A judge has struck down the bulk surveillance of Americans' phone records by the government. This is a huge victory for our privacy rights, but what does it mean for the Chinese government? And what will it mean in the long-term? Plus, a new technology that could allow the government to spy on us in a way no one else can. This week's guest is Alex Blumberg, host of the podcast "The FiveThirtyEight" and host of "The Alex Show" on the pod. He's a journalist, podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He's also the author of the book, "The Patriot Act" and has been a frequent guest on the Alex Show. Alex joins us to talk about his new book, The Patriot Act: The Truth About It, and why we should all be worried about the government spying on us. Also, we talk about the new technology called "End-to-End Encryption" and how it could be a game-changer in the privacy crisis we're all facing, and how companies like Google and other tech companies are using it to track our every move to track us and keep us safe. We also talk about what's going on in the world and what we can do to protect our privacy, and what companies are doing about it. and how they can do about it, too. . Thank you for listening to the podcast! Big thanks to Billy and Bobby for coming up with the intro and outro music, Bobby for the outro, and for the intro music, and thanks to Bobby for making us feel like we're in the mood for this week's theme song. , and thanks for coming out loud and clear and clear, and bright and clear in this episode, and we hope you like it. Thank you Bobby for letting us know what you're listening to this episode. Cheers, Bobby and Bobby, and good vibes! and good night, bye, bye. Cheers! -Bobby, Cheers. -Eugene, Bobby, Bobby & Billy - EJ, EJ and Joe, and Joe and Cheers -Joby, and JUICY, and Good to See You, and Bye Bye, Bye Bye Bye bye, Bye, bye Bye Bye. Blessings, bye! -Jon & Bye, Love, - P. & GOTY,
00:01:07.000This ruling, this is actually not the first time the federal government has or the appeals courts have struck down some of the federal surveillance programs as unlawful.
00:01:18.000But this one is really important because it happened from an appeals court.
00:01:26.000And what they had ruled was that the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records was illegal.
00:01:35.000And this is the very first sort of mass surveillance program that I and the journalists, really that the news was broken back in 2013. So this is a huge victory for privacy rights.
00:01:49.000What it means is There was this provision of the Patriot Act.
00:02:31.000It's just so much propaganda attached to that name, like the Patriot Act.
00:02:36.000This is one of the funny things because it should be a warning for anybody who's in, like, you know, just anywhere in the country and they hear on the news they're talking about, like, the Save Puppies Act.
00:02:46.000There's actually one that they've been trying to push through recently, which is basically outlawing meaningful encryption from the major Internet service providers.
00:02:56.000Like, if Facebook or Google, for whatever reason, got out of bed in the morning and they actually wanted...
00:03:02.000To protect the security of your communications in a way that even they can't break.
00:03:09.000Like right now, Google and Facebook, they do a great job keeping other people from spying on your communications.
00:03:17.000But if Google wants to rifle through your inbox, right, if Facebook wants to go through all your direct messages and give that to the federal government, like you tap one button and boom, they've got all of it.
00:04:19.000And so the idea that a lot of them have, that they've considered, and this has actually become a bigger thing in the COVID crisis where we start talking about like contact tracing.
00:04:30.000These companies want to know where everybody is at all the time so they can hand this over to medical authorities or whatever.
00:04:35.000There's this idea called end-to-end encryption, which what it means is that when you send a message, you know, when Billy sends a message to Bobby, Billy and Bobby both have the keys to unlock that message.
00:04:48.000And it could be sent through Facebook.
00:04:51.000It could be posted on a bulletin board in the town square.
00:04:54.000But without that key, which the people who run the bulletin board, right, the people who own the bulletin board, Google, Facebook, they don't have that key.
00:05:04.000Only the phones at the end, the laptops at the end, the people who own those, they're the only people who have the key.
00:05:09.000So if somebody comes to Facebook and says, we want to see that information, Facebook hands over the encrypted message, right?
00:05:30.000Congress is trying to stop the basically proliferation of that basic end-to-end encryption technology.
00:05:37.000And they're calling it like the Child Online Predator Act or something like that.
00:05:42.000Where they say it's all about protecting the posting of like child exploitation material and really, really horrible stuff.
00:05:50.000But that's not actually what the law is about.
00:05:54.000The law is about making it easier for spies and law enforcement to reach deeper and deeper into your life with a simple warrant stamped by any court.
00:06:03.000And the funny thing is, this never used to be the way law enforcement worked in the United States.
00:06:09.000I mean, when you hear about a warrant, what does that mean to you?
00:06:22.000The real issue with warrants when it pertains to encryption, like when you're talking about the Child Safety Act or whatever they're calling it...
00:06:32.000Anyone would say, yes, we have to stop child predators.
00:06:36.000But the problem with having the ability to use something like that to stop child predators, in my eyes, I start thinking, well, if I really wanted to look into someone, what I would do is I would send them some malware that would put child predators Pornography on their computer,
00:06:52.000and then I would have all of the motive that I need to go and look through everything.
00:06:58.000Like, say if they were a political dissident, if they were doing something against the government, and you were someone who was acting in bad faith, and you decided, okay, we want to look into this guy, but we don't have a warrant.
00:07:23.000So we have to, well, do we have motive?
00:07:26.000All you'd have to do is, and we both know this, it's very easy to put something illegal on someone's computer if they're not paying attention.
00:07:34.000It's very easy to install, like you could send someone a text message that looks like a routing number for a package they're going to get.
00:07:42.000They click on that, and then you, what is that, what the Israelis have, Pegasus.
00:07:50.000Well, it's from Brian Fogel's new film, The Dissident, which is about Jamal Khashoggi's murder and how the Saudis actually tapped into Jeff Bezos's phone.
00:08:05.000And that's where all of the, this is the suspicion, is that that's where all of those National Enquirer photos came out and all the attacks on him.
00:08:14.000Because they had access to his actual phone through this.
00:08:17.000So someone could easily get into your stuff if you're not paying attention.
00:08:21.000And then they could use, you know, whatever acts they've come up with.
00:08:26.000Whatever, it's the Patriot Act or whatever act.
00:08:54.000This company, the CEO's name I think is Shalev Julio, is run in Israel.
00:09:00.000It was previously owned actually by an American venture capital firm.
00:09:04.000I believe they've been re-bought out, but it doesn't really matter.
00:09:09.000Their entire business This is preying on flaws in the critical infrastructure of all the software running on the most popular devices in the world.
00:09:19.000The number one target, right, is the iPhone.
00:09:21.000And this is because the iPhone, as secure as it is relative to a lot of other phones, is a monoculture, right?
00:09:30.000You get these little software update notifications all the time that are like, hey, please update to the most recent version of iOS.
00:09:55.000But to actually break into a device, Is that it's not patched, right?
00:10:00.000Patch means getting these security updates, these little code updates that fix holes that researchers found in the security device.
00:10:10.000Well, Apple's really good about rolling these out all the time for everybody in the world.
00:10:15.000The problem is Basically, all these different iPhones, right?
00:10:20.000You got an iPhone 6, you got an iPhone 8, you got an iPhone X, you got an iPhone, you know, 3, whatever.
00:10:27.000These are all running a pretty narrow band of software versions.
00:10:34.000And so these guys go, if they want to target, for example, Android phones, like Google phones, like a Samsung Galaxy or something like that.
00:10:41.000There's like a billion different phones made by a billion different people.
00:10:45.000Half of them are completely out of date.
00:10:48.000But what it means is it's not one version of software they're running.
00:10:53.000And this is actually bad for security on the individual level.
00:10:57.000But it's good for security in a very unusual way, which is the guys who are developing the exploits, the guys like this NSO group who are trying to find ways to break into phones, they now have to have, like, 50 different handsets running 50 different versions of software.
00:11:52.000All the important people, all the lawmakers, all the guys who are in there.
00:11:55.000So they've made a business on basically attacking the iPhone and selling it to every two-bit thug who runs a police department in the world.
00:12:04.000You know, they sell this stuff to Saudi Arabia.
00:12:08.000And there's a group of researchers in Canada working at a university called the Citizen Lab.
00:12:15.000And these guys are really like the best in the world at tracking what NSO Group is doing.
00:12:19.000If you want to learn about this stuff, the real stuff, look up Citizen Lab and the NSO Group.
00:12:25.000And what they have found is all the people who are being targeted, By the NSO group, the classes of people, the countries that are using this.
00:12:35.000And it's not like the local police department in Germany trying to bust up a terrorism ring or something like that.
00:12:43.000It's the Mexican government spying on the head of the Mexican opposition.
00:12:48.000We're trying to look at human rights defenders who are investigating student disappearances.
00:12:53.000Or it's people like the friends and associates of Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by the Saudi government.
00:13:00.000Or it's people like dissidents in Bahrain.
00:13:04.000And these petro-states, these bad actors nationally, will pay literally tens of millions of dollars each year Just to have the ability to break into an iPhone for a certain number of times, because that's how these guys do it.
00:14:13.000And when you click the link for the funeral arrangements, it opens your web browser.
00:14:17.000And the web browser on your phone is always the biggest, most complicated process in it, right?
00:14:23.000There's a zillion lines of code in this as opposed to an instant messenger where there's fewer lines of code in it.
00:14:30.000And they'll find one thing in that, where there's a flaw that lets them feed instructions, not just to the browser, but basically escape the little sandbox that the browser's supposed to play in, that's supposed to be safe, where it can't do anything too harmful, and it'll run out of this sandbox,
00:14:47.000and it'll ransack your phone's, like, hardwired operating system, the system image.
00:14:54.000It'll like give them privileges to do whatever they want on your phone as if they are you and then as if they have a higher level of privilege than you.
00:15:04.000They have system level privileges to change the phone's operation permanently, right?
00:15:09.000And this is the problem is on the phone.
00:15:12.000You can replace the phone, right, and they'll lose access to that.
00:15:16.000But if they've already used that, To gain the passwords that you use to access, you know, your iCloud or whatever.
00:15:23.000When they have control of the phone, they've already got your photo roll, right?
00:15:26.000They've already got your contact list.
00:15:28.000They already have everything that you've ever put in that phone.
