Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire dissect Bill Cosby's overturned conviction, emphasizing classical liberal principles that prioritize preventing wrongful imprisonment over retribution. They pivot to Tucker Carlson's NSA allegations, exposing how secret FISA warrants enable mass surveillance without judicial oversight or defense for targets like Carter Page. Despite bureaucratic denials, the hosts argue that centralized data collection, built during the Obama era, inevitably corrupts regardless of appointees, silencing dissent through classification rather than arrest while leaving citizens with no legal recourse against an unchecked intelligence state. [Automatically generated summary]
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Justice, Vengeance, and Technicalities00:15:15
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am the most consistent motherfucker you know, Dave Smith.
He is the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein, and we are both happy to be back with you.
What's up, my brother?
You looking good.
Ah, well, you know, I'm wearing hats.
It helps a lot.
Dude, we've been having these problems with doing these shows from the studio to here and the pixelated camera stuff, which some of you may have noticed.
Oh, I thought you were saying I looked pretty.
I didn't realize you meant it was a tech thing.
Oh, no, you look way better in the pixelated camera than in this one.
Now, all of a sudden, it's depressing.
We can see you again.
No, but I just came on here and Brian and these guys were like on with the tech guy forever and they figured it all out.
And then I came on and you were just gone.
And I was like, wouldn't that be hilarious if they spent all this time fixing the camera and then you just got kidnapped and none of it was for anything?
Or maybe I was never really here with all that pixelation.
You're talking on the rob robot.
The plot thickens.
What if that was just, that was all a scheme?
You're like, look, I'm going to take a two-week vacation, but Dave can't know.
So just fuck with the cameras and I'll get someone in here.
You could probably pull that off.
All right.
So, literally, just as we were about to start, this was just announced that they're letting Bill Cosby out.
Bill Cosby is a free man.
Rob, your letters have paid off.
They're letting out the great comic.
I got to tell you, my whole life, I've never been like, you know, despite my ethnicity, I've never been a money grubber.
I've never been a guy who was like obsessed with money, but I didn't realize that you could be rich enough to rape.
I didn't realize that there was like that level of richness where you hit that category.
And now, you know, I got to get myself some money, dude.
Yeah, it turns out our people had a lot of wisdom behind them.
They knew.
They knew what was really important.
Yeah, well, there certainly is no question, right, that if Bill Cosby did not have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers, it's quite possible that he would not have been able to, you know, get off on this technicality.
I'll tell you what is interesting.
We're going to re-get him.
I'll put my, like, the same way that what's his name is being tried again.
Who's the other?
He's being tried again for something new.
I bet there'll be some sort of a new case.
You know, I don't know.
Cosby is so old at this point that I don't know how much will there's going to be to go after him.
I mean, he really is like, I think he's in bad shape health-wise, and he's very old.
And so we'll...
I hope he books a theater, just gets right back to it.
Well, yeah, right, possibly.
But I'll tell you, you know, what's kind of interesting about this is that the technicality they got him off on is that evidently, I was just, this literally just came out, so I was just reading about it.
But evidently, the prosecutor said that they were going to, that they were not going to indict him.
And then in a civil suit, he admitted some stuff that was used against him in the later criminal case, which is a no-no.
You're not allowed to do that.
And so this is how they went to the state Supreme Court and the judge said, yeah, yeah, no, this is not a valid conviction.
And so they so they let him go.
He's released.
So his conviction is overturned.
His sexual assault conviction is overturned.
And he is a free man, which is, you know, it's interesting on a few levels.
Like, of course, on one level, you go like, well, here's a guy who is almost certainly guilty getting off on a technicality.
And nobody, you know, likes that aspect of it.
You know, that's not a good thing.
I would counter that it gets scary when you think the person can repeat the behavior.
And so you're like, this guy shouldn't be in society because I know he's a murderer.
And Jesus Christ, he just got off.
It's going to happen again.
Someone like Cosby, not saying that, you know, maybe there shouldn't be some element of justice or whatever, but I'm just saying, at least, you don't really have the concern.
I don't think he's getting back out there to rape more.
Well, you know, justice is an interesting thing.
And I think that a lot of people, at least most Americans, I think today, don't really think through what we mean by justice.
And let me just open by saying that there's a difference between opposing injustice and seeking justice, right?
So opposing injustice, meaning you want injustice to stop, is one thing.
That's a very clear black and white line.
Like you want to stop people from being victimized.
However, then the whole like enforcing justice, that gets a little bit tricky.
It's very tricky and it's kind of complex.
And I think that in the American system, we really don't do a lot to think through what exactly this is.
What are we doing when we convict someone and put them in jail?
You know, it's like, is it what you said?
Okay, we got to keep dangerous people off the streets.
Is it retribution?
Is it simply just a punishment?
Is it somehow a compensation for the victims?
Because those are different things.
You know what I mean?
Like those are three distinct things.
One is protecting future potential victims.
One is doing what you can to make whole somebody who was wronged.
And one is just vengeance.
Just like you deserve to be punished for doing a horrible thing.
And I think there's also one more element which might go into the last category you mentioned of vengeance, but also disincentivizing the behavior because there's punishment and ramifications.
Yes.
Well, you could argue that any punishment could disincentivize a behavior and the more severe maybe would be more effective at disincentivizing the behavior.
But to me, when I think about these things, I find just intellectually, I can make an argument and I can kind of understand solid arguments for reparations toward victims and for protecting future would-be victims.
The vengeance one, I certainly get on a gut level, but it's very hard to make an intellectual argument for.
