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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you, Heidibergojen back with us after ten years as the executive director of the National Lawyer's Guild. She is the co host of the weekly civil liberties radio show called Law and Disorder. She received her Juris doctor's degree from Temple University, where she was the editor in chief of the Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review. She also holds an MS degree from Boston University in a bachelor's degree from
Brown University. Heidi, why's it taking you ten years to get back here?
George? It's great to be back with you. Thanks for having me.
On a pleasure boy. Ten years went by pretty fast, isn't it.
Yes, it did. And I've got to say, we're under a lot more surveillance than we were. Even then we.
Were under a microscope these days, aren't we.
Yeah? We are. Yeah. I think that basically, if your listeners think back to the events of nine to eleven, that's when we really saw the beginning of the installation, the ratcheting up of our surveillance state. And I think what most people who are trying to understand their surveillance state think they think that it makes us safer, George. They think that we are going to be more free if the government and its corporate partners are looking out
for signs of criminal activity. But what happened at the same time, after the events of nine to eleven in the Patriot Act, we saw law enforcement shifting to a preemptive role, sort of like the film Minority Report, looking for acts of terrorism before they happened, instead of reacting to crime in the traditional way, which is after it happens.
And we also saw the advent of the Internet and then ushering in of smartphones in two thousand and five, androids a few years later, and with that bringing into our own homes the devices that actually do the majority of surveillance, the collection of our data by corporations, the Internet of Things, smart devices, Amazon's Alexa, all of those gadgets that are so enticing and by design addictive, have morphed into collecting enormous tropes of data about our daily routines,
our preferences. And I think that people are under a false sense of security that it's a criminal is going to you know, do something harm us FBI NSA gathering of that data will lead to actionable intelligence, and what they ignore is the very big possibility of data misinterpretation, false positive, innocent people being swept up, bilified, Muslim Americans, activists, and so I think that with all the attention now on artificial intelligence and more technological advances, we're seeing kind
of a frenzy to enact new laws to really make up for what the United States has fallen behind. When you look at other countries like Europe, we don't really have national privacy laws, so we have a patchwork of new laws that in many aspects may actually restrict our freedoms and gather more information and going forward.
Heidy, is this the price we pay for the perception of safety?
Well, I think if people look back a couple of decades, you know, the CIA actually began to look into the issue of outsourcing intelligence to the private sector back in the early nineteen nineties. After nine to eleven, Congress dramatically increased funding to higher intelligence contractors. And your listeners may know that about seventy five percent of such contracting work is done the government's intelligence work is done by outside contractors.
It's the multi billion dollar industry. The Defense Intelligence Agencies Joints Intelligence Task Force compassing terrorism grew from about eighty members to four hundred in just a couple of years, and it became a very lucrative business. James Bamford, in his grape book The Shadow Factory, talks about how contractors thrive off NSA outsourcing of surveillance. So what's happened is
we've gotten data aggregators into the business. And at the same time we had those smartphones coming into our lives, we also had the advent of social media, which in a way perfected the ability to attract all of our personal information as Americans willingly give it up on sites without really understanding the wee percussions. And I think that one of our problems is that we are suffering from
digital illiteracy. We had technology really do some wonderful things in the period of two decades, but we haven't kept up in educating people about the risks of not protecting their data and not really understanding how much data is being collected by Facebook and by all the other social media platforms and apps that we willingly load onto our phones to make our lives more convenient and fun because it is fun.
It is fun. It's a double edged sword though idea. On one hand, it is fun, it gives us a lot of information. On the other hand, what happens if we had no surveillance at all? What are the dangers there?
