Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - SPECIAL - Harrison Berger : The CIA Attacks Civil Liberties.

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Sept. 22, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano

26:35

SPECIAL - Harrison Berger : The CIA Attacks Civil Liberties.

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	Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
	Today is Monday, September 22nd, 2025.
	We welcome a new guest to our cameras today, Harrison Berger and investigative journalist.
	After you're listening to him for a few minutes, he'll remind you of our dear friend and regular guest and hero of mine, Max Blumenthal.
	He also was a former colleague of another hero of mine, uh, Glenn Greenwald.
	Harrison has done extraordinary work on surveillance on Americans, not just by the government, but by private entities uh working in behalf of the government.
	Harrison, welcome here, my dear friend.
	I understand you are familiar with the program.
	Uh, and after watching a clip of you on another program, I'm I'm happy uh to have you here.
	How extensive is warrantless surveillance on Americans today, whether done by the FBI engaged in computer hacking, or whether done by private enterprise at the behest of government.
	Well, this is a massive issue, and unfortunately, uh it used to be a left-wing issue uh during the Bush administration.
	Uh people like Nancy Pelosi even used to be very concerned uh about this sort of warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection uh that our government was revealed to be doing in 2005.
	Those powers were ultimately uh retroactively legalized with what was called FISA Section 702 in, I believe 2007.
	And ever since uh laws have been on the books, which basically uh guarantee that these unconstitutional mass surveillance programs that the security state constructed in the wake of 9-11, that those programs continue to this day.
	Um we obviously continue to uh vote on the Patriot Act, so that remains in place.
	And we really do have this sort of national emergency that has been in place.
	In fact, uh Trump a few weeks ago, although it went really unreported in much of the media, uh, voted um to renew the national emergency that George W. Bush uh implemented after 9-11.
	So we've been living kind of in this national emergency state uh ever since uh we began this war on terror and and mass surveillance has continued.
	What's different about uh mass surveillance now than when it started is that it's completely outsourced.
	If you remember, it was Edward Snowden who revealed all this with Greenwald uh in 2013.
	And let me let me just stop you.
	When he did that, and we all remember what happened, the the meeting in in Hong Kong and his flight to uh Moscow and all of that.
	I mean, he revealed government actors, he revealed the NSA spying on Americans without warrants.
	This is what James Clapper lied about uh under oath when years later he uh he testified about it.
	Go ahead, please.
	That's exactly right.
	And more than that, he at the time he was working for a company called Booze Allen Hamilton, which was a private contractor with the NSA and that also does work with the CIA.
	Uh what's happened is that all of this mass surveillance that the government was originally doing, um, and they got a lot of flack for doing in about 2005, they ultimately outsourced it to companies like Edward Snowden's Bus Allen Hamilton, but also to the company that I wrote about, uh Palantir.
	This is a company that to this day denies their role uh in NSA mass data collection.
	Just two weeks ago, their CEO Alex Carp was at the all-in summit, where he said, No, we we don't work with the FBI, we don't work with the NSA, we don't work with the CIA to do all the things that have already been reported that they do, mainly to take All of the data that the NSA has collected on American citizens unconstitutionally and to interpret that data using kind of pre-crime model, something out of you know Philip K. Dick's minority report.
	Um, and they use that to assess threats.
	The problem with all of this that I should mention is that this trade-off that we kind of have since 9-11 since we uh instituted the state of emergency.
	This trade-off was that we would sacrifice our civil liberties, so our first amendment right to free speech, but also more importantly, too, in this case, our our Fourth Amendment right um against unwarranted search and seizure.
	And the trade-off was that we give all those things up and we get in return security.
	We eliminate the threats.
	That obviously has not happened.
	Um, I mean, just a week ago, there was a very high-profile assassination that the NSA and FBI completely failed to stop.
	There's mass shootings all the time in this country.
	There were two assassination attempts on the president that they had no clue were going to happen.
	Um, so obviously that trade-off um it doesn't really work.
