Stefan Molyneux discusses the truth about Edward Snowden and breaks down the history, origin, legality, and the terrifying reality of warrentless wiretapping, data collection and government spying. They are watching you.
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| Hello, hello everybody. | |
| It's Stefan Mollerny from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Welcome to all the new subscribers. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| This is the truth about Edward Snowden. | |
| So let's use the way, way back machine to go back to the 18th century and start talking about Edward Snowden. | |
| So the guy named James Otis, he fought at the time what were called Ritz-Benz. | |
| Of assistance. | |
| This is where the British soldiers, basically there were general warrants. | |
| They allowed British soldiers to raid and search homes based on no suspicion of criminal activity. | |
| Just felt like ambling in. | |
| Basically, it was like everybody was on parole. | |
| Any soldier could violate the sanctity of anyone's person or home at will. | |
| And this was, you know, as you can imagine, quite generally loathed by, I guess, what my ancestors probably called the colonists. | |
| The risk of assistance were extreme violations of basic privacy and property rights of Americans and the American revolutionaries. | |
| Oh, how they hated them. | |
| So Otis put a court case forward and he said, look, specific warrants describing the people, places, or things to be searched and sworn by an affirmation are legitimate and legal. | |
| What's called a search warrant? | |
| You've got to go to a judge and say, here's why we want to go and search, and here's the probable cause, and here's the reasons, and here's the evidence, and so on. | |
| But general warrants, those which do not require any specific information or targeting, well, these warrants that enable the government to search at will are illegal. | |
| Ah, tragically, he lost his case. | |
| Ah. | |
| But who was sitting in the audience but the founder of a brewery, I believe? | |
| John Adams? | |
| Otis's argument formed the basis for the 14th Amendment to the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which was written by Adams, which in turn inspired the Fourth Amendment to one U.S. Constitution. | |
| So, Fourth Amendment. | |
| The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. | |
| No warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by an oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. | |
| So you can't just go into someone's house and start searching. | |
| You have to have some sort of proof that... | |
| Something was stolen and it was seen, a bicycle was stolen, it was seen in the backyard, and therefore you can go and look for it. | |
| I mean, so the Fourth Amendment was intended to create a constitutional buffer between U.S. citizens and the intimidating power of law enforcement. | |
| It has three components. | |
| First, it establishes a privacy interest by recognizing the right of U.S. citizens to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. | |
| Second, it protects its privacy interests by prohibiting searches and seizures that are unreasonable or are not authorized by a warrant based upon probable cause. | |
| Third, it states that no warrant may be issued to a law enforcement officer unless that warrant describes with particularity the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. | |
| This is very, very important and has a huge effect on the Snowden case. | |
| Ah, remember the good old days when we had a small government and lots of privacy? | |
| The only way that you can think of the good old days as the good old days is you simply refuse to visit them objectively. | |
| So during the pseudo-war with France, there was this alien and sedition acts of 1798 were passed by the Federalist Congress. | |
| It made it illegal to criticize a federal government official, or any federal government officials, even if the criticism was true. | |
| With the exception of Jefferson, I believe, who was a vice president, but... | |
| Didn't want to be protected or wasn't to be protected by this fundamentally democratic thing. | |
| In the 1920s, there was a predecessor to the NSA called the Cipher Bureau, also known as the Black Chamber. | |
| So the Black Chamber's mission was to monitor international telegraphs for threats to national security. | |
| Do you see how much things change? | |
| The Chamber approached Western Union, the nation's largest telegraph company, hoping to gain access to the messages traveling as telegraph lines. | |
| Just as Verizon is today, Western Union is more than happy to comply, giving the Chamber's secret access to its customers' private communications. | |
| Now, I don't blame the companies too, too much. | |
| You know, when faced with the awesome power, might, and terror apparatus of the federal government, it's not that hard to cave. | |
| During World War II, Project Shamrock gave the Armed Forces Security Agency, which became the NSA, daily access to the communication records of Western Union, RCA Global, and ITT. Shamrock was legal during World War II. But shockingly, the government program designed to work during the war did not stop when the war ended. | |
| Do you remember how, what was it, 1917, the income tax was introduced as a temporary war measure? | |
| Soon to have its 100th year anniversary and have gone up many, many dozens of times in rates since the beginning. | |
| Shamrock was legal during World War II but did not stop until the war did, continuing until 1975. | |
| The Nixon problem. | |
| We'll get to that in a sec. | |
