morning i'm maggie rose march and i'm filling in for dolores five dale and the day this is what's going on our guest today is alex martin use and he's going to talk to us about the fourth amendment right is that that i have that correct yes he did thank you maggie so i run an organization called the campaign for digital fourth amendment rights here massachusetts and we were founded three years ago now to try and protect ordinary people against what we perceive to be the threat all of and over  suv government collecting data on everything that we do everywhere we go every communication that we make particularly those on the internet and this seemed to us to be against the notion of the constitution is to post supposed to be set up to do in the fourth amendment you can say people stuff you can seize people allowed to put them under surveillance that is how it's supposed to work but that is not what we have to do we have today governments that are sucking in an enormous amount of digital data that part of it we have generated our selves and our then using it effectively to put all of us under suspicion and to have to prove that we're all right and that we're not one of the federally on reform of mass surveillance and i can talk a little that's interesting was there something in particular that happened in two thousand and thirteen that that's what got the ball rolling for you eight or ten months in the whistleblower edward snowden comes along and everything goes for him suddenly it's something everyone is talking about and everyone is interested in and it becomes something much bigger than i'd ever for some people who don't remember that incident in particular can you tell them a little bit about it yes of course edward snowden was a contractor working with the n s a he was formally employed by allen and hamilton he was a systems administrator so he would is the person to try to make the networks work within the n s he had access to a lot of and released the information to them which they then over the next eight months to a year reviewed and then released the puck and what the documents that he provided to them showed was that what the government said it was doing and what it was actually doing were two very different things they were saying that they did not spy on americans but it emerged that they  collecting say the phone data of every single american and from every from provider so yours and mine and everybody's was going into the databases of the n s a they were partnering with technology companies and getting access whether wittingly or unwittingly to date on google and yahoo and other major internet service provider they had a collective all for last that every piece of information was relevant and they were using secret interpretations of law that you have to have a particular person in mind you have to have a suspicion or probable cause that they are involved in criminal activity you can't just say oh let's collected warn them we'll sort it out later but that is what we will issue a warrant that covers everybody's cell phone day and you can't do that under the fourth amendment that's not how it's supposed to be the fourth amendment really it says you have the right to assume that you're not going to be molested upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation particularly describing the person and the thing or things to be said so this is definitely you know in contradiction to the fourth amendment rights doing to the thinking i mean we seem to have lost a lot of our rights since nine eleven and there and more of the civil liberties seem to be taken away from us but nobody knows what the answer is i mean that you're proposing i think by fighting this but we need to now understand more so yes i think that the september eleventh attacks provided an opportunity for when people's opinions and people's ideas and people's comments on stuff on the internet you could start to form very complex and detailed profiles of essentially everybody and you could do it cheaply used to be very expensive to try and do that you'd have to individually track somebody twenty four hours a day now you can gather it on everybody and we have a situation where where it is possible to and a relatively small proportion of it is going to have a human look at it because there are only so many n s a agents and only so much time in the day we calculate that for every one n s a agents time the n s a is collecting  over the course of a year the n s a is collecting twenty three million years worth of data so an individual person can look at all of that that's why they're very interested in things like natural language recognition artificial intelligence trying to terror attacks in advance and it's never been shown that any of this has helped to do that what it does instead is to give everyone the feeling that they are being watched in a way that they will not watch before and i think that that stamina change to this country is not how it's supposed to be well big brother is watching that is i mean we make the jokes but that is the feeling i met new you justify so i haven't got anything interesting so they're not looking at me but in fact where you are i am i live in belmont time a homeowner i'm a dad i go to church how interesting is my life really going to be but the problem is that it places in the hands of prosecutors who themselves are not very accountable in a system it places in their hands anything that they want to point you hang him so that's really what's happening if you have everybody's data in the hands of government unrestricted then prosecutors can just pick and choose who they  can do that for any reason and there won't really be a backlash if they choose wrong and i for one don't have the level of faith in prosecutors said that always going to choose the most rational this is a very there's a fine line here and yet there's not a fine line it's really a dual duality to this that's a little bit more than a little scary when we're talking ferguson missouri and search and seizure and you know that's of the not from what was said on the internet but then you take it and you you