	Um the programs and and the promises that we were made about them uh failed.
	And the reason they still exist is is pretty unclear at this point.
	Well, why the passion to spy?
	I I remember when I was at Fox and was beginning to expose uh a lot of these things.
	Uh two of my sources who at the time were uh NSA people told me they were in a room where the head of the NSA pounded his fist on the table and said, gather it all.
	We just want everything we can about everybody.
	I mean, this is Orwellian.
	This is mono maniacal.
	Why the passion to spy on innocent, ordinary, everyday Americans who pose no threat to national security by anybody's measurement.
	I mean, I think that question kind of raises serious questions about why we even have this giant national security state to begin with, because this mass surveillance is actually something that they've been doing really since the inception.
	It was James Engleton, for instance, who devised the famous mail opening uh system from the CIA that was exposed um with the water um with I'm sorry, uh with the church committee hearings.
	Um so we've been doing this since the 60s and the 70s.
	There's obviously COINTELPRO as another example of that of uh surveillance and disruption from the from the federal government.
	And obviously, this hasn't stopped.
	The people who, for instance, devised uh Palantir, the new surveillance company, uh, this came out of the CIA.
	It was someone named John Point Dexter, who was Reagan's national security advisor.
	He was an Iran-Contra criminal.
	And he and someone named Oliver North, who is also uh his Iran-Contra co-conspirator, they had this very anti-democratic belief that the reason that we lost the Vietnam War and the reason why American uh militarism is constrained is because of anti-war agitators at home who represent to them to these national security elites much more of a threat than any threat from abroad um to than any terrorists.
	This this sounds uh sense Nixonian, and yet it was happening under the Reagan administration.
	It absolutely was.
	And you know, even lifelong liberals like Gore Vidal observed this process in real time, starting in the 1990s.
	He wrote a very famous piece called Shredding the Bill of Rights, where he just observed how more and more citizens were being monitored, um, their speech was being restricted at the time they had to go through that they just started the TSA at this point, um, you know, groping everyone and their uh families at the airport, which was not a thing before I was born, apparently, um, but it is a thing now we all have to go through.
	And he looked at this and he said that the the Bill of Rights that we're promised, um, it's shredding and and um they're eroding these constitutional protections in the name of national security.
	And that effort, though it failed in the 1990s, it was revived after the war on terror when they had this national uh security excuse to do it.
	And we've just been living in that world ever since.
	That's basically where this comes from.
	Does the um at one point in the rig in the Trump administration, the first Trump uh administration, supposedly without telling President Trump.
	Uh, the FBI uh bought something called Zero Click.
	I'm sure you're familiar uh with this.
	Uh, this is an Israeli uh product uh which uh enables the government uh to get inside your desktop and your mobile device without tricking you into clicking on a link.
	You know, click here and get this for free.
	You click on it and you're nailed.
	Um Chris Ray claimed they never used it, they just wanted to see how it worked.
	Nobody really believes that.
	One of the people that didn't believe it was Joe Biden.
	And in Biden's presidency, ordered uh the FBI not to use the zero click.
	Someone sounds like a straight out of the soprano.
	So they stored it in a in a warehouse in New Jersey.
	According to the Washington Post, Trump has now authorized the FBI to go back to using zero click.
	This is exceedingly dangerous, is patently uh unconstitutional.
	There's no conceivable legal use for it.
	Do you know from your research if the federal government is back to using this uh Israeli software zero click?
	I actually don't know, and I'll have to look into it.
	But the question does raise a very interesting point about this, which is that while a company like Palantir um is obviously a threat to our civil liberties, um, it's also a major national security threat because of their close ties to Israel.
	And I include another company, uh Oracle, Larry Ellison's Oracle, uh, in that group as well in my article.
	Uh these are companies that have very close ties to Israel.
	Uh their donor, Alex Carp is a major Zionist.
	He thinks that college students, um, people on campuses who use their free speech to criticize the foreign government of Israel and the genocide that they're committing that American taxpayers are forced to pay for.
