STUNNING: New Report Exposes US Govt Is Buying All of Your Data—All While Fear-Mongering on TikTok. Plus: Thoughts on RFK Interview | SYSTEM UPDATE #98
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, whenever you think the U.S.
government can't get any more brazen in their domestic spying or any more contemptuous of the core privacy rights of American citizens, they prove you wrong.
A newly revealed report from inside the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the U.S.
security state is using your tax dollars to purchase enormous amounts of data about you, information that they would be barred by the U.S.
Constitution from gathering on their own without a search warrant, but which they are now claiming the right to collect on the ground that it is available on the commercial market.
We'll have details about exactly what this program is and why it's so menacing.
But we'll also examine the underlying propagandistic framework on which these sorts of surveillance state programs rest.
Namely, constantly featuring a carousel of new enemies and threats that they want you to be afraid of so that you are willing to acquiesce to whatever new powers they claim as long as it's justified in the name of keeping you safe from those threats.
The U.S.
security state are experts at this kind of propaganda.
They have been using this same template for decades, from the Cold War, through the War on Terror, to the alleged threats of an insurrectionary movement inside the U.S., to the always reliable dual enemies of Russia and China.
And that is why there is no duty of American journalists or of American citizens more urgent then constantly subjecting these fear-mongering tactics to critical scrutiny rather than passively ingesting them.
Failure to do so ensures not only the continuation of these massive state powers in this surveillance state, but its endless expansion.
Then our interview last night with Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., generated substantial discussion, controversy, and reverberations.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about that interview with a focus on a rare and, I think, encouraging character trait that interview revealed.
One that is, I think, encouraging beyond any specific policy position.
It illustrates how so many people, even someone born to one of the most storied political dynasties in American history, have become radicalized by really realizing the extent to which U.S.
institutions of authority are so fundamentally corrupted and how willing they are to lie chronically and deliberately to the faces of the American people, a reality that once someone sees can't be unseen and which will inevitably shape one's views of issues far beyond the one that originally fosters this distrust.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We speak often of the surveillance state under which we live, And I think sometimes that term has been repeated so often that we almost become inured or immune to just how invasive and menacing it actually is.
This has been something that we've been discussing since at least the advent of the internet and the emergence of the war on terror in which the threat of Al Qaeda and terrorism justified in the minds of a lot of Americans the need to have the U.S.
government collect enormous amounts of information on us, which was previously unthinkable to even permit them to collect, let alone monitor, store, and analyze.
In the weeks after 9-11, the Patriot Act was implemented in a climate of fear by an overwhelming bipartisan majority.
And at the time, we were told that we need not worry about the Patriot Act, that it's just a temporary measure, an emergency measure, designed to ensure the US government has added spying powers for just as long as is needed to combat and vanquish the threat of terrorism.
And as soon as that's done, which will be very soon, We were told the Patriot Act will go away and here we are 22 years later.
Nobody talks about the threat of Al Qaeda any longer and yet nobody talks either about getting rid of the Patriot Act.
It has become a just standard feature of the woodwork of American politics.
We barely even notice That a law that was described even in the wake of 9-11 as a radical departure from how America functions is now just part of the reality of American political life that we accept.
And each year brings added increases in the surveillance powers the U.S.
government aims, not at foreign nationals, But here at home at American Citizens, it is a domestic surveillance state that has been implemented and expanded by the same propagandistic framework, namely constantly feeding you a new enemy to keep you in a state of fear that fosters an acquiescence on the part of the population that even though we may not like the fact that the government is constantly collecting more and more data on us,
We prefer that to what we're told will be the result if we resist.
Namely, we won't be safe, we'll be killed by either a terrorist organization or a foreign country.
Even though we spend more in our military than the next 12 nations combined, we're constantly being told by the U.S.
government and their media allies that we're at constant risk.
Sometimes from foreign governments, sometimes from foreign terrorist groups, and increasingly we're told by domestic enemies, by an insurrectionary movement that expressed itself on January 6th, by a group of white ring extremists or white supremacists that Joe Biden and the net U.S.
security state now says is the single greatest threat to the homeland.
It really doesn't matter what the enemy is.
All that matters is that you believe that there is one And as a result, believe that you can at least tolerate, if not support, increasing levels of government spying, government surveillance on American citizens, on U.S.
soil, in exactly the way, exactly the way the U.S.
Constitution was designed to prevent.
Last week, we commemorated the 10-year anniversary of the start of the Snowden reporting, which began on June 6, 2013, which revealed for the first time the existence of a mass, indiscriminate, suspicionless system of domestic electronic surveillance that the U.S.
government, through the NSA, had implemented in complete secrecy, without any democratic debate, And 10 years later, while some parts of it have been curbed, while some impediments have been placed in the way of the U.S.
surveillance state, in many ways the situation has gotten worse and worse.
The powers of surveillance, of snooping, of domestic tracking and monitoring of U.S.
citizens on U.S.
soil by the U.S.
government is worse than ever.
And we now have a newly released report that doesn't come from a media outlet.
It doesn't come from an anonymous source leaking or making unverified claims to a media outlet.
It comes from the U.S.
government itself.
The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Hines, who was the Deputy Director of the CIA under President Obama and is now Joe Biden's number two, or the Chief Intelligence Official, the Director of National Intelligence coordinating all intelligence agencies for the Biden administration, received a report at her request that was classified about the extent to which the U.S.
government, the U.S.
security state, is purchasing what it calls commercially available information.
Information that is available on the open market for a price that contains not just publicly available information, but deeply invasive information about who you are, what you do in your life, where you do it, with whom you do it.
Information that gives the government a very sweeping picture of your life.
In fact, this information is so invasive There's no question, even the US government admits that if they wanted to collect it on their own, through their surveillance powers, they would need a search warrant in order to do it.
That's how invasive it is.
They have no right to collect this information on you by themselves.
But internally, in secret, they adopted a theory As long as the information is commercially available, in other words, for purchase on an open market aggregated by data collection firms or social media companies or some combination thereof, they have the right to buy whatever it is they want about you, collect it, store it, analyze it, and utilize it without a search warrant on the grounds that it is commercially available.