think about how easily that actions are taken that have permanent and lasting consequences and change lives all around us and then there was a teenager we were talking earlier and then i forgot the things for him that's the way he knew them yeah so somebody at his school saw that reported it to the school resources officer the school resources officer went to the local police department him prosecutors got involved in  just mushroom and it turned out to interest something up to that point yeah see there is where went crazy up to that point i feel like ever it should have been reported and he needed to be directed but then then the in jail and i and some other folks organized and attended his hearings and of tried to make a big stink about the case and in the end the grand jury refused to indict this kid he missed his graduation because he was in jail but he got out the point here is that i was i was eighteen and i said a whole lot of dumb stuff that was never recorded anywhere but now because teenagers young men communicating on social media and on twitter and on other services i probably don't even know about that's getting picked it but we can't prosecute every person who says dumb stuff on the internet there are millions and millions of those people we probably can't prosecute everyone who says something stupid about guns on the internet there are millions of those too so the problem is here they're it when there is this paranoia over anything that might possibly be construed as terrorists then sometimes people panic and draw people into the criminal justice when they're not really planning to do anything this this kid is just a kid  maybe not a very bright you know certainly wasn't in his own best interest yeah no i mean he is probably not the brightest kid and when when you're eighteen you do do wrong in terms of what we say that's not how this country is set up that's not what the first amendment is for the default is that we can speak our minds and if some of these are offended by what we say then they can say something back and they can articulate why they're offended is not a law enforced in force mass but we have no right to not be offended we have there's no law that says that we can say controversial things about foreign policy if you look at how the supreme court has ruled that it's even protected by the first amendment if you make threats on twitter or facebook for long as soon as threats are not narrow and plausibly connected to some sort of actual plan that you're going to home that's what the law is and yet prosecutors and police departments in the intelligence agencies are going beyond the norm and putting everybody under it's a very very complex issue and this is fascinating you're so knowledgeable i i want to jump into another talk on the internet and we didn't have an internet and things were said and i said stupid things in other people said things and you learn that so and so said something about two words or e or in threaten to beat you up or whatever i mean there are all these things somehow we found ways to resolve these issues without involving the police usually and then if we did need to involved it was usually the school principal first and they made the decision whether it needed to be asked lighted up but with the horrible mass murder of children in the in the school children in the school and so much of the the information they found out after the fact was posted in social media there were clues in there that could've i think you know i thought he started feeling justified in looking at this so where do how do we how do we build a society that's more sensitive to this without violating the rights how do we get  there the first thing i should stay say here is that i do care a lot about the matter of bullying in schools and i feel it personally because i was bullied myself for men so i'm not going to discount that what i would say is that governments may think very large claims that in advance monitoring can help to prevent these sorts of terrible things from happening guy and there were postings on the internet that he made i think there were troubled postings the problem is from a law enforcement perspective that you have thousands mass surveillance is not useful for preventing terrorist attacks or shoot you or school shootings or anything else in advance it can't because the volume is too high and there can never be the manpower to process and integrate that data head of time or that it allows you to do and this is somewhat useful is to go back afterwards and see what you missed and like you said if you know you've written six sentences something in there can be used against you because anything you said can be yes i mean i have a blog and that i that i have been writing for years for this organization at war prosecutors are not well equipped to navigate that line between what is controversial and what is threat and the first amendment is there to say you know it's  not the business of the government to police acceptable speech and to define it from an except because it's exhausting for the government is a waste of resources if you have real evidence if you have relevant to thwarting terrorism it isn't it isn't effective it isn't useful the government's not there and it can't be all knowing and it can't and it i think a good argument could be made if if financially just looking at the waste of resources to just there is a good reason we have so many other things that are on the plate this is a very foolish use of resources it is and why this is being driven in part by private companies maggie private security companies who know that the governmental budget for thwarting terrorism is essentially and less and they can go to the government with a proposal and say we're going to do this and this and this and we're going to call it anti terrorism and the government will go yeah ok so they're even though he is an enormous amounts of money out of this i say thank you so much for these insights this useful and i am grateful thank you very much for being with us thank you i wish we had more time but this is a big topic  that wraps up what's going on