The Highwire with Del Bigtree - FISA AND THE SURVEILLANCE STATE

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

A significant FISA vote has indicated an expansion of government surveillance that may bypass constitutional protections. Meanwhile, recent actions in Scotland and Canada have raised concerns about potential restrictions on freedom of speech for citizens.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Right now, as we speak, the Senate is deliberating on the FISA Amendment reauthorization. That's the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. This is what it looks like in the news if anybody hasn't been paying attention. This is coming down to the wire as we speak right now. Take a look. A key law in the fight against terrorism is in limbo. As a group of GOP lawmakers attempted to block the bill Monday, but could not get enough votes to win. Now the bill heads to the Senate.

FISA allows the government to gather information on Facebook. foreign nationals who it believes could be compromising American security and be able to do it without a warrant. The White House and national security experts, they say that FISA is critical to protect America's national security. They say that without it, we would lose vital information about threats to the homeland, threats to America's infrastructure, information on Russian war crimes, supply chain information, bringing deadly drugs through the U.S. border, and much more. Failure to reauthorize 702 or gutting it with some new kind of warrant requirement would be dangerous and put Americans' lives at risk. There isn't technically a warrant for those communications, and that is the problem that some of these members have.

They think that there's something that is unfettered, and we know that there have been hundreds of thousands of times that this has been used for Americans. There are times when Americans' data could be at risk, and so that is really the concern that some lawmakers have had. within the course of the debate. Almost 300,000 violations of that where they spied on on Americans and that's not what it's about. They are allowed to spy on Americans without a search warrant, ma'am. That's a clear violation of Fourth Amendment. I think that's a very chilling effect. So this act was a federal law and it's established, established procedures for surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence on domestic soil. So not of Americans and why was this created. Let's bring people up to speed for this whole story, because there can be a lot of nuance here that's missed.

So in the 70s, we had Senator Frank Church. He had the church committees. And in there, it laid bare all of the illegal, unconstitutional things that the intelligence agencies were doing. From that, we learned about co-intel pro. FBI was infiltrating and discrediting civil rights activists, environmentalists, protesters of Vietnam War at the time. They targeted Martin Luther King Jr. We learned Project Mockingbird where the CIA was recruiting journalists, push narratives, MK Ultra, it goes on and on.

So from that, the government got together and said, look, we need some guardrails on this. So in 1978, Pfizer was enacted. And then after September 11 attacks, you had this Amendment 702 to deal with some of these new communications, digital communications to surveil. But what happened is it didn't go as planned. So in 2023, the Washington Post updated some unsealed court documents and reported on those. This was the article FBI misused surveillance tool on January 6 suspects, BLM, arrestees, and others. It says the FBI has misused a powerful digital surveillance tool more than 278,000 times,

including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, people arrested at the protest after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, and in one case, 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate according to a newly unsealed court document. Now, it goes on to give a little background of it. It says the Section 702 database is a vast trove of electronic communications and other information that can be searched by the National Security Agency and the FBI. The FBI is authorized to search the database only when agents have reason to believe that such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes or evidence of crimes. But in the aftermath of September 11, 2021 terrorist attacks, the database is seen by U.S. officials as one of the prize jewels at the national security apparatus. Its primary purpose is targeting foreign intelligence or terrorism information, but the sweeping nature of the information in the database has long-worryed civil rights advocates who argue that the government has proved it cannot be trusted to use the system carefully. So just last week, this passed the house.

And one of the headlines here, just to give a flavor of what's going on, it says intelligence community largely won. House FISA fight now comes the Senate. And another view of this was from the Guardian. So as it's going through these deliberations in the House and the Senate, there's other amendments and other additions that are being added and tacked on to this and reject it. One of them is this. This is the Guardian reporting. The U.S. isn't just reauthorizing its surveillance laws. It's vastly expanding them.

It says Section 702 in its current form allowed. the government to compel communications giants like Google and Verizon to turn over information. An amendment to the bill approved by the House vastly increases the law of scope. The Turner Himes amendment, so named for its champion representatives Mike Turner and Jim Hines, would permit federal law enforcement to also force what they call quote, any other service provider with access to communications equipment to hand over data. That means anyone with access to a Wi-Fi router, server, or even phone, anyone from a landlord to a laundering mat could be required. to help the government spy.

