The David Knight Show - Interview: The Bill Of Rights Is Collapsing In Real Time

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Patrick Eddington, Cato Institute senior fellow and former CIA analyst, confirms what civil libertarians have argued for years: the FISA court has quietly inserted a national security exception into the Fourth Amendment that doesn't exist anywhere in the Constitution's text, and the FBI has been searching the Section 702 database for information on American citizens without a warrant since 2008. The reauthorization is currently stalled — caught between Trump's demand to attach it to the Save America Act and a Senate that doesn't have the votes — but Eddington warns the surveillance hawks will use every tactic available to push it through. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is Patrick Eddington. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He focuses on Homeland Security and Civil Liberty. I guess it is the classic case, Patrick, of the promise of security versus the reality of taking away our liberty. But we're going to be specifically talking about the reauthorization of Section 702. What is it? How does it affect us? How are they gaming the system and the law here? And what is the current status of it? Because I've seen that. up and down and up and down. I thought they're just going to rubber stamp it. But let's begin with that, Patrick. As of today, and we're talking about June, let's see, is going to air on the 26th. What is the current status of the Section 702 reauthorization? Well, at this stage, David, it is pretty well stalled in Congress. The politics of this have become quite interesting, frankly. I think I probably to some degree shared your concern that this was simply going to be ultimately railroaded through by surveillance hawks. But we've run into a very interesting situation where this whole 702 authority, which we

can talk about in more detail as we go along here, has kind of been caught up in some of the larger politics here in the D.C. area in our nation's capital. And it's revolving around a couple of things that are clearly on Mr. Trump's mind, the first of which is the Save America Act, which folks may know by its authors, you know, has been designed essentially to try to deal with allegations or actual incidents of voter fraud, things of that nature. And the president, you know, has made that a priority. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, of course, has been the principal sponsor of it in the Senate and the biggest booster. And so what Mr. Trump started doing a few weeks ago was basically saying, you know, once it became clear that

the Congress was not going to get to some kind of immediate resolution on reauthorizing Section 702, he wanted to see to it first that any 702 reauthorization was attached to the SAVE Act and through the Congress. And Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, has made it clear both publicly and privately to the president that the votes are simply not there to do that. And so what Mr. Thune has been proposing essentially is to try to have the Senate move some kind of standalone version. Now, all of this is still wrapped up in the larger controversy surrounding the fact that the Section 702 program, which has been law since July of 2008, does not currently require a warrant for the FBI to go into what's known as the 702 database to search for information on American citizens. And there have been repeated decisions by the FISA court since 2015, which have basically said, you know, once the information is. has been, quote, lawfully acquired, end quote.

Searches of the 702 database do not constitute a separate search under the Fourth Amendment. I and I think almost every privacy and civil liberties expert in the country have disagreed with that interpretation over and over and over again, because the plain language of the Fourth Amendment, when you really boil it down to, it goes like this. No probable cause, no warrants, no exceptions. That's how it's supposed to work. And in a criminal, Article III criminal court, that is how it works. So we have this bifurcated system of justice effectively where this intelligence program, which may or may not be as effective as its proponents claim.

This particular intelligence program is allowed to collect data on Americans without having to go through a normal, you know, Article III court process. And I think that's a problem. Senator Rand Paul has always believed it's a problem. have believed it's a problem. So that's kind of where we're at right now overall. And of course, this goes back. We look at 2013,

and Ron Wyden is a part of this again. And I really don't agree with Ron Wyden. I'm pretty much anything except this, but he has kind of focused on this. And I remember in 2013 when he said to James Clapper, are you collecting information on Americans? I search warrant.

No, Senator. Not intentionally. And then we found out right away with Ed Snowden, yeah, they are doing it. It wasn't any question about it. And you even had Michael Hayden come back and say, well, I blame Ron Wyden. He knew what we were doing.

And so did all of his staff and all the other centers there. And they didn't have any problem with it. He was the only one who pointed it out. And he got a finger blame pointed at him by Michael Hayden, who has been ahead of the NSA and CIA in the past. And it's like, how dare you point out we're violating the Fourth Amendment? And yet nobody ever came after him, not Randall. Nobody came after him for perjury.

for lying to Congress, even though it was shown that he was lying to Congress. Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, and I'll say that, you know, Senator Wyden, a senior Democrat from Oregon, is the longest serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I have tremendous respect for him and his staff. He has some of the very best committee staff on Capitol Hill, you know, working these kinds of issues. And, you know, Wyden has really kind of become kind of diogenes, you know,

last honest man. When it comes to this issue, yeah. Yeah, when it certainly when it comes to this particular issue. And I do think kind of the overarching politics surrounding not just this particular surveillance authority, David, but an awful lot of different surveillance problems. We have biometrics and automated license plates readers, you name it. Oh, yeah. It's a very interesting coalition of people on the political right, people that, you know,

tend to be more libertarian, essentially, in their outlook. You know, Thomas Massey, in Kentucky, basically my favorite member of Congress at this stage of the game. I regret that he's not going to be there next year. But you get people like Thomas Massey on the one hand. And then Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, who literally represents a good chunk of Silicon Valley, when they agree that this kind of stuff needs to end, everybody really ought to be kind of paying attention, you know, to the implications of all of this. But it's, it has, I will just tell you, it has astounded me. And I've been in Washington now for almost 40 years, you know, kind of hard for me to

