we are talking today with robert scheer robert scheer is editor in chief at truthdig dot org and a contributing editor at the nation between one hundred sixty four and one thousand sixty nine he was vietnam correspondent managing editor and editor in chief of ramparts magazine from one thousand nine hundred six to one thousand nine hundred three he served as a national correspondent for the los angeles times and in one thousand nine hundred three he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the los angeles times where he was named a contributing editor he can be heard on the political radio program left right and center on k c r w the n p r affiliate in santa monica california and he is currently a clinical professor of communications at the university of southern california and emberg school for communication and journalism he has written ten books including america after nixon the age of multinationals the pornography of power how defense hawks hijacked nine eleven in a week and america the great american stick up how reagan republicans and clinton democrats enrich wall street while mugging main street and he is here to talk about his latest book they know everything about you how data collecting corporations and snooping government agencies are destroying democracy robert thank you very much for coming  us what was the motivation in writing your latest book they know everything about you well you know i was back in the one nine hundred ninety s when bill clinton was president he teamed up with republicans in the congress to push through financial deregulation at the behest of the banking lobbies it was the reversal of the price piece of financial legislation that came out of the great depression out of franklin delano roosevelt the glass steagall act which restricted what different banks could do to protect consumers to protect deposit society wouldn't have any too big to fail banks and another piece of legislation the commodity futures modernization act which took away any restrictions on all these concerning your data your privacy because it was very clear that the lobbyist were for the merger of all these you know insurance companies banks investment houses very thing because they were grabbing all this data and this is one big data was born and at that time there were some people who said this is really very dangerous one of them was a congressman from massachusetts ed markey who's now fortunately to senator he's the junior senator elizabeth warren so we have a state there it's got t terrific senators but also included a conservative side william saffire who had been nixon's speechwriter and then become a columnist at the new york times but like many principle libertarians that we have now a silicon valley we do have them trying to frontier foundation and other folks i shouldn't characterize them i'm just i'm sure they have a lot of different people in there but i seem to meet libertarians when i go into view and but b got in the ninety's they were the people pushing back and they said no you shouldn't be allowed to merge all these data because people didn't give their insurance they did with the idea that their mortgage broker would have it or that the somebody's trying to sell me a car or hustle something else they should control that and a problem that exists obviously right to to now you know company like facebook and you're going to get an app like whatsapp you're going to have all this data and you're going to pull it and what are you going to use it so the privacy advocates back then said let's put in a protection of opt in the consumer who surrendered this data in the first place say to their life insurance company doesn't want the bank to have their medical records or anything else and so before you can pass it around either your affiliate the you've now merged or to a third party company you should have the explicit opt in permission and that remains the big battle today instead the banking lobbyist said no we want opt out which is all this junk mail you get and says hey if you discover something you don't like you can complain about it lotsa luck and so for us it's totally meaningless restraint and other people like markey and sapphire and others urged president clinton to veto the bill unless there was this protection he he betrayed that concern and he and because the banking lobby a said no we want to exploit the state or they didn't say exploit we want to better or more effectively market to people and that's why when you're on the internet everything all these ads pop up around where somebody has sold your day to remind your data so that was my interest that time and then i was also interested what is this internet doing to privacy and i was editor of some of something called the online journalism review it university southern california so i was interested in where where's the internet going and i'm not anti internet i'm a big celebrant of the internet i've loved technology i'm not a lot i you know i worked on my first big computer was an i b m machine took up a whole warehouse huge warehouse and when i was in graduate school it had less power than a smart phone now but i mean i always was a really adapter i'd like the stuff and i saw that the internet was a way of uniting people educating people was a great thing but i also saw the downside so in one nine hundred ninety nine i wrote an article for yahoo internet life which was the cover of the whole issue devoted to this question of where is the internet going as far as privacy and at that time i was concerned because the f b i there and the cia that these various programs carnivore and others that were getting people as they and this was before nine eleven and at that time you still could get a good discussion going about the fourth amendment to the us constitution and other protections of our individual sovereignty and so i or did this whole issue and i warned that we were developing a technology that was you know a dictator's wet dream in the old days a stalin or hitler or somebody just had all this data and you know well that was ninety nine and you know now you see where the data is going well the thing that changed because we would have had a good discussion about it and maybe had reform was nine eleven and the nine eleven world trade center and pentagon attack became this great excuse for destroying the american constitution