Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you,
Speaker 2: Heidibergojen back with us after ten years as the executive
Speaker 2: director of the National Lawyer's Guild. She is the co
Speaker 2: host of the weekly civil liberties radio show called Law
Speaker 2: and Disorder. She received her Juris doctor's degree from Temple University,
Speaker 2: where she was the editor in chief of the Temple
Speaker 2: Political and Civil Rights Law Review. She also holds an
Speaker 2: MS degree from Boston University in a bachelor's degree from
Speaker 2: Brown University. Heidi, why's it taking you ten years to
Speaker 2: get back here?
Speaker 3: George? It's great to be back with you. Thanks for
Speaker 3: having me.
Speaker 2: On a pleasure boy. Ten years went by pretty fast,
Speaker 2: isn't it.
Speaker 3: Yes, it did. And I've got to say, we're under
Speaker 3: a lot more surveillance than we were. Even then we.
Speaker 2: Were under a microscope these days, aren't we.
Speaker 3: Yeah? We are. Yeah. I think that basically, if your
Speaker 3: listeners think back to the events of nine to eleven,
Speaker 3: that's when we really saw the beginning of the installation,
Speaker 3: the ratcheting up of our surveillance state. And I think
Speaker 3: what most people who are trying to understand their surveillance
Speaker 3: state think they think that it makes us safer, George.
Speaker 3: They think that we are going to be more free
Speaker 3: if the government and its corporate partners are looking out
Speaker 3: for signs of criminal activity. But what happened at the
Speaker 3: same time, after the events of nine to eleven in
Speaker 3: the Patriot Act, we saw law enforcement shifting to a
Speaker 3: preemptive role, sort of like the film Minority Report, looking
Speaker 3: for acts of terrorism before they happened, instead of reacting
Speaker 3: to crime in the traditional way, which is after it happens.
Speaker 3: And we also saw the advent of the Internet and
Speaker 3: then ushering in of smartphones in two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: androids a few years later, and with that bringing into
Speaker 3: our own homes the devices that actually do the majority
Speaker 3: of surveillance, the collection of our data by corporations, the
Speaker 3: Internet of Things, smart devices, Amazon's Alexa, all of those
Speaker 3: gadgets that are so enticing and by design addictive, have
Speaker 3: morphed into collecting enormous tropes of data about our daily routines,
Speaker 3: our preferences. And I think that people are under a
Speaker 3: false sense of security that it's a criminal is going
Speaker 3: to you know, do something harm us FBI NSA gathering
Speaker 3: of that data will lead to actionable intelligence, and what
Speaker 3: they ignore is the very big possibility of data misinterpretation,
Speaker 3: false positive, innocent people being swept up, bilified, Muslim Americans, activists,
Speaker 3: and so I think that with all the attention now
Speaker 3: on artificial intelligence and more technological advances, we're seeing kind
Speaker 3: of a frenzy to enact new laws to really make
Speaker 3: up for what the United States has fallen behind. When
Speaker 3: you look at other countries like Europe, we don't really
Speaker 3: have national privacy laws, so we have a patchwork of
Speaker 3: new laws that in many aspects may actually restrict our
Speaker 3: freedoms and gather more information and going forward.
Speaker 2: Heidy, is this the price we pay for the perception
Speaker 2: of safety?
Speaker 3: Well, I think if people look back a couple of decades,
Speaker 3: you know, the CIA actually began to look into the
Speaker 3: issue of outsourcing intelligence to the private sector back in
Speaker 3: the early nineteen nineties. After nine to eleven, Congress dramatically
Speaker 3: increased funding to higher intelligence contractors. And your listeners may
Speaker 3: know that about seventy five percent of such contracting work
Speaker 3: is done the government's intelligence work is done by outside contractors.