believe, frankly. But I have seen and, you know, watch these battles and participate in these battles since I went to Capitol Hill in August of 2004. And I've never, I've never, I never get over the fact that that people who support these authorities will resort to almost any tactic imagin. to try to, you know, to try to keep them in place. I mean, it comes down, it comes down, you know, to linguistic slate of hand or to just outright lying, as you pointed out, when General Clapper was in front of that particular committee. You know, so it's, it is a deep, deep, deep,

seated problem that we have here in the Capitol. And quite frankly, if, I'll just give you an example, because I worked in the House of Representatives for over 10 years. And if the, if the, if the Speaker's office was reduced to a much more ceremonial role. And the individual members and the committee chairs and the ranking members actually had the real power. This 702 authority and probably several others simply wouldn't exist. That's right. They simply wouldn't exist. It's become a dictatorship. You know, it really has. I mean, it, we, I certainly believe that a lot of very bad decisions have been made by successive Congresses, present. and especially the courts that have allowed the basics of the Bill of Rights to be eroded.

It doesn't just apply to the Fourth Amendment here. It absolutely applies to the Second Amendment. Right now, I have the misfortune of living in the Commonwealth of Virginia. And you may be aware that our elections here off year. And in last year, the people of the Commonwealth made a very bad choice, in my opinion. They elected former House member Abigail Spanberger to be our governor. And she and her fellow anti-second Amendment Confederates have succeeded in passing yet another state-level ban on modern sporting rifles like the AR-15. And former CIA, I should point out as well.

And I will tell you, there's a big difference between Patrick Gettington, former CIA analyst, and Abigail Spanberger, who in every respect of the word, I think, is a full. fledge member of the deep state. I mean, this is somebody who's really bought in, you know, to the program. Yeah. My wife and I, of course, in 1996 were front page New York Times whistleblowers with respect to CIA misconduct in a particular episode related to operations, Desert Shield and Desert Storm. But I think the point that I'm making here is that multiple components of the Bill of Rights are under attack. That's right. And you wrote an article about that, how this impinges really? on Second Amendment. And of course, Dudley Brown at the National Association of Gun Rights was pushing back against this. I did some work for Dudley when they were trying to push through

the UN Arms Trade Treaty that was happening. He was on top of that as well. But talk a little bit about that because that's a good example of how they can use this to entrap a lot of people and start spying on people. Talk about how these international shooting organizations, how they overlap and how if you're going to correspond to. on to foreign corporations and things like that, as, you know, these various gun manufacturers are, how that get you caught up in the web? Well, and, you know, that's one of the things, quite frankly, David, that was not really in the conversation about FISA Section 702.

And to just make sure that the folks that are listening or watching this program ultimately have an opportunity to kind of really get their hands around this, when FISA Section 7, or I should say Title VII of FISA, of which by the section 702 as a part, when that was passed in July of 2008, the rationale went something like this. We, the United States government, need to be able to collect intelligence on foreign targets of interest, who may be involved in espionage, may be involved potentially in terrorism, things of that nature. Now, on the surface, I think most Americans would probably agree that that is a necessary activity. The problem, of course, comes in when we have, ultimately, when this law

begins to get challenged a few years in, we have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that oversees this particular program, issue rulings from 2015 all the way up through, I think, 2023 or 2024 even, basically claiming that, okay, well, once the National Security Agency, which of course is America's big signal intelligence collection outfit at Fort Meade Maryland, with facilities all over the world, once they collect this data, whether it is flowing over the internet backbone, I mean, where they're literally plugging into the telecom infrastructure and just kind of think of it like a Hoover vacuum cleaner, but the digital version of it, if you will.

Jagger Hoover vacuum cleaner. Yes, yes. Well, I mean, that mentality certainly figures into all of this, right? So they wind up, you know, scooping up all this stuff, and they get to store it. they keep this stuff for like five years, right? And so, you know, they assert the authority to go in and search for information on Americans if they believe that a particular foreign entity or agent of a foreign power is in contact with this American.

Well, in a normal, you know, Fourth Amendment context in an Article III court, they would have to have probable cause on the front end of this before any judge would then say, okay, I'll authorize a wiretap so you can get the information you need to confirm her to whether or not there's a real there and there. And so this program literally inverts the process. And that has always been, you know, my problem with it. Now, to kind of look at the at the U.S. to foreign angle here and where it can ensnare an enormous number of Americans, first off, you know, we can talk about the millions of

Americans who simply live overseas, right? Their communications are just getting swept up in this. So they could be communicating with family members, anybody else. and that digital vacuum clear that NSA runs that goes against the internet backbone, what they call upstream collection. Your stuff, my stuff, anybody stuff. If we're talking to anybody overseas, essentially, that stuff is almost certainly getting swept up in all of this.

Now, if you are a gun owner like I am, and let's say, you know, you own weapons that have been, you know, produced by overseas manufacturers, let's say Beretta in Italy, or CZ in Czechoslovakia. Or Glock. Or Glock, of course. in Austria. Those foreign

foreign firearms manufacturers they have American subsidiaries here in the United States that act as the interface between the American gun owning and Second Amendment supporting public and the manufacturers. So if you need additional parts

from Glock, things of that nature, you're oftentimes going through that American subsidiary of Glock in order to get there. Well, what does that mean? It means that when that American subsidiary, when the employees of that American subsidiary, American voters who work for that foreign subsidiary.

