[Music]
a couple of days ago we told you that
the national security agency had read
our
emails and was effectively threatening
us with them leaking them
it's not a statement you would make
lightly known wants to go on tv and say
the government's spying on me you sound
like a lunatic except when it's true and
in this case it is true and of course
it's not just
this show you're spying on a lot of
people
and they should stop because it's
illegal yesterday we had a long
conversation with
officials at the national security
agency we got a statement out of them
and they effectively conceded yes they
read our emails they have some
justification for it
but it's not justified it never is
accepting cases when national security
is threatened
nothing that we did would ever threaten
national security period
liberals used to understand that they
were very worried about this program
back in 2006 joe biden himself
said he was worried about the nsa spying
on american citizens
i don't have to listen to your phone
calls and know what you're doing if i
know every single phone call you made
i'm able to determine every single
person you talk to
i can get a pattern about your life that
is very very intrusive
and the real question here is what do
they do with this information that they
collect
that does not have anything to do with
al qaeda and we're going to trust the
president and the vice president united
states that they're doing the right
thing
don't count me in on that so now joe
biden is in charge of the national
security apparatus
and his administration has turned it on
americans who he has redefined as
combatants domestic terrorists white
supremacists
where does this go from here we think we
know and we're deeply concerned about it
we know the nsa is collecting data from
american citizens
spying on them they have a heart attack
if you call it spying that's exactly
what it is let's stop using bs language
it's spying
in a house judiciary committee meeting
today a senior microsoft executive said
that most americans would be
stunned if they knew how often the
federal government used secret orders to
collect information on them
while the recent news about secrecy
secret investigations
is shocking most shocking is just how
routine
secrecy orders have become when law
enforcement targets an american's email
text messages or other sensitive data
stored in the cloud
throughout the obama trump and biden
administrations
up to a third of all legal demands we
receive
from federal law enforcement include
secrecy orders
up to 3 500 in just one year
and these are just the demands on
microsoft add the demands likely served
on facebook apple google twitter and
others
and you get a frightening sense of the
mountain of secrecy orders
used by federal law law enforcement in
recent years
so what we need is an investigation into
what exactly is going on we have the
largest bureaucracy
in the history of mankind
there's never been a human organization
larger than the american federal
government
and so we need to know what the
important parts of it the parts with a
lot of power
are doing in our name we need an
investigation and today at that hearing
at least one republican member of
congress matt gates of florida
called for that
the most watched cable
news host has been stating for the last
several nights
that the nsa has been monitoring his
communications
and amazingly the nsa has issued a
statement
that is so couched it is functionally at
admission
and it's not like the nsa's never lied
to us i mean
we were told that there was no bulk
collection of americans data
turns out there was bulk collection of
americans data we cannot count on these
people
to police themselves join me in calling
for inspector general investigation
into any monitoring that the nsa or any
other element of the intelligence
community
has engaged in relative to tucker
carlson because these denials
these couch denials raise more questions
than they provide answers
they gather the information and they
threaten you with it information
is power the more they have the more
power they have over
you and if they don't like your politics
it's a problem
so we do need an investigation and
tonight the house minority leader kevin
mccarthy of california
has called for that an investigation by
the house intelligence committee we'll
see what happens
glenn greenwald meanwhile is one of the
people who is responsible
for what we know about what the nsa does
he broke the original story of the nsa's
mass surveillance under the obama
administration he writes now for sub
stack we highly recommend he joins us
tonight glenn thanks so much
for coming on so your position on this
has remained consistent for more than a
decade
american citizens unless they pose some
obvious national security threat
imminent national security threats
shouldn't be targeted by their own
government for spying
why is that not the position of everyone
in journalism
that's a really good question you know
it's interesting when i did the
reporting with
edward snowden in 2013 in 2014
liberals loved that reporting so much
that they gave us
every award that they have to offer the
pulitzer the polk the film that was done
about
uh my my work with edward snowden was
given an oscar i went up on the oscar
stage they couldn't
lavish enough prizes and praise on us
and now here we are
after the trump years and we know that
the democratic party and journalism in
general
has aligned with the cia the nsa and the
fbi
and has aligned and merged with the
security state and so in response to the
report that you did you would think
other journalists
just out of self-interest even if they
dislike your ideology and you
would say we want to know whether the
nsa is abusing their powers
in order to spy on journalists they
dislike and instead they
mocked it they said that oh he has to be
paranoid in order to think this and they
took the nsa statement that i have seen
over and over tucker over the last eight
years that is designed to mislead the
public they use their carefully
constructed words to say
tucker carlson is not an intelligence
target of the nsa which may be true
but what that leaves out is that there
are so many other ways that they have to
spy on the communications of american
citizens
without making you a target without
getting a warrant they have
huge authorities that really haven't
been reined in
since 2013 and 2014 i'm glad to hear
kevin mccarthy other gop leaders
calling for an investigation but the
reality is that in bipartisan washington
nancy pelosi and chuck schumer
have been joining with the likes of
kevin mccarthy and mitch mcconnell
to expand the nsa to kill any attempts
to reform it so these are kind of empty
words
i totally agree with that mitch
mcconnell is 100 on board with what they
do
i got a number of calls and texts they
won from politico asking me
well who are you emailing and i think
clearly you would never claim your
emails are being read by the government
unless you could prove it
again you said crazy person we can prove
it it happened
but now the line is well you must have
been emailing the wrong people
i was under the impression as a
journalist and an american citizen
i have the right to email anybody i want
is that not the standard any longer
tucker ponder the authoritarianism
needed for them to say that think about
the premise there they're saying
that if you talk to somebody that the
nsa has decided should be spied upon
it means that that person even though
they've been charged with no crime and
convicted of nothing
is up to no good they're like a
terrorist or a threat and you yourself
are
also the whole point of the reporting
that we did is that the nsa spies on
millions and millions of people
indiscriminately if you're a journalist
it's almost impossible
not to talk to a target of the nsa they
target everybody constantly all the time
that's why they're this huge sprawling
agency
but the authoritarianism that is
pervading journalism says
if you're talking to somebody the nsa
doesn't like you're a bad person
it's and we're not we're not going to
put up with it uh at all once they have
the information
then they threaten and control you and
that's what they were trying to do to us
glenn greenwald i appreciate it
and your reporting which we have new
appreciation for thank you