Speaker 1: It's great to welcome Tom Hartmann back to the program, Tom hosts the Tom Hartman
program and is also author of The Hidden History Series.
The latest book in the series is The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, How the
Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten US and our democracy.
Tom, always great speaking to you.
Speaker 5: Hey, David, great to be here with you.
Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1: So James Gleich wrote this book, The Information, and one of the things that
Gleich writes in the book is that for as long as there has been any communication technology,
think drums to communicate over long distances in the African savannah.
There has also been the ability to surveil, intercept, send confusing messages to trick
those wishing to communicate in that in that method, and you can sort of follow that with
every communications technology up through today.
When and how would you say that what we might consider the modern kind of surveillance and
lack of privacy apparatus really got going in the United States?
Speaker 5: It was in the late 90s, prior to 1996, the internet operated under the same
telecommunications rules as telephone companies, and this went back to the 1930s.
To this day, if you're on a phone call with somebody and it's actually being carried over
cell towers, it's not a VoIP call.
It's not a voice over internet call because the rules for the internet are now different.
But if you're talking to somebody on a cell tower or on a regular phone for the phone
company to listen in, for the government to listen in, for any third party to listen in,
they have to have a warrant.
There has to be a legal basis for that intrusion.
In 1996, with the Telecommunications Act, Section 230 said, we're going to drop that
for the internet so that that's one piece of it.
The other is another metaphor that to kind of explain where we're at is that prior to
1996, the rules for people who host sites on the internet were very similar to the rules.
For people who own disco clubs, you know, dance venues, bars, restaurants or you're
in your home.
I mean, if you, David, were to put a sign out in front of your house that said, Hey,
big party on Saturday, come on and just leave the front door open and you're sitting in
your living room Saturday afternoon.
The sun's going down.
There's there's somebody raping a woman in the back room.
There's a there's a bunch of people shooting up heroin over in the corner and there's a
guy in the other back room who is who is selling illegal pornography and the police bust in.
They would not only arrest all those people, they would arrest you as the host of the party,
right?
You have a responsibility for what happens in your house that you know about.
And that was, you know, I mean, this goes back to British Common Law back to literally
the 10th century.
So Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 said that's still true for your house.
It's still true for a bar.
It's still true for a restaurant.
Is still true for a civic center.
But it's not true for anybody who builds a house on the internet.
And thus, Mark Zuckerberg became one of the wealthiest men in the world.
He built a house and he said, Hey, come on in and have a party.
And he largely ignored the people who were shooting heroin in the corner and selling,
you know, I mean, they started.
They eventually started cracking down.
Obviously, they were from the beginning and on the obvious stuff.
But even now, there's just I mean, you know, this new report, the January six, was largely
planned on Facebook.
And this isn't just a trash Facebook.
I'm not, you know, he's playing by the rules.
And that's the problem.
I mean, you know, when you have capitalism in a republic, the job of government is to
set the rules so that capitalism can work in a way that doesn't damage society.
And we have failed in that regard.
And so the Speaker 1: Republicans during the Trump era
talked a lot about Section 230, and some of them seemed to think that if the platforms
had greater liability for the content that was posted that it would benefit the right
in some way, I guess, because they believed that the left is regularly defaming and slandering
and so on and so forth.
But they seem to sort of misunderstand the true impact that changing Section 230 would
have, do they not?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think the right's embrace of changes in Section 230 came along
with Donald Trump complaining about how he was being treated by social media.
Right?
And they thought somehow if they repealed that part of Section 230, that, you know,
a thousand flowers bloom or something.
You know, I've never seen the logic in Josh Hawley actually wrote one of the better books
about the horrors of Section 230.
The last half of the book is mostly mostly a screed about how liberals want to destroy
America.
But, you know, the first part of his book is a really good description of the problems
and what's going on and why.
And and you know, you've got people like Ron Wyden.
You know, the my senator here in Oregon, who's one of the leaders of the effort to change
Section 230, but it is bipartisan.
Josh Hawley is on board, too.
So, you know, back in 1980 or 81, I started running forums for CompuServe.
Nigel Peacock, who was still my webmaster and I. He lives in the UK and we were running
forums.
We had like 30 of them, you know, the IBM PC Forum, the Macintosh Forum, the JFK Assassination
Forum, the UFO Forum, the ADHD Forum.
We had a whole bunch of them and CompuServe paid us well.
I mean, we had a staff.
We had about 30 people volunteer, but they weren't volunteers.
We paid them who were working with us.
And it was a it was a fair amount of money that CompuServe was paying us because this
was before Section 230 and they built this house.
It was called.
This is before HTML.
This is before the web as we know it today and copy serve and AOL, we're pretty much
the only game in town.
And so because they had built a house on the internet, they had a responsibility for what
happened in that house.
And so we were the ones who were kind of the hall monitors.
And in 1996, when Section 230 passed, basically they laid us all off.
Mm-Hmm.
That was why they stopped paying us.
Right.
Speaker 1: You could keep working, but we're no longer going to.
Yeah.
You know that there's progressive, conservative and libertarian perspectives in terms of opposition
to the sort of surveillance that that we now know takes place.
But they're they're sort of different principles.
It's sort of like with flat earth you talk to for flat-Earthers, they all believe the
Earth is flat, but for conflicting and sometimes very, very different reasons.
And progressive conservatives and libertarians have different reasons for opposing the practices
that we see now.
Can you talk a little bit about those different perspectives?
Speaker 5: With regard to Section 230 or just more, more generally, we're seeing things.
Well, you know, I think to the extent that and we're seeing this in particular with the
with Republicans across the country tightening the screws on your right to vote, that the
the for lack of a better phrase, the police state aspect of because in my book, I basically
bring out two kinds of Big Brother.
There's the state Big Brother, which is what George Orwell wrote about.
