-
We are all activists now.
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
I'll just stop here.
-
From the families who are fighting
to maintain funding for public schools,
-
the tens of thousands of people
-
who joined Occupy Wall Street
-
or marched with Black Lives Matter
-
to protest police brutality
against African-Americans,
-
families that join rallies,
-
pro-life and pro-choice,
-
those of us who are afraid
-
that our friends and neighbors
-
are going to be deported
-
or that they'll be added to lists
-
because they are Muslim,
-
people who advocate for gun rights
and for gun control
-
and the millions of people
-
who joined the women's marches
-
all across this country this last January.
-
(Applause)
-
We are all activists now, and that means
that we all have something to worry about
-
from surveillance.
-
Surveillance means
government collection and use
-
of private and sensitive data about us,
-
and surveillance is essential
-
to law enforcement
and to national security,
-
but the history of surveillance
-
is one that includes surveillance abuses
-
where this sensitive information
has been used against people
-
because of their race,
-
their national origin,
-
their sexual orientation,
-
and in particular
because of their activism,
-
their political beliefs.
-
About 53 years ago,
-
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
gave his "I have a dream" speech
-
on the Mall in Washington,
-
and today the ideas behind this speech
-
of racial equality and tolerance
are so non-controversial
-
that my daughters study
the speech in third grade.
-
But at the time,
-
Dr. King was extremely controversial.
-
The legendary and notorious
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed,
-
or wanted to believe,
-
that the Civil Rights Movement
was a Soviet communist plot
-
intended to destabilize
the American government.
-
And so Hoover had his agents
put bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms,
-
and those bugs picked up conversations
between civil rights leaders
-
talking about the strategies and tactics
-
of the Civil Rights Movement.
-
They also picked up sounds of Dr. King
-
having sex with women
who were not his wife,
-
and J. Edgar Hoover saw
the opportunity here
-
to discredit and undermine
the Civil Rights Movement.
-
The FBI sent a package of these recordings
-
along with a handwritten note to Dr. King,
-
and a draft of this note was found
in FBI archives years later,
-
and the letter said,
-
"You are no clergyman and you know it.
-
King, like all frauds,
your end is approaching."
-
The letter even seemed to encourage
Dr. King to commit suicide,
-
saying, "King, there is
only one thing left for you to do.
-
You know what it is.
-
You better take it before your filthy,
abnormal fraudulent self
-
is bared to the nation."
-
But the important thing is,
-
Dr. King was not abnormal.
-
Every one of us has something
-
that we want to hide from somebody,
-
and even more important,
-
J. Edgar Hoover wasn't abnormal either.
-
The history of surveillance abuses
is not the history of one bad,
-
megalomaniacal man.
-
Throughout his decades at the FBI,
-
J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed the support
of the presidents that he served,
-
Democratic and Republican alike.
-
After all, it was John F. Kennedy
and his brother Robert Kennedy
-
who knew about and approved
the surveillance of Dr. King.
-
Hoover ran a program
called Cointelpro for 15 years
-
which was designed to spy on
and undermine civic groups
-
that were devoted
to things like civil rights,
-
the Women's Rights Movement,
-
and peace groups and anti-war movements,
-
and the surveillance didn't stop there.
-
Lyndon Baines Johnson,
-
during the election campaign,
-
had the campaign airplane
of his rival Barry Goldwater bugged
-
as part of his effort
to win that election,
-
and then of course there was Watergate.
-
Burglars were caught
-
breaking into the Democratic
National Committee headquarters
-
at the Watergate Hotel,
-
the Nixon Administration was involved
in covering up the burglary,
-
and eventually Nixon had
to step down as president.
-
Cointelpro and Watergate
were a wakeup call for Americans.
-
Surveillance was out of control,
-
and it was being used to squelch
political challengers.
-
And so Americans rose to the occasion,
-
and what we did was
we reformed surveillance law.
-
And the primary tool we used
to reform surveillance law
-
was to require a search warrant
-
for the government
to be able to get access to
-
our phone calls and our letters.
-
Now, the reason why
a search warrant is important
-
is because it interposes a judge
-
in the relationship between
investigators and the citizens,
-
and that judge's job is to make sure
-
that there's good cause
for the surveillance,
-
that the surveillance is targeted
at the right people,
-
and that the information that's collected
-
is going to be used
-
for legitimate government purposes
-
and not for discriminatory ones.
-
This was our system, and what this means
is that President Obama
-
did not wiretap Trump Tower.
-
The system is set up to prevent
something like that from happening
-
without a judge being involved.
-
But what happens when we're not talking
about phone calls or letters anymore?
-
Today, we have technology
-
that makes it cheap and easy
-
for the government to collect information
-
on ordinary everyday people.
-
Your phone call records
-
can reveal whether you have an addiction,
-
what your religion is,
-
what charities you donate to,
-
what political candidate you support.
-
And yet, our government
collected, dragnet-style,
-
Americans' calling records for years.
-
In 2012, the Republican
National Convention
-
highlighted a new technology
it was planning to use,
-
facial recognition,
-
to identify people who were going
to be in the crowd
-
who might be activists or troublemakers
-
and to stop them ahead of time.
-
Today, over 50 percent of American adults
-
have their faceprint
in a government database.
-
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives
-
concocted a plan
-
to find out what Americans
were going to gun shows
-
by using license plate detectors
-
to scan the license plates of cars that
were in the parking lots of these events.