00:16:11.000To a group like Citizen Lab, they can basically use that link to basically use like a dummy phone, like sort of a Trojan horse, to go to the site that would attack your phone and catch it.
00:16:24.000And this is what the sort of process that all of their research is based on.
00:16:28.000There are other more advanced types of attacks that actually don't have these defenses against them that are far more scary.
00:16:40.000Yeah, the Citizen Lab is the name of this research group at the University in Canada who basically studies state-sponsored and corporate malware attacks against civil society.
00:16:51.000It's run by a guy named Ron Deber, I believe.
00:16:55.000You guys will have to fact-check me on that one.
00:17:15.000I asked you about warrants, and you talked about the fact that people could plant evidence on things and then get motivation, or rather they could show probable cause to the court to then investigate you, and then they can get everything.
00:17:31.000And you said, you know, you thought...
00:17:33.000That a warrant meant they can go and search your house.
00:17:35.000And this is the kind of thing that we, you know, modern people are used to thinking of in the context of a warrant.
00:17:41.000Cops go to a specific place looking for specific things that are elements of a crime.
00:17:48.000Now, you know, you've heard all these things where, like, cops find a way to, like, stop somebody and they, like, are like, oh, I smelled pot or whatever, and they try to, you know, toss their car or whatever.
00:18:00.000Or plain sight doctrines where they open the door and the guy sits down and talks to them and they go, oh, you know, I see a bong or something.
00:18:07.000You know, that's paraphernalia, you're going to jail.
00:18:16.000Warrants in the United States could only be used to gather two things that were called the fruits and instrumentalities of a crime, which meant even if the cops knew you did it, even if the cops knew you rode the subway or worked for this company or whatever,
00:18:32.000they couldn't get all the company's records.
00:18:34.000They couldn't, if they existed, get all the emails that you ever wrote.
00:18:39.000They couldn't get your friend to turn over like an exchange of letters that you had with this person.
00:18:45.000The fruits of the crime were the things that they gained from it, right?
00:18:48.000If they robbed the bank, the cops could get the sack of money.
00:18:51.000The instrumentalities were the tools that were used, right?
00:18:54.000Like if you I used dynamite or a crowbar or a getaway car.
00:19:01.000But the idea that the cops can get everything, the idea that the FBI can get all these records, you know, all of these things, your whole history, is very much a new thing.
00:20:06.000And if we decide the cops shouldn't have this, if we decide the spies shouldn't have this, well why in the hell should Facebook or Google or somebody trying to sell you Nikes, why should they have this?
00:20:26.000Once you have gained a certain amount of access, and you can justify that access, like we're stopping crimes, like the Patriot Act, and then later the Patriot Act II, which was even more overreaching.
00:20:39.000Once they have that kind of power, they never go, you know what, we went too far.
00:20:45.000We have too much access to your privacy, and even if you've committed a crime, we shouldn't have unrelated access to all these other activities that you're involved in.
00:20:55.000Yeah, and I mean, that's exactly the thing about the whole Save the Puppies Act, right?
00:20:58.000If it's got a name like that, you've got to be like, no, something doesn't smell right here.
00:22:08.0009-11 was where we made a fundamental mistake, and that was we were so frightened in the moment because we had had such an extraordinary and rare terrorist attack succeed, which by the way could have been prevented, and I think we discussed this in the last episode.
00:22:30.000The Congress, you know, they were just terrified.
00:22:34.000They said, look, intelligence services, cops, FBI, whoever, anything you want, blank check, here you go.
00:22:41.000And at the time, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, they were like...
00:22:49.000We are worried that this goes too far, because God bless them, that's what the American Civil Liberties Union does.
00:22:54.000And one of the provisions that they had a problem with was this Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which I believe they were calling at the time the Library Records Provision.
00:23:05.000And what it said, basically, this tiny little phrase in the law...
00:23:10.000He said, the FBI can basically get any records that it deems relevant to a counterterrorism investigation under a warrant.
00:23:20.000And the worst thing the ACLU could imagine was that these guys would go to the library and get what kind of books you're reading and like shock horror this is the worst thing these guys could do.
00:23:32.000And so they protested and they lost and this passed and it went on and lo and behold 10 years later we find out in 2013 they had used this provision that people were worried about just going after individuals library records To instead get the phone records of not an individual,
00:23:52.000not a group, but everybody in the United States who was making calls on U.S. telecommunications providers delivered to the NSA daily by these companies, right?
00:24:03.000So no matter who you were, no matter how innocent you were, the FBI was getting these because they said, well, every phone call is relevant to a counterterrorism investigation.
00:24:13.000And the court went, finally, you know, this is seven years after 2013, Then when, guys, that's too much.
00:24:19.000If your definition of relevance is basically anything, anywhere, all the time is relevant to a counter-terrorist investigation, the question is, what then is not relevant?
00:24:31.000What is the limiting principle on this?
00:24:35.000And this is a very important thing, because even if it's not enough, right, even if this doesn't shut down all the programs, the program was actually already stopped a few years ago because of previous court decisions and changes in law, The fact that the courts are finally beginning to look at the impacts of these sweeping new technologies that allow governments to see all of these connections and interactions that we're having every day,
00:25:05.000It is the foundation of what we will see in the future will begin to be the first meaningful guarantees of privacy rights in the digital age.
00:25:16.000Now that you have been, at least according to this court, exonerated or justified, what happens to you?
00:25:28.000And what happens to what they've been doing?
00:25:33.000And how much of the breaks do they hit on this?
00:25:45.000I mean, you would think when you get a court, not even a first-level court, but an appeals court, That looks at these issues, you know, they're talking about serious stuff, they're talking about counter-terrorism investigations.
00:26:01.000By the way, in the same thing, in the same decision, they said the government has been arguing, you know, for 20 years now, these programs were saving lives.
00:26:24.000And the one terrorist attack or terrorist conspiracy, whatever, that they said it did stop was this case that was just decided.
00:26:35.000And the court found, and this is important, After looking at the government's classified evidence, so this is not just the court deciding on their own.
00:26:43.000This is the government going, look, here's all the evidence that we have, the top secret stuff, the stuff that nobody can see.
00:26:49.000Please don't, you know, say our program is ineffective or whatever.
00:26:52.000The court looked at it and they went, holy crap.
00:26:57.000This invasion of hundreds of millions of Americans' privacy happening over the span of decades did not make a difference in this case.
00:27:08.000They said even in the absence of this program, if it hadn't existed, if the government had never done it, They still would have busted this ring because they were already closing in on them.
00:27:20.000The FBI already had all the evidence they needed to get a warrant to get the records through traditional means.
00:27:26.000And the fact the government had been saying, Congress had been saying for years and years and years that this program was necessary, the court says that was misleading, which is legalese for sending the government's effing liars on this.
00:27:42.000So that raises the question of, okay, as you said, Well, what now?
00:27:48.000Well, it does mean the government has to stop doing this particular kind of program directly, but that program had already shut down.
00:27:58.000And the government has a really great team of lawyers for every agency, right?
00:28:04.000The DOJ has got lawyers, the White House has lawyers, the FBI has lawyers, the NSA has lawyers, and the CIA has lawyers.
00:28:09.000And the only thing these guys are paid to do all day is to look at basically these legal opinions from the court that says all the ways the government broke the law and go, huh, is there any way we can just rejigger this program slightly so that we can dodge around that court ruling to go,
00:28:30.000all right, you know, the abuses are still happening, but they're happening in a less abusive way, and then it's business as usual.
00:28:38.000So this is always the process with the courts ruling against the government.
00:28:44.000This is not an exceptional thing in the case of, you know, it's NSA, it's CIA. What happens is when the government breaks the law, as the court has ruled them to do last week, There is no punishment.
00:28:59.000There is no criminal liability for all the bastards, the head of the FBI, the head of the NSA, who were violating Americans' rights for decades.
00:29:31.000And what they do is they try to create exactly what just happened, which is a system where they can break the law For 10 years, you know, 2001 to 2013 basically, and no one even knows that it's happening.
00:30:45.000But this is in the context of a system where we lack accountability, where the government does have a culture of impunity.
00:30:53.000This is what winning looks like because things do get better.
00:30:57.000The problem is they get better by decades.
00:30:59.000They get better by half centuries and centuries.
00:31:02.000If you look at the United States, you know, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, things were objectively worse on basically every measure.
00:31:10.000The fact that we have to crawl to the future It's a sad thing when we know it could be fixed very quickly by establishing some kind of criminal liability for people like James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, who lied under oath to Congress and the American people saying exactly this program didn't exist.
00:31:30.000The NSA wasn't collecting any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans when in fact they were doing that every day.
00:31:49.000We see the same kinds of abuses happening under the Trump administration.
00:31:52.000We saw the same kind of abuses happening under the Bush administration.
00:31:56.000And the only way this changes Materially is if our government changes structurally, right?
00:32:04.000And that's kind of the issue that I think everybody in the country sees.
00:32:07.000When you look at the economy, when you look at all the struggle, when you look at all the class conflict and the divide and the political partisanship that's happening today, The problem isn't, right, like about this law or this court ruling or this agency.
00:32:23.000It's about inequality of opportunity, of access, even of privilege, right?
00:32:28.000I know people don't like talking about that.
00:33:24.000And what can anybody change at this point to stop this overwhelming power that the government has to invade your privacy and to all the things that you exposed?
00:33:36.000When you talk about how The particular program that was in place has been shut down, but all they do is manipulate it slightly, do it so that you can argue in court that it's not the same thing, that it's a different thing, come up with other justifications for it,
00:33:53.000withhold evidence, and then drag the process out for years and years and years.
00:33:59.000For you to be so optimistic is really kind of spectacular considering the fact that you've been hiding in another country, allegedly.
00:35:08.000And I really think that what you exposed is hugely important for the American citizens to understand that Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:35:21.000And these people had the ability to look into everything.
00:35:55.000If you see government saying all these things that work for safety, they're protecting you, and they never establish the efficacy of it, the chances are it probably isn't effective.
00:36:07.000Because, you know, the government leaks all the time.
