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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
From the Lever's reader supported newsroom, this is Lever Time. I'm David Sirota. As the Biden administration continues to support Israel's war in Gaza, protests are spreading on college campuses across America. In response, police have been deployed to crush some of the demonstrations, raising questions about whether America actually respects its own First Amendment that's supposed to protect free speech and free assembly. But viral videos of police regiments storming onto campuses are only a glimpse of what some say is a larger growth of an American police and surveillance state, a dangerous expansion of Big Brother that's happening inside national security agencies, state legislatures, and the court system.
Arjun Singh:All of it designed to suppress dissent and crush speech that those in power don't wanna hear. On today's episode of Levertine, we look at why student protests against the United States' support for Israel's war has prompted such a harsh crackdown, And we look at what kinds of protest America's laws are supposed to protect. We also look at how the crack down against demonstrations is happening at exactly the same moment that the government is asserting a right to much broader forms of unregulated surveillance. Some of it pushed by those who wanna silence critics of Israel's war in Gaza. Protest and then backlash.
Arjun Singh:It's as American as apple pie. Back in the mid 20th century, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both got themselves elected to public office, promising to impose so called law and order on those protesting against war and protesting for social justice during the 19 sixties.
Speaker 2:When the so called free speech advocates, who in truth have no appreciation for freedom, were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbol of law and order a policeman on the campus, and that was the moment when the ringleaders should have been taken to the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university once and for all.
Arjun Singh:More recently, president Donald Trump made the same promises amid the Black Lives Matter protests.
Speaker 3:I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.
Arjun Singh:And now it's a similar theme from the Biden administration amid nationwide student protests against the United States support of Israel's war in Gaza.
Speaker 4:It's basically a matter of fairness. It's a matter of what's right. There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.
Arjun Singh:A big question in all of this law and order rhetoric has always been, what exactly is the law? Isn't there a first amendment that's supposed to be the law that protects the freedom of speech even speech people in power may not like? Aren't there supposed to be laws that restrict the power of the government to spy on protesters? Aren't there laws that are supposed to protect the right to public demonstrations? These are more complicated questions than they seem, especially right now as protests have sparked a new assertion of government power in the name of law and order.
Arjun Singh:In recent years, we've seen state legislatures pass laws designed to punish protesters and punish civil peaceful disobedience. Last month, the Supreme Court fortified those laws. It lets stand a ruling from a Trump packed court in Texas that says protest organizers can be financially punished if even a single attendee at a protest breaks any law. In Congress, a different kind of crackdown is now happening as protests intensified against lawmakers who passed a new bill providing Israel's government with more money to conduct its brutal war in Gaza. Along with that funding bill, members of both parties reauthorized a warrantless surveillance program that's been used to spy on protesters.
Arjun Singh:In fact, the American Prospect reported that the vote in Congress was backed by pro Israel groups quote for the purpose of spying on foreign involvement in domestic anti semitic events, a clear reference to anti war demonstrations regarding Gaza. It seems there's now an entire intelligence apparatus aimed at protesters. Just listen to New York mayor Eric Adams talk about intel his city is now collecting about protesters at Columbia University.
Speaker 3:We know based on our intel and evidence that there are individuals who are instructing students to do, bad things, and they are participating in some illegal actions.
Arjun Singh:Meanwhile, congressional lawmakers of both parties also joined together to give the executive branch the authority to strip the tax exempt status of any nonprofit group it unilaterally deems to be so called terrorist supporting organizations, an almost comically Orwellian term. If that bill passes, it's no stretch to imagine the new law not only being used right now against groups protesting Israel's war, but also being used by a potential future Trump administration against any of Trump's political enemies. All of this has echoes of Orwell's own warnings in his most famous book, 1984.
Speaker 5:In 1949, George Orwell had a vision of the future. Today, that vision is still a best selling novel, and his prophecy remains as terrifying as ever. If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. A future where freedom
Arjun Singh:On today's episode of Lever Time, we're gonna take a look at how big brother is getting even bigger in this new age of protest. Senior podcast producer Arjun Singh takes a look at what's motivating the protests and the unrest on college campuses, and he explores what the law actually says about what is and isn't permissible. He also goes deep into the surveillance state. He explores how the government has continued to significantly expand its domestic surveillance machine decades after 911, and how under the guise of fighting terrorism, that surveillance machine can target dissenters.
Speaker 6:On Tuesday evening, Alastair Kitchen, a student journalist at Columbia University, arrived on the school's campus in New York City.
David Sirota:I joined the campus at around 6 PM because it was clear that something was going to happen. There were 3 helicopters in the sky rotating in a, like, points of an equilateral triangle going around and around and around in a circle. Police began to arrive. They suddenly went from a very light presence on campus to a very heavy presence around the campus.
