Welcome back to Snaffoo, ladies and gentlemen, your favorite show about history's greatest screw ups. I'm Ed Helms, and this past season we covered how Jay Edgar Hoover embroiled the FBI in one of the worst intelligence snaffoos of all time, a daring heist that exposed it all, and then the staggering fallout that sent shockwaves through America. Today, we're back
with a bonus episode. I thought one of the most fascinating parts of this season was the Church Committee hearings, which investigated co intel pro but there was a lot we just couldn't get to. For example, the Church Committee hearings didn't just cover the FBI, they also covered abuses within the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies. So we thought it was worth digging in a little deeper into those hearings, some of the aftermath and where it
leaves us today. To do that, we called back up our old friend and leading intelligence expert Locke Johnson, who contributed a lot throughout the season. Locke was a key player in the Church Committee hearings, working directly for Senator Frank Church through the entire sixteen month process. In this conversation.
We get a fascinating insider look at the inner workings of those hearings, and then tackle some fiery questions like how do you strike the right balance between security and civil liberties, how have advances in technology like artificial intelligence affected modern day surveillance, and how much privacy do we actually have left these days? I had a lot of fun with this conversation. It was stimulating, fascinating, and maybe at times a little bit scary, but well worth it.
And now here it is my extended conversation with Locke Johnson Locke, welcome back, Such a delight to talk to you.
Thanks.
Now our listeners will remember you from this past season, specifically episode seven, where we covered the existence of FBI abuses unveiled during the Church Committee hearings. We'll get into some of that, but before we do, remind us your background and how it is that you came to join Senator Frank Church's team.
All right, Well, in a nutshell, I was born in New Zealand and my father, when I was in the womb, was an RAF pilot unfortunately killed on his twenty eighth mission, and about five years later my mother married an American soldier who was also fighting in the Pacific, and he brought us back to the States. So I'm in New Zealander by birth, but I've grown up in an American family and lived all over the place because he was
a career military officer. And I've been teaching political science for a long time now and love my days at the University of Georgia. Before that, though, I had been a Congressional fellow, and it's a wonderful fellowship because you can pick any member of Congress you want out of
the five hundred and thirty five to work for. So I picked Frank Church back in nineteen sixty nine in the middle of the Vietnam War, because in my view, he was the most articulate spokesman against that war and I felt the same way he did, and so it
was great to spend the year with him. And by the way, during that year, we had the incursion, or what I would say was an invasion at Cambodia by the Nixon administration, and the passage of the Cooper Church Amendment, which was an effort to get those troops back into Vietnam rather than expanding the war. So that was an
exciting period of time. To be with Frank Church. And then a couple of years later he telephoned me and said, I've been named to head up this investigation into the CIA, and you and I worked the other well when you were a congressional fellow. So would you come back and help? And I explained to him I knew nothing about that topic, and he said he laughed, and he said, we'll learn together.
So he was something of adfi too, although he overstated the case because he had been in World War Two as an intelligence officer in China, so he knew something about intelligence, but probably not much about the CIA really, So we were learning together, and that launched a sixteen month inquiry beginning in nineteen seventy five, looking into initially that agency, but as we began to turn the stones over look at the other agencies, we found that they
were doing things that were just as bad as what the CIA had done, and in fact, in case of the FBI, shockingly worse. If you can imagine.
After everything we learned this season, I sadly can imagine it now. As you know, our podcast season is all about the media burglary, which ultimately revealed co intel pro, which is a code word for counter intelligence program. This program was designed by the FBI to surveil and disrupt political organizations. Locke, do you recall when you first heard about co intel Pro.
I really began to focus on it when I joined the Church Committee, and then my memory was refreshed that we had heard of cointelpro already, because that was one of the set of documents revealed by those really amazingly brave people who broke into that office and found those documents. Because I really alerted as to the fact that the FBI had really straight off the reservation rather dramatically. But at the time I think we were so involved in
Vietnam War that got a little bit lost. But when the Church Committee came along, the Vietnam War was over officially ended that year, and once we began our investigation, we initially looked at CIA illegal spying on a student activists, but then, as I mentioned, we began to turn over other stones, and one of the stones we turned over was the FBI, and that LEDs to Cointelpro, and that refreshed our memories about what happened in nineteen seventy one.
But I would have emphasize that of all the things we looked at on the Church Committee, and recall we looked at assassination plots and cis flying at home and a lot of other rather shocking things NSA's flying at home.