Speaker 3: It's the multi billion dollar industry. The Defense Intelligence Agencies
Speaker 3: Joints Intelligence Task Force compassing terrorism grew from about eighty
Speaker 3: members to four hundred in just a couple of years,
Speaker 3: and it became a very lucrative business. James Bamford, in
Speaker 3: his grape book The Shadow Factory, talks about how contractors
Speaker 3: thrive off NSA outsourcing of surveillance. So what's happened is
Speaker 3: we've gotten data aggregators into the business. And at the
Speaker 3: same time we had those smartphones coming into our lives,
Speaker 3: we also had the advent of social media, which in
Speaker 3: a way perfected the ability to attract all of our
Speaker 3: personal information as Americans willingly give it up on sites
Speaker 3: without really understanding the wee percussions. And I think that
Speaker 3: one of our problems is that we are suffering from
Speaker 3: digital illiteracy. We had technology really do some wonderful things
Speaker 3: in the period of two decades, but we haven't kept
Speaker 3: up in educating people about the risks of not protecting
Speaker 3: their data and not really understanding how much data is
Speaker 3: being collected by Facebook and by all the other social
Speaker 3: media platforms and apps that we willingly load onto our
Speaker 3: phones to make our lives more convenient and fun because
Speaker 3: it is fun.
Speaker 2: It is fun. It's a double edged sword though idea.
Speaker 2: On one hand, it is fun, it gives us a
Speaker 2: lot of information. On the other hand, what happens if
Speaker 2: we had no surveillance at all? What are the dangers there?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think the point has to be made. First,
Speaker 3: we are not safer as a nation because of this surveillance,
Speaker 3: and that is a myth that people have to understand.
Speaker 3: There have been a lot of studies. I think even
Speaker 3: a military academy came out with the study a few
Speaker 3: years ago. They looked at, you know, terrorists related arrests.
Speaker 3: Many of them were unfounded. They didn't lead to any
Speaker 3: valid prosecutions of individuals. And so I think that we
Speaker 3: also don't realize the extent to which corporations were profiting
Speaker 3: to the tune of billions of dollars off of our data,
Speaker 3: re selling it, coming up with digital profiles about us
Speaker 3: marketing to us than making more money off of it.
Speaker 3: When we really look at how we are not only
Speaker 3: not safer, but we are less free because we are
Speaker 3: being targeted monitored. In many cases, we see a new rash,
Speaker 3: for example of anti protest laws, and we know that
Speaker 3: years ago, all sorts of surveillance devices, including drones, were
Speaker 3: deployed against you know, activists to discreet to protest, and
Speaker 3: really an American tradition, Black Lives Matter was infiltrated, monitored,
Speaker 3: occupy was infiltrated, monitored, shot by shut down by the
Speaker 3: Department upon Land Security. And now we're seeing rashes of
Speaker 3: laws in many states that let motorists driving into legitimate
Speaker 3: legal protests get off scot free if they killed someone.
Speaker 3: What I think we're seeing is suppression of descent very
Speaker 3: American long cherished values, curtailments of First Amendment freedoms, but
Speaker 3: with no commensurate value in terms of legitimate intelligence to
Speaker 3: law enforcement agencies. And to answer your question, kind of
Speaker 3: think we need to go back to sort of old
Speaker 3: fashioned gum shoe detective work and policing that we had
Speaker 3: that was working pretty well. Your listeners may recall after
Speaker 3: Cohen Telpo and unlawful spying on Americans in the seventies,
Speaker 3: we had nineteen seventy five the Church Committee looking into
Speaker 3: how unlawful spying and disruption was going on to peace groups,
Speaker 3: Martin Luther King religious groups, and they put limits on
Speaker 3: what the FBI could do. I think we need to
Speaker 3: go back a bit, pull back on some of this
Speaker 3: electronic monitoring that's so invasive and not keeping us safer,
Speaker 3: and just rely on how we did things before preemptive
Speaker 3: policing was introduced.