And in the case of Bill Cosby, yeah, as you were saying, it's not as if we're overly concerned that this behavior is going to happen again in the future.
He got away with it for decades.
I'm assuming that he's guilty of all these things, but I'm fairly confident in that assumption.
And he got away with it for decades, and that's it.
It's over.
And whatever you could give the women who he raped, whatever you could do for them is you're not going to, you know, you don't have a time machine.
you're not going to go back and like undo what he did.
And I don't know what's the best you can get.
I mean, okay, they could take money from him.
That's better than nothing.
It doesn't solve, it doesn't make what happened didn't happen, but it's better, you know, then that happened and you don't get anything.
But I think he's already, you know, civilly been forced to pay them a lot.
Now it's possible that just seeing the guy suffer, you know, like is something they want.
I don't know.
It's just interesting.
It's something that, you know, we don't really think about a lot in our criminal justice system.
Like, it's like, well, what exactly is the goal here?
What is it that we're trying to do?
And I just think that stuff's worth thinking about.
And quite possibly that, you know, if you really start thinking about that, you might start questioning a lot of what we do and whether locking people in cages for even for violent crimes is necessarily the best way to do this.
It's a strange thing that we haven't kind of like, where we've reinvented, and this is true in government practices across the board, where we've reinvented so many other things about society and the way society function, but yet this mechanism will still be the same exact one that it was hundreds of years ago.
I think is a good example of that as well.
I think there's a natural, and I'm not necessarily endorsing this because, but I think there is a calling for kind of getting yours, which is like the vengeance, that if someone does something terrible to you, you don't want to know that they're just out living a good life.
And I feel like that's, I haven't had anyone do anything that terrible to me.
So I'm not walking around with like that, that feeling or that pit in my stomach of just like feeling discomfort that someone that's done something horrible to me just gets to live a good life.
But I do think that there's probably a very human need for kind of that vengeance or just knowing that somebody didn't get away with something.
And I guess with the prison system, maybe like I think as we don't really want to, you know, do whippings or other things that might be give people that feeling of like they got theirs.
I think prison is just kind of the easy solution of you don't have to see it.
You know that they're locked away.
Whatever terrible there is not on paper as actually going down.
So I think that's why society kind of likes it.
Well, or certainly at least why they tolerate it.
You know, like I, so I agree with you.
I think there is certainly a human inclination to have that impulse.
And so that's, that's part of the reason why it's persisted for so long.
It's just an interesting, an interesting thing to kind of question.
You know what I mean?
Like, is that like, is that necessarily the best solution?
It doesn't seem like there's a lot of thought put into that.
It's just kind of like, well, this is how we do it.
Anyway, back to the technicality that he got off.
Oh, my bad.
Okay.
My bad.
So back to the technicality that he got off on.
At the same time, I think there's people focus on these situations where, and these do exist, where real criminals, real violent criminals get off on technicalities.
This happens.
It doesn't happen that often, but it happens.
Like people who were truly violent criminals get off on a technicality.
But I would still argue that for the most part, these technicalities are really good things.
And that it's really, it's one of the best things about our society that we still even have some of these vestiges of restraints on how the government can prosecute people, how they can go after people, and that you can't use all of these dirty tricks.
You know, you think about even things like double jeopardy and things like that.
Like if we didn't have that, it would just be a wide open door for the state to go after all of its enemies and tie them up and use every dirty trick and charge them over and over again with the same crime.
And it really is like, although so many of these kind of pillars of checks on the government have, you know, withered away, there still are some.
And we should kind of be grateful for those that we have.
So I am like an old school.
This is my, you know, classical liberal tradition that I still have alive in me.
I really do believe that it's the idea that it's better to let, you know, a hundred guilty men free than put one innocent man in prison.
Like I absolutely, that's where I plant my flag, that anything you do that can prevent the government from throwing an innocent person in a cage is the most important thing to do.
And so it's interesting to see these kind of technicalities.
And of course, they get highlighted in examples where you hate to see that.
But you see these technicalities where like people, guilty people get let off.
And oftentimes it'll be some type of like police tampering of evidence or files or getting things wrong.
And there'll be things where like, you know, it was almost certainly a guilty person, but the police planted a little bit of something or they did something wrong or they tampered or they, you know, they were fraudulent in some of the documents and the case just gets thrown out.
And as much as it's awful that that innocent, that that guilty person maybe doesn't have to, you know, compensate the victims or be punished or whatever it is that you look for out of this system, I always look at that and I'm like, yep, good.
Thank God we have those rules because you have to have some type of rules that let these agents of the state know, yeah, you mess with anything here and this is going to get thrown out because otherwise it's just way too easy to frame an innocent person, which to me is the truly terrifying thing.
Yeah, I agree with you 100%.
You got to keep to your rules.
And also then that's almost punishing the cops because I think some of these guys, they actually do want to catch bad guys and feel like, hey, I'm doing something good here.
I got this guy off the street.
So if you use your dirty tricks, you kind of learn your lesson of like, oh, shit, I just got one of the worst people that I probably would have caught and got in my numbers here is going free.
However, when it's just rich people like Cosby that are actually able to get their thing to the Supreme Court to get back a government for violating its own rules and the checks and balances, that's not a good look for the structure.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, there's no question that having a whole bunch of money to buy the best lawyers really helps.
However, I do think that in any system of society organizing itself, there are always going to be unfair advantages that some people have over others.
I mean, again, like just being really smart is a big advantage.
And even if we had some type of system where there were like dispute resolution organizations that were perfectly private or anything that we might want to see, there's always going to be some people who have advantages over others.
