Transcription
So, if I was to go down the rabbit hole on Diddy, or I'm sorry, on Epstein, here's where it gets a little weird, right? Like, all right, the guy didn't really have the credentials to hold the jobs that he had. Strange. The person who was his mentor was a part of OSS, which was arguably the precursor to the CIA.
>> Not arguably.
>> Okay. Strange, right? Uh, I forgot the guy. Um, my gosh, I forgot his last name, but, um, it's, uh, strange. Okay. Nobody knows where the money came from from the fund.
>> Strange.
>> Strange. Oh, right. Like, all right. Now, he, he committed these crimes and he was allowed to leave jail. Where did they, he was convicted?
>> And he was allowed to leave. It's like day furloughs. Strange.
After knowing he was guilty of this stuff, the most powerful people in the world still coalesced around him. Pam Bondi just admitted there are 10,000 tapes and then got caught on camera and then had to do some sort of weird impromptu thing from her, like, I don't know, drive, some weird press conference like, yeah, there were 10,000 tapes and they're with kids who's on them. And, and the, so now the conspiracy theory is, all right, Jane Maxwell's father has some maybe potentially strange connection to. Long story short, people think he's an asset.
>> Yeah.
>> And that he's capturing leverage on some of the most impowerful, powerful people in the world to use as a lever for the desired outcome you're talking about. But no president put that operation into place if it, in fact, is real.
>> No US president.
>> You haven't thought about him being a foreign asset. So this is how the game of intelligence works. You want well-placed people who can get you access to other well-placed people. Imagine if he was an asset for Israel, and then no matter what problems he ran into in the United States, Israel had the kind of leverage over the United States to get him out of whatever that trouble was. Because what Israel wanted was him as an intel asset. But what the United States wanted was justice to be served. But do they care more about justice of one person, or do they care more about the international diplomatic relationship between them and Israel? Just as an example, right?
>> Uh, when it comes to national security, when it comes to national security, the calculation changes because you're trying to protect a nation.
>> And sometimes you break the rules for individuals to protect a nation. And when you start to pick apart the Epstein case specifically, all those strange elements that you talked about, how do those things happen? You, you start to see a pattern that's very much in line with what an intelligence operation looks like.
>> Got it.
>> But then you land on exactly the same question you landed on. Why would any US president make that happen? Maybe it wasn't.
>> Got it. Okay.
So, the CIA isn't just going rogue. Essentially, if they did play a role in killing Kennedy, Kennedy didn't direct them to kill Kennedy, then. So, is that just conspiracy, or how could somebody have infiltrated the CIA to be like, "Kill that guy"?
>> Yeah. So, there's a, the Kennedy example is a fantastic example because there's, there's two overlapping issues here. The first is that pre-9/11 CIA was a very different animal. Prior to 2001, CIA operated with very little oversight, very little approval. It was essentially just like the Rottweiler of the president. There was no Senate Intelligence Committee. There was no director of national intelligence. There was no forced cooperation with FBI or NSA or DIA. That they were just, you go and do your thing and you, you know, Operation Midnight Climax, MK Ultra, all these crazy ass things that involved American citizens. They just went and did it because they were told to by the president. But then we dropped the ball on 9/11, and we dropped it in a very public way, and, and the 9/11 Commission that came out in 2003 identified who's, who's supervising CIA, and oh, by the way, who's supervising all these other too, NSA, DIA, NGA, etc. So then a huge thing that came out of the 9/11 Commission was the development of the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, whose job it is to coordinate all the intelligence services.
>> That's Telsey now.
>> Correct.
>> Got it.
>> So post-2001, we have a completely different CIA than pre-2001. So, Jen Kennedy was a long time ago. So how, how did that wild Rottweiler of a CIA handle Kennedy? It could have been any number of ways. The president was Kennedy, but were they, were they trying to do what Kennedy directed, or was there some element of them that disagreed with the president? Because we saw that happen in 2016.
>> Right?
>> Yes.
>> And is that really a rogue agent if the whole agency is kind of on board?
>> Outside of control. Exactly.
>> Wow. Okay. So, I want to, I want to segue to this for a second here. We're talking about 9/11, right? And we're talking about national security, and I have been told broadly, um, that, listen, you don't want to see 9/11 happen again. Okay. Well, then you got to sacrifice some of your freedoms. You don't get it both ways. And I, by the way, I genuinely think that's probably true.
>> M.
>> So, so I'll let you tell me if I'm right or I'm wrong here, but now you're starting to see stuff like Palunteer, the Real ID, and it's like, then you had Snowden exposing, hey, we weren't just spying on bad guys, we were spying on you guys. So the first question is, are there significant sacrifices with regard to privacy that need to be made for security? Yes or no?
>> It's, it's hard to break that into a yes or no answer, right? So, let me just, let me give you how we look at it at the agency. There's a spectrum.