Now, rather than show you a couple of media reports that have emerged on this new report, I want to instead show you the document itself and key parts of the document.
I want to take some time to go through it because I think it's important for you to hear in the government's own words a report to the DNI, the Director of Actual Intelligence, about exactly what it is they're doing.
This report, as you see here, was compiled in 2022, and it was approved for release in It was declassified by the Office of Director of National Intelligence only because a couple of members of the U.S.
Senate, to their credit, including Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a longtime privacy advocate, was badgering and hectoring the DNI for its release.
So this report originally was not meant for your eyes.
It was compiled in total secrecy.
And it bore a designation of secret, which meant it was a crime for anybody to reveal it.
Only because of political pressure, a unique and rare example of the Senate actually performing their oversight functions on the U.S.
Intelligence Committee, was this report made public and we can now learn how commercially available information is being purchased by the U.S.
government using your tax dollars to learn everything they can about you and their own description of how intrusive this information is, of how much subject it is to abuse It's something that you want to hear from their own mouth so you don't have to wonder if this is an anonymous source exaggerating its importance or a media outlet or someone like myself describing it in melodramatic ways.
So let's look at some of the key parts of this report.
Here you see the title.
It says it's for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
It's from a senior advisory group panel on commercially available information.
So here is how the report begins.
Quote, there is today a large and growing amount of CAI, commercially available information, that is available to the general public including foreign governments and their intelligence services and private sector entities as well as the US intelligence community.
CAI clearly provides intelligence value, whether considered in isolation or in combination with other information, and whether reviewed by humans and or machines.
It also raises significant issues related to privacy and civil liberties.
The widespread availability of CAI regarding the activities of a large number of individuals is a relatively new, rapidly growing, and increasingly significant part of the information environment in which the U.S.
intelligence community must function.
There is today a large and growing amount of what the U.S.
intelligence community refers to as commercially available information, CAI.
As the acronym indicates, and as we use the term in this report, CAI is information that is available commercially to the general public, and as such, is a subset of publicly available information.
We do not use the term CAI to include, and we do not address in this report, commercial information that is available exclusively to governments.
So, let's just stop there for a second.
There's an entire other category that this report does not cover that they also purchase that they consider to be commercial information that is only available to governments.
This is not what they're talking about here.
That is a separate category.
of extremely sensitive data that they purchase.
What they're describing here is information that is available not just to governments but corporations as well.
And so according to the U.S.
government, their legal position is even though this information would be information they're barred from collecting on you without a search warrant if they wanted to spy directly on you, they can use private actors, third-party commercial vendors To get this information about you and store it inside the U.S.
government and then use it however they want.
The report goes on, quote, the volume and sensitivity of commercially available information have expanded in recent years, mainly due to the advancement of digital technology, including location tracking and other features of smartphones and other electronic devices and the advertising-based monetization model that underlie many commercial offerings available on the Internet.
Keep in mind, this is information the U.S.
government is collecting about you, U.S.
citizens.
Although CAI may be anonymized, it is often possible, using other CAI, to de-anonymize and identify individuals, including U.S.
persons.
So, the information sometimes may come without any indication of whose information it is.
Sometimes commercial actors purchasing and don't care who you are, they just want to use it to identify what you like, what you do, in order to better sell to you.
But the government doesn't care about that.
They're not interested in a profit motive.
They're interested in learning about you so they can control you, so they can monitor and track the domestic population.
And what they're saying here is even if the information sometimes is anonymized, they have the ability using other information that they buy to connect it to who you are in terms of your real life, your real identity, your real name.
Here's the government going on with its report.
Quote, CAI clearly provides intelligence value, whether considered in isolation or in combination with other information, and whether reviewed by humans and our machines.
The IC currently acquires, the IC, the intelligence community, currently acquires a significant amount of CAI for mission-related purposes, including, in some cases, social media data, and then the rest is redacted, and many other types of information.
As a resource available to the general public, including adversaries, CAI also raises counterintelligence risk for the intelligence community.
It also has increasingly important risk and implications for U.S.
person privacy and civil liberties, as CAI can sometimes reveal sensitive and intimate information about individuals.
Without proper control, CAI can be misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S.
persons.
The widespread availability of CAI regarding the activities of a large number of individuals is a relatively new, rapidly growing, and increasingly significant part of the information environment in which the ICU must function.
That is the core of why it was necessary and appropriate for the IC to recognize the complex issues in modern CAI and to commission this report.
Under the U.S.
Constitution, federal statutes, and IC elements, internal procedures, CAI is generally less strictly regulated than other forms of information acquired by the IC, principally because it is publicly available.
Now let me just stop here for a second.
What they're saying is that this information not only has great intelligence value to the U.S.
government, because they can learn enormous amounts about you by buying it, That they'd be constrained constitutionally from acquiring.
Why does the U.S.
government need to learn so much information about us?
We already know from the Snowden reporting, for example, and many other subsequent reports, that the amount of information the U.S.
government can legally collect on us is enormous, vast, virtually limitless.
And what they're saying is that's not enough for them.
There's only a small sector of information that is off-limits to them by the Constitution now, as case law has developed in the War on Terror where they've read all these statutes to be as broad as possible in terms of the government's domestic spying capabilities, and yet what they're saying is, that's not enough.
We need to go and buy even more information.
And what they're also saying is there's a counterintelligence risk here, meaning that it's not just the U.S.
government that can buy this information about U.S.
citizens.
It's also foreign actors and foreign states.
Now, this is one of the reasons why I've long been suggesting to you that a lot of the hysteria around TikTok Mainly the claim that China has created TikTok to be a spying machine on Americans, a fear that the government disseminated and then introduced a law to give them the power not only to ban TikTok but multiple other social media outlets, never made sense to me.
Why would China Need to create and maintain and promote a social media company to spy on Americans when all this information is available on the open market for China to buy.
If you look at who actually owns TikTok, these are people who are basically capitalists.
The main founder and the CEO is somebody who was born in Singapore.
He's not even Chinese.
He left Singapore to go to the London School of Economics and then worked for Goldman Sachs.