that's how i see it because the essential wisdom of the constitution the framers the people who gave us the constitution we know they were flawed we know they had their contradictions where you know their notion of democracy was basically limited to white males and some you know means however they had gotten hold of two really important ideas and that inform if you want to be a representative republic you can't be an empire and that's the lesson they drew from europe they drew it from you know spain france england but they also do it obviously from the roman republic if you're going to conquer you're going to be in foreign entanglement going to be messing around the world as people say in war truth is the first casualty and your citizens back in the home republic are going to lose control are all saying they're going to be mired in secrecy and treachery and intrigue and it's going to go there and so that very clearly w gone wrong with europe and so that's why they were very much against the empire big government unfortunately they had a contradiction they were building an empire within the north america bubble in the main though they understood the problem of foreign intrigue but the really important idea that was connected with that was the idea of limited government be suspicious of government restrain in its power have separation of powers you know have checks and balances have go for a bill of rights why because they believe very deeply that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and so publicly individuals out there should have guarantee of their sovereignty they are ceding limited powers to the state and to the national even more limited national government and that they always have to be protected in their right to assemble to redress of grievances and you know freedom to press and freedom to associate and freedom and their home and home the fourth amendment and others in terms of trial and due process and everything why because not it was the public was going to be suspicious of government power ok well what happened they have to nine eleven we flipped that whole concept and we said no the public is now going to be treated with suspicion and the government is going to be doing the checks and balances on the public and that's where you got the idea of the haystack of information of everybody's personal government that is free of being viewed this week as everything is secret tied up we don't know what they're doing you know story and today's papers we record be old news by the time you broadcast this but the fact is you know the police departments routinely now intercept mock cell phone center and routine intercept all this data on everybody they claim they're only going after a few bad guys but they have all this sting ray and these different programs as well but that's not  new this is was been developing all over the place and you have privately held for profit companies like the one that was doing sting ray but you also have palin tear and others mining data formed by the cia originally backed by the cia see i was  client the only client for the first three years but now you know they can do anything there and they're go through the data of the l a police department a new orleans police by as well as all of our intelligence agencies cia and say and everything else so we've created this monster in the wake of nine eleven a totally unregulated and controlled unknown to us a story in today's new york times as we were recording this and santa clara county in california one supervise is there objected where what are we doing here and he can't even ask that question after all to sign nondisclosure agreements anybody's going to work with it so we've turned this whole idea of the public watching government around to the government watching the public in the name of making us safer so that's a long winded way of telling you how i got into this but then in writing this book or so i wanted to pursue it in more detail and you know the website that i edit  is for the best political blog three times and two times i have lost track but for the best political site but you know we go back to these meetings were involved with a lot of people on the internet a like the internet and so the problem was i kept asking people what's going on and i found many people were concerned the last webby thing in new york they celebrated aaron swartz and talked about the need to hold in check and so there's a real sense that something is right what is the bright spot in all this is that with the snowden leaks and i think edward snowden's greatest american citizen says daniel ellsberg i think they're doing what the whole thing is based on independent honest people fact we always knew the internet was originally a government creation we knew darpa had done it was all part of cold war idea have a robust system to withstand nuclear explosion and so forth but what we didn't know was the detail of interconnection between silicon valley and the internet companies and the telecoms you know eats into you know rises and the defense establishment and you now have you know the military industrial complex that eisenhower warned us about it's really the military intelligence complex and it's horrible because what you have is the very people who are assessing the danger have a stake in inflating the danger as what eisenhower warned about they control the information everything is classified they tell you these are the bad guys they're growing all the time this is a way to fight them and we have the tools and we'll make the money from fighting of and that's what's happened here with the whole data mining and everything else but what snowden did is he showed the contradiction in the system to the whole world because what he was able to show is that this private data which we were giving up to private companies was not private at all that government had or had said you know you know what do you have to hide don't do i d f to hide well the whole assumption of our society is not that we you know we are the ones that should have th protection because we have something to hide it's because the government is going to make stuff up about us the government is going to intimidate us the government is going to force us into self censorship this is the one nine hundred eighty four brave new world warning and if we don't have protection in the fourth