>> Um, a spectrum that covers the gamut from security on one side of the spectrum to convenience on the other side of the spectrum. And it's just one line between security and convenience. So that means when you stand on that line, the closer you get to convenience, the further you get from security. And the closer you get to security, the further you get from convenience. So every individual gets to choose where they land on that spectrum. But we're all on the same spectrum. So if you take us as a, as a whole organism, the United States, do we want to be a convenient nation, or do we want to be a secure nation? Because you're going to have to sacrifice conveniences to become secure. And part of those conveniences are not necessarily your freedoms, but the way that your freedoms are experienced is absolutely part of that convenience. So if you want a country that is not, uh, easily accessed by foreign radicals, then you need to have some sort of surveillance capable of tracking those foreign radicals inside the United States. And that's what Snowden actually reported on, the, the collection of metadata.
>> Can you define metadata, please?
>> Absolutely. So metadata is, um, it's like the secondary and tertiary data, the technical data.
>> Because they're like, metadata is not important. Just metadata.
>> Metadata is like the, yeah. It's, it's the ancillary information that that piggybacks with important information. Okay.
>> I, I dial your phone number.
>> Your phone number is not metadata.
>> Oh, it's not? I thought it'd be like, our conversation's not metadata.
>> Your phone number is not metadata. Our conversation is not metadata. Even the encrypted channel that you and I are using to talk is not metadata. The metadata is a signal was sent on this day. That signal was sent using this platform.
>> That signal connected to another device that was a, that was of this type of genre. Right? Metadata is all that intelligence services need to be able to connect suspicious behavior. Right? Because now if I always call you at 2:00 on every Thursday.
>> Uh-huh.
>> And it's always the same.
>> Connecting towers and whatever the hell.
>> Correct.
>> Same device signal or whatever.
>> That's, that's strange. That's not a husband and wife having a conversation. So who's having a segmented conversation in that way? Or when, when we find that your metadata ID is also contacting somebody in Pakistan.
>> Ah, that's strange.
>> So metadata is enough for us to be able to start connecting dots so that we can go to an organization like FBI and say, here is metadata tied to, you know, phones, phone device IDs that are suspicious to us.
>> Pakistan.
>> Can you grant us the authorities to now collect inside the United States on this person?
>> Is that a FISA? Is it?
>> Yeah. Well, FISA is freedom of, of, uh, yeah, foreign intelligence surveillance collection is a FISA warrant or FISA connection or FISA authority.
>> Got it.
>> So, you're trying to get somebody with the correct authority to collect on that information.
>> Okay.
>> Snowden's problem, just to finish that point.
>> Yeah. Oh, I have a whole bunch of questions for you on Snowden.
>> Snowden's problem wasn't that he was wrong that we were connecting, that we were collecting against American citizens. We were collecting against American citizens, but we were collecting metadata until the American citizen showed a pattern of behavior to suggest that they were supporting terrorism.
>> Got it.
>> And then we move through proper legal channels to collect information on that target. CIA believes that all people are born with a spy secret superpower. For some people, that means they can win deals. For others, they can spot liars. Some can even seduce lovers. I built a free 3-minute test to help reveal to you exactly what your secret hidden superpower is. All you have to do is click on the link in the description below, take the test, and start using your spy superpower to stay ahead of 99% of people without that. And when Snowden ratted us out worldwide and told all of our adversaries about this, when he did that, he also undermined multiple other collection platforms that had nothing to do with the collection of metadata against American citizens. So Snowden's a bad guy, clear and present, not because of his whistleblowing effort, but because he chose to build insurance into his whistleblowing effort by working with American adversaries and compromising multiple other programs that had nothing to do.
>> He went to Russia.
>> And Hong Kong and, uh, Latin American countries that were hostile to the United States. Like the dude, the dude only worked with adversaries when he did his whistleblowing. That's not someone who's trying to help.
>> Oh gosh, I thought he was like a hero.
>> Most people think he's a hero. There's a reason that the court system and the executive, the both judicial branch and the executive branch both agree.
>> He's a bad guy.
>> Son of a.
>> Yeah.
>> Oh my god. He's portrayed in movies and I've watched different interviews with him and it's like, I fell on the sword for you. Well, I gave up everything and I'm in exile because I was trying to, you know, expose this to you. I had no choice but to blow the whistle. Your government is surveilling you and they think you're enemy number one. And I was like, "Oh, God."
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's not like that at all. It's, it's what's really heartbreaking is all of the true American heroes who worked at NSA, who built those programs, and the true American heroes who submitted requests to the, uh, to the Director General of NSA saying, this collection might cross a legal boundary. Right? There's lots of paperwork. There's lots of people who filed those complaints. There's lots of people who raised it the right way, and because of the demand for protecting American lives, security, and convenience, because the focus was so much on security,
>> Legal powers in the, in the legislative, in the judicial branch decided, we are going to continue to collect this even if it does push a social boundary.
>> The boundaries.
>> It wasn't until that went to a civilian court that it was deemed to be illegal. In all of the vetted secret courts, it was continually approved and approved and approved. It wasn't like the president pushed it through. It was multiple branches of government that pushed through the idea, if we're going to collect on terrorists, we have to have the metadata inside the United States.