How the US government spies on people who protest -- including you | Jennifer Granick

101,728 views ・ 2017-09-14

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We are all activists now.
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(Applause)
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Thank you.
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I'll just stop here.
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(Laughter)
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From the families who are fighting to maintain funding for public schools,
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the tens of thousands of people who joined Occupy Wall Street
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or marched with Black Lives Matter
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to protest police brutality against African Americans,
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families that join rallies,
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pro-life and pro-choice,
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those of us who are afraid
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that our friends and neighbors are going to be deported
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or that they'll be added to lists
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because they are Muslim,
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people who advocate for gun rights and for gun control
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and the millions of people who joined the women's marches
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all across the country this last January.
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(Applause)
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We are all activists now,
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and that means that we all have something to worry about from surveillance.
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Surveillance means government collection and use
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of private and sensitive data about us.
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And surveillance is essential
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to law enforcement and to national security.
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But the history of surveillance
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is one that includes surveillance abuses
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where this sensitive information has been used against people
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because of their race,
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their national origin,
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their sexual orientation,
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and in particular, because of their activism,
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their political beliefs.
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About 53 years ago,
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech
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on the Mall in Washington.
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And today the ideas behind this speech of racial equality and tolerance
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are so noncontroversial
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that my daughters study the speech in third grade.
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But at the time,
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Dr. King was extremely controversial.
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The legendary and notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed,
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or wanted to believe,
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that the Civil Rights Movement was a Soviet communist plot
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intended to destabilize the American government.
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And so Hoover had his agents put bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms,
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and those bugs picked up conversations between civil rights leaders
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talking about the strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement.
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They also picked up sounds of Dr. King
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having sex with women who were not his wife,
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and J. Edgar Hoover saw the opportunity here
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to discredit and undermine the Civil Rights Movement.
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The FBI sent a package of these recordings
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along with a handwritten note to Dr. King,
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and a draft of this note was found in FBI archives years later,
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and the letter said,
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"You are no clergyman and you know it.
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King, like all frauds, your end is approaching."
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The letter even seemed to encourage Dr. King to commit suicide,
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saying, "King, there is only one thing left for you to do.
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You know what it is.
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You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self
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is bared to the nation."
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But the important thing is,
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Dr. King was not abnormal.
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Every one of us has something that we want to hide from somebody.
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And even more important,
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J. Edgar Hoover wasn't abnormal either.
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The history of surveillance abuses
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is not the history of one bad, megalomaniacal man.
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Throughout his decades at the FBI,
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J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed the support of the presidents that he served,
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Democratic and Republican alike.
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After all, it was John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy
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who knew about and approved the surveillance of Dr. King.
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Hoover ran a program called COINTELPRO for 15 years
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which was designed to spy on and undermine civic groups
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that were devoted to things like civil rights,
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the Women's Rights Movement,
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and peace groups and anti-war movements.
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And the surveillance didn't stop there.
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Lyndon Baines Johnson,
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during the election campaign,
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had the campaign airplane of his rival Barry Goldwater bugged
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as part of his effort to win that election.
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And then, of course, there was Watergate.
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Burglars were caught
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breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters
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at the Watergate Hotel,
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the Nixon administration was involved in covering up the burglary,
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and eventually Nixon had to step down as president.
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COINTELPRO and Watergate were a wake-up call for Americans.
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Surveillance was out of control
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and it was being used to squelch political challengers.
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And so Americans rose to the occasion
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and what we did was we reformed surveillance law.
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And the primary tool we used to reform surveillance law
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was to require a search warrant
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for the government to be able to get access to our phone calls and our letters.
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Now, the reason why a search warrant is important
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is because it interposes a judge
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in the relationship between investigators and the citizens,
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and that judge's job is to make sure
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that there's good cause for the surveillance,
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that the surveillance is targeted at the right people,
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and that the information that's collected
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is going to be used for legitimate government purposes
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and not for discriminatory ones.
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This was our system,
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and what this means is
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that President Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower.
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The system is set up to prevent something like that from happening
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without a judge being involved.
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But what happens when we're not talking about phone calls or letters anymore?
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Today, we have technology
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that makes it cheap and easy for the government to collect information
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on ordinary everyday people.
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Your phone call records
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can reveal whether you have an addiction,
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what your religion is,
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what charities you donate to,
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what political candidate you support.
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And yet, our government collected, dragnet-style,
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Americans' calling records for years.
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In 2012, the Republican National Convention
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highlighted a new technology it was planning to use,
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facial recognition,
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to identify people who were going to be in the crowd
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who might be activists or troublemakers
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and to stop them ahead of time.
