The Daily Beast Podcast - If Only Ted Cruz Cared About This Constituent Who Almost Died

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Texas woman Amanda Zurawski ripped into Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, her state Senators, and other Republicans at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Wednesday, verbally holding them to account for their role in the abortion policies in the state that almost killed her. Hosts of The New Abnormal politics podcast, Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie, got to unpack her testimony in this bonus episode of the show, and they had a lot to say, too. The hosts also listen to more clips and make fun of other Republicans, including Sen. Ron Johnson who they listen to making the most idiotic case for climate change that they’ve ever heard. Plus! Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, chats with Andy about whether or not individual states can really ban TikTok, if a ban would actually protect against China getting Americans’ information, and one particular piece of legislation that could turn the private conversations you have online into not-so-private ones. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Cindy Cohen, who's the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and she's going to talk to us all about the restrict act. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clips.

All right. Let's start with the clip that I really felt. rocked the world this week. The big news of the week that we have a new Howard Dean scream, a tone that is such a strange energy, it will haunt someone for a lifetime. Let's hear one Ron DeSantis, unfortunately speak. Governor, I'll show you falling behind the Trump. Any thoughts on that? I'm not, I'm not a candidate, so we'll see if and when that changes. He just sounds like an asshole. Like, if you knew nothing else about him and you just

played that audio and listened to like the flatness, what the flaccid nature of his voice, he just sounds like a dick. I mean, look, the good thing about that was that there's not a still photo that has been all over the internet and is just being used to completely mock the ball run. So thank God for that

because that would be awful if that were true. My favorite clip is still the one where he looks like he's about to cry while Charlie Christ, like the worst debater, biggest milk toast white guy of all time, debates him. And he was that shook by that boring a guy with no charisma. Yeah, he's going to do just fine against Donald Trump. No problems there. I have to say, though, you know, as much as I like meatball rod, weird rod is sitting right there just for the taking. But I feel like that's an insult to weird owl. This is true, and we don't want to disparage him.

No. Well, speaking of weirdos, we had a global warming hearing, and as we know, that's where thoughts go to die. And in the past, these have brought some of the more dub takes, like when Jim Inhoff brought a snowball into the building, and, well, Ron Johnson would like you to hold his old-style beer. I actually found that chart of yours somewhat comforting for, at least America, when you take a look at the mortality risk, again, these are all projections. I don't put any stock in them whatsoever.

In terms of excess deaths, warming globe is actually beneficial. In my own state, your study shows that we'd have a reduction of mortality of somewhere between 54 and 56 people per, I guess it's 100,000. Why wouldn't we take comfort in that? So thanks for the question, Senator Johnson. And what the work shows and the chart is that the effects of climate change are going to be very unequal. And absolutely, Wisconsin, Chicago, where I live, the reduction in cold days, the benefits from that will outweigh the damages from the hot days. But if you look more carefully at that, there's large swatches of the country where the damages will be much larger. And in fact, I... But again, if you want to balance it all out globally, if you want to balance it all out globally, if you're trying to mitigate harm globally, isn't it true that the number of deaths, according to this Lances study, the number of deaths caused by heat are 600,000 per year, deaths caused by cold, are 4.5 million annually.

So the fact, in terms of global health, in terms of exercise, death, we're actually in a better position to prevent death by having the climate increase in temperature a little bit, right? Senator, I'm not familiar with that study. What I am familiar with is my study. Your characterization of it is incorrect. Well, your study is very favorable to my state. Our mortality finds benefits for 100,000.

Wisconsin will benefit in terms of mortality. There are 49 other states, the United States. Many of them will suffer. Many of them will suffer more than Wisconsin will gain. and that is the nature of climate change. It's very unequal. According to your study, you're concerned if you're in the really hot region of Africa, but in terms of the United States and most of Europe,

we're in pretty good shape. We're all blue. We have reduced risk of death. So basically, we ended on a rich note of racism, which was, who cares about those fucking darkies? They're all going to die, but us over here in the white areas, we're going to be just fine. Also, do you have to take a science, an earth science exam,

in order to become a member of Congress? My God, the fucking stupidity. I love that he really thought he had something there. He always does. I know. I know. It's just amazing. Like, he really thought he had his little gotcha moment for the scientists.