So that is one of the main contentions here people are talking about is, whoa, we're expanding this way beyond a scope. This dragnet is going to get so much American information. So there was an amendment last week that was rejected by the House. They tried to put an amendment requirement. That's the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. An amendment requirement, the government would have to obtain a warrant for any Section 702 acquired data that it gathered on Americans.

That was rejected. Wow. So this is where we're at right now as we speak. And interestingly, I'm going to say this from the COVID reporting. We have a somewhat unbiased article from the New York Times, which is really refreshing. It says, what happens if a powerful surveillance law expires this week? It's supposed to expire tomorrow, April 19th. And it says this, Senate leaders of both parties are urging their colleagues to renew an expiring warrantless surveillance law before it lapses at midnight on Friday.

as advocates of the law have argued that any expiration would mean going blind on a key source of counterterrorism information and other foreign intelligence. So they're creating this need. But it also goes on to say, but the suggestion that the tool itself was simply lapsed in April 19th is significantly misleading. A national security court this month granted a request from the federal government that allows the program to operate for another year, even if the law, known as Section 702, expires. So it's kind of, I mean, I guess you call that misinformation because they're trying to rush, this through, this law is still going to be in effect. And one of the reasons for the people that are that are for this law is they have these amendments, they want to get these through, because if any other amendments are tried to tack on to this, it has to go back, go through the deliberation

process, start back over, be voted through. And it's this long, circular process where everyone gets a voice. So right now, you know, from those from those reporting, it seems like the intelligence agency has received the pieces it wants, and it wants to be pushed through. So we're going to be keeping an eye on this. You can keep an eye on our Twitter account, or our X account, I should say, for updates. But this is a really interesting time because a lot of Americans are paying attention to this.

So we really need to pay attention to this here in America. Tag that on with the AI conversation. What happens when they have that right to warrantless searches and suddenly they just put AI on it and now everything you're doing and inside your home, all of it is just under constant surveillance. You know, I've argued with, friends my whole life on this and some people that I've worked with, they're like,

what is the problem, Del. If you're not breaking the law, what do you care? It's exactly how China deals with it, right? As long as you're not breaking the law, everyone should be happy here. We don't hear a lot of happiness. There's a lot of people, you know, rushing into America for that freedom. And when you see, you know, just talk to anyone that was sort of raised in one of the Soviet bloc countries. And they're like, my God, Del, it is terrifying watching what's happening in America. The very thing that we ran from. is now just people like voting it in, like it's okay. Do you know what it was like to live with a KGB watching everything you were doing?

You know, it's horrible and people turning each other in and, you know, you just are never free. You're never able to just be yourself. I mean, it really is, and we're so close to it being completely out of our control. And speaking of that, governments have been trying to pass bills putting like chilling effects on speech. And one of the bills we've covered is Scotland's Hate Crime and Public Order Act. This is now active. It's one of the first in the world to really go this far. And just to give people an idea who haven't seen our past reporting,

it allows police complaints for stirring up what they're calling hatred. If through one's behaviors or communication, you're innocent until, I'm sorry, you're guilty until proven innocent. You can be up to seven years in prison and they can even search your home and get a warrant to search your home if you're doing that in your privacy of your own home. So what has happened since this has been put through? Well, this is one of the headlines here because again, the police have to deal with this. Hate crime complaints to Scottish police set to outnumber total for all other offenses. Think about that for a second. We're talking every offense that a police

I mean, we just reported this last week. Like it's just coming online. Like we're seven days in and suddenly there's more cases of hate speech than anything else that's happening in Scotland. It's on its way to get there and that's what they're saying. And so that's crazy. So boy, what would that do to the police force? Well, it talks about that in this article. It says David Threadgold, chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, which represents frontline officers told the BBC, police Scotland have gone public and said that on every

occasion reports of hate crime will be investigated. That creates a situation where we simply cannot cope at the moment. Officers have been brought back in to do overtime shifts and the management of that is simply unsustainable. So obviously the police are under a lot of pressure here to comply with this new law. But what about the citizens? Because a lot of people really worried that this would be weaponized against people for, you know, vendettas or politically motivated.

Let's look at a news report from a Scottish woman who has been targeted by this. Take a look. All right. A pensioner was arrested in Scotland after she was wrongly accused of a hate crime. 74-year-old Morag McDougall Brown says that she's traumatized following the incident. and she joins me now. Morag, thank you so much for joining me. So Morag, what happened?