It's just egalitarianism in its purest sense is an impossible vision to achieve.
And in its realist sense is usually, as Murray Rothbard would put it, a revolt against nature.
The Whistleblower Claim Explained00:15:12
I think we'll get some Cosby bits about being in prison.
Final act, a final half hour about being in jail.
Listen, I do not think Bill Cosby is going to put out another comedy special, but I'd watch it if he did.
If it was about prison, I've never been a Cosby fan.
I thought gone through his archive and material, but if he did a half hour on prison, I'd watch that for sure.
It's just, oh, yeah, this would be great.
Great.
Bill Cosby himself, the rapist.
It'd be hard not to.
It'd be hard not to watch that special.
Who would pick it up?
That's the question.
Who could he get to YouTube?
I think that'd have to be a YouTube release.
Yeah, maybe do what Louis C.K. does.
Just fucking charge a few bucks, put it on your website.
Let's talk.
Let's talk, Cosby.
We'll figure something out.
Gas Digital is interested in meeting with Bill Cosby.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, I just, so as that news just broke, I thought that was like a little interesting thing to talk about before we got into what is my lead story for today's show.
And Brian, I sent you a video, by the way, that will play that in a little bit.
But the lead story of today's show is Tucker Carlson and the NSA.
So Tucker Carlson, have you been following this, Robbie?
I saw the headlines, but you know, the NSA spies on everybody.
Well, here's what's interesting, right?
Tucker Carlson goes on a show two nights ago, and he made a pretty explosive claim.
And I think it's, you know, like I've said many times before on this show, and one of the things I really try to focus on, and this is for like, you know, obviously I'm a libertarian and I have my libertarian, you know, like lens that I view a lot of this stuff through.
Ah, you're getting pixelated again.
But so I obviously am a libertarian, but this is something I focus on, not just to libertarians, because we have a lot of people who listen to the show who are left, who are right, who are, you know, none of the above, all of that, is that you want to really focus on what matters and not get lost in the distractions.
And in 2021, it is really, really easy to get, you know, to lose sight of what matters, to mistake the, what is it, the signal for the noise or whatever.
So it's this stuff where you have the kind of deep state or the Pentagon versus Tucker Carlson.
It's very easy for a whole lot of people to, you know, look at this through the lens of like a left-right thing.
You know, the leftists have taken over the deep state and Tucker Carlson's a right-wing guy.
They look at it through the lens of like Trump versus Biden and Fox News versus CNN and all these other things.
But to me, what I just see staring right in the face of everyone is that Tucker Carlson is the biggest show in cable news and is the most outspoken critic of the warfare state.
And that's like, that's what's really going on here.
You know, all this other stuff is like distractions.
What's going on here is that Tucker Carlson uses his huge 8 p.m. platform on Fox News of all places to blast the whole empire.
And he's really, really good on that topic and sound.
And he's really good as soon as things happen.
He's been for years now on the right side of all of these conflicts.
And so when the Pentagon is coming out and criticizing Tucker Carlson, like, I don't care if it's over like, you know, military uniforms or something like that.
There's something more going on here.
So anyway, a couple days ago, Tucker Carlson made the pretty explosive claim that the NSA was spying on his show.
Now, he and on him particularly.
Now, what he said was that a whistleblower from the NSA reached out to him and that this whistleblower, again, these are Tucker Carlson's claims, that this whistleblower was in a position to know what he's talking about there.
So Tucker Carlson is claiming this isn't the janitor at the NSA.
This is somebody who's got some level of seriousness there.
And so the whistleblower said, told him that the NSA has been monitoring him in an attempt to bring down his show.
So according to Tucker Carlson, he was like, well, I'm going to need some proof of this.
And the guy read him an email that Tucker Carlson had sent.
So the guy basically confirmed, as far as Tucker's concerned, and if Tucker Carlson is telling the truth, he proved it to him, right?
Like he read him an email that only that Tucker Carlson had sent from Tucker's email that only Tucker would have known and the person receiving it, right?
So this is Tucker Carlson's claim.
Now, it's an interesting thing, right?
Because we have no way of verifying that Tucker isn't lying.
And that dude's for sure dead.
Who?
Oh, that dude?
NSA guy, kidding me?
What an NSA whistleblower?
You're playing with the big dogs.
Well, here's the thing, right?
Some of these NSA guys are pretty savvy, and they may know what they're doing.
Now, the NSA, what they said about Snowden, and I believe this.
I don't know.
Again, I don't know for sure this is true, but this is what the NSA claims.
And I believe that they're actually telling the truth about this, is that they had no clue Snowden had taken the documents that he took.
And they didn't know until they were released until the Intercept started publishing them.
They didn't even know they had been breached.
And I believe that that's true.
You have these guys who are these computer whizzes who are working there and they know the system and they know how to get around it.
So it's possible.
Now, what Snowden did that put himself in jeopardy is he came forward and he was like, I'm the guy.
But they didn't, you know, otherwise, I think they wouldn't have known who he was.
Snowden could have taken the stuff and sold it to the Russians and never said a word and just gone on and lived his life.
But he decided to step forward and be like, I'm the guy.
I'm blowing the whistle for these reasons.
Yeah.
Well, the line between hero and idiot sometimes is thin, you know?
So anyway, so Tucker Carlson is making this claim.
Now, I got to say, this just off the facts of the matter, right?
Like the situation is that from what Tucker's claiming, if he's telling the truth, then he really would know for sure that this is true.
Like someone can prove that they're spying on your emails if they can read you back your emails, then you know they're spying on your emails, right?
However, none of us know this for sure.