amendment of our own space we're not free to think to explore to challenge to question to push the do all these things and this fourth amendment i carried around me i hope i have a copy of it with me  come from it comes from the magna carta really comes in which common law it was an idea developed against the king to restrain the king in england and it was basically that even the king of england with divine right to rule and everything else could not go into the hut of the poorest peasant and rummage around and find incriminating material and then jail i'm ok seize the property not allowed to do that had to have a specific warrant couldn't have a general warrant had to have due process how to you know make a case and why he was why they were there ok very specific and so that language is in our fourth amendment the right of the people to be secure in their purses houses papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be se a fishing expedition not rummaging around there e specific that you've got some magistrate to sign off on after nine eleven we turn that upside down and the whole argument then became oh the cats had a bit of modern technology to bear guys have access to all this stuff we have to have the haystack we have to roam and the main thing was that constitutional protection the fourth amendment oh no that doesn't work anymore cos we have the internet and we have computers and we have smartphones fortunately we've had a very clear ruling from the robert supreme court conservative court last june two thousand and fourteen on the cell phone case and the police and it set the law very clear it said a couple of things it said one the fourth amendment is very much a life it's robert's pointed out of decision the american revolution started over the principles of the fourth amendment this is what the boy's tea party about the whole objection to the ages of the king coming into your business your home rummaging around until they found something incriminating was what ticked off the man he said roberts in his decision unanimous decision the liberals conservatives all signed off on it and he said this is what american revolution and you know can quote john adams who was there at the key trial you know dealing with it and so it's all in my book and everything so that's number one secondly he took on this argument that somehow technology trumps the wisdom of the fourth amendment oh you know internet and everybody's got smart phones and he said no that's precisely the reason he took the argument turned into get around again he said that's precisely the reason why the fourth amendment is more relevant than ever and has to be interpreted in a broader sense to accommodate modern technological situations he said and his this is robert's job or you know said there's more information on ads fell phone than was ever in anybody's home ok and that means heard the police crack your code your sign on or whatever and they get that information they've got more access to your diaries to your thoughts to your friends your association than any dictator any government ever had over anybody's home and that's precisely why the fourth amendment has to be expanded in its focus royden and its impact to accommodate this modern technological age now the problem with the roberts court is that they have not yet applied to the n s a you know into national security and all that but if you follow the logic it's very clear and it demolishes the anti privacy argument and so far only just to sort of summarize those package why am i optimistic i'm optimistic snowden leaks showing the complicity of the private telecom companies and internet companies with the gun it destroyed an illusion about their basic product these companies said we are multi national corporations we are not subject to the whim or will demands of a national government we may be american based but we are out to serve customers people all over the world so you can trust us whether you live in germany where you live and in china because you know we may be american based we may speak english a lot but no ok well the snowden leaks show you go if dangling merkel or something as you showed this is nonsense and that in fact and whether we can have a lively argument about how much did google know and how much that apple and how much of facebook and people know but but you know the fact the matter is has been made very clear that not only did they do ssion to protect the data of their people because dead will make it more difficult for the f b i cia to come in so they're denying these companies right to serve they're really not their customers because they're giving free g mail and free you know you know we all know  know this is me you can't buy the book or read it because the book lays it all out i think but the other point that i want to drive home in the book is that this is a defense of this is that it makes a safer as an absurd defense because the only makes an assumption about our whole experiment in democracy that is i think it shames the memory of the founders because what it basically says is that freedom is a luxury there can be afforded only in the safest of environments the best of times that's the before and after nine eleven argument but we were attacked and there it is mocks the very idea of freedom as seen by the founders who argue freedom is something that makes you safer it's not a luxury it's something you do to make better decisions good ideas drive out era you know free people are people who will be less likely to make mistakes they will hold their government accountable we won't go invade iraq where there is no presence of al qaeda and saddam hussein is effective in controlling them on the argument that he's got weapons of mass destruction no we will expose the liars in our government when they lead us astray so the whole argument about freedom was no you need it in the most troubled of times and indeed you know the question i put the people's where do we get this fourth amendment that i just read to you before we got it when we are just come out with  terrible bloody war with the most powerful country the world anyone we knew they could return any time in fact they did return in eight hundred twelve you know and so so what are you saying they gave us that guarantee of the fourth amendment along with the first amendment all the other members when they were