09/30/13 – Marcy Wheeler – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here.
Man, I had a chance to have an essay published in the book, Why Peace, edited by Mark Gutman, but I didn't understand what an opportunity it was.
Boy, do I regret I didn't take it.
This compendium of thoughts by the greatest anti-war writers and activists of our generation will be remembered and studied long into the future.
You've got to get Why Peace.
You've got to read Why Peace.
It features articles by Harry Brown, Robert Naiman, Fred Bronfman, Dahlia Wasfy, Richard Cummings, Karen Gutowski, Butler Schaefer, Kathy Kelly, Robert Higgs, Anthony Gregory, and so many more.
Why Peace?
Because war is the health of everything wrong with our society.
Get Why Peace down at the bookshop or Amazon.com.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's the show, the Scott Horton Show, here on No Agenda.
First up today is Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel, they call her on the internet, EmptyWheel.net.
She's at Empty Wheel, of course, on Twitter, too.
Hi, Marcy.
How the hell are you?
I'm good.
Yourself?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Sure.
You've got a great blog.
Man, you keep, I don't know how many hours a day you work on this thing, and I know you've got a couple of partners there helping you out, but boy, oh boy, do you cover everything and in such depth.
It's just incredible.
I could just forget everything else and just read your blog.
You keep me up to date on it all, it looks like here.
On those very narrow subjects we actually cover.
Well, I don't know.
Yeah, foreign policy and civil liberties, if that's very narrow, then yeah, I guess you're very narrow on just covering everything that I'm interested in.
All right, well anyway, enough praising you.
So first of all, let's talk about this little bitty, no big deal story that came out in the New York Times by James Rison and their number one national security guy, and Laura Poitras, recipient of the original Snowden document leak there with Glenn Greenwald.
They published this thing that I think basically proved that the NSA's been telling the truth about everything this whole time, right?
You mean Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower, has been telling the truth about the business of whistleblowing.
Oh, right, right, that's what I meant.
Right, Bill Binney used to be one of the top people at NSA, and after 9-11 he quit because we were doing so much spying on Americans.
And especially last year, he started saying that NSA has dossiers of Americans, and Keith Alexander, as he does, went out and said, oh gosh, we don't have any dossiers.
And that story, the dossiers, Bill Binney's claim that the NSA was putting together these dossiers, was actually one of the rebuttal attempts that led to James Clapper lying to Congress, lots of back and forth between Ron Wyden and Keith Alexander and James Clapper.
But basically what the New York Times reported is that in addition to, basically the NSA is trying to figure out who in the United States talks to its foreign intelligence targets.
And by this, it's not just terrorists.
So it's no longer, if you don't talk to a terrorist in Yemen, you're safe.
It's also things like, do you talk to foreign diplomats, do you talk to people who might be proliferators?
I mean, basically, this covers all of their foreign intelligence collection target emphasis.
And so if you talk to interesting people overseas, what they're going to do is they're going to put together a portfolio on you that includes not just who you contact, who your friends are, whether by internet or phone, and one of the things this story revealed is they're collecting this phone metadata and location via some other means that's not the business records FISA that we keep talking about.
But they're also getting your Facebook information and banking information and travel information and yada yada.
So they're collecting a broad breadth of information to figure out who it is that has interesting ties with their foreign intelligence target.
Well, and a big part of the story, I guess, too, is how well they use this information, how they perfected how to put it all together.
It sort of it, it makes the the kind of proverbial FBI file pale, right?
They just hit enter and all of their different computers and databases and data mining machines and records of everything all assemble themselves on the screen in a in an instant.
They don't need to have the complete file.
It just it comes from its bits and pieces and then they can analyze everything about I think I forgot I don't have it right in front of me, but I think they use the term graph like they can represent visually everyone's connections to everyone and everything important about them, even who has ridden in a car with them down the highway before and all of these kinds of things.
Right.
