David H. Price | American Surveillance State, Dual Use Anthropology, & The Restrict Act

00:07 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan. There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man, until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view and find the more you think you know less you really do. We'd be without THC! We know they're lying to us just don't know what degree. I said great car wooden company

00:58 Here we go again, Hireside Chatters doing the thing from sunny San Diego. I'm Greg Carlwood and when you reflect on the way America's attitudes have changed about privacy and surveillance over time it might be one of the most radical all-encompassing cultural shifts we've had in the last 50 years It's a change in attitude that spans all races classes and ages of citizens today And I can't help but think it might not be 100% organic Where people were once skeptical of state-sponsored eavesdropping, wiretapping and surveillance... ...today they stand in line, spend thousands of dollars to maintain and frequently update devices that would make our great grandfathers roll over in their graves. And even though the American Empire has a long history of keeping an eye on ideological rebels critics and dissidents

01:47 Today's citizenry acts so surprised when counter-narrative experts and those with criticisms of power are pushed out of the digital conversation. From Hoover's dossiers to the modern day cell phone ads, surveillance is no stranger to the American empire but our complete acquiescence certainly seems to be something new Maybe this mass acceptance process started with the Patriot Act and airport processing. But give people a shiny screen and little added convenience, and they'll open up everything to the prying eyes of government and corporate manipulators." And the push for digital everything everywhere all at once is clearly aimed at advancing this agenda until your contacts, communications, travel, transactions and energy use are all thoroughly tracked, traced and ultimately throttled. But hey, at least your Alexa device can play music when your hands are full and your Ring camera captures the occasional trips & slips on front porch steps!

02:40 It's all clearly an interesting and dramatic change for American culture, and few people have had their finger on the pulse like today's guest David H. Price. He is a professor of anthropology at St. Martin's University Department of Society & Social Justice who has been thoroughly examining the crossroads of anthropology in the national security state for several decades tracking the intelligence agency's use of academic anthropologists at key times in history the steering of public perception, and highlighting just who it is the government has watched most closely over the years. His books include Anthropological Intelligence—The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, Threatening Anthropology—McCarthyism in the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

03:24 Weaponizing Anthropology, Social Science and Service of the Militarized State. Cold War Anthropology, The CIA, The Pentagon and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology And the recently released American Surveillance State How the U.S. Spies on Dissent It's gonna be a wild one so let's do it! The anthropology author and astute surveillance state spectator, The Peoples Professor David H Price welcome to The Higher Side Thank you so much Greg really nice to be here Yeah, I appreciate you doing this. Your work was brought up in an interview with a guest who goes by Schwab and then I actually found your book Cold War Anthropology as an online PDF which was a great read and that goes deep into the intelligence agencies overlapping with academics in your field of anthropology and the effects of all that. And then you were kind enough to share with me your latest book American Surveillance State which is clearly pretty relevant but to break us in here

04:20 Let's talk about the journey of doing this work and writing these books, which I understand comes from shooting your shot with many, many Freedom of Information Act requests over time. Is that right? Yeah, that's right! You know, I started off as a cultural anthropologist. I did some archaeology and a lot of cultural anthropology in the Middle East I had a long interest in the history of anthropology, and I knew a little bit about the Freedom of Information Act when I started over 30 years ago doing this research. And so what I initially did is, I just started using the Freedom of Information Act to make first dozens and then hundreds of requests for records on anthropologists. And I started off with anthropologists because that's my field. I'd heard lots of rumors about anthropologists

05:15 working for the CIA or during World War II doing all sorts of intelligence work. And I was interested to see what sort of records I could find, and it took me in directions I didn't think I would go in. You know one of the first big surprises is I was surprised how much anthropologists were being spied on by the FBI or harassed by the FBI during the 1950's when they were involved in racial equity campaigns. They're involved in civil rights campaigns, very much linked to their anthropology and that sort of lit a fire under me and I just started doing more and more requests looking at a whole range of things from public intellectuals to political figures and started sort of doing an anthropology of the national security state. I love it! That's a great intro