And it's just like every time, like you said, they always think they have this big gotcha moment. And the scientists are just like, no, let me explain why it's not. And then they just keep going with their same talking point and as if the scientist never spoke. Was this the same hearing where Marjorie Taylor Green talked about the taxes that people paid during the Ice age? Danielle, you're rooting the next clip. God damn it. It's like you just want me to be marinating in hell today, Jesse.

On that note, but of course. Stupid abounds our legislative body and the undefeated champion of our era musket on the action of discussing climate and put these betas in place. So let's hear from Margie on climate. People are not affecting climate change. You're going to tell me that back in the ice age, how much taxes did people pay and how many changes do governments make to melt the ice? The climate is going to continue to change.

And there is no reason to just open up our board. and allow everyone in and continue to funnel over $50 billion or however many billions of dollars or trillions of dollars to foreign countries all over the world simply because they don't like the climate change. Yeah, I don't even know what to say. Well, I for one really look forward to when she calls the actor who voiced Fred Flintstone to the stand to testify soon, because that seems about where she's going next. Has she seen Ice Age the meltdown? Like, I feel like only watched the first Ice Age movie? I have a feeling that she thinks those movies are woke and so she's not.

I was going to say, I'm like, for her, that's a documentary. So she's definitely not going to be unpacking the theory behind the theory there. But the Flintstones, she absolutely believes that humans and dinosaurs were on the earth at the same time. She absolutely believes that. She believes that the world is flat. So there you go. I would love for the follow-up to have been as like, when do you,

think taxes were invented? And like, I bet you her answer is like amazing. Like it's got to be like so comically good of like probably like a Democrat president enacted in 1972. Like she thinks it's like Gerald Ford and she's mistaken about parties and has no idea what's happening. It would be amazing to hear when she thinks they were made. It's just like if this is your representative, how stupid the constituents. If this is the person that you're like, this, she stands, she could speak from me any day, because that's essentially what you're saying when you vote for representative. They have your voice. Like, my God, we should, like somebody, somebody needs to check the school systems there. I just want to say, I have to voice a little dissent on this because I can't live with my own personal

identity with Eric Adams representing me. You know what? You're right. It's fair. You're right, but I didn't vote for him. Neither did I. Okay. And like when he wasn't put on trial, and then they decided to still keep him in, you know, like just saying. Okay. Well, I was worried about the blood pressure rates on this podcast after all that.

So I decided to put in a person who I think is incredible. Amanda Zeroski, I apologize if I butcher that name, a woman who is suing Texas for being denied an abortion is doing something I'd like to see much more of which is connecting terrible policies to their human consequences. Let's listen to some powerful testimony she gave at a recent abortion hearing in the Senate. We've heard a lot today about the mental trauma and the negative harmful effects on a person's psychological well-being after they have an abortion, supposedly. And I'm curious why that's not relevant for me as well, because I will.

wasn't permitted to have an abortion. And the trauma and the PTSD and the depression that I have dealt with in the eight months since this happened to me is paralyzing. On top of that, I'm still struggling to have children. And I wanted to address my senators, Cruz, and Cornyn, who, neither of whom regrettably are in the room right now. But I would like for them to know, that what happened to me, I think most people in this room would agree, was horrific. But it's a direct result of the policies that they support. I nearly died on their watch. And furthermore, as a result of what happened to me, I may have been robbed of the opportunity

to have children in the future. And it's because of the policies that they support. What happened to me was horrible, but I am one of many. and quite frankly, I'm lucky. I'm lucky that I have a husband that could take me to the hospital. I don't have other children that I had to worry about finding health care for. I have a job that was understanding that allowed me to grieve for three days as I waited to almost die. What about all of the women that don't have those same opportunities, that don't have access to health care, that don't have health insurance, that don't have a partner?