This is total information awareness, but not again, not just for counterterrorism, but for all of NSA's intelligence collection programs.
I think, you know, remember the Simpsons movie where they have 100 million NSA guys sitting there spying on everyone?
And that and then the joke is that obviously it doesn't work like that.
They're not spying on us.
All South Park was like that, too, where, oh, we're spying on this guy making arrangements to pick up dinner and the kid from soccer practice and whatever.
But they are.
It's just it doesn't take that much manpower to do it.
It's the computer.
Right.
I mean, and and they're you know, and they've got so many different data collection places that they you know, it just they they get it's just it's automated.
One of the one of the lines in that story, which I thought was apt, was was this is the digital equivalent of killing somebody, of following somebody in real life and figuring out what they're doing.
Although, you know, the it's every time we've been told that metadata is that much more revealing, what this shows is that they're they're developing the metadata with focus on American citizens and they're using I mean, they're bringing together all of these multiple sources of metadata.
So it's not just our phone records there.
You know, they're tying the metadata in with our they're tying the phone metadata in with our Facebook and with everything else and with our phone records.
So it's just this incredible rich picture.
Now, I guess this sounds silly and I don't even know if I have a point, but I've been meaning to mention this all along, which is that Dean Koontz, who I guess people consider him the knockoff Stephen King writer.
Well, when I was in, I guess, in high school or just out of high school, maybe I read a book by him called Dark Rivers of the Heart, where the antagonist is an agent who works for a government agency with no real title.
I think he gets his paycheck through the Department of Justice and he works for the Deputy Attorney General, but really is just a secret hitman for the deep state kind of thing.
And he just opens up his laptop and types in the right code and he has access to every computer in the world, basically.
It's the mama computer.
And by way of the National Security Agency, it's hacked into every other government database and every major private database and it's basically this kind of total information awareness.
And I don't know how far into it they really were, so this would have been like, I don't know, 95 or 96 or something like that, I guess, when I read this.
I don't know how sophisticated it was then, but certainly the premise was there, that you know, after all, that's why they created, that's why the government funded all this high-tech revolution over the last few generations in the first place, right?
It's to keep tabs on everybody, the Russians and the Americans too.
Right.
Right.
Right.
I mean, the Ma Bell AT&T was just a project of the NSA, if you want to look at it that way.
I mean, they built the entire telecommunications infrastructure of the United States and of the world from the bottom up.
So, you know, of course they're tapping the backbone.
It's their backbone, you know?
Yeah, right.
But anyway, so the problem is this, there's the old law that says that, hey, you can't investigate me unless you got a predicate, right?
Whatever happened to that?
And that's really what we're talking about here, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, one of the interesting things is, A, also released yesterday, David Christie used to be in charge of National Security Division in DOJ and is one of the smarter people on this.
He just released an article on the business records FOIA, not on this, but, you know, he provided the explanation of relevance that the government has been unable to provide.
I think they're going to all start stealing from David Christie's article.
But it was interesting because he was sort of like, you know, these are enterprise investigations.
This is what we're supposed to be doing.
And the government has basically included, you know, once you've got that relevance language going on, which they do, then you've got this notion that they can do an enterprise investigation, which is, you know, we're just going to go out and try and find the terrorists.
But they can include us as targets in that enterprise investigation because of this kind of crazy haystack theory that they have.
And then they've reapplied it to foreign intelligence.
So, you know, that's how things get out of control.
But that appears to be what has happened.
Well, so it's confusing to me about that.
Any connection to anything foreign leads to any American, basically.
Right.
I mean, how many degrees of separation are we talking about or how many Americans are they?
Do they say in here what percentage of us this accounts for?
I mean, obviously, some people don't ever talk to anyone overseas, even by a couple of degrees of separation.
But pretty much everybody's got a couple of hops, as they call it, right.
This haystack theory that everybody could be caught up in this basically.
Right.
Well, they could be.
We don't know.
And I suspect that.
