America’s Big Brother

Leticia Wiggins 
Welcome to History Talk, produced by Origins, a project of the public history initiative and the Goldberg Center and the Department of History at The Ohio State University. The American philosopher John Dewey once wrote, "History which is not brought down close to the actual scene of events leaves a gap." Our goal with Origins and History Talk is to fill that gap and help make for more engaged citizens. We hope you enjoy what you find.

Patrick Potyondy 
Welcome to the inaugural relaunch of the Origins podcast. I'm Patrick Potyondy, one of your cohosts and I'm joined by the dynamic Leticia Wiggins, the other cohost.

Leticia Wiggins  Hello, everyone. Alright, in this episode of History Talk we have three guests right now. First, we have Dave Hadley, history doctoral candidate and author most recently of America's Big Brother, A Century of US Domestic Surveillance, which is found on the origins.osu.edu website say hello, Dave.

David Hadley 
Hello.

Leticia Wiggins 
Next both, the editors of Origins have joined us. Steve Conn is a professor of US history, who blogs on Huffington Post and the Chronicle, among other things. So, say Hi Steve.

Dr. Steven Conn 
Hello.

Leticia Wiggins 
And third, but not least, we have Nick Breyfogle, who is a professor of Russian and environmental history.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
Hello, hello.

Patrick Potyondy 
Alright, let's get right to it. The first question and we'll start with Dave here. So not to bring out the, you know, Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, in all of us. But one of the first things that should maybe be addressed here is were any of you that surprised when Edward Snowden leaked these documents? And maybe second about the apparent capabilities of the US intelligence system to collect all this information? Were you actually that surprised when this came out?

David Hadley 
Well, I'd have to say I wasn't actually that surprised with some of the initial discoveries. I think as the summer progressed, and as more came out from what Snowden was leaking is, I did get surprised at how far reaching some of the NSA programs were, especially, most recently, right before the article was published, actually, it was the revelation that they had been, in addition to this, you know, semi legal framework. But that they'd also just been straight up breaking into the Google and Yahoo kind of cloud interface and that there's even in the PowerPoint presentation explaining how they do this, there's a little smiley face, written in by the presenter making it to demonstrate like this is where we're tapping into the system, smiley face. And so that did surprise me that first off that they'd be willing to do that and be so kind of cavalier about that.

Dr. Steven Conn 
I was surprised by a couple of things. And I guess I'm trying to figure out whether there's a distinction between the, the scale of all of this, whether that really is something that is different in then what has gone on, as you point out in your article, Dave, for at least a century, whether the digital world makes the scale of this so enormous that it really is qualitatively something new for us. So, I was certainly surprised by the scope of all of this, the gratuitousness of some of it. I remember enough of, of the old Richard Nixon in Watergate hearings to remember that there were at least political reasons why Richard Nixon went after the people he did even though it was entirely illegal. A lot of this stuff just seemed arbitrary and why bother? I was also surprised by the figure of Edward Snowden himself that a man with a pretty unusual educational background winds up as a private contractor with access to this top-secret material. I wonder how many Edward Snowden's are out there in this because it isn't just the employees of the CIA or the NSA, it's apparently a whole world of outsourced private contractors,

David Hadley 
I mean, security contracting is a huge industry in the United States. And the fact that Snowden was able to access as many files as he did wasn't just that he had access to all of those files. But well, one of the points the NSA makes is well, this information secure and we collect it, but we don't look at it without a court order. Yet, Snowden was able to get this material because shortly after he began working at the station in Hawaii, he can he basically talked to some of the other employees there and to giving them his passwords, as his explanation was, well, he needed that to do his job involved with IT. And so, it's not exactly the kind of, you know, highly secure location that we might think of like a kind of popular culture representation at the NSA.

