Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Patrick Eddington.
He's a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a former CIA analyst and an ex-House senior staffer.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
My pleasure.
So you wrote this very important thing over at Cato.org, the Snowden effect, six years on.
And I was just thinking the other day, hey, it's six years later and The Intercept is starting to publish Snowden documents again.
I don't know what the holdup was.
Anyway, so that's good.
They're back in the news somehow.
But we're still living with the ramifications of all that, such as they were.
And as you say, I guess here in paragraph one, if there really was a concrete result of the Snowden leak, it was the USA Freedom Act in 2015.
Is that right?
Yeah, I think.
I mean, if we look at this in like a legislative context.
Right.
In other words, how, if in any way, shape or form, did Congress actually respond to these revelations?
The passage of that particular piece of legislation is probably the thing that stands out the most.
So, you know, as I go on to say in that piece that ran on JustSecurity.org, the critical thing about it is, you know, the USA Freedom Act was really kind of a relatively weak piece of legislation, fundamentally.
I mean, it didn't, contrary to the claims that a lot of the folks made at the time, it did not actually end the telephone metadata program, per se.
But what it did do was basically trunk a little bit.
So to just kind of conceptualize how this stuff was working, at least with respect to the telephone metadata program.
Imagine yourself kind of standing there with your smartphone in your hand and you're like, I'm going to call my friend Joe.
Right.
So you call your friend Joe.
You have a conversation about, you know, whatever.
And then Joe's like, hey, I think so and so friend of mine would be interested in this, too.
And Joe turns around and calls his friend that that's what NSA would call like the second hop.
Right.
And then Joe's friend decides, hey, I think that's interesting stuff.
I think that Steve would be interested in that.
So he calls his friend Steve.
And that becomes like the third hop is how NSA would say.
So what they were going after with the original version of the telephone metadata program was essentially not just what doing and not just what Joe was doing or talking to, but who Steve was talking to as well, because this is kind of like an NSA version of, you know, six degrees of Kevin Bacon or whatever.
But in this case, it's like three degrees of you.
And they would basically kind of wrap all that data up and they'd be looking at that.
And of course, the excuse always was, well, you know, we're trying to find terrorists and so on and so forth.
But the plain fact of the matter is mass surveillance of any kind, I don't care whether it's electronic or physical or, you know, whatever, has never stopped an attack on this country.
And that was the thing that we found out, right, thanks to Snowden, is when he, you know, gave that Verizon order, the order that Verizon got from the court, you know, for all this data.
All these, you know, millions essentially of call related, you know, records that they were literally like just grabbing literally everything that they could.
And so the USA Freedom Act essentially said, okay, well, you can't go all the way out to Steve, but we'll let you go all the way to Joe is what it boils down to.
So it didn't stop mass surveillance with respect to that program.
And the program never stopped a terrorist attack on this country.
And there's a really great archival video out there of Senator Leahy talking to the deputy director of NSA at the time, Steve Inglis, at a hearing in which NSA and the administration had claimed, this is the Obama administration, had claimed that this particular telephone metadata program had stopped like 54 attacks on this country.
Well, in about a four and a half minute space of time, Leahy takes Inglis from 54 plots to zero.
And Inglis was supposed to admit, no, well, we could kind of connect it maybe tangentially to this case, et cetera, et cetera.
But the truth was it hadn't stopped anything.
And that's the problem with mass surveillance.
But the crazy thing was Congress went ahead and like reauthorized this thing.
Right.
And that's what the USA Freedom Act did, which never made any sense.
And now this year, in December, that program is supposed to die.
And one of the points that I make in this piece is that we ought to use that as an opportunity to go back and evaluate all the surveillance stuff and shut down everything that isn't actually bad guys.
All right.
So a couple of things there.
First of all, you say here that they admitted at some point the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a report where they said it turned out, even if they'd gone from three hops to two or what have you, that they ended up with three times as much telephone metadata on Americans than they were collecting back before the law was passed.
