April 20, 2024 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
17:14
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| This is the Jason Burma Show on today's News Talk TNT. It is my utter pleasure to be joined by Amy Peekoff. | |
| I've been following her ever since. | |
| We saw Parler taken down in a fashion that was clearly anti-free speech. | |
| And I'll never forget when you were talking about the Faustian bargain that had been made with Big Tech and the government. | |
| Currently you're with BitChute, a platform that predates Rumble. | |
| And I've encouraged you even had some interactions with the guys behind the scene. | |
| They are currently expanding into live streaming, monetization, all sorts of great things. | |
| So congratulations on that and thank you for joining us. | |
| So for those that are unaware of your background and your fight, now you've been fighting for free speech for a very long time. | |
| The big tech issue is not, I wouldn't say relatively new at this point, but you certainly predate that. | |
| Let's talk about that. | |
| What has your journey been exposing Right. | |
| So there's actually two issues in which I've been involved that relate to the relationship between big tech and government and, of course, the suppression by big tech of up-and-coming competitors. | |
| And those are free speech, of course, and privacy. | |
| And privacy was my academic specialty. | |
| I did a lot of academic research and writing and publishing about Privacy, the so-called right to privacy. | |
| And so, you know, this is where I've been following the issue that we'll get to today, you know, talking about this FISA Section 702, the warrantless spying on Americans. | |
| I studied the legal doctrine and wrote about the legal doctrine that made statutes like that possible. | |
| So this was before I ever got involved in actually working for a social media company. | |
| There is a strategic investor who was a strategic investor in both Parler and now in BitChute who saw my work and was interested and we were talking. | |
| And it was right around the time that Parler was having its surge and it looked like they actually needed to bring on somebody to deal with policy. | |
| And so that's how I got involved. | |
| So let's talk about this because, you know, right now I think we have a lawless government. | |
| I think we've had one for a very, very long time. | |
| I don't think this is necessarily a new phenomenon, especially when we talk about the government and technology companies. | |
| I often talk about Hepting versus AT&T and the fact that pre-9-11 you had these secret server rooms where basically all the information was just being funneled Into a server to the National Security Agency, and it was twice thrown out of court. | |
| You know, obviously, we've gained a lot of leeway for the government since then. | |
| The Patriot Act, NDAA, Military Commissions Act, the birth of Homeland Security, the extension of fusion centers by them. | |
| And then ultimately, this big tech collusion, and also a program that's not discussed enough, and I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, the Signature Reduction Program. | |
| That William M. Arkin reported on almost three years ago in Newsweek, where they have 60,000 people in a program made by the Pentagon. | |
| They operate domestically and foreignly. | |
| They have access This is an open admission. | |
| Again, there's never been any oversight of that. | |
| That article is three years old, but it'll take a good hour or two to read it. | |
| What is the recourse? | |
| And you just talked about 702. | |
| I mean, this really makes every single company that has any type of significant interaction with you have to give over all of their information to the government, does it not, if requested? | |
| I mean, pretty much, you know, there is such a broad targeting standard in 702. | |
| It's that they're believed to have foreign intelligence information, where foreign intelligence information is a notoriously broad term. | |
| EFF has actually said at one point, at least, that this definition of this term was secret. | |
| Some of these things are even secret. | |
| We don't even know how broad the term is. | |
| So imagine they can target anybody who is overseas according to that standard and have then an excuse to sweep up conversations of anyone with whom they are communicating here at home and put it all into this vast database and then say, oh, it's lawfully collected. | |
| So basically we can do whatever we want with it. | |
| We can search it whenever we want. | |
| We don't have to have a warrant, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| And what is currently before the Senate, which they're going to vote on tomorrow, | |
| is the bill that was passed by the House in which not only have they not added a warrant | |
| requirement to it, which every privacy advocate has asked for, and it almost passed in the House, | |
| lost in a tie, where Johnson cast the deciding vote against adding a warrant requirement to it. | |
| So no warrant requirement to search the database. | |
| In addition, they are expanding the authority, if this passes tomorrow in the Senate, such that they can not only go to the traditional communication service providers and demand that all the communications get turned over, they can go to any business person Who has access to a mode of communication, so a Wi-Fi router and all sorts of other examples of devices. | |