Speaker 6:For weeks, Columbia students like students at schools across the country had been engaging in protests against Israel's war in Gaza. And on the day Alastair went to the school grounds, a group of students were camped out in a building called Hamilton hall, which protesters had renamed in hall. The name being a reference to a 6 year old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza in January. This building
Speaker 2:This building is now This building This building. Is now liberated. It's now liberated.
Speaker 6:But when Alastair was there, the scene felt a little bit more subdued, almost like the calm before the storm.
David Sirota:There was a lot of nervous anticipation among the police and among the other spectators.
Speaker 6:Eventually, Alistair headed back to his apartment.
David Sirota:I turned on WKCR radio, the student run radio station here at Columbia that services the entire area.
Speaker 8:It's that I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I do need to interrupt. I'm so so sorry. Go ahead.
Speaker 8:Go ahead. NYPD corrections bus that is coming down 1 14th in Broadway, and they are now NYPD is now currently pulling students who are sitting on the ground, here at 14. And then NYPD off the hill. They're pulling students off the ground quite violently, I will add,
Speaker 6:That night at the request of Columbia, dozens of New York City police officers dressed in what looked like riot gear arrived at the
Speaker 2:school. The
Speaker 6:whole day, Columbia's campus had been locked down except for students who lived on campus and essential employees. When the police arrived, they began to order student journalists inside of the aptly named Pulitzer Hall. Soon after, the school radio station announced what was happening.
Speaker 9:I just wanted to update too because we did have word that police were entering through the windows of Hamilton Hall, from the Amsterdam, and 1 16th side of Hamilton Hall.
David Sirota:If it were not for the student run radio station, we would have had no idea about what the police were doing or what was happening inside of campus.
Speaker 6:To Alastair, the scenes he was hearing about and watching on social media were startling. It also shook his faith in the school.
David Sirota:It was the largest police operation that I have ever seen, and one of the most shocking things that I have ever seen. I do not know a single person, staff or faculty, who is not horrified at the administration. The divide between the administrative class of the university and the people who are involved in education and pedagogy has never been starker.
Speaker 6:This is not the first time the United States has seen a wave of student led protests. It's also unfortunately not the first time the nation has watched the police use heavy handed tactics to silence protesters. But this moment is unique. These protests are happening amidst a backdrop of what's felt like a sharp curtailing of the right to protest. It's also happening in an era where our digital is larger than ever, and in a time when police departments and other government agencies can purchase data we often unwittingly provide to private corporations by going online.
Speaker 6:Watching all of this can feel dizzying. And that's why I sat down with someone who could help put this all in perspective.
Speaker 10:So as a First Amendment matter, because they are a private university, they can choose to try to enforce their rules, using police. That doesn't mean they should. And, certainly, I don't think that they should use armed police in any way when it is not a last resort measure.
Speaker 6:Vera Edelman is a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's project on speech privacy, and technology. Given everything I had seen this week, I put it pretty bluntly. Do we still have a right to protest in this country?
Speaker 10:I don't think the right to protest has been eroded, and I also don't think that it is terribly unusual, deplorable, and kind of embarrassing for government actors as it is that their reaction has been not to engage with the substance of the protests, but instead to pass laws meant to show that they don't like particular protest movements, that they don't like particular protest tactics, and, perhaps also to make people more afraid to join together and join movements and speak out with one voice.
Speaker 6:In protesting, however, the tactic also matters. Occupying a building can be considered trespassing or perhaps breaking and entering, regardless of whether it was a political act or not. The same applies to blocking traffic.
Speaker 10:The government can prohibit, consistent with the First Amendment, people from blocking traffic. And even if people are blocking traffic to, say, to express themselves and entirely for a political purpose, that doesn't immunize them from being, subject to those rules. Even if it's absolutely righteous, even if the point is to make a point, the First Amendment doesn't protect violating otherwise valid content neutral laws.
Speaker 6:One reason I wanted to talk to Vera is because she's currently representing an activist named DeRay McKesson. You may recognize that name, or you might know him by the signature blue vest he usually wears. But lately, McKesson has been embroiled in a legal controversy that started in 2016 when he was participating in a protest against police brutality in Louisiana. At this protest, some people allegedly threw rocks at police officers, and an officer claims he was hit by one suffering injuries. But rather than sue the person, they sued McKesson claiming he was a protest organizer.
Speaker 6:Here he is talking about the case.