Dr. Steven Conn 
Yeah, and one of the things that emerged during the height of the Iraq War was just how much of the American military's operations have been outsourced. And at one point, there were even more private contractors in Iraq, and there were American military personnel, and that raise some questions probably not enough questions, frankly, about what that means for a democracy to essentially be outsourcing its military like this to profit making enterprises and I think those questions arise here as well.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
And this for me, I mean, we talked about surprise, the greatest surprise was that there was this mid-level, lower-level guy who had access to all this material, I mean, extraordinary to me that someone in the NSA wouldn't have thought to themselves, please, we should protect all this material we're gathering legally or illegally. And because they clearly know where they were gathering some of it legally as the smiley face attests but I mean, how does this random guy who, you know, he's a young man, not much experience necessarily and suddenly is able to get. So that, for me was an enormous surprise what didn't surprise me is that we were collecting all this data. And I think that we have such a long history in United States of, of data collection and this sort of thing, in all sorts of different ways. Also just struck by the, by the technology of it all and the fact that, I mean, we really shouldn't have any pretensions that anything is private anymore. I was struck. Just the other day we were taking photographs on my wife's iPhone and the iPhone, not only organizes the pictures in it by date, but by location which was taken so somebody at Apple knows where we were on that lovely Sunday afternoon while, we took those pictures. And they knew that we change locations on that Sunday afternoon. And so that, you know, the idea whether it's Apple or Google or whoever I mean, and so the notion that anything we do digitally is private strikes me is unsurprising in any sort of a way.

David Hadley 
And I do think that the, I think it's an interesting issue, the level of privacy that we would have today in the digital world is that obviously a lot of information about us is collected and sold, you know, quite, you know, openly so in order to, you know, advertise this, if you go on Facebook, and you notice that there's, you know, something advertising to you chances are that that's part of an algorithm that is designed based on your viewing history as to what you'll get it which leads to some disturbing questions as to why in some cases, you're getting some of those advertisements as what were you possibly looking at that could have gotten them to recommend those.

Dr. Steven Conn 
This is a family broadcast. Bring this in.

David Hadley 
I'm not saying anything about what I have been recommended. But part of that distinction is that those records well being held by a lot of different people, I guess it's are they being held, is it less disturbing if they're being held to sell you something, that you have the choice as to whether or not to buy and that they are periodically erased just because these private entities don't really want to invest in the infrastructure to save them over this period of time. Whereas the NSA has put, you know, a lot of effort into being able to save just a tremendous amount of data every day.

Leticia Wiggins 
Right, kind of tying into this, like one thing I'm struck with is how upset some people are in somehow not upset a lot of other people are on when the story originally broke. And it's interesting, there are a lot of people who are incredibly wary of the government collecting information from emails, you know, for example, but as you all mention, they're perfectly comfortable with Google or Facebook, already having all of that information and other information too. So, but why is there this discrepancy with what we're okay with people having access to?

David Hadley 
I think part of it ties into the idea of a lack of surprise. Like I think that there's a kind of groundwork laid for this that people expect government to be doing something like this in this particular era. You know, after, you know, after 9/11, after the earlier revelations about the NSA's is more blatantly illegal program under George W. Bush, I'm not sure how much of a surprise it is anymore. So, it's kind of these revelations came out on, you know, kind of prepared ground, I think might be a good way of putting it that there had been some, you know, hints about this coming forward. And so, I'm not sure how many average Americans would have been either surprised that this was happening, or worried about it based on the justifications of counterterrorism. That if, you know, people are saying, well, this is what's necessary to prevent another 9/11 I think that a lot of people are willing to give some leeway to the government in terms of counterterrorism.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
It seems to me there's kind of two reasons why we see part of this difference. I think what you have to say about people accepting that, you know, along with so many other restrictions on rights that we've experienced since 9/11, that this is just one and that we see it as as necessary. But, you know, I was thinking a couple things as to why we see this kind of discrepancy. Partly, I think that you see a difference between how people approach Google or Facebook than how they do the government in part because Americans, you know, or at least  some Americans have little discomfort with government. And that there's a long and, and storied kind of tradition of being antigovernment and worried about government and governments always in your face and doing this and, and that the sort of association of any kind of state agency or government agency is being bad inherently is, is something that is that's deeply inbred and in in our, in our society. And so, we might trust Google or Facebook, in part because well, ultimately, all they really want to do is make money. Well, that's fine. The government has potentially in the minds of men, I think many people, all these other nefarious types of things that they might want to be doing with this information, which I think we don't associate with Google. I also think that part of the difference, part of the reason we have a discrepancy between businesses and private actors and the state is, is the question of legality in the sense that, well, part of what the NSA was doing was legal part of it was legal through the FISA courts. Part of it wasn't. Now ultimately, what Google, Facebook, all these all this data collection they do, it all has to be legal in some respects, or at least we haven't discovered that they've been somehow illegally collecting data. There is this sort of sense that the NSA not only was doing something that was pretty extraordinary in terms of the volume of data collection, but was doing much of it illegally and unconstitutionally and this sort of thing.