On Tuesday morning, two officers appeared at my door that I knew from previous incidents. They had been here and they said they were here to arrest me and asked why they couldn't tell me. They said they would need to take me to an interview room at a police station. All they could say was it's an allegation. So I was unaware of what was happening to me.

I said what happens if I don't come? They said, we'd need to handcuff you. This was because I think it was a neighbour or somebody had claimed that you had said something, but it wasn't you at all. It was actually then. I hadn't even spoken to her. She'd actually, I'd seen her that day out in my back garden. She was pulling down my rose bush. And I took a photograph with the kitchen, never went out the door.

Yeah. So she must have thought that I was going to report that. So she spawned the police and made up this lie that I called her. Well, it's awful, Warren. How ridiculous do you think these Scottish hate crime laws are if someone can do that? I think it's awful, because she could maybe do that tomorrow and I could be taken away again

because they said that they can't interview me in my own home because of the new law, they had to take me to a police station. But I was searched, I was read my rights. Jewelry was taken off me, and then it was only in the interview room that they told me it was an allegation that my neighbor had made a complaint and said that I'd called her that name. Now, Adele, this is, there's a similar flavor of this bill in Canada as well. We're seeing these pop up in a lot of countries in the world. In Canada, it's titled C-63, and one of the headlines that came out of there is this one here.

Justice Minister defends house arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in the future. Justice Minister Arif Varani, it says, has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future, even if they have not yet done so already. He says, if, quote, there's a genuine fear of an escalation, then an individual or group could come forward and seek a peace bond against them and to prevent them from doing certain things. Think about that woman we just saw. I'm emerging two of these bills here, but she's talking at an escalation. What if she gets called again down to the police station because of another complaint? What happens then? Can they get a bond against her?

I mean, every Karen in the world loves this law, right? Now I can just throw my neighbors in jail that aren't cutting their lawn right. I'll accuse them of whatever I need to or I don't like how they're raising their children. I mean, just the whole thing. I think everyone has at some point or another dealt with someone they probably called a psycho. And now the people like that have this ability to just turn your life upside down. And just, I mean, and then what is it going to do to every other issue we have that we need police for? They're all going to be busy sitting, you know, with typewriters taking declarations from, you know,

grandmothers trying to defend themselves as not having, you know, stage the hate. crime from inside of their, you know, the old folks home. This is just madness. And forget about charged political debates. Those will not be happening anymore because people will take offense to that. And, you know, this is this is on the continuum to what George Orwell, the author of 1984, deemed what was called a thought crime. In 1984 was not meant to be a roadmap. It was it was meant to be a warning for people. Maybe that's what we thought. I mean, who knows? At this point, I'm starting to ask myself because we're falling so far in line with what it was, you know, portraying. Right. So let's take a minute to do a little story time from a book that was written so many years ago.

And let's take this chapter here and we'll look at this. He writes this. With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worse of all was that by means of such organization as the spies, they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the party. It goes on to say it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards against the enemies of the state, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought criminals. It was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason for hardly a week past in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing

how some eavesdropping little sneak, child hero was the phrase generally used, had overheard some compromising remarks and denounced his parents to the thought police. Wow. I mean, I'm not sure we're not there yet quite yet, but these bills really have to have an eye kept on them. People really need to make their voice heard as this legislation is going through. If you're for or against it, it's time to make your voice heard stand up. Well, that's what's so amazing. Just these three conversations we've had so far today, you have AI technology that is now, you know, moving through every computer technology system we own. You have a FISA law that says it wants to be able to just, you know, search you, everything you're doing without a warrant.

And now we live in a world where we can see just a little bit in the future. Scotland is ahead of, you know, where we're at in America. looks in Canada, you get to see all these different varying heat maps of these decisions that are being made. Do we want to live in that world? I mean, you just can't imagine what in Scotland was so bad that you needed this law, that you needed to have grandmothers being handcuffed and dragged into the police office daily by the thousands and thousands, as it were. I think they said 8,000 so far this week or so. Eight thousand claims all have to be investigated. I mean, it's just, this is the time.

And I say it. And I'll probably end this show saying, no matter what's going on, one thing's for sure, we live as adults that are still thinking and still have freedom. And those of us that have the freedoms, we've got to take this moment seriously and recognize we're here for a reason. We cannot be quiet about these things or we are about to be steamrolled in a major way.