06:11 So we've covered a lot of examples of dual use, mainly in technology and these things that get developed that can then be weaponized and have militaristic applications. But how would you describe dual-use anthropology? Yeah the way that I use it comes very much from the sort of biomedical sciences which is very much anchored in the idea coming up with some sort of a treatment for a disease, there's also the possibility that whatever you're doing could be weaponized. And I use that very much in terms of looking at anthropologists' engagements with military and intelligence agencies. A lot of this grows out of the Second World War when World War II started in the United States within the first year and a half of the war

07:09 At least half, some will say up to two-thirds of American anthropologists were full on engaged in the war effort. And they were doing things like teaching languages. You know so much of the war was going on in the Pacific where there were these languages that Americans had very little experience with whether it was in Micronesia or Polynesia Japan or in Asia there were anthropologists who'd lived in these places and had firsthand experience. And so, anthropologists became very valuable at places like the OSS, the predecessor agency to the Central Intelligence Agency which comes into existence a couple of years after the war or working in the State Department or for military intelligence, naval intelligence and such

07:59 And really what happened very quickly without people really thinking about it, the sorts of ethnographic knowledge that anthropologists had. Anthropologists who'd been living in say Micronesia where battles were going on and the Navy needed people who could go in and try and negotiate now use negotiate very loosely negotiate or talk to local people and try and smooth things out for essentially military occupations that were going on during the war. And I got really interested in looking at, especially in the Cold War how there were lots of research projects that were funded that were of interest to anthropologists for their own reasons they wanted to study these very different cultures

08:53 But in terms of the geopolitical interests of the Cold War state, there were other uses for this knowledge. So while an anthropologist might get a grant from a private foundation like The Ford Foundation or Rockefeller Foundation or from The National Science Foundation, or from a CIA funding front where they had no idea where the funds were really coming from The anthropologists in good conscience could be working on a project that was of interest to them. It might be about religious structures or social structure, just how things work in a small village community but there were often other uses for this and this is where I use dual-use in terms of thinking about dual-use anthropology where anthropologist did work for their own reasons

09:47 But the state had different reasons for wanting this work done. Right, right? Yes well it's good to have someone around who knows the culture because it's just proper manners to at least let a people know they're being strong-armed and steamrolled It's just rude not too And I wanted to ask you a little more about FOIA requests themselves because surprise surprise interview A lot of people who use the FOIA process And I've picked up that it seems to kind of be an art form of sorts, and you've done this far into the triple digits. So talk to us about that process and give us some tips and tricks you've picked on over the years to get better results because its not exactly straight forward." Sure!

10:32 You know, when I started, I had no idea what I was doing. I read an article in Rolling Stone about the existence of the Freedom of Information Act and that first request I made, I just sent off a letter and just you know, dear FBI, I am interested in getting the FBI file of... And it started with this anthropologist Leslie White who I knew had been a socialist member of the Socialist Labor Party from the 1930s up until the 1960s And I just wrote them and the FBI wrote back and said, no it doesn't work that way. Because of the Privacy Act you need to establish that this other person is dead. This is how I learned was by through trial and error and then there were several mentors who had been doing this for some time who helped me out. I help other people out as they're getting started. There are these two acts, The Freedom Of Information Act and The Privacy Act

11:30 Well, the Freedom of Information Act says you can request files from almost any. There are a couple you can't almost any federal agency under the Freedom of Information Act for documents and the Privacy Act says that you and I who are among the living at this moment we have privacy expectations that other people cannot get identifying files that mention us But once we die, our expectations to privacy die with us fortunately. And so you need to if you're doing it on an organization, you can just make a request of any federal agency almost any federal agency on organizations for files and they're supposed to write to you and let you know whether or not these files exist. It's a very basic process when I do a request say the FBI

12:29 or maybe State Department, or CIA. You can do it online electronically but since I started so long ago and have a whole filing system it's just easier for me to use a very simple form letter where I say dear FBI, I'm requesting the file on this person in order to prove that they're dead here is printed copy of their obituary that I probably got online and then I'll put maybe three to five sentences describing who the person is incase there someone else has the same name And then there are a couple of little magic words you can throw in. There's a Clinton-era executive order that says that any records that are over, I think it's 35 years old, they're supposed to really release without a lot of hassle with it. Of course they can do national security exemptions and things like that