Dr. Steven Conn 
So do you think this is also maybe has a technological explanation and what I what I mean by that is, you know, in the good old days of domestic spying, somebody could break.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
I miss those days. I miss those days.

Dr. Steven Conn 
Somebody broke into your house and tapped your phone and they put a little bug they just really called and they put a little bug on your phone. And so in that sense, when people would discover this or when news would about this would come out, it really did involve a kind of physical violation of your private space in a way that maybe playing on the internet doesn't in quite the same way. It's somehow doesn't feel as invasive as when they're taking pictures of me through my bedroom window from a van across the street. Do you think that's work?

David Hadley 
I mean, that would make a lot of sense to me. I guess what I'd be careful in trying to just for myself come up with some kind of grand explanation explaining like the American reaction to this is that I think part of that technological change is a very important one, and that we are more and more used to surveillance and it's also something that's I mean, it's represented in popular culture, a lot that we've seen before this kind of idea and If you look at, you know, some of this post 9/11 popular culture, a lot of it focuses on, you know, the dedicated government agent with wide ranging powers who's, you know, acting in your interest now that it's an interesting counterpoint to the people who still have greater suspicion, I would say and who are more taking a kind of heritage from the 1970s, that there's a smaller group that's protesting this that is kind of bringing up the 1970s the reasons to distrust government. But I think the larger reaction is very much more of a post 9/11 reaction.

Patrick Potyondy 
Bringing us back a little bit to that kind of international angle, after the story originally broke, it came out that the US had been spying on foreign leaders, including high profile ones, right, as we all know, including Angela Merkel, among others. At the same time, the US has alliances at varying levels with many of these countries that that the US had been spying on. And so, have these leaks hurt America standing in the world, especially since President Obama ran on a platform of restoring the country's reputation?

David Hadley 
I think that they're going to make Alliance diplomacy a lot more awkward in the near future. Especially, you know, the Germans are a major player internationally. And that's probably not going to change anytime soon. And so, the fact that I mean, not just that the NSA was spying on Germany, but that they were directly tapping into Angela Merkel's cell phone, an actual, personal slight that she'd be feeling. And it's actually one of the more worrisome aspects that it's unclear whether or not Barack Obama knew about this or not, and he claims that he didn't even know which, I mean, it'll be up to future historians to determine whether or not that that was true or not. If it is true, that's somewhat disturbing that surveillance on that high profile figure was not something that the President himself knew about.

Dr. Steven Conn 
Either way, it's problematic. Either he knew about it or he didn't know about it, and there's no good answer. That was actually one of the things that did not surprise me about the go back to the first question we dealt with, in the sense that nations have always spied on each other. And so, we shouldn't be altogether shocked that this was going on and that it isn't still going on. It hasn't gone on and all kinds of different ways. I think you're right, that the level of personalness seems as I said before, gratuitous that we did this because we could not because it served any larger interest. And I do wonder, I do think that it will make as you call it Alliance diplomacy more difficult in the near term. I suspect not all together in the long term. But that points up another issue that I think is worth thinking about, and I think may explain why some of the people who are upset about this are upset about it, and that is the tremendous continuity that you talked about in the article. I think that it underscores just how difficult it is to put Pandora back in the box and administrations come, administrations go. This was true for our nuclear policies. This has been true for a lot of things, especially since the Second World War, we have created a machine that goes of itself.

David Hadley 
At a certain point, I mean, it would just it's of a size that would make real direct supervision a difficult thing. I mean, the NSA is over 100,000 employees. And now it has, you know, billions of different types of communications that it intercepts. And so, you know, in that sense, you could say that it's very difficult to keep a close eye on it. But I think the foreign element, what's particularly interesting about it, is how the NSA's foreign activities can also impact the domestic side that there's not this really clear divide necessarily, and that, you know, we know there's cases where they've got around issues with domestic law at home by essentially asking our partners in the United Kingdom to do it  for us and then they pass it along if it was something we wanted to know. And we, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have essentially since World War Two been part of the kind of informally known as the UK-USA agreement that's essentially making a very strong concerted allied intelligence effort. But spying abroad can also now lead to information at home. The internet isn't, you know, a entering data on Facebook in the United States doesn't guarantee that that's going to be saved on a US based server.

