You get one particular slide for example and one exchange that comes from Snowden's revelations. And of course it is a power point slide, it has to be. Americans are so good at Power Point, it's incredible. Anyway. You get this not ninety percent, not eighty percent, not ninety five percent, not ninety two percent, I don't want any percentage of information below a hundred. That's the NSA objective. I want to collect one hundred percent of every communication in the friggin world.
That's their goal. And then you sit back and you say, okay, now I know why they're building four to six billion dollars facilities out there in the West. I know why they're breaking ground for another one. I know why they need these huge storage areas and everything.
And you ask yourself two fundamental questions when you realize all of this;
One, when and where, and it's already occurred as it's well pointed out in the book, is this colossal power that the NSA is exercising is going to be abused, because the one thing you know about the American government, you know absolutely is that if power can be abused, it will be abused, and if it is exercised in secret it will be abused majorly.
And the second thing you want to know is how is this impacting our ability to go after real threats? Whether they be conventional threats like Russia and Ukraine for example or whether they be terrorists threats like Al Qaeda? How is this impacting it? And the answer there is clear, too. It is very, very dangerous, inimical to those real threat interests. That is to say if you're collecting all of this data and you're trying to analyze it through artificial intelligence, random sampling, whatever, you are spending so much time on that you are not focused on the things that might present a real threat to your country. So the book was very revealing in those three aspects and I think it's fairly accurate in those three aspects.
R.K.: You have a little blurb for the book?
L.W.: I would say read it and weep, America.
R.K.: What about what we can do about the surveillance state that we are living in?
L.W.: That's a good question. I sit on something called the Liberty and Security Committee on the Constitution Project in Washington, give you some idea of the eclectic membership of that committee, we have former FBI directors, we have general counsel for the FBI, we have former FISA court judge, we have a Vice President of the National Rifle Association, a whole group of people who are nonetheless brought together by their interest in protecting the constitution, particularly the bill of rights and one of the things we have been looking at of late as you may imagine is FISA Amendments Act, the Patriot Act, the Surveillance State in general and how we might suggest to Congress in its oversight mechanisms better ways to watch what is happening, to check what's happening. To investigate and so forth.
Frankly I have been just stunned at how little we really are able to do when you boil it down to bare facts. I think we're slowly rolling up, particularly the first and the fourth amendments to the constitution, particularly the fourth where you're supposed to have a right to your privacy, you're supposed to only be searched upon probably cause with a warrant having been issued by a legitimate court, so on and so forth, I think we just passed that by.
I think we're already in a new state of civil liberty usurpation by the government that will be extremely difficult to walk back from. And the NSA, giving the signals intelligence that's necessary to do a lot of this is a principal institutional ingredient in this marching backwards in terms of civil liberties and when you put it all on the wall and you look at it and you say, why? Why? Where is this massive threat that is causing us to do this? We didn't go this far in the Cold War when thirty thousand nuclear missiles were poised to fire at us. Why are we doing it now?
R.K.: Why?
L.W.: Well you get the answer. The answer is we're doing it because a threat exists that has less statistical probability of killing you and me than a lightning strike and it's called terrorism. That's why we're doing it.
R.K.: We just had this long conversation that started with you describing how the military was doing criminal actions for corporations and then how that was transitioned to the CIA doing secret actions, covert actions, and I wonder how much of this is corporate-driven.
L.W.: That's a very good point. I suspect that someday someone will do some research and write a book maybe or two and present us with a case where people like Alberto Gonzalez, former counselor of President Bush and then Attorney General and the guy who followed him, can't remember his name now but he is running a company out there now that capitalizes on this counter-terrorism business. Michael Hayden, he's doing the same thing. Others.
These kind of fresh grown corporate interest in the security state whether it be private intelligence contractors or whether they be private security contractors or whatever, they're associated with the so-called military industrial complex and they are perpetuating a lot of this threat, if you will. Because it generates lots and lots of profits for them. I don't think that's the overriding interest yet, but it could well become the overriding interest and it is certainly an enhancing interest right now.
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