13:21 And that's pretty much it, and then you wait. The amount of time you wait could be ridiculous! If you're lucky it could be as short as say three to six months maybe nine months but I've had some that have taken over seven years uh...to get. Wow wow Yeah and once you get it there are course redactions Redactions are the crossed out sections But they have to tell you why they redacted it. So in the little margins, there'll be used to be little handwritten notes but most everything is scanned at this point so it's a little computer code that's over there and they give you a key so their little numbers on there and usually its things like they could've redacted something under the Privacy Act. While they can release things on the person that I've established as dead

14:13 There might be informers or the names of agents or things like that, that are on there and they can redact those. They have national security clauses. There are a whole bunch of different reasons why they can do it they can withhold entire pages, you know there's all sorts of things like that. Again they have to tell you why in a very general sort of sense it can be... You know there's one that says this could reasonably be expected to harm diplomatic relations with another country I mean they have all these things right and If you're satisfied with what you got, and a lot of the time especially since I'm doing... A lot of what I do is historical. It's pretty easy to get some very informative documents even with the redactions if you're fine with that, you can stop but The next step you can do if you think too much as redacted or there's something you really want to know more about You can do an in-house appeal

15:11 which is very strange and essentially you wind up writing a letter making an argument about why something that you don't know what it is should be released. And I actually do okay at that stage, I might succeed maybe 1 third of the time doing that which isn't bad Sometimes I've gotten really important documents released, but you're in a difficult position because you're trying to make a logical argument about something in a black box that you don't know what it is. Yes And if you fail at that and you really want something You can pay court costs which I think now are about 100 and 150 bucks something like that and go to the nearest federal court to you and ask for help from a judge

15:58 And I mostly don't go that route. I have enough other things to sort of keep me busy, but if something's really important enough that's certainly worth doing Yeah, that's a good breakdown. I do like that later stage aspect of trying to get creative with how you can get access to something that you really don't know what it is, but there you go people if you have a research project that you might be working on a decade from now it's never too early to start clearly so get those FOIA requests in now And you did give us the overview, but I'm curious based on the rumors what some of the first threads were that you pulled on concerning this overlap with intelligence agencies and your academic field. When did you actually start to get a sense of the real depth of this relationship and its implications? Because it's no small thing. Well that really started in graduate school. I started graduate school at the University of Chicago in the mid 1980s

17:00 And I had a strong interest in the history of anthropology, and I would go down the hall and talk to the oldest anthropologists in the department about various things. And I don't quite know how it started but I started developing an interest in what American anthropologists had done then 40 years earlier during the Second World War. So if there were people that were in their 70's or 80's or 90's which they're They all had these amazing stories and very little of this had been written about. And I did that for several months informally, you know? I didn't even keep notes. I was just collecting stories with sort of this black hole in the history and of course 40 years is sort of history but it's not like its ancient history.

17:54 An anthropologist, a historian of anthropology in the department, very famous anthropologist George Stocking found out what I was doing and he cautioned me. Not in a bad way but he said to me it's like you really don't want to be doing this. This could blow up in your face. This remains a very controversial thing to talk about, anthropologists assisting the military Whereas, of course during World War II it was we're fighting Nazis and fascists and everybody's joining in. Most everybody is joining in and these sorts of things but there was a rethinking of a lot of these relationships during the Vietnam war

18:37 I sort of wondered if this Professor Stalking was doing his own project on this and was trying to get me to not step in where he was, but I think he actually was trying to give me good advice. He wasn't working on a project like this, but it just made me all the more interested. So it's something that just stuck in my head. The thing that was interesting is that these elders really wanted to talk about it and they were somewhat conflicted. They kept saying things like Right now, it might not make sense to you that I would do this thing. There were anthropologists who worked in the camps in the war relocation authority camps that locked up Japanese American citizens here in the US and some of them by my own personal judgment did some pretty horrible things and some of them did heroic things as do some of the internees characterize

19:33 what they did. And by that I mean, they stood up for the people who were being incarcerated and their rights and tried to get better treatment for them and got in trouble for those sorts of stances they took. So it was sort of a slow start starting off being interested in World War II. Then you know, I did field work...I started off doing doctoral fieldwork in Yemen and then it became politically impossible So I did my dissertation in Egypt. And when I was in Egypt, there were just all of these stories I would hear about archaeologists or anthropologists who did very simple sorts of things that did involve collecting intelligence. I had a professor