00:36:11.000If they say, we saved this person, we did that.
00:36:15.000Whenever they're being criticized, they go on TV and they very seriously go, oh, that's classified and we can't expose that.
00:36:21.000You never hear of the successes we do because it's so important that they stay secret.
00:36:25.000Look, I worked for the CIA, I worked for the NSA. That's bullshit.
00:36:29.000When they do something great, it's on the front page of the New York Times by the end of the day because they're fighting for budget, they're fighting for clout, they're fighting for authority, they're fighting for new laws.
00:37:02.000Of course, there are some secret successes, but it's about stuff that no one cares about.
00:37:09.000It's stuff that wouldn't win the political clout.
00:37:11.000It's like they gained an advantaged negotiating position on the price of shrimp and clove cigarettes, which was actually one of the stories that came out of some kind of classified disclosure that I think was from WikiLeaks.
00:37:26.000That kind of stuff, it actually does happen, right?
00:37:30.000But we're never having a conversation of, do you want to give up all of your privacy rights so that we can get better prices on shrimp and clove cigarettes?
00:37:37.000Like, that would be a very different political conversation than, do you want to give up all of your privacy rights because if you don't, your children will die.
00:38:55.000There's actually, if you watch Citizen 4, Which is the documentary from 2013 where I was meeting with reporters and Laura Poitras had the camera rolling in the room when we talked for the first time.
00:39:08.000I said, you know, the government's gonna say I harm national security.
00:39:30.000Even though the most recent ruling has showed that you were correct, and what they were doing was illegal, and you exposed a crime.
00:39:38.000Yeah, well, I mean, this is a continuing story.
00:39:41.000In 2013, you know, when this first came out, President Obama went out on stage, you know, because he was getting singed in the press, and said, you know, take it from me, nobody is listening to your phone calls.
00:39:56.000Even though nobody said they were listening to your phone calls.
00:40:01.000It wasn't like they had headsets on, you know, 300 plus million people in the United States.
00:40:10.000But what they did do was they collected the records of your phone calls.
00:40:14.000And to an analyst, to an intelligence analyst, that's more valuable than the transcripts of your phone calls.
00:40:20.000We care less about what you said on the phone than who you called, when you called them, what else you were doing, what your phone was doing, right?
00:40:30.000The websites that you would access, the cell phone towers they were connected to.
00:40:34.000All of those things, that metadata creates what's called the social graph.
00:40:39.000Your pattern of life It says, based on when your phone becomes active in the morning, when you start calling people, when you start browsing, when you check your Twitter feed, you're scrolling on Instagram, whatever, that's when you wake up.
00:40:51.000When it stops, that's when you go to sleep.
00:41:01.000You don't need the content of your communications.
00:41:03.000I don't need to see what picture you posted on Instagram.
00:41:07.000To know you're awake and active, and you're communicating with this person at this phone, this place, this area code, this IP address, you know, this version of software, whether they're using Android or iOS, you know, all of these things.
00:41:20.000And now as we get smartphones, as your cars begin connecting to the internet, it's just richer and richer and richer data.
00:41:28.000I don't know where I was going with that, sorry.
00:41:40.000Now, Obama was saying, you know, nobody listens to your phone calls, right?
00:41:44.000That was June 2013. By January of 2014, giving his State of the Union address, he went, although he could never condone what I did, The conversation that I started has made us stronger as a nation.
00:41:56.000He was calling for the end of this program, the passage of a new law called the USA Freedom Act, another Save the Puppies Act, which was better than the thing it was replacing but still really bad.
00:42:10.000And he did that not out of the goodness of his heart.
00:42:13.000He did that because the court in December of 2013 had ruled these programs were unlawful and likely unconstitutional.
00:42:21.000And this is again, it's not an Obama thing, it's a power thing.
00:42:27.000But year by year, step by step, things get better.
00:42:30.000We make progress a little bit at a time.
00:42:32.000And the fact that someone is suing, the fact that the ACLU is bringing this case, and we should thank them for that, for years, which is a difficult and expensive proposition with no guarantee of success, means that we have stronger privacy rights seven years later as a result.
00:43:00.000But when we do struggle, when we do stand up, we believe in something so strongly we don't merely believe in it.
00:43:08.000But we risk something for that belief.
00:43:11.000We work together and we pull the species forward an inch at a time.
00:43:16.000We move away from that swamp of impunity and unaccountability into a future where, hey, maybe not just the little guy breaks the law and goes to jail, but maybe a senator, maybe an attorney general, maybe a president,
00:43:34.000And that would be a very good precedent to have.
00:43:38.000Do you wonder whether or not someone will use you as a political chess piece at this point and decide?
00:43:47.000Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure you have overwhelming support of the general public.
00:43:54.000Most people believe that what you did was a good thing for America and that you are, in fact, a patriot.
00:44:01.000I think the vast majority of people, and the people that I've talked to, I have talked to a few people that disagree with that, they're misinformed.
00:44:08.000They were misinformed about what you did and what information you leaked or whether or not people's lives were put in danger because of that.
00:44:15.000And I had to explain the whole chain of events and where the information actually was, how it was leaked and what you had done to protect people.
00:45:08.000These journalists were only given access to the information on the condition that they would publish no story Simply because it was newsworthy or interesting, right?
00:45:17.000They weren't going to clickbait classified documents.
00:45:20.000They would only publish stories if they were willing to make an independent institutional judgment and stand by it that it was in the public interest That this be known, right?
00:45:32.000And then as an extraordinary measure on top of that, before they publish the stories, right?
00:45:36.000And this is not me publishing things, putting them out on the internet or blog or something, which I could have done, would have been very easy.
00:45:43.000It's not me telling them what to write or not to write.
00:45:45.000They're doing this, the Guardian, the Washington Post, you know, Der Spiegel.
00:45:51.000They are then going to the United States government in advance of publication and giving the government a chance, an adversarial opportunity to argue against publication.
00:46:06.000Or, he's not lying, and yes, these are true, but these programs are effective, they're saving lives, whatever, and here's what we can show you to convince you, please don't publish this or leave out this detail.
00:46:16.000And in every case I'm aware of, that process was followed.
00:46:19.000And that's why now in 2020, remember, we're seven years on from 2013, the government has never shown a single example of any harm that has come as a result of the publication of these documents back in 2013,
00:46:40.000It's unscientific, but I've seen polls run on Twitter very recently in the last few weeks when this pardon question came out, where 90%, like 90 plus percent of people were in favor of a pardon.
00:46:57.000Even in 2013 when we were doing well, it was like 60%.
00:47:02.000In favor among young people, but it was like 40% for older people.
00:47:07.000But that's because the government was on TV every Sunday, you know, bringing these CIA suits going, who were there with their very stern faces going, oh, this caused great damage and it cost lives and everything like that.
00:47:20.000But those arguments stop being convincing when seven years later, after they told us the sky is falling, the atmosphere never catches fire, right?
00:47:58.000They were trying to make a drama out of it.
00:48:00.000And that's a big part of why I wrote Permanent Record.
00:48:04.000And it's been tremendously gratifying to see people connect to it.
00:48:09.000And actually, this, you know, I mentioned it, we talked on Twitter, when we were talking about the possibility of having this conversation.
00:48:16.000And I was like, I looked back at our first conversation we had, and it's had like 16 million views, man, that's for a three hour conversation.
00:48:26.000And then probably an equal amount of people just listened to it in audio.
00:48:41.000The book on Amazon has thousands of reviews.
00:48:45.000It's got a 4.8 rating by the number of people and how it's rated.
00:48:51.000That's one of the best autobiographies according to ordinary people in the audience in like years.
00:48:56.000And to see that after these years of attacks To me is evidence that despite all these news guys at night going, well, Senator, you know, no one really cares about privacy these days.
00:49:10.000These kids with their Facebooks and their Instagrams, you know, people do care.
00:49:16.000What they're actually feeling is kind of what you got to earlier, like this sensation that nothing changes.
00:49:24.000But the thing is, you've got to have a broader view of time.
00:49:28.000You've got to look at the sweep of history rather than the atmosphere of the moment.
00:49:33.000Because right now, yes, Things are very bad.
00:49:38.000And even if you love Donald Trump, because I know some of your viewers do, you've got to admit, a lot of things in the world suck right now.
00:49:45.000A lot of things in the country suck right now.
00:49:48.000But the thing is, they only get better if somebody does the hard work to make them better.
00:51:11.000And it's funny because this was actually promoted by all these CIA deputy directors and whatnot who were responsible for these abuses of Americans' rights, who were writing opinion pieces in the newspaper, and they were like, you know, what if Vladimir Putin sends Snowden to Trump as an inauguration gift?
00:51:55.000A pardon is not something that you agree to.
00:51:58.000A pardon is a constitutionally enumerated power.
00:52:02.000I think it's Article 2, Section 2, where The reason that it exists is basically a check on the laws and the judiciary, where the laws as written become corrosive to the intention of them.
00:52:20.000And this is something that I think actually is meaningful.
00:52:23.000You know, people are like, are you going to ask Donald Trump for a pardon?
00:52:30.000But I will ask for pardon for Terry Albury and Daniel Hale and Reality Winner and all the other American whistleblowers who have been treated unfairly by this system.
00:52:41.000The whole thing that brought this up was two weeks ago.
00:52:43.000Some journalist asked the president, like, oh, you know, what do you think about Snowden?
00:52:57.000Because it's impossible to get a fair trial under the Espionage Act, which is what I've been charged under.
00:53:03.000And every American whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg in the 1970s has been charged under this law, the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between someone who is stealing secrets and selling them to foreign governments Which neither I nor any of these other people have done,
00:53:21.000and giving them freely to journalists to advance the public interest of the American people rather than the private interest of these spies, you know, individually.
00:53:33.000And this is the kind of circumstance for which the pardon power exists, where the courts and judges will not or cannot And a fundamentally unfair and abusive circumstance in the United States,
00:53:52.000either because they're fearful of being criticized, of soft on terrorism or whatever, or because the law prohibits them from doing so.
00:54:01.000The problem with the Espionage Act is it means you can't tell the jury why you did what you did.