A very standard, profit-motivated person.
I say this not to say that TikTok isn't a bad influence on American culture.
It very well might be.
But the claim that the Chinese need TikTok to spy on you never made sense to me, given what this report is saying, that all of this information is available on the open market, the U.S.
government buys it, and so does China.
It always seemed instead to me to be a way of getting you afraid of social media platforms owned by foreign governments to give the U.S.
government the power to ban whatever platforms they want to ban.
And that's what we saw coming out of the hearings on TikTok was not a bill to ban TikTok, but a bill to empower the Biden administration to ban whatever social media companies they want that are foreknown by simply deeming it to be a threat to national security, which would have the result of meaning the only social media companies available in the United States are the ones that we know the U.S.
security state controls through censorship and other forms of pressure.
Keep that in mind whenever TikTok and the controversy surrounding it emerges again, especially when it's accompanied by government claims or demands for greater power to ban social media platforms.
Now, this report goes on.
Under Carpenter v. United States, which is a Supreme Court ruling, acquisition of persistent location information Meaning where you are when you use your internet, when you use your telephone, and perhaps other detailed information concerning one person by law enforcement from communication providers is a Fourth Amendment quote search that generally requires probable cause.
However, the same type of information on millions of Americans is openly for sale to the general public.
As such, the intelligence community policies treat that information as publicly available information, and intelligence community elements can purchase it.
So think about that.
The Supreme Court ruled that in order to get location information about you, they need a search warrant.
It falls under the Fourth Amendment prohibition on searches without a probable cause warrant.
So they can't go and find out where you are when you're using your smartphone or where you are in general using your internet data unless they can get a search warrant on you.
Convince a court there's probable cause to believe that you've engaged in wrongdoing.
That is a big impediment for them.
Now they found a way around it.
They'll just go buy that information.
Call it publicly available information and proclaim for themselves that they no longer need a search warrant because now they have the ability to go buy it.
Here are a couple of examples in the Here are a couple of examples of the types of information that they are able to buy and are buying.
So here, for example, from Thomas Reuters, the CLEAR program is powered by billions of data points and leverages cutting-edge public record technology to bring all content together in a customizable dashboard.
LexisNexis offers more than 84 billion records from 10,000 plus sources including alternative data that helps surface more of the 63 million unbanked or underbanked U.S.
adults.
So those are just some of the examples.
I can't read the rest so we have to go back to There you see Exodus has over 3.5 billion records updated monthly, and PQ collects and combines scattered content from social sites, news sorts, homepages, and blog platforms to present comprehensive online identities.
This is four examples of the billions of data points they are buying to learn more about you, and here's what they say.
About those types of purchases.
Quote, as these examples show, there is a large and growing amount of commercially available information in existence and offered for sale, some of it sensitive with respect to privacy.
The market for CAI, including analysis and exploitation of CAI for insight, is evolving both qualitatively, e.g.
as to the types of data available, and quantitatively as to the amounts of data available.
See, for example, this March 2021 summary from Gartner.
It includes significant information on U.S.
persons, much of which can be acquired in bulk.
And then here you have this section that's entitled The Origins and Evolution of Commercially Available Information, where they describe the history of this type of information and how the U.S.
intelligence community is buying it.
Quote, in substantial part, the vast and growing amount of available CAI results from evolving digital technology and the proliferation of digital dust created by individuals in their daily lives.
As our TOR explains, quote, the digital revolution has placed an incredible amount of information into the hands of private actors, many of whom seek to sell the data.
For example, CAI can be obtained from public records, sometimes digitized from paper originals, such as information about real estate transactions that can be found in local title offices or courthouses.
It can be obtained from smartphones and other software applications.
often in the form of software development kits that collect information from devices in the U.S. and abroad.
And CII can be obtained from cookies and other methods, sometimes associated with real-time bidding for sales of online advertising that track end users as they browse the Internet.
That track end users as they browse the Internet.
In April 2021, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators raised questions about, quote, the sharing of Americans' data through real-time bidding, the auction process used to place many targeted digital advertisements.
The details of these digital developments are beyond the scope of this report.
It is sufficient for our purposes.
This is one of the most important places these companies go to sell this data.
that they have significantly contributed to the profound increase in CAI.
In other words, the intelligence community is such a lucrative and prolific purchaser of this information that they are driving the market for this data.
This is one of the most important places these companies go to sell this data.
It's to the U.S. government.
Why does the U.S.
government need to collect all of this information about its population?
People who are not suspected of having done anything wrong.
How is this a legitimate function of the U.S.
government?
And the fact that this has been done behind a wall of secrecy so that everything that involves or pertains to this program has been marked classified or top secret and means it's a crime to reveal it, Means there's been no democratic debate about whether we want the U.S.
government having the capability to use our tax dollars to purchase enormous amounts of information, incredibly invasive information according to their own descriptions, that give them a complete picture of how we live our lives.
These are the kinds of things that actually matter.
That you cannot turn on CNN or read the New York Times in order to learn about.
Because this is what the government really does.
It happens in the dark.
The report goes on, quote, the DAI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, currently provides funding to another agency.
I wonder who that might be.
So the DAI is providing funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones.
The data DAI receives is global in scope and is not identified as, quote, U.S.
location or foreign location data by the vendor at the time it is provisioned to DAI.
DAI processes the location data as it arrives to identify U.S.
location points that it segregates in a separate database.
CAI, listen to this, CAI, which is what they're buying.
can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S.
persons and non-U.S.
persons.
It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals.
Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government's ability to peer into private lives, to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.
Mission creep can subject CAI collected for one purpose to other purposes that might raise risks beyond those originally calculated.
The IC's use, the intelligence community's use of commercially available information is also the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation by political leaders, the news media, and civil society.
CAI contain information that is deemed sensitive, meaning information that is not widely known about an individual that could be used to cause harm to the person's reputational, emotional well-being, or physical safety.
Let me read that again.
CAI contains information, this is what they're buying, that is deemed sensitive, meaning information that is not widely known about the individual that could be used to cause harm to the person's reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety.
