07/05/13 – Greg Gordon – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, I'm Scott Horton.
Greg Gordon's going to be joining us here in just a minute.
McClatchy reporter.
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All right, good.
So now to our next guest.
It's Greg Gordon, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
And if you're smart, you'll sign up for their morning email.
In fact, I think you'll get one at night too.
Anyway, they do really great stuff and they've got a lot of really great reporters there at McClatchy DC.
Welcome back to the show.
No, welcome to the show for the first time.
Greg, how are you doing?
Nice to talk to you.
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me.
I'm so used to saying welcome back to the show.
I'm just like a broken record stuck on that track there.
So a great piece here.
It's called Hints Surface that NSA is building a massive pervasive surveillance capability.
And that's a pretty blaring headline.
And the hint surfacing, of course, mostly means the Edward Snowden revelations and documents published in The Guardian and or The Washington Post.
And so I like this article because it's a good overview for people just catching up.
It's a complicated subject after all.
It's not quite nuclear technology, but it is computer technology.
And those of us regular people, we tend to think of that as a very specialized subject for you computer geniuses to understand.
And then, you know, let us know what to right click on when the time comes kind of a thing.
So I really appreciate this article.
And I was hoping you could really give us kind of an overview of what's been released so far, how to categorize it all in our tiny little non-computer genius brains and understand what exactly it is that we're dealing with, what's been proven, what are still the open questions that we really want to know and that kind of stuff.
Okay, I'll give it my best shot.
I'd kind of like to start by pointing out that one of the really dramatic changes that's occurred now that we're in the cyber age is that, and we all know this, we use cell phones and we use all these handheld devices and desktop computers.
But just a few years ago, maybe a little over a decade ago, when the FBI wanted to wiretap somebody, they had to be somewhere where they could record it, you know, using an old-fashioned tape recorder.
We always see these scenes on TV of a van with a big reel tape recorder kind of winding slowly along as two guys with earphones are listening to the subject or target of the wiretap.
Well, now everything's changed because it's all going over fiber optic cables.
Everything is going over fiber optic cables.
And so what we have is a digital fingerprint in ones and zeros of everything that's being done electronically in our new world.
And so it's all capturable if you can get it, if you can tap into it somehow from the big carriers, either the big Internet carriers, the big telecom carriers like AT&T and Verizon.
But in their case, they're both telecom and Internet.
And so what we come down to is what are the programs that have been permitted?
And why this NSA controversy is, of course, particularly difficult to follow is that most of it's classified, and there's the secret court that was created way back in the 90s to try to deal with warrants and wiretaps in pursuit of spies and also terrorists.
But now it's become a big counterterrorism program since 9-11.
So the first big revelation was in 2005 when the New York Times reported that there were warrantless wiretaps being conducted with the approval of the secret court on foreign targets or subjects of suspicion who were making phone calls to Americans.
And normally when an American is on a phone call and a government agency is listening in to a domestic phone call or address a person on a phone call, a warrant is required.
But this program, the Bush administration, was set up and ran secretly for years, and it was relatively targeted, apparently.
They had to have a suspicion that some foreign individual was contemplating either espionage or terrorism against the United States.
But one of the things that happens, of course, is if the American or the person in the United States who's considered an American under these programs generally is then talking about some nefarious activity, then that person becomes the subject and then you would switch over to probably an FBI agent or a group in the FBI pursuing that individual, and then everything fans out.
Okay, so we had that program and it ran secretly, and then it was exposed and there was a big flap, a big ruckus.
And ultimately that program was merged into another program and things kind of were quiet for a while.
There were these several National Security Agency whistleblowers who previously in the early 2000s had spoken out about some activities that the NSA was doing.
So you have in the middle of all this, I should take a step back, let's remember this is all ramping up because of terrorism threats.
And the pendulum has swung back and forth rather quickly between the privacy advocates and the counterterrorism, what do I call them, fearmongers.
If you're in one camp you call them a fearmonger and if you're in another camp you'd say these are the folks who are protecting us from more terrorism and that they're breaking up lots of plots and we've only had the Boston Marathon really since 9-11.
And so then we have our friend Mr. Snowden who is a pretty wily character.
I'm not sure that we yet know how much he knew about what the government was doing versus how much he knew about what data he could get his hands on.
He's a self-educated guy, he's obviously very smart and now there are reports coming out that he had even taken a class in hacking and he learned how to access all this data apparently within a very short time after joining Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm that he works for, the contractor, the NSA contractor.
And he had a high clearance and was able to get access to all this information.
So then it came out that there was a program after the earlier program was shut down, there was a new program that emerged and that the NSA began to collect what they call metadata.
And metadata is not the content of the phone calls but it is who you called, when you called, where were you when you called, where was the other person.