Remember that Ron Wyden keeps asking for the number of Americans who have been searched on because they're the NSA and one other agency, probably FBI, have the authority to take what what's called incidentally collected information and search on it for U.S. person data.
And so I suspect that's part of where this data comes from.
In other words, they've explained to themselves that they can collect that they can collect on target.
So, you know, that Yemeni terrorist, along with targeting that terrorist, then they get a couple of hops away from the terrorist.
And that's when they get into, you know, journalists or human rights workers or what have you in the United States.
But then they can go in and having collected that information on human rights workers in the United States, go in and collect and use it.
Right.
So I suspect that's part of what's going on.
But but in spite of Ron Wyden's repeated efforts, the government claims we can't tell you the number of Americans who are being searched on in that fashion, because if we did, it would be a privacy violation, among other things.
And also, we don't have the resources to count how many Americans were spying on in this fashion.
That's the answer.
Oh, they can't.
They would like to tell you, but they don't have the answer.
And if they did have the answer, then it would be a violation of your privacy to notify you that you've been spied on.
Not even that.
It'd be a violation of one's privacy, a mythical one.
If they reveal the total number of Americans that they had spied on, and that just sounds like a non sequitur, really.
It's an excuse.
I mean, you know, when when you get an answer like that from the government, a safe bet is that if they actually told us how many Americans they were spying on, then we'd be outraged and we'd make sure it was changed.
So they're not going to you know.
And the other thing about that is if they can't pull up the number automatically, it means they can't audit it very easily because they can't you know, they're not keeping well enough track of, you know, when people are actually spying on Americans to just pull up a number.
Right.
So it just doesn't you know, the fact that they refuse to answer that question should be setting up alarm bells everywhere, especially given this New York Times disclosure, this new story.
Yeah, well, and, you know, I mean, it kind of sounds silly because I know nobody pays much attention to me.
It's not like I'm breaking major news stories here or anything like that.
But I do recognize that in my own personal tale of chilling effect here that, you know, I talked to people who are former CIA officers.
I talked to people who are real journalists who do have sources overseas that, you know, may very well be the focus of whatever type investigation.
Right.
This is like part of Chris Hedges lawsuit was, hey, I'm a reporter.
I talk to Al Qaeda sometimes, but geez, so what does that mean for me?
Well, I got Chris Hedges number in my cell phone, probably still.
It's been a while.
But so then does that mean that they're keeping tabs of everybody I ever ride in a car with and by a hop or two?
I got, you know, skater buddies of mine are now linked to Al Qaeda in the mind of the computers of the government of my country, you know, and makes me feel like, well, maybe I just shouldn't be palling around either with my friends who are my true friends, or maybe I shouldn't be palling around with these journalists who are doing good work.
Maybe I'm, you know, responsible for getting somebody in trouble and I should stop doing something that I'm doing, even though I'm not doing anything wrong.
And even though, as I said in the first place, I'm not trying to be extra paranoid.
I know that I'm not all that consequential or anything, but I'm just saying it occurs to me, you know, right, right.
And, you know, and they can use this stuff for espionage investigations.
And you and I both have Glenn Greenwald's contact in our cell phone, right?
No doubt about it.
You're telling me that?
Yeah.
So it's just, you know, what it demands is more disclosures.
And this is probably some of the stuff the NSA has been trying to hide most diligently from us.
And can I just, you know, interject and say that I love the notion that James Risen and Laura Poitras are working on the story together, because that's got to make the NSA pee its collective pants just by seeing their byline together.
Oh, yeah, because, in fact, the article even starts out.
That was how I captioned it when I posted on Facebook, too.
Cool byline.
Risen and Poitras.
I really like that.
And then I think it's paragraph two that says, according to documents provided by Edward Snowden and interviews with senior officials, yeah, that's that James Risen connection there where he goes, oh, OK, so here's a bunch of information for context.
Let's go to the very best sources that any journalists have in America on the national security beat.