We just either have to believe Tucker or not.
I will say I am absolutely inclined to believe Tucker Carlson just from the first day when he said that, because it would just be such a bizarre lie to come out and tell.
It would be, I don't know, it just doesn't.
I just like, like, if I had to guess in my head, of course, as I'm saying, I don't know.
None of us know for sure.
But if I had to say what's more likely here, that Tucker Carlson is just making this up and there is no NSA whistleblower who told him that they're reading his emails, that he just decided that was a good story to make up, or that the NSA, who's been known to spy on American citizens, who certainly was spying on the Trump campaign, and then probably on the Trump administration, we know the FBI was,
that they would be spying on the biggest guy in cable news who is an opponent of the military-industrial complex.
To me, one seems much more likely than the other.
But then, if that wasn't enough, interestingly, and this is only, again, only because Tucker Carlson has such a large audience, the NSA responded.
So, Tucker Carlson made the claim, right, a very specific claim, that the NSA, that he had talked to this whistleblower who had read his email.
So, in his mind, this is proof.
They've got my emails, my personal emails, and they're reading it.
But the NSA responded and they said, on June 28th, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been monitoring, has been, quote, monitoring our electric communication and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.
This allegation is untrue.
Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the agency, and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.
That's not a denial of emails.
NSA has a foreign intelligence mission.
We target foreign powers.
Hold on.
We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States.
With limited exceptions, NSA may not target a U.S. citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.
Now, to your layman, if you just read that, you'd be like, oh, that's a denial.
That's a denial of what Tucker Carlson is claiming, right?
I mean, he's saying they did it.
They're saying they didn't do it.
I mean, because they did say the words, this allegation is untrue.
But they changed his allegation.
Right.
So then they say Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the agency.
That is a very, very different claim than saying we have never read Tucker Carlson's emails.
Those are just two different things.
And if you know the lingo and how the NSA operates, that's what they always say.
That's what they say.
Why do they bother being tricked?
Why don't they just lie and say we didn't look at his emails?
Like at this point, you broke the law.
Why don't I don't get it?
Well, the thing is that they will lie sometimes also, right?
Like they will lie, like Clapper lied to Congress about them doing any type of monitoring of Americans' metadata.
But that's a fair question.
That is an interesting question.
But they're not even lying.
They're not even just coming out and denying it.
So I would say after that response, I 100% believe Tucker Carlson, at least 99% believe Tucker Carlson.
Like, so just to be clear, this is what they do.
And probably my guess would be there is no paper trail to prove otherwise.
So I, you know, I do not think anywhere there has been an email written down or an email or something or a note or a phone call or anything like that where someone says our goal here is to get Tucker Carlson off the air.
I mean, like, why would you put that in writing?
That's just ridiculous.
But I have no doubt that that's what the goal is.
And I certainly, and as far as saying he's not the target, this is what they said about Trump.
Okay.
So this is like how they always were.
It's the same as what the FBI did, right?
Who was the target?
Well, the target was Carter Page.
Just happened to be an advisor on the Trump campaign, but that was the target.
Maybe the target was Michael Flynn.
That was the NSA's target.
It's Michael Flynn.
Just happened to be Trump's first national intelligence or national security advisor.
But the target wasn't Trump.
What are you talking about?
It's just people on his campaign.
However, once you target somebody, you can then listen to any communications that they have.
And they, you know, a Trump advisor or a national security advisor, they might be talking to Donald Trump, right?
So that's how they play this game.
They get somebody else as the target.
And then if you accuse them of spying on that person, you go, no, no, no, that person's not the target.
But that's not really what's a question here.
What's a question, what the question is here is, did you read Tucker Carlson's emails?
Yes or no?
And that's, to me, like what's pretty interesting about this.
So this ain't a denial.
So between the fact that it just seems kind of unlikely that Tucker Carlson would just completely make this story up, and then the fact that there's a very specific accusation, and then the fact that the NSA isn't even denying it, I think we all know what's going on here.
And it's a good reminder to just see, for people to see just how dangerous this whole thing is, what's really going on here, and that it's like, yeah, they are going after, they are spying on a cable talk show host.
And really, it's just for the crime of being good on war.
That's what Tucker Carlson has done wrong.
And you could try to make up a million other things that, you know, are the real reason why they would be going after him or, you know, he's just such a terrible right-winger on this issue or that issue.
But there's been terrible right-wingers out there for a long time.
There's my entire life.
Like, you know, cable news, talk radio, all this stuff.
There's just been a ton of terrible right-wingers going out there all the time.
There's a reason why you don't hear scandals about like the deep state going after those people because they're bad on war.
But this guy is guilty of being a right-winger who's good on war.
And so this is somebody who's got to be, you know, dealt with, I suppose.
And national security threat, which was part of what they said, that on limited basis, we can target Americans.
I think they said national security threat was at the language.
iTrust Capital and Crypto Safety00:03:44
It's not that hard to spin.
I mean, just look at it this way.
You got a guy on the news every night who's advocating against war.
Maybe he's a Russian asset and he's trying to influence the American mind so we don't spend as much on defense or we don't get involved in tactical missions.
So obviously, if you've got a person who's talking out against wars that has this much influence, we're going to have to monitor that individual.
Well, right.
And then also you're not going to be able to.
It's not even that hard to spin.
Yeah, well, they also use a lot of other justifications.
Like I don't think, certainly not publicly, but I doubt even behind closed doors that they would use that as the spin because they don't even want to address the fact that this is about the war issue.
Like they don't even want to like talk about that because that's just like once once that it's January 6th.