| And at the height of this program, it collected and analyzed its over 150,000 messages a month with no search warrants or court oversight. | |
| Ah, the good old days when privacy was assured. | |
| So then, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 after it was learned that President Nixon had used federal resources, including the FBI's COINTELPRO, to spy on his political opponents, such as Dr. | |
| Martin Luther King Jr. | |
| I had a dream that my dreams would be monitored by the government. | |
| So FISA created a secret court. | |
| Ooh, there's nothing like a secret court for the fine administration of justice. | |
| And the secret court authorized warrants to surveil foreign nationals inside the U.S., Now, there are some criticisms that the FISA court was rubber stamping warrant requests based upon the tiny amount of information that we have, which is there were 18,000 warrant requests in the first 26 years of this court's existence. | |
| It denied... | |
| Oh, let me see if I have enough fingers and thumbs. | |
| It denied... | |
| I do! | |
| Five! | |
| It denied five of those requests. | |
| That could be considered a rubber stamp. | |
| Let's talk about Echelon. | |
| So this is in the 1970s. | |
| Under a system co-named Echelon, the NSA and its junior partners in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada operate a network of massive, highly automated interception stations covering the globe amongst them. | |
| Any of the partners can ask for any of the other partners to intercept its own domestic communications. | |
| Right? | |
| So if you want to track someone in the US and you have the American government, all you do is you ask Canada to track someone in the US because the US is a foreigner to Canada and vice versa. | |
| And therefore you can say, well, we don't spy on our own citizens. | |
| We ask our neighbors to do that. | |
| Much, much different. | |
| Echelon was carried out with any official acknowledgement of its existence because, remember, robust debate is essential to a democracy, let alone any democratic oversight or public or legislative debate as to whether it serves a decent purpose. | |
| The extensiveness of the Echelon global network is a product of decades of intense Cold War activity. | |
| Ah, yet with the end of the Cold War, its budget, far from being greatly reduced or eliminated, was increased. | |
| And the network has grown in both power and reach. | |
| Never let a good crisis go to waste. | |
| Now, it's not just about spying on people. | |
| Let's talk about some commercial spying or espionage. | |
| So German security experts discovered several years ago that the Echelon was engaged in heavy commercial spying in Europe. | |
| Victims included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. | |
| So in 98, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. | |
| Tragically, when the company tried to market its invention in the U.S., It was confronted by its American rival, Kenetec, which announced it had already patented a near-identical piece of technology. | |
| Kenetec then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale of its equipment in the U.S. You see, because we live in such a free-market paradise. | |
| In a read public disclosure, an NSA employee who refused to be named agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon's secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran between Enercon's research lab and its production unit some 12 miles away. | |
| Detailed plans of the company's invention but then passed on to Kenatech. | |
| Trade spying in 1994, Thompson S.A., located in Paris in Airbus Industry, based in Blanc-Nac, SEDEX, France, also lost lucrative contracts snatched away by American rivals, aided by information covertly collected by NSA and the CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the U.S. in 1995 over auto parts trade. | |
| So the US has been trying to persuade European Union countries as well to allow it backdoor access to encryption programs, claiming that this was to serve the needs of law enforcement agencies. | |
| Oh yes, it's always law enforcement. | |
| A report released by the European Parliament in May 1999 asserted that Washington's plans for controlling encryption software in Europe had nothing to do with law enforcement and everything to do with US industrial espionage. | |
| See, if A European company does really well, the government doesn't collect taxes from it, but if an American company does well, the American government collects taxes from it, so it has an incentive to promote the interests of American companies. | |
| Code-breaking. | |
| The NSA has dispatched FBI agents on break-in missions to snatch code books from foreign facilities in the U.S. and CIA officers to recruit foreign communications clerks abroad and buy their code secrets, according to veteran intelligence officials. | |
| By the way, if you've made it this far, since I always get this question at least about 100 times, all the sources are in the low bar to the video or the notes for the podcast. | |
| For decades, beginning in the 1950s, the Swiss company Crypto AG, not a bad name for a punk band, sold the world's most sophisticated and secure encryption technology. | |
| The purchasing nations, there were about 120 who bought this technology, including prime U.S. intelligence targets such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia. | |
| They were confident that their communications were protected, and so they sent messages from their capitals to their embassies and military missions, trade offices, and espionage dens around the world via telex, radio, and fax. | |