00:54:07.000You cannot mount what's called a public interest offense.
00:54:10.000Where you say, hell yeah, I broke the law.
00:54:14.000I took a classified document and I gave it to the journalist and the journalist published it and then it went to the courts and the court said, This guy was right.
00:54:25.000In the courts, if I were, you know, in prison today, as reality winners in prison today, or rather Daniel Hale, who revealed government abuses related to the drone program, or Terry Albury, who revealed problems with racial policies in the FBI,
00:54:45.000When these guys are on trial, all of that stuff is forbidden from being spoken.
00:54:51.000Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer asked Daniel Ellsberg, why did you do it?
00:54:56.000In court, in open court, under oath, you know, why did you publish or provide to journalists the Pentagon Papers?
00:55:03.000And the prosecutor said, objection, objection, he can't say that.
00:55:06.000And the judge said, sustained, fine, he can't say it.
00:55:09.000And his attorney looked at the judge like he was crazy and said, I've never heard Of a trial where the jury is not allowed to hear why a defendant did what they did.
00:55:21.000And the judge said, well, you're seeing one now.
00:55:25.000And this is why the pardon power exists.
00:55:29.000Well, that's what's so creepy about something like the Espionage Act.
00:55:33.000If you can't even establish a motive, you can't even explain that you are doing this for the American people, that there's a real precedent that should be set for this kind of thing, especially in regards to what you're being charged with, which has now been determined that you were exposing something that was,
00:56:03.000I mean, we see these kind of injustices happening in the United States every day, and it's not about the Espionage Act specifically.
00:56:09.000I mean, you see with drug charges, you see with civil forfeiture, asset forfeiture, where like, you know, they take an old lady's car because her nephew was selling weed or something like that, and there's no way for her to get it back.
00:56:21.000Whether we're talking civil or criminal, whether we're talking federal or state, we see where the system of laws in the United States is letting people down constantly.
00:56:38.000But the question becomes, how do we fix this?
00:56:43.000And, you know, you can mount a national campaign, you can try to change the law, but as we talked about before, unless you're Jeff Bezos, unless you're Bill Gates, that's very difficult to do.
00:56:53.000But the governor can pardon people for state crimes.
00:56:56.000The president can pardon people for federal crimes.
00:56:58.000But we have not developed a compassionate culture that actually looks at this.
00:57:04.000Every president has abused their pardon power or their pardon authority to sort of let their cronies off the hook.
00:57:12.000We've seen it under previous presidents.
00:57:15.000But it is very difficult to establish And understanding among average people that it's actually okay for presidents to use this power more liberally, when particularly we're talking about nonviolent offenses, when we're talking about things that have not,
00:57:33.000you know, they're not that controversial, but they are being controversialized because of the political atmosphere of partisanship, where everything has to be criticized for political advantage from one side or the other.
00:57:49.000Well, particularly in your case when you're talking about polls that show 90% of people support you being pardoned and this recent ruling that what you exposed was illegal.
00:58:00.000I wonder how much the president actually knows about your case.
00:58:48.000I think, particularly at this point in time, where...
00:58:51.000People are really, look, if there's ever a time where people are fed up about the overreaching power of government, it's during this pandemic lockdown, you know, for good or for bad, whether it's incorrect or incorrect, people are very frustrated right now with power.
00:59:07.000They're very frustrated right now with the draconian measures that some states have put in place to keep people from working and their eyes keep people safe.
00:59:17.000All this would contribute to the motivation to pardon you, because I think that it would show people that the president actually does agree that there have been some overreaches, and in your case, not just an overreach,
00:59:32.000but a miscarriage of justice, a disgusting, un-American overreach.
00:59:37.000I think when you ask this question about how much does he know about the case, it's fair to say not a lot because he's intentionally being misadvised by his advisors.
00:59:48.000You've had the Attorney General, William Barr, who says he would be vehemently opposed to a pardon for me.
00:59:55.000His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has literally, I think said I should be killed.
01:00:00.000John Bolton, at least, said I should be killed.
01:00:04.000And, you know, I think when this conversation first came up a couple weeks ago, Mike Pompeo probably hid every pen in the White House because he's trying to make sure things like this don't happen.
01:00:14.000I think there are a lot of people who try and control the president.
01:00:20.000But this whole question about, you know, What's right for me?
01:00:26.000What's right for the president in terms of political advantage is the wrong question.
01:00:32.000This is why I haven't been advocating for pardon.
01:00:37.000I did ask for a pardon for Chelsea Manning, which we didn't get, but we did get clemency, and that's an important thing.
01:00:47.000What we need is we need for pardons to be made not as a question of political advantage, but as a decision taken to further the public interest.
01:00:59.000And this is why I say pardon all of these previous whistleblowers.
01:01:04.000Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Terry Albury, reality winner, Daniel Hale.
01:01:48.000The extradition trial has nothing to do with that.
01:01:51.000Actually, the U.S. government, under William Barr, the current Attorney General, is trying to extradite this guy and put him in prison for the rest of his life for the best work that WikiLeaks ever did, that has won awards in every country basically around the planet,
01:02:16.000Things that are about explicit war crimes and abuses of power, torture and people who were killed who shouldn't have been killed, violations of use of force protocols, and all of these things, right?
01:02:28.000And this could all be made to go away if William Barr, the Attorney General, simply dropped the charges.
01:03:31.000Is something that you in this country can be prosecuted for, that they would try to extradite you and drag you from another country.
01:03:40.000They'd kick him out of the embassy and bring him back to the United States to try him for that.
01:03:44.000It seems like we're talking about some kangaroo court.
01:03:47.000It seems like we're talking about some dictatorship where you have no protection to freedom of speech, no protection under the First Amendment, no protection under the rights of the press.
01:04:01.000It's so disturbing that there are workarounds for our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, that we all just agree to, just accept that this is happening.
01:04:12.000There's no riots in the streets for this.
01:04:14.000No one's up in arms that they're trying to extradite Julian Assange.
01:04:22.000For whatever reason, The mainstream news has barely covered it over his current court proceedings in the UK. Well, I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that they see Julian Assange, by this they I mean a lot of the mainstream media,
01:04:40.000the broadcast outlets, as a partisan figure.
01:04:44.000And it's really sad because the most dangerous thing about the charges against Julian Assange is if they extradite Julian Assange, if Julian Assange is convicted, He's charged under the Espionage Act, the same act that I'm charged under, the same thing that all these whistleblowers are charged under,
01:05:45.000There is no way you can make that argument in court in a way that will be defensible, particularly given what we've talked about with the government and how careful they are to avoid prior court precedents and to work around it and create obscure legal theories.
01:06:02.000Everyone knows these theories are false.
01:06:04.000But under the law, you know, they bend just enough that they can pass the argument through and get the conviction they want.
01:06:10.000You cannot convict Julian Assange, the chief editor and publisher of WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act, without exposing the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, you know, CNN, Fox,
01:06:26.000whoever, To the same kind of charges under this president and every coming president.
01:06:32.000And I think people don't think about that.
01:06:37.000You know, another thing that's disturbing, well, there's many things that are disturbing about this case, but another thing that's been disturbing was he was a guy who the left supported up until 2016, and then it became inconvenient.
01:06:51.000When he was dragging Bush, it was great.
01:06:53.000Then when he's dragging Clinton, it's not so great.
01:07:22.000That was the left's—he was the darling of the left.
01:07:26.000I mean, they were all free Julian Assange.
01:07:29.000And it's just—it's so interesting how that narrative can shift— So completely to all of a sudden he's a puppet of Russia and that's what it became in 2016 and that propaganda stuck and people who were pro Julian Assange before now all of a sudden I've seen these people say fuck WikiLeaks you know and fuck Julian Assange like that guy's a puppet of Russia I'm like like how much have you looked into this?
01:07:55.000It's amazing how that kind of propaganda, when you just get the surface veneer of whatever the narrative they're trying to push, how well it spreads.
01:08:08.000That all these people who were these educated left-wing people now all of a sudden were anti-Wikileaks.
01:08:16.000And I'm like, do you not remember how this whole thing got started?
01:08:20.000It was the Iraq War, which we all opposed.
01:08:23.000Do you not remember this whole bullshit lie about the weapons of mass destruction that got us into this crazy war?
01:08:31.000And then Julian Assange and WikiLeaks exposed so much of this.
01:08:36.000And yet, here we are, in 2016, it turns up on its head, and now he's a puppet of Russia and WikiLeaks is bad because, inconveniently, the information that he released damaged Hillary Clinton's campaign.
01:08:51.000I think a lot of it comes down to people forgetting what principles are and why they're important, right?
01:09:53.000That doesn't mean you have no opinion.
01:09:54.000That doesn't mean you have no political power.
01:09:57.000What it does mean is that you have to recognize that everyone has the right to their own opinion, even terrible opinions.
01:10:05.000What we have to protect is the speech, is the platform, is the assembly, is the association, is the process That allows us to understand and recognize and identify when people did break the law, when they did harm others, to go to a fair trial where the jury can consider why they did what they did,
01:10:22.000what they did, and not just whether it was legal or illegal, but whether it was moral or immoral, whether it was right or whether it was wrong, and whether they are the lowest person, you know, the most ordinary citizen in the Whereas today,
01:10:42.000you know, we call them public officials and private citizens, but with all of the surveillance, all of the data collection, people in power, commercially or governmentally, they know everything about us.
01:11:46.000You automatically think of liberal people when you think of the ACLU. But...
01:11:52.000The ACLU, just for the record, is a nonpartisan organization.
01:11:56.000Yes, but supported overwhelmingly by left-wing people.
01:12:03.000I mean, obviously they are nonpartisan, but people are so partisan today that this rejection of nuance...
01:12:12.000It's so easy for people to look at things as left versus right and ignore all of the sins of their team and concentrate on defeating the other side.
01:12:26.000And it seems to be a giant part of the problem today, so much so that people are in favor of A lot of people are in favor of deplatforming people that just simply disagree with them.
01:12:40.000And I want to talk to you about that because it seems to be a gigantic issue.
