Has the surveillance state claimed the last bit of our privacy? Our lives are being stored at enormous "data centers" in the US and abroad. Everything we do, every transaction, every website we visit. This has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with control. Today's Liberty Report is joined by former State Department official Peter Van Buren to discuss the surveillance state as so masterfully depicted in the recent Oliver Stone film, Snowden.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Has the surveillance state claimed the last bit of our privacy? Our lives are being stored at enormous "data centers" in the US and abroad. Everything we do, every transaction, every website we visit. This has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with control. Today's Liberty Report is joined by former State Department official Peter Van Buren to discuss the surveillance state as so masterfully depicted in the recent Oliver Stone film, Snowden.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
I'm Daniel McAdams, the co-host of the program.
Dr. Paul is traveling yet again today, so I'm afraid you'll have to bear with me alone.
But I'm not alone.
I have a good friend and a terrific guest joining today at the Liberty Port.
And that's Peter Van Buren.
Peter spent 24 years at the State Department, including a famous stint in Iraq, where he blew the whistle on a lot of malfeasance in the provincial reconstruction teams and has since gone on to write several very important books, including We Meant Well, which details his time in Iraq.
So Peter, thank you very much for joining us.
My pleasure, Dan.
Always happy to be back with you here on the Liberty Report.
It's great to have you.
Well, we do want to, our main topic, we want to talk a little bit about the Snowden movie, which came out at the end of last week, and the sort of the broader implications of this as it moves into popular culture and film as a medium to transmit ideas about the surveillance state, etc.
But first of all, something very interesting happened.
You had an article that was picked up by The Guardian and is now on the front page of The Guardian, and it deals with terrorism.
And that, of course, is on everyone's mind today after some bomb attacks on the East Coast and some knivings in, it's not funny, but some knivings elsewhere.
So Peter, if you can just give us a quick synopsis of your article.
Absolutely.
I live in New York City.
And so Saturday night, as I was coming back home, the news was ablaze with a bomb attack not too far from where I live.
And then, of course, that was preceded by bombs going off in New Jersey.
And then this morning we found out there were bombs in a New Jersey transit station and all sorts of things.
We're not sure we're done with all this yet, though.
Apparently, one of the people involved is in custody.
I don't want to call it coincidence or happenstance, but I had written an article that was published late last night and picked up by The Guardian this morning.
That was my apology to my daughter.
We just sent my last child off to college, her senior year in college.
And of course, her thoughts are all on the future.
She's apprehensive like any college senior should be and is about her future.
But in fact, while she's worried largely about finding meaningful work and all those good things, the future for her is in fact going to be controlled by the terrorism, the incidents we saw this weekend, the reaction that our government has been putting forth to terrorism for the last 15 years, and in fact, the surveillance state that Edward Snowden was brave enough to bring to our attention.
My article was largely an apology to her, an apology that persons like myself in the government failed to do anything about this.
An apology that people like yourself and Dr. Paul, who saw these things coming, were not able to reach an even larger segment of the American public and mobilize them to do anything about this when it would have been easier to stop.
And an apology that we're going to be leaving her to go out into a world that's very, very different from any that Americans have ever experienced before.
One that we are destined to be controlled by fear, where our government will manipulate us based on fear, and where the magic word of terrorism will be used to justify, well, absolutely anything the government wants to do to us.
That sounds disturbing, but very interesting.
You know, it is a great point, and I have young kids, and I feel the same way.
The world in no way resembles the world we grew up in, even in the midst of the Cold War.
It in no way resembles it.
And we see in the politicians' reactions to the recent attacks, the two major presidential candidates, virtually indistinguishable, probably competing with each other to be the most shrill and to convey the most fear.
Donald Trump says, well, this is just why we need to profile people more and we need to bomb more.
And Hillary says, well, we need to start bombing Syria more.
And doing the same thing that's created this disaster in some way will fix it in their minds.
So there's not a lot to be super optimistic about, I think.
It's frightening because whoever takes over the White House in January will be the fifth consecutive American president to bomb the Middle East, Iraq in particular, but also other parts of the area.
Five presidents in a row have been bombing in the area.
Bill Clinton dropped bombs in Somalia.
And as you commented to me offline, the Somalis are now looking about ways to strike back into the United States.
The person that's been arrested was originally from Afghanistan.
The United States has been making war there for 15 years.
My daughter is 21.
That war started.
She was six years old.
We were practically, well, she'd get embarrassed to hear, you know, we were practically still changing diapers.
Not really.
But the idea would be that people of her generation have known no other world.
They've never lived, at least as adults or even thinking teens, in a world not dominated by terrorism, where the United States was not at war in multiple countries across the Middle East, overtly, and then semi-covertly in places like the Philippines, Southeast Asia, across the African continent.
They don't know any other world.
And they live in fear.
They live choosing to accept with somewhat cynical attitudes or disbelief or false patriotism the idea that if we're not surveilled, we're not safe.
They've grown up in a place where the police search you in the subways here in New York.