January 6th.
No, he keeps getting inside scoops and so we got to plug the leak within governments.
We'll figure out yeah.
Once you accept this premise that January 6th was an attack on our country, you know, like this was an attack on our democracy and all of this.
It's like, okay, well, who are the most popular figures?
Who those guys were listening to?
Well, he's right up there as one of them, right?
Who were people who were asking questions about the election or whatever?
You know, like it's fairly easy to spin any of this stuff.
Right.
It's like 2020 is Osama bin Laden because we took care about Qaeda.
Now the issue is domestic terrorism.
And this is the guy talking them into a frenzy.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
So there's lots of different ways that they can spin this.
But holy moly.
I mean, this is like pretty chilling.
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Warrants, Spies, and Naivete00:15:53
I think that sometimes there is almost too much of an impulse, even amongst in our circles, to catastrophize the situation and to say, like, well, yeah, of course, this is the way it works, and no one can ever speak their minds.
But in a weird way, there's a silver lining here.
There you go, oh, no, no, no, there is a guy with a big platform who's speaking his mind, but this is what they'll try to do to him.
And so this is kind of interesting.
I got to say, Tucker has some real courage because he's just going out and he came out the next day on his show and just blasted them and were like, and called this out the same way we are.
Like, this is not a denial.
And he's in a position where, you know, unlike me and you, who are going to sit here and say, yeah, I just think it's more likely that Tucker's not lying about this and that the NSA was actually spying on him.
Tucker's in a position, assuming he's telling the truth, that he knows he's right.
Like he's not guessing that this happened.
He's like, a guy from the NSA called me and read me my emails.
They have my emails.
They have collected them.
So it's an interesting situation.
And he is really, he's got some courage in this department because he could just kind of back off of this, but he's like, no, no, no, I'm pushing.
So it'll be interesting to see if he's.
I would be sending emails.
I love the NSA.
I think they do great work.
I'm going to start sending some of those emails myself.
We've got to cover all our bases here.
I would say that there's, you know, and part of this is libertarians' fault because we have not put up our most serious people as our representatives.
And I don't just mean that like people running for office.
I just mean in general, like libertarians, you know, the face we put on to the world is sometimes not the best.
And there are some fairly unserious people in the libertarian world.
And, you know, it's ironic that me as a comedian, I have to be the one to point this out.
But this is, there are these moments, and I've had these a lot with right-wingers over the last couple years, where, look, I want to just tell them that they're right about the battle that they're in right at the moment and kind of like be allies with them on single coalition kind of allies on these issues.
But it's really hard to not have a little bit of an I told you so attitude.
And I understand that that's not the, you know, it's a little bit of a, maybe a dickish impulse or something like that.
But, you know, you see these guys like Tucker Carlson and so many of these other right-wingers who just like insult libertarians so regularly and kind of like, you know, like with a very like kind of mocking, dismissive attitude.
And it's like, okay, well, we really called that puppy, didn't we?
Like we like when it comes to like the most important issues, libertarians have a track record of being on the right side of so many of them.
And this was a huge one.
There were no bigger critics of the NSA mass surveillance than in the liberty movement.
Those were like the best guys.
And as far as like congressmen and senators and stuff, it was like Ron Paul and Justin Mosh and Rand Paul and all these guys.
They were the best guys on this issue.
And so it would be cool.
Okay, I understand even if you don't get the economics of it completely and you think that like Walmart would destroy everyone or you think Bezos should pay more in taxes or whatever.
I mean, obviously I think you should think about it and read about that more.
But okay, you can, you can, even if you're going to, you know, be married to those views, or even if you believe the dumbass shit like that, like somehow, you know, society would like degenerate if it was, you know, if libertarians had their ways, even though you're watching, look, under the biggest government in human history, you're watching what's happening to the culture right now.
But regardless of that, like, at least if you're going to bash libertarians all the time, at least like maybe at some point acknowledge like, oh, yeah, they were really right about that, you know?
Like, well, I was like a George Bush supporter or while I was like one of these guys, oh yeah, they were really blowing the whistle on this.
And it wasn't, it wasn't so, it wasn't nearly as overblown as maybe you thought it was.
And so that's, there's a reason why, you know, guys like Snowden saw what was going on at the NSA and thought it was that important to risk everything and speak out against.
Because I think he realized that this is the situation you're going to have.
You're going to create a society where dissident voices can be compromised immediately.
I wonder.
Who knows what they got?
Well, that's what YouTube's going for now.
Huh?
That's what YouTube's going for now.
How so?
Just censoring.
Doesn't matter.
Not anything that's outside of, you know, I'm not even going to mention some of these terms, but you just float certain terms as possible alternative cures for the coronavirus.
They'll strip you right off the platform.
Yeah, that's right.
Oh, yeah, no, it's really quite a chilling effect, right?
And there's, there's, yeah, there, this is, well, that's one part of it, right?
The censorship of big tech stuff, like, that's one threat.
But also, you know, just the NSA spying thing, I mean, nowadays, and particularly for younger people, but even for people like Tucker Carlson's age, I mean, nowadays, your whole life is on a computer, on a cell phone, you know what I mean?
And they can find out everything about you.
And I think just about everybody's got something, something that's, you know, where there's some dirt on them or something, you know?
Hopefully Tucker doesn't have anything too bad.
But that's the plan now.
You can monitor someone's entire life.
And so if someone is a dissonant voice, you just find where the weaknesses are and then go after that.
And they've been doing this shit for a long time.
It's just much easier now that it's on the computer, you know, because the FBI sent audio recordings of Martin Luther King cheating on his wife to his wife.