20:20 who had been involved in Aswan Dam project, reconnaissance project in the 1950s and 60s. The Aswan Dams built in the early 60s. A lot of archaeologists went and worked in Nubia in the northern part of Sudan, southern part of Egypt where it was all going to be flooded when the dam was made. I had a professor who'd worked on this who said, oh yeah, when I went over there Working on this UNESCO project, he had been contacted by someone he believed was military. They could have been CIA and said carry a little notebook and just jot down anything you see involving troop movements or what sort of armaments you see? So it's very non-invasive. You're just passing through but if you have an eye for knowing what's what in terms of munitions and things like that

21:16 it makes sense that you have these people who can go out there. So I started off just collecting stories and I started keeping track of these stories, and then I would do everything I could to work in archives where often you can find people who are working on projects overseas or writing lots of letters and describing things and sometimes they drop hints very explicitly that they're involved in some military or intelligence reconnaissance And then I just started going full on with the Freedom of Information Act. So, I would sort of triangulate with get ideas of where to look for documentation and then go to archives reading correspondence and then lean very heavily on the Freedom of Information Act. It took me a long time but I wasn't in a hurry

22:08 And I was able to piece together a lot of sort of the Cold War story about how all this worked. Yes Very great summary. And I think mostly we're going to be talking about American surveillance state, but what stuck with me most from Cold War anthropology was probably some of the CIA's front companies or at least one that was connected to the MKUltra stuff funded through the Human Ecology Fund out of Cornell Medical School. Can you talk to us a bit about that? Yeah, the Human Ecology Fund was a CIA front. It had a different name. This actually happens a lot with the fronts. They'll kind of cycle through a couple different names. The other was the Society for something like the Investigation of Human Ecology. They both had human ecology in there. So human ecology was started by this neurologist named Harold Wolff

23:04 And Harold Wolfe was a specialist in brain trauma and in migraines. He had a textbook for many years that was imprinted studying, you know, pain, intense migraine pain. And he had—Alan Dulles' son in the Korean conflict had received a very bad head wound. I think it was a grenade He had shrapnel and a lot of pain and all this. And Wolfe had treated his son, and this is how Dulles met Wolfe. So through this connection one of the strategies the CIA did in the early 1950's was they could run all these off-the books programs, a whole variety of them by creating these things that we now call funding fronts that were created

24:01 So that research programs could be funded either off the books or could be done in public view without really acknowledging what was going on. And there's sort of an interesting history of these funding fronts, a lot of what they funded is very similar to programs that go on now with public funding and one of the reasons was Many of these programs that existed were sort of liberal anti-communist programs, not conservative anti-communist programs. The conservative anti-communists were people like McCarthyism where you're hounding people. There were a lot of liberal anti-communist programs that were funded off the books through these programs because Congress wouldn't fund them

24:51 So you had things like Radio Free Europe was one of these things. And it had a parallel in Asia that later becomes the Asia Foundation, which was run with CIA money and they started off doing things like broadcast but there weren't enough radios in Asia so they switched over to doing more sort of soft power scholarships and things like that. Well the Human Ecology Fund was set up by the CIA primarily to fund social science research and some medical research, but mostly social science that could inform interrogation projects. So MKUltra is of course the big classified name that a lot of these programs fell under

25:40 There's a lot we do know about MKUltra. There is a lot of speculation about MKUltra in terms of what we do know, Human Ecology Fund is really one of the best programs in terms of documentation both because we have some Freedom of Information Act documents from the CIA that they purged and tried to destroy a lot of records from this program but there are also other means We have a lot of documentation how this funding front worked. We have financial reports, we know the projects they funded, we know who the personnel were... I've contacted some of the people who are unwittingly funded through it and after right there's very famous incident that happens during the Korean War when these Americans are captured they're taken up into China up into Manchuria

26:38 and the whole first concept of brainwashing comes into existence where we have this footage of these prisoners war that are just starry eyed glassy eyes saying on american sorts of things. And it really freaked out people in washington dc including the cia and this is really the roots of mk ultra trying to come up with means of you know what they were going to call mine control weather would be hypnosis or using lsd or all sorts of things. And there was a great interest in interrogation and a lot of the programs that were funded through the Human Ecology Fund were very innocuous looking bits and pieces, I think that's the important part they were bits and pieces of the types of research you would want to do if you are going to design forms of interrogation