The NYPD is conducting random, so-called random bag searches.
At the airport, we take off our shoes.
My last trip through the airport, I had confiscated from me a tube of squeezed cheese.
It was intended as kind of a joke for a friend, but it was taken away because it was considered a liquid.
Right now in New York City, because of the UN General Assembly is in town, we are on virtual lockdown.
NSA's Vacuuming Operation00:13:04
Traffic across major arteries in America's arguably most important city is shut down.
You can't travel across town in certain areas.
When Obama decides it's time to go home, they're going to shut down some of the major roads in and out of the city.
It's astonishing to realize we live in a world that is headed towards this dystopian surveillance future that in many ways is already now.
Yeah, and yet the mainstream media, instead of questioning this move toward tyranny, they back the government.
They back the state.
They cheer it.
They're excited by it.
You know, it gives them so much.
But, you know, that's a great segue into just a short discussion about the movie Snowden, which I think is a very important movie.
You had a great review of it on your website, which I encourage everyone to frequent.
We meantwell.com.
It's a great place, and Peter's writing is so engaging.
I'm jealous often, Peter, of your ability to convey.
But you saw the film, you gave it a very interesting review, and you pointed out that this is the main point of the film that came through to you was the idea that the national security state is not a benign thing.
It's not there to protect us.
It's actually a very malignant growth on our society.
And I think that's such an important point.
Absolutely.
Oliver Stone has made a tremendous movie, and I think others have said it as well.
That, I mean, this is the movie that he was destined to make.
No one else could have made something like this.
There was a terrific documentary made about a year ago called Citizen Four that was shot literally in the hotel room where Snowden was revealing his information to the journalists.
And it's a hell of a movie of its own.
However, what Stone has done with Snowden's story, as he's done in previous movies, is to dramatize what happened, to emotionalize what happened, and most importantly, to bring this story to a mass audience.
Previous efforts to talk about Snowden have either vacillated between what we'll call left and right, which tend to speak to specific, fairly defined audiences.
Oliver Stone can put a movie into thousands of theaters.
He can reach a suburban, if you will, audience that either doesn't know that much about the Snowden case or really is sort of may have an opinion, but it may not be a very formed opinion.
And so by dramaticizing the event, by painting Snowden as a human being who eventually became a man of conscience, a man of courage, he is pushing out to an awful lot of people a very important message.
And this is what his whole career has been about.
If you go back to some of his better-known films, JFK, which brought information about the conspiracy to kill the president that was really not known to many people and to a wide-scale audience.
Wall Street, which came out at a time when everybody in America was competing to make money, and Stone pointed out that this was not going to end well.
And even back to some of his earlier films like Platoon, which suggested that American soldiers in Vietnam were not the angels, the noble warriors stuck in a terrible war.
But back to the Snowden movie, one of the most impressive and terrifying scenes in the film, and I don't want to give too much away, is where a fairly still naive Naive Edward Snowden is exposed to some of the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance.
Because of Snowden's revelations, we kind of smile and nod and make jokes even now.
Oh, I'm sure the NSA is watching me.
Oh, gosh, I hope they didn't listen on my phone call to my mom this weekend.
But Snowden is suddenly exposed to a world where at the keyboard, an NSA technician can access a webcam, can do a search of both government intelligence files and social media and emails, can quickly link those through what they call degrees, where they access, Dan, your email, then they access the email of the people who have written to and from you, then they access the email of the people who wrote to and from those people.
And suddenly, you are connected in a web of potential co-conspirators.
There's a terrific scene in the film, and it's been on the trailer, so I hope I'm not acting as a spoiler here.
Where, as an example, the NSA technician covertly activates a webcam of a Muslim woman disrobing.
She starts off in her hijab and her veil, and by the end of the scene, she's there in her underwear, and the technician is making kind of rude sexist remarks about her.
And that's designed to really pound home in a small way, in a narrow way, what 24-hour constant surveillance is all about.
You have no privacy, and Snowden, the movie, really drives that home.
You know, Professor Bob Higgs gave a lecture at the Mises University recently, and he said that he believes the surveillance state in the U.S. is probably the most tyrannical in history, and a lot of that is because of technology, what enables it to happen.
And what's interesting, you know, there is the covering the webcam with tape and everything, but also the normalization of surveillance.
You know, I moved to Hungary right after the end of communism, and I was working as a reporter, and I was trying to understand the political scene as it emerged.
And I remember at the time, whenever I would have a phone call with a political figure, they would always say, well, go down to the pay phone.
Don't call from home.
And I always thought how absurd and ridiculous it is.
This paranoia about the government listening in.
Come on, guys, get over it.
And it seems so absurd, but now it's completely normalized here, something that makes that look like child's play.
It is.
It is.
And there's two factors that have changed things from the bad old days, the things that the KGB used to do across Eastern Europe or the various security services in places like Hungary or East Germany.
And I think the difference is the storage capability and the ability to link things together.
These are tools that the Stasi and the KGB could only have dreamed of.