Sweet.
Very good.
And it also is that represents the most severe investment on behalf of the most important newspaper in America to I mean, Bart Gellman from The Washington Post.
I love that guy.
And it's important that he was in on it from the beginning.
I think Edward Snowden made a very good choice in bringing him in on it.
But now what are they going to do about it when James Risen is on the story?
In fact, I thought it was kind of strange, Marcy.
What did you think about when it started off?
It was just Scott Shane and it seemed as though Risen was being excluded or I don't know.
Was there something to that?
Are we wasting time?
We should be on more important things.
You know, I did a post on that.
I thought it was sort of interesting that Shane was included just because Shane's become, you know, I and I blame the the prosecutions of journalist sources as much as anything else.
But Shane has become very much a way the administration gets out its official version of the story of late.
And and given what The New York Times did with the WikiLeaks cables, where they went out of their way to basically tell the government what what they had sort of spying on themselves, the government, I, you know, I just thought it was it was dubious.
But hey, I'm really happy to see Risen working with Poitras.
Sounds great.
Well, and I really want to see Charlie Savage on it, too, because, you know, he's a very independent minded and kind of a journalist.
And also, you know, he's like you.
He's really smart on this stuff.
It all makes a lot of sense to him when he looks at it, where the rest of us are kind of scratching our head and waiting for Marcy to explain it kind of a thing.
So, you know, I'd very much like to see him on the case.
But anyway, plenty of time and apparently plenty of documents still to come.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So yeah.
Anyway, so that's really good.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you about Obamacare, because you did a lot of work on this.
And frankly, I probably agree with, well, I wouldn't say the right wing critique, but you know, I got a libertarian critique of the whole thing.
But I'm very interested in Greg Palast wrote Obamacare is 98 percent Cheney.
And of course, Greg Palast being, you know, total pro-democracy, pro-regulatory state, good government kind of public utilities, sort of a progressive kind of a guy.
And he says this is 98 percent Cheney.
And I'm really more interested in a left wing critique like that or a liberal or progressive critique like that than, you know, Obama's from Kenya and he's here to turn us all over to Vladimir Lenin or Putin or whoever.
So I was wondering if you could tell us about some of the work that you did on the health care law and its origins and and some of the likely consequences from your point of view.
Sure.
I'll say up front, there are parts of it that are unquestionably good.
And those are the expansion of Medicaid with and I'll put in a caveat in just a second, because until we get the poorest Americans actually receiving health care rather than emergency room care, the rest of us are going to be subsidizing them anyway.
So better subsidize them in primary care than subsidize them in our hospital bills.
So that's one thing that's good.
The other thing that's good is true Medicare.
The government is trying to deliver services better and they've been able to do this in the VA.
I mean, you know, the VA actually has far better outcomes than even Medicare and certainly our private services.
And so, you know, the goal is to deliver health care better and more effectively without, you know, without taking away our fake needs and stuff like that.
So those are both unquestionably good aspects of Obamacare.
But there are you know, and I'll go back to the Medicaid.
One complaint I had from the very beginning and I was screaming about it at the time was that if you're if you're a corporation, the only way to get health care for your employees provided for free is to ensure that they are poor, that they stay under that hundred and twenty two percent of poverty level, that means that they can get Medicaid for free because the Medicaid is always going to be better than what they would provide and and they qualify.
And we knew, I mean, Wal-Mart was at the table when they were designing Obamacare.
And we knew even then that Wal-Mart relied on Medicaid in those states and California is one of them in those states where the qualification level was high enough such that people who worked could actually get Medicaid as well.
So we had to expect that, you know, this was one of the primary things that Wal-Mart was interested in doing.
So what's happened since Wal-Mart has moved a bunch of people to part time, ensuring that they're not that they don't qualify for Wal-Mart's own health care system and and also ensuring that they're too poor, that they're poor enough that they're going to qualify for the Medicaid in the states where it's been expanded.