Yeah.
And the funny thing, too, is back during the Republican presidential primary season in 2015 and 2016, Senator Ted Cruz kind of let the cat out of the bag when he was kind of going back and forth with Marco Rubio about this whole issue of stuff.
And Cruz basically said, they're collecting even more now than they were then.
And Rubio attacked him for, quote, endangering national security, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then earlier this year, of course, NSA finally says, yeah, we think we can kill the program.
It's really just not doing anything for us.
After having spent literally six years telling the world vital national security, if we don't have this, people will die kind of in a Jack Bauer 24 kind of way.
And that's exactly how it went down.
Right.
So that's why any time any official of FBI, NSA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whoever in the executive branch is saying this authority is critical, we have to have it or people are going to die.
Always, always, always be skeptical of that claim because more than likely untrue.highest level of fear and crisis that they can drum up if they need to in support of stuff like this.
And then we kind of forget that later when, as you're saying, the NSA themselves are saying, nah, we don't really need this thing.
And actually, that's surprising me.
It seems like they would just keep it on the shelf and not say anything about it rather than embarrass themselves this way with announcing that they don't really need it at all.
I think they were on the verge of kind of being outed over it anyway.
I think they're probably on one or more of the committees and maybe elsewhere who are on the verge of, you know, kind of coming out and saying, you know, this is a fundamental problem.
At some point, they had said that they had busted a cab driver for sending some money home to Somalia that may have made it to Al Shabaab or something.
That was the best that they could ever claim to have uncovered here.
Right.
That's correct.
That's exactly correct.
With this particular program.
Yeah.
In fact, that was the Mualim case.
And that's the one Grace Inglis, you know, tried to get, you know, Pat Leahy to agree was actually like an example.
The plot stopped and Leahy wasn't having anything to do with it because it had to do with things going on in Somalia, not anything going on here in the United States.
Yeah.
And it was America that started that war in Somalia anyway.
Yeah.
It's by our friend Charles Featherstone.
I think you'll really like it.
It's a dystopia from the very near future.
And I won't tell you too much about it and spoil your fun, but I know you'll like it.
Kesslin runs.
Now, help explain to me some things because I always forget exactly how this works.
We have the Freedom Act here, but then you mentioned Executive Order 12333.
There's also a Patriot Act Section 215, although I think that was changed by the American Freedom Act.
And then there's the FISA.
You mentioned this to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 78 has Section 702.
So these are the things that you're saying, hey, as long as the NSA is saying we don't need this at all, we should review all of these processes that have got us this far in the first place now.
So what are they?
Can you tell us the difference between these three things?
Sure.
So we'll kind of break these things down into segments, if you will.
So Executive Order 12333 was originally promulgated under President Reagan in his first term, and it has been renewed by every administration ever since.
And it serves essentially as like the guiding document for U.S. foreign intelligence operations.
On the surface, you might be thinking, okay, well, that's cool.
We want them collecting stuff on potential bad guys and so on and so forth, which we do.
But the problem is intelligence collection almost always winds up ensnaring Americans in one fashion or another, and particularly in the digital age, where if you or I are going to place a call, it might go to the tower near my house, and then it's going to get routed maybe to somewhere in D.C.
And then it gets routed maybe like through, I don't know, Tokyo or somewhere else.
So the way that signals travel, particularly when we talk about email and text messages and stuff like that, anything essentially that's traversing the Internet winds up going through these different kinds of nodes, some of which are located here, many of which, however, are located overseas.
So it's those kinds of communications that ultimately get swept up by NSA and kind of this blanket stuff.
And under 12333, they've been able to operate using those particular, with basically almost no kind of oversight whatsoever.
It was Chuck Grassley just a few years ago who actually found out that the NSA inspector general had found out that a number of NSA employees had basically been using NSA assets to keep tabs on their former wives or former lovers or former spouses or even current spouses under executive order 12333 authorities.
So that got a little bit of attention, and then it was kind of swept under the rug.