going to be the government you know they were going to be the government and you say we you have to you citizens have to be protected in your freedom to challenge us you know to feel secure in your freedom to challenge us because we are going to be bad guys unless we're challenged that wisdom has somehow got lost in all of us and so my book does us me and i give you a long explanation that's why i wrote the book is because i i hold these ideas to be self evident i think a higher basic to the experience and in human freedom and the experience of human freedom and i think in this bizarre cavalier dunham way where we've elevated the convenience of in shopping to the highest level manifestation of human freedom and we've said anything that enhances my shopping experience is a good thing and there's no downside you know so yes here's my location and we do as i say we give a government any time we want to hear you i'm here i'm here on there and then you correlate it with what the other folks you know exactly who how far read in a book who i talked to after i read the book what music i listen to who i so say with where i go when i go to church what i do when i demonstrate anything anything and it's kuno be put together and for those who say we have been dying government with the not only is that a betrayal of our whole tradition of suspicion of government but it gives license to any government in the world so i say here's a two bit dictatorship in north korea showed that they could hack into the most one of the most sophisticated electronic corporations in the world sony and get their most intimate little e mails and everything bad mouthing each other and north korea can do it any government can do we're just off the shelf stuff that's what eric schmidt's and his book off the shelf stuff any dictator can do it and our government has now given a moral cloak to people who do that and say oh no it is about governments have to do they have to invade the privacy of their services so we betrayed the basic idea you know we have the sovereignty of the individual has been betrayed that ocean in the eyes of the world so if the roberts ruling in supreme court which happened the middle of last year is a step forward at least recognizing the fourth amendment with our electronic devices the phones then when is the pushback going to come if clearly the phase of courts have not honored that in that in the time that has passed since then and clearly the just recently in the last week or so the cia announced its expansion and ten more sections that will be monitoring you know date our data even that much more closely when that comment when's the pushback from the people come and that's why i'm here talking to you i'll take any opportunity to talk to him in all due respect to just about anybody who's willing to talk about it no i'm not you know it's interesting the books only been out now for about a week and a half but i've done a number of panels i was a back at a forum in new york that had some very smart people there i mean i saw i get around and i first i thought well all these guys are going to dump on make us you know there's a lot of people been following these issues and you know a lot more than i do about some of the ins and outs the software engineering and all this stuff you know and the only criticism i've gotten so far is i'm being too kind to google and apple and you know that's going christmas hurt i mean no no one says snowden describe that on the book where he appears on the head of a robot you know and he's and you know moscow in their interview well that's the elite of the technology you know surrogate brain and all these people were there these people paid seventy five hundred bucks for a seat there just had conference and you know at the end a game of standing ovation because they know he spoke the truth and they knew the business was so now in terms of the pushback let me give you a couple examples when people write excerpts from my book like we do on truthdig or they did  we have all of them but on the bottom and it's from google and it's take action alerts not coming from somebody else is coming from google take action and and takes you to a site where they say joined three million people have already signed up to complain about the surveillance state around the world in a pushing back to save the net where you're getting that message from wikipedia now you're getting it from a lot of people and and i'm not saying it is the same as google will compete as a wonderful institution that's nonprofit and google's out for money but we are getting pushback and one of the disappointing things is that particularly younger people don't seem to have this fear i notice in my own teaching if they've come from another country where freedom is in question or if their parents have recent memories of freedom being challenged then they get it right away but we have been deluded in this country into the idea even though our government has systematically lied to us you know and let us astray and and you know we can watch a movie like selma and see you know the f b i try to destroy martin luther king using what was by today's standards very primitive means of surveillance you had to actually tap into his phone line or have the hotel room next to him and you know listen and follow him you know physically well if they had today's means for a martin luther king they would destroy him and he wouldn't even know what hit him you know and i would have so much stuff that make up stuff play and stuff you know drive him crazy or try to drive the commit suicide will probably would have succeeded with today's means and convince his wife he was when i read the fairest thing in the world you know and so we've had people you know run into trouble i don't know where you're eliot spitzer who i don't was one of the most promising politicians former governor of new york who was the attorney general and when you have to the banks and suddenly what he does with some prostitutes becomes big public knowledge you know scott ritter who a former marine who was involved in pointing out there were no weapons of mass to struction in iraq and played a truly heroic leading role next thing you know he's accused of doing some stuff on the internet which some cop who's pretending to be young woman and you know underage and then boom he's in jail for years you know so