And so basically what we've done is given huge employers an incentive to pay their people poverty wages.
And we've seen that roll out.
And you know, it's not a surprise.
You're saying that's what Wal-Mart was doing at the table, was making sure that it was that way.
This is an accidental, unforeseen consequence.
I know it can't be unforeseen because it made perfect sense to me at the time.
And it's perfectly in it matches Wal-Mart's past behavior perfectly because we knew they already were relying on Medicaid and it matches what they've done since.
So, you know, it seems to me it was part of the plan.
And I was screaming about it at the time and people like, oh, you don't really have to worry about it.
And I said, I'm worried about it.
So, you know, they'll say even Wal-Mart thinks it's a good idea, you know, even my enemy agrees with me.
So I must be right.
Kind of a confirmation bias error, you know, and this is the same thing that happens with the minimum wage.
Of course, they always push for an increase in the minimum wage.
Well, they already pay a little bit more than the minimum wage anyway.
So it doesn't really affect them.
But it does help bankrupt all the mom and pops, the last ones in town still competing with them who can no longer afford to hire high school kids as summer jobs anymore and that kind of thing.
And, you know, it's always an ulterior motive, no matter how good they're trying to make it sound.
And, of course, maybe it's just my confirmation bias only seems like I'm right all the time that when when they're in on it, that, yeah, you're right to be suspicious of them and their motives and to take it as confirmation that something underhanded is going on here.
Yeah.
And, of course, didn't you write about how, like, the the number one insurance company lobbyist in America lady was the primary author of the whole thing?
Right.
But, you know, if you looked at the bill as it came out of Max Box's office, it actually had this Fowler is her last name.
I'm trying to remember.
I think Liz Fowler, the woman whose name was on the PDF file with this woman who had been vice president of and I forget which insurance company it was, but of one of the biggest insurance companies in the country.
This is why I love Marcy Wheeler.
She went and clicked properties, right click properties on the PDF file and saw the original author.
And there she was.
Right.
And she actually was one of my readers.
But my readers are brilliant, though.
But but yeah, that's important to note that like and then she has since gone back to the private sector.
So, you know, it's this what it's this case of revolving door.
It happened at a time when the insurance companies, because of the economic crash, were in a bunch of trouble because, you know, the the financial because I mean, they're basically the insurance is just a way to get money to go play on the stock market.
It's not entirely true, but but I'll just leave it there.
And so and so what it did was give insurance companies a huge new batch of subsidized consumers while doing not enough.
I mean, there are means, you know, one of one of the other really good things about the law is something called medical loss ratio, which limits how much the insurance companies can charge for overhead and executive salaries and so on.
And, you know, it was implemented imperfectly.
It was implemented with the rates that way too low.
So, in other words, rather than 90 percent have to go to health care, depending on where you are and how much you're getting subsidized, 75 or 80 percent has to go to health care.
But that has already led to people getting money back.
You know, so if the insurance company is spending too much on stuff, it's not health care.
Then then you get money back because you pay, you know, you paid so it is good.
It could be a lot better, but that is good.
But but nevertheless, you know, there were those kinds of limits.
But with the exception of those limits, basically what it did was give insurance companies a captive set of consumers without doing enough to kind of reel in the ugliness that is insurance companies.
And, you know, we were already seeing them find ways to get around the new rules placed on them.
So just as an example, I'm a cancer survivor.
And before this, before Obamacare got passed, I have great insurance.
My insurance company always paid for all my mammograms.
Obamacare passed a must must cover preventative care, which was sold as this will cover mammograms.
But for people like me who have to get really high level mammograms because I'm a cancer survivor, the first time it went through, the insurance company said, oh, this is not preventative care.
It's diagnostic care and charged me for it for the first time and charged me.
And because I'm, you know, a cancer survivor, I have to get the digital mammograms and yada, yada, yada.
So, you know, the insurance companies still suck.
And this Obamacare didn't change the fundamental problem.