27:35 or torture that were effective and to try and find out what was what. And so when you look through the Human Ecology Fund list of projects that they funded, there's everything in there from studies in graphology looking at handwriting. And these were very simple studies that were very thinly disguised sort of looking at can you tell when someone is lying by the way their handwriting changes? There were studies in posture that had to do again with trying to figure out if people are telling the truth or lying. I found a whole series of reports that anthropologists were involved in, that we're looking at stress cross-culturally and if you think about how important that would be in terms of interrogation knowing whether or not somebody's lying

28:34 or knowing when they're under stress, that's like most things. Culture is going to have a big impact on that and so what the Human Ecology Fund did is it funded lots of small parts of research that were informing the teams that were making what's now called The Kubark Interrogation Manual which is this incredible CIA manual that in the 1980s, I think it was the Baltimore Sun got released under the Freedom of Information Act. You can just Google KUBARK interrogation manual and you'll get a PDF and you can look at it. It's pretty interesting by my read, the majority of things in there I would not call torture

29:31 Some of the things are torture that are in there. And when I say that, what I mean is maybe two-thirds or some number like that are just very interesting interview techniques not any sort of physical coercion or things like that it has more to do with sorta behavioralism and trying to control a conversation and getting the person who you're interviewing to shift their idea of control from themselves to you and things like that And so this was dual use work where you had people doing, like one of the papers that was looking at stress in other cultures was looking at the grieving process in Polynesian society. It was somebody working on the islands, anthropologists and they were looking how

30:16 At time of death, people... their sense of self disintegrates in this different sort of way. They have isolation and this and this." And on the one hand it's exactly what it appears to be. It's this really interesting essay studying how grief works in another culture but if you know that people who are funding it are interested in breaking people down, it's also this dual-use piece where somebody else has another use for it Yeah, wow. I mean sometimes you just don't realize the scope of these things until you read a book like yours and to get into American surveillance state You separated into four parts and you say the first part provides an historical and

31:06 theoretical context for understanding the development of centralized surveillance systems in the United States with special focus on the public's long resistance to these intrusive developments and on efforts to socialize this public into accepting previously unthinkable levels of surveillance. And that's probably Part of the book I'm most interested in when it comes to this, as you say long standing resistance to these intrusive developments and efforts to socialize the public into accepting these previously unthinkable levels of surveillance. Clearly they've turned that page and I find it very curious because

31:46 We basically shifted from one extreme to the other, complete acquiescence. What sort of techniques have been employed to that effort and which do you think have been the most successful? Because it is quite an accomplishment." Yeah great point! You know clearly 9-11 here in the United States was a period where very rapidly expectations of privacy changed people were much more willing to give up you know, sort of long-standing resistance to being monitored in all sorts of ways. So in terms of what's the most important thing? Fear is probably the most important thing in terms of doing it just looking at something like the telephone and American attitudes towards the telephone in the early part of the 20th century there were a number of cases some of the earliest ones involve bootleggers where

32:44 a sheriff or police departments would install wiretaps, which were of course very simple to do in the pre-digital age. Just involved roach clips on the red and green wires on a phone and something to listen in on it wasn't a complicated process but even though the people were engaging in illegal activity, the public polling on this... People were outraged And the courts were ambivalent. There would be cases where they could side with police doing, you know we're talking about warrantless wiretaps just going out and listening in on people and it took a long time for the American public to sort of develop an attitude that well if the crime was bad enough things like this could happen

33:35 And there were incidents such as the Lindbergh kidnapping, Charles Lindbergh's baby being kidnapped where the FBI would use this public outrage that this celebrity family had had this horrible thing happen to it. To try and push the public further and further into accepting that you could have this sort of monitoring But the public was very, very resistant. And you can still find evidence in polling before 9-11 where you can get easily a majority of the American public saying they don't want to have any sort of telephone surveillance going on. But of course after 9-11, very quickly The Patriot Act this massive document is produced and really what it does is it rolls back

34:26 the corrections and protections that had been put in place in the post-Watergate era, in the United States of 1974 or 1975. We have again post Watergate you have these two congressional committees. You have the church committee and the Senate run by Frank Church, The Great State Of Idaho investigating abuses by the FBI and CIA. And this is where we learn about all sorts of crazy stuff, including MKUltra things. And then in the House you have Otis Pike, The Pike Committee does its own investigation and they're really interesting investigations. The Pike Committee report which was never supposed to be public but was leaked is very short

