| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Fighting for Unclassification
00:02:14
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|
| Before the EMP Commission came along, EMP was classified. | |
| I mean, it was one of the most deeply, darkly kept secrets by the Department of Defense. | |
| And it's still hard to get the Department of Defense to let things go out unclassified so that people will know about it. | |
| That's one of the things we're fighting about right now. | |
| We want our reports that we have written to go to the American people and to go to the utilities so they will know how to protect themselves. | |
| Why don't they? | |
| Because they want to keep it a deep, dark secret. | |
| And so they want to classify our reports so that nobody outside of the government can read them. | |
| And this is one of the things we're fighting with them now. | |
| The only reason most people who do know about EMP now mostly know about it because we did get two of our reports unclassified. | |
| The 2004 and 2008 reports were published unclassified. | |
| It was no mean feat to achieve that. | |
| We had a huge battle for a year to get those reports unclassified. | |
| Most people don't know, you know, but there were four other reports that we didn't get unclassified. | |
| They're still classified, okay? | |
| And we're having the same problem. | |
| So that's one thing. | |
| The EMP threat has been classified for so long. | |
| And it comes on the scene so people think it's a new threat, all right? | |
| And EMP, you know, because it started in 2004, 2008, it actually took longer than that, you know, because it didn't get a lot of press coverage. | |
| People hadn't heard about it. | |
| They thought, oh, this is some screwy made-up thing. | |
| It sounds like science fiction. | |
| Some people still think it's science fiction. | |
| People who are taken seriously by the press. | |
| Jeffrey Lewis is a good example. | |
| Here's a political scientist who last year who was on national public radio and laughed at the idea that EMP is a series. | |
| Of course, he doesn't know anything about EMP or nuclear weapons design, but he's a politically correct scientist who supports Obama administration thinking on things. | |
| And so he gets lots of press coverage and lots of attention. | |
| Now, I don't want to be too hard on the Congress because the fact of the matter is, you know, we have, we are supported overwhelmingly in Congress. | |
|
Critical Infrastructure Protection Act
00:03:14
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|
| And one example I was going to give you, you know, is the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act that passed the House unanimously last year, in last December. | |
| And it passed the Senate by unanimous consent too. | |
| And we do have a bill, you know, recommended by the EMP Commission, you know, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to start planning and preparing to protect the country from EMP. | |
| And not only that, but they're supposed to educate the states. | |
| They're supposed to send out information to governors and state legislatures and educate them on the EMP threat. | |
| And they're supposed to offer help to the states and have pilot projects. | |
| One of the things we did, we call it the Louisiana Project, where we got a project going where the state of Louisiana would cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security to develop a plan to protect the Louisiana grid. | |
| And if this happens, it will be a breakthrough if it actually happens. | |
| Now that the EMP Commission has been discontinued, I don't know if it will happen or if the Louisiana project will continue. | |
| I'm saying that to let you know that it's not an all-bad news story. | |
| It's not like everybody in Congress. | |
| Most people in Congress get it. | |
| The overwhelming majority do. | |
| But the way Congress works now, it doesn't work the way the founders originally intended. | |
| I mean, most people don't understand that if you are a lobby like the electric power industry has all kinds of lobbies. | |
| They don't call themselves lobbies. | |
| They're not supposed, they call themselves think tanks, like the North American Electric Reliability Corporation or the Electric Power Research Institute or something like that. | |
| If these guys lobby, all they have to do is get one person, one chairman on a committee on the right committee, and they can stop a bill from ever coming out. | |
| After the EMP Commission went out of business back in 2008, we had a bill called the SHIELD Act. | |
| And this was a Democrat-controlled Congress, and the Democrats, to their credit, you know, Benny Thompson, Democrat from Mississippi, one of the most liberal members of the Congress, understood the threat and supported passage of the GRID Act, as did a gentleman from California. | |
| His name escapes me now. | |
| I'm embarrassed to say, but he was also a very left-wing person. | |
| But they understood the EMP threat and wanted to try to protect the American people. | |
| And so the GRID Act was passed unanimously. | |
| Every Republican and every Democrat in the House of Representatives supported it, okay? | |
| And it went to the Senate. | |
| But the way Congress works now, one senator can put a hold on a bill so that it won't come to a vote, and they don't even have to disclose their identity. | |
| Somebody in the Senate did that to the GRID Act back in 2010 and stopped it from coming to a vote. | |
| And we don't know absolutely, I think I know who did it, but not absolutely positively because they have anonymity and they can do that. | |
| And one person in the Senate can defy the entire House of Representatives and not even have it come to a vote. | |
| Had that GRID Act passed in 2010, it's now seven years later, we estimated it would have taken moving at a leisurely pace, a normal kind of pace, that it would have taken three and a half years to protect the grid. | |