So just a quick clarification for any listeners wondering why is the CIA coming up or the NSA. Well, it turns out that all of these agencies kind of had their own version of co intel pro going at the same time. For instance, the CIA's program was called Operation Chaos, which was intended to find connections between domestic political activists
and foreign communist groups. But this all begs the question for you, Locke, when you joined up with Frank Church, were you somewhat aware that each of these agencies had their own surveillance operations.
Well, I was Frank Church's designe as we call them. That meant I was a top assistant. So I went to every single meeting the committee held, and so I was aware not just of the CIA, which was one of the topics I was working on mainly, but really across the board of all these agencies. That was the virtue being his aid. I got to go everywhere with him and go to all the meetings. The most profoundly troubling was Cointelpro. And one of our senators we had
eleven on our committee, was Philip Hart. Really an amazing man, the only man in the Senate at the time with the beard, and very seft spoken and thoughtful, and kind of a relative newcomer to the Senate. But it shows you how amazing he was to realize that one of the three Senate buildings was named after him when he passed away during the Church Committee days, that's how highly
regarded he was. But I remember he was quite ill with cancer and didn't attend many of our meetings, but he came to one of our early public hearings on Cointelpro and he said, with six hundred people in the Caucaus building and all kinds of media people, he said that he had been sitting around the table a couple of years earlier with his kids who were in college.
They were telling him that they thought the FBI was spying on them and maybe at the CIA too, and he told them at the time, you guys are just smoking too much pot, that those agencies don't do that kind of thing. And then he paused, and there wasn't a murmur in that room. Everyone was quiet because, for one thing, his voice was soft. He was not feeling well because of the cancer, and he was in a weakened condition. But he paused and he said, they were right.
They were right, and it was just probably the most moving moment at church Meny. In fact, some of the staff members believe it or not, who are pretty hardened
individuals in some were sobbing. But my eyes welling up as well, because he was this man whom we respected so much, and he was so moved by the realization that the FBI, one of the organizations that he venerated as part of the backburne of America's defense against criminals and against Russian agents is on the FBI, had been involved in these efforts to destroy the lives of blacks and anti war protesters. He was astounded by that. I realized at the time that the FBI had been done
some things that were, to say the least questionable. And the reason I knew about that fairly early is because Church asked me almost immediately to do some work on the Houston Plan, and we could spend a whole program
to talking about that. But in a nutshell, Richard Nixon was so concerned about student protests, and so fervently believed that the KGB was supporting their activities that he called upon the top US intelligence agencies to test that proposition, to go out across the country from California to Maine to find out and to prove that the Russians were giving these student protesters money as a way of harassing the United States. So the agencies signed on to this
Houston Plan. Tom Charles Houston was a White House aide who Nixon put in charge of putting together a spy plan against America's students. And the first thing Houston was to go to the FBI and said who here can help me do this? And that's where person number three, William Sullivan stepped forward and said, I'm the top operations
officer here. So in a way it should be called a Sullivan plan because Houston worked with Sullivan, who was the expert on spying and espionage, to put together a package. And then when they asked the directors of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and military intelligence to sign on to this plan, every one of them did it. Everyone signed the plan that allowed them to violate American laws right and left to conduct surveillance against protesters and also
those involved in the civil movement. So, I mean, the Houston Plan is just an amazing document. Now, once it was all signed, Hoover began to have second thoughts because he was sixty five at the time, going a little beyond the retirement age, and he was afraid if this leaked, he would have to leave office and that was his whole life to be, to be EE director. So he went to the attorney.
Who was more scary to him than being exposed as the criminal.
I think.
So that's an incredible story, and it speaks to the fundamental tension between a government's responsibility to conduct secret operations for national security and its need to respect the rights of its citizens.
Ed with that phrase, you just nailed the problem.
That's the dilemma, and I know that you've written extensively on that exact subject. There are a lot of ways to read that situation. And I'm curious if we get into Nixon's head a little bit, do you think that he genuinely believed that Russian communist forces were supporting student protesters at the time, or was it more of a cynical ploy to just tie students to Russian propaganda mechanisms. In other words, was he coming from the right place?
Can we give him any benefit of the doubt. Of course, his execution in stomping on citizens' rights was not right, but the fear. Was there any integrity to his fear or was it just paranoia?