| I'm not a techie myself, but they're giving examples like any cable service guy who has to come to your house and maybe mess with your modem could be forced by the government to do something to the modem to give them access to it. | |
| And then suddenly you're being spied upon and you don't know it, of course. | |
| You know, and that's that's one of the worst things about these programs is that the tradition was if you were under investigation by our government, an agent would come to you and present a warrant to you. | |
| And then you, you know, let them search or you turn over the piece of evidence or whatever it was. | |
| Now they go to a third party. | |
| You're never aware of it. | |
| And of course, they don't even have to present a warrant. | |
| No probable cause, no particular suspicion. | |
| This is what's up for a vote tomorrow. | |
| And it's been abused over 278,000 times over a course of several years. | |
| That was documented by Reuters. | |
| It was a finding of the court. | |
| This program needs to be curbed. | |
| You can't trust the FBI to police itself on this. | |
| And it certainly doesn't need to be expanded. | |
| You can't trust the FBI to police itself, period, or any of these three letter agencies, let's be honest. | |
| And what really is troubling about this is, you know, you mentioned all those different times that they've utilized this when they shouldn't have. | |
| It should be so obvious to at least the spectrum of people that are behind Donald Trump, where they clearly did this to him and his campaign. | |
| Again, they convoluted some kind of Russian collusion that was absolutely never there, weaponized the Justice Department against him, and yet this kind of shows how false the left-right paradigm is. | |
| This thing passed through the House with plenty of Republican support, and it may get plenty of Republican support tomorrow. | |
| It might. It might indeed. | |
| And one of the interesting things when you bring up Trump was at one point several days ago, there was a post on True Social whereby he said something, you know, he does all these all caps posts, right? | |
| He types in all caps. And it was something about Kill FISA. In all caps. | |
| And I'm thinking, okay, this is great. | |
| Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy has been telling him some good stuff again or something, you know, and he's telling him to kill FISA. And then, of course, Johnson, who he supported as becoming Speaker of the House, Johnson did not kill FISA. In fact, he made sure that it sailed through and he made sure that it didn't have a warrant requirement attached to it either. | |
| Right after Johnson had cast the deciding vote against the warrant requirement, got FISA through, he went down to Mar-a-Lago and they had a press conference together. | |
| And Johnson was saying nothing about FISA at all, of course. | |
| He doesn't want to talk about it because he knows he's wrong. | |
| I think he knows he's wrong in his heart. | |
| And Trump, he doesn't know he's walking into. | |
| He thinks he's talking about whatever Johnson's talking about. | |
| And in the Q&A, because he likes Q&As, he likes to talk, somebody got him with a question about FISA. What do you think about the FISA that just passed? | |
| And he said, you know, a lot of his usual nonsense strung together things, right? | |
| He said, I've studied FISA better than anybody, that I'm not really a fan of it, but I told Johnson that he could do whatever he wanted with it. | |
| And he just completely walked back what he had posted on True Social maybe a day or two before about kill FISA, basically, you know, saying okay. | |
| Yeah. Which is extremely disappointing because, again, this has been kind of a transactional and naive president. | |
| I think that we can't look to anybody to be a hero. | |
| I think the other choice is so patently worse and has really shown themselves to be patently worse in the last four years. | |
| But at the same time, you can go to Operation Warp Speed. | |
| You can go to how he handled the Assange situation. | |
| You could go to the promise of showing the JFK documents twice. | |
| I'm sorry, folks, I'm going to say every single time, if you can't take the deep state on from 1963, all right, now, 60 plus years ago, I don't know how you'd take the deep state on now. | |
| I would agree with you that, you know, Ramaswamy, again, he's unproven, but he's said a lot of good things. | |
| Oh, I mean, he steered Trump in the right direction on a few things, definitely. | |
| You have to admit that. | |
| Absolutely. Well, I'm just saying actions speak louder than words. | |
| And who knows what's going to happen in the next seven months? | |
| Who knows what's going to happen tomorrow, for God's sake? | |
| Again, that sets such a terrible... | |
| Folks need to understand, that sets such a terrible precedent that you could say, you don't need a warrant, you could say infiltrate large swaths of people in political campaigns in real time right after and put that under some kind of special program where you would have mass surveillance the likes of which you couldn't imagine and anything they did it wouldn't be Russian collusion or whatever the pretense was just like we've seen they would wage lawfare against them and I've got news for people a lot of people that work in DC and around it are very corrupt people At least on lower levels, it will not be hard to charge them with misdemeanor-type crimes or threatened felonies if this thing passes through. | |
| That's where I see this going. | |