What about them? Yeah, I mean, I was going to say good for her, but great for her for, for, Speaking truth like that, I wish she hadn't had to. And I wish that either Cruz or Cornyn cared, but they don't. They absolutely do not care. I commend her so much for being able to sit before that committee and share such an incredibly fresh and heartbreaking story. This only happened eight months ago.

And I got to tell you, one, Cornyn and Cruz are chicken ship, which is, I'm I'm assuming why they didn't show up to hear from one of their constituents about how their policies are actually causing great and irreversible harm, right? For people who say that they are quote unquote pro-life, pro-babies, they just robbed this woman of the ability to have a baby. I think about one of the things that sticks out to me that she said when she spoke about having a job that allowed her three days to grieve? Yeah.

Three days? I mean, that's our, that's our system of capitalism. That's our system of greed and putting profits well above the needs of people. But the idea that she held that up as a good thing, that at least she had those three days while she was wondering if she was going to die, the unborn baby is going to die, or both that her husband got to think about. I mean, this is, it's, it's, it's, this country, man. It is, this is really, that story breaks my heart.

Yeah, I sadly hope too that people have to keep hearing these stories because I think it's the only way we're going to get our way out of these horrible laws. Good job finding a clip to cheer us up, Jesse. Yeah. Way to go, Jesse. Well, you know, yeah, yeah, you know, I said blood pressure go down, you know. The smell of us out. I hear the mellowness. You're like, can we get some sponsors in here for blood pressure and anti-depriessing?

Can we talk about CBD or some shit? Happy to do a personal endorsement for that here. Okay, one last clip. Famously, Rupert Murdoch's almost fifth wife, till the engagement was recently called off, said this of Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson is a messenger from God. Well, it seems Kimberly Gilfoyle is experiencing the same brain trauma. It's just awful because, you know, it has sort of a chilling effect, right?

It makes all the talents and the producers and the incredible. team of people that work there. There's so many talented people that work at Fox, you know, whether they're, you know, line producers, executive producers, the hair makeup team, all of the above. And so it's unfortunate. Tucker is a personal friend of mine, you know, of Don Jr. of the family. I think he's unbelievably talented. I've known him for decades. And, you know, I feel like it's a loss for Fox News and I feel like it's a loss for America. But there are new chapters in life. And I'm sure we will be hearing from Tucker. very soon. He's got a compelling voice. He understands the America First base. He is a fearless

warrior. I don't want her eulogizing me. I just, I love hearing her give a shout out to the hair and make up people at Fox. They hated her so much. Literally what I thought was your stories of this. Oh, I got so much good gossip about her from them because they absolutely. Absolutely hated her. Oh, please give us a little bit of a tidbit, Andy. Please. I honestly don't remember really any specifics. I just, they just did not like her.

I mean, she was as diva as it gets. She was just not liked pretty much at all there. I can't think of why. Yeah. No, she is a truly unpleasant person. Yeah, I was about to say it. Something tells me it was more of the personality than just the extensive job they had to do a makeup on that face these days.

Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. Look, they're used to that. No, it was absolutely. It was 100% the personality. Don't they, they should win an Emmy for costume. I mean, for real. Oh, God. For the past 33 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been defending civil liberties in the digital world, defending free speech online, opposing surveillance, and promoting things like open source software, file sharing, and encryption.

Joining me now is EFF Executive Director and co-host of the How to Fix the Internet Podcast, Cindy, thanks so much for being here. Oh, thank you for inviting me on. So I want to start by talking about something that's been in the news lately. It's a thing called the Restrict Act. It's being described as a TikTok ban, but that's not all it is, right? And it's actually pretty bad. Yeah, I think it's very bad. Regardless of what people think about TikTok, this bill is a really bad way to go about trying to address any concerns that people might have.