When they're communicating with the Glock head office in Austria or the Beretta head office over in Gardeau in Italy, or, you know, you fill in the blank, you know, on this. Those communications are almost certainly getting swept up in this process, right? And there's no reason under the sun, ultimately, for that kind of thing to be happening, right? That's right. So that's one of the Second Amendment infringement angles that we see here. The other one you kind of alluded to, which is if you are engaged in competitive shooting sports, particularly in the international arena, and these kinds of matches take place literally all over the world, right?

If you are communicating, if you're a competitor here in the United States and you want to go to a foreign match, well, you're going to have to make phone calls or emails in order to get the hotel accommodations taken care of your airline. and taking care of all the rest of that kind of stuff. That's additional information on you, an American citizen, engaged in the shooting sports that's getting swept up, you know, under this program. So there are some members of Congress, Mr. Burleson, you know, has definitely picked up on this. Ms. Bober to Colorado, she's picked up on this. There are others who've begun to finally, you know, kind of pick up on this.

But this thing that we've been talking about, David, in the Second Amendment context, this U.S. to foreign aspect of it, it would apply to every industry in this country that has a foreign parent corporation with whom they need to communicate, right? So, you know, I own an Azuzu in present, right? So, excuse me, a Subaru in present. So, you know, if my local dealership here or whatever, you know, needs to communicate, you know, with the Subaru main office, you know, over in Japan, that kind of stuff is getting. getting swept up. So when you start taking all of these industries, and there may be,

there are circumstances where American exporters are simply dealing with markets overseas, right? All that kind of thing can get swept up in to this program, ultimately. And that's what, to my mind, makes it absolutely crazy, totally overboard and something that is crying out, you know, for some bona fide changes to the program that actually make it genuinely, I mean, as close to Fourth Amendment compliant as you can possibly get. Well, we're basically talking about the six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon, right? You know, the game that everybody would play, you know, so Kevin Bacon was in this movie, but who else is in this movie?

And then you take it from that person or that person doing these hops. And I remember years ago, I talked to William Benny, former global technical head of the NSA, and he said, yeah. You know, they're saying you can do like three hops or whatever. Well, you know, if you go with six hops, you basically got everybody in Hollywood connected to Kevin Bacon. And so that's essentially what they're doing with this. Now, I've got a question.

When they passed FISA after the Church Committee hearings and things like that and created the FISA court, it was my understanding that what I'm foggy on is where this Section 702 comes in recently because it was my understanding that as part of that they were going to forbid the surveillance of Americans without a search warrant, and they were going to forbid the surveillance of foreigners in America without a search warrant. So the only people they were allowed to look at, I thought, were foreigners in foreign countries. countries. And so, did 702 change that? The original 1978 version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was designed essentially to operate the way that you have described it. Now, if you've had Bill Benny on your program, and Bill is a friend of mine, and I've been a big

supporter of him and the other guys who are NSA whistleblowers about how 9-11 could actually been prevented. And we can talk about that if you'd like. But, you know, once 9-11 happened, and we, again, we can thank Edward Snowden for this, I think primarily. Within hours of the attacks on 9-11, General Michael Hayden, who at the time was the director of the National Security Agency, instructed his personnel to begin collecting every last bit of information flowing between the United States and Afghanistan.

When he did that, he committed a felony. violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He was never prosecuted for it. And of course, anybody else who followed that order would have been guilty of felonies as well in that respect. But what happened, of course, is that in that period from basically September 12th, up until December 2005 2005, what people didn't know was that that program that Hayden started would ultimately get the code name Stellar Wind. and that program would only be exposed by the New York Times in December 2005, Jim Risen and Eric Lus Blow with the two reporters that blew the lid off of it. And this is when President Bush comes out and says, well, this is the President's surveillance program.

Now, that should have been everybody's clue that when the President says that he has a surveillance program, we're way off the way off of it. Well, when the President does it, it's not illegal. Nixon told us. Yeah, one of Mr. Bush's predecessor said that, and it didn't work out real well for him either. But, yeah, and so, you know, they make this decision to conduct this completely secret Stellar Win program. The FISA court was completely cut out of it because they knew that what they were doing was not lawful. It was not lawful. So once the New York Times exposed this, and this is when I was up on the hill, so I kind of witnessed this whole battle in real time,

it put the Congress on basically a two and a half year odyssey to try to take this illegal stellar win program and try to find some way to make it at least facially lawful right so it goes through some iterations and we finally get this thing called the foreign intelligence surveillance amendments act right and that's how we get this entire title seven of fisa added to it whereby they now turn FISA essentially into, under this Title VII, a mass electronic surveillance program that ostensibly is only supposed to go after foreigners, right? But because of the very nature of the structure of the global telecommunications system, they automatically sweep up the communications of Americans. They try to refer to this as incidental collection, but that's a misnomer. There's nothing incidental about it. It is inevitable collection, the way that this program has been operated. So that's how we went from a relatively cabined and narrowly structured FISA of 1978 to this monstrosity of Title VII of FISA now with this mass electronic surveillance insanity.

That really, I appreciate you going through that history because that really does connect the dots with me. I've seen, I've played many times a clip of Michael Hathen's like, oh, Section 702, that's such a safe haven for us. Most thing about that, because they got that past. kind of in retrospect to cover his felonies. So now he's safe. He's got 702 covering up his felonies there. My son, Lance, who's doing the board here, says, yeah, this whole six degrees of separation thing is an understatement. You can get 99% of the global population with just four degrees of separation.