Well in the case of the cell phone it's not so clear whether they know but there's a lot of discussion about whether they're potentially even going to be able to track everybody by their cell phone calls to various data.
Now there was a bulk collection program that ran for several years collecting metadata and into two years into the Obama administration.
And that program finally was shut down.
Some members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in particular Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado were pressing, demanding to know whether that program was really producing any results.
And finally it was curtailed.
Meantime, or after that was shut down, there's a new program called PRISM which collects internet data.
I'm not sure I've got my sequences exactly right here because I haven't been on this story all that long so forgive me listeners if I'm off a little bit on the timing of the programs.
PRISM is a program where they collect internet data from the nine big U.S. internet carriers.
And those nine carriers, the original reports by the Guardian of Great Britain and the Washington Post were that PRISM was enabling the government to download massive amounts of emails and internet content and so forth from all these carriers.
But in fact, according to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in fact PRISM was much narrower than that.
And that they only went and collected this data with the approval of this secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court with the knowledge of the provider and based upon a written directive from the U.S. Attorney General and Mr. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.
So that this was for targeted acquisition of foreign intelligence information.
So this program was purportedly much narrower than originally described by the newspapers.
So what we have here is we're getting the outlines now that the NSA is, you know, in pursuit of, you know, giving them the benefit of the doubt.
They're in pursuit of terrorists.
They're collecting, they're capitalizing on the fiber optic transmission of all of our Americans' personal data and foreigners' personal data to build, certainly around targets, to quickly build profiles about who they are, where they go, what they do.
It's not been clear yet whether they're getting credit card data, but when I asked a security expert who had been a government consultant and says that he's seen taps into fiber optic cables all over the country, when I asked him if they were getting credit card data, the answer was, all of it.
I said, well, are they getting bank data?
All of it.
What don't you understand about all of it?
And so one of the comments on the bottom of my story on our website is a few items that are now fact.
Your vote is no longer secret.
Your drug use status is not secret.
All of your relationships and their nature are known.
Your sexual preference, whether you had an abortion or status with disease, including STDs, are known.
Your opinions are noted.
Your thoughts, musing, and any other private communications are laid bare for inspection and interpretation.
That is hyperbolic, no doubt, but that's the fear out there right now, that the NSA has figured out how to collect all this stuff.
The NSA is building a massive storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, about a little ride south of Salt Lake City, that is supposed to be able to hold 20 yodabytes of data.
I was told that a terabyte of data is, quote, stupid large.
A yodabyte is, I might mess this up, but I believe it's a billion billion terabytes, just to give you the scale of this whole thing.
A former chief technology officer of a huge U.S. corporation told me that the government, or anyone in the industry, that the scale now of storage, the capacity to store within something that's affordable, because it was immensely expensive, that the capacity is there now to store yodabytes of data.
So the question is, is the government going to, is this administration, some future administration, some rogue head of the NSA, going to actually start storing content to create what could be referred to as a look-back capability?
So that if I'm an investigator at the NSA and I have a suspicion about something, do I have the ability to go into the computer and pull up, put my earphones on, and listen to telephone calls that occurred three years, four years, even five years ago?
And I look at emails that were contemporaneously sent, along with those telephone calls, to piece together the whole communication line of someone that is either a terrorism suspect or some possible spy, or what have you.
Or, in the worst case, to somehow penetrate this data and look for something in some abusive way.
The example was given to me by one of the former NSA whistleblowers.
He said, you know, let's just say you're watching television and you see the leader of the Tea Party on television.
And you could quickly identify the person.
You could go back in and you could look up all of his telephone contacts and his email contacts, and you'd be able to identify who the Tea Party members were in a flash.
Think how fast that could occur.
Right?
Yeah.
And then it was another article at McClatchy.
I'm not sure if it was one of yours or not, but it pointed out who you worship with, who you associate with in any way.
All of this becomes your business.
It's sort of like J. Edgar Hoover, if he became the lawnmower man or whatever and just took over – remember that movie?
He takes over the entire network with his malevolent will, so you don't even need to send a G-man around to harass somebody to death like Hemingway or something like that.
All you really have to do is hit the Enter button, and the screen in front of you, you can just watch as someone's entire life is assembled from all the different databases all at once before you.
So it's the instant, ultimate FBI file on everyone.
As you say, look back capability.
Even listen back to you from years ago talking on the phone.
Now, let me give you the counter to that, because let's be balanced here.
Okay, so Libya's leader Gaddafi fell, and when he fell, thousands of heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles supposedly disappeared.
Last week, or the other day, just a few days ago, there was a report in the paper that Qatar is sending heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles to the rebels in Syria who include, or at least are fighting alongside, al-Qaeda members.
Okay, so these heat-seeking missiles, the big fear is that these heat-seeking missiles can be used to bring down commercial aircraft.