	Um, we have to pay for all of their bombs.
	And if you object to any of that, you're labeled an anti Semite.
	Uh, someone like Alex Carp views those people as an infection inside of America.
	So that's his word, not yours, right?
	That is his word.
	Those are not my words.
	Um that's very dangerous.
	This is someone who has direct links to the Israeli military.
	And I should mention um that the connection that you raised between um, you know, whether or not the the U.S. should be using this Israeli spy technology.
	Um it's a good question because uh more and more the limits between the U.S. and the Israeli national security state are blurred, especially under the Trump administration.
	The journalist Max Blumenthal, I think, has actually done the best work on this from the gray zone, who you've had on your show often.
	Uh, he did a report from a couple months ago where very serious questions are raised about the loyalties of the current CIA director.
	This is someone who boxed out um the director of national intelligence from any meetings with President Trump uh and fed Trump uh basically cooked up Massad intelligence that had all sorts of fake information about Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program to make sure that that Trump bombed um uh Iran on behalf of Israel.
	That's running the national security state now.
	Consistent with what you've just said, are such notables who are regulars on this show uh as Colonel Douglas McGregor uh and Scott Ritter, uh, obviously uh Max as well.
	Uh let me ask you about someone.
	Um, about uh eight years ago or so early on in the Trump administration when Section 702 of the Patriot Act uh was about to expire, uh, and Congress uh was voting to renew it, and Congress did vote to renew it.
	Uh and it was sitting on Trump's desk.
	I was at the time a host on a pretty well-known show then and now called Fox and Friends, and I looked in the camera about 6.15 in the morning, and I said, Mr. President, the authorities in 702 are the same mindset, the same authorities that spied on you, and they profoundly contradict the Fourth Amendment.
	About 10 minutes later, he tweets out, I'm vetoing it.
	Well, this resulted in a slew of Republicans running to the Oval Office.
	One of them was a guy I never heard of.
	They talked him into signing it.
	But the guy that was there that I never heard of was Mike Gallagher.
	Who and where is he today?
	Yeah, Mike Gallagher is the head of defense now at this company at Palantir.
	Um, he's someone who also uh is a major China hawk.
	Uh he sat on the anti-CCP committee at the time that that was around.
	He headed it, I believe.
	Um he's another major pro-Israel voice um that works at Palantir who is directly involved with their genocide, and they arm it with the AI targeting tools that they use to mortar uh murder scores of uh you know children and women let me make sure I have this correctly.
	An American company Palantir sells a product to the IDF, which the IDF uses to locate, identify and murder women and children in Gaza.
	True.
	More than that, uh, including Americans, there's Americans in Gaza, there's Americans in Lebanon.
	We actually don't know the full extent because it's not publicly released of Palantir's involvement with this.
	Microsoft is another company uh that does this.
	Dell, uh actually, the Jerusalem Post, uh, they just uh today, I believe, or yesterday, um, published an article talking about all of the top uh Jewish billionaires in the United States who have quote quietly enabled Israel's what they call war.
	Um that's what they call the genocide uh in Israeli media.
	Um that's exactly what the company's doing, but it's a little more sinister than that, too, because um there's also Oracle at the same time, which is uh supplying Israel with their entire database.
	So Palantir interprets the data, but uh Oracle is the one who who helps store it.
	Uh do any of these entities or people, whether it's Alex Carp or uh Mike Gallagher or Peter uh Thiel, do they register as it's almost silly for me to ask this because I know the answer, do they register as agents under the foreign agent registration act, the failure to do which results in prosecution and jail time?
	No, they absolutely do not.
	Neither does APAC, as you know, and neither does a group like you know, the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, uh, which you know, even Israeli spies, uh, like one of their chief spies, Seema Vakman Gill says is an arm of the Israeli government.
	That's an American lobby group based in Washington, D.C., that Israeli spies consider their own organization for obvious reasons because they pair it the exact same uh Israeli press releases.
	Um the Americans that have been murdered in Gaza are, I'm going to guess probably there as aid workers or as journalists.