Five degrees you get you at 100%. They say six to be on the safe side. And that's basically what William Benny was saying at that point in time as well. And he was saying they give themselves three. So it really is a scam. And, you know, when you're looking at this, of course, you've been fighting, this has been going on a long time. And that's why I asked you, you know, what is the current status of this? And you guys were fighting this stuff back in March and April.

Tell us what happened with the FBI when you had this FOIA request. Well, you know, it's really interesting because, as I think I mentioned earlier, there are an awful lot of these surveillance authorities or capabilities. that are out there that most Americans are not aware of. Some of them tend to be kind of arcane. And, you know, one of the most interesting things that I discovered when I got to Cato, this was when I'd been there for, I guess, maybe a year, year and a half, something like that. I actually had a then colleague come to me and say, hey, I was actually interviewed by the FBI. They were upset about some things that I was writing about a particular foreign

country, which at this particular point I cannot identify because we're trying to keep this person's name out of the headlines, and it will become clear why here in a second. And so I debrief this individual and got a lot of details out of this person. And it was really clear after my conversations with this person that they had been interrogated by two FBI agents from the Washington field office. This took place in the fall of 2012. So this is under Obama. And, um, and, um, and, This person was questioned about their writings. They were questioned about their travel. They were questioned about their associations, all the rest of that.

And they were also basically told in so many words that, you know, those of you at Cato really enjoy the benefits of American freedom. And you should think about that, you know, when you're writing about, you know, some of these topics. So it was a very, very, very odious, you know, kind of like, you know, you better shut up and, and, uh, and, play ball or there are going to be problems. You tell them the price of that is eternal vigilance, right? Yeah. Well, this individual was so shaken by their experience that they stopped writing on this particular topic for a while.

But they finally got their gumption back and they wrote another piece in early 2013, which elicited another phone call from one of the FBI agents who had interrogated them. and this time that that then colleague made the right decision, did not return the phone call, did not have any other contact with the FBI. But that put me on the path essentially of trying to find out just exactly, you know, what the FBI was doing with respect to Cato. So at the institute, I run Cato's Freedom Information Act or FOIA program, essentially. So I basically kind of oversee the litigation, litigation strategy.

I'm not a lawyer myself, but I oversee the litigation strategy. Our council of record for this is Lovia and Lovia of Chicago. They've been absolutely fantastic. We've been working with them for almost a decade now in multiple cases. And this one involving a particular FOIA that I put in on Cato, the initial response I got in 2019 was no records on anybody at Cato, no records dealing with Cato. And I thought that's just not believable.

Within a few months, when I appealed that, on a search adequacy basis, we got a follow-up from DOJ's Office of Information Policy saying, not only did the FBI give you the right response, but we refuse to confirm or deny we have any records on the Kato Institute. That's what's known as a Glomar response. So I waited a few months, and then I submitted a new request. And to make a very long story short, where in 2019, the FBI was claiming they had nothing on Kato, and then we're not going to confirm or deny. We are today at a place where we have a thousand pages of material on Kato that's been turned over to us.

The FBI has admitted that they were, in fact, investigating Kato and Kato employees for activities. At this point, they've not specified. and they're continuing to withhold information from public release having to do with Cato, claiming that under a FOIA exemption called B7A, section B7A or exemption B7A, that there is a perspective or ongoing legal case, possible legal action, which is, you know, beyond anything that I'm aware of. They certainly have never been indicted, the Institute, has never been involved in any kind of prosecution at the hands of the federal government during

its, you know, basically almost 50-year existence at this point. So there's no question. There are a lot of shenanigans going on. And the thing that I want to make clear to everybody is that this is how the FBI has operated since it was created basically in July of 1908. Yeah. I mean, this kind of stuff goes back. This kind of stuff goes back over 100 years at this point. and you mentioned the guy that really kind of gave us this mentality, and that was Jay Edgar Hoover, who to this day remains the longest serving government bureaucrat in U.S. history, and certainly one of the most malign government bureaucrats. Rightfully so, I think, yeah.

If they want to reform, the first thing they do is take his name off the building. That show that maybe they're serious. They've had a moment of reflection here. Yes, yeah, exactly. But I think, you know, what's important to understand for our folks out there, you know, you might think that, well, you know, the FBI's got to have some kind of criminal basis to open an investigation on me. Well, if you believe that, friend, you would be wrong. I need to talk to you to see if I can get a four request for information about me. I'm sure they got a long dossier for a lot of different things. Well, in the very last quarter of the Bush 43 administration, the then-attorney general Michael Mucasey updated the Attorney General guidelines for domestic FBI investigations. And when he did that, he created this new category of de facto investigation called an assessment.