we have a famous case is you know reporters and others being harassed we know that they go after whistleblowers with a particular vengeance and you know it is one question i raised all the time you know who are the good guys in this thing you know we always like to think you know we know but no we don't know i mean i asked people who i said well what about the obama mystery or is it really was it really just george bush you know who did it well then how come obama comes in and he's going after  whistleblowers and truth tellers and government and persecute prosecuted and persecuted more of them than all previous presidents combined that is horrible fact here's a constitutional law professor who knows what everything i've said so far in this interview was accords with our sense of american history why hasn't he told us he has the bully pulpit what why doesn't he get up there and tell people why he's got to cut off the n s a and why kill that the f b i run amok and so forth he says he would be president if not for martin luther king well you know one of the christmas so movies it was too harsh about lyndon johnson well but my view of lyndon johnson is why know hillary clinton's secretary of state they know was going on why didn't they tell us and of all the stuff they were doing you know was valid needed you know they say well we couldn't tell you because the bad guys would find out what the bad guys assume the worst about you anyway we really i mean when it was your bag i would have to be you know mentally you know defective to think his cell phone is not tapped you know or that you can read his e mails or something you know that you know  you know the people you didn't want to tell was us because we might object we might say no you were claimed and still justify those means and you know not doing the right thing so they did level with us you know and then so what is representative government about said about voting us what those women did in iraq sticking their purple stained fingers up in the you know it's supposed to be about an informed public making decisions about what their interests are speaking of recent of elements another reason development was the fine discovery by i believe it was kaspersky who does internet security related software finding out that the and as a has install on the firmware of most hard drives software that they can monitor what's going on with the hard drive and at the program goes back fourteen years so basically back to you know nine eleven i mean that seems like a pretty to me that was a pretty scary development even with all the snowden revelations that this program goes that far back and is that and that they have kept it secret for that long i mean the hard drives are like on everything now obviously are you know we've got the computers any of the the home you know tivo units you just hard drives it just seems like they have really been work in this situation for a long time you know you have to ask what with a sinking because you know i'm a maybe they had this idea this would never we'd never learn this but you know stuff comes out might take longer and you want but if you really want to do destroy the internet the use of computers of any kind the vitality of any american company being involved the business model i mean what is the message you're sending to the world you're saying instead of embracing this world wide web instead of embracing this new technology instead of seeing it liberating i remember i was in the old soviet union you know and i was you know covering that for the los angeles times i was there was a fellow at one point you know people had a hard time getting their hands on computers when you went there they have you would know guide the first step to freedom is to be able to communicate be able to use this device as i remember going over my with as a trash radio whatever the stuff you got it radio shack you know and i had a compact was like a sewing machine i went oh when i was you know people were marble what you have and members you know the first machines to come in there and everybody said this is going to be to end of totalitarians is going to be the end of the soviet system and it was and you fear like with the sixty minute show where they can use your car and turn it against you and your car is going to crash and you know you know all the things that are going to happen in your heating you know thermostat in your house is spying on you and your television spying on you and your desktop is spying on you even when it's turned on and you know so almost any story you can make up about how u s imperial government is using it the technology of u s companies or even when that technology assembled abroad but they can get into and distort it and turn into a weapon of coersion and surveillance is over and a you make up will probably be proved true you know one a few months later weeks later i mean it's just unbelievable you know so if you want disparage an american company that selling products are all over the world and you just say well you know say he just goes in there and hard wires their stuff to make it a spy a tool right and then you  start to get this whole feeling well i don't want to buy anything that any american company has anything to do with even if it's assembled in china you know and then you get balkanization the people who love the internet you know to people who invented it  and the only role of governments and regulatory agencies should be to prevent static we don't or you know it's like spectrum space and radio and television that we don't all talk at the same time and that thing can work that's the whole idea of n neutrality and then we can all design our own vehicles and everything to get on it but the main thing is it should not be polluted so that messages can get through it's not censored it's not checked it's not surveilled and then they use this nine eleven thing as as a cop out to say you know no in order to make ourselves safe we have to destroy this this mechanism the science this technology that is really quite liberating into you go mucking about with it and then you know the argument which really requires exploring is the efficiency of what they claim that's the point of the guess because i would make the argument even if you can show me that you are more efficient by ten fifteen but we still have to argue whether it ends justifies