Digital Defense - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 9/4/24

or twenty eleven. But to me, we initiated it in a sense, you know, we're going after the Iranian nuclear program back then, and countries, yes, are going back and forth initiating attacks against each other. It's a constant thing. We have what's referred to as advanced persistent threat groups from different countries. The four main belligerents that we find, you know, attacking Western countries Western democracies are Russia, China,

North Korea, and Iran. Those are the names that generally pop up whenever we talk about this sort of international hacking. But within the United States, we do have agencies like you know, sees and different agencies within the sub agencies within the intelligence community that yeah, this is sort of their job, you know, and and a lot of it is, you know, not necessarily to be offensive, but you know,

kind of to be defensive. They're they're being proactive in terms of trying to figure out what are the best defenses against emerging.

since the nineteen eighties. But I mean it basically we're all interconnected through that internationally, and data is transferred you know, through whatquote unquote Worldwide Web that as it exists today. You know, I'm sorry, I just that's kind of a really kind of a broad question. I don't want to come off sounding like Kamala Harris or something explanation of it, you know what I'm saying.

That's part of it, you know, part of what could be affected potentially.

So if you're let's say, a smaller country, you don't have to be one of the big four, like I pointed out before, between Russia and China, North Korea and Iran. Let's say you're a smaller country, but you want to you know, attack another country that's bigger and more powerful and has like a military that that can destroy you and wipe your country out. You can you can get pretty much, you know, a strong offensive front via cybersecurity

and hacking. You know, it's I think cybersecurity and hacking is the great equalizer between military powers in terms of you know, smaller countries being able to go on the offensive against larger countries. That's one way I think I would kind of praise it in terms of, you know, the dangers that exist on that quote unquote internet.

actually unfortunate and kind of sad. But they were talking about, like you know, from the perspective of myself as a Hispanic voter, they were talking about how they could better reach Hispanics, and they were referring to it as Tackle Bowl engagement, which is, you know, kind of pretty racist

and offensive in a sense. But they they they were looking for something that they can put out there that I believe damaging to one of one of the other campaigns, whoever it is, or just to sow discord and you know, in anyway, just to cause confusion, spread disinformation. There's a lot of things going on right now. One of the things actually it was there's now what AI. There was recently an AI robo call campaign that was going on, which is another version of like let's say election interference.

You know, they the social media apps have gotten or tried to get a little bit better in terms of who they're allowing to purchase ads during the election cycle, Like you have to go through a little bit more stringent supposedly betting before they'll allow you to post a political ad, whereas it was a little bit more of the wild West and twenty up to like through twenty sixteen and twenty twenty and in the last few cycles.

But I think like in this most recent case, right you had like Iran and this was confirmed by the FBI that they they did actually hack both campaigns, the Trump campaign and the Harris campaign specifically, like somebody like that that we all know the name of Roger Stone. He had his hack, and they were trying to hit

other high ranking members and operatives between both campaigns. I think it's along the lines of, you know, a country like Iran is gonna sit there and think, all right, from a geopolitics position, you know which campaign favors us, you know which one would be. You know, how are we better off we better off with Trump as president

or we better off with Harris's president. So they may be looking for the same level of let's say, embarrassing communications like what you had in like twenty sixteen emerge and see if they're maybe that can have some sort of an effect on who actually wins the campaign. I don't think that, you know, based on just that alone, whether it would have that much sway within a campaign. But it's just another thing to distract it. You know, then there's another distraction. It's another thing.

But just go ahead, and how's our information take it without our explicit permission or knowledge that it's even going on. All that, you know, volumes and volumes of metadata being stored, being stored by the National Security Agency. I think it's a threat. I mean, that's something that an attack against the citizenry. And you know, as a political activist myself, one of the points that I always make is that, you know, we talk about parties, we talk about Republicans

versus Democrats, it's not Republicans versus Democrats. That's a sham, George. You know, at the end of the day, both parties, even though I mean I may be registered as one and I may support the candidates generally of one party over the other, but they're both doing sort of the same bidding, and it's anti citizen. I mean, it's not really Republicans versus Democrats, more or less government versus the

private citizen. And I think that Edward Snowden went a long ways in sort of exposing that and bringing that reality to the American people, whether or not a lot of people want to accept it, whether or not it was covered by the media in a way where it was explained, you know, because you have to. You know, the American people, it's a sound bite society. You know, they read headlines, but they don't go ahead and do

critical thinking for their own private research. You know, I have to explain it to people sometimes like they're a two year old, so they can fully get it. But I think that Edward Snowden really tried to kind of show the American people where the government and where this you know, data collection apparatus is at this point. And you know this happened years ago. Think about how further advanced we are since then. And it's not even the

government just collected this information anymore. We willingly give it up when we go ahead and interact with the website. We don't read terms in conditions when we download an app. We don't do any of those sorts of things. We just click go ahead, you know, we move along to this because it's more convenient to just you know, click all the boxes and say yep to everything, so you

can go ahead and use something. So no, I mean, I would happen to think, you know, I happen to have a I would say, a favorable opinion of Edward Snowden.

need to know the truth of what's going on. You know, that's the biggest issue is the governments lie to their citizens. I mean, you know, I don't think that that's you know, that's not something that should come as a shock to anyone who's been actually paying attention.

to you know, because of social media. They sit there on their phones, staring up their phones all day, not knowing that they're giving up all their information to all these private companies, and a lot of them are you know, foreign and collecting information from us, and we have no there's no accountability to what they do with that information.

That's why like the issue with TikTok, you know, TikTok, which is a Chinese application, you know, and then you have like security applications like Kasperski, you know, they're a Russian base. That's actually, as at the end of this month, you can't buy Casperski any longer. If you have if you're trying to do it from an American IP address,

it's not allowed anymore. But these countries like China and Russia have laws in place that at any time, at any moment, the whim, at the whim of the government, they can go ahead and seize the data that these these companies these applications, these websites or whatnot have collected, you know. And I wrote a piece for Human Events last year about how there were thirty two members of Congress, thirty one of them happened to be Democrats that were

still on TikTok. And these are people that had really important, you know, committee assignments where they were handling information regularly that was you know, of national security interest, you know, beyond classified you know sort of information. If they're having any sort of communications on their cell phones. You know, think about the permissions that we allow whenever we download

one of these apps. You know, they have access to our files whatever, you know, our contact information, our text communication, you know, all sorts of things that we keep on our cell phones. There's so many people that operate, you know, people that operate their business and just have all their

communications strictly limited to their cell phones. You know, China can go ahead and go, hey, you know, let's tap into you know, Corey Booker cell phone or somebody a member of Congress that's on like an important you know, military or national security based committee and wind up having access to all this information. It also opens up the

door to potential blackmail. You know, if they're looking at your text messages and they can ascertain that you're in an affair or something, they could potentially compromise a high ranking member of you know, the US government into giving them information or into providing or in trying to influence, you know, favorable diplomacy for them, because they're because they have access to their information, they're able to blackmail them.