Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: How Ineffective is Mass Surveillance?

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

Ray McGovern: How Ineffective is Mass Surveillance?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, February 3rd, 2025. Ray McGovern will be here in just a moment on mass surveillance, mass spying on Americans, how ineffective it is, and why does the government thinking it can get away with it. But first this. Markets are at an all-time high. Euphoria has set in. The economy seems unstoppable. But the last administration has buried us so deep in debt and deficits, it's going to take a lot of digging to get us out of this hole. Are you prepared? Lear Capital specializes in helping people like me and you grow and protect our wealth with gold. Did you know

that during Trump's last presidency, gold rose 54% to a record high. If that happens again, that puts gold at $4,200 an ounce in his next term. Don't wait. Do what I did. Call Lear at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com for your free gold ownership kit and special report. Forty two hundred dollar gold ahead. When you call, ask how you can also get up to fifteen thousand dollars in bonus gold with a qualifying purchase. Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620 or go to Lear Judge Snap.com and tell them the judge sent you. Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend. I want to start with some basics. Does the intelligence community, of which you were once a part for many years,

respect and feel bound by the Constitution? Or does it believe, as some federal prosecutors have argued, that somehow it is immune from constitutional norms because the Fourth Amendment only applies to law enforcement and not to intelligence? Well, I wouldn't say immune. I'd say that they carve out an exception for themselves. I had an unusual opportunity to quiz Robert Mueller, who had just stopped being the director of the FBI. The Robert Mueller, the same Robert Mueller that prosecuted Donald Trump. The sainted Robert Mueller, yeah. So he was giving a lecture before a whole bunch of CIA alumni. They made the mistake of including me in the invitee.

Don't tell me they dragged you out. No, actually, I was able to stay there, but I wouldn't know friends. After he made some remarks, I, you know, the skunk in the picnic, I raised my hand. I was the first one. So, the skunk in the picnic, I raised my hand. I was the first one. So, yes, you in the front there. I said, Mr. Mueller, don't you, well, let me tell you, do you have any qualms about collecting information on U.S. citizens under this little procedure called parallel construction?

He says, what's that? I said, well, for those who here don't know, it's when you collect... He claimed, because this is well known in law enforcement, in judicial circles, he did not know what parallel construction was? No, and he didn't think that I could explain it in a couple of sentences. So I said, that's where you illegally acquire information. And then you hide the provenance, the source of that information, because it's illegally obtained, usually from a wiretap or surveillance of some kind. And you hide that from the judge. You hide that from the defense attorney and you use that by reconstructing a case tipped off by this illegal information. But now you don't tell them about where you got the information. You say, well, no, we got them through these other means, parallel construction. And, you know, every time.

So Mueller looks at me and he says, Mr. McGovern, after 9-11, we were given special authorities, special authorities, which we can do this. So I guess my question to you, Judge, is can you be given special authorities that violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution? I always thought no, but apparently it is exempt. Of course, the answer to that is no, but it is true that he was told by his boss, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, gather the evidence first and worry about the Fourth Amendment later. So it is true that they told them they could violate the Fourth Amendment. It is true they violated it. That, of course, doesn't make it lawful, and it's profoundly unconstitutional. I think, you can correct me if you see this differently, a whole generation of federal agents, FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, came of age in that era from 2001 up to the present first, worry about its lawfulness later.

And we are stuck with that today. I don't know if Trump, Attorney General Bondi, soon-to-be FBI Director Patel can change that. It would require a sea change in the thinking of tens of thousands of federal employees. Of course, Trump himself was a victim of thousands of federal employees. Am I right? Of course, Trump himself was a victim of all this. Yes. So you would think they would have some incentive to change it.