Now, under an assessment, this is a good one, let me tell you. under an assessment, they can open one on you, me, the Cato Institute, you name it, with no criminal predicate, right? They just have to have an authorized purpose. Well, guess who gets to decide who the authorized or what the authorized purpose is? The FBI agent deciding whether or not he's going to open an assessment. So it's a great gig if you can get it, you know, you get to make up your work and get paid for it. So under these assessments, they can, can search classified databases like the 702 database. They can utilize every commercial database imaginable, right? They can task confidential informants to run against you, me, the Cato Institute,

fill in the blank. They can conduct physical surveillance. And they can do all of this without ever having to go before a judge. Wow. Yeah. And we've been suing on this issue. I've got probably several hundred pages, maybe getting closer to a few thousand now, on a lot of these closed assessments. And I will tell you that thanks to Cato's efforts, a few years ago, we managed to convince Nancy Mace, the outgoing member from South Carolina in the House and Jamie Rask and the current ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, we managed to get them to ask the government accountability offices, which is Congress's primary watchdog. They asked them to have them take a look at these assessments and report back. So in January,

of this year, they finally released that report, except they didn't release it. GAO classified it as restricted, clearly under pressure from the FBI. So one of my journalist friends, Ryan Lovelace, over at Rackett News, he worked his sources, and he got a copy of that thing. And what GAO found was that over 1,000 organizations and individuals had assessments opened on them for clearly First Amendment protected activity. Yeah, yeah. So this, this, this, this, this assessment authority is as out of control as the FISA section 702 authority.

And in an assessment, I'm sure they're actually able to get into the 702 database, you know, and, and searches and all the rest of that. So we've just talked about only two examples so far in our time together here, David, two surveillance examples that show just exactly how far off the rails the federal government is when it comes. comes to using this kind of stuff, especially in a predicate-free or a warrant-free environment. It's just absolutely nuts. It's totally nuts. And it begins with one or two organizations, one organization that metastasizes throughout government because we had, as part of what was being done with ICE, I remember I've played the clip many times, Mike Johnson, say, we can't be bothered with warrants? Can you imagine how long that would take us to do that? And so now this has become the operating principle.

Yeah, we didn't have to do warrants over there, and it's so nice when we don't have to go through and do that paperwork or whatever and have to prove anything. So let's just dispense with that altogether. It's an inconvenient thing. Well, it was designed to be inconvenient, wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, are people who founded our country, the people who gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and especially the Fourth Amendment, a lot of these guys like Jefferson, Washington, some of the other key players, they used back in the United States. the day, what we today call encryption, but what they called codes and ciphers back in the 18th and 19th century. And they used these codes and ciphers to communicate with each other before, during,

and after the revolution. So what does that tell us about them when they were drafting the Fourth Amendment in Philadelphia, when they were bringing the Constitution together? If those men had felt that the Fourth Amendment required some kind of so-called national security exception, they would have put it in there. Yeah, you know, there's one of my favorite. favorite programs about the revolution was one called Turn. And it was about that very thing. It was about the intelligence agencies in the American Revolution. An excellent series if nobody has seen that.

And that got to the encryption and the rest of the stuff that was about that. They understood exactly what that was about. They understood the nature of government. They understood the nature of man. And that's why they have this division here. And this is the thing, Patrick, that concerns me. Because we're seeing across the board, we're seeing a contempt for the Bill of Rights.

We're seeing a contempt for privacy, contempt for freedom of speech from both the left and the right. And at the same time that is happening, and I kind of get the sense that, you know, artificial intelligence and the data centers are on their way. They're going to have information about everybody. They'll be able to deep dives and audits, as we saw with Bill Pulte when he was just housing and, you know,

on the housing side that Trump put him in there. He used artificial intelligence to go do deep dive. on Trump's enemies, his enemy list. And of course, he's able to find some process crimes that people have committed, perhaps. That's the type of thing that's going to happen to everybody that they don't like. That creates a vulnerability. And it's artificial intelligence that's going to be able to do that. So, of course, Trump is going to promote him to be, I mean, D&I.

That's exactly where they want to go. Everything that they look at, the solution, whether you're talking about voter fraud or the rest of this stuff, well, we have to have some kind of a global government ID number, right? Right? Global biometric ID. That's always a solution to everything. And I look at it and it's like, well, I was in, I used to live in North Carolina and we had a real problem there because they did not require any picture ID, right, to vote. And a friend of my brother-in-law is, wouldn't come on my program and talk about it. He didn't want to, you know, make it public. But he told my friend, he said, I went to vote the other day. And you would just walk in, you'd give them a name and an address. And that's all you'd need to vote. And he said, I went in to vote. And they said, I went in to vote. And they said, said, you've already voted. And so there's this other person that you're addressing goes, that's my mother. She's been dead for years. And so it is a real issue and it is a real problem. But their solution in terms of having this kind of biometric digital ID for everything is like burning your house down to kill a fly. It's crazy what they're doing. Well, it puts us on the

kind of path that communist China has been on, you know, for a very, very, very long time. you know, and that is the antithesis, the absolute opposite of what the founders intended. And so, you know, I think anything that we as citizens can do to throw a wrench in that works on this stuff and to find a way to raise these issues and try to reverse them, I think any of that kind of thing is absolutely necessary, and it's always laudable because at the end of the day, you know, this notion, and I'll just, I'll talk talk about one other thing that I really just absolutely detest, and that's this whole real, real ID thing. Yeah. The notion,

and they've pushed it now where if you don't get a so-called real ID compliant ID, you either won't be able to apply, or you'll have to pay a special $45, I refer to this, as an extortion fee, through some kind of additional screening in order to allow you on the plane.