I'm unaccustomed I must say to say good things about Richard Nixon, but in this case I really have to. In a way, you'll see what I mean. Nixon could not fathom the idea that he could be unpopular across the country. Richard Nixon, he got elected to the presidency, How could I possibly be unpopular? So he had trouble understanding that, and he convinced himself, maybe with the nudging of Henry Kissinger, I wouldn't be surprised that it must be the Russians that are causing this trouble. How else
could it be explained. He's such a wonderful person himself, who could love Richard Nixon? So he thought, so there had to be an explanation, and that's the one he came up with, and he wanted to prove it empirically through violating a host of US laws. Was created in nineteen forty seven with a foreign mandate, and it was expressly prohibited in its founding statue to conduct operations inside
the United States. Yet Richard Holmes, the director of the CIA, signed on to Houston Plant anyway, So I think in a way one can understand Nixon's motives. I think they were wrong, but he really did believe that the Communists were behind all of this, and.
He went into to those operations, the Houston Plan, probably with a lot of confirmation bias in place, just looking to prove a connect as opposed to looking to discover a connection.
Well, yes, and you know, these four agency directors I mentioned were happy to play along with us with their own motives.
And why did others so readily jump on board these programs.
We could start with Hoover, who was really, in some ways the key player here, and he hated student protesters, he hated civil rights activists. The person he despised above all others in the United States of America was doctor Martin Luther King. So here's the president, officially within the Oval Office, telling him to go out and spy on these people. It was wonderful news for Hoover. He was already doing some of that anyway, but this sort of gave it the upper moter of the White House. In
the case of Richard Elms was a different motivation. Okay, let's play along with the President. We don't buy this Russian puppet hypothesis. That's not going on at all. We know that from tracing the Russians and what they're up to. But if the Nixon wants to us to give us money, some of that to spy on those crazy students out at Berkeley, We're going to use a big part of that money to do our own activities to see if, in fact the Russians are doing things of a malicious
nature directly against the United States. And the NSA felt the same way. Here's a bag of money that will allow us to do what we want to do anyway, and we'll let Nixon think we're going along with his nutty hypothesis.
So in the case of the FBI, it was, oh, yeah, we're totally aligned on this needs to obliterate the rights of our city survail them. But in the case of the NSA and the CIA, it was, oh, sure, we'll just take some money. Yeah, it's neither one is necessarily a very noble No.
And you know what I still reel in my mind when I think about is Richard Holmes a director of the CIA.
No relation.
By the way, No, and Noel Guilerc. We're willing to go along with this official, albeit secret plan despy on American citizens. What they should have said is, mister President, there are laws against CI in the NSA from doing this, and we're not going to do it. But that's not the position they do.
So I know you've written about the shock theory of congressional oversight for intelligence. I wonder if you could just tell us what that is quickly and then tell us how that applied in that moment to the church hearings. In other words, what precipitated the church hearings, why did they happen when they did, and is that an example of your theory?
Yes, I must say I'm extremely impressed that you've looked at the shock theory of intelligence, because that's pretty esoteric stuff, and I commend you and thank you for looking at that.
I'm a very esoteric person.
The idea is, these members of Congress have a lot going on and mainly raising money so they keep themselves getting re elected, so they don't do a lot of accountability when it comes to keeping a close eye on the executive branch, even though the genius, the magnificent center of our constitution is Madison's notion of checks and balances and how Congress would be a check against the most dangerous thing in the history of humanity, and that is
political power out of control. So that was the theory of our Constitution coming mainly from the brow of James Madison, and members of Congress often don't really uphold that at all. In fact, it's rare to find someone like Frank Church who takes accountability seriously and spends the hours checking up on these agencies as he did. We have a few people like that today too, I'd say Mark Warner of Virginia,
for example, but there aren't too many. So what happens is people are lackadaisical on the hill despite the ghost of Madison and looking down at them when it comes to checking the abuse of power in the executive branch, and those abuses occur, and sometimes they occur of a magnitude that it becomes a scandal, and that's when the
shock comes in. The members of Congress are shocked into waking up into realizing the genius of the Madisonian checks and balances, and they're finally convinced to do their job. So you have major investigations and then often new laws or pass and new internal regulations, and then they go back to their complacency and worrying about re election again. And then unfortunately another shock comes along because they haven't been watching what these agencies are doing, and it starts over again.