Well, you know, I think the point has to be made. First, we are not safer as a nation because of this surveillance, and that is a myth that people have to understand. There have been a lot of studies. I think even a military academy came out with the study a few years ago. They looked at, you know, terrorists related arrests. Many of them were unfounded. They didn't lead to any
valid prosecutions of individuals. And so I think that we also don't realize the extent to which corporations were profiting to the tune of billions of dollars off of our data, re selling it, coming up with digital profiles about us marketing to us than making more money off of it. When we really look at how we are not only not safer, but we are less free because we are
being targeted monitored. In many cases, we see a new rash, for example of anti protest laws, and we know that years ago, all sorts of surveillance devices, including drones, were deployed against you know, activists to discreet to protest, and really an American tradition, Black Lives Matter was infiltrated, monitored, occupy was infiltrated, monitored, shot by shut down by the
Department upon Land Security. And now we're seeing rashes of laws in many states that let motorists driving into legitimate legal protests get off scot free if they killed someone. What I think we're seeing is suppression of descent very American long cherished values, curtailments of First Amendment freedoms, but with no commensurate value in terms of legitimate intelligence to
law enforcement agencies. And to answer your question, kind of think we need to go back to sort of old fashioned gum shoe detective work and policing that we had that was working pretty well. Your listeners may recall after Cohen Telpo and unlawful spying on Americans in the seventies, we had nineteen seventy five the Church Committee looking into how unlawful spying and disruption was going on to peace groups, Martin Luther King religious groups, and they put limits on
what the FBI could do. I think we need to go back a bit, pull back on some of this electronic monitoring that's so invasive and not keeping us safer, and just rely on how we did things before preemptive policing was introduced.
What would police agencies say about what you talk about today in your opinion?
Unfortunately, I think they too have fallen for the hetoric that the government gave to us after the nine to eleven attacks, where basically it instilled fear in all of the citizens in this country, most of them, most of the media outlets, and provided huge funding and subsidies to ratchet up local law enforcement departments. Many of them, which sorely needed the money, were able to buy new equipment,
you know, enlarge their capacities. But I think that the problem is we've made this machine so big that I think, you know, most law enforcement agencies have gotten used to this new paradigm. There are some who have been brave enough, for example, to stand up to ICE or other organizations who have asked them to do really intrusive surveillance and
they've said, we're not going to do that. So I think there needs to be more across the board education about perhaps our resources could be better deployed pursuing you know, more legitimate leads in cases and not, for example, going after various communities just because we've stigmatized them. You know, in two thousand and five, YETBI labeled animal rights activist environmental activists the number one top domestic terrorist threat. That's
because some of the extreme factions of these groups. Again, groups that have been protesting and making some successful changes to policies, you know, of how corporations treated the environment or animals. A few were engaging in property damage. But the ye FBI started calling that terrorism, and I think we've seen that term two terrorism exploited. I think we need to go back a bit and really look at, well,
who are the real terrorists. We have a big problem with white supremacist violence in this country, other legitimate forms of violence that can be just arrected after they occur. Try to stay on top of them, but not vilify communities where only a few people may be breaking the law. But you really stigmatize some legitimate social movement.
So what would your preference, IDB, how would you handle this situation?
I would stop creating new laws, of new terrorist laws even I'll tell you because I think we can ignore along with the safety and public safety, part of why we allegedly have this surveillance apparatus. Let's face it, it's mostly to corporations who are making so much money off of our data. We have a children's data protection law,
for example, that's being considered. It's called the Kids Online Safety Act, and you know, it sounds good in theory protect our kids data aggregators or targeting them from an early age. But what it would do is it would hold platforms Internet platforms responsible for certain harms that might occur. So if a teenager went onto a site for anorexia and you know, continued to hurt herself, for example, they
would be liable. So what they would end up doing is they'd have to create online systems to find out the age of users, but that would apply to all users. That would gather more of our data. And the second thing is they'd have to censor a lot of content and that would also hurt not just kids, but everyone. So I think that we have to educate legislators really about how technology works, and instead of creating new laws, including terrorist laws for online acts that may be harmful,
arrest the offenders. We already have laws on the books that can be used to go after criminal actions, but don't create new laws that are then going to hurt everyone by not being well thought out and informed. And I think we have a big lag in how legislators policy makers don't understand technology and the surveillance states, and so they're not adequately addressing it. I mean, we have nine states in this country that have data privacy laws.
California is a really strong one. Every state needs to have them. We need to start looking at privacy as going hand in hand with national security.
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