Dr. Steven Conn 
And that distinction that has been central to American spying between what goes on somehow domestically and what is international, that lines always been blurry.

David Hadley 
Yeah. And I mean, that's what the Pfizer court was created to try and address of these points where foreign intelligence activities, intersected with domestic ones. But the idea is, well, we want to be able to spy abroad, we think that's important and necessary. And so what this is going to do is try to create a framework in which we can do that espionage abroad. And then the court is supposed to implement what's called minimization procedures. So that it minimizes how much of an impact this has on actual US citizens. But the Pfizer court in a lot of ways is kind of a compromise between, you know, strong intelligence, and at the time, you know, strong cold warrior types, and those who wanted greater control over the NSA over the CIA.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
I think this distinction between domestic international which is crucial in some ways to this whole story is also one that that kind of speaks to how others outside the United States view us, because the very fact that I mean, you asked the question earlier about what impact does this have on America standing and this whole question of is going to be harder to create multi-lateral bilateral agreements, and this sort of thing. I'm not sure it's gonna have much of an impact. I mean, I think ultimately the US you most countries who are paying any attention are enormously distrustful of the intentions of the United States, I think we, in the United States tend to believe that we're the good guys out there. But that's not how much of the rest of the world looks at us. And this is one, you know, the case in the case of Angela Merkel is a classic example of the things that we do, and we do on a regular basis suddenly brought to light. But folks around the world know that we're doing this, maybe not to the degree but I mean, I think that, you know, the sense that I've received from friends outside of the US is that, you know, they shrug their shoulders, they sigh it's just another moment of the US doing what the US is going to do. And because we can, because we're big kids on the block, and, and so we're allowed to do that. But it's also just another example for people around the world of how we play this this this very hypocritical game that we believe in one set of laws for people inside our country and we believe in another set of rules for those outside the countries as if we're that much better than everybody else, that our rights should be protected, but nobody else around the world should have their rights protected. And it really, the hypocrisy of that is plain  to the rest of the planet, particularly when we go around with our hyperbole about being, you know, being this great bastion of democracy and, and, you know, these kinds of ideas and ideologies of what we stand for freedom, democracy, all these sorts of things. Well, freedom, democracy for us, but not for other people.

And I would like to point out in terms of the that this is a sense that what a lot of people do is that it's not as though the United States is the only person or is the only country obviously, it's not a person sorry.

Dr. Steven Conn 
It's not a corporation.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
Not yet. The supreme court may vote on that still.

David Hadley 
The United States is not the only country that does this kind of surveillance. And so, you know…

Dr. Steven Conn 
Well, and I wonder if this distinction that we've been talking about here. It's sort of domestic versus International. And how do you draw a line that separates that? Is that a distinction that other countries also make? If I find my British citizen living in England, do I have my Google email supposed to be treated differently than if I'm a foreign national, that Britain is spying on?

David Hadley 
Well, I'm not sure that I'm not sure what Britain's with the average British approach to this would be. But I know that from their intelligence community and from the kind of controls that their government is willing to put on, they in some ways, have a broader reaching ability to keep what they're doing secret like they can still try and, you know, kill stories more directly, and they could do that for longer than United States. And, yeah, they also have an intelligence apparatus that kind of grew up not like the United State. Well, not like the CIA, in which it was a lot more covert and private has a much longer Tradition. And so, I'm not sure that they necessarily would be surprised either what their country has been doing.

Leticia Wiggins 
seems like there's a lot this long history of people involved in intelligence circles kind of just doing what they want. And this isn't unique as you say it to the US. But lately, there's been a lot of talk about legislative reform or oversight of the NSA. And so, do we think this is doable? What makes us think this might be doable?

David Hadley 
I think Well, one of the things is I'd like to clarify is that, while some of these activities, I would say are done more, almost on autopilot than necessary, than necessarily, as you know, them making their own policy. It is important to see that the overall control is that there is executive control. The question is whether the executive will rein it in. And I think that we can go back to the last time, the United States had this major investigation of our intelligence activities, which was the Church Committee in 1979.

Dr. Steven Conn 
Yea talk about that a little bit.