So it's just kind of this sine wave of ye to problematic surveillance and doing investigations, calling it out, making adjustments. And the Church Committee was maybe the first big example of that as the shock from the CIA's Operation Chaos emergers. Let's talk a little bit about the way that the Church hearings played out in popular culture at that time. What did the news coverage feel like? Did Frank Church play into that? Was he participating in a kind of
a public narrative of the committee hearings? And if so, how.
The CI is flying on American citizens? Are you kidding? That was blockbuster news and that spread across a country like a prairie friar, and the end result was members of Congress and virtually every congressional constituency in state realized they had to look into this because people were upset. What do you mean the CI is flying honors? George Orwell was right, Only it's not nineteen eighty four, It's only nineteen seventy five.
I'd love to know what it was like to be in those rooms, in those depositions, in those hearings. Did it feel like you were part of something that really might change our government for the better? And was it exhilarating? I guess is my question.
I think exhilarating is a good word for it. And we worked seemed like around the clock. We worked very hard, all the staff and the senators as well, and we were all stunned. Frankly, I think the Phillip Haart moment when we were talking about cointelpro and public hearings was the pinnacle of this astonishment that we talked about in public. But throughout the hearings and throughout our depositions and so on, it was almost a daily dose of being amazed and
appalled at what these agencies had done. In some cases, now I'll just keep in mind, I would say that most of the people in these agencies were doing what they were designed to do, and that is to gather information from around the world about our enemies. You began this program, Ed, I think, in a very wonderful way, by pointing out the dilemma between the need to have these agencies to help protect us by gathering information about the furious people overseas who mean to harm us. We
need to have that information. But then they have these capabilities which if misuse, can be a great threat to our own democracy. And we saw that in the Houston Plan, and there are other examples today. Just very quickly, let me say that we are under threat. We have intelligence agencies with the most phenomenal technical capabilities. If a dictator were to take over America and use these agencies to maintain their power and to obliterate their opposition, that could
be done. There would be no place to hide. Let's say Ed and I gathered together in some secret location because we wanted to be a resistance against the dictator. They would know about it. This would be an abyss.
And what we tried to do on the Church Committee, and I think people are continuing to do if they've got their head screwed on right, is to make sure these agencies with this enormous technological surveillance power that they have are kept in check and are led by the rule of law, and are kept accountable by the few
people who take accountability serious. And what, by the way, the good news here is it only takes a few, really, it takes a Frank Church and a less Asphin and some of these other people to really keep these people honus. But it's a perilous situation because these agencies have great powers and they could be misused.
Again, let's go a little higher altitude now, just stepping out above the Church hearings. What are the main takeaways from the hearings, both from a practical policy standpoint and from a kind of general public disposition standpoint.
I would say that the tone changed in Washington, d c. From the belief and intelligence exceptionalism to an understanding as a result of cointelpro and chaos and a number of other abuses by these agencies, that that doesn't work. That we had to bring the secret agencies into the American government and subject them to the same laws and same accountability as the Department of Agriculture or any other agency
in the government. So it was the difference between night and day ed when it came to controlling these agencies and supervising them and all this was leading. And I think this is the major contribution of the Church Committee to creating permanent oversight committees that would watch the activities of these agencies day in and day out. Now it's hardly been perfect, because sometimes the committees are active and aggressive and understand the Madisonian need for checks and balances,
and sometimes they haven't worked too well. Richard Holmes always used to argue to me that two committees were one too many. There ought to be a joint committee so he didn't have to go to the Senate and then the House and say the same kinds of things. And I mentioned this true friend of mine. My friend said, yeah, but when you're flying in an airplane, it's better to
have two engines rather than just one. And I think that's true in this case, because sometimes the Senate Committee is filled with some good people and they're active and they're keeping an eye on things, and then sometimes it's the Houses performing that duty.
The sort of fallout from the Church Committee was pretty massive, a new kind of a new ethos on Capitol Hill on how to maintain integrity in these surveillance operations. I think we're really just exploring that ongoing question of where is the line, how do you find the balance between between security and citizens' rights, and when it comes to the necessary secret operations of a government and the slippery
slope into compromising the rights of citizens. I'd love to get to nine to eleven and the Patriot Act and where I think a lot of these questions, a lot of that tension really came to a head. Talk to us about the aftermath of nine to eleven in terms of these Church Committee reforms and how it really threatened where things stood.