the means because you know we believe in freedom and we believe in freedom even if it's not as efficient as as well as how terry government but what we've learned out through human history governments are not offish and they make big errors they go off the cliff you know hitler didn't do the germans any great favor he destroyed what was the most modern effective technologically advanced scientific society in the world in a couple of years nine eleven where this idea is you know the best thing we do to make ourselves secure is frightening heck out of all of our people and that is the most appalling part of this whole thing because in fact when you look at this so called terrorist danger and i say called because it's not some undifferentiated man is and it didn't just spring upon us i mean it has been if wired terrorism we mean attacking ordinary civilians and disrupting civilian life and you know bringing war  to what should be the ordinary existence of people going to work at the world trade center or anywhere else well we've had that since the cave dwellers you know so it was always some nut case come pick up a rock and smash in the head or something that makes some point you know then you had to figure out can we get together and control that person or you know or maybe have a village council or you know or you know and talk make decisions another way so that's always been an issue in terrorism comes from lots of different sources you had a jewish terrorists killed it's a grabby in israel because he and he was on the right side of the old testament you know and yet protestants and catholics are killing each other in ireland claiming to be ra parading out of the same book the ultimate terrorist weapon and by you mean bringing havoc and destruction to people who are just trying to lead a normal life and you know intimidated that was the bombing of hiroshima nagasaki for god's sake i mean what was that you know he's a fisherman kids going to school a bomb was dropped in the daytime to maximize civilian damage and you know fry people you know so you know terrorism cannot be attributed to one religion you know the biggest population that's muslim in this world or in indonesia and in much terrorism you know a lot of the terrorism that's connected with the muslim religion we or at least i hope these are monsters of our creation going to afghanistan you know where under jimmy carter  very much on the ronald reagan we're going to in the words of his big new regime is key carter's national security advisor we're going to give the soviets their vietnam you know and we're going to overthrow a secular government in kabul that happens to be close to the soviets who are after all right share a did this come from you got a guy aside series you don't like them you decide you know well it's not a religious fanatic and you know and this summer you unleash these freedom fighters and isis comes out of that and they move in the lead stability of iraq and then irony of ironies you turn to another group of muslims who actually isis hates and wants to destroy core shiites and you know but they happen to be backed by iran so now you have this crazy situation where these folks from iran are we have said is the are the biggest menace and they're that you know it behooved intelligent people who actually read a book you know i mean anyway this someone i know a lot about course i'm an older guy old guy that old i'm old guy and so i was in vietnam and sixty four sixty five reporting on it and you know looked at this whole situation wrote about it you know and everything and i remember the question i always had for everybody says that how did you ever believe this made sense you have a siri that somehow you member they are it was the domino theory so because this was a you know first time i went to cambodia vietnam with a woman these people are digging in the mud planting rice what the hell is going on here how are you going to cause any trouble for you this was not an undifferentiated movement this was a highly nationalist movement so you know the cuban communist unlike the chinese and the russian kind babar you know that actual is a really was what defined it and so your whole theory is wrong and now it's doesn't make any sense and and no it's not true if we lose in viet nam they won't attack san diego that's the argument it was tell young kids went off to fight you know fifty almost fifty nine thousand of them die in viet nam  three and a half million indo chinese people die over a fiction that if we don't defeat them there they're going to take san diego so we suffer the most ignominious defeat in human history of our history merican history  lifted off the roof of the american embassy terrible situation blah blah and what happens i asked people as well to what happened to your prediction they would be in san diego there in san diego right there fighting for shelf space at wal mart and cosco with the chinese communists there competing i said where their military where they're fighting well what happened after we lose in viet nam communist china in communist vietnam go to war and they're still fighting over these bloody islands and everything else they're still fighting so the whole theory was wrong same thing happens with this terrorism thing we don't really want to know where it comes from we have an undifferentiated simplistic view of this thing you know we would nor the fact difference is saudi arabia has been the main funder our concern about the muslim bomb in pakistan because we want pakistan to back us going into afghanistan and of fighting in iraq so stupidity rahm's and yet intelligence is use this excuse well gathering intelligence everything has to be secret and very you are the first you know not the first whistleblower the one we remember is daniel ellsberg and then ellsberg when i've interviewed him and for my book he talks about you know he waited forty years for another whistleblower and that was there were snowden i mean there were some in between what was the significance of daniel ellsberg and if you look at good the back of my book you'll see i have a blurb from then you will prove who remembers that i was that his trial but also john dean who was in the white house as white house counsel then they both blurb in my book and i know both these guys you know so you ask yourself what was said about what was a pentagon