they've expanded this to, you know, so-called lone wolves proven somehow to be in contact with any foreign terrorist group as well, that the standard for tapping them under the FISA Act of 1978 is, you know, I forget if it's just reasonable suspicion or lower than that, but they're virtually never denied.
In fact, they even already had an emergency provision where they could tap you for 72 hours before bothering to get back to the judge about it.
And that's how it already was before the Patriot Act was ever even passed.
Am I wrong?
No, you're exactly right.
You know, this idea that, like, the government was, you know, had their hands tied behind their back before 9-11 was always just crazy.
You know, there's tons of evidence showing the FBI knew of some of the hijackers and some of the agents had tried to warn others and that there was bureaucratic infighting between the FBI and CIA, and that's why they were, you know, keeping data from each other.
There was nothing, you know, there was nothing that they didn't already have that they needed to stop attacks like this, and, you know, these laws are just an excuse.
We know that when they passed the Patriot Act, it was actually just laws that law enforcement had wanted to get passed for decades, but because they just weren't politically tenable, they couldn't.
And so, basically, they got everything in their dreams after 9-11 and have used, by and large, many provisions of the Patriot Act, you know, 99 percent of the time against, you know, cases involving drugs that have nothing to do with terrorism.
And now, did I read right that the, I think it was Judge Napolitano's column, he said that the inspector general had just came out and said, of the Justice Department, I guess, maybe the NSA itself, and said that, no, actually, they didn't get anything useful from this program the whole time.
Yeah, this is the most amazing part of this whole past week, is that the Justice Department released this incredibly timely, comprehensive report that concluded on the very first page that Section 215 of the Patriot Act had not produced any major case developments in its existence, and that it actually isn't this tremendously vital tool that the administration has been saying for years.
And yet, the media has basically ignored this report, again, from the Justice Department.
This isn't an outside report.
This is from the Justice Department's inspector general, who interviewed countless FBI agents and Justice Department officials about the law.
And even though they concluded that it's not vital at all, that we don't really need it, that it basically just repeats information we already have, that the sky will fall, and hell will rain down upon us next week when this law expires, and it's just ridiculous.
All right.
Now, so two more questions in very little time.
The first one is, are they still going to be able to use Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and Executive Order 12333 to violate our rights, to basically, in the same way, in other words, to go around the cancellation of this part of the Patriot Act?
And then secondly, is there a campaign somewhere that you can refer people to where people are working, making phone calls, writing letters, sending faxes, doing whatever they can to select members of Congress to make sure to keep Patriot from being reauthorized and to keep USA Freedom from being passed?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the number one thing you got to do right now is call your senator, because they are actually having this vote, and there are so many votes up for grabs.
It's not like one of these normal congressional votes where things are kind of decided in advance.
And any support that they have from the public will do a lot of good.
As far as if they can do this again if the flock expires, you know, they claim that they're not.
They have to shut down the program.
Whether we believe them or not is one thing, but we have to remember, the only reason this was authorized by the FISA Court to begin with was because they thought that Congress had somehow secretly authorized it.
And so once Congress takes away its authority, hopefully the FISA Court will, too.
And we already know it's been declared illegal in public court, and so there's no way that they can do this without breaking a whole host of other laws that would be very hard to avoid getting prosecuted under.
Right.
All right, well, thanks again for coming back on the show and for your education on this very important subject.
I think this is one of those where you got some swing votes, and the way it shakes out with party breakdowns and stuff, this really could, we could see a successful Sunday here if people get in gear.
Not that I believe in politics too much, but this might work.
Thanks very much again, Trevor.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
That's the great Trevor Timm, everybody.
He's at TheGuardian.com.
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