| Ask your parents. | |
| All the while, because of a secret agreement between the company and the NSA, these governments might as well have been hand-delivering their messages to Washington uncodedly. | |
| Their crypto AG machines have been rigged before being sold to them so that when they used them, the random encryption key could be automatically and clandestinely transmitted along with the enciphered message. | |
| So you were getting the encrypted message plus the decryption key was being sent to Washington. | |
| NSA analysts could read the messages as easily as they could the morning newspaper. | |
| Which I think even back then was covering the Zimmerman trial. | |
| Now, this is a bit more controversial. | |
| Microsoft denies this, but I thought I'd put forward this case. | |
| In September, this is a new meaning to Windows. | |
| In September 1999, it was revealed the NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special keys into Windows software in all versions from 95 OSR 2 onwards. | |
| An American computer scientist in North Carolina had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun. | |
| Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test the software before they released it. | |
| Inside the code were the labels for two keys. | |
| One was called key, the other was called NSA key. | |
| Microsoft again denies this. | |
| Fernandez presented his findings at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. | |
| The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did or why it had been put there without users' knowledge. | |
| Fernandez says that the NSA's backdoor in the world's most commonly used operating system makes it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer. | |
| According to the recent Snowden leaks, the level of collusion between Microsoft Corporation and the NSA is really quite astonishing. | |
| Microsoft allows The NSA to skirt encryption protocols on Outlook, Skype video, and cloud services such as SkyDrive and data captured by the NSA is routinely passed on to both the FBI and the CIA. In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation, the DAS, the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that the NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft Software. | |
| According to the DAS report, quote, it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system by the same administration. | |
| Bill, open gates! | |
| The report stated that there had been a, quote, strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumors about the existence of spy programs on Microsoft and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams. | |
| The Pentagon said the report was Microsoft's biggest client in the world, and actually for years there has been a Microsoft liaison office at the NSA buildings. | |
| Now you've probably heard about this recently. | |
| Police departments, they use these automated license plate recognition cameras. | |
| To track where you're going, the cameras record the movement of all passing vehicles and store the information in a centralized database. | |
| Police in real time can find vehicles on a hot list to issue tickets for expired registration or unpaid parking tickets. | |
| Cars have been towed from home driveways, Walmart parking lots, and even outside church during services for alleged non-payments of as little as $50. | |
| The data showed that in most jurisdictions, 99% of the vehicles recorded have done nothing wrong. | |
| Maryland, for instance, tracked 85 million license plates in 2012, and of the 0.2% flagged as violation, 97% of them had expired registration, so that's a revenue-gathering tool. | |
| Only 0.005% of the total reads pointed to a serious crime. | |
| Even if a hit is registered, it does not mean that the vehicle is actually being driven by a criminal, as the database information is frequently wrong, something that has led to fatal mistakes in the UK, where license plate cameras are even more widely used. | |
| U.S. law enforcement agencies rarely place any limits on the use of this information. | |
| The Scarsdale, New York Police Department says the use is only limited by the officer's imagination. | |
| So let's look at some of the laws surrounding Snowden's revelations. | |
| So there's this thing called the third party doctrine. | |
| The third party doctrine is a legal principle that, in effect, you lose your Fourth Amendment rights when you relinquish information to a third party. | |
| This ruling said that by giving data, such as phone numbers, to a third party, such as a phone company, You'd given up any expectation of privacy in that data. | |
| That ruling was made in 1979, but it's now used to suggest you've given up an expectation of privacy in lots of data you give to online services. | |
| There is, to me at least, a bit of a difference between an expectation of privacy and turning a whole bunch of stuff over to the government. | |
| When the Fourth Amendment was drafted, of course, the vast majority of people's private activities occurred inside the home, so it made sense to make the home the focus of Fourth Amendment protections. | |
| But as people began conducting more and more of their lives outside of the home, with telephones, email, credit cards, and so forth, using the four walls of the home as the boundary for the Fourth Amendment protection made less and less sense. | |
| Now, just by the by, common law, you know, law that is sort of private and evolves based upon circumstances, tend to keep step with changing technology, but government law generally doesn't. | |
| Whatever is surrounded by force, like government laws and edicts and so on, regulations, they tend to get frozen in time. | |