As a primary justification for finding precise cell site location information subject to the Fourth Amendment's protection in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court focused... This is the Supreme Court saying why the intelligence community needs a search warrant to get location information from your cell phone or other electronic devices.
They can't just go and collect this on you without a search warrant.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2018, Carpenter v. United States.
And in so ruling, the Supreme Court, quote, focused...
On how the data provides an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them, his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.
These location records, quote, hold for many Americans the privacy of life.
CAI can also contain intimate information, meaning information that reveals private details about how other people relate to one another.
Studies document the extent to which large collections of sensitive information about individuals, CA or not, can be subject to abuse.
Document examples of abuses, government officials spying on actual or potential romantic partners involving other intelligence collection demonstrates the potential for comparable abuses of CAI held by the intelligence community.
In the wrong hands, namely the US intelligence community, sensitive insights gained through CAI could facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.
Does anybody think this is a legitimate function of the U.S.
government to be collecting?
Putting the power to destroy people's lives and reputations into the hands of the CIA and Homeland Security and the FBI with no limits of any kind on their ability to use it?
Because they've internally decided that because this information is commercially available, it means there's no limits on their ability to collect and use it.
Does anyone want the U.S.
government doing this?
But there's no debate on that, so it doesn't matter what you want or not.
They've just done it.
Here, the report continues.
The title of this next section is, CAI Increases the Power of the Government.
You think?
The government, this is the report, the government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits.
Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation.
While the intelligence community cannot willingly bind itself to this information, it must appreciate how unfettered access to CAI increases its powers in ways that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other societal expectations.
CAI also implicates civil liberties.
CAI can disclose, for example, the detailed movements and associations of individuals and groups revealing political, religious, travel, and speech activities.
CAI could be used, for example, to identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad tracking records.
Now, the reason I didn't want to quote from a media report, and there aren't very many, About this record, this document, this report, is because it's so much more accurate and reliable and more chilling to hear the US government's own description of what they're collecting and the dangers it poses and the power it gives them in their own words.
And remember, this report was never intended to be public.
It was prepared with a secret or classified designation.
Which meant that if you were in the government, let's say someone was in the government, this is how privacy, this is how secrecy powers are abused.
Let's say somebody is in the government, an Edward Snowden, a Daniel Osberg, a Julian Assange, a Chelsea Manning.
And they come across this report and they see this report and they learn that the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security is collecting billions of data points that are incredibly invasive about American citizens with no search warrant.
And they say to themselves, this seems illegal to me.
Or at the very least, this is something the American people ought to know about.
So we can debate whether we want our government doing this.
Because this report was stamped secret, or classified, it automatically becomes a felony to disclose it.
And this is the point I've been making in the context of President Trump's indictment for carelessly mishandling classified information and every other one of these kinds of cases about classified information.
So often, because everything in Washington is reflexively classified, everything they do is put behind this wall of secrecy, it oftentimes is composed classified information is either a very banal information or the kind of information that ought to be disclosed.
By making it a crime to leak it, they are not protecting you and they're not protecting American national security, they're protecting themselves.
And that so often is how secrecy powers are used and abused and exploited in Washington.
And why I'm so skeptical when I hear them saying, oh, President Trump had very sensitive documents, the disclosure of which would really endanger us because so often that is a lie.
So often, the reason information is classified is to protect the people inside the government from their wrongdoing and deceit and abuse of power, not to protect you in any way.
Now, just in case you think this is an isolated case, and I'm sure you don't, the primary benefit of the Snowden reporting, which we did 10 years ago, and I've been giving a lot of interviews about the Snowden reporting 10 years later, and people ask me, did it really produce any benefit?
And I point to some of the laws that were implemented, not just in the United States, but around the world that give greater privacy protection and the awareness that people have now that their privacy is constantly under attack.
But the main change, the main benefit it fostered was the use of encryption.
Both in terms of what companies offer, so if you use, for example, WhatsApp, the communication device owned by Facebook, it's automatically subjected to end-to-end encryption.
Your communications are very difficult to obtain, not impossible, but very difficult.
Almost every journalist I know now will automatically want to use Signal in order to communicate about anything, which is a Communication app that offers enormous amounts of encryption.
Encryption is basically a shell, a technological mathematical shell constructed around your communications that makes it very difficult for the government to invade it and grab what it wants.
They're constantly working the NSA is on how to crack encryption, but it's kind of an arms race.
Privacy advocates and hackers and private companies constantly develop privacy enhancing tools of encryption that make it harder for the government to invade it.
And encryption has been something that was the guarantor, the anchor of privacy ever since the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s.
And it has been an obsession of the U.S.
government since the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, to try and essentially make encryption illegal, or to require that anyone using encryption, any company offering it, give the backdoor keys to the U.S.
government so they can invade Communications of any kind so that there's no such thing anymore as private communications beyond the reach of the US government.
I mean it used to be that if you want to have a conversation and make sure that nobody's spying on you you could just go outside to a park and speak with someone one-on-one.
They want to make it so that in the digital environment there is no such thing anymore as a private communication that even if you're using encryption Under the law, anyone offering encryption, companies offering encryption have to provide the government a backdoor in order to be able to listen to it.
They've been trying for 25 years using every conceivable fear-mongering tactic known to man, starting in the Clinton eras, when at first the idea was we have to monitor white supremacy groups, or militias, or pedophiles.
And then when the Oklahoma City courthouse, the U.S.
courthouse in Oklahoma City was bombed and Timothy McVeigh was convicted for that crime, the Clinton administration immediately seized on that and said, look at the threat of domestic terrorism.
This was planned using the internet.
If we had been able to have a backdoor to encryption, we could have prevented it.
And they introduced all kinds of laws requiring That encryption give the government a backdoor and they've never quite been able to get it.
And they're still trying.
And I want you to look at the history and the way in which the tactic they use to get it.
So here is a op-ed from today in the New York Times by the security writer Julian Englund.
And the title of it is one of the last bastions of digital privacy is under threat.
And she's talking here about how the government is trying to use the threat of pedophilia to convince Americans that they need this backdoor finally to encryption.