| Not just them, though. Not just them, right? | |
| You and I. I mean, there's a book, I forget the exact title of it, but part of the title of the book is Nine Felonies, that essentially any of us could be construed to have committed some nine felonies at any given time. | |
| And there are so many laws on the books, and some of them, especially in some industries, I used to hear from John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T, in the banking industry, some of the alphabet soup agencies would tell them to do A, and some of the alphabet soup agencies would tell them to do non-A. And so at any given time, they'd have to, of course, choose. | |
| They'd have to either do A or non-A, one of the two, and they could be then accountable to the other agency for not doing what they thought you were supposed to do. | |
| And, you know, we're not as heavily regulated as a bank, right? | |
| Not yet, anyway. | |
| But certainly there are things where we think we're doing the right thing, but there's some law according to which we might not be acting exactly perfectly. | |
| So tell me what's going on with Bitchute right now, because obviously you guys are expanding. | |
| I think that you have been at the forefront of being a true free speech type platform for some time. | |
| You do not curate content in the manner that, say, even a rumble does. | |
| I think that your rules and regulations are, hey, we don't want to see things that are illegal, you know, no snuff stuff. | |
| Obviously the basics. | |
| Where is this going in the future? | |
| So right now we are adding features. | |
| We're actually working on an entire new site redesign that is not too far off. | |
| We have added, as you mentioned earlier, monetization. | |
| So the first step of that is that we created PayShoot. | |
| So if you go to PayShoot.com, you can check it out. | |
| There's ability to blog, to create communities, to have subscriptions, to do something we call chat bombs, whereby you can Send, you know, some sort of a token contribution to someone at the same time, maybe with a compliment or a question. | |
| We're eventually going to integrate that in with our livestream feature. | |
| We do have livestream active on BitChute. | |
| We have it with a live chat. | |
| We're going to get the chat bombs in there as well. | |
| So, there's a lot of functionality that we're adding. | |
| Like I said, a whole new site redesign. | |
| And we also have this new series that we're doing called Podshoot, whereby I've been doing interviews of all kinds of interesting people. | |
| It's once a week. It's on Wednesdays. | |
| People can go check it out on the main BitChute channel. | |
| I just interviewed John Ruddick who is a member of the Legislative Council within the Parliament of New South | |
| Wales in Australia I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's a libertarian | |
| and Had a really nice conversation with him right around this | |
| time yesterday actually because it was morning, Australia time | |
| Well right now in Australia Obviously we have those cases where they have criminalized | |
| speech and they have forced the hand of social media to directly | |
| take down in. | |
| These hate speech laws continue to become more and more prolific. | |
| In this country, in these last couple of minutes, you're in the arena. | |
| What do we have to do in order to actually have Google is a shell company for Alphabet, YouTube, works with the NSA, works with NASA, works on quantum computing and artificial intelligence. | |
| They're an arm of the government. | |
| So how do we start making that separation of this techno-fascistic partnership that clearly targets anything that gains steam and de-platforms on all sides? | |
| Well, as a platform, we have a completely independent stack. | |
| So we are not relying on a cloud service provider like Amazon, as Parler was. | |
| We've got our own servers and etc. | |
| So going and actually supporting a platform that has done the work to build an independent stack that has good functionality, which BitChute does. | |
| It's already solid. It's about to get even better, like I said, with this Entire site redesign, etc. | |
| So yeah, come check it out. | |
| And you don't have to give up the other platform at this point. | |
| You know, suppose you're still using a YouTube hoping that somehow their content curation is going to get better sometime in the near future or Maybe it's the monetization that you've become dependent on, etc. | |
| Start building up alternatives and come check out BitChute. | |
| Just cross-post everything. | |
| And as we grow and as our monetization expands, we've got ads coming. | |
| We're going to have ad revenue sharing coming very soon. | |
| Get in on the ground floor and do it. | |
| Amy, thank you so much for joining us and I couldn't agree more. | |
| We have to get ourselves away from these technopolies. | |
| Again, you look at Google, they're the number one search engine. | |
| If you look at Android and Chrome, they're the number one platform across the world. | |
| The number two search engine is YouTube. | |
| The number one video platform is YouTube. | |
| We haven't even talked about all the other shell companies involving Alphabet. | |
| Once again, we've got to break free of this big tech conglomerate that is hand-in-hand with the military-industrial complex. | |
| Thank you so much. Guys, we're going to take a break. | |
| We're going to come back. Great second hour lined up for you. |
Export Selection