Speaker 2: What would police agencies say about what you talk about
Speaker 2: today in your opinion?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, I think they too have fallen for the hetoric
Speaker 3: that the government gave to us after the nine to
Speaker 3: eleven attacks, where basically it instilled fear in all of
Speaker 3: the citizens in this country, most of them, most of
Speaker 3: the media outlets, and provided huge funding and subsidies to
Speaker 3: ratchet up local law enforcement departments. Many of them, which
Speaker 3: sorely needed the money, were able to buy new equipment,
Speaker 3: you know, enlarge their capacities. But I think that the
Speaker 3: problem is we've made this machine so big that I think,
Speaker 3: you know, most law enforcement agencies have gotten used to
Speaker 3: this new paradigm. There are some who have been brave enough,
Speaker 3: for example, to stand up to ICE or other organizations
Speaker 3: who have asked them to do really intrusive surveillance and
Speaker 3: they've said, we're not going to do that. So I
Speaker 3: think there needs to be more across the board education
Speaker 3: about perhaps our resources could be better deployed pursuing you know,
Speaker 3: more legitimate leads in cases and not, for example, going
Speaker 3: after various communities just because we've stigmatized them. You know,
Speaker 3: in two thousand and five, YETBI labeled animal rights activist
Speaker 3: environmental activists the number one top domestic terrorist threat. That's
Speaker 3: because some of the extreme factions of these groups. Again,
Speaker 3: groups that have been protesting and making some successful changes
Speaker 3: to policies, you know, of how corporations treated the environment
Speaker 3: or animals. A few were engaging in property damage. But
Speaker 3: the ye FBI started calling that terrorism, and I think
Speaker 3: we've seen that term two terrorism exploited. I think we
Speaker 3: need to go back a bit and really look at, well,
Speaker 3: who are the real terrorists. We have a big problem
Speaker 3: with white supremacist violence in this country, other legitimate forms
Speaker 3: of violence that can be just arrected after they occur.
Speaker 3: Try to stay on top of them, but not vilify
Speaker 3: communities where only a few people may be breaking the law.
Speaker 3: But you really stigmatize some legitimate social movement.
Speaker 2: So what would your preference, IDB, how would you handle
Speaker 2: this situation?
Speaker 3: I would stop creating new laws, of new terrorist laws
Speaker 3: even I'll tell you because I think we can ignore
Speaker 3: along with the safety and public safety, part of why
Speaker 3: we allegedly have this surveillance apparatus. Let's face it, it's
Speaker 3: mostly to corporations who are making so much money off
Speaker 3: of our data. We have a children's data protection law,
Speaker 3: for example, that's being considered. It's called the Kids Online
Speaker 3: Safety Act, and you know, it sounds good in theory
Speaker 3: protect our kids data aggregators or targeting them from an
Speaker 3: early age. But what it would do is it would
Speaker 3: hold platforms Internet platforms responsible for certain harms that might occur.
Speaker 3: So if a teenager went onto a site for anorexia
Speaker 3: and you know, continued to hurt herself, for example, they
Speaker 3: would be liable. So what they would end up doing
Speaker 3: is they'd have to create online systems to find out
Speaker 3: the age of users, but that would apply to all users.
Speaker 3: That would gather more of our data. And the second
Speaker 3: thing is they'd have to censor a lot of content
Speaker 3: and that would also hurt not just kids, but everyone.
Speaker 3: So I think that we have to educate legislators really
Speaker 3: about how technology works, and instead of creating new laws,
Speaker 3: including terrorist laws for online acts that may be harmful,
Speaker 3: arrest the offenders. We already have laws on the books
Speaker 3: that can be used to go after criminal actions, but
Speaker 3: don't create new laws that are then going to hurt
Speaker 3: everyone by not being well thought out and informed. And
Speaker 3: I think we have a big lag in how legislators
Speaker 3: policy makers don't understand technology and the surveillance states, and
Speaker 3: so they're not adequately addressing it. I mean, we have
Speaker 3: nine states in this country that have data privacy laws.
Speaker 3: California is a really strong one. Every state needs to
Speaker 3: have them. We need to start looking at privacy as
Speaker 3: going hand in hand with national security.
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