And here's what she writes.
Quote.
A tsunami of digital tracking technology has made a large portion of our lives public by default.
Nearly everything we do online in our phones, our movements, our conversations, our reading, watching, and shopping habits is being watched by commercial entities whose data can often be used by governments.
One of the last fashions of privacy are encrypted messaging programs such as Signal and WhatsApp.
These apps, which employ a technology called end-to-end encryption, are designed so that even the app makers themselves cannot view their users' messages.
So if you go to Facebook or you go to Signal, and the government says, I want that person's conversation that's turned over to me, Signal and Facebook or WhatsApp do not have the ability to do it because it's encrypted at each end of the conversation.
The only people who can get it are the two users.
That has been driving governments crazy, the fact that end-to-end encryption exists.
It was offered in the wake of the Snowden reporting by companies desperate to prove to their users they wouldn't just turn over everybody's conversations to the NSA, but instead would protect the privacy of users.
She goes on, quote, texting on one of these apps, particularly if you use the disappearing messages feature, can be almost as private and ephemeral as most real-life conversations used to be.
However, governments are increasingly demanding that tech companies surveil encrypted messages in a new and dangerous way.
For years, nations sought a master key to unlock encrypted content with a search warrant, but largely gave up because they couldn't prove they could keep such a key safe from bad actors.
In other words, imagine if the US government had a key As they've been demanding, that allowed them to break all encryption and have a backdoor to read any communications that you ever have online, in real time.
The concern was, what if terrorist groups obtain that?
Or what if China or Iran or North Korea or Russia obtain it?
Then they too would have full access.
Not just to your information, but to the US government's.
They go on this article, now they are seeking to force companies to monitor all their content, whether or not it is encrypted.
The campaign to institute mass suspicionless searches is global.
In Britain, the online safety bill, which is making its way through parliament, demands that messaging services identify and remove child exploitation images, quote, whether communicated publicly or privately by means of the service.
In the United States, bills introduced in Congress require online services to identify and remove such images, and in the European Union, a leaked memo revealed that many member countries support weakening encryption as part of the fight against child exploitation.
The surge of regulatory efforts are part of a larger worldwide concern about the prevalence of child exploitation images online.
Although substantiated cases of child sexual abuse have thankfully been on a steep decline in the United States, down 63% since 1990 according to the University of New Hampshire Crimes Against Children Research Center, The prevalence of sexual images of children circulating online has risen sharply, swamping the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's cyber tip line with 32 million reports in 2022.
The recent legislative proposals are focused on detecting these images as they circulate online.
But once you are in the businesses of scanning content, you are in the surveillance business.
And that is not what we want from the companies that hold our most intimate communications.
So they always have some excuse.
Obviously people are afraid of terrorism.
People are afraid of communism in the Cold War.
People are afraid of Al-Qaeda and then ISIS.
People on the left are afraid of Russia.
People on the right are afraid of China.
They always have some new fear to present to you as to why you should allow full-scale government snooping.
One of those now is online pedophilia because obviously that's something that makes us all disgusted.
But if we give in to every fear that's presented to us and never ask whether there's a way to combat these evils, short of allowing the government full-scale access to our communications, there will never be any end to state surveillance.
That is the framework they have been using forever.
Now, I wanted to show you the climate in the mid-1990s because I do think one of the things I've learned As I get older, a phrase that doesn't come out of my mouth or anyone's mouth cleanly is that you often assume that major historical events that you've lived through are common knowledge to other people because they shape a major part of your political framework and your political understanding.
But every year that goes by, an event that you've lived through To more and more people becomes something lost to history, something they haven't lived through and therefore often know nothing about.
There are a lot of people who don't know what the Snowden reporting is because they were too young when it happened.
There are a lot more people, millions of Americans in fact, who did not live through 9-11, who did not live through the way in which the government exploited 9-11 to implement the War on Terror and the assault on civil liberties.
They don't know who neocons are or what they did.
So a lot of this history is lost, to say nothing of the mid-1990s Clinton administration's attacks on civil liberty, and to say even less about the Cold War attacks through McCarthyism and the like, which is why when Russiagate happened, And the CIA and the FBI begin feeding the New York Times and Washington Post classic McCarthy themes of is President Trump a Kremlin agent?
Are his supporters loyal to Putin?
Lots of people didn't recognize that as McCarthyism because that historical knowledge has been lost.
It's a historical ignorance that the government exploits.
But this effort to create a surveillance state long predated 9-11 and the war on terror.
Let alone ISIS and Al-Qaeda and Russia and China and pedophilia.
One of the most interesting articles that I cannot encourage you to read highly enough was an article in Vanity Fair in 1998 by the longtime leftist Gore Vidal.
Gore Vidal was a Very famous author who was a literary figure.
He was kind of the caricature of an American aristocrat.
And for a long time he was kind of a standard Democratic Party supporter.
He, I forget exactly what it was, had a personal connection to the Kennedy family or to Jackie Kennedy.
He ran for Senate as a Democrat.
He used to have online debates with William Buckley, where William Buckley represented establishment conservatism and Gore Vidal represented establishment liberalism.
He was a very kind of mainstream liberal democratic figure.
But then, later on in his life, he became increasingly radicalized.
About the US security state and the evils it presented.
And one of the main reasons was because he watched the Clinton administration, in the wake of the attack on the Oklahoma City courthouse, immediately exploit that terrorist attack to demand massive powers that were previously unthinkable, including full backdoor access to internet communications.
Right as the internet was emerging as a technology, the Clinton administration immediately acted to try and commandeer it.
And destroy its core value of letting human beings communicate with one another without the government watching by exploiting the Oklahoma City attack to demand a power they had wanted even before that, which was backdoor access to the Internet.
But it wasn't just that.
It was also the Justice Department and FBI's attack on Waco under Janet Reno, claiming that they were guilty of sexual assault of children.
They firebombed this kind of cult or whatever you want to call it that was loyal to David Koresh because it wasn't respecting the power of the U.S. government.
They murdered dozens of people.
They shot at Ruby Ridge, a person who, according to the government, had a white supremacist ideology.