01:12:45.000It is a gigantic issue with social media, whether it's with Twitter or YouTube or many things.
01:12:51.000In fact, Unity 2020 is something that...
01:12:56.000My friend Brett Weinstein is putting together this idea that we should look across both parties for people that are reasonable and rational people and look at what we agree with rather than simply sitting on partisan policy on party lines and only voting You know,
01:13:21.000blue across the board or red across the board.
01:13:23.000And let's look at reasonable people from both sides, whether it's Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard or whoever it is that are they represent different parties, but they're both reasonable people.
01:13:33.000Let's get them together and have these communications.
01:14:11.000But when someone like Ross Perot came around, it threw a monkey wrench into the gears and became very dangerous for both sides because the Republicans lost a lot of votes and that's how Bill Clinton got into office and George H.W. Bush did not get a second term.
01:14:26.000Directly because the influence of Ross Perot.
01:14:28.000So they changed the requirements for getting into the debates and everything became very different and very more complicated after that.
01:14:36.000The fact that Twitter would be willing to ban Unity 2020 specifically because they're calling for people to walk away from this idea that you have to either vote for Trump or Biden and trying to get mainstream acceptance of a potential third-party candidate is extremely disturbing.
01:14:56.000But de-platforming in general, I think, is extremely disturbing because it's a slippery slope.
01:15:01.000If you decide that someone has Views that are opposite of yours and they bother you.
01:15:07.000Those views bother you and you could do whatever you can to get them off of a platform.
01:15:12.000It's very dangerous because someone from the right who gains power or someone from an opposing party that gains power, if they get into a position of power in social media, if they own a gigantic social media company like Twitter or YouTube and they decide in turn to go after people that agree with your ideology,
01:15:33.000Well, then we have a freedom of speech issue.
01:15:35.000And you're literally supporting the suppression of freedom of speech if you're supporting de-platforming people on social media.
01:15:42.000And I've always thought that the answer to someone saying something you disagree with or someone saying something you vehemently oppose is a better argument.
01:16:20.000And this goes back to what you're saying.
01:16:22.000This partisan viewpoint that we have today, fiercely, rabidly partisan, in a way that I've never seen in my life.
01:16:30.000Yeah, I think the question of deplatforming, this is one of the central issues of our time that's really overlooked and it's underappreciated.
01:16:40.000So many people on both sides are in favor of this when it's somebody they don't like, right?
01:18:07.000Constitutionally, there's no freedom of speech issue implicated there because the Constitution restrains the federal government and the state governments in certain circumstances.
01:18:48.000And there will always be more what-ifs.
01:18:51.000And the categories of prohibited speech will constantly expand.
01:18:56.000So we need to ask ourselves, well, who is best placed to make those decisions about what can and cannot be said?
01:19:03.000Traditionally, the access to broadcast It was limited.
01:19:09.000You had radio, you had TV. If you didn't have that, you had the soapbox on the corner, right?
01:19:14.000Or the local university, the coffee shop.
01:19:17.000And somebody owned those places, or somebody ran those places.
01:19:23.000You know, the college president would say this person would be invited to speak, this person wouldn't be invited to speak.
01:19:30.000And I actually think it's right and proper for people to be able to protest speakers to say this person shouldn't speak at our college.
01:19:38.000But I think the college itself, the institution, has to be willing to make value judgments about why they invite certain people to speak.
01:19:47.000And if that person's a very unpopular speaker, if that person is representing a viewpoint that is not well supported by the college, if it's not necessarily what students want to hear, But the administration believes, like the faculty believes,
01:20:03.000that it's something students should hear.
01:21:08.000You've got frickin' Nazis on the internet.
01:21:10.000And I'm not talking like, whatever, the guy's got a Trump sticker on his truck.
01:21:14.000I'm talking goose-stepping, you know, swastika-bearing actual frickin' Nazi.
01:21:19.000You have those people out there on the internet calling for violence, calling for all these terrible things.
01:21:25.000And normally the way you deal with this, even in the case of something like ISIS, you drag them onto the platform.
01:21:32.000You discredit their ideas before the world because if you don't, If you drive them underground, if you make them, you know, this faction that's, you know, hanging out at a radical mosque, or, you know, they're hanging out at the hardware store if they're freaking Nazis or whatever,
01:21:49.000there are places where you create its own community that is sheltered from other perspectives, it's sheltered from other ideas, and that is where extremism thrives, where it cannot be challenged, Where it cannot be exposed for what it really is.
01:22:09.000But when you've got YouTube going, oh, you like Nazi A? How about Nazi B? How about Nazi C, right?
01:22:15.000These people never get exposed to counter speech.
01:22:21.000Well, it also gets tricky when you decide that someone is saying something that's offensive and you remove them from the platform and then you open the door for other things being offensive, things that maybe aren't offensive to you.
01:23:13.000I could call you a terrible, I could call you that and there's no problem.
01:23:17.000But if I choose a name that used to accurately represent you...
01:23:24.000As a different gender, because this is some new, incredibly important distinction that we've decided.
01:23:31.000It takes precedence over everything else, including, it's more significant than insults, more significant than demeaning of, I can call you a moron, I could demean your intellect, all those things are fine.
01:23:43.000But if I choose to call you by a name that used to accurately represent you when you were a different gender, or when you identified with a different gender, Because of today's political climate, that is grounds for banning you for life.
01:23:58.000It shows you how incredibly slippery censorship can get, because I would have never imagined that.
01:24:04.000If you said to me 10 years ago, well, when someone becomes a transgender person 10 years ago, if you said this to me, If someone becomes a transgender person, you call them by their original name.
01:24:15.000You could be banned from social media for life.
01:24:32.000So it just shows you, deadnaming of today, you agree with that today, that opens up the door for all kinds of crazy shit five years from now, ten years from now, if we still get more and more rabidly politically polarized, and our idea of PC culture gets more and more extreme.
01:24:54.000And if you decide to give up a little ground, the slide is imminent.
01:24:58.000I think this is, like, you can argue on that axis, but I think incrementalism and the failures of imagination going, you know, 10 years ago, we couldn't imagine this would have been a valuable offense.
01:25:14.000Because if you go back to the founding of the country saying, you know, women should have the right to vote, black people should have the right to vote, you know, that was unimaginable.
01:25:21.000That would get you equivalently deplatformed, not welcomed to the speaking community or whatever.
01:25:27.000Sure, but those are positive and inclusive things.
01:26:01.000And I think civility is not too much to ask people generally.
01:26:05.000As you say, you know, calling people fuckface or moron or whatever is completely normal on the internet, and that's not really going to get you banned from anywhere.
01:26:14.000And now you have all of these companies contorting themselves to fit into these blocks to not isolate or anger all of these different demographics.
01:26:28.000But if we truly want to have a global broadcast, a public commons, the question I think that's more important here is, Not so much what should and should not be banned, because that's accepting the premise of banning.
01:26:43.000It's how do we create an inclusive platform where everyone can talk and even strictly and harshly disagree with each other without it coming down to name calling, without trying to dox people, without trying to basically dog whistle them or screw them or hurt them or harm them,
01:27:19.000So when you say these things, and, you know, there's a young audience listening right now to like everything, and they think it's cool, they think it's funny, or they don't think it's cool, or they don't think it's funny, but they think they shouldn't be deplatformed for it.
01:27:35.000They're edgy, you know, they push the lines or whatever.
01:27:38.000They get that out there, and they start emulating this behavior.
01:29:12.000The more we can encourage civility, the better we all are in all aspects of our life, whether it's person to person, face to face, or online.
01:29:20.000I try very hard to only say things online that I would say to someone's face.
01:29:27.000Online now, I do not interact with people.
01:30:22.000And the people that I've blocked on my Twitter account are the ones who are posting about Bitcoin scams that are like, you know, send me five Bitcoin, I'll send you five Bitcoin back.
01:30:47.000But that doesn't mean necessarily that you take their voice entirely.
01:30:51.000Yes, I most certainly agree with that, particularly in terms of de-platforming.
01:30:58.000My question to you about this is, and I've raised this question to many people and I really haven't got a satisfactory answer, do you think that things that get so huge, like Twitter or Facebook or even YouTube, do they become a basic right?
01:31:23.000The ability to communicate online seems to me a core aspect of what it means to be a human being with a voice in 2020. And I don't think it's as simple as removing someone from Twitter is simply a company exercising their right to have whatever they want on their platform.
01:31:44.000I think when it gets as big as Twitter is, I think we've passed into a new realm, and I think we need to acknowledge that, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or Facebook or what have you.
01:31:53.000And I think it should be very difficult to remove someone from those platforms.
01:31:58.000And I think it should probably involve some sort of a trial.
01:32:02.000I mean, this is a really, really tough issue.
01:32:07.000It's much larger than just deplatforming, because what we're really talking about is the Internet as a public utility.
01:32:21.000When you talk about something like Twitter, when the president is basically directing policy from Twitter, It's clear something has changed.
01:32:35.000Our laws were not designed with that in mind.
01:32:41.000And unfortunately, we have a legislature that's just fundamentally broken.
01:32:45.000This gets back to the electoral system, which you talked about earlier.
01:32:48.000Most countries in the world have a wide swath of parties.
01:32:53.000They're not this two-party binary system where it's just two groups.
01:32:58.000Largely neocorporatist groups that are just handing power back and forth.
01:33:01.000The president changes, but the actual lawmakers, the actual structure behind the president, the advisors, are largely from the same cohorts.
01:33:11.000We don't have that We don't have that governmental structure that allows us to adapt in a way that truly represents, I think, the broadest spectrum of public opinion in a way that allows us to respond to changes in technology in a meaningful way,
01:33:32.000which is what's left us stranded today where these companies are sort of deciding things for themselves.
01:33:37.000It's because there is a vacuum of legislation.
01:33:42.000Now there's a question, do we want legislation?
01:33:45.000People on different spectrums from authoritarian to libertarian here will go, we want lots of legislation, we want no legislation.
01:33:53.000But there is a push and there has been a push in Congress for years, actually since the 90s, with the Communications Decency Act and the first crypto war where the government was treating the ability to encrypt your communications to make them secret or private as you communicate with people online.