And up until the Privacy and Liberties Board did their examination of this, which is still classified, by the way, and I'm trying to actually get that released, nobody had ever done a really deep dive on it.
So think of kind of 12333 like the Wizard of Oz in terms of surveillance.
We really have no idea.
The public as a general rule has no idea what's going on there.
Now, the next thing along, of course, is the Patriot Act, and this is past six weeks after the 9-11 attacks.
This is legislation that has 160 different components to it.
And this telephone metadata program is part of the Section 215 aspect of the bill that you mentioned.
But there are other authorities under the Patriot Act that they can use essentially to collect stuff.
So Section 215 also allows them to go after business records.
This also became known as the library provision of the Patriot Act because the American Library Association was really concerned, and it turned out it was a valid concern, that the FBI would basically try to get information on books you were checking out of the library to see if you were reading about, you know, bin Laden, al-Qaeda, you know, and later on ISIS and all the rest of that.
So very, very invasive.
And the crazy thing, of course, about the Patriot Act is that this is legislation that's passed before Congress has done anything to investigate how 9-11 happened.
And once you actually get the first congressional investigation going in early 2002 by the time it's done that summer, what they figure out is it wasn't a question of us not collecting enough info on al-Qaeda before the attacks, which is basically what the Patriot Act is based on, right, not collecting enough data.
That was all false.
9-11 happened because the intelligence agencies and the FBI didn't put it all together.
They had the data in front of them.
They didn't do a good job putting it all together.
But they went ahead and they passed the Patriot Act.
And then later on, once the illegal Stellar Wind mass surveillance program was exposed by The New York Times in December 2005, and this is like the big time internet spying component, essentially, of the domestic surveillance program that started after the 9-11 attack.
Once that is exposed, then it starts like this two-year process in Congress of trying to take that illegal Stellar Wind program and make it legal.
And they first start out with a stopgap legislation called the Protect America Act, which ultimately turns into what we now call the FISA Amendments Act.
And the short of it is, Section 702 of that particular law allows them to go after the communications of just about anybody, particularly in an overseas context.
And when they do that, as I explained earlier, because of the nature of the global communications system, they're picking up a tremendous amount of human traffic.
And the fear, of course, is that they're gathering this data and God only knows ultimately what they're using it for.
So there have been examinations of this stuff.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board said that 215 was useless and should be ended.
Of course, Congress didn't do that.
With respect to 702, they said it's actually got some value and they wanted to see it essentially kind of tightened up.
But there hasn't really been a comprehensive look since then.
And that's why I keep saying we need like a church committee 2.0.
We need a comprehensive look, not just at all this electronic surveillance stuff that's been going on.
But we've got the DEA using automated license plate readers to go after people.
We've got FBI and Customs and Border Protection just going bonkers over facial recognition and wanting to use it in just about every kind of context you could think of.
So we need a holistic look at how all this technology and all of these policies and all of these drivers essentially within the FBI, NSA and the larger national security establishment are kind of creating what amounts to a digital and even physical panopticon for the American people.
Yeah, I'm worried about them.
I just make it that much worse where they just share their worst ideas with each other and get it all rubber stamped by the Senate that doesn't give a damn.
So I don't know, because it's all law enforcement, you know, the most valuable people in our entire society who must be deferred to on all questions, who want and need this stuff.
Who are you to deny them?
Yeah, you know, that's like, you might as well be talking about taking vitamins away from pregnant moms or something.
How dare you?
So it's exactly that mentality, you know, it's like, you know, don't question what we're doing, you know, we're doing this to protect you, and so on and so forth.
And, you know, a big part of the problem is you will know, is that, you know, too much of the public is too easily buffaloed by this stuff, right?
I mean, they buy this nonsense.
But when you actually put these programs under a microscope, you find out at the end of the day, that in the end, it's really all about aggrandizing power within the executive branch, right?
These agencies want more power, they want more ability to do things, whether or not they really should be doing them.