Like, this is what they do, you know?
So I guess the moral is don't cheat on your wife.
Or if you are, you got to scream, I'm totally thinking about my wife while you're doing it.
Certainly.
Following.
Oh, my wife.
Yeah.
Anyway, I have a feeling that's not what was on the audio recording.
So anyway, that's the situation.
I find it interesting.
I do think, I don't want to be a dick about it, but I do think that when you're, you know, if there's a group of people who are right about all of the biggest issues and then you start coming into conflict with how bad not listening to them was, maybe take it easy on using them as your punching bag for a little bit.
Maybe even give them some credit for it.
I don't know.
That's just a thought.
Okay, so here's a clip of Tucker Carlson.
He was talking to a civil rights attorney about this on his show the other day.
Let's check in.
At we're happy to have her on the show tonight.
She's dealt with a lot of this stuff.
In a text exchange we had a couple of hours ago, I expressed my frustration.
You said, quote, I'm not surprised at all.
It seems to me we should be shocked by this.
We have a right to be as American citizens.
Why can't we find out?
It hardly just applies to me.
Why can't any American find out if some bureaucrat in a spy agency is reading your private email?
It's a really simple question.
Why can't we know?
Well, you should be able to find out, Tucker.
And the reason I said I'm not surprised is for the last 20 years since 9-11, I and other civil libertarians have been screaming about the Patriot Act and other laws.
But dating back to 1947, our securities laws have said that the spying may only be on foreigners, not on American citizens.
And our government regularly flouts that.
I mean, you know, we have the example of James Clapper lying to Congress about spying on American citizens and gathering millions of pieces of data, phone call records and all of that.
And so when you ask why, well, of course, it's about this military-industrial complex, the security-industrial complex, and they justify the spying on Americans in the name of we're really focusing on foreigners.
And the American data that we scoop up, they call that incidental.
So I suspect if you're able, because you are a person with a lot of connections and this is a good platform, if you are able to find out more information about this, I think what you're going to find is that you are being described as incidental.
So the gathering of your information is going to be because they're really focusing on somebody else.
But I want to really break that down.
When you look at the Carter Page violations, for example, the lies to the FISA court, does anybody think that the national security apparatus was trying to find out Carter Page's activities and communications?
No.
The trick is, if they can get a surveillance order on an individual, what they're able to do is scoop up all of the communications of all of the people who reach out to that person, text them, even without any predicate.
And so that's really where it's at.
And so that's a huge dragnet.
And when Americans have become scandalized or members of Congress are asking questions about this, there have been some reigning in of these things.
But now the current law is that the phone companies gather this data and they have to store it.
But the NSA can go over and ask for it and go shopping in a treasure trove of billions of pieces of data anytime they want.
And in fact, dating back to 2018, the NSA has looked at or had access to over half a billion records of American communications.
So you're one of them.
But frankly, any important person, any enemy of the state should expect that there's some way that the NSA can get a hold of somebody near you, get an order or a right to ask questions, and all of a sudden they have all that information.
And a bunch of unelected, faceless bureaucrats are going shopping in your data and then talking to the guy next door in the cubicle next door, passing it around the office, and then threatening what to do with it.
Yeah, exactly.
And threatening me, which is exactly what they did.
So the system you described might work if you had patriotic, nonpartisan, non-political, duty-oriented bureaucrats who are fighting, say, a Cold War.
But if you change the focus of the war.
Let's pause it right there.
It's just, I love, yeah, if you had God running government, then maybe the government structure would work.
That's always the thing.
Like, yeah, it didn't work this past time, but we can get it right.
No, the point is you put the structure in place and power corrupts and you will always get this.
There is no magic wand of the individual who will go get that job who won't use these power structures to do exactly what you're being targeted for.
That's the conservative and liberal fallacy every time.
Yeah, it's funny because, right, like this is such a powerful segment so far.
And everything they said is just spot on.
And it's amazing.
And again, this is why I think some libertarians are so goofy where they can't like, even if you disagree with Tucker on several issues, as we obviously do, this is incredible that he's putting this out on the biggest show on Fox News, that people are hearing this, that this is actually how they operate.
They call it incidental collection, but it's almost always the true target of the investigation.
You know, like it's just in the same way, like that she said, what I said earlier, like, yeah, Carter Page probably was not the target, even though they call him the target.
And it's also just this shady thing where there are these secret warrants.
You know, like the idea of a warrant, right, in its, you know, traditional sense was that, well, look, people have the right to privacy, but sometimes there's situations where we could find out really valuable information if we violate their privacy.
But this is a right of theirs.
So in order for us to trample on their rights and, you know, search someone's home, let's say, we have to go to a judge and convince a neutral arbiter that we have this like pretty overwhelming evidence that is more important than that.
You know what I mean?
And like you can think of lots of situations where that is the case.
You know, it's like, okay, well, there's been a kid that was kidnapped and like three people say they saw this guy bring him into his home.
So yeah, I know like it's his home and all, but like, screw that.
We got to go in.
So you present that to a judge.
They go, yep, absolutely.
Three people saw it.
You go into this guy's home.
You show up.
You say, sir, we have a warrant and we're here to search your house.
That's it.
You have no choice.
You have to let us search your house.
Right.
Now, okay, there's always flaws in any statist, you know, situation, but that is like a reasonable way to conduct things and, you know, compare to other options.
But this is something much different, where what you're talking about with these FISA warrants, where you go and you get a warrant in secret to spy on someone in secret.
So they have no idea that they're even being investigated, that anyone's even looking into them.