He was really just kind of a person who believed in the segregation of the races.
He bought a ranch in Idaho where he was living and the government shot his wife and dog.
And so Gore Vidal became radicalized about the U.S.
security state and its abuses and the menaces it presented and wrote this article in Vanity Fair.
In which he was essentially saying that a lot of the concerns that were being expressed on the American right about the dangers of the federal government, the dangers of the U.S.
security state, were ones he used to scoff at but then came to realize were not only valid but pressing and urgent.
Just to give you an idea for how these debates have been working for many decades and how the same tactics are always used by the U.S.
security state, To extract greater and greater surveillance powers, namely to fearmonger.
So I just want to read you a couple of excerpts.
I'm sorry, what?
So this is published in November of 1998 by Vanity Fair.
And it really gives you a sense for what the climate was All the way back then, even though it seems like a long time ago, it was very redolent.
So here's just a couple of excerpts from Gore Vidal's essay, which again, I really encourage you to read.
The title of it is Shredding the Bill of Rights.
Very much to the point.
Quote, in the last year or so, I have had two Cary Grant-like revelations, considerably grimmer than what went on in the good old days of relative freedom from the state.
A well-known acting couple and their two small children came to see me one summer.
Photos were taken of their four-year-old and six-year-old cavorting bare in the sea.
When the couple got home to Manhattan, the father dropped the negatives off at a drugstore to be printed.
Later, a frantic call from his fortunately friendly druggist, quote, if I print these, I've got to report you and you could get five years in the slammer for kiddie porn.
The war on kiddie porn is now getting into high gear, though I was once assured by Wardell Pomery, Alfred Kinsey's colleague in sex research, that pedophilia was barely a blip on the statistical screen.
Somewhere down there with farm lads and their animal friends.
Meaning bestiality.
Lately I've been going through statistics about terrorism.
Usually direct responses to crimes our government has committed against foreigners, although recently federal crimes against our own people are increasing.
Meaning, he's been looking at statistics about terrorism, which was Bill Clinton's argument for why he needed backdoor encryption, and what he found is, usually terrorism is a response to crimes we commit against foreigners, and then foreigners bring that violence to US soil.
Many people, and I would certainly be one of them, see 9-11.
At least in part is that.
The CIA has always called that blowback.
Or domestic terrorism, federal crimes, which he says are responses to crimes against their own people.
Timothy McVeigh cited Waco as his radicalizing event and anger over it.
So he's connecting crimes by the US government on the one hand to the crimes that they cite in response that justify greater and greater power.
Gore Vidal goes on, quote, only twice in 12 years has an American commercial plane been destroyed in flight by terrorists.
Neither originated in the United States.
To prevent, however, a repetition of these two crimes, hundreds of millions of travelers must now be subject to searches, seizures, delays.
Currently, the Fourth Amendment is in the process of disintegration out of, quote, military necessity.
The constitutional language used by Lincoln to wage civil war, suspend habeas corpus, shut down newspapers, and free southern slaves.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees, quote, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Just a reminder of what the Constitution actually prohibits.
Gore Vidal says, quote, the Fourth Amendment is the people's principal defense against totalitarian government.
It is a defense that is now daily breached by deed and law.
So this is before 9-11, before the war on terror.
Gore Vidal was warning about the menacing growing surveillance state and the other powers of the federal government in the name of fighting terrorism, even though the threat of terrorism was trivial.
In the context of what the government was doing.
Now, one of the very first articles I wrote after I began writing about journalism in 2005, this was March 2006, I called it a trip down right wing memory lane because I was reminding Supporters of George Bush and Dick Cheney that much of what they were supporting in the name of war on terror, the war on terror, they had been opposing only seven or eight years earlier when it was the Clinton administration demanding the same powers also in the name of fighting terrorism.
And here's what I wrote, quote, here's your trip down memory lane when conservatives used to pretend that they believed in principles of limited government powers, the need for investigations into law-breaking accusations, and the preference for individual liberty over increased security.
Let us begin with Senator John Ashcroft, who became George Bush's Attorney General in the 9-11 era, but in July of 1997, just four years before the 9-11 attack,
Senator Ashcroft warned of the profound dangers posed by proposals for the federal government to overcome encryption technology in order to enable the government to monitor international computer communications, a power justified by the Clinton administration on the ground that terrorists use such communications and the U.S.
government must therefore be able to monitor them.
Here's what John Ashcroft wrote, quote, J. Edgar Hoover would have loved this.
The Clinton administration wants government to be able to read international computer communications, financial transactions, personal email and proprietary information sent abroad, all in the name of national security.
In a proposal that raises obvious concerns about Americans' privacy, President Clinton wants to give agencies the keys for decoding all exported U.S.
software and Internet communications.
Not only would Big Brother be looming over the shoulders of international cyber-surfers, he also threatens to render our state-of-the-art computer software engineers obsolete and unemployed.
Granted, the Internet could be used to commit crimes, and advanced encryption could disguise such activity.
However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps.
Why then should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the web?
The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear.
The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value.
Every medium by which people communicate could be exploited by those with illegal or immoral intentions.
Nevertheless, This is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our email diaries, open our ATM records, or translate our international communications.
Those who made such arguments in 1997 were great patriots defending American liberty.
Now, anyone who says such things is, according to Ashcroft himself, an al-Qaeda ally who is working subversively to destroy America.
That's how radically The Republican and Democratic parties switched in the War on Terror, though certainly Democrats are very supportive of the surveillance state after 9-11 as well.
Now, just to give you a little bit more sense of this history, that what I just showed you, this new report about massive government spying on your lives, maintaining dossiers about what you do through purchasing Commercially available information or the attempt to eliminate encryption by citing the threats of Russia or China or terrorism or pedophilia has been going on for almost 30 years in the United States.
It's the same attempt over and over to prevent the internet from being a place where you can speak privately.
Here in a New York Times article in 2010 is an article entitled, Recalling 1995 Bombing, Clinton Sees Parallels.