Be careful whose side you're on now, Greg.
You could be committing treason.
America backs the rebels in Syria.
So you're in the NSA, and the FBI, and the CIA, and your biggest job right now, although the CIA is probably pretty busy trying to figure out what to do about Egypt and Syria, but the CIA, one of the major jobs of the intelligence community is definitely to try to prevent terrorism acts.
And they're now, we're always worrying about loose nukes.
Now we've got loose heat-seeking missiles.
And you want every tool you can get your hands on, and the NSA says that there are only 22 people within its hierarchy who are allowed to tap in, or to authorize the tapping in, to any data that they've collected.
They deny that they have content, but there's a problem with the denial, and that is that the NSA typically considers the word collect, or at least this is how a number of people have described it to me, that when they use the word collect, they mean that they, for example, if it's a phone call, that they've listened to it and understood it.
Otherwise, they're not collecting it.
They may have it in their data banks, stored somewhere, but they haven't collected it.
And thus, when, and this may be the explanation, but when Jim Clapper went before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March, and Senator Wyden asked him directly, are you collecting massive amounts of data on Americans?
He said, no sir.
And later on, he backed off and said, I gave the least untruthful answer I could give.
So now we've got Snowden out with all these releases of information, and apparently this stream of classified information is still going to flow for quite some time.
Yep.
Well, and you know, we've seen over years, and to the point where now it's getting absolutely ridiculous, the abuse of this term terrorism to go for at least 50 different cases of outright entrapment by the feds, and then plus it must be another, at least a couple of hundred cases of trumped up terrorism charges where they don't belong.
But then, I don't know if you saw this one from this morning where the woman breastfeeding at the country club, who was told to leave, said, no, I'm going to sit here and finish, which she should have left if it was private property or whatever.
But so they called the cops, and the cops came out with the full SWAT armed response apparently, or at least they were treating the couple as though they were a serious, dangerous threat and guns drawn.
And the cops said, you have a black backpack.
You could be a terrorist.
And you know, this happened just a couple of weeks ago where the guy said, if you're complaining about your water quality, the local water official, so if you're complaining about your water quality, well, that's terrorism, right?
Anything that makes a government employee feel weird is terrorism.
And so they can, it's not hard to see the slippery slope.
We're on it right now.
A lot of us have experienced, I actually had a little exchange with an airline employee out at the airport one time because they didn't like the way I asked a question about the flight time or something.
And it escalated within a matter of seconds to the point where she was saying, you better watch that attitude.
And my wife was grabbing me and ready to muzzle me.
But there is a real tension out there between law enforcement folks who are trained to be on the watch for terrorism.
And, you know, an FBI agent told me shortly after 9-11 that if two Muslims get together for a cup of tea, they get a phone call.
You know, and this kind of happens and this is a problem.
But, you know, let's also remember that after the Boston Marathon attacks, everybody was hounding the law enforcement agencies.
Why didn't you connect the dots?
Why didn't you catch this guy?
These Chechens had got, you know, Russia had warned us about the older brother and why didn't they do more?
So they're kind of caught because now the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
People are really very concerned about their privacy.
I had a couple of security folks just tell me, look, that ship has sailed.
There is no privacy anymore.
And, you know, let it go.
Get over it.
Get over it.
That's what they said.
And of course, the thing is, it's such a ridiculous false choice.
Everyone has to be completely naked before our overlords because they couldn't be bothered to call flight schools in the years before September 11th.
You know what?
I say off with the FBI's heads and we'll all be free.
And NSA's too.
We can all take care of ourselves and our own security just fine without them at all.
How about that?
Instead of everybody's a terrorist for not appreciating how much they do for us all day.
I don't know if I'm going to sign up for that one.
There's somebody who's followed what the FBI does and the FBI has done some very good work along with bungling some things from time to time.
Well, one of them actually said, well, what did you expect us to do?
Call every flight school in America?
When, of course, the answer to that is yes.
Before 9-11?
Yeah.
They couldn't be bothered.
You know, hair on fire, red lights flashing.
We'll get around to it when we feel like it may be, you know.
They missed some clues there without question.
Someone who covered the case involving Zacharias Moussaoui for four and a half years and wrote the stories about the flight school there in Minneapolis.
I should go back and look at that.
They missed some opportunities.
They missed some big opportunities and it's unfortunate.
It's tragic.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I shouldn't have done so much editorializing at the end of your great interview, but I sure do appreciate your time on the show today.
It's a pleasure, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Greg Gordon, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers at McClatchyDC.com.
They've got a great stable of reporters over there, McClatchyDC.com.
And that's it for the show.
We'll see you all on Monday.
Oh, man, I'm late.
I sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from SecurityEdition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
I've got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
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Hey guys, I got his laptop.
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Hey, all.
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