| So precisely what the Supreme Court recognized this in the famous 1967 case of Katz versus the United States, which held that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping of public payphones, because the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. | |
| So they said you could not wiretap public payphones. | |
| So save us, Supreme Court! | |
| Oh dear. | |
| Well, maybe not. | |
| The Supreme Court effectively says there's no way to challenge warrantless wiretapping. | |
| So the court basically says that any harm It's speculative, and thus there can't be any standing at all. | |
| We decline to abandon our usual reluctance to endorse standing theories that rest on speculation about the decisions of independent actors. | |
| Does that clear it up for you? | |
| Quote, we need to only assume that the government is doing its job to find out about and combat terrorism in order to conclude that there is a high probability that the government will intercept at least some electronic communications to which at least some of the plaintiffs are parties. | |
| The majority is wrong when it describes the harm-threatened plaintiffs as speculative. | |
| So, you know, just trust the government. | |
| I'm not sure when one B. Spears was elevated to a seat at the Supreme Court, but I guess she did. | |
| Now I'll follow a couple of internet activists and refer to this as the Patriot Act because the word Patriot has some moral value that is co-opted by a fundamentally Darth Vader-ish evil piece of legislation. | |
| The Patriot Act includes a requirement to obtain a U.S. court order of 72 hours after surveillance has taken place for U.S. citizens. | |
| So you can do it. | |
| You've got to get the court order afterwards. | |
| Foreign citizens can be subject to surveillance for up to one year without any court subversion. | |
| Now, of course, the reality is that with IP masking, proxy servers, and so on, you can pretend you're anywhere in the world. | |
| And so knowing who's a domestic and who's a foreign citizen, particularly when you're trying to find people who are doing wrong and want to hide from the government or doing things which are considered illegal by the government, not always the same as doing wrong. | |
| And so the idea that you can easily figure out who is domestic and who is foreign is a ridiculous notion that is only believable to people who have no understanding of computers. | |
| So the court which oversees FISA is called FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. | |
| But it is, according to a former NSA analyst, more or less rubber-stamping surveillance and basically a kangaroo court, as we talked about before. | |
| The NSA wasted millions of dollars on a system called Trailblazer, which was supposed to analyze data carried on communications network. | |
| And despite having Trailblazer and using it, the NSA didn't discover the 9-11 plot. | |
| Although Trailblazer was tracking 20 trillion communications transactions of Americans, it didn't get any of the analytical results. | |
| In a December 2012 interview, retired U.S. intelligence officer William Binney explained how much worse surveillance had become under Obama. | |
| Quote, information is not filtered anymore, just stored. | |
| And if government wants to get you, it will just pull out the data. | |
| That same central government will define... | |
| What's right or wrong. | |
| If your position is something the government doesn't like, you become the target. | |
| That's why I always try and do things the government likes. | |
| So, let's talk about what... | |
| Look at that. | |
| What is it? | |
| Nineteen minutes in, hey, we're getting to Snowden! | |
| So NSA Prism secretly collects two things. | |
| One, foreign online communications, email, chat, voice over IP, telex, fax, you name it. | |
| Metadata on millions of phone calls. | |
| So GPS locations and who you're calling and the time and so on. | |
| But they say not the content of the calls. | |
| Whether that's true or not remains to be seen. | |
| Major technology companies have been required to provide backdoor access to the NSA. The details have not been revealed. | |
| Because remember, President Obama welcomes a vigorous public debate, but will not release the information that might enable it. | |
| In 2008, Lord Loveham, Yahoo fought back saying the orders were unconstitutional. | |
| The court ordered Yahoo to comply. | |
| In 2008, Congress gives the DOJ authority to make reluctant companies comply by force. | |
| All government is compliant by force. | |
| And remember, there's a lot of backdoor software. | |
| All phones can be backdoor converted into listening devices, even when you're not talking. | |
| They can install software without asking the user. | |
| And phones, they can also be told to only pretend to turn off and still be listening to your environment. | |
| So the U.S. government, without obtaining proper court warrants before, during, or after, has obtained hundreds of millions of phone logs of Americans who have no connection to any terrorism whatsoever. | |
| So, Snowden offered information on how the NSA has a newly developed program, this PRISM thing, supposedly targeting suspect terrorists, but in the process also sweeping up huge amounts of data about ordinary Americans. | |
| It's done through a variety of U.S. companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype, and Apple. | |
| The information can then be locked away for a long time and easily accessed in the future. | |
| A huge $2 billion facility was recently built in Bluffdale, Utah, by the Obama administration. | |