Speaker 11:I wasn't organizing it. I was just out there supporting people. I was tweeting about it, getting people to come in terms of Twitter, but I was not one of the organizers. We've repeatedly said this in all of the the legal documents. Here's, like, a
Speaker 6:McKesson's case is currently tied up in the legal system, and VI explained part of it has to do with laws and statutes specific to Louisiana, but Mckesson's case made me wonder, can it happen to anyone? Can encouraging people, for example, to go to a protest make you civilly liable for what happens there?
Speaker 10:As a first amendment matter, generally, people have the right to, encourage or support even unlawful tactics. You can absolutely say, what's happening in the world is incredibly unjust, and we should push back in any way we possibly can. You can either you can even more directly encourage, unlawful activity. What you can't do is incite illegal activity, which is a very specific high standard, which is defined as intentionally pushing people towards imminent and likely illegal activity. So the sort of typical example of that is standing in front of a crowd and saying, let's all go do this illegal thing.
Speaker 10:That is meant to get people to do the illegal thing. It's likely to cause them to do it, and it's likely to cause them to do it immediately right now. Incitement online, I think, is a much harder thing to establish. Simply tweeting, I support the students at Columbia, or I think their cause is righteous, is protected speech. I think we have a history in this country both of people really speaking out, protesting for what they think is righteous, making change as a result of that.
Speaker 10:And alongside that, we have a history of, pretty brutal responses to those exercises of speech, whether that is excessive force, whether that is really troubling, clearly, speech based surveillance, whether that is attempts to pass new laws that are, ultimately unconstitutional. And I think that students and others who are speaking out now are are doing it against a history of of real resilience and resistance.
Speaker 6:That resistance is now taking place on two fronts, the physical and the digital. And today, our digital lives are part of a complex and interconnected web of software companies, telecommunications corporations, and the government. In fact, as David mentioned at the beginning of this episode, there are open calls for the government to deploy digital surveillance tools on these college protesters. But these tools don't require hacking. They use the data we give away to private corporations every day.
Speaker 12:The sheer amount of information that was out there commercially was also a huge and growing part of their appetite for information and was a genuine phenomenon that represented this weird and sort of unholy alliance between corporate power and government power and that was leaving a lot of us ordinary citizens in the dark about it.
Speaker 6:After the break, the rise of the surveillance state, and how corporations taught the government to love data.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Welcome to the Rose Garden. Today, I'm pleased to sign landmark legislation that is vital to the security of our people.
Speaker 6:In 2008, president George w Bush was giving a speech in the rose garden. The bill Bush was talking about was a reauthorization of the foreign intelligence surveillance Act, a law originally passed in 1978 that set up procedures for the government to collect intelligence on the communications of those suspected of being agents of foreign powers. Over time, the bill would be amended though. In this case, Bush was pleased to announce that Congress had approved an amendment that would create a section of the law called Section 702. This section essentially allowed the government to monitor the electronic communications of people outside of the US without a warrant.
Speaker 6:The thing is, if those communications were happening with an American citizen, their information was going to get monitored too. But what it would open the door to were things many in the Rose Garden that day had no idea were conceivable.
Speaker 4:This law will protect the liberties of our citizens while maintaining the vital flow of intelligence. This law will play a critical role in helping to prevent another attack on our soil.
Speaker 6:To understand why the government had just handed all this power to the intelligence community, we have to go back to 2,001 when the CEO of a company called Acxiom, which managed consumer databases, realized that they might have the key to preventing another terrorist attack in the US.
Speaker 12:After 911, they had a ton of consumer information on almost everyone in the United States because at some point, we've all given our address to some entity that's provided it to Acxiom or we, you know, buy a house and that's in the county, property record office. And these data brokers go and they vacuum it up.
Speaker 6:Byron Tau is the author of Means of Control, How the Hidden Alliance of tech and government is creating a new surveillance state.
Speaker 12:So with a repository of information that rich and one that was commercially available, that's when government started to get interested in these datasets after 911.
Speaker 6:Remember, this is 2001, long before the iPhone and long before social media. So when Byron's talking about consumer data, he's not referring to things like GPS. Instead, what Axiom compiled was the kind of information that we hand over all the time, possibly without even thinking about it. For example, if you buy a magazine subscription that's registered with the magazine company, Acxiom's bread and butter was compiling different data points from this user information and then helping other companies better understand their customers. And pretty quickly, it attracted the attention of the FBI, who realized that this data could be a gold mine for them.
Speaker 12:In some instances, they were, you know, demanding years years worth of passenger records from airlines. They started to demand lists like everyone that's ever taken a scuba diving class or gotten a license from dive shops all over the country, everyone that's rented a helicopter, you know, everyone that has a cab license. They started doing these big data projects after 9:11 to try to figure out, you know, who possibly intended to do something other than enjoy a coral reef with their scuba diving license. And so this was a real realization that you could tell rich stories about people through this data that wasn't in some secret government intelligence report, but was just an ordinary piece of data that some company somewhere in America had.