I think it's been something of a roller coaster ride sometimes, these principles put in place by the Church Committee, that is an emphasis on the rule of law and a belief that no president, no intelligence agency is above the law. Now, whether or not the Supreme Court, which is looking at that question right now, has the wisdom to understand that no president is above the law is another matter. We'll
find out. People have had different views on these things over the years, and in the crucible of war or a terrorist activity, the Constitution begins to take on malleable proportions for some people. So let's look at nine to eleven. Soon after nine to eleven, Bush two led around by the nose, by and large by Dick Cheney, his vice president, who is much more of a foreign policy expert than Bush two was Bush who relied on him a lot.
Those two brought the director of the CIA over to the White House to them, Look, you've got to use the NSA to make sure we don't have any more nine to eleven. We've got a really big more robust in our use of surveillance, and you may even have to surveil American citizens who might have connections with Terrists. And the director of the NSA at the time, General Hayden, said, mister President, I don't have the authority to do some
of the things you want me to do. And Dick Cheney basically said to him, get out of this office, go back to Fort Meade with the NSA and do what we told you to do. So he went back to the NSA, General Hayden and talked to his chief counsel and said to him, look, the President wants to go Article two. And as you know, Article two of the Constitution gives the president a lot of authority, and so what he meant by that was the President wants
to forget about the laws on Capitol Hill. We had a terrorist attack, we might have new terrorist attacks, so unleash the powers of the NSA to make sure that you do them utmost you can. What should have happened is that Bush should have sent Hayden up to Capitol Hell and said, look, we need wider authorities because we've learned from nine to eleven that we're under a threat and we have to do more to surveil our potential enemies.
But no, that's not what happened. The Bush to administration just decided junilaterally in the confines of the Obel Office, to tell the NSA director to forget the law, go and do whatever he needed to do. That led to as Ed Snowden eventually leaked to us, so we know about it, the indiscriminate use of NSA's electronic surveillance powers
against a lot of American citizens. In fact, all of us really were examined in terms of our so called metadata, the telephone conversations we made to whom and so on, Now,
not the content of them. The NSA didn't go that far for most of us at least, but it was really it really had gone beyond all expectations from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, because remember that Act said you want to use electronic surveillance against an American citizen, you go to the Foreign Surveillance Court and get a warrant. I'm going to say that again because it's so important, get a warrant if you're going to surveil.
Someone a United States citizen.
And the United says citizen, yes, thank you. But that's not what the NSA decided to do with the blessing of the Bush to White House. So Snowden leaked this. What he should have done, of course, and he didn't, is to go to the Senator House Intelligence committees and tell him, look, this is what's going on. Go through official channels. But has said he leaked all this information to the Post and to the Guardian in England.
Do you think he would have found a sympathetic audience had he gone through the right.
Absolutely, because I know a lot of those players, I know a lot of the staff people, and they tell me that if you had come up there, they certainly would have pursued them.
Well, do you think the public would have as much of an awareness of what was going on.
I think so, because I think that the committees would have been so shocked by this, at least some members of the committees. Diane Finstein would be an example that there would have been public hearings and probably an inquiry, maybe not at the magnitude of Church Committee. They're an investigation. So it's too bad to snowden Wind as far as he did, because that initial instinct of his was a good one.
So the metadata program is a great example of blanket surveillance where you're just like throwing this massive net out there and pulling in an incredible amount of data. What are the drawbacks of that? Just from a practical intelligence standpoint, but in the ethics aside, what are there Actually? Are there more practical reasons that is not the best way to go about it.
Yeah, For one thing, you get what I would call the fire hose effect. It's like calling a fire hose to your mouth and all this data is coming in because you begin to collect everything inside and discriminately. Then you store it out in these vaults in Utah that the NSA has built out there, and then people can go back and look at our conversations and whenever they want to later on without a warrant to do any
of that. Well, even a few days ago, and remember the section seven oh two of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was renewed.
Just to clarify quickly for our listeners. Section seven oh two is part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which permits the intelligence community to conduct targeted surveillance of foreigners outside the US.
Yes, and the FBI and NSA and others said, we've got to have this. It stops terrorism and if we don't, we're going to put America. That was all bologney, And yet a majority of both the houses the Senate went along with here. But in reality, the metadata program and this other related program really hasn't come up with anything of any use. Sure, people in secret agencies come to you and say, oh, listen, you've got to trust us.