I mean, the thing that it's changing, it gets a little wonky, but there's a thing called the Berman Amendment that basically means that the United States stands for freedom of information and people being able to have access to knowledge. And it basically doesn't allow the government to block channels by which people get information. So it's important from our perspective, from a country that believes in free speech. But it's also really important that the United States kind of stands as a beacon for freedom for the rest of the world about freedom for information. So what the Restrict Act does is basically create a TikTok-sized hole, well, actually bigger, as you say, but a hole in the Berman Amendment that lets the U.S., you know, the president block a channel of communication. And I just think that it's problematic on a bunch of levels. And it's not even going to solve the problem that they're thinking about solving, which is the, you know, the risk that the Chinese government has access to information that TikTok collects on. people. I hate to break this to the Congress, but there's a swath of data, oceans of data about what we do

online that is already available. They should ask the FBI because the FBI buys it regularly. And so do a lot of people around the world, including foreign governments. So, you know, cutting off the potential of the Chinese government have access to TikTok information isn't actually going to cut them off from having information about what Americans do all day. In order to address that, you need a real privacy law that starts really getting directly at giving us more control over the data that is collected about us as we go about our business online. Is there any good data privacy legislation out there that EFF supports? EFF wrote one called Privacy for All with our friends at the ACLU a little while ago. It contains the things that we like. I would say that right now it's not the thing that's being

chosen and that's because I think of the other forces that work in the legislative process. But we kind of think about three things that are needed in any privacy law. The first thing is it have strong substantive protections. The second thing is that it doesn't preempt stronger state laws. So California has a pretty strong privacy law right now. A couple other states do and are tinkering with stronger laws. One of the things that the proposed federal law that was moving and is probably the one that's going to get picked up again is it basically sets a ceiling on what the states can do. And And basically instead of having a privacy floor with the federal government, we're going to have a privacy ceiling that the federal government sits. And EFF will strongly oppose anything that does that.

And then the third thing is a private right of action, this idea that if your privacy is violated, you should have the right to, you know, go to court and get protections. We know that while there are some federal regulators that do privacy, the FTC does its best. There's some others that do some work on this. It's just not even remotely up to the challenge. And as a result, we keep seeing our privacy violated over and over again. So we need a way that individuals can be empowered to protect their privacy and change the situation. And those are the three things that we look at for any law. And right now, there isn't anything moving on the federal level that would address all three of those.

Yeah. I suppose I knew the answer was, of course, there isn't anything actually proceeding on the federal level. The state of Montana actually did pass an outright TikTok ban. Is that kind of thing enforceable? I don't think so. I mean, is it enforceable legally? Maybe they can do some enforcement mechanism. But as a practical matter, it's going to be pretty hard.

You know, the internet is really, it's not easy to ban things off of the internet in the way that they're trying to do in the state of Montana, much less by a single state. But that doesn't mean it's not problematic. I mean, even if, you know, smart people with technical. skills are still going to be able to have access to TikTok. You know, it's just the wrong way to go about dealing with things is to try to restrict this thing. And I really think there are a lot of people who love TikTok and for whom it's been really important, especially through the pandemic. You know, now's your time. You know, you need to stand up and tell, you know, statewide and federally, like, this is kind of madness and

not good. And by the way, we're watching and we're going to pay attention at election time about whether you stood up for our rights to communicate with each other. You didn't. Yeah, it absolutely will be interesting to see how moves like this affect, particularly obviously the younger generations who love using apps like TikTok and whether or not, you know, this kind of thing will actually hurt Republicans even more with the youth vote, which they are already in grave danger of losing almost completely. Yeah. I don't understand the political calculation here. But I also think that to me, the concerns about TikTok really are voicing what are, I think, legitimate and broader concerns about privacy. And what we need to do is direct that energy into a privacy law that

protects us regardless of who's trying to violate our privacy. And that we push these companies to business models that, you know, are respectful of us instead of treating us like the fodder for, you know, their secondary and tertiary sales to other people. Yeah. I mean, I personally, like, I killed my Instagram account a couple of years ago because I got tired of the idea that Mark Zuckerberg was getting all my data. On the other hand, I do have a TikTok account, which I guess says about me that I am more concerned about Zuckerberg having my data than the Chinese government. I mean, I think it's a no-win situation, right?