| Snowden also talked about another program called Boundless Informant, which tracks a billion pieces of intelligence data around the world. | |
| In March 2013 alone, the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of information from computer networks worldwide, and 3 billion of those pieces came from US-based networks. | |
| On the plus side, 96.8 billion pieces of that information were lolcats. | |
| This contradicts the NSA's recent assurances to Congress that it cannot exactly track all the surveillance it performs on American communications with the rest of the world. | |
| Now, most of this data that comes around worldwide does come from Middle Eastern countries, but Snowden says, quote, we hack everybody everywhere. | |
| We make no distinction between us and the others. | |
| We do not have the tools, and I have maps where people are scrutinized most. | |
| We collect more digital communications from Americans than we do from Russians. | |
| Snowden reveals his fear of an Orwellian world, quote, where everything I do and say is recorded, where there is no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. | |
| This is called the chilling effect. | |
| When you believe that everything that you're doing that involves any kind of digital communication is being stored, tracked and monitored and analyzed and could be used against you, it puts a chilling effect, which, you know, the government is never against. | |
| A former East German Stasi, this was their sort of Gestapo there, NKVD, officer says, quote, it is the height of naivete to think that once collected, this information won't be used. | |
| This is the nature of secret government organizations. | |
| Now, of course, remember, Snowden had sworn an oath to protect the Constitution, so we'll have an examination of the legality of what the government is doing. | |
| But let's just drop into three other whistleblowers who've been saying some of the same stuff for years but came forward to support everything that Snowden said. | |
| USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden's leaks, corroborate some of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts. | |
| So they say his disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security. | |
| What Snowden discovered is material evidence of an institutional crime. | |
| We'll get to that. | |
| As a systems administrator, Snowden, quote, could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure, because he would be responsible to get it back and up and running, in fact. | |
| It failed, if in fact it failed. | |
| So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. | |
| That's why he said, I think, I can even target the president or a judge. | |
| If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list, which would be distributed worldwide, and then it would be collected. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | |
| As a super user, he could do that. | |
| It's a lot of power. | |
| The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth. | |
| Of course it is. | |
| Who watches the watchers? | |
| Well, you can't have anybody watch the watchers, which is why the very idea of government is so dangerous. | |
| Congressional overseers, quote, have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. | |
| They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing. | |
| Lawmakers, quote, don't really understand what the NSA does and how it operates. | |
| Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand. | |
| Even if they're told the truth, which is not often. | |
| Okay, so Edward Snowden, 30, decided to work with intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in order to obtain information about U.S. surveillance programs, the NSA leaker told the South China Morning Post. | |
| Quote, my position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to a list of machines all over the world the NSA has hacked. | |
| That is why I accepted that position about three months ago, he said. | |
| He said that he could not live with what the NSA was doing. | |
| He has been charged with the unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence and is wanted in the US for a variety of counts that could result in decades in prison if convicted. | |
| He narrowly missed the charge of treason, which has the death penalty. | |
| He was charged in June with three felonies, theft of government property and two charges under the Espionage Act of 1917, unauthorized communication of national defense information and conveying classified communications information to unauthorized persons or people. | |
| He is the eighth person to be charged under the espionage statute under the Obama administration, more than double the other presidents combined. | |
| Well, is he a whistleblower? | |
| Well, the Associated Press has told all of its member agencies to refer to Snowden as a leaker, not a whistleblower, because freedom of the press is very important. | |
| The Whistleblower Act in the U.S. provides protection for government employees who report dishonest or illegal activities occurring in a government agency. | |
| So if you find dishonest or illegal activities, you are protected from repercussions. | |
| Now, the government says PRISM is legal and authorized by the FISA and Patriot Act. | |
| Two lawsuits are currently challenging this reading, charging that this program violates the constitutional protections as well as federal law, specifically breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association and due process rights. | |
| So the Patriot Act is a law that in many ways overreaches constitutionally protected rights of U.S. citizens. | |