01:34:13.000They were treating that as a weapon And saying you couldn't export this code without getting a license from the government and all kinds of craziness.
01:34:21.000But the Communications Decency Act, the idea that there would be obscenity regulations, some years ago you may remember a scandal involving Backpage, which was like a variant of Craigslist that had a lot of prostitution ads on it.
01:34:38.000Government has been trying more and more to say these kind of things can be done on the internet, these kind of things can be said on the internet, these kind of things can't be said on the internet.
01:34:48.000And they have been doing this largely under the guise, I would argue, of the Commerce Clause, right?
01:34:55.000The federal government, where do they get the constitutional authority to regulate what we say and do businesses wherever?
01:35:00.000Well, they go, well, The internet is global, it's international, therefore it's interstate commerce, and so we're going to regulate this as if you're, you know, shipping bushels of corn from Iowa to Florida.
01:35:12.000But it's a little bit different than that, and I think What we need to recognize is that the internet is a utility and people, individuals, and corporate entities should be criminally liable For
01:36:02.000Work this kind of stuff out, or at least hundreds of years.
01:36:07.000But when you get the government and you get officials in Congress, you get officials at, you know, whatever the local department of this country or that country, you know, Russia's got a Telecommunications Censorship Bureau, China's got one, France, Germany, the United States, all of these guys have different regulatory authorities,
01:36:24.000whether it's the FCC in the United States or Roskomnadzor in Russia.
01:36:29.000And you cannot substitute their judgment.
01:36:32.000For the judgment of a jury, for the judgment of the people and the public broadly.
01:36:37.000And I think it's dangerous that we are trying to have the government pick winners and losers when whether you win or lose determines whether or not you can engage with the world, whether you can have a public presence on the internet because the internet is real life today.
01:36:59.000And could it be that the option would be to extend the First Amendment rights to the internet in general?
01:37:08.000And to, if you want to run a social media platform, you know, other than what we're talking about, putting people in danger, doxing people, threatening people's lives, doing things that can cause direct harm to people, but the ability to express yourself in controversial ways.
01:37:25.000Shouldn't we extend First Amendment protections to social media platforms.
01:37:32.000I think this is a much more complicated question than it appears because you get into the whole thing of obligation of service.
01:37:41.000There was a cause celebrate on the right, actually, that would seem like a similar issue.
01:37:48.000Remember, there was the cake shop somewhere where they didn't want to serve like a same-sex marriage thing.
01:37:53.000And again, this gets back to civility.
01:37:56.000But some people, they have a very strong fundamental belief here that these people shouldn't be able to do this, that, or the other.
01:38:03.000And if you impose that on them, that requirement on them, they've got to serve whatever their business is to these people that they don't like or that they don't agree with.
01:38:14.000There's a compulsion of service there.
01:38:16.000You start doing this with the internet, And then there's a completely different country, you know, let's say there's a website in Belgium that's now bound by American laws, that's bound by this, and Twitter can't ban this person even though they're against them.
01:38:34.000But isn't that a different argument, though?
01:38:35.000Because all these companies we're talking about, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, are all based in America.
01:38:46.000Right, and would that be their loophole?
01:38:52.000Yeah, would that be their loophole to get out of that, just sell it to China?
01:38:55.000Right, but I mean, more fundamentally, we have to recognize either as a society, we can compel people to standards of civility, or we can't.
01:39:08.000And we need to decide how we handle that, because that's what all of these tie around, right?
01:39:14.000I think we have forgotten in many ways just we're not teaching people the golden rule well enough because we are all angry.
01:39:25.000And the funny thing is the guy on the right who's poor and living in a trailer is not much different than, you know, the hippie on the left who's scrounging out of dumpsters, you know.
01:40:00.000And we are all getting lost in our own ideological differences and losing sight of the things that actually tie us together and that if we worked together, maybe we could change in a more meaningful way.
01:40:13.000And the more people you meet, the more people you talk to, the more you realize how malleable people really are and about how so many of these ideological perspectives that they so rabidly subscribe to, they've adopted because it allows them to be accepted by their community,
01:40:29.000by whatever neighborhood they're in, whatever group of people they hang out with, and they choose to adopt These ideas about how the world is, and so many of those people just don't experience people that are different from them.
01:40:43.000I mean, that is the case with racism, that's the case with homophobia, that's the case with many of the issues that people have with other folks, is that they just don't know people from those other groups, and they haven't experienced, you know, they haven't walked a mile in their shoes, as it were.
01:40:57.000I think civility should be encouraged as much as possible.
01:41:02.000Also though, I'm a comedian and I talk a lot of shit and that's in the sense of humor like you can miss and it's been done against me many times where they've taken things I've said in jest and put them in quotes completely out of context and it looks horrible Because that's not the way it was intended.
01:42:23.000But there's also the problem of sensationalizing these things because the people that did find those people that didn't want to make those cakes, they went to a bunch of people that agreed to make the cake first.
01:42:36.000They went and tried to find someone who didn't want to make that cake, and then they turned it into a big story.
01:42:55.000I feel bad that they're bigoted in that way and that it's such a foolish thing to care who someone is in love with, whether it's the same sex or an opposite sex.
01:43:35.000Like, What is right and wrong, this is what people forget, is changing constantly when we're talking about public opinion, because public opinion is changing constantly.
01:43:46.000And this is why doing right by people, it's so sad that we've lost sight of this basic impulse to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
01:44:00.000Because when you talk about the internet, when you talk about deplatforming, when you talk about humor, as you said, you know, people are going back and they're looking at your jokes.
01:44:14.000There's things that you've said, things that I've said, things that the person listening right now have said that they believed, that they meant that they said ten years ago, that they said one year ago, that they said three weeks ago.
01:44:54.000And this society has become aware of this.
01:44:57.000Activists on all sides have become aware of this.
01:44:59.000Immediately they use this To try to attack people on the other side of any issue that they don't like, to go after their credibility, to go after their character.
01:45:09.000And what we are losing in that conflict, and this is a rational strategy on the part of both sides in the moment because they realize there is a real political advantage to be gained.
01:45:21.000You can get people canceled very easily nowadays.
01:45:25.000But the thing is, When we pin everyone to their worst moment, when we do away with the concept of forgiveness, we do away with the potential for growth,
01:45:45.000And this gets back to those rat holes of extremism on YouTube, on Twitter, on everywhere else, where they start self-reinforcing and eventually reaching the bottom of the hole at the worst of the worst with everybody else who's been canceled too.
01:46:02.000Part of that is because they can't climb out, or they think they can't climb out.
01:46:09.000And there's a question, how do we resolve that?
01:46:13.000One of the nice things about the pre-internet society was as bad as you were, as ignorant, as racist, as exploitative, as whatever you don't like, right, as that person,
01:46:28.000that character was, They could find something new.
01:46:36.000And even if nobody in their town would ever forgive them, rightly, in some cases, because they had done something truly terrible, something truly unforgivable, they could leave.
01:46:47.000They could move to a different state, and that history would not follow them.
01:46:50.000They could reinvent themselves, and they could become someone truly, honestly better, instead of being married to their prior ignorance.
01:47:02.000That is a very important thing because we all are in a constant state of growth.
01:47:07.000If you're not, you're really making some fundamental errors with your life.
01:47:12.000We're all in this constant state of accepting and acquiring new information, gaining new perspectives, learning from our mistakes.
01:47:22.000And unless you're Dr. Manhattan, unless you're some person who's not making any mistakes, And you just have this all-knowing vision of the world.
01:47:36.000Most of us are in this weird state of being a human being on Earth where everyone is trying to figure it out in this incredibly imperfect world, incredibly imperfect society.
01:47:47.000Everything from the structure, the economic structure to the societal structure, everything.
01:47:59.000And the idea should be that we're all communicating to try to grow together and that we're learning together.
01:48:05.000And it's one of the more interesting things about interacting with people online is that you can get different perspectives.
01:48:10.000And if you can let go of your ego and if you can let go of your preconceived notions, you can learn things about the way other people see and feel and think about the world that could change and enhance your own ideas.
01:48:24.000And I think that it's important that we not just accept the fact that people are growing and getting better and improving, but that we encourage it.
01:48:54.000One of the interesting things about this surveillance machine that has been built around us, the sort of architecture of oppression, the turnkey tyranny, as I describe it, so much is known about every person, regardless of how innocent or how guilty they are.
01:49:18.000It's just waiting to be requested and analyzed and used.
01:49:25.000What this means, like there's this old idea of the panopticon, right?
01:49:31.000Which is you create a prison that is circular.
01:49:35.000And in the middle of it, there's this great tower, right, that rises way up.
01:49:40.000And at the very top of the tower, there's a mirrored glass room that the warden sits in.
01:49:47.000And no prisoner knows where the warden is looking because the warden can see out but they can't see in.
01:49:53.000And so everyone believes that they are watched and so the idea is that no one will misbehave because they're all afraid that they'll be retaliated against for breaking the rules or whatever.
01:50:05.000But what we have seen as this surveillance machine has been built is we all realize Intuitively, innately, inherently, in ourselves, even if we don't recognize it, even if we don't speak to it, we witness it in the news every night.
01:51:07.000It happened without our participation.
01:51:09.000We weren't asked whether this was okay.
01:51:11.000But I think in some way, that is beginning to change the moral character of people.
01:51:18.000And what we need to do, starting with the top rather than the bottom, because China is trying to do the reverse, they're going, Alright, well, there's a simple solution to this.
01:51:26.000Let's just start screwing everybody who breaks the rules instantly and immediately.
01:51:31.000You know, you got a social credit score, you protested, so you're going off to a camp, you know, whatever.
01:51:38.000But imagine what it would mean If we saw people where now any official, the minute they are guilty of the slightest infraction, immediately exposed in the press, they go on trial,
01:51:54.000they go on all this stuff, they're ruined, they're disgraced.
01:51:59.000But it turns out every other member of Congress is going to court in the same week because everybody is in violation of something somewhere.
01:52:06.000We all have some measure of guilt, large or small, even if we're completely innocent because, you know, our legal code is so complex there's no way you can make it through a week without breaking some kind of rule about you can't wear a green hat on Tuesday.