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Today, over 50 percent of American adults
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have their faceprint in a government database.
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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
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concocted a plan
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to find out what Americans were going to gun shows
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by using license plate detectors
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to scan the license plates of cars
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that were in the parking lots of these events.
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Today, we believe that over 70 percent of police departments
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have automatic license plate detection technology
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that they're using to track people's cars as they drive through town.
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And all of this information,
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the license plates, the faceprints,
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the phone records,
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your address books, your buddy lists,
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the photos that you upload to Dropbox or Google Photos,
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and sometimes even your chats and your emails
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are not protected by a warrant requirement.
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So what that means is we have all of this information on regular people
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that's newly available at very low expense.
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It is the golden age for surveillance.
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Now, every parent is going to understand what this means.
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When you have a little baby
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and the baby's young,
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that child is not able to climb out of its crib.
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But eventually your little girl gets older
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and she's able to climb out of the crib,
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but you tell her, "Don't climb out of the crib. OK?"
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And every parent knows what's going to happen.
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Some of those babies are going to climb out of the crib.
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Right? That's the difference between ability and permission.
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Well, the same thing is true with the government today.
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It used to be that our government didn't have the ability
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to do widespread, massive surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans
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and then abuse that information.
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But now our government has grown up,
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and we have that technology today.
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The government has the ability,
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and that means the law is more important than ever before.
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The law is supposed to say
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when the government has permission to do it,
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and it's supposed to ensure that there's some kind of ramification.
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We notice when those laws are broken
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and there's some of kind of ramification or punishment.
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The law is more important than ever because we are now living in a world
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where only rules are stopping the government
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from abusing this information.
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But the law has fallen down on the job.
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Particularly since September 11 the law has fallen down on the job,
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and we do not have the rules in place that we need.
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And we are seeing the ramifications of that.
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So fusion centers are these joint task forces
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between local, state and federal government
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that are meant to ferret out domestic terrorism.
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And what we've seen is fusion center reports
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that say that you might be dangerous
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if you voted for a third-party candidate,
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or you own a "Don't Tread On Me" flag,
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or you watched movies that are anti-tax.
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These same fusion centers have spied on Muslim community groups' reading lists
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and on Quakers who are resisting military recruiting in high schools.
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The Internal Revenue Service has disproportionately audited
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groups that have "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their name.
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And now customs and border patrol
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is stopping people as they come into the country
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and demanding our social networking passwords
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which will allow them to see who our friends are,
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what we say
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and even to impersonate us online.
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Now, civil libertarians like myself
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have been trying to draw people's attention to these things
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and fighting against them for years.
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This was a huge problem during the Obama administration,
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but now the problem is worse.
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When the New York Police Department
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spies on Muslims
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or a police department uses license plate detectors
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to find out where the officers' spouses are
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or those sorts of things,
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that is extremely dangerous.
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But when a president repurposes the power
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of federal surveillance and the federal government
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to retaliate against political opposition,
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that is a tyranny.
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And so we are all activists now,
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and we all have something to fear from surveillance.
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But just like in the time of Dr. Martin Luther King,
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we can reform the way things are.
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First of all, use encryption.
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Encryption protects your information
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from being inexpensively and opportunistically collected.
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It rolls back the golden age for surveillance.
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Second, support surveillance reform.
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Did you know that if you have a friend
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who works for the French or German governments
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or for an international human rights group
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or for a global oil company
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that your friend is a valid foreign intelligence target?
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And what that means is that when you have conversations with that friend,
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the US government may be collecting that information.
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And when that information is collected,
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even though it's conversations with Americans,
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it can then be funneled to the FBI
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where the FBI is allowed to search through it
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without getting a warrant,
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without probable cause,
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looking for information about Americans
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and whatever crimes we may have committed
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with no need to document any kind of suspicion.
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The law that allows some of this to happen
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is called Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act,
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and we have a great opportunity this year,
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because Section 702 is going to expire at the end of 2017,
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which means that Congress's inertia is on our side
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if we want reform.
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And we can pressure our representatives
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to actually implement important reforms to this law
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and protect our data from this redirection and misuse.
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And finally, one of the reasons why things have gotten so out of control
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is because so much of what happens with surveillance --
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the technology, the enabling rules and the policies
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that are either there or not there to protect us --
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are secret or classified.
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We need transparency, and we need to know as Americans
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what the government is doing in our name
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so that the surveillance that takes place and the use of that information
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is democratically accounted for.
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We are all activists now,
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which means that we all have something to worry about from surveillance.
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But like in the time of Dr. Martin Luther King,
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there is stuff that we can do about it.
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So please join me, and let's get to work.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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