I'm from Missouri. You'd have to show me that he would be able to do this. Section 702 of the FISA Act has been recently renewed. It's really problematic. Just to give you a feel for how intrusive this is, there is this two-hop policy, okay? So I call somebody, that's the first hop, okay? Now they can kind of, that's authorized. They can look at what you're saying and what he's saying okay second hop also what's the second hop well my friend is in touch with google google wow yeah because you five billion hops that same day that's how intrusive it was it is as far

as i can determine and you know you don't get any good information out of this. The head of NSI, General Alexander, did not tell the truth many, many times by saying, oh yeah, we got 50 terrorists this way. Or no, it was five. No, we got one that got mum. And that's clear, clear as some of the public testimony that was done later. So they not only do all this stuff, they think they're entitled to do it, but then they lie about it just as they lied about the torture. You know, I'll tell you a story about General Alexander. Fox News was invited to interview him, and they brought a whole entourage with him brett bear went was

doing the interview and they had a backup interviewer and they had camera people and they had technical people and they had makeup people alexander looked at this crowd in the room where they were doing the interview and he said oh where's judge napolitano of course they knew that i wasn't going to go there. He was dying to, I suppose, threaten to incarcerate me or whatever he was going to threaten me for because I had been ripping the NSA from pillar to post. This is, of course, the version of events related to me by folks that were there.

General Alexander. And for those unfamiliar with the system, we're calling him general. He was a general. The head of the NSA is a three-star general and often argues that the NSA is part of the Defense Department, which it is. And when the president as commander-in-chief orders them to do something, which he does, they're not bound by the Constitution, which, of course, is absurd. The president is bound by the Constitution no matter what he does. But this shows you the attitude that they have. General Alexander famously or infamously, according to

our friends Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe, said, gather it all. Seize everything. Spy on everything. Gather all the information. You never know what you're going to need. This is a long-winded introduction to my simple question. Does mass surveillance work? Or is it overproducing data so much that it can't even be accessed? Judge, the problem is't processing all this stuff.

When Bill Binney told me first off that they were monitoring everything, I said, come on, Bill, for God's sake. Emails, telephone calls. He said, trust me, Ray, I helped create the system which enables them to do it. I objected strongly when they just decided to do it for unlawful persons, but that exists, okay? Well, how do they do this, Bill? Well, they can do it, and they do do it technically, and they don't listen to all our conversations or read all our emails, but they have them.

They store them. They have a building almost as big as the Pentagon now, out there in the West, I think, Utah or Idaho, someplace like that. And they store, you know how much stuff you can store on a little thumb drive? Well, think about it, Ray. They can do it, and they do do it. Now, after, yeah, after Ed Snowden came out in 2013 with the slides showing not only what NSA was doing, but how they were doing it, the trace

roots and the whole thing, Bill Binney and his colleagues, Kirk Wiebe and I published a memo 12th of December 2016 when Trump was still president-elect. And we showed that it was physically impossible. The law of physics made it impossible for the Russians to have hacked into the DNC computers, and we not know about it. Now, that was gold standard then it's still gold standard and bill is still pulling his hair out saying they're doing it they continue to do it and you know in in the spring of 2013 when wolfgang schmidt who was a Stasi operator, after Ed Snowden's disclosure, he was like, what do you think, Wolfgang? And he said, oh, this would be heaven in the Stasi. We only had four telephone lines.

And if we wanted to bother somebody else, we had to drop somebody else. This would be heaven. And then he said, and get this, folks, he says, the only way to prevent this from being used against you is to prevent it from being collected in the first place. And that's it. They don't read it all. They don't listen to it all, but they have it on file. If they want to get something on you, they've got it. And I fear for those senators that are voting on Tulsi Gabbard and on Kash Patel. They know that NSA's got it. They know that the FBI's got it.

It will be really a test of strength to see if they are able to exercise enough integrity to dismiss these attempts at blackmail, which are inevitable, mark my words, and vote the right way. In my review, that's to approve both Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard. But it's stacked against them, and this is precisely why. And Alex, I didn't want to say it before, but he lied through his teeth so many times. Why was he not held accountable? The deep state does not hold people accountable.

