The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy by Thom Hartmann

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy by Thom Hartmann America’s most popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how the government and corporate America misuse our personal data and shows how we can reclaim our privacy. Most Americans are worried about how companies like Facebook invade their privacy and harvest their data, but many people don’t fully understand the details of how their information is being adapted and misused. In this thought-provoking and accessible book, Thom Hartmann reveals exactly how the government and corporations are tracking our every online move and using our data to buy elections, employ social control, and monetize our lives. Hartmann uses extensive, vivid examples to highlight the consequences of Big Data on all aspects of our lives. He traces the history of surveillance and social control, looking back to how Big Brother invented whiteness to keep order and how surveillance began to be employed as a way to modify behavior. As he states, “The goal of those who violate privacy and use surveillance is almost always social control and behavior modification.” Along with covering the history, Hartmann shows how we got to where we are today, how China—with its new Social Credit System—serves as a warning, and how we can and must avoid a similarly dystopian future. By delving into the Constitutional right to privacy, Hartmann reminds us of our civil right and shows how we can restore it.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. We've got an amazing guest that I think you're going to like. He's been on the show several times already. Tom Hartman will be on the show to talk to us about one of his amazing new books. He's got so many books. I think we'll have to ask him for the count on them. But in the meantime, go see the video version of this at youtube.com,

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So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Today, once again, Tom Hartman is on the show. He is the author of the newest book that's come out March 8th, 2022, The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threatens Us and Our Democracy.

And he's going to be talking about this new book. He's got an amazing number of books. He is the nation's number one progressive talk show host for over a decade. His program is live from noon to 3 p.m. Eastern on commercial radio stations across the United States, on nonprofit stations via the Pacifica Network, and on channel 127 of Sirius XM Radio Network. Welcome to the show, Tom. How are you? Hey, Chris. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you again. Great to see you congratulations on the new book give us your plug so people can find you on those interweb things yeah so oh i'm sorry yeah harpen report.com or tom harpen harpen report.com

is a daily grant that i do uh it's free and there's no ads and tom harpen.com is just our basic generic website for the show and all that kind of stuff. There you go. I love your radio show. Well, the simulcast, I guess, on YouTube. So awesome sauce. I was catched over there. So what motivated you to want to write this book?

I think that this is an issue that kind of came to the fore during the Trump administration when he and Ajit Pai blew up net neutrality. But outside of that, most Americans don't think too much about it. I mean, we talk about government, big brother. And after the Patriot Act was passed, there was about a year of conversation about it. And it kind of died out.

And of course, when Ed Snowden's revelations came out, we discovered that government big brother actually is watching more than we thought. And very few people talk about corporate Big Brother. And those are the two kind of categories of Big Brother that I deal with in the book, as well as the history of even the word privacy. Why does the word privacy not occur in the Constitution? So that's what I just wanted to take that stuff on it i think that if we are facing a cultural crisis in america right now i think an awful lot of it has to do with the business models that are being pursued by some

of these large companies on the internet that that are enemies of privacy shall we say so what are some of the ways that corporations are we're familiar with kind of with the everett stone and stuff but what are some of these corporations are doing this? Well, they're gathering massive amounts of data about us. The conduct of our daily lives has become something that can be turned into money. So, you know, you may get a smart thermostat in your house and you think, oh yeah, the thermostat's controlling the house. Well, it won't work unless you hook it up to the company's server in some distant city and they're tracking when you get up, when you go to bed, what your temperatures are. Oh, look at big temperature variations. Maybe somebody's

going through menopause or maybe somebody's doing cancer treatment. I mean, the granularity is absolutely shocking. You want to buy a smart bed? It won't give you information on how you're sleeping unless it goes through the server. You want a smart doorbell? They're wiring neighborhoods together, tying them into police departments, putting facial recognition up to it. And they know when you're having parties and who's coming over to your house and when you came home and when you left. And this is just the kind of obvious stuff, right? Then it gets a whole hell of a lot more granular. There's a company that sells information to companies that are to retail or to retail outfits that are answering the phone, dealing with sale. For example, if you owned

a company and you were advertising, we got the best product, best price on this widget, and we will match anybody else's price in your Acme widget. And you hook up with one of these companies. And when the phone rings, the phone number for the person calling you gives that company's data bank access to who they are immediately. They know who they are. And they can then tell you in real time if in the previous hour that person has searched the websites of your competitors. And if they have, then you know that this is the person who's calling to get the best price, and you put them on hold for an hour.