You know, insurance companies are primarily regulated at the state level.
Those state commissioners tend to be well-funded insurance company lovers.
So in very few states is there really effective regulation of insurance companies.
And so you're going to see stuff like this.
You're going to see insurance companies find ways to game the game, the system.
And until you use at the federal level real sticks to stop that from happening, we're still stuck with really crummy insurance companies.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing sounds to me like the ultimate in regulatory capture and I want to say real quick, too, because I meant to say before, but I forgot.
But it's an important point to bring up, which is there are a lot of companies slashing hours like you were talking about with Walmart there, but it's not because they want to, because they're evil like Walmart and whatever.
It's because they have no choice and it's going on all over the place.
I see on my Facebook feed, the local YMCA cut everybody's hours down to 35 and whatever it is, every all over the place.
And a lot of these bosses hate this.
These are their people.
You know, they're human beings with personal relationships here.
It's not just as easy as, oh, yeah, sorry, guys, cutting your hours, but they have to follow suit because what else are they going to do?
The unforeseen consequences, like you're saying, of course, the insurance companies are going to continue to find every way to screw you that they can.
My only hope actually is that the consequences are going to be so bad that they'll have to repeal it because there's just no way they'll be able to blame it on freedom or whatever like they'd like to.
It'll be so clear that this law is what set all the incentives even more perverted than before and raised everybody's prices even more than before and that maybe eventually there will be a pushback.
But I don't know.
There's so many vested interests involved, you know.
Yeah.
But anyway, hey, listen, great work all the way around.
I love your blog and thank you again for your time on the show, Marcy.
Appreciate it.
Take care, Scott.
All right.
That is the great Empty Wheel, EmptyWheel.net, Marcy Wheeler.
And also follow her on Twitter, too, would you?
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Rocky Mountain Miners at RockyMountainMiners.com.
Ever wanted to destroy the Federal Reserve System?
Now's your chance.
New free market currencies are making our fake government money a thing of the past and good riddance.
If you want to mine new Bitcoins and Litecoins into circulation, you need a computer set up to crack the codes to the new coins.
Get the Prospector from RockyMountainMiners.com.
It's ready to do the work right out of the box.
Crack the equations, spend the money.
Use promo code ScottHortonShow and save $100.
Get all the info and get the Prospector at RockyMountainMiners.com.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
Now, you know they publish great articles at fff.org every day, but their best stuff goes in The Future of Freedom.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 to read it online, and I got a new one coming out in September in there, U.S. responsible for Somalia's misery.
Support FFF.
Sign up for The Future of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them Scott sent you.
So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at ScottHorton.org, we'll make a donation to support The Scott Horton Show.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here, hawking stickers for the back of your truck.
And they've got some great ones at LibertyStickers.com.
Get Your Son Killed, Jeb Bush 2016, FDR, No Longer the Worst President in American History, the National Security Agency, blackmailing your congressman since 1952, and USA.
Sometimes we back, Al-Qaeda.
Sometimes we don't.
And there's over 1,000 other great ones on the wars, police, state, elections, the Federal Reserve, and more at LibertyStickers.com.
They'll take care of all your custom printing for your van or your business at TheBumperSticker.com.
LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here to talk to you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State, The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite.
In the book, Swanson explains what the revolution was, the rise of empire, and the permanent military economy, and all from a free market libertarian perspective.
Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation, says the book is absolutely awesome, and that Swanson's perspectives on the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis are among the best I've read.
The poll numbers say if the people agree on one thing, it's that America is on the wrong track.
In The War State, Swanson gets to the bottom of what's ailing our society, empire, the permanent national security bureaucracy that runs it, and the mountain of debt that has enabled our descent down this dark road.
The War State could well be the book that finally brings this reality to the level of mainstream consensus.
America can be saved from its government and its arms dealers.
First, get the facts.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson, available at your local bookseller and at amazon.com.
Or just click on the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org.