They're too afraid. Justice Scalia told me, he and I were very close friends, the gift to me, that friendship during the last 10 years of his life, that the court was being spied on by the NSA. Is that true? Does it surprise you to hear me recount that? It wouldn't surprise me, Judge. The mechanism might be this. We have five I's, okay, since World War II. England, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Now, we probably would not have spied directly on the Supreme Court. We would put out a little memo to our colleagues in the other

four eyes saying, you know, we'd really like you to collect them, but the Supreme Court is considering, could you do that? Now, am i making that up no that's precisely what nsa ordered gchq the it's a british counterpart to do before the the attack on iraq a month before when it looked like the the security council of the u. UN would not approve this. This fellow named Frank Koza, it's in his email. Thanks to Catherine Gunn exposing it. He says, look, we are told to surge all capability against all members of the UN Security Council, especially those non-permanent members in this period because we want them to vote the right way. It was done. And we know that because one gutsy whistleblower said,

that's against not only the Fourth Amendment of the United States, that's against my morality. She gave it to the London Observer. They published it in two weeks. This is kind of cute. You know how they confirmed that it was genuine? The Observer journalist called up NSA. He said, I want to talk to Frank Koza, please.

Nobody here but Frank Koza. So he has a secretary call up in the afternoon. Can you get me Frank Koza right away, please? Just a second. Frank Koza. This is the London Observer. So

when you do this patriotic duty before the war, as Catherine Gunn did, you have a chance of preventing it in that case if it worked. You may remember when a lot of people's noses were out of joint when I reported at Fox that GCHQ had been spying

at the behest of President Obama and CIA Director Brennan on Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016. And GCHQ went berserk over this fox took me off air for uh 10 days my source was our friend larry johnson and others larry outed himself so i'm not revealing anything that wasn't revealed and then the guardian of london published though that judge in new y York that's getting all this, he's right because four of the people who worked at GCHQ decided to spill the beans. The CIA charter specifically prohibits the CIA from engaging in any surveillance in the United States, and it prohibits the CIA from having anything to do with law enforcement. Now, those prohibitions were core to the creation of the CIA because many members of Congress of both parties were prepared to vote against the National Security Act of 1947, unless those prohibitions were in there. They didn't want to create another SS like we had just defeated in World War II.

It's 1947. The war is only two years over. So those prohibitions are right there in the charter. Not followed today, is it? Well, they're not. And it's not only that. We have four extra eyes, not glasses or anything, but four allies that can do our snooping internally for us and pass the information to us. There's one other thing here, Judge, with respect to the British and the five-eye aspect.

Ratcliffe just recently released some, Ratcliffe is the new CIA director, he released information saying that John Brennan sent out the names of 26 members of the Trump administration for people to collect on. Sent that to GCHQ, the British equivalent of NSA. And, you know, these things can be easily done not only by the electronic people, but by MI6 and all that kind of stuff. And as you know, in a lead up toward the 2016 election, the Democratic National Committee was employing British people like Steele to make up stuff about what Trump did way back when in a hotel in Moscow.

So it was that bad. What really interests me now is whether Trump, if he gets Tulsi and if he gets cash confirmed, it's going to be the cudgel will be laid down and we'll have to see whether he's really got enough strength and enough support from people who have to come out of the woodwork to prevent this kind of violation of the statute of the law, 1947, that created the CIA. Is the CIA physically located in every statehouse in the United States as two governors independent of each other told me? They're former governors. They were governors at the time. Yeah. Governor of Minnesota, I believe. Well, Jesse Ventura is one of them. He's publicly admitted this. The other other one i won't

give you his name a well uh regarded governor of a northeastern state well uh jesse is kind of a mercurial person but on this why doubt what he says he talks about these guys come in and they say now this is the real deal this is how we operate here even v Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has said that publicly. He said, you know, I've worked with three or four U.S. administrations, and all the newly elected presidents sound really good, and they say we want good relations. And then the people with the little briefcases and the dark glasses and the suits, just like I'm wearing, says Putin, come in and they tell him what's going on, how things work really in Washington. So

that's what I'm faced with, says Putin. He said that about four years ago as a direct quote. So everyone knows that the president is not free to do what he wants to do, except maybe this time. We'll have to see. It would be the exception that approves the rule. Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend. Always a pleasure. Thank you for letting me pick your brain on this sensitive subject. We'll look forward to seeing you with Larry Johnson at the end of the week. Thanks, Judge. Of course. All the best. The aforementioned Larry Johnson, of course, will be here at 1130 this morning. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!