I mean, at the moment, most of this stuff is just massively irritating, but they are gathering information about us that could be used against us in ways that are just absolutely breathtaking and are being used against people in authoritarian countries on a fairly routine basis. Wow. I never thought about, I mean, I've always noticed how if I search for something, you know, like if I search for your book, cause we're gonna have you on the show, I'll suddenly get Facebook ads and everything else. It's like so many people on Facebook will be like, man, I searched for one thing. And like all of a sudden they notice it.

Even talking your phone on Siri or Google Voice. I don't know if Siri, I don't know if they block some of that with Siri and the latest rules from Apple. But, you know, who knows anymore, really? Because, you know, they tell you one thing and they do another. Back in the late 1800s, we got the first law that says it's a crime to open people's mail. It was in the 1920s, I believe, or maybe the early 1930s that we got Title II of the Telecommunications Act that said that it's a crime to listen in on a phone call. So now we've got this ironic situation. And this, by the way, applied to the internet up until 1990. Excuse me, this applied to the internet in most regards up until Ajit Pai and Donald Trump blew it up when

they ended net neutrality. So now if you're using your smartphone and you're talking to somebody on the phone and you're bouncing it off a cell tower, so it's within the infrastructure of the phone company, it takes a warrant for anybody to listen to what you're saying. On the other hand, if you've turned on the use internet for my phone calls feature on your phone, which for some people, they think it makes it more convenient or whatever, it makes it cheaper for the phone company, right? Now, because IGP and Donald Trump blew up net neutrality, anybody can listen to your phone call. They don't need a warrant. The phone company can listen to it. Your internet service provider can listen to it. Or anybody who just figures out how to hack the stream with no legal consequences. In fact, your internet service,

we're the only developed country in the world where the internet service provider, the company that brings the internet into your home, which has the unique ability to know absolutely everything you do, every keystroke on your computer, every you get every email you send every page you browse and record that information all of it everything that that they not only can do that in the united states but you know they they can sell that information to anybody they want they can use it in anything they want that is crazy and in fact wasn't the fbi or somebody sending a fake cell phone towers that could pick up the pings? Yeah, those are called stingrays, and it's another innovation. And there's a little riff about them in the book.

I learned about stingrays. Stingrays are a classic man-in-the-middle attack. Box, and on one end, it's hooked up to an actual cell tower that thinks it's talking to a cell phone. And so it carries both data and phone calls. And on the other end, it's got an antenna that says, I'm a cell tower. And so as your phone, as you're walking by, if your phone is constantly looking for the nearest tower to get the closest signal, and if you walk by one of these stingrays, your phone will think, oh, it's T-Mobile. Thank you very much. And I'm connected. You're actually connected to the stingray, which then has the ability to suck everything that's in your phone out. Wow. I learned about this was back six, eight years ago.

I was living in D.C. and I walked past the White House every day on my way home from work. And every time I walked by the White House, my phone would get hot. I'd lose like 20% of my battery in about four blocks. Holy crap. I didn't know what the hell was going on. And then there was this news story about how, I think it was Israel was busted. It was a foreign country. It was busted for running stingrays around the White House, which causes you to think. And then we learned that there were more than 20 stingrays in D.C.

And nobody knew who owned them all. And now we're finding out the police departments all over the United States are using Stingrays. Private detectives are using Stingrays. I mean, it's just gone nuts. And they can just suck all your data out of your phone, get your passwords, get your contact, get your emails, get everything if they want. And mostly they're used for espionage, but it's something that should be regulated. And by and large, it's not.

I hope someone's enjoying all those naked pictures they take for weight, but it's something that should be regulated. And by and large, it's not. I hope someone's enjoying all those naked pictures they take for weight loss where it's the before and after. I don't really do that. Well, that's the thing. I was talking to a colleague of ours the other day. I didn't know we talked to him. And he was like, you know what they're going to use against us if they ever decide they want to take us down is our porn watching habits. Yeah.