I think that a lot of people feel pushed into trying to make their individual decisions about what tools they use, you know, trying to make the best ones. And the deal is that it's rigged. I don't want to live in a world where you unplug and go live in a hole somewhere. And I don't think you could even really live that way anymore. But I wouldn't want to live in that world. I still want to talk to my family and friends and be in community. So we need to stand up for better legal systems, right? Legal systems that empower us and that address some of the excesses of this extreme, you know, embrace of a surveillance business model that's kind of taken over

everything. And it's problematic from the company side, but it's also problematic. You know, I'm a civil liberties lawyer, kind of the OG kind of civil liberties lawyer where I thought about the government. And, you know, the government is a huge beneficiary of all of this tracking of us that's happening. They buy it. They have access to it. They tap into the internet backbone and get access to it there. So without comprehensive privacy, by comprehensive, I mean that this involves the government too, not just corporate actors, but certainly if we can even limit what corporate actors can do, we're going to cut off the flood of things going to governments as well. And it's not just our government. I mean, we're circling back to TikTok. But, you know, the Chinese government is a very aggressive purchaser and

obtainer of information about people who use digital systems quite apart from TikTok. And, you know, they're willing to break into systems, right? Some of the data breaches that we've dealt with, including the Office of Management Budget one, the main suspect is the Chinese government actors getting access to this information. So I'm all for trying to limit the amount of information about us that is collected and used against us in our online activities. I just think singling out TikTok and pretending like that's where the whole, that's where the problem is is is is is is wrong. Yeah, absolutely. I want to move on to

two new bills that are before Congress that seem more than a little troubling. Talk to me about the earn it bill and the stop CSAM Act of 2023. Yeah, they're both problematic. I mean, you know, the Congress has suddenly decided that the internet matters, which, you know, I've been at this for over 30 years. It's one of those careful what you wish for situations because of the things. things that they're embracing are really problematic. So the Earnit Act is something that everyone should have on their lips who cares about security and privacy online. This is an attempt to try to basically force companies into dumbing down the security that they offer all of us in exchange for keeping some liability protections for what other people say online. So it's kind of the

worst of both worlds, right? It's going to make a less secure internet where there's more censorship of what people say and less willingness for platforms to host it. So the first thing is that it wants to push companies into building a backdoor into anything you say or do online, which means dumbing down the security that they give you. And in exchange for that, the companies will enjoy some liability from what users post, or something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is a law that says that intermediaries aren't responsible for what their users say and do users are responsible for what they say and do. That's what the Ernid Act does. And as I said,

it's kind of the worst of both worlds, right? We need more security and we need to make sure that the places where we want to speak online are willing to host our speech, even if it's controversial. And this is going to cut against both of those. It's a bill that we've killed, we, meaning the broader community of people online, have killed this bill several times now. It's like a zombie. It's back from the day. And we can kill it again. But we need people to stick with it. right? I mean, this is one of the tricky parts of being, you know, advocating for the public interest against law enforcement. You know, they show up all the time, everywhere you go over and over again. And when you think something's dead, it's never really dead. It'll come back again. And that's

what's happened with the Earned Act. And so we really need, there's an action on EFF that's been tremendously popular so far. But people need to just show up again and say, nope, it was a bad idea before and it's a bad idea now. The Stop C-Sysam Act is also a bad proposal. It's using the scourge of child sexual abuse material, CSAM, that's what that stands for, again, to try to create more liability for intermediaries and make intermediaries block end-to-end encryption and instead scan everything that happens on your device or on your system. It's moved a lot, so I may be a little wrong on the specific, so maybe at the end of this, I'll check back and be very specific. But the Stop CSAM Act is another way that the government is trying to push companies,

into building less secure systems so that you and I can't have a private conversation in the digital world anymore. And it basically treats everyone as if they're a suspect. Right. And trying to encourage or require companies to build, you know, basically massive mass scanning of our digital technologies because some people, you know, might be engaged in sharing child sexual abuse material. But in the United States, you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. we're supposed to be able to live our lives freely and law enforcement should have to actually do legal work to try to figure out, you know, who the bad guys are. They shouldn't be able to just sit back at a push of the button and scan everybody's stuff in case somebody's doing something wrong. So I have a