Right now, the NSA is vacuuming up everything they can, if not already everything, about us.
And they have the ability for the first time to store it, to build data centers in Europe.
And there's another one apparently being built in Maryland, where they can literally store everything about your life.
Your emails, your texts, your phone calls, whatever covert listening devices they're using, your Wi-Fi data that tracks you, the license plate data that police departments collect telling where you were and who you were with at the time.
It's all being stored.
And it's being stored for two reasons.
One is so that if one day you pop up as a so-called person of interest and they haven't been paying all that much attention, they can go back.
That's what's happening right now with this guy that was arrested in New Jersey in connection with the bombings.
They're going back through everything they've got stored on him for as long as they've kept the records.
The other thing about the storage is it's waiting for new technologies.
No one knows what kind of data mining tools might exist in, say, 10 years.
And they'll be able to use that stored data and apply the new tools against it.
The other thing that's happening, and Snowden is, the movie does a terrific job of explaining how this works, is the way that everything can be linked together.
Once upon a time, you had a paper file that had reports from FBI agents who were watching you on the street.
You had transcripts in another file that were picked up off your phone calls.
You had this, that, and the other thing.
There were all these data sets out there, but they were all disparate.
Now, using the amazing supercomputing powers that the NSA has, this can all be combined.
And so we start the day off with your cell phone sitting next to your bed, and we find out what texts and emails may have come in overnight.
We watch that cell phone move because we're tracking you both through the cell towers and any Wi-Fi you collect to.
We match that data up against your license plate readers, and we start matching it up with the people around you.
We start to create patterns out of your life that we can put together into a holistic picture of who you are.
What do you do?
What sites do you look on online?
What products do you purchase?
You pull money out of an ATM.
What for?
You're going to the doctor.
After the doctor, you stop by the pharmacy.
What do you do at the pharmacy?
What do your prescription medicines tell us about your overall health?
Do they expose vulnerabilities that will allow the government, if they wish, to press on soft spots if they need to work and manipulate you?
What if they find that you're, I'm not talking about you, of course, Dan, but what if they find that a target is having an affair?
What if they find that a target has been taking hormones that may help him or her transition?
What if that information was passed on to a spouse or an employer or in case of a celebrity leaked to the media?
This surveillance and the ability to pull this information together not only destroys our privacy, but it opens up every single one of us to manipulation if and when this government decides it's time to push a few buttons.
And let's get that suspect on our side, if you will, or he or she will risk his life being ruined.
And the other part of that, of course, is the idea that you will exercise self-censorship.
You will change the way you behave because you have the sense that you're being watched, that the state is watching you.
You may do things differently.
That always seems like the most insidious part of the whole thing.
But, you know, there was a big outcry.
This is the point that disturbs me the most.
You know, what you've just described is really something out of a sci-fi horror film, except that it's real.
But if you ask the average American, I think they still have the feeling because it hasn't trickled down to affect their everyday lives.
They have this feeling that they are somehow immune to all of this.
And when they finally wake up, this system will be so entrenched and so in place that there literally will be nothing to do to fight it.
That's the biggest fear that I have.
One of the expressions that I use in the article that's in The Guardian when I'm apologizing to my daughter is the one about how fish can't see the water that they swim in.
This world that you've described, that the movie Snowden describes, is becoming, for people of a certain generation, normal.
And for many younger people, it is normal.
There is no other world they've grown up in.
don't know anything different.
They don't have to be cowed into submission.
They don't have to be convinced that this surveillance is benign.
They have grown, literally grown up with it.
I use the example and perhaps some older viewers will find this a touch point.
You know, people who grew up during the Great Depression in the United States, my grandparents did, and for the rest of their lives, they hoarded things.
They saved paper bags and they kept aluminum foil and the basement was full of stuff that they just couldn't bring themselves to throw out.
They were raised in a world where there was always a question of whether they would have enough and they never could get past that in their lives.
It became very, very normal.
And I'm afraid the same thing is happening to all the generations that have, I almost said come online, who have been born and grown up post 9-11.
This is simply the way that they live, monitored 24-7, aware that they're monitored 24-7, and really facing absolutely no choice but to find that normal.
Otherwise, psychologically, how can they get through their day?
It's a very, very dangerous situation and one that literally terrifies me for the future of our country.
24/7 Monitored Society00:00:54
Yeah, that's absolutely right, Peter.
And we do have to go now, but I think if anything, that should motivate great communicators like yourself, lesser communicators like some of us, to redouble our efforts to do everything we can while we still can to try to convey, try to tell people, try to warn people the dangers of the surveillance state.
So thanks so much for all the work that you do to help us understand.
And thank you very much for joining the Liberty Report.
Thanks for helping me get the message out and thanks for all that you and Dr. Paul are doing to try to educate people to the water that they're swimming in.
Thanks, Peter.
As always, I want to thank the audience.
Thank you so much for sticking with us, for watching the report.
Please let your friends and family and neighbors and even enemies know about the report so they can watch it.