And of course, you know, when you give them authorities like this, they say, well, we need money in order to carry it out, right?
So it becomes kind of this self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, whereby they're saying, we need more money to do this, we need more authority to do this.
And that's the loop, essentially, that gets created.
And it's kind of amazing to me that even when we have external entities like the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, or this external technology and surveillance review group that Obama set up come out and say, no, no, no, no, no, this particular thing, in this case, the telephone metadata program is useless, we should get rid of it.
It's like it's automatic renewal in Congress, just because they're so afraid, right, of actually doing something that's pro-liberty.
They're afraid of doing something that would actually force them to uphold their oaths, you know, that they took to uphold the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights.
And that's what's suffering here.
Fundamentally, we're changing the very character of the country, you know, by the way that all this stuff is going down, you know, and the way that it's just becoming more and more and more normalized.
You know, we have an entire generation of young people now, who are going to be graduating high school this summer, who have grown up under this mass surveillance thing.
It's all they've ever known.
They haven't known, you know, anything else.
And that leads to a normalization, essentially, right?
And there's no way that that, in the end, that doesn't change fundamentally, the very character of this country.
And that's what I fear.
That's what I'm most terrified of.
Yep.
Well, and it's already happening.
And you know, it's funny, it's like Hamilton versus Jefferson on the Constitution in the first place.
Whatever the Constitution does not explicitly forbid, it allows.
And that's how the bureaucrats treat the law, too, and even then.
But essentially, I mean, you're the expert, not me, but I don't think they ever passed a law saying that the U.S. police agencies shall now implement facial recognition and gait recognition and this and that other kind of surveillance methods against us.
The bureaucracies just decide to do this.
And unless Congress stops them, which they never do, and I guess Congress has to keep paying for it all, but they always do.
And so it all just kind of rolls on unless there's a really specific objection.
Cato really wins one for the guys this time or something.
Otherwise, it all just rolls on unchecked.
Yeah, I mean, the one victory that we've had, those of us who value a liberty-centric society, the one victory that we've had kind of in this technological arena in the last few years was success in getting rid of those porno scanners in the airports, right?
I mean, the ones that would actually take like full nudie x-rays of you as you were going through, they're called backscatter x-ray machines.
And when I worked on the Hill, my boss, my then boss, Rush Holt of New Jersey, and Jason Chaffetz of Utah kind of tag teamed on this.
And they were able to beat up John Pistole, who was the head of TSA at the time.
They were able to beat him up enough politically that they forced them ultimately to kind of take those machines out of the airports.
And that was definitely a solid real win for privacy.
Now, you've still got those millimeter wave machines that are in the airports.
And by the way, if you're wondering, are those machines basically worthless from a security standpoint?
The answer is yes, they really are.
Somebody who knows what they're doing can get by those machines pretty much every time.
Hey, all they have to do is pay $68 and then go right through the pre-check line with the rest of us.
Yeah, exactly.
Al-Qaeda can't figure that out.
All you've got to do, Al-Qaeda, is go and get yourself fingerprinted and give them $68, and they'll give you a knife to get on the plane with.
Yeah, exactly.
So, if you've got somebody who's willing to die, but who previously has a clean record or something like that, and they're told to kind of go and do that, then that's absolutely the easy way that they could do it.
I shouldn't have said that.
I don't want to talk them out of that program, because I'll pay the extortion rate to go through the short line.
I'll do it.
I have to.
I think that's part of the issue, too, right?
I mean, a lot of folks have been kind of mesmerized by the convenience of a lot of things.
I mean, I don't believe that the TSA should be charging.
Number one, I don't think TSA should exist.
Let me just say that up front.
I think all that should be privatized.
I don't believe that any American citizen should have to pay some kind of special fee or tax or anything else to be able to get on an airplane, right?
I don't think you have to.
We should live in a society where the TSA decides, well, you're guilty until proven innocent, and that's really what this system is, right?