| In section 215 of this act, the government is required to provide facts to show that the information they are gathering, quote, shall specify the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation conducted in accordance with subsection A2 to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence services. | |
| It's impossible that every wireless customer in the U.S. has made calls related to international terrorism or clandestine intelligence services, so this is a violation of the law. | |
| And even if you take the broad reach of the Patriot Act, what the NSA is doing and has been doing for years is clearly legal. | |
| Again, I'm no legal expert. | |
| The sources for all of this are in the low bar. | |
| This is just what people say. | |
| Now, is the U.S. going kind of nutty? | |
| Are they empire on steroids? | |
| Well, Let's look at what the Allies do to leakers, whistleblowers, or people who release government information. | |
| In the UK, the US's closest military and intelligence ally, the maximum penalty for public disclosure of intelligence or security information is two. | |
| Count them two years. | |
| Oh, poor Manning. | |
| Since Britain's official Secrets Act of 1989 entered into force, 10 public servants with authorized access to confidential info have been prosecuted under the Act. | |
| Of those, the longest sentence one year in prison was served by Stephen Hayden, a Navy petty officer who pled guilty to selling security and intelligence info to the Sun tabloid concerning a plot by Saddam Hussein to launch anthrax attacks in the UK. In the US, that offense would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, the same law being used to prosecute Bradley Manning, which brings a possible life sentence. | |
| Recently, Luxembourg's long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker announced his resignation this week over a spying scandal involving illegal phone taps alongside a number of other highly corrupt activities. | |
| Illegal phone taps. | |
| One tiny, tiny sliver of a percentage point of what prison was doing. | |
| And Luxembourg's Prime Minister had to resign. | |
| Hmm. | |
| So a survey of the laws and practices of 20 European countries found that in at least 13 countries things are even more relaxed. | |
| A disclosure of classified information to the public would not result in any penalty in the absence of a showing of harm. | |
| Ten countries require the government to prove either actual or probable harm in order for any penalty to be imposed. | |
| An additional three countries allow the lack of harm to be raised as a defense or mitigating circumstance. | |
| Under U.S. law, the mere fact of a leak is sufficient cause for prosecution. | |
| In practice, a few lower courts have required some showing of harm, but the harm can be minimal and speculative, and the interpretation has not been confirmed by the Supreme Court. | |
| The Obama administration continues to assert that the prosecution is not required to establish harm, at least concerning disclosure of classified documents. | |
| Ah, and what has America been doing to its fine European allies? | |
| Well, U.S. intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top-secret U.S. National Security Agency documents leaked by Juan E. Snowden. | |
| One document lists 38 embassies and missions describing them as targets. | |
| It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialized antennae. | |
| According to Snowden's revelations in the German magazine Der Spiegel, the NSA snoops through approximately 20 to 60 million German phone connections and 10 million internet data sets a day. | |
| According to the Snowden report, all in all, the NSA comes through about half a billion German phone calls, emails, and text messages on a monthly basis. | |
| So, Snowden's disclosures of massive surveillance that was technically illegal should have been disclosed at least to members of Congress and certainly was information of high public interest. | |
| Attempts at internal disclosure had previously failed. | |
| The Congressional Oversight Committees had been informed of the prison program and at least two Congress members reported that their efforts to prompt an effective investigation were stymied, went nowhere, Both senators had warned for years that the government secretly claimed broader surveillance powers than a plain reading of the laws permitted – that's a nice way of putting it – but said they were barred from elaborating because of laws protecting classified information. | |
| The Attorney General's office should use one of the more than 150 laws on the books that criminalize the disclosure of specific and well-defined categories of information, including intelligence sources, codes and methods, identities of covert agents and technological data about nuclear data. | |
| Moreover, to comply with the First Amendment, courts should interpret such laws, some of which expressly so state to require both a likelihood and an intent to cause significant harm. | |
| So two Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that the National Security Agency provided inaccurate and misleading information about the government's extensive surveillance operations. | |
| So the NSA's response, when questioned, wasn't in tune with what Senators Wyden and Udall had been told of the programs. | |
| We were disappointed to see that this fact sheet contains an inaccurate statement about how the Section 702 authority has been interpreted by the U.S. government. | |
| In our judgment, this inaccuracy is significant as it portrays protections for Americans' privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are. | |