So this is another example, essentially, of treating American citizens as suspect first. Oh, yeah. And citizens a very, very distant second. And I'll also say that, you know, there's more than enough case law at this point from the Supreme Court, I think, you know, for someone to probably be able to successfully mount a challenge to this kind of stuff. Because the right to travel from state to state without molestation by officials of government is literally a basic constitutional right. And, you know, and the Supreme Court I know is

weighed in on these kinds of issues previously. But if I had my way, Real ID would be repealed tomorrow. None of this kind of thing would be allowed to go on. And the notion, again, that, you know, when you're having to show up and they do this one-to-one match, you know, against their database and all the rest of that, they want to go. TSA wants to go much further than that. You know, they want to be able to do essentially what NSA has been doing in the 702 program, which is get your days and keep it for as long as they want it.

And, you know, this whole aspect of trying to control the population. I view these as population control measures, you know, whether it's a 702 program or whether it's real ID or some of these other things. At base, these are population control measures. And that's what the communists do. That's not what we're supposed to be doing. Absolutely. And I'm seeing this coming from Republicans, Marshall Blackburn, who I live in Tennessee,

she'll likely be our next governor, but she is at the epicenter of all this stuff. She's introduced one bill after the other to essentially pull together artificial intelligence, cryptography, and kids online and all the rest of the stuff, always about creating IDs and a permission-based society to take what were fundamental rights of privacy and free speech and make them privileges granted by government if you do everything they want. I'm very concerned about what's happening with that. And you look at this explosion of data centers, as I was saying earlier this week. yeah, the data centers are going to raise our price of electricity, it's going to raise taxes,

it's going to be something that is a noise disturbance and an environmental aspect. You can oppose it on all those things, but you're not going to stop it on any of those things. You have to oppose it on the basis of the attack on liberty that it presents and the surveillance state that is funding it and putting it together. Again, when you look at the Trump administration and Marsha Blackburn, they basically wanted to override the 10th Amendment, say there's not going to be any state regulation of what we do with artificial intelligence. They want absolute, omnipotent, omnipresent, godlike powers over all of us. Nothing else will satisfy them. And you know,

this is not my Republican Party. No, mine either. I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I, when I was 17 years old in 1980, I went door to door for Ronald Reagan. And President Reagan would never, in a billion years sanction any of this kind of stuff. Not a billion years. And the other disappointment that I see here is, I was born in Missouri, and one of our prior senators was a guy by the name of Thomas Hennings during the 1950s and 60s.

And he was an absolute bulldog on the Fourth Amendment. I mean, this guy held hearings, did everything he could, essentially, to try to shut down any kind of warrantless surveillance, things of that nature. And, you know, what do we see now? you know, we see guys like Justin Amash, you know, you got, you wound up having to leave Congress. He was one of the leaders essentially in trying to fight this stuff.

Thomas, Thomas Massey now has become a casualty, all the rest of that. So it really bothers me, you know, when I see the Republican Party kind of going in this particular direction. And then, you know, the other aspect of this, you know, there are plenty of Democrats out there, unfortunately, that do not embrace, you know, most aspects of the bill. rights. I mean, there are some, you know, that have been halfway decent on it. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, you know, is one of them. But, you know, as a party, you know, Democrats were willing to give Barack Obama a pass, you know, on a lot of the stuff that he did. And when you go back in time and you look at this stuff as I have, you see that pattern over and over again, you know, particularly in the post-church committee era, you know, where you get red team in the White House

and Red Team in Control of Congress, and it's like, well, you know, it won't be that bad. He won't go over the line, yada, yada, yada. They always do. I mean, I just don't, you know, I consider myself at this stage in life to be a 21st century antiferalist. So my political ancestors, unfortunately, are the ones who lost at the Constitutional Convention. And I believe to this day that if they had won, if the anti-federalist position on a lot of these kinds of issues had prevailed, you and I wouldn't have to talk about this stuff. That's right.

It wouldn't be necessary to do. But that's a measure of how far in two and a half centuries, you know, we've gone down this road away from this concept of rights that are inherent to us because we exist. Right? And I had a lot of people criticize me because I said, you know, they do need to have a warrant for some of the things that they're doing, even if they're coming after somebody, for committing the crime of coming here illegally.

I said, you know, we give that kind of protection to everybody, and we do it not on the basis of citizenship. We do it on the basis that we are created in the image of God and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. And once you get away from that concept, and you start saying, well, because somebody is a citizen, now they get this or that. Now you're going down the route of a privilege,

not a basic human right, and that is a very dangerous precedent. Yeah, well, I mean, it just reminds me at commies again. That's right. That's right. This is what you get. Well, let's talk a little bit about the excuse that they use because they do have a technical excuse. And you talked about that and you dismantled that completely. They say, well, you know, we imagine how complicated this is. We got our, we got our ear to the internet cable here, right?

And we're listening to all of the conversations that are happening on the internet. And they're all packets. and we don't know where these packets come from. So, of course, we're going to scoop up this stuff. And we can't do anything about it. It's an engineering problem. It's a technical problem. And it can't be solved with that.

So get off our back about it. It's basically what they're saying. But you dismantle that pretty effectively in your article at cato.org. Well, it's really interesting because I had a former very, very senior executive for one of the top three financial services institutions in the country reach out to me at one point. because I mentioned this kind of this concept kind of previously that the notion that NSA ultimately doesn't have the ability to kind of distinguish foreign traffic from American traffic really didn't ring true to me. And it didn't ring true to me for, you know, for several reasons. One of those reasons is your friend, our mutual friend, Bill Binney.