01:52:21.000But if this happened, if there was accountability for infractions of the rules any time an infraction of the rules was witnessed, The laws would change instantly to enshrine the right to privacy because the people in power wouldn't want to lose their position of power.
01:52:38.000They would not want to lose this position.
01:52:41.000And suddenly, when they have skin in the game, they would realize, oh, everybody deserves this.
01:52:46.000And I think there's just something interesting to that.
01:52:49.000I haven't thought this out all the way fully, so this could be, you know, give me some slack here.
01:52:55.000But I think this is really what has changed.
01:52:59.000We have built a panopticon, but what sits at the top of it is a computer.
01:53:05.000That computer witnesses everything we do.
01:53:09.000In reality, it's a distribution of computers.
01:53:12.000They're owned by many people and answered to many people.
01:53:20.000And what is happening is the audience, society, the people have realized that they can see through this computer.
01:53:29.000They can see through the panopticon from a certain angle, a certain degree, in a certain direction at any given time.
01:53:35.000The cops that have been, you know, monitoring all of us for years, right, they've got surveillance and drones and stuff that they couldn't have imagined in generations prior.
01:53:45.000But now every person on the street has a smartphone with a camera too and the cops are being witnessed for the first time and now people are trying to impose upon them the same judgment that has classically been imposed upon us and this I think is one of the dynamics that the changes that is leading to this increasing conflict in society is when you realize that the people that throughout you know your
01:54:16.000generations A youth, we're told in Hollywood and stories, our common shared national myths.
01:54:25.000You know, the government's the good guys.
01:54:26.000The FBI's are going to get the gangsters and the terrorists and things like that.
01:54:40.000The same way everyone else is, people start questioning Power and how it is used, the basic legitimacy, the way it impacts our lives, what the limits of it should be.
01:54:51.000But people yet have not realized One of the responses to this should be a limitation on the amount of power the government has, or rather not just government, but institution.
01:55:11.000The powers of institution should be limited to interfere in our lives.
01:55:15.000Instead, what they're trying to do, both sides, you know, blue team, red team, whatever, they're squabbling, they're fighting over who has their hands on the trigger.
01:55:25.000Who gets to aim the weapon rather than should the weapon exist?
01:55:31.000Are you talking about police violence when you're saying these things?
01:55:38.000But police violence is very much the public part of it that we see right now.
01:55:44.000That seems to be one of the most complex abuses of power because the kind of power that you give someone when you allow them to be a police officer is literally the power to end life.
01:55:59.000It's not just the power to kick you off of Twitter.
01:56:01.000It's the power to decide this person who's just a regular person, no different than you or I, with all sorts of problems in their own life and stresses and strains and a disproportionate amount of strain and stress for the actual job that they do.
01:56:16.000I mean, it's a spectacularly stressful position to be in life.
01:56:20.000But yet you give them the ability to literally, with a finger pull, end someone's life.
01:56:27.000I think that's being exposed in a way that we've, because of these cell phone cameras and because of social media, it's being exposed in a way that no one ever would have ever dreamed imaginable before.
01:56:45.000Almost impossible it is to have that position as a human being.
01:56:51.000The position of power like that over folks and just to have a regular person with a normal psychology and not some incredibly brilliant Zen master who's in charge of overseeing drug crimes or pulling people over or assault or whatever it is.
01:57:21.000But at the end of the day, it's about a human being's ability to have a massive amount of power by law over other human beings, which is always going to be a problem.
01:57:38.000We've known about this, you know, there's aphorisms that go back a zillion years, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
01:57:45.000You know, you give a monkey a stick, the first thing he's going to do is he's going to look for something to hit with it.
01:57:51.000But this is also one of the things you asked earlier about, like, how I can be hopeful, how I can be idealistic when I see the scale of the problems, the challenges arrayed against us.
01:58:05.000When I understand not just that mass surveillance exists, but I understand the mechanics of it.
01:58:12.000I understand the resources behind it that want to prevent the change of it and instead want to entrench it and expand it to make it more powerful and have more influence over the direction of our lives.
01:58:23.000Down to this basic stuff about, you know, We are told that cops are the best among us.
01:58:29.000People sign up to be cops, I genuinely believe, because they want to serve and protect, more so than they just want to be the big tough cop guy.
01:58:38.000And some people say, you know, that's naive, some people say that's petty, but I think it's different.
01:58:43.000I think the reason that I feel this way, the reason that I am okay with seeing how much we fail, seeing how much incivility and violence and just ignorance that we have in the world today is, Is I have a lower expectation of the individual at the moment,
01:59:02.000but a higher appreciation for their potential.
01:59:06.000And the reality is we are all inherently flawed.
01:59:13.000And I think in a lot of ways, you're not as good as you want yourself to be.
01:59:20.000But I know that I have become a better person with time.
01:59:25.000You have become a better person with time.
01:59:27.000I think we all have and we all can or those of us who have not could if they chose to or if they had guidance or if they had love or friendship or someone who cared and directed them and helped them become better.
02:00:34.000And I think there's also a bunch of them that are emotionally and psychologically unqualified for the job to begin with.
02:00:41.000And then here we are with these calls in America, at least, to defund the police, which I think is even more ridiculous.
02:00:48.000I think, if anything, they need more funding and more training and a more stringent process of elimination, of removing people that aren't qualified for that job, because I believe very few people actually are qualified.
02:01:01.000I think there's great police officers out there, I really do, and I think most of them Most of the interactions that people have with police officers aren't horrible, but there's enough of those horrible ones that are captured on video that we have this bias towards these negative results that we see over and over again,
02:01:18.000and we don't take into account the full data set.
02:01:21.000We're not taking into account all the interactions that people have with police officers because those aren't documented.
02:01:26.000What we're getting in front of our face day in, day out are the terrible interactions.
02:01:31.000And I don't see nor do I hear a real workable way of improving this.
02:01:39.000You get people that are either calling to defund the police or you're calling for people to support police officers.
02:01:48.000And from a few people like Jocko Willink, you see really great suggestions that they should be treated the same way they treat Navy SEALs, where you're spending literally 20% of your time training.
02:02:00.000And you're going through psychological training, you're going through actual real-world situations where you're going over what's the correct protocol and how to handle certain situations.
02:02:12.000And I think it's a giant problem in our society today, and I think that's an understatement.
02:02:19.000That every time someone gets shot that shouldn't have gotten shot, particularly if it's a person of color, it becomes a gigantic flashpoint for our society.
02:02:29.000Well, let me challenge you on that a little bit.
02:02:31.000Because, I mean, we can have civil disagreements in a way.
02:02:55.000The other measure that is being discussed, and it's not being discussed as broadly in terms of the mainstream news, it should be, is ending police unions, right?
02:03:20.000Each generation learns from the cases prior, right?
02:03:22.000It's in training, people learn the rules, things like that.
02:03:26.000The reason a lot of police violence occurs Even if it's not all, again, there's no magic wand we wave that saves the world, is the lack of accountability.
02:03:38.000We know there are cops, and even cops say this, right?
02:03:43.000There are cops out there who aren't good people.
02:03:46.000There are cops out there who have abused their authority.
02:03:49.000There are, you know, really tragic cases where a cop has done something straight up criminal, And they have faced no meaningful consequences as a result.
02:04:02.000But if it was anybody else, they would have gone to prison.
02:04:05.000And so there's a question of how do we remediate this in a way that preserves the legitimate interest of, you know, police officers as a class, But it also preserves the rights of the people who are being policed in,
02:04:26.000by your own admission, at least some cases, people who are abusing their authorities.
02:04:31.000And again, I'm not saying all cops are bad or anything like that.
02:04:35.000But if we recognize there are abuses, and this is a class that is invested, as you said, with the power over life and death, We have to be willing as a society, and the people occupying this position have to be willing to assume a higher standard of accountability than ordinary people,
02:06:08.000And look, there's good cops out there.
02:06:10.000I had a lot of interactions with cops as a young man that were nothing but positive.
02:06:17.000It's not that police as an idea are the enemy.
02:06:21.000It is the system that is rotten, and I think even honest cops recognize that the system is fundamentally broken.
02:06:28.000The question is not, or the question from their side should not be, can we stop reform?
02:06:35.000Because if they are, if that's their position, I think they're doing the public a disservice, and I think to themselves they know they're doing a disservice.
02:06:42.000It's how do we handle this appropriately?
02:06:45.000How do we handle this in the right way?
02:06:47.000And if there's cops out there who legitimately have served, you know, they've been out there for years, they've been exposing themselves to danger to keep people safe at night, they've done a good job, and they don't want to walk the beat anymore, that should certainly be an option that's available to them.
02:07:02.000And from my perspective, as not a cop, but I think when you look at The state of law enforcement in the United States.
02:07:13.000You know, do they want to work on dispatch?
02:07:15.000Do they want to work on investigation?
02:07:16.000Do they want to be cross-trained in forensics?
02:07:19.000There are ways that we can end issues or at least mitigate some of the issues that we see with policing today without saying cops are the worst people in the world and without saying, you know, these guys should be above the law.
02:07:35.000Well, I don't think anybody's saying they should be above the law, but...
02:08:36.000I think health insurance is a fundamental right of being a human being in a civilized society.
02:08:42.000I think it should be treated the same way we treat the fire department.
02:08:45.000I think it should be something that we all agree we should pay into because it benefits all of us.
02:08:50.000I mean, I just think if we are a community, and that's what really a country is supposed to be, we're supposed to be a large community, wouldn't we want to protect the most vulnerable members of that community?
02:09:05.000If you have a small, knit family, and something happens to someone in the family, everybody chips in to help that person.
02:09:11.000You know, that's what I think health insurance should be.
02:09:15.000I think it should be an important part of a culture, of a community, of a group of human beings that decide they're all on the same team.
02:09:24.000We have to take care of the most vulnerable people.
02:09:27.000I mean, I think that across the board.
02:09:28.000And I mean, that's really the argument that I'm making for how we want our police to be.
02:09:33.000When I say, you know, cops are bulletproof, I don't mean in the literal sense.