And we were talking about how Elliot Spitzer got taken down as governor of New York. That's true. And for sleeping with a hooker. But the thing was, he kept his black socks on while he was having sex. Everybody in America knew that, that little nuance. And so they'll find something kinky about a video that you watched, and that's what they'll show everybody, right? Yeah. I didn't know black socks was kinky i'm gonna have to knock that off i guess well this was i mean this is 1990s right yeah well it was his text messages too that kind of i mean i don't know if they discovered the heart way but the text messages you know who

nailed it was roger stone yeah roger stone broke federal law to spy on Eliot Spitzer and discovered that he was hooking up with this hooker. And then fed that information to the press and never went to jail for it. I mean, he committed a major felony to take down Eliot Spitzer and brags about it. There's a documentary about it. Yeah. Called Plant No. 9. And we can't still get that guy in jail after over December 6th. Hopefully he's on his way.

I don't know. It's man it's crazy so um i mean i talk to friends every now and then have some friend on facebook they're like yeah i'm gonna quit using social media because i don't be tracked or i'm really i don't want to use that because i'm into privacy and i'm like you have a cell phone in your hand honey like that thing's between apps and everything else that thing is crazy yeah yeah it really is and i think we all have to operate on the assumption that at least most of the time we're being surveilled the question is ultimately as a society what are we going to do about this are we going to embrace privacy or not and i think frankly that without privacy you can't

have a functioning democracy yeah and you can't have a functioning democracy. Yeah. And you can't have a functioning protest movement either. I remember when Mark Zuckerberg let out of the bag, I think it was 2004 or something. He made the comments that there's no privacy anymore or something. And like everyone just hit the, hit the, hit the, started screaming and yelling.

And he was basically telling us what, what he already knew that the cat was already in the bag. Is there any way to put that back in the box? Or do we have to just come up with privacy laws? The Europeans have got a good start on this. The European Union, they have this system of laws that protect privacy that include the right to be forgotten, which is very cool. You can simply say that article about me or this search engine result about me, I don't want that showing up anymore. And we know it's just particularly useful for people who've been cyber stalked or revenge porn or whatever, but it goes way beyond that.

But this is why you're seeing on a lot of websites, will you accept cookies? Because if that cookie has a function in the European Union, they have to acknowledge that they're tracking you. And exactly that's what they're tracking you. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize how bad those cookies are sometimes, especially some of the evil ones. Oh, and how persistent they are. Yeah. Sometimes, just for

giggle, just go into your cookie file. I mean, it's there on your computer. You can typically, and look, you'll be astonished. Yeah. All the cookies that are in there and who, and who they represent. Yeah. I know I'll use a program called spy bot every now and then, and they'll go clean all the cookies and take out like really evil ones, I guess they target. And it's amazing how much of them will be sucking out your memory in your computer and slowing it down. Yeah. I need a right to forgotten law, but a right to be forgotten by your ex's law where

your exes can't stalk you anymore. I need that. But all these things made me quit being a mob boss. I finally gave up the Cosa Nostra several years ago, five months ago. No longer doing contract hits? Huh? No longer doing contract hits? No longer doing contract hits.

After we had Peter Strzok on the show and Frank Fugluzzi, they said, you got to knock it off, Chris, with the Cosa Nostra thing. And I was like, okay, I'll, but I don't want to get wrapped up in anything I haven't done already, but as long as they don't dig in the backyard, we're cool. Wait, are we live? What are some other aspects of the book? I mean, is there anything that people can do to protect themselves more or is it just. You well there's a couple things uh number one if you don't want your internet service provider to record everything you're doing then you can use a virtual private network you know a vpn just be really careful some of the cheap vpns or the free VPNs or buy our product. Can you get this VPN? Those VPNs also record everything. I'd sell it. So there are a couple of companies out there that just say right

up front, we do not even have the ability to record what's passing through us. We are simply a portal into the internet. And those are the VPNs you want. And they're going to cost you money. They're going to typically are five, six bucks a month. But, you know, you're going to have to actually pay for it. We've reviewed a few good ones on the show. Yeah. Step one. The other thing is be careful where you plug your phone in.

Absolutely amazing. If you plug your phone into somebody's car, most cars will automatically suck down your data. All your contacts. For the phone system and for the addresses and everything else. And I mean, this one Uber driver who's in my book, he discovered kind of accidentally that his car had the complete contact list for 70 different people who had driven in his car, who had just plugged in off his car. Yeah. And so it's like, be really careful where you're plugging your phone in and make sure that it's just a power block. If somebody says, here, you want some free electricity, free recharge, be very careful.

Yeah, it's amazing how our phones are just like these things. What about using that one site? What is it? The Onion? I forget what it's called. It's a website. Yeah. Where you can search and stuff.

