How the US government spies on people who protest including you Jennifer Granick
We are all activists now.
(Applause)
Thank you.
I’ll just stop here.
(Laughter)
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 the 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 noncontroversial
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 wake-up 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 faceprints,
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. OK?”
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 it’s 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)