	Or even if they're not, even if they even if they live there, uh by what authority can an American company help a foreign government murder an American in a third country.
	I mean, there's no authority to do that.
	It's completely unconstitutional.
	Uh, President Obama, unfortunately, was the one who created this loophole when he uh drone assassinated Anwar al-Waki, an American citizen in Yemen.
	Uh, that was in I think 2012 or 2013.
	Um, and ever since uh, you know, American officials um and I guess American tech companies working with the Israeli government uh can kill as many Americans as they want.
	But as you know, is Israel um has impunity when it comes to murdering American citizens.
	They did it with Rachel Corey in 2002.
	No one really said anything about that, and they've killed you know hundreds in in this uh war uh alone.
	Uh and no one seems to care about it, or at least no American officials.
	Um it's pretty shameful.
	There is no um legal authority for any of this.
	Uh, if you were to ask why do presidents kill, the answer is because They can and because they can get away with look at these people that Donald Trump is murdering on speed boats uh in the Caribbean.
	Uh no evidence and uncharged.
	Well, they're bad people and they're gonna bring harmful stuff here, so I'm gonna kill them before we put them on trial.
	Even if they were doing what he said they were doing, and even if they were guilty and charged with them and convicted of the maximum uh crime, the the it's they're not capital crimes.
	So why does the president get away with killing?
	I guess because Palantir can get away with helping people to kill.
	Does Oracle help people uh help the Israelis murder people as well?
	They absolutely do.
	And uh that's why I said earlier that uh specifically Larry Ellison and his family, uh, because he has a kid named David Ellison uh who inherits a lot of his father's money uh and spends it gobbling up uh mass media in the United States, like CBS like Paramount.
	Uh they're gonna go after CNN and HBO to kind of create this uh Ellison News Network, if you will, like ENN.
	Uh that's their goal.
	They just bought TikTok too.
	But they're major donors uh to the IDF, specifically the friends of IDF.
	Uh, they also assist the Mossad and Israeli military intelligence with their operations.
	Again, they're another company that's directly involved with the war effort.
	Larry Ellison, I mean, going back to our conversation about mass surveillance.
	This guy is one of the NSA's top contractors.
	Uh, he's very proud of that fact, too.
	In 2014, when Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald did the brave work to expose the NSA's secret unconstitutional mass surveillance book to uh data collection program.
	He defended it.
	He said that those activities are essential.
	Of course, he defends it because he makes billions of dollars from it.
	In fact, his company, Oracle, is itself, like Palantir, a CIA company.
	Uh it came from uh this project called Project Oracle.
	So he was just handed this company by the CIA to be their lackey.
	There's a billionaire in the White House.
	He must know these people and must know what they're doing.
	I know he's not the smartest bulb in the pack, but he's got to know what the people around him and with whom he socializes are doing.
	I mean, tell us about the deal for TikTok.
	Who's going to own and control TikTok?
	Who's going to regulate the algorithm?
	And do you have to be a Zionist to regulate that algorithm in the new TikTok?
	Well, TikTok has been a major problem for the Israel lobby for two years.
	The problem is that Israelis are posting too many of their own war crimes on TikTok.
	Too many doctors and nurses are going on TikTok to give testimony about what's happening there, about all the really just ugly and disturbing behavior of these IDF soldiers.
	Um the IDF soldiers, they can't help themselves post their own war crimes.
	They do it daily, and uh they they seem to get some type of glee out of it.
	And it's really changed the narrative.
	It's radicalized an entire generation, Gen Z against this foreign government uh that we just for some whatever reason are supposed to unconditionally support.
	Gen Z is incredibly tired of it, um, has been for two years, and TikTok is the app where they get most of this information.
	As a result, people like Mike Gallagher and other Israel lobbyists uh have sought to ban the app.
	They tried they they tried to ban the app about four years ago, citing fears of Chinese uh data manipulation and propaganda.