problem with it philosophically because I think it turns kind of due process and the way we think about criminal law on its head. It also doesn't work very well. I mean, the CSAM scanning that we've looked at in other contexts is massively overbroad. It flags far more stuff. than the stuff that they're really after. And the result is that the authorities are basically flooded with false positives. And they don't prosecute very many. I mean, the numbers are really low. The percentage of reports versus the percentage of prosecutions is very, very low. And some of that's because law enforcement's flooded and they don't have a lot of resources. And some of that is because of the flood of false positives. So, you know, if you're really trying to find the kind of, you know, needles in the hay stack that the wrong thing to do is pile on more hay. And that's what the, this Stop-C-Sysm Act is essentially doing where, you know, if we really want to get at the scourge of this, it'd be better to throw more resources at traditional law enforcement techniques to find and then prosecute at a higher level than they're currently prosecuting for this horrible crime. Yeah, and it does feel like, you know, we see this a lot.

To me, it's a cynical use and it is a, I hate to use this word, but it's an exploitation of child sexual abuse material, which. look, I can't think of anyone who thinks that that is not one of the most horrific things in the world. But what they do is they take that sort of natural feeling that 99.9% of us have, and they try to use it to take away our rights and to take away our ability to communicate with each other without surveillance. And it's, to me, not dissimilar sort of from what they have done with, what is it, Foster and Sesta, where they are claiming to try to try to, help women who are forced into sex work and minors who are forced into sex work. And what they end up doing is harming people who are legitimately doing sex work voluntarily. Yes, it's exactly the same problem. And in fact, it's, you know, it's using some of the same mechanisms, right? Trying to increase

liability. And you're exactly right. And the thing about foster sesta is that now we actually have pretty good research. We, you know, we predicted that this wasn't going to help with sex trafficking and instead was going to drive a lot of legitimate content, including, you know, we have a client, we're challenging that foster sesta in a case called Woodhole. And, you know, we have a client who's a regular non-sexual massage therapist who, you know, Craigslist doesn't host those ads anymore. So he's lost one of his ways of getting business. You know, there's a lot of sex worker organizing that happens and information to help keep sex workers safe, like bad date lists and things like that. That's all been pushed to the shadows and pushed off of the mainstream places. And the result is, you know, not only has this not make a dent,

in the real problem of sex trafficking, it's put a whole lot of other people at risk. And so we have research now. This is not, you know, I'm not in the pre-law thing where I was like, this is going to happen. Now we're like, this happened. And, you know, I live in San Francisco, the number of sex workers out on the street in my neighborhood has gone up since Foster Sesta passed because they can't, you know, operate online, which is much safer. And we're not dealing with the underlying problem.

So to turn around and do the same thing around. CSAM or the Earned Act. We know this doesn't work. We know it's not the right way to go about it, but yet you're exactly right. The emotions run high. You say something like sex trafficking or child sexual abuse material. And a lot of people just want you to fix it. And they don't really want to pay attention to all the ways in which the thing that you're putting up as a fix isn't a fix and is also problematic in other ways. Yeah. And then it leaves you on the other side, you know, saying, well, exactly what you just said. But all people here, is, oh, you don't want to stop child sexual abuse material. That's why I say it's just to me,

it's such a cynical exploitation of a horrific issue, and it just really bugs me. Before I let you go, I want to ask you about one more thing. The Biden administration wants Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the FISA amendments, and you have been directly involved in lawsuits challenging the kinds of things that Section 702, I guess, makes legal. Tell me about that. People may recall, even before Mr. Snowden, but Mr. Stodin confirmed that the U.S. government was tapping into the internet backbone, the kind of back-end part of the internet, in order to watch all the traffic that goes by, and also was presenting orders to the Googles and the Facebooks of the world that require them to search their whole corpus for anybody who talks to anybody who talks to anybody,

kind of three levels back. And also the phone records collection. So we discovered that the NSA was massively spying on people. And so the NSA and the phone companies and other people who'd been cooperating with them ran to Congress and got a law pass called the FISA Amendment's Act Section 702, which purports to legalize this thing that had been done completely illegally since shortly after September 11th until they were caught in about 2007, 2008. Sorry, this is more history than you probably need. No, this is good.

