Zaid Jilani talking:
when Trump says he wants to close parts of the Internet, you know, when people are fighting with us, I mean, is he saying to take Iraq and Syria off the Internet? I mean, that’s crazy. I mean, that’s actually what Assad—Assad did that in Syria during the start of the revolution, is he actually knocked off parts of the country from the Internet. And, you know, I actually met a man who was involved in the revolution. They used a little USB dongle, and that we used to put them on donkeys and send them to the next town, right? I mean, is that what—is that what Trump wants to be doing here in the United States? And it’s also interesting, just the idea of knocking people off the Internet. You know, our intelligence agencies actually like to have access to people’s social media accounts and to—and to people putting out broadcasts, so they can actually—can track people who may be, you know, doing us harm. So I don’t think that just sort of walling off the Internet to certain parts of the world is necessarily going to solve much at all.
And I think that it also goes back to the debate about surveillance. I mean, there’s no evidence that the bulk collection of data would have stopped the San Bernardino attack. I mean, it’s entirely speculative. And even in cases where we do have sort of a paper trail—like, for example, Dylann Roof, laid out a detailed manifesto about what he was doing. We had plenty of public information about, you know, the weapons he had and such things, and yet we didn’t use that information to intercept him in any way or to surveil him in any way. So I think, actually, there is a danger in collecting too much information, and I think, actually, that’s what Paul was getting to.
And even in the case of San Bernardino, isn’t it the fact that the woman who was involved with this attack was just actually openly on social media talking about violent jihad? This didn’t take going deeply into some, you know, private part or encrypted parts of communication.
there’s been this huge attack on encryption following the Paris attacks, and yet we don’t have any evidence that they were using encryption. I mean, they were using unencrypted data to move this stuff around. So, you know, a lot of the times it’s not necessarily about, you know, we have to get tougher, we have to get more intrusive, we have to take away more of our liberties. It’s more about like, hey, we have the police, we have the tools, we need to go to them and say, “Hey, what are you doing here? Maybe are you just collecting too much information to where you can’t sift it sufficiently?” And that’s a real threat, as well.
Arun Kundnani talking:
there’s two moments where someone said something I think is correct. One was Rand Paul actually saying, you know, the problem that we have with surveillance is we’re just collecting so much information that we can’t analyze it properly. I mean, most actual incidents of terrorism, that’s been the issue. The person was known, information was in the system, but it couldn’t be assessed. So, you know, I think the idea that we just need to suck up more and more data is completely misconceived.
And the other aspect here is, you know, if you look at those posts that Tashfeen Malik made in the San Bernardino case, they weren’t in English. So you’re talking about recruiting huge numbers of translators, if you want to do this mass processing of data. She wrote in Urdu.
so, we would need to have an army of Urdu translators, if we’re going to—if we’re going to look at every social media profile of everyone applying for a visa. So, who’s going to vet the translators that we’re going to recruit? Right? We don’t have the translators to translate their social media posts. We get sucked into craziness when we start thinking like this.
the ratio of surveillance agents here in the United States that’s comparable to East Germany before the fall of communism.
if you look at the number of agents in different intelligence agencies within the United States looking at the domestic situation, we have such a huge number now working there in those kinds of agencies. But if you look at the ratio to the number of Muslims in the United States that are subject to that surveillance, the ratio looks roughly the same as what the East German population was facing under the Stasi. So, you know, roughly for every Muslim in the United States, I think, if I remember right, it’s about 70 or 80 intelligence agents who are spying on them—same ratio that Stasi had. And, of course, the lesson here is that that level of surveillance doesn’t tell you what you think it tells you, because, after all, the Stasi didn’t anticipate their own downfall.
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Zaid Jilani
staff reporter at The Intercept.
Arun Kundnani
author of The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror.
— source democracynow.org