	That effort ultimately failed, and the new effort to ban TikTok was revived immediately after October 7th, after all these videos of uh the children that Israel had murdered uh went viral.
	Um they succeeded actually in in banning the app.
	Congress voted um on that and and it was signed into law, but uh they no longer need to ban the app anymore because TikTok has now become one of the most censored apps there is.
	That's because of um the Israel lobby and mainly the Israeli government through groups like uh Cyberwell that they've created, they've funded and uh propped up new content moderation organizations uh like this group, Cyberwell, to partner with TikTok.
	In fact, they partner with all social media platforms now to censor any information that the Massad and the CIA don't like.
	So they censored, for instance, uh video that was going around of Max Blumenthal talking about how Israel implemented the Hannibal Directive on October 7th.
	That's just a fact that they killed their own citizens on October 7th.
	Or they censor videos that talk about how there were not mass rapes on October 7th, something that was also debunked.
	Or that there weren't 40 beheaded babies.
	If you say any of that, you will be censored on TikTok.
	And that's a result of the Israeli government putting in place this group, Cyberwell, to work with TikTok as a content moderation partner to censor the app.
	The new owners of TikTok, well, it's Larry Ellison.
	It's Oracle.
	This Zionist oligarch that I just spoke about.
	And they will obviously keep to that mission.
	In fact, just a month and a half ago, TikTok appointed a new hate speech czar, this woman named Erica Mindel, who I'm not joking, is a former IDF instructor.
	She even calls herself a passionate Zionist.
	So that's who controls TikTok now.
	It's the Israel lobby.
	And you can bet that they're gonna stamp out all the uh you know Gen Z criticism of Israel that's just been rampant on that app.
	Um not too long ago, maybe two or three days ago, President Trump told Fox News that Rupert Murdoch is going to be one of the owners of uh TikTok, and that his son Lachlan, uh, who's the heir apparent and is the uh chair of Fox News as we speak, uh, will be uh on the board that controls TikTok and its uh and its algorithm.
	Is this consistent with your own research?
	It is, yeah.
	Um it's going to be Oracle, but also um the Murdoch family will be involved again.
	The Murdoch family is very pro-Israel, as you know, because uh you were on Fox News for a while.
	Uh they are neocons.
	So not just criticism of Israel, but criticism also of uh the proxy war that we've been funding in Ukraine.
	Remember, that's why they fired Tucker Carlson because he talked about people like Julian Assange too much.
	Uh he advocated for him, and because he was against the proxy war that we're funding uh in Ukraine, which continues to this day.
	Uh so their censors naturally, and that's absolutely what they're gonna do to this app.
	Yeah, it's bizarre.
	Uh Trump is suing for Murdoch for 15 billion for producing a document that everybody says is true and accurate.
	That's sort of scurrilous uh note uh that uh Trump supposedly sent to um uh to uh Epstein.
	Uh and yet uh the deal that Murdoch put together for the new ownership of TikTok includes uh Murdoch and Murdoch was invited to King Charles' uh dinner honoring Trump uh last week.
	You can't you can't make this stuff, you can't make this stuff up.
	Uh Harrison have enjoyed this immeasurably.
	I hope you'll come back again.
	And the next time you have one of these expeditions, exposes, send it.
	We'll post it on uh Judge Snap, and uh we'll have you on to talk about it.
	I I really appreciate you inviting me on.
	Again, I'm a huge fan of your show.
	I watch it every week.
	So thank you for for the opportunity.
	Uh pleasure, my dear friend.
	All the best to you.
	Straight from Rio.
	We'll have you on again.
	Thank you.
	Wow, a very bright uh and articulate uh young man, and I can see uh from the comments that you're writing and that you agree uh with that assessment.
	Tomorrow Tuesday, uh, Ambassador Chaz Freeman at 8 in the morning, Colonel Bill Story at 11.
	Matt Ho.
	Remember, Matt?
	Matt is back with us at two o'clock at three o'clock, Colonel Karen Kwakowski at four o'clock.
	We have a long day for you.

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