Yeah, it's a search engine that does not record your searches or doesn't personalize them, unlike Google. Yeah, I've used DuckDuckGo for years. In fact, when it first started out, we had the founder of it on our show, and that got me all excited about it. I hope they do a great job. And are they part of the Tor browser network? That's what I was thinking. I was thinking the Onion. Oh, you were thinking of Tor. That'll get you

into the dark web and also anonymize what you're doing by bouncing it off from multiple servers around the world. No, Tor is probably way beyond the capability of most people. And the average person probably wouldn't even want to try it because once you get on the dark web, it can be a scary place. I mean, you've got drug dealers and pimps and predators there. Yeah. Note to self, go back to mob ties on Tor network. Anyway, there you go. So there's one other thing I wanted to ask you about on privacy and it kind of do a Tor. The FBI was doing something where they bought something off. What was that Israeli scuff up over some software? Turns out the FBI ended up buying some of it and

sampling it. Did it have to do with privacy? I think that those were basically tools that are used to hack into your computer. I remember when the FBI had figured out how to dial into everyone's webcam and I'm like, if the FBI wants to watch me running around naked around my house in the

mornings or after a shower, I sorry for that fbi agent so yeah but you should also feel outraged that it's even possible yeah i mean yeah i mean i think edward sonan talked a little bit about that and everything because they were having some fun with being able to another guy mark zuckerberg who puts a band-aid over the camera on his lap yeah i remember i remember that controversy i I was like, oh my God, he knows. So they go, I leave mine on all times. If anyone wants to see me naked, God bless them because their eyes are going to burn out of their freaking head. So, you know, that are they, that are they're going to lose all that Taco Bell the night before. What else do you want to touch on your book that we need to know about? Well, I think that, you know,

one of the really interesting things that I learned when I was writing the book is that you will hear people say privacy is not in the Constitution. And the word literally is not in the Constitution. Why is that? Well, because the word privacy had a completely different meaning in the 1700s than it does today. Back in the 1700s, nobody had a bathroom. The bathtub was always next to the stove in the kitchen because that's where you heated the, and most people didn't have a toilet because the Thomas Crapper had not, he didn't popularize the flush toilet until the 1860s. They had outhouses and the outhouses were sometimes referred to as privies. Well, why were they called privies?

Because when you wanted to go to the toilet, you'd say, excuse me, I need a moment of privacy. And that was the meaning of the word back then was toilet functions. And so the framers of the Constitution thought, yeah, we really don't want to write toilet functions into the Constitution. So instead, they said you have the right to security in your home, papers and effects in the Fourth Amendment, that you have the right not to have your home invaded by soldiers in the Third Amendment. You have the right to speak or not to speak, to keep your thoughts secret. In the First Amendment, you have the right not to incriminate yourself, not to speak about what you've been doing in the Fifth Amendment. These are all dimensions of the right to privacy. But they were never recognized

under American law until 1965. In 1961, this was the year that the birth control pill was legalized by the FDA. But it was still illegal in many states across the country for even married couples to have any kind of birth control in their home. It was a crime. Oh, yeah. You get some really aggressive Catholics out there who got a lot of these laws passed. Wow. The famous one was in Connecticut because that was the one that got litigated twice before the Supreme Court. And in 61, when that was litigated, the Supreme Court said, basically, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. Sorry, you can't have a condom if the state of

Connecticut says you can't have a condom or a birth control pill. And so then in 65, a married couple sued. And this is called, the case was called Griswold v. Connecticut. And the Supreme Court discovered privacy in the Constitution. And married couples can have a condom in their home without being afraid that the police are going to kick in their door and drag them off. Because that's what was happening. I mean, that happened to this couple. And it was in the course of another kind of investigation, but they would add these charges on illegal possession of condoms. And so in 65, they legalized possession of birth control pills based on privacy for married couples. But it wasn't until 1972 that the Supreme Court legalized the possessions, the women's rights movement, and that also led directly to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that said that not only do you have the privacy to use birth control, but you also have the privacy to control your own pregnancy,

at least until the point where this is actually a viable baby, at which point it becomes societal power, as it were. Yeah. Wow, I didn't even know that that was that recent. That's crazy. Yeah, it really is. So is it possible for, I don't know if you're talking about this in the book, but is it possible to get our politicians who are always owned by all these different companies? Is it possible? I mean, they benefit from the cookies because when they want to do their advertising for re for their campaigns to get reelected they benefit from that like i remember back in the day we owned a huge telemarketing company and they did the whole dnc band telemarketing sort of thing but they made an exclusion where

politicians could still call and i was like are you kidding me right and so an exclusion for the politicians yeah and so they so, so the politicians benefit from, it's like trying to get them directly Facebook and everything else. They benefit from running those reelection ads and cookies and knowing what you, okay, are you right leaning or left leaning and who do you vote for and what groups you're in?