They don't even have the opportunity to then like step into the process where someone else could say, you know, in that situation could be like, oh, no, no, no, no.
Like, I came in here with my kid.
That's who they saw me come in here with.
Oh, I guess he had the same jacket on.
Here, let me show you my kid.
Let me show you his jacket.
Like, you don't even have the opportunity to insert yourself into it and defend yourself, you know, early in the process.
And perhaps if there were honest investigators, give them important information that they could be missing something, right?
So it's none of that.
In secret, there's a warrant out on you.
Quite possibly, whoever Tucker Carlson was communicating with didn't even know, had no idea that they were even looking into them.
But then, of course, there's more layers to it where, you know, oftentimes they don't even get a warrant at all and all of this data is collected and it's a whole mess.
But yes, to your point that you started with here, Tucker Carlson is doing a fantastic segment.
He's saying all of the right things.
And then he makes the classic right-winger, you know, falls right into the classic right-winger delusion, which is, you know, here's what's our takeaway from all of this.
Well, the takeaway is if we just had patriots in there.
You know, if we just had patriots during, say, like a Cold War, then we wouldn't have to deal with all of these problems.
Now, leaving aside all of the violations from a civil libertarian perspective that took place during the Cold War in the name of the Cold War, you know, look into J. Edgar Hoover for that.
Leaving all of that aside, this is just the level of naivete to believe that you could have this type of centralized power, that you could give a government agency the ability to spy on all American citizens, but hope that you get good people in there.
I mean, this is like, I mean, and again, it's all statist, so I don't think it's unfair for me to make this comparison, but this is some commie-type wishful thinking.
This is like, if we just had the great central planners in there who really cared about the people, then they would plan all the right ways and they would take care of everybody and they would do, and like, okay, like there's like the calculation problem and the knowledge problem and all of that stuff.
But leaving that aside, you know, one of the things I remember Jordan Peterson used to say, which I thought was a really great way to put it.
Big Data and National Security00:12:31
And he was like, when people say, you know, real socialism hasn't been tried yet, what they're really saying is that they think they could do it better.
Like that what they're really saying is like, if I were dictator, I would do the right things.
And he's like, first of all, no, you wouldn't because you're not that good of a person.
So the fact that you think you're above being corrupted is a reflection of how ignorant you are about your own nature.
But he goes aside from that, even if you were that good of a person, some bad person would shoot you in the head and take that position from you, right?
Like once you create, this is a magnet for evil.
Once you create this type of power, a government agency now has the power to spy on all of its citizens, and you think that's not going to be used for political purposes?
You know, it's funny because oftentimes, you know, people who advocate for freedom, one of the things they'll throw at us is like that this is utopian, right?
The idea that people will just do the right thing if left to their own devices, which isn't really what our position is.
But the idea that like markets are utopian, that's bullshit.
This is utopian.
And it's a shame that Tucker, even as he's going through this, can't see that it's like, no, no, no, this power cannot exist, right?
Like we may not be able to banish all power off the face of the earth, but this power, this power completely unchecked, in the hands of the federal government to spy on everybody and not even have to justify it publicly or to, you know, to anyone, that people don't even have to know that they're being spied on, all of this, that is, that just needs to be abolished, period.
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This spying apparatus, this particular one, was built up during the Obama years.
It's not as if we're saying, you know, like even when we talk about abolishing the income tax, and I remember back in the day when Ron Paul used to talk about this, and he'd be like, look, we didn't have an income tax up till 1913.
Like the country still existed.
We won a few wars.
We were doing pretty good.
We were the wealthiest country in the world, like all this stuff.
But 1913 feels like a really long time ago.
Now, you have to kind of explain to people, it's actually not that long ago.
You know, it's like your grandpa could live to being like within a decade or two of going back to 1913.
It's really not that long ago, but I understand what 1913 feels like.
That feels like ancient times to people.
We're talking about the Obama administration.
Like abolishing this is not like, oh, we're going back to some wild, wild west with nothing else.
It's like, no, just the way it was before that.
Just the way things always were, where the NSA did not have this program, which as she correctly pointed out, was then transitioned away from being...
So the NSA doesn't collect all the data now.
The phone companies do.
But the NSA can go take it from them whenever they want to.
So it's basically a worse version of the same thing.
Call me a cynic, but even if you changed whatever laws existed on the book, they're in the business of big data.
That's what's coming next.
The NSA is going to get this no matter what.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I don't think the CIA or the NA, like the same way the CIA, they supposedly don't torture people, but they, you know, send them to black sites.
Yeah, they send them to black sites and they have other people do it for them.
I think the NSA, listen, we're in some new generation where big data is really important.
I don't know what you do with it.
I don't know why it's so valuable, but the big tech companies, they all want that big data.
They're pushing for artificial intelligence and government's not going to be left out of that game.
And so I don't know what law you could put on the book.
The CIA, the NSA, the U.S. government, they will collect all of our data all the time.
It's not going away.
Oh, I agree with you.
It's a daunting task to try to roll this thing back.
And truthfully, I really do think that the only answer, I mean, again, this is not an easy path, but the answer is to abolish all of these agencies, to simply not have them.
Because as long as you have them, they're going to be in this game.
It's a good steal because it's not like they got a kick in your door.
None of us see it happening.
So it's pretty easy for them to do.
And it's hard to even articulate what the value of the big data is.
Well, in some ways, it's in some ways it's nice for dissidents like me and you because it has led to a more efficient yet less brutal form of silencing dissidents.
Now, if you're stupid and you do the wrong thing, they will still crush you.