Yeah. You know, when Bill and his team at the Signal Automation Research Center or SARC at the National Security Agency, by the fall in 1999, Bill and his team, team had developed a capability, essentially, to go out in kind of a vacuum cleaner way, against the internet, against all this digital traffic, but sort the traffic into foreign versus U.S. or suspected U.S. And then quarantine, essentially, literally quarantine, anything that was U.S. related or that was believed to potentially be U.S. related. For further analysis, but only after they had gone to wait for it, a federal judge. judge to get a warrant to examine the data, right?

They didn't want his solution. No, they did not. They wanted 7-02, yeah. Well, what they wanted was this other inside-the-beltway banded boondoggle called Trailblazer, which wound up squandering, well, the official figure that we have in writing as a result of our foil litigation is north of $700 million. But I think the actual figure is probably four to five times that. And it never produced a working prototype and all the rest of that. But the long story short here is that even the Privacy and Civil Rights Oversight Board has been saying, at least until, unfortunately, President Trump basically destroyed it, saying that, you know, NSA needs to be forced, you know, to do this research in order to find ways to absolutely minimize the amount of stuff they actually ingest that's actually genuine intel on genuine.

you win threats. And that simply hasn't happened. And so you're absolutely right. That's what folks at Fort Meade have basically been kind of, you know, treading water on for the last 18 years. It's like, oh, it's too hard. It's too hard. It's too hard. This is the United States of America. We invented the airplane. We invented the personal computer. We sent people to the moon and back repeatedly, right? Don't tell me it can't be done because the banking industry in many respects has solved a lot of these problems already. And they had to because of the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act. That's another particular piece of legislation that probably needs to be seriously dismantled in a lot of respects. That is a true black hole that my colleague, Nick Anthony, and I'd

encourage you to have him on your program because he can talk about that chapter and verse. But, you know, when Bill Binney and his team met with me and they talked about this thin thread program they developed, and then the privacy and civilry's oversight board, and the other hand, saying, no, no, no, no, no, NSA needs to be pushed on this. That's why we need to get to that place. I will give you this hopeful note, though. The day after President Trump was in office for the second time in January 2025, Judge Hall in the Eastern District of New York released a previously sealed opinion she had in a 702-related case where the government essentially had conducted database searches on somebody and lied about it and then only, you know, fessed up to it later.

And the question that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals asked her to look at on remand was, does going into the 702 database constitute a separate Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant? And she said emphatically, yes. Now, the Trump administration has appealed that. The Second Circuit heard that case on April 22nd of this year. So I am hoping, I am hoping, that before this whole 702 thing, you know, finally plays itself. out. It will actually get a ruling from the Second Circuit affirming that you have to have a probable cause-based warrant to go into that database. And then things will get really fun. Well, that'd be good. But I think the key thing is Americans need to understand what this is. And even though I hang out in this,

I looked at it and I thought, well, you know, 702, but I thought that was what was originally done with the FISA Act. And so that little bit of history that you gave us there connects it in my mind. But there's a tremendous amount of ignorance, if you will, and people just don't understand. understand what this truly is about and how serious it is and how it's going to be abused and how we are on the cusp of handing these people who have no respect for our rights or liberties or the Constitution. We're on the cusp of handing them the most powerful tools to violate all of these things that they've ever had.

And I think that's the reason we're seeing all these things start to come together. They're chopping out the bit waiting to turn AI loose on every single one of us. As Harvey Silverglades pointed out, we all commit three felonies a day. without even knowing it. So we're all sitting there like Lisa Cook wondering, you know, well, is there something in my past that are going to come after me for a process crime or something? But I think, you know, when you laid this out in your article at Cato, misdirection and misinformation, the FISA reauthorization fight intensifies in that you talk about the fact

that the banks are already doing this. You know, they come out and say, this is technically not capable of being done. And yet you point out all the banks are doing this and they have to do it because all these different jurisdictions that they're dealing with internationally, Europe's got one, was it Singapore had another one, the U.S. has got different rules and everything. So they have to, when this stuff is coming in, for them to handle it in accordance with the law of these different jurisdictions, they have to put these packets in the appropriate buckets to know they're handling them the appropriate way. And you point out, I think it was Bank of America had something like

7,000 patents to do this. And that's not including the other major banks who also have thousands of patents each in order to do this type of stuff. So this is something that has been solved. It's been used for years in the private sector. And yet the federal government and these people who are doing this stuff deliberately, I think, are telling us, no, it's just impossible. It can't be solved. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why, you know, I gave my little homily about, you know, the technological prowess of our country over the course of the last two and a half century. The notion that it is not technologically possible for Americans to solve a given problem has been refuted over and over and over and over again. And that's why NSA needs to be held to the highest standard

when it comes to this kind of stuff. And, you know, look, David, the truth of matter is they don't want to do it because it's just easier to vacuum this stuff up and then just go back and search it at their leisure. I mean, it comes down to laziness at the end of the day. And there's a certain amount of maliciousness as well, because when you talked about your fight on this FOIA stuff, you were talking about how finally when you got these, the judge gave the order said, no, you got to release this information, you file a FOIA request, and they don't want to give you any information. And usually it always ends up in a lawsuit. That's why I've never done it for myself, because I'm not going to get involved in a lawsuit to try to get this. So now they know they