It's basically saying, okay, well, we're going to presume, essentially, that you might be a terrorist, but you need to give us all this personal identifying information, which, by the way, we'll never properly protect under IT systems, and it will probably be hacked at some point.
And then after you go through this process, then we will basically pronounce you blessed by the government to go ahead and get on an airplane.
You know what, that sounds like hyperbole, but you're exactly right.
I was on a tram one time at LAX with a TSA guy, and I went ahead and put him through the ringer about this, and that was exactly what he said.
Like, uh-huh, grandma very well could be a terrorist.
I'm going, yeah, no, she could not, either.
Uh-huh.
You know, because that's what you're supposed to say.
That's what you have to believe, or else, why are you doing this for a living?
What are you doing?
So, it's all just attitude, false behavior kind of self-justification.
But meanwhile, I'm telling them, how many terrorists have you guys ever stopped?
You harass men, women, and children all day long, and you accomplish nothing.
But that doesn't matter.
There is no cost-benefit or price analysis or any kind of wasted effort versus success in any way.
It's just, continue on.
And they feel no consequences, right?
Most of the time, they just don't feel any consequences for what they're doing.
Yeah, no cost for their failures.
Just like when the FBI sneaks a bunch of knives through on a red test or what have you, nobody's held accountable for their failure.
Everybody still gets to go to work the next day.
So true.
And isn't it like a 95% rate when they do those tests?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, anytime, essentially, TSA has kind of been caught out in this testing of this stuff, they almost always get roasted, right?
And then this whole behavior detection officer category of folks they have, it's like, well, somebody is sweating a certain amount, or yada, yada, yada.
And there's absolutely no published, peer-reviewed science to back any of that stuff up.
Absolutely nothing.
So it's just an enormous kind of bureaucratic, self-licking, self-sustaining ice cream cone, as long as the money is there.
And that's why I'm a big fan of just radically slashing budgets for a lot of these organizations.
And then they're forced to actually focus on real things, like real crime.
Hey, let me ask you something.
When you're on the Internet all day, do you keep it in the back of your mind that you know that this is all going on your permanent record, and you either do or you don't care, or you don't think about that, or you don't assume that, you think that's not true, or what?
So when it comes to the level of stuff that they're actually collecting and keeping and all the rest of that, if I have any concerns about a particular individual that I want to communicate with, then I will resort to the use of a VPN or virtual private network.
I almost always use a VPN for browsing on the web.
And if I want to have a secure telephone conversation or text message exchange, I use Signal.
I strongly encourage everybody, if you're not using Signal for that kind of thing, get it.
Encourage your friends to get it and use it.
Because we know from what Snowden has told us, and we also know from the public audits of Signal software, is that it is really, really, really the best there is out there.
It's extremely rock solid.
That's that thing, get right around that and just hack your phone where they get in before the encryption, so they make it move, right?
So in order to do that as a general rule, though, they'd actually have to have physical control of the device.
And that's one of the advantages, essentially.
As long as you are using a very strong passcode to unlock your phone, and again, I strongly encourage people to use a passcode.
I know the whole Face ID thing with Apple products and older generation stuff like Touch ID.
Yes, it's convenient.
It's super convenient, but it's also an easy way for the cops to get into your phone.
If they just make you stare at it, or if you're still using Touch ID, they make you put your finger on it, all the rest of that.
If you have a really solid, large alphanumeric code that's relatively easy for you to remember, but that would take a computer like forever to try to break, that's really a much better way to kind of approach this stuff, and that's what I do.
But you put your finger, I think, on a fundamental problem is that we simply cannot go through our daily lives, in this digital age especially, with any kind of confidence that our stuff is not being collected in violation of our constitutional rights.
Until we get a Congress that has a much more liberty-centric mindset, guys like Justin Amash, guys like Thomas Massey, women like Zoe Lofgren on the Democratic side.
She's really great on this kind of stuff.