| Lawmakers rejected the NSA's claim that any inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a U.S. person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorized purpose nor evidence of a crime. | |
| We believe that this statement is somewhat misleading, replied the Senators, in that it implies that the NSA has the ability to determine how many American communications it has collected under Section 702, or that the law does not allow the NSA to deliberately search for the records of particular Americans. | |
| In fact, the intelligence community has told us repeatedly that it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the U.S. whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the FISA Amendments Act. | |
| So, look, I mean, the internet, digital communications, cell phones, you name it, they are the greatest tool for totalitarian surveillance that any government has ever dreamed of throughout human history. | |
| No government in history has ever had as much access to detailed information about all of its citizens as the governments that exist right now. | |
| And you know the tragedy of it is that the NSA would never have been able to make sense of the massive amounts of data it was collecting without the maturation of open-source software tools such as Hadoop. | |
| Of course, these are tools that programmers created and refined and shared and grew, usually voluntarily, to deal with the operational problems of handling big data. | |
| And this is where we really get to the meat of the matter. | |
| Let me just zoom in a little bit here and talk to you just for a minute or so about what this fundamentally means. | |
| So look, the government would never have invented this stuff. | |
| The government doesn't really invent anything. | |
| The government just co-ops stuff that the free market creates. | |
| So, all of this electronic communications, surveillance equipment, the internet, fundamentally, well, the internet was developed as a Cold War bypass technology for the phone lines, but it wasn't commercialized until the free market came along and improved and so on. | |
| So the free market breeds all of this stuff, and cell phones and GPS tractors, all of this stuff is popularized and put out to the consumer by the free market. | |
| And whenever you have a government, you have something which hoovers up all of the virtues and values of the free market and turns them into some pretty black, evil monitoring devices. | |
| So whenever you have a government at the center of society combined with an incredible technological driver in the free market, you end up with a freedom fueling fascism. | |
| And this is really tragic and really can't be avoided. | |
| Now, the other thing that's important is that there's a reason why you're supposed to get some sort of warrant before going in and doing searches, because that means you actually have to do some proactive legwork. | |
| If you've just got all this data, what do you do? | |
| Well, you sit back and wait for a request to come in. | |
| And of course, most of the things you're going to pursue are political in nature or revenue generating in nature, such as going after people who haven't paid for their licenses. | |
| For their cars or something like that. | |
| So it makes people pretty passive. | |
| It gets rid of proactive police work. | |
| And it just makes you sit on a whole bunch of data, comb through it once in a while based upon various requests, maybe try to look for a pattern here or there, but not actually get out into the world, train people to go undercover, train people to become double agents, and all that kind of stuff. | |
| You just end up sitting on a bunch of data and getting lazy. | |
| There's a reason why you need law enforcement to focus, because you really want them to be proactive in trying to figure things out rather than just trying to drink from the sea of data. | |
| So, all of this stuff is really important. | |
| You know, the government is one of the oldest forms of social organization known to man, going all the way back to the Stone Age, going all the way back to primitive tribes, where you had the tribal leader, the chieftain, who was the most violent usually, or the one most willing to use violence. | |
| You had, that was the alpha male, you had the beta males who were willing to be the enforcers, and then you had everyone under the control. | |
| And you had what Ayn Rand used to call the witch doctor, who was the propagandist, which is a sort of switch between the mainstream media and This hierarchical pyramidical form of social organization is, you know, you can see it in chimpanzees. | |
| It's really primitive. | |
| It's really old. | |
| And unfortunately, when you feed this primitive ancient method of social organization Dare I even say organization, a social hierarchy. | |
| With all the tools that freedom and volunteerism and property rights and trade develop, then you are really swelling, you know, what used to be a blunt stone used to crush people's heads into a literal death star. | |
| You are feeding fascism with technology and so this is one of the reasons why I fundamentally question the need for a government style structure for a violent hierarchy And a violent monopoly of the initiation of the use of force at the very center of society. | |
| It's only going to get more dangerous as technology develops further. | |
| So I hope that you will mull upon that. | |
| Thank you so much for listening. | |
| Have yourselves a wonderful day. | |
| This is Tevan Mullen from Freedom Main Radio, reminding you to donate if you like at fdrurl.com forward slash donate. |