papers about well no one's ever been able to say there was a single secret in the pentagon papers that we didn't have a right to have because daniels who didn't just turn over all of the thing and pick what he thought you know he was an expert on national security so we didn't turn over some stuff that he thought maybe could compromise some individuals he turned it over to senators and he turned over like snowden stone turned over to the washington post guardian just throw it out there you know let them make decisions about how to handle this material acted so what did we learn from the pentagon papers we learned that and war made no sense and we also learned of you live titus thing up and get out of there you got to be a lot better off but we didn't share that of measure of the american people we just let the american people in on something that they had a right to know but their knowing it proved embarrassing for the administration to gotten everybody killed saying so that's the whole thing with the screw up and put in people who don't work it's about five minutes to these people in power so many of them that you have personally interviewed do they actually believe the lies that they're passing on to us well the biggest liar most of the biggest cyber the one who got most people killed that i interviewed was robert mcnamara an interesting thing i don't know why i'm laughing cause is tragic but he w being i challenge him we both have to be speaking at harvard at one point when there was a big demonstration and he was still secretary defense when debate the issue and i you know i was the editor of ramparts rather but well when i finally got to interview him he was head of the world bank and he put vietnam off limits i mean it was amazing that he was willing to be interviewed but and then we got that movie the fog of war which people haven't ever seen that documentary it's they should go get it somehow and it's basically the the story of robert mcnamara and at the end of his life he gave this a do and he wrote a book too and in which he basically admitted he didn't know which end  and he was part of a bureaucratic machinery and lyndon johnson a guy wild in the thing never made any sense and he even says in the fog of war i could have been just if we lost the war meaning america was not so powerful because we did lose  so i would have been judged a war criminal and not only for vietnam for he was involved with the strategic bombing of japan as a young much younger man and there deliberately destruction of japanese villages  talking to him was very critical of what he'd done he had gone through some self exam anation i would say one of the guys i find really interesting is ronald reagan and i never was one with what ronald reagan was so close simpleton i always thought it was like you shouldn't demean actors most of the actors i know are quite intelligent reagan had run a union the screen actors guild he grew up in the depression his father lost his job just like my father did his father went to work for the new deal and his first biography whereas the rest of the reagan said you know if not for the new deal we wouldn't have i would have been able to grow up properly i would live on school or anything and so you know then he said the democratic party left me get rid of them and there was these folks out there the hardline hawks that that's when they start again magistad about whether reagan's got all simers or senile or something because he was making sense so i think reagan at the end he had also learned what the savings and loan scandal that happened on his watch at these bankers weren't so wonderful and that business had to be watched and so as i pointed out of my last book the great american sticker by the end the reagan's term he actually was put through more regulation rather than less so you know i was wrote a thing about how in my whole analysis of the reagan and then i got a nice little personal letter from then see reagan thanking me for my insights so maybe she even agree with me i don't they forget it was richard nixon who made the opening to china i made the opening to russia and realized it was a dead end to keep fighting with these people you know so maybe he got some wisdom a unfortunately with that we are out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spend time with us today ok and thanks for giving me opportunity and you know what we could talk of six months from now you can tell me whether i got it right or wrong so i was wearing a george bush is an international terrorist he said i had five of them and i would wear them you know all the time basically for many years and i was in an airport in d c and discovered that i wasn't allowed to board the flight unless i changed my shirt and  woman complaining apparently about my t shirt who thought if you're going to be a terrorist you're probably not going to wear a shirt that says international terror is not right so probably had less to worry about me than anybody else i mean i'm wearing the shirt of course i'm not going to  complain but but then they put me on another flight two hours later and gave me a free ticket to anywhere in the country for my trouble so you know that worked out well but actually then i consulted a lawyer that i know and he said actually under you know the law you did not have the right to wear that t shirt at the airport if they want to change it they don't have you don't they don't have to let you on the plane you know it's it is their right to tell you to change your t shirt not yours to wear the one because it seems basically like feudalism to me for the most part you know when you consider that it's like mostly banks you know big big property owners to own the whole country and then like you know other people see a theoretical in their houses and actually they're just paying it off their whole lives mortgages you know and then and then most of us are renting and we're just completely at the mercy of massive property holders we have no rights whatsoever democratic rights or any of that kind economic rights none of that stuff you know to control i mean some places they do a little bit you know san francisco you know they can't raise the rent more than one percent a year but they get around it by moving their relatives in for six months and then they can raise the rent to whatever they want my rent in portland has gone up