We need more members of Congress like that who are actually willing to do what they're supposed to do according to their oath, which is protect the Bill of Rights, which means protecting our rights.
Yeah.
You know, the one that always shocked me the most, I like repeating this one because, I don't know, it worked on me the best out of all of them, I guess, was keeping the location data of your cell phone.
In other words, and for up to five years, I guess they said, as far as we know, but in other words, everywhere you've been, every car you've been in, every living room or bedroom you've been in, every association you have, who else was in this car?
And you know how they do, especially from the Afghan war and whatever, oh, this person is linked to this person who's linked to this person.
And then they either make up the context or just fill it in with their imagination, or they just don't even require context at all.
But they figure they can draw up all their own little patterns of conspiracy to try to implicate people in things that they didn't do.
And we know that, I mean, in Afghanistan, that'll get you killed by a Hellfire missile.
So that is the way they look at it, for sure.
So that's the one that really gets me is because, you know, I don't know who all I was ever on a bus near and what implication one might draw from that if they felt like trying to come up with a theory to explain it, you know?
Yep.
And, you know, Michael Hayden, the former director of NSA and former director of CIA, said very publicly, we kill people using metadata, right?
So, you know, they're willing to kind of take all that extraneous data, which can tell you a lot, an enormous amount about, you know, patterns of life and how people go about their daily lives and so on and so forth.
And it's absolutely easy to jump to conclusions, erroneous conclusions about what might be affiliated with who and so on and so forth.
Yeah, we've seen that too.
I mean, with the results of the drone wars where innocent people get killed all the time, the algorithm says they're guilty, but that's about it, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, you guys, check out my institute, LibertarianInstitute.org.
Did you know I have one?
Yeah, I do.
Me and the great Sheldon Richman.
He's my partner there.
It was Will Grigg, the late, great Will Grigg.
But his book is coming out soon.
And we've got a lot of great writers there.
I hang out on the blog all day long.
And we have a lot of great podcasts as well.
Myself, Mance Rayder, Kyle Anzalone and his great foreign policy podcast, Patrick McFarlane and Keith Knight holding it down as well.
Check out all that stuff if you like the libertarian podcasts and writings.
LibertarianInstitute.org.
So there are some police drones in America, but so far we don't have Predator and Reaper drones up there, but they'll be coming in, you know, army surplus and what have you, that kind of thing.
But are there any American cities that have a constant drone surveillance yet?
Do you know?
I think it's very difficult for us to say definitively what that looks like.
I will say that CBP, Customs and Border Protection, has actually been operating Predators and Reapers for a few years now.
They've been criticized by the DHS IG for it because the DHS IG was basically saying this is, no pun intended, overkill.
You know, you don't need this kind of drone essentially for border surveillance and trying to catch illegals and all the rest of that.
But the technology, as you well know, has proliferated just radically.
And police departments around the country, I can tell you, they're beginning to reevaluate their use of helicopters and they're starting to think about, you know, going to drones.
Because number one, obviously the per hour operating cost and the per unit cost for a drone compared to, you know, a helicopter of almost any kind, it's not even a close call in terms of how much money you save.
So they're talking about doing that.
A number of departments have deployed, you know, a fairly large number of drones at this particular period of time.
But we also know that the FBI, among others, continue to operate fixed and rotary wing aircraft for aerial surveillance.
And we know that when the Freddie Gray related riots were taking place in Baltimore and all that unrest was going on because of the police brutality against him and the bogus verdicts that came out of those trials, that the FBI, among others, was actually operating, you know, fixed wing aircraft with some pretty advanced surveillance suites over the city of Baltimore for extended periods of time.
So how much of that is taking place on a daily basis is yet another question that ought to be examined by, let's say, the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees or the Oversight and Government Reform Committees.
Those are things that ought to be taking place because those are questions that absolutely need answers.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show, Patrick.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, you guys, that's Patrick Eddington.
He's a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a former CIA analyst, and an ex-House senior staffer.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scothorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scothortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