Speaker 6:Companies like Acxiom were soon seen as invaluable to the work of intelligence gathering and the vast troves of data they had coupled with the ability to mine through it was a boon for the government, but it's not unreasonable to ask why these companies are able to access this data in the first place.
Speaker 12:Probably the permission to do that is right there on page 250 of a 300 page privacy policy that you didn't read when you downloaded the app or agreed to to sign up for the service. And so corporations have really taken advantage of fatigue with, having to read all this stuff to share a lot of information, mostly for commercial purposes.
Speaker 6:Back in the 2000, consumer data looked pretty simple compared to today. In 2007, though, a year before Bush was standing in front of the rose garden, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was making an announcement that would fundamentally transform how we thought about privacy, data, and surveillance.
Speaker 13:An iPad, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it?
Speaker 6:I don't think anyone sitting in the auditorium or watching that presentation understood what the iPhone would be able to do. Not even Steve Jobs, but over time, the iPhone would become a part of a way of life.
Speaker 12:Today, so much of our lives is on these mobile devices and on our wearables that, there's tons of information that can come off of these things. Let's start with anything that you post publicly on a social media site. That of course can be scraped and there are these data brokers out there that specialize in gaining access to these social spaces, and taking the information at some periods in time. Then, of course, all the apps that you put on your phone, some of those apps, the way they make money is by selling information about their users. So, anything that's asking for your location that's free, is probably in in some way shape or form making information available to a data broker in some way shape or form.
Speaker 12:And that could be, your GPS location. It could be other attributes about you or your phone.
Speaker 6:And anyone can buy that data, including the government.
Speaker 12:Finally, every time you load, one of these apps or a website that has ad space, you're actually participating in this really complicated system of ad targeting and data collection, that actually ends up passing a ton of information about your device back to 1,000 and thousands of advertising companies who are all bidding a little bit of money as to whether they wanna serve you an ad and how much they're willing to pay to serve it to you.
Speaker 6:But one very easy way for the government to surveil people is because of the things we often wanna make public. And it's something police departments have actively used to monitor protests.
Speaker 12:During the Freddie Gray protests in 2000 15 and, the Michael Brown protest in Ferguson, during that era, there was a lot of experimentation among police departments and seeing if they could identify protesters or protest leaders or important people, in protest movements based on what they say on social media. Sometimes they were even, you know, doing things like running faces for warrants and so there was real interest in this from government agencies, from your sort of three letter intelligence agencies in the military all the way down to local police departments who started getting these tools and looking at what was happening in their own communities.
Speaker 6:Even when social media companies have tried to make information more difficult to hide or people are behind private accounts, private companies have managed to find a way to get access to it.
Speaker 12:Clever social media vendors have found ways around these restrictions. So now, often, they just scrape it. And Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, these are less public than Twitter. Often, you need to log in to enter, some of these spaces, but you know, these government entities or their contractors have figured out ways to do that, to scrape the data and to provide it.
Speaker 14:Have you given thought to what it is that
Speaker 15:the US government's response to your conduct is in terms of what they might say about you, how they might try to depict you, what they might try to do to you?
Speaker 16:Yeah. I I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. I I could have, people come after me or any of their their third party partners. You know, they they work closely with a number of other nations.
Speaker 6:In 2014, Edward Snowden, an employee at the company Booz Allen Hamilton, a massive government contractor, revealed just how wide reaching the government surveillance apparatus had become at the time. One of the programs that he disclosed to a group of reporters was called PRISM, which is what grew out of that 2008 FISA reauthorization Bush signed.
Speaker 12:PRISM was a way to search that information on the government side. Why it's controversial is that, you know, the government is not just surveilling terrorists, but they're also doing intelligence on things like European diplomats or, people who work at international institutions. Sometimes they're surveilling foreign journalists and their communications with their sources abroad.
Speaker 6:Snowden revealed Prism in 2014. And at the time, it was a major media story. Americans had seemed horrified by how much of their information the government working with private companies were able to about them. And for a time, it felt like things might change. But then just a few weeks ago, congress and president Biden reauthorized FISA, including section 702.
Speaker 6:But even without section 702, private firms seem to constantly be gathering data on us. I think it raises the question. In the digital era, is privacy really possible? Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever Time. This episode was produced and engineered by me, Arjun Singh, with editing support from David Sirota, Joel Warner, and Lucy Dean Stockton.
Speaker 6:Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. If you'd like to read more of Alastair Kitchen's reporting, we'll include a link to his newsletter in our show notes. Lever Time is a production of The Lever. We'll be back next week with more episodes of Lever
Speaker 2:Time.