And, you know, this is what the January 6th people found out.
Like, yeah, yeah, don't go storm in any government buildings.
That's not a smart way to be a dissident.
But the kind of, again, not saying it's impossible to happen too, but assassinating people, institutionalizing people, locking people up who are dissident voices is not even as necessary anymore because they can just get you silenced, you know?
Which is usually, you know, what the point of assassinating someone was.
And so nowadays, it's much more a game of just like, yeah, get them, get them kicked off all the big platforms, get them silenced, and even things like this, right?
Like the goal here ultimately was not to like arrest Tucker Carlson for, you know, like what a primitive dictatorship would do, arrest Tucker Carlson for crimes against the state, right?
That's the type of thing you'd see in like a third world dictatorship.
But what are they trying to do here?
I just get a show off the air.
That's the goal.
Just silence them.
So it's creepy, but I suppose better than, you know, an assassination or something like that.
Okay, let's play the rest of that clip.
I don't know how much we have on it.
Change the focus of the war on terror inward against Americans who are disobedient and don't support the regime.
By definition, you're going to have corrupt ideologues and partisans using this information against American citizens with, by the way, the help of NBC News and CNN and the entire edifice of Intel-connected, totally corrupt news agencies.
I mean, that's like a recipe for tyranny.
Right.
And let me add a couple of things that'll not make you sleep any better, which is that when you try to go into court and challenge these as some civil rights organizations, EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union, cases last for over a decade.
The current case pending in the Ninth Circuit is called Jewel versus National Security Agency.
And for the last 13 years, that case has bounced back and forth up and down to the courts.
So if you can prove that you're being spied on, which is what all of the, you know, glitterati there in D.C. are mocking you for saying, you know, then the government says, well, because this is a national security issue, we can't reveal any information.
We're not going to give you any information in response to subpoenas.
But you usually don't get that far.
They just say, you can't prove it.
It's anecdotes, even if you have a witness like you have.
And so you have no recourse.
No lawsuits against the NSA have effectively been successful in stopping the spying on a particular American citizen.
Look, I'm not, I mean, I'm just, I hate even to be put in a position where I have to say is I'm actually not doing anything wrong.
So it's not like, and if I was, you would be on the front page of the New York Times, you can be sure.
But my concern is that this will be used against tens of millions of Americans who have no power whatsoever and are being reclassified as white supremacists, and therefore they're terrorists, and they're going to bear the brunt of this kind of treatment.
So here are the questions that we have for the NSA, and we're going to keep pressing them on behalf of a lot of people who are going to face this kind of treatment, but have no recourse.
Here's the first.
Does the NSA have any surveillance product on me or our producers?
Two, who authorized the retention of that product?
These are all terms of art.
The Intel community will understand what they mean.
And here's the last one.
What were the minimization procedures for U.S. citizens and journalists in this case?
Will you explain that last one?
I think this is a key.
This is a key safety mechanism that's supposed to protect us from partisan lunacy from Nacassonian people like that, but may not be.
What's a minimization procedure?
Well, they're supposed to do their best to make sure that there's a screening and filtering that goes into place before this data is either given to the NSA for filter for use or certainly to other agencies.
I mean, and what's ironic is that the NSA may be among the good guys in our national security apparatus.
The NSA doesn't like giving information to the FBI in recent years because the FBI has been blatantly abusing the information that the NSA gives it.
And so in reality, these are self-policing agencies.
They're secretive agencies.
There is no effective oversight in Congress or in the executive branch.
And they run rampant with this information and they weaponize it against American citizens.
That's the truth.
That's exactly right.
In fact, an NSA official just said to me on the phone, well, we're very carefully overseen by Congress.
There's a lot of oversight.
And since I've lived in Washington my whole life, I had to laugh because that's a lie.
You know, whatever the NSA does, you know, Mitch McConnell's happy with it on the right.
And of course, the Democrats are more than happy to see their political enemies hassled by an intelligence agency.
It's really scary.
Harmie, I appreciate your work on this issue.
One of the last things.
So I got to say, I do find this whole thing just to be fascinating.
And I hope that Tucker keeps up this push, just if nothing else, to just bring, kind of shed some light on what's going on.
There's still a lot of Americans who just like are really unaware of how this works or how creepy it is, how dangerous it is.
But yeah, that's pretty much the situation right there.
There is, and this is, you know, just the reality of our government, is that it's just not what people are taught in school.
And it's not that there's just like Congress and the presidency and then the Supreme Court and these constitutional limits.
There's this whole secret government that essentially answers to no one.
And you could imagine if you were a congressman who wanted to stand up to the NSA, what would be the thought going through your mind?
You'd be like, oh, they're going to read all of my shit now.
I mean, that in itself will just kind of, you know, that in itself will just kind of, you know, chill a lot of people, especially politicians who tend to be a little bit corrupt in general.
I don't, that'll slow a lot of them down.
So anyway, we'll see where this whole thing goes, but pretty interesting, pretty interesting little event there.
Tucker Carlson versus the NSA.
Any other thoughts, Rob?
Nope.
Can I plug some report store?
Plug away, my friend.
Summer port store in session.
Philly, only got two tickets left.
That's this Thursday, July 4th, close to Maryland.
And then Nashville, August 14th with BK Chris, live podcast, CPU God Standup.
And then we have August.
I forget the weekend, but Rochester.
Tickets are moving.
So if you're upstate New York, come hang out at Rochester.
We're going to be at a comedy club telling some jokes.
It's going to be a great time.
Hell yeah.
Me and Robbie the Fire in Rochester telling some jokes.