put it out in public. I'm not interested in so on them. So they'll never give me any information. But the bottom line is that even after you won and the judge gave them a deadline, they refused to send it to you by email. They put it in a FedEx. And so you didn't get it. And finally, didn't get it and contacted them. They could have, they mailed it out on the day of the deadline. You would have gotten it the next day, but you didn't get the next day. So then they take their time and like three or four days later, they send you the packet that's heavily redacted, of course, you know, they're going to cover up most of the information. And yet in that packet, they emailed it three or four days after the fact. There's just a contempt that is there with

these different, I mean, it was, it was there just out of spite that they would do that kind of thing. And, you know, this is the second time in the last, you know, two years that this kind of nonsense has happened, you know, with any of the FOIA litigation we've been engaged in at Cato as it pertains to the FISA Section 702 program. This is just another, it's another form of bureaucratic and legal warfare, you know, that the establishment engages in here to try to, you know, prevent damaging information being brought to the attention of most members of Congress before a key vote on the program. I mean, that's just really what's happening here. Yeah. And we see the people who are carrying the water for this. Besides Mike Johnson, on the Senate side, you got Tom Cotton, who just put out a bill saying that he wants to merge the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies together. I mean, how insane is that?

And it's not even a merger, is it, Patrick? Because while the U.S. president is compelled to share all the information with Israel, there's not any sister bill that is happening in their country that would require them to do the same thing, right? Yeah. Well, and I think without getting into specific classified examples, what I'll say is this. Throughout its history, and certainly during my time at CIA and after, among the top five most aggressive counterintelligence threats to the United States faces are the intelligence services of the state of Israel. Yeah. That's Jonathan Pollard. Yes.

Yes. And so, you know, when people tell me, well, they're an ally and yada, yada, yada, well, that's not how allies treat each other, right? I mean, and that's, and that, and that's why, you know, I think a fundamental reevaluation of the U.S. relationship with Israel is long overdue. You know, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, you know, wrote their book, you know, about, about the lobby, you know, APAC and all these other organizations that, you know, essentially. act as, in my opinion, de facto agents of a foreign power. Yeah. You know, making arguments on behalf of the government of Israel. And, you know, look, I support any American citizens' right to petition their government for redress of grievances and, you know, and all the rest of that. But that, to me, that kind of approach is not an America first approach to things, right?

I mean, at the end of the day, we need to look out for our own people first, our own people first, our own. own interest first. And then if we're in a position to be of help, particularly with, you know, humanitarian aid and things of that nature, to other countries, you know, sure, great. You know, I'm certainly for that. But we, we've got an enormous number of domestic and particularly legal problems in this country when it comes to adherence to the Bill of Rights. And we need, we need to be focused like a laser essentially on cleaning up our own government and purging it of individuals and purging the federal bench, quite frankly, of judges, you know, who engage in the creation of doctrines that have no constitutional basis whatsoever. You know, the state secrets privilege,

the Supreme Court decision in the Reynolds case in 1953. It's just a prime example of that. You know, something like, you know, this judicially invented doctrine of state secrets, which basically grants the executive branch the ability to keep things secret, in essence, forever, if they, you know, basically make the assertion of the privilege in the words of the decision. There's no constitutional basis for that. There's no text in the Constitution at all that supports that kind of thing. But when we have judges on the federal bench that are, and this is where I blame the FISA court, the FISA court essentially inserting a national security exception into the Fourth Amendment that does not exist in the text of the Constitution.

That's right. We have a real problem with judges engaging in that kind of thing. Yeah. And we've got a real problem with people who want to reassess our relationship with Israel. They're reassessing it in the wrong direction. People like Tom Cotton. And so it's like, yeah, let's reassess this and take it in completely the wrong direction. and that's exactly what he's doing.

And he's the same type of guy who is then pushing for this Section 702 reauthorization. So to wrap this up at this point is something of a stalemate at this point? It is. And we'll just have to see, you know, how it plays out because, you know, I think it's very clear to me at least that Mr. Trump is far more interested in the Congress passing the Save America Act than he is in FISA, which is weird, in my. view because it was a different title of FISA, Title I of FISA, that was actually used to go after a member or one of his consultants to his first campaign, Carter Page. And that's not just my opinion. That's what the Department of Justice Inspector General itself found, right? So I just find it really weird that this president who legitimately had his campaign in 2016 victimized

by an out-of-control Department of Justice and FBI. I would think this is from a a self-interest standpoint. He wanted to make sure there were some real guardrails around this stuff to, you know, to make it, you know, impossible. So it's just really crazy. But, yeah. Well, there may be some other self-interest things that we're not privy to, but we kind of suspect that they got their hooks into them. Patrick has been so great talking to you. I really do appreciate it. Very informative. And people need to understand where this is headed. We're not going to stop this unless we start to reassert the principles of liberty that we're the basis of the Bill of Rights.

And it doesn't mean that we're just limited to the Bill of Rights, but hey, that would be a start if we could get it back, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would, especially coming up on our 250th anniversary. That's right. Yeah, we could celebrate it and kind of like have a, like some people on their wedding anniversary. Let's take our vows again. Maybe they could take their vows to the Constitution again, this time really mean it. Who knows?

There we go. Patrick is so great to having you on. And again, Patrick is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. and Patrick Eddington, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Thank you.