And the article states, quote, With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing approaching, former President Bill Clinton on Thursday drew parallels between the anti-government tone, this is during the Obama year, so he's trying to say, He's trying to warn that opposing the government or questioning the government is very dangerous and he's using Oklahoma City to do it.
Former President Bill Clinton on Thursday drew parallels between the anti-government tone that preceded that devastating attack and the political tumult of today, saying government critics must be mindful that angry words can stir violent actions.
In advance of a symposium on Friday about the attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building and its current relevance, Mr. Clinton, who was in his first term at the time of the bombing, warned that attempts to incite opposition by demonizing the government Can provoke responses beyond what political figures intend.
Quote, there can be real consequences.
And when what you say animates people who do things you would never do.
Mr. Clinton said in an interview saying that Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, and those who assisted him, quote, were profoundly alienated, disconnected people, disconnected people who bought into this militant anti-government line.
The former president said the potential for stirring a violent response might be even greater now with the reach of the internet and other common ways of communication that did not exist in 1995 when the building was struck.
Quote, because of the internet there is this vast echo chamber and our advocacy reaches into corners that would never have been possible before, said Mr. Clinton, who said political messages are now able to reach those who are both, quote, serious and seriously disturbed.
He will be delivering the keynote address Friday at an event about the Oklahoma City attack being sponsored by the Center for American Progress Fund and the Democratic Leadership Council.
He spent 15 years exploiting that singular attack That terrorism attack in Oklahoma City in 1995, even 15 years later during the Obama administration saying, you people who are too critical of the government, who are stirring up too much skepticism about the government, you need to stop because blood is on your hands if you continue to do so.
Now, this is the technology I was talking about from the New York Times in 1994.
They called it the Clipper Chip.
There you see the article, The Battle of the Clipper Chip from 1994.
So this was a year before the Oklahoma City bombing.
Once the Oklahoma City bombing happened, the Clinton administration said, do you see we need backdoor access to your encryption?
So that nobody can communicate on the internet privately.
But they were arguing that before Oklahoma City even happened, just like neocons wanted to invade Iraq years before 9-11 and then seized on 9-11 as the excuse, the Clinton administration tried to get fears of terrorism to justify eliminating all privacy on the internet, even though it was something they wanted before the Oklahoma City attack ever happened.
Listen to, this is 1994.
The internet was just emerging.
People are seeing the potential to empower the individual.
And they were petrified that it would let people be too free.
And they immediately, the government, and the NSA, and the CIA, and the FBI, started plotting how to take this internet technology and put it under their control.
Make it impossible for you to use it for what it was intended to be, which is a way to communicate and engage in all kinds of activity without having to go through governments or large corporations.
They were petrified that individuals would become too empowered.
So listen to this, this is 1984, so we're talking about 30 years ago, 29 years ago.
Just to give you a sense, in the wake of this new report, how this is what the government is trying to do forever.
Quote, on a sunny spring day in Mountain View, California, 50 angry activists are plotting against the United States government.
They may not look subversive, sitting around a conference table dressed in t-shirts and jeans and eating burritos, but they are self-proclaimed saboteurs.
They are the cyberpunks, a loose confederation of computer hackers, hardware engineers, and high-tech rabble-rousers.
The precise object of their rage is the clipper chip, officially known as the MYK78, and not much bigger than a tooth.
Just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket.
A computer chip from the outside, indistinguishable from thousands of others.
It seems improbable that this black chiclet is the focal point of a battle that may determine the degree to which our civil liberties survive in the next century, but this is the shared belief in this room.
The Clipper chip has prompted what might be considered to be the first holy war of the information highway.
That was what the internet was called then, the information highway.
Two weeks ago, the war got bloodier as a researcher circulated a report that the chip might have a serious technological flaw.
But at its heart, the issue is political, not technical.
The cyberpunks consider the chipper the lever that Big Brother is using to try and pry into conversations, messages, and transactions of the computer age.
These high-tech Paul Revere's are trying to mobilize America against the evil portent of a quote cyberspace police state, as one of their internet Jeremy's put it.
Joining them in the battle is a formidable force, including almost all of the communications and computer industries, many members of Congress, and political columnists of all stripes.
The anti-Clipper aggregation is an equal opportunity club uniting the ACLU and Rush Limbaugh.
These were the people, it was the ACLU, the old school ACLU, they would never be caught dead doing this now, but they were warning that the Clinton administration and the federal government were trying to destroy privacy using the internet to turn it into a ubiquitous surveillance system and so was Rush Limbaugh.
And their focus of this was this Clipper chip that would give the government backstore access to encryption.
Quote, the Clipper's defenders, who are largely in the U.S.
government, believe it represents the last chance to protect national safety and national security against the developing information anarchy that fosters criminals, terrorists, and foreign foes.
Its adherents pose it as the answer, or at least part of the answer, to a problem created by an increasingly sophisticated application of an age-old technology.
Cryptography, the use of secret codes for centuries, cryptography was the domain of armies and diplomatic corps.
Now it has a second purpose, protecting personal and corporate privacy.
Computer technology and advanced telecommunications equipment have drawn precious business information and intimate personal communications out into the open.
The phenomenon is well known to the current Prince of Wales, whose intimate cell phone conversations were intercepted, recorded, and broadcast worldwide.
And corporations realized that competitors can easily intercept their telephone conversations, email messages, and faxes.
High tech has created a huge privacy gap, but miraculously, a fix has emerged.
Cheap, easy to use, virtually unbreakable encryption.
Cryptography is the silver bullet by which we can hope to reclaim our privacy.
This solution, however, has one drawback.
Cryptography shields the law abiding and the lawless equally.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies contend that if strong encryption codes are widely available, their efforts to protect the public would be paralyzed.
So they have come up with a compromise, a way to neutralize encryption.
That's the chipper clip.
And that compromise is what this war is all about.
The idea is to give the government the means to override other people's codes according to a concept called key escrow.
Employing normal cryptography, two parties can communicate in total privacy with both of them using a digital key to encrypt and decipher the conversation or message.
A potential eavesdropper has no key and therefore cannot understand the conversation or read the data transmission.
That is end-to-end encryption.