-
Today, we believe that over 70 percent
of police departments
-
have automatic license plate
detection technology
-
that they're using to track people's cars
-
as they drive through town.
-
And all of this information,
-
the license plates, the face prints,
-
the phone records,
-
your address books, your buddy lists,
-
the photos that you upload
to Dropbox or Google Photos,
-
and sometimes even
your chats and your emails
-
are not protected
by a warrant requirement.
-
So what that means is we have
all of this information
-
on regular people that's newly available
-
at very low expense.
-
It is the golden age for surveillance.
-
Now, every parent is going
to understand what this means.
-
When you have a little baby,
-
and the baby's young,
-
that child is not able
to climb out of its crib,
-
but eventually your little girl gets older
-
and she's able to climb out of the crib,
-
but you tell her,
"Don't climb out of the crib. Okay?"
-
And every parent knows
what's going to happen.
-
Some of those babies are going
to climb out of the crib.
-
Right?
-
That's the difference between
ability and permission.
-
Well, the same thing is true
with the government today.
-
It used to be that our government
didn't have the ability
-
to do widespread, massive surveillance
on hundreds of millions of Americans
-
and then abuse that information,
-
but now our government has grown up
-
and we have that technology today.
-
The government has the ability
-
and that means the law
is more important than ever before.
-
The law is supposed to say
-
when the government has permission
-
to do it
-
and is supposed to ensure that
-
there's some kind of ramification,
-
we notice when those laws are broken
-
and there's some of kind of
ramification or punishment.
-
The law is more important than ever
because we are now living in a world
-
where only rules
are stopping the government
-
from abusing this information.
-
But the law has fallen down on the job.
-
Particularly since September 11
the law has fallen down on the job
-
and we do not have the rules
in place that we need.
-
And we are seeing
the ramifications of that.
-
So fusion centers are these
joint task forces
-
between local, state
and federal government
-
that are meant to ferret out
domestic terrorism,
-
and what we've seen
is fusion center reports that say
-
that you might be dangerous
-
if you voted for a third party candidate
-
or you own a "Don't Tread On Me" flag,
-
or you watched movies that are anti-tax.
-
These same fusion centers have spied
on Muslim community groups' reading lists
-
and on Quakers who are resisting
military recruiting in high schools.
-
The Internal Revenue Service
has disproportionately audited
-
groups that have "Tea Party"
or "Patriot" in their name,
-
and now customs and border patrol
-
is stopping people as they
come into the country
-
and demanding
our social networking passwords
-
which will allow them to see
who our friends are,
-
what we say,
-
and even to impersonate us online.
-
Now, civil libertarians like myself
-
have been trying to draw
people's attention to these things
-
and fighting against them for years.
-
This was a huge problem
during the Obama Administration,
-
but now the problem is worse.
-
When the New York Police Department
-
spies on Muslims,
-
or a police department uses
license plate detectors
-
to find out where
the officers' spouses are
-
or those sorts of things,
that is extremely dangerous,
-
but when a president repurposes the power
-
of federal surveillance
and the federal government
-
to retaliate against political opposition,
-
that is a tyranny.
-
And so we are all activists now,
-
and we all have something
to fear from surveillance,
-
but just like in the time
of Dr. Martin Luther King,
-
we can reform the way things are.
-
First of all, use encryption.
-
Encryption protects your information
-
from being inexpensively
and opportunistically collected.
-
It rolls back the golden age
for surveillance.
-
Second, support surveillance reform.
-
Did you know that if you have a friend
-
who works for the French
or German governments
-
or for an international human rights group
-
or for a global oil company
-
that your friend is a valid
foreign intelligence target?
-
And what that means is that
when you have conversations
-
with that friend,
-
the US Government
may be collecting that information.
-
And when that information is collected,
-
even though it's
conversations with Americans,
-
it can then be funneled to the FBI
-
where the FBI is allowed
to search through it
-
without getting a warrant,
-
without probable cause,
-
looking for information about Americans
-
and whatever crimes we may have committed
-
with no need to document
any kind of suspicion.
-
The law that allows some of this to happen
-
is called Section 702
of the FISA Amendments Act,
-
and we have a great opportunity this year,
-
because Section 702 is going
to expire at the end of 2017,
-
which means that
Congress's inertia is on our side
-
if we want reform,
-
and we can pressure our representatives
-
to actually implement
important reforms to this law
-
and protect our data
from this redirection and misuse.
-
And finally, one of the reasons why
things have gotten so out of control
-
is because so much of what
happens with surveillance --
-
the technology, the enabling rules,
and the policies
-
that are either there
or not there to protect us --
-
are secret or classified.
-
We need transparency and we need to know
-
as Americans what the government
is doing in our name
-
so that the surveillance that takes place
and the use of that information
-
is democratically accounted for.
-
We are all activists now,
-
which means that we all have something
to worry about from surveillance,
-
but like in the time
of Dr. Martin Luther King,
-
there is stuff that we can do about it.
-
So please join me and let's get to work.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
Retired user
There seems to be a mistake in the transcript in 9:10-9:13.
We notice when those laws are broken => We know this, we know those laws are broken
Could someone double-check it, please?
Seok Kim
"We notice..." is the correct transcription. But the mistake here is that this part was broken into two sentences when the speaker wasn't even done.
So it's supposed to be one sentence like this => "....there's some kind of ramification we notice when those laws are broken, "