We know what's going on, and there's great danger out there, and if you don't trust us, it's going to be catastrophic.
Fear is it a very powerful motivator, if not the most powerful human motivator.
Yeah, And you remember Roosevelt's famous comment about fear. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, and we do it.
Gets which sounds like very difficult feedback loop psychologically. But is it ever not, bolooney, Is there ever a time when the danger is so great that some of these compromises are necessary? And I think I know your answer, but it's an important question. There are a lot of people out there who who think, Look, if I've got nothing to hide, then I've got nothing to worry about.
Surveillance is keeping me safe? How are they wrong? Why should I worry about massive surveillance powers on the part of my government that they're not going to come after me?
Do you want your government to know everything about you inside out? Do you want them to know your sexual preferences, your religious activities, what you eat, right you spend your week. That's not the kind of society that I want to live in. I don't want big Brother hanging over my shoulder all the time. And that's what could happen.
You mentioned this awesome power of technology. It seems to me that with the just unbelievably fast growth of artificial intelligence, and you mentioned the fire hose effect, blanket surveillance can just give you too much data so that it becomes impossible to analyze and impossible to actually even catch bad guys because you're just swimming in too much data. Well, it seems like with artificial intelligence that may change that data analysis becomes a whole different proposition when these kind
of superhuman computer forces are at work. And of course these advances in facial recognition gate recognition, which can be accomplished from great distances. That's when an artificial intelligence can actually identify you by the way that you walk, which they can do with startling accuracy. So with all of these advances and the sort of growth of power, do you think we have the right checks and balances to keep this in check or are we getting into difficult territory again.
I think the truth of the matter when it comes to artificial intelligence is that we're not really sure what the end result is going to be. There are some very positive aspects of it from an intelligence point of view, because these machines can do a lot of mundane tasks at a very high speed, which would take human beings maybe months or even years to do, so that can help analysts. Intelligence analysts understand certain aspects of the world.
Let's say that you're interested in where ships have been attacked by terrorists sea over the past one hundred years, so that you can begin to have a model of where you are to concentrate your defenses. That would take a lot of work for you and I to sit down and pour through all the documents and try and put that together. But if you feed that information into a computer with a certain algorithm, you can find the patterns very quickly. So that's going to be helpful, I
think for some analytic problems. But then, as you suggest, what about the downside? I have to say I sometimes have nightmares about this whole notion of deep fakes, and not really eventually if you and I'm being able to understand what's true and what is is that really you I'm looking at or is it some fake thing that I'm looking at.
And we're moments away from being able to perpetrate a deep fake in real time. It's one thing to present a video of a deep fake, but it's another thing to have a live conversation with somebody that's also a deep fake, right, Yeah, And that's and we're very close to that, and these are becoming what's really scary is that they're accessible to anyone in technology. So yeah, I agree with you, Mike.
I can remember maybe fifteen years ago, so quite a while ago before people were talking about AI seeing a CIA video of Saddam Hussein when I was out visiting the to do some interviews, and the CIA had managed to change his lip configuration a little bit through computer manipulation and then have him saying something that he really didn't say. And then that video was distributed in certain parts of the world where we were trying to fool people into thinking that Saddam is even worse than he
actually was. And that was a long time ago. Now that skill has been refined considerably. Or take autonomous weapons. We're going to use artificial intelligence to send weapons out to fight our enemies, and the instruction to the weapon. Let's be a hypothetical example, and let's use bin Laden and take it back to that time period, and the instruction to the drone would be, if you see anyone
who's six ' five or taller, obliterates them. So the autonomous weapon goes flying out there and looking for someone who's six ' five or better. There are a lot of people who are maybe not a lot, but more people than Ben Lauden's just six ' five. In the Middle East. So the autonomous weapons indicate to us I think how artificial intelligence can really get out of hand here.
So tell our listeners a little bit about section seven oh two and what has brought it recently back into the news.
I think the basic idea of seven oh two is that the NSA believes that it has to have special powers to protect the American people against particularly terrorists and also Russian intervention so on. And seven oh two allows the FBI to gather through electronic methods information about American citizens who may be in contact with suspected terrorists overseas.