That's what has been so scary to the government and still is.
But with Clipper, an additional key created at the time the equipment is manufactured is held by the government in escrow.
With a court-approved wiretap, an agency like the FBI could listen in.
By adding clipper chips to telephones, we could have a system that assures communications will be private from everybody except the government.
And that's what rankles Clipper's many critics.
Why they ask should people who are accused of no crime have to give the government the keys to their private communication?
Why shouldn't the market, rather than the government, determine what sort of crypto system wins favor?
And isn't it true that use of key escrow will make our technology so unattractive that the international marketplace, that the United States, will lose its edge in the lucrative telecommunication and computer fields?
Clipper might clip the entire economy.
Nonetheless, on February 4th, the Clinton White House announced its approval of the Clipper chip, which has been approved under study as a government standard since last April, and the crypto war broke into full force.
Within a month, one civil liberties group, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, received 40,000 electronic missives urging a stop to Clipper.
Quote, the war is upon us, wrote Tim May, co-founder of the Cyberpunks, in an urgent dispatch soon after the announcement.
Quote, Clinton and Gore folks have shown themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of Big Brother.
That really was the start of this war that 30 years later continues to rage, that the government believes that you should not have any room in the digital age to speak privately without its prying eyes being able to be cast upon it.
And this new report demonstrates that they found a way around it, which is to buy so much information about you that they can essentially learn everything you're doing anyway without bothering to get a search warrant in the first place.
Here from Mars Technica in 2015 during the Obama years shows you the same fight was happening.
The FBI director under President Obama said Silicon Valley's encryption is a business model problem.
Makers of phones today that can't be unlocked a year ago they could be.
Obama officials also were trying To demand backdoor encryption, leaders in both major political parties have increasingly been calling on tech companies to give law enforcement encryption backdoors in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in Paris and California.
FBI Director James Comey has suggested that Silicon Valley isn't faced with a serious technical problem, but rather a business model problem, according to a report in his comments in The Intercept based on C-SPAN video of the hearing.
This is what has been going on for years.
The U.S.
government has constantly been trying to present you all kinds of things you're supposed to be scared of.
Three months ago, they told you you should be very scared of TikTok because China is using TikTok to spy on you.
And a lot of people bought into that, got scared of China, believed that China created TikTok as a spying device on Americans, even though, as I said, the US government acknowledges they could buy that information in the open market.
And then the government took that fear that people in good faith believed about China and TikTok.
And tried to implement a law that would give the Biden administration the power to not only ban TikTok, but all social media platforms with foreign ownership simply by decreeing those platforms to be a national security threat.
They originally used the threat of pedophilia and are currently using the threat of pedophilia to try and play on your emotions, to give the government backdoor to encryption, backdoor keys to encryption.
They used Al-Qaeda until that no longer worked, then they used ISIS, then they fed us Russia, now China.
It's always a constant effort to keep you in fear, to allow you, or to force you, to manipulate you, to giving the government power that ought to be unthinkable for the US government to have.
That's the war that's been going on for 30 years.
And what made the Snowden reporting so consequential was it showed how much progress the U.S.
government had made in spying on the Internet, in cracking encryption, in turning the Internet into a full-scale surveillance state.
And this new report released just this week that was prepared in secret for the Director of National Intelligence shows the length they're willing to go, that they're taking your money And they're creating dossiers about you, massive comprehensive files according to their own words that can enable them to blackmail you or destroy your reputation or cause you physical injury or physical risk and emotional suffering that gives them enormous power.
And they've implemented this program totally in secret.
By calling it secret and classified and therefore making it a crime to reveal it, with no democratic debate, they've just seized this power, and they've completely circumvented the legal protections of the Constitution that are imposed by the Supreme Court, so that their position is, we know we need a search warrant if we want to collect this information about one person, but if we want to buy it about millions of Americans, there are no limits on what we can do.
We live in a surveillance state.
I know that is a harsh term that seems appropriate only for more despotic regimes, but if you look at the way in which your privacy has been destroyed and the goal of the US government, of the NSA, And many Snowden documents revealed this, that they say this explicitly, is the total elimination in the digital era.
Meaning there is no place that you can go digitally beyond their reach, beyond their ability to surveil or learn what you're doing.
That goal is being increasingly fulfilled, and it's being fulfilled with barely any transparency and with no democratic debate, and that is what makes this report, and the reason we spent so much time walking you through the report itself, so you can hear the government in its own words describing what they're doing, so deeply menacing.
Now, I indicated that I wanted to devote a segment to talking about my thoughts about the interview that we conducted last night with Robert Kennedy Jr., which has produced a lot of discussion, a lot of controversy, a lot of kind of reverberations about some of the things he said, and I specifically wanted to focus on a couple of the impressions I had about
His kind of mentality and specifically his willingness to do something very rare which is acknowledge the way in which he felt he was victimized by propaganda and how the COVID crisis and his views that the government systematically lied to the American people and then censored dissent radicalized him in a way that I think a lot of us have experienced where you go into one incident
Or one episode, see the extent to which the government is lying to you, and that destroys your trust in government authority and in media institutions, and then prompts you to rethink and re-examine all of your views.
He certainly hasn't gotten there yet.
I think there's still some views he holds by virtue of having held them for decades that he hasn't reconsidered.
But that personal characteristic, that trait, I actually think Donald Trump has it too from having seen The corruption and evil of the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security up close and personal, and it has radicalized Donald Trump against establishment propaganda and against the validity and legitimacy of establishment institutions, is also very present in RFK Jr.
We don't really have time.
I've gone over what our allotted time is.
It's already 8.20.
That is a little bit of insight.
I'm going to continue discussing that.
On our Locals program, we move every Tuesday and Thursday to Locals, which is part of the Rumble platform.
It's available exclusively for subscribers.
We often, or sometimes, publish excerpts of that on our own page, as we recently did with my discussion of how the LGBT cause has been commandeered and used for establishment ends.
But I'm going to continue that discussion on Locals.
If you want to be a part of that discussion, if you want to have access to our After Show on Tuesday and Thursday, you can simply join our Locals community, doing so All right.