This is the authority. This is the authority by which the NSA is tapping in. to the internet backbone and giving these orders to the Googles and Facebooks of the world. That program is called Prism. And the tapping into the upstream thing is called upstream. So this authority authorizes those two programs, probably some others that we don't know about. And Congress, while it passed this law, it did set it. So it would expire every few years and have to be renewed.

So 702 is up for renewal in December of this year. And there is a real effort on behalf of a lot of people to, try to rein the NSA back in and get rid of this kind of mass spying. We know that the system is imperfect. Every single time a inspector general or somebody looks at it, they find all the ways in which the NSA just cannot pull this off. The FBI has access to this data now too. Once the government collects this data, they take the position that if they collected it in the first place, it can be used for lots of other purposes that don't have anything to do with national security because national security was a reason they collected in in the first place.

This is, we call this backdoor searches that the advocates do. And it's highly, highly problematic. We just learned that Representative LaHood, who's a member of Congress from Michigan, had his phone and other things and Internet targeted by the NSA. You know, like they weren't even able to stop themselves from illegally spying on a member of Congress, right? That's all the rest of us. So it's a problematic thing. It's time to rein the NSA.

NSA back in and bring them under the rule of law in a way that protects all of us who are innocent. Again, this just flips the whole idea of being a free people on its head where everything we do online is subject to scanning and secret processes that we're not really able to see. And the government says, well, don't worry. It's for national security. And so don't worry your pretty little head about it, human. I just think that that's not how it should work in a democracy. That's not how it should work in a country where people actually have freedom.

And they don't do it very well. They're spending a lot of money and they mess up over and over again in terms of this. Even the FISA court, which is the secret court that approves these kind of programmatic warrants, not individual warrants, but programmatic ones. The FISA court has continually, every single time, every single order that gets declassified, we see all the ways in which they actually aren't doing this very well. And I think it's time for us as a country to put the brakes on it and make them come back to us with something that is, more narrow and more focused on, you know, developing out actual leads that they have rather than scanning everybody first and figuring out second who you really need. Why are both parties so bad on these issues? I mean, this is, honestly, this is one of the reasons I was a libertarian for so long.

I think that often people get stuck into this dichotomy where they're asked, well, do you worry more about corporations or do you worry more about the government? And it's just a false dichotomy, right? Everything corporations do is available to the government. And so we have to think of them together, and we also have to think of the consequences. I don't like the surveillance business model. I don't like being tracked all around by companies. I also don't like the idea that that information is, you know, can be and is regularly used to throw people in jail without proper due process and warrants that, you know, and Fourth Amendment protections that we should experience as Americans. Amen to that. Cindy, thank you so much for being here. Cindy Cohen. It was

great talking to you to our listeners. Go to EFF.org to learn a lot more about these and other they're really important issues. Cindy, thanks again. Thank you. Hey, one more last thing if I have a second. One of the things about being in my chair is that we're often always talking about things that are horrible and going wrong and not good and the fights we have to have. And I just wanted to note that we put together the podcast, How to Fix the Internet, to give ourselves a chance to really talk about what it looks like if we get it right and help build a vision of an Internet that supports people's security that supports their privacy, where the government is limited in what it does to the tools. that it really needs to keep us safe and not things that involve mass surveillance.

So the flip side in some ways of the work that I do every day in this conversation we just have is what we're trying to make sure that we're lifting up in the podcast. So I don't know if your viewers are interested, but I thought that might be. That's one of the ways that I've dealt with the fact that there is so much going wrong and there's so many ways to criticize it is to try to find the people who are helping us build a better world and talk to them sometimes too. Excellent. Cindy, thank you so much. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal.

We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support. all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline.

Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.