But the trouble is that definition is very fuzzy, and often these people who have been so object to electronic surveilance it turned out really had no reason to be surveiled at all. They were just a law abiding American citizens. And then all this information that has been gathered, and this has been going on for since the bush To administration, is stored in Utah and other places and now can be visited by FBI officers who dig through it and have the carte blanche to find out whatever they want
about people in those files. So the essence, ed is that we are the Church meeting. And I think most of civil libertarians believe of a right and left wing persuasion and the middle that you should have a warrant if you think you need to surveil someone electronically, and the section seven oh two makes that very fuzzy. And the NSA and the FBI will say, well, look, we don't have time to get a warrant in some cases,
that is boloney. That argument so many times, particularly from the CI we don't have to get a fund, but we don't want to get approval from the White House and report to Capitol Hill because we need to move quickly. The America's survival may be at stake. No, no, no, that's a kind of ticking bomb scenario which is maybe theoretically interesting but not actual. And so there is time to get a warrant, and there is time to get presidential approofal for COVID actions. And by the way, I've
seen these approvals go just like that. Members of Congress are not ignorant of the fact that there could be emergencies. So there are procedures in which you can really get a warrant immediately if you've got a good reason for doing so. But you have to make the case. You have to show the evidence as to why you should
be surveiling Ed Helms or Lork Johnson. And that's really important, and that spells the difference between the way they do business in North Korea and the way we should be doing business in a constitutional government.
Is seven O two you under examination right now?
Well, it was on Capitol Hill and there was a vote held in both the Senate and the House to renew seven ZH two to allow the NSA to use this fuzzy language to have wire tabs in which one of the parties might be an American citizen without really making the case before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that this American citizen is suspicious and ought to be surveiled. That is no longer necessary because both the House and
the Senate by neuro majorities, but nonetheless majorities. Seven oh two is now ongoing. Very controversial though, and it makes for strange bedfellows because you get people on the far left and people on the far right saying, wait a minute, this is threat to civil liberties and it truly is.
And I was disappointed to see it happen. And the Church Committee is I think monumental in its effect because it introduced this whole new era in which these agencies now are part of the American government and expected to behave in a constitutional, law abiding fashion. That is revolutionary compared to what we had before.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the really recent surveillance going on on campuses? Now? How is surveillance being used in this contemporary context and is it responsible?
I don't think anyone knows other than those people who are directly involved in those who have responsibility for maintaining accountability. So if we were able to go into the inner sanctums of the Senate and the House Intelligence committees, we could get some very up to date answers to that, if indeed they would answer them to be highly classified information. And of course in the higher reaches of the Biden
administration you'd be able to find answers too. But speculating as an outsider who has been following these countries things for over forty years, and given the tenor the tone of the Biden administration, I would be willing to bet that the pies of procedures of foreign intelligence surveillance court procedures are being used if necessary, and let's use a hypothetical case. Let's say that some Hamas person has slipped across our southern border and is now trying to provoke
trouble on Columbia or UCLA or someplace. My guess is there would be authorized surveillance against a person like that, done in a legal fashion of the PISA warrant. But
I'm not positive. And that gets us back, as American citizens, to hoping that the people in these powerful positions on the National Security Council, with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee understand James Madison understand the most important principle to emerge in the Church Committee that no president,
no intelligence agent, is above the law. We have to hope that there are people like that in place, and I think there are, and I think usually there will be. But and now, thanks to the Church Committee, they've been armed with important laws like Hughes Ryan and the nineteen eighty Intelligence Overside Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveilans Act. So it's a world of difference. Now there's no guarantee that wrong minded people might bypass all of this apparatus
to keep us safe, and that's the danger. And you get someone in the White House who flips the bird at the whole notion of accountability and supervision, things go off track very rapidly.
Let's hope we've learned those lessons at a very deep level.
Yeah, let's hope.
And you are a big part of that. Lock Johnson, thank you, Thank you for everything you've done for our country. Thanks.
I appreciate it.
SNAFU is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This season of SNAFO is based on the book The Burglary The Discovery of Jay Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer is
Stephen Wood. Our associate producer Tory Smith edited this bonus episode. Nevin Calla Poly is our production assistant. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris Editing, sound design and original music by Ben Chug, Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley theme music by Dan Rosatto. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh, and Ben Rizak. Additional thanks to director Johanna Hamilton for letting us use some
of the original interviews from her incredible documentary nineteen seventy one. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens com Mission to Investigate the FBI Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy Finegeld, Heath Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer and Bob Williamson.