And then there's the corporate Big Brother, which George Orwell hadn't anticipated and
which is actually, at the moment, far more aggressive.
Or at least, you know, the tip of the iceberg above.
I mean, Ed Snowden kind of showed us what government was up to, but.
So anyway, the right seems to be embracing kind of the police state tactics with regard
to voting and and would be or generally are more inclined to to to.
Not so much embrace police state tactics on the internet, but to say that, you know, if
if the billionaires who are running big social media sites want to do what they want to do,
they should be allowed to do it.
There's just this reflexive thing against regulation.
Libertarians pretty much the same thing.
I mean, libertarians, this the Libertarian Party was a scam was created in the 1940s
by the real estate lobby as a way to provide a political cover for basically deregulation
of the industry.
And, you know, they thought of it as as as a scam themselves.
I think it still is to a large extent.
You know, the idea that a country can work with nothing but the military and the police
being provided by the government and the courts.
But I think most Democrats are slowly beginning to realize or understanding my party metaphor.
Really, I mean, this is this is really what it is, is that you have to have rules for
the game.
You know, the NFL defines the rules for football.
And if the NFL went all libertarian, you know, they they were all Republican as it were.
You know, they could they would probably change their rules to say, Well, you know, whichever
team gives the biggest contribution to the guys on our board of directors gets an extra
player on the field throughout the game.
You know, we can we can tweak things if there's enough money involved and that kind of thing.
That's sadly and that's what they've done.
I mean, there you have Rick Scott's new 11 point plan promoting deregulation of the polluters
because their big campaign donors to the Republican Party.
So with regard to privacy in the United States, I think the dynamic is just very similar,
David, Speaker 1: when it comes to, you know, in
Europe, we've got the GDPR.
California passed the Consumer Privacy Act in 2018, so at least people know what personal
data is being collected about them.
Are those types of laws significant and impactful?
Or do they give people maybe some kind of false sense that something is being done?
Speaker 5: They are significant.
They do have impact.
They they these are those laws are why when you visit websites that want to do business
in California or in Europe, they will say, Will you accept cookies?
Right?
It's it's like a flag.
It's a it's a way of saying, Well, yeah, there is something going on here.
We are sort of spying on you or keeping track of you or, you know, or maybe it's just to
help your experience.
And in some cases, it is actually.
But in any case, I think that that's that's something that we need to, you know, really
seriously look at is the in particular the European rules and the one.
There's a whole chapter about this in my book in Europe that we definitely do not have.
Here is the right to be forgotten.
This came out of a 2018 lawsuit.
Or maybe it's twenty eight.
No, I'm sorry.
I had to look up the year, but you know, there was a Spanish guy who discovered that whenever
he googled his net, he had gone through a rough divorce and bankruptcy back in, like
1998 and lost his property, lost his business.
And when he googled his name, he was at a real, low profile guy.
And when he googled his name, that was pretty much all that came up and it looked really
bad on him, you know, and it was impeding his ability to to to get data and find a job.
And so he he asked Google to delete that from their search.
You know, things that came up when his name was put in, Google kind of laughed at him.
He sued in Spain, and European Court went along with him.
And now you've got, you know, this was the right to be forgotten across Europe, where
if you don't like what is being said about you on the internet, you can't necessarily
always petition individual websites to take down the content about you, but you can ask
the search engines to no longer deliver it to people.
And that's a pretty consequential thing.
And I know a lot of people in the United States are probably very much appreciate that particularly
people who have been a victim of of, you know, what's the phrase for when mostly men manner
outing, you know, old girlfriends with porn pictures and things like that?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
What is the term for that?
I don't remember the term.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like revenge porn, I think.
Yeah.
Yes.
The phrase.
Yeah.
So anyhow, that's something that we should seriously look at as well.
Speaker 1: If.
Last thing I want to touch on if the direction that things have been.
Going isn't resisted in some of the ways we've talked about and that you write in the book
what what sort of at the at the tail end of it, I mean, is it the direction of like the
Chinese social credit system?
You know, everybody has some different idea of what they believe would be sort of at the
end of this, what do you think would happen if this goes on a post?
Speaker 5: We already have a business version, the Chinese social credit system, and there
are companies that brag that they have 10, 15, 20000 data points on every single one
of us.
They know our most subtle preferences.
They know if we've, you know, for example, if they're providing information to a company
that's trying to decide whether to answer your customer service, call in two rings or
in two hours, you can tell that company if you have recently browse the website of that
company's competitors.
So are you one of those people who's calling in and saying, Hey, I'd like that price match?
Well, you get to wait two hours or if you're a regular customer of that kind, you know,
just really, really granular data and some of which could be used to, you know, basically
harass or embarrass people, as well as to increase the profits of companies.
So and similarly, there are companies that specifically market, you know, this kind of
social credit score.
And it's not just your finances, it's not just whether you pay your credit card on time.
It's, you know, whether you've ever been arrested for drunk driving or whether you've ever been
in an altercation with anybody or you know how you behaved online.
In some cases, they're selling this information to employers, they're selling this information
to landlords, they're selling this information to retail companies, they're selling this
company to companies, you know, just to cell phone companies and airlines and everybody
else who get calls from customers.
There's the potential for abuse is extraordinary.
And I'm not saying that it's not appropriate to do that.
You know, if I was a landlord, I would like to know if the person who wants to rent an
apartment trashed the last one and let dog poop.
All right.
That's not unreasonable.
But there there have to be reasonable limits on this stuff, and there are none right now.
Speaker 1: The book is The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, how the Death of
Privacy and the Rise of surveillance threaten us and our democracy.
The book's author is Tom Hartmann.
Tom, always appreciate your time.
Speaker 5: Thank you, David, it's always a great, great honor and pleasure to be here
with you.