They benefit from all that. Is there any way to get these jokers to, to actually enforce some sort of privacy law? Because that's kind of like the stock thing these days. Yeah, I agree. And I think in your question, you identified the real issue here, which is that the cancer in our society is money in politics. And we're the only developed democracy in the world that allows politicians to be owned by billionaires or big corporations, limited in every other country.

And the only reason that it's not limited here is because in three Supreme Court decisions, 1976, Barclay v. Vallejo, the Supreme Court ruled that if a wealthy person owns a politician and that politician consistently votes in the interest of the wealthy person and the wealthy person is the principal patron of the politician, that's no longer called bribery or corruption. That's now called free speech. Two years later, a decision written by Lewis Powell, First National Bank of Boston versus Balad, he ruled that applies to corporations as well. And then the Supreme Court tripled down on that in 2010 with Citizens United. So we now have a political system where, you know, unless your politician is a member of the Progressive Caucus where they've sworn not to take that kind of money, you have wholly owned politicians. The most recent example of this was Kyrsten Sinema

voting against the piece of legislation that would have allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices after piles of money from Big Pharma. Yeah, both her and Man mansion uh just so much money from the gp she was the epipen person it's so insane they should they need to publicize this more somehow i don't know people don't read or pay attention they're busy i don't know watching the bachelor or something oh i just lost the bachelor crowd all two of them yeah i think i remember you talking this about the supreme court decisions when you came on for the Hidden History of American Oligarchy or the book. So people should grab that as well.

That's a real eye opener. In fact, I've shared a lot of people in the game read this book and understand how those SCOTUS decisions. And a lot of people don't realize even like why groups like the Bessie DeVos Center for National Policy have been trying to stack the Supreme Court for years. And we're probably up for another fight with the new person that wants to get on there. I forget her name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Katanji Brown-Dutton, I think. Yeah. They're already lining up to cause problems with that, and they kind of have to because of the way their base is. They call it the leftist radical. Yeah. Yeah. Anything more you want to touch on in your book before we go out? I think you'll find a lot of fascinating stories in it.

You'll learn a lot about, you know, what's known about you that you didn't know. And there are steps in the end of the book, action steps you can take both to protect yourself and to try to clean up our politics around this stuff. So that's, that's why I wrote it.

And that's what it's got in it. We all need to pay better attention and do more stuff. Well, it's been great to have you again on the show, Tom. Good to see you. Thank you, Chris. Back at you. It's becoming just a regular visit for you. So how many books do you have out now so far?

You got a ton of books. I don't know. It's in the 30s. The last part of the series, I think it's going to be the last one of the series, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism, How Reaganism Gutted America, will be out in September. So I'll see you again then. I will want to see that. We've had a lot of great authors on the show that have talked about Ronald Reagan and those years and everything,

even the rise of, who was my favorite book? It was the biography of, who was our Goebbels that was in the White House over immigration? He looks like Joseph Goebbels. Why can't I, Edward? What's the name i'm missing anyway anyway it'll be interesting read to hear about it anyway thank you very much for coming on the show give us your plugs your.com so people can find you on the norms please yeah hartmanreport.com is probably the best place to introduce yourself to my thoughts and

tomhartman.com if you want to know where to find the web of the show or the books and stuff yeah however you spell it will get you there. Subscribe to the newsletter too, man. That thing I get every day, oh my gosh. It's like a wormhole. You go down and it's like three hours later, just like, wow, I learned. Thanks for being on the show, Tom. Order up the books, guys, wherever fine books are sold.

Remember, don't go in those alleyways because you might get shivved. The book is called The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. How the death of privacy and the rise Rise of Surveillance Threatens Us and Our Democracy. Learn, educate yourself, and all that good stuff. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Foss at the bell notification button, goodreads.com forward slash Chris Foss, everywhere where the Chris Foss show is. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.