David Hadley 
Frank Church kind of opens up, you know, Frank Church, democratic senator from Idaho, kind of opens up this investigation into the CIA with the question, you know, is the CIA, a rogue elephant? Is it operating on its own? Is it making US foreign policy? Is it getting us involved in things that we don't want to be involved in? But what the Church Committee findings really demonstrate is that the CIA, while doing many illegal things, in the early days of the Cold War wasn't.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
Many many

David Hadley 
Many things, it wasn’t doing them free from executive supervision that more it was doing what the executive expected it to do. And so, in this case, now, I would say that there's a general tendency of the executive I think, to accept and promote these programs, they don't really have a clear reason not to if there's not a great deal of upset about them and they might be seen as doing something against terrorism.

Dr. Steven Conn 
So, in that sense, the issue is not whether these operations are controlled, but it's really By whom? And in this sense, exactly. Congress has more or less been dealt out of this because it has been part of the steady growth of executive power since the Second World War.

David Hadley 
And in some ways Congress has dealt themselves out. You know, the accepting with the Pfizer court setup is there is a senate Oversight Committee on Intelligence, a permanent committee that comes into being after the, you know, after the Church Committee. But there's a question that, you know, what came up after Edward Snowden released, you know, his files is a fairly bipartisan congressional reaction that was, they told us about this, and we were fine with it, and it's essentially the executive is directing these things, and Congress has, you know, nominal oversight, but how much they're actually doing of that and whether they could demand a greater role for themselves in the system. I think That's very open question.

But you make an interesting observation that in fact, what we have is a bipartisan indifference to these revelations, by and large, there are some people who've been very upset about this. But there doesn't seem to be the energy to try and reassert Congress's role in this the way there was in the 70s with Senator Church, which had nothing to do with international events it had all to do with domestic spying.

And in the funny thing about that is that Watergate in some ways, represents some kind of democratic strength for the American intelligence community. Because the reason Nixon is going to these amateurish, you know, private actors, is that the FBI stops cooperating with them, and the CIA refuses to cover up what he's doing.

Dr. Steven Conn 
A nice point. That's a nice point.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
I think the whole question of the changes of technology is something that I think is really interesting that I wanted to just kind of bring in at the end again, because I think this this is something that is wanting to I feel like as we go forward, we are we are I mean part of what this event reflects is, is this massive change in how we understand ourselves and what privacy means and, and the sort of notion of privacy and private and public. And the distinctions that we made for generations, I think these are things that are that are transforming so rapidly, I would hope that we would use this is an opportunity to really think about what do these things mean in this digital, you know, increasingly global kind of context. And in a world that is increasingly interconnected?

Dr. Steven Conn 
Yeah, I wonder if we started off by talking about public reaction to all of this. I wonder, I haven't seen any information about this. But I wonder if it isn't generational at some level, that people who remember what a notion of privacy really is, are more upset about this, then people who have grown up attached to digital devices for whom having your personal information out there all the time has is second nature and they don't really have the same notion of privacy. So, in that sense, 10 years from now, 30 years from now, maybe nobody's upset about these kinds of things, because I'm second part of our second digital nature.

David Hadley 
I think that that there's a very real possibility about the importance of that generational divide. But I just like to conclude my part of this by saying that I think there's an interesting historical parallel with what happened with the Church Committee into question whether or not we're at the end of a process, or you know, partway through because before the Church Committee, there were a series of efforts, following some of the revelations of, you know, the CIA's activities or the FBI activities, to assert congressional control and most of those failed, you know, there weren't enough votes. There were several stalwarts who would try and get greater congressional investigation, and they failed until after Watergate in the Church Committee. So, I guess my kind of question for the future is, are we going to go in a direction as to people not caring about this? Or is this is going to be one of the milestones towards a greater reevaluation and reflection about the role of you know, intelligent, security and surveillance in our society.

Patrick Potyondy 
All right, that's a perfect place to stop. So that wraps up this episode of History Talk.

Leticia Wiggins 
And we'd like to thank our listeners and guests again for joining us today.

David Hadley 
Thank you.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 
Thank you.

Leticia Wiggins 
This edition of the Origins podcast History Talk was brought to you by the public history initiative and the Goldberg Center in the history department at The Ohio State University. Our main editors are Steve Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley, our website manager and technical advisor is Mitchell Shelton. Our audio editors and cohosts are Patrick Potyondy, and Leticia Wiggins. Find our podcasts and more at our website origins.osu.edu. Thank you for listening.