02:09:36.000There are a lot of cops who have given their lives to stop very bad people, and we should honor them.
02:09:54.000Any occupation that has, it's really this simple, as long as we have an occupation that is invested with exceptional authority, they must be invested with an extraordinary standard of accountability.
02:10:10.000It doesn't have to be a terrible thing, it doesn't have to be an aggressive attack, but it's this basic principle.
02:10:16.000Today, In the world of business, in the world of government, in the world of policing, anywhere you look, right, it's a common issue.
02:10:24.000What we have is a disproportionate allocation of influence, a disproportionate allocation of economic resources, a disproportionate allocation of authority without an equal allocation of responsibility.
02:10:48.000And I think we also both agree that it's not a shock that a disproportionate amount of criminal activity exists in a place where there's a disproportional amount of poverty.
02:11:50.000Yeah, and you know, we were talking about this previously on a different show in regards to the way people reacted to the pandemic in terms of economic support to businesses and trillions of dollars that were allocated to all these various businesses to try to stimulate them and keep them active and alive and keep people working.
02:12:07.000And my thought was, like, imagine if that same attention to detail had been to impoverished neighborhoods.
02:12:14.000If they had decided, like, listen, there's obviously a disproportionate amount of crime and poverty in these neighborhoods.
02:12:21.000We've got to figure out a way to lessen that burden and strengthen those neighborhoods.
02:12:27.000And in a real simplistic way of putting it, the way I've always said, if you want to make America great, you want less losers.
02:12:35.000What's the best way to have less losers?
02:12:37.000Have more people with an opportunity to succeed.
02:12:41.000More people who grow up in an area where it's actually safe, where there's economic possibilities, where you're given more access to education, more access to healthcare, more access to counseling.
02:12:55.000More access to community centers, any kind of support that you could possibly give people that gives them more of an opportunity to get by in life.
02:13:04.000And that this is something that we've conveniently ignored, this need to strengthen these core and significant areas of our culture, but yet we do when something comes along like a pandemic that might close down business.
02:13:23.000I think we should have put, I think a long time ago, we should have put similar resources and attention into these impoverished neighborhoods that have been impoverished for decades.
02:13:34.000And a lot of it because of slavery and a lot of it because of redlining laws and Jim Crow laws and all the things that happened after slavery.
02:13:41.000There's so many areas of our country that just don't get better, and we don't do anything about it.
02:13:46.000And we just assume that these crime-ridden areas will remain that way forever.
02:13:51.000And they send cops there, and then you see the videos of the interactions that cops have with people, and it just creates more and more anger and more and more frustration without any real...
02:14:03.000Some sort of socially responsible action by the government and some sort of a program where it's explained to people, explained to the general public how this is going to benefit everyone,
02:14:19.000that we will have less crime, that we will have more opportunity, that we will have more people involved.
02:14:24.000That are educated and empowered entering into the workforce.
02:14:46.000When you look at all the problems of today, and for somebody who's focused on privacy and surveillance issues, it's easy to be reminded every day of how deep in the hole we are.
02:15:53.000We have spent trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, Killing far away people who, literally going by the statistics, are more likely to be non-combatants than combatants, I think.
02:16:11.000And even if every one of those people was someone we didn't like, was the level of effort, was the level of resources that we invested in it, Was the cost to our national soul worth whatever it is we can be said to have gained?
02:16:30.000And I think the answer is that we have been generationally diminished.
02:16:39.000Not by that president alone, but by the policies that that administration popularized that have been embraced and continued by the administration since.
02:16:52.000And until we learn that lesson, we, you, me, everyone else will have an obligation to try and change things, to return us to a better path.
02:17:04.000I agree with you and I also think there's a real good argument that there's certain aspects of technology that have been implemented in terms of like warfare and how we deal with terrorism that you could say short term perhaps might have eliminated some targets,
02:17:22.000but I would argue long term probably encouraged more people towards radical fundamentalism, particularly drones.
02:17:29.000When I tell people the efficacy of drone attacks and how many people who are killed by drone attacks, what I've gone into with people that really haven't focused on it, the amount of people that are innocent that are killed by drones and the vast majority of that being the case,
02:17:46.000that when you're dealing with 100 drone deaths, it might be like 84 of them are innocent.
02:17:53.000Like, imagine that being anything else.
02:17:55.000Imagine if the police did that, if they prevented crime by killing 84% completely innocent people.
02:18:04.000Like, we have to stop that immediately.
02:18:06.000But because it's done with a robot that flies through the sky remotely from Nevada by some guy with an Xbox controller, and he's launching missiles into some sort of a car convoy, we've accepted this.
02:18:22.000There's a real argument that it's being accepted because of the remote aspect of it, because we don't see it, we don't feel it.
02:18:31.000It seems distant, and even seems distant from the person that's holding the remote control.
02:18:37.000They're saying that the people that are doing that, that are responsible for operating these drones, are experiencing a new level of PTSD and a very severe form of it.
02:18:48.000Many of them, they're haunted by the idea of what they've done and the fact that even though their own hands have done it, they weren't there to see it.
02:18:57.000It's some sort of a bizarre disconnect and that they're murdering literally Who knows what percentage, but it's a very high percentage of innocent people.
02:19:09.000This gets us back to what I was talking about in calling for the pardon of these different whistleblowers.
02:19:16.000This is the core issue of Daniel Hale.
02:19:19.000Daniel Hale is an American who I believe is still on trial.
02:19:24.000They have yet to be convicted, but the government is going to bury this man if they get the chance for revealing abuses in the drone program and the failures of the drone program.
02:19:35.000And this also gets, you know, you talk about this question of efficacy and percentages.
02:19:43.000Just last week, this was covered nowhere in media that I've seen so far in a prominent way.
02:19:50.000I think the Washington Post wrote an article, but it, you know, it was buried.
02:19:54.000It wasn't like a front page A1 sort of top of the fold splash on the FISA court.
02:20:00.000A lot of people have heard about the FISA court because of the relationship to the Trump thing.
02:20:04.000I hope one of your guys who works in production can pull out a headline or front page or the Twitter thread from Elizabeth Goitin, I think it's at Liza Goitin, who went through this.
02:20:18.000It was published in declassified version of the FISA Reauthorization for last year where the court goes through every year and the FBI submits this request for basically a blanket surveillance warrant that they can use on all these different people for all these different sort of categories of behavior that they want to monitor.
02:20:42.000And the FISA Court reauthorizes this annually.
02:20:45.000And in this annual review, they look at, is the system functioning?
02:20:54.000And one of these experts, I think she worked at the Brennan Center for Justice.
02:21:01.000Correct me and edit me out if I'm wrong here.
02:21:06.000There were thousands of cases in the last year.
02:21:09.000Thousands of cases where the FBI looked people up under the aegis of a FISA warrant, right?
02:21:16.000And this is like a mass warrant that's used for multiple people instead of one for everyone else.
02:21:20.000And we know how bad these FISA warrants can be.
02:21:23.000And over the course of thousands of cases, The court found that they had been unjustified in looking up these people's background in all but seven cases.
02:21:35.000I think it was seven cases out of thousands.
02:21:41.000We have created a procedural state, a bureaucratic state, an automated system For policing, and I mean that broadly, I don't just mean, you know, guys in shiny shoes on the ground with a pistol on their waist.
02:21:57.000I'm talking about, is it platform behavior and speech on Twitter?
02:22:01.000I'm talking about, is it surveillance behavior both domestically against American citizens and abroad around the world?
02:22:07.000We are trying to create a system That observes everyone and judges everyone in a way that we already know is not fair.
02:22:22.000It is not used properly, it is not used appropriately, it is not used effectively, and I believe does more harm than good.
02:22:31.000And why are we trying to create a system that sees everything we do and judges us, which is effectively trying to invent God, When we know that it is a dark and vengeful one, we need to think about the kind of technologies that we are putting in place that rule us,
02:23:41.000Or a law that's only enforced against the powerless but not against the powerful.
02:23:45.000Right, particularly if you or me or Jamie had done the same thing, we would for sure be in jail for a violation of privacy, for invading someone's privacy, for doing something that is against the law.
02:23:59.000If we were tried, we would be convicted, we would wind up doing time or pay some extraordinary fine.
02:24:05.000We would be in real trouble, is my point, but they're not in any trouble at all.
02:24:11.000We can't have that in a society because if you have that ability to completely bypass any liability and any responsibility for a violation of law, then we've created two classes of human beings.
02:24:26.000We've created human beings that are the governed, and then we've created human beings that are the governors, and the governors are exempt.
02:24:51.000There's no repercussions whatsoever for violating laws that can greatly...
02:24:57.000Impact people's lives in a negative way.
02:25:00.000That's crazy You can't have that we can't have that and we need to agree as human beings particularly now Because of the age that we live in and the access to information that we enjoy We're aware of this acutely.
02:25:12.000It's obvious It's it's right in front of our faces and it's one of the many reasons why I think you should be exonerated Why I should I think you should be pardoned I mean, you've exposed this and you've opened people's eyes to this.
02:25:26.000The exponential increase in people's understanding and appreciation for that, based on your work and what The Guardian put out and how you exposed all that, it's changed the conversation.
02:25:42.000And it needs to be changed, and the repercussions need to be changed as well.
02:26:29.000And I think if people really did know the facts, particularly the way you explained it earlier about how the information was distributed and the way it was handled ethically and morally, you did the best you possibly could have done with that situation.
02:26:48.000It's an incredibly bold move that you've done, and I feel like the time has come.
02:26:54.000I really do, and I hope Trump listens to this.
02:27:00.000I hope he listens to this, and I hope he understands also what a political piece it would be.
02:27:06.000I mean, this is a massive—if he pardoned you, I think it would be a massively positive move for his own—the way the United States citizens view him.
02:27:19.000Well, I hope what we see under this administration or any other, but certainly we don't have to wait much longer for, is ending the war on whistleblowers.
02:27:30.000Because as much as I would like to come home, as much as I would like to see recognition from the system, that there are times when the only thing you can do is tell the truth, and that should not be a crime.