35:18 you can get a paperback edition that's gonna be under 200 pages or something like that, whereas the church committee hearings... I forget how many volumes but it's about two and half feet long. It's a hefty thing and it's very impressive and it looked into assassinations, COINTELPRO, these FBI programs that were infiltrating and harassing legal political organizations here in the United States. And it was out of these hearings that a firewall came up saying that the FBI and CIA could not interfere with these political activities

35:57 It's the first time that there was ever really congressional oversight of the intelligence community throughout these hearings. Of course, weakened with the years. There were some real protections in there basically from 1975 up until the early Reagan years where he rolled back a lot of these reforms that had been in there And whatever was left in terms of these protections, and these included protections like the CIA doing domestic activities with political organizations and such or the FBI infiltrating political organizations. These were all blown out by 9-11 with the Patriot Act. This is what the Patriot Act did as it rolled back these very intentional protections that had been put in place because of abuses

36:45 And so, one of the chapters in here is a social history of wiretaps. Sort of looking at how fear and these different incidents along the way have been used to shape the American public. One of the things I read about is very early on after September 11th 2001...I want to say it's 2003, I might be wrong. There was this program that the Bush administration introduced and they called it total information awareness. And it's worth googling and looking at the little insignia they had, they just had this wild insignia that looks like it would be on the headquarters of a Bond villain or something like that you know? The all-seeing eye and all these different things

37:35 And this was the surveillance dream. And again, it was pitched for to we're going to stop the terrorists by doing this and so The proposal was there would be this new agency called total information awareness and they would have real-time access to things like traffic cameras, to credit card purchases, to cell phone activity, to email. To just all of these things that would be out there to track people and when word of this got out the American public freaked out and said absolutely not we are not going to allow anything like this and Poindexter who had been involved in

38:17 No, it was Rumsfeld. I'm sorry. Rumsfeld had been involved in this... you know had egg on his face and they disbanded it very quickly. It was only a couple months and they said okay that was just mistake we're not going to do that but of course they did! They killed the agency but when you look at the Snowden leaks when you look at what we know about the passive collection of intelligence that the NSA and other agencies are doing out there Homeland Security It seems that their mistake was a publicity mistake, that they announced that they were going to do this sort of thing. And that's... To me is the sort of shocking or surprising thing about Edward Snowden's revelations as we had this documentation released showing what many of us suspected was going on, it was very clearly going on in a very warrantless broad sweeping sort of way

39:17 And sort of the proof of us being all worn down in worrying about these things, nothing really happened. There weren't large congressional investigations no new firewalls were put in place as far as we know every one of these programs has continued to grow under a veil of secrecy and again it's this measure of how over a long period of time people have gotten to a point where they don't really object to these sorts of trackings that are going on. Right, yeah. That is a really good summary of a really complex history of surveillance and the law and it's an interesting time to have you here because there's a lot of talk about this bill S-686 aka The Restrict Act which some people are calling Patriot Act 2.0 or The Digital Patriot Act I guess this is in part to protect us from TikTok You know that's the big boogeyman this time always something to fear

40:20 This one's a little bit silly, but hey it's working apparently. And some people I follow have read the bill and have brought up some really concerning aspects. Apparently it allows federal agencies to access any of your software or hardware at any time without any judicial oversight debatable if that's not already in play But also, a lot of people don't like the language of casually referring to foreign parties as adversaries. Transactions with these designated adversaries can make you subject to huge six-figure fines. Some are saying the language essentially bans the use of VPNs and takes a sledgehammer to the crypto community and

41:02 I read that anything subject to this bill will be exempt from FOIA requests, which is gonna hurt your next book. But have you been able to dig into the restrict act at all yet? Just on the surface and I would agree with everything that you've said it's sort of odd to see TikTok being selected as the boogeyman for all this where I think pretty much any social media platform could receive criticism and I definitely believe that. Yet, on the other hand, I'm also really critical of how all of us myself included have so easily gotten used to leaving these digital fingerprints everywhere with social media and we don't know whether it's American friendly which i'm saying with ironic quotation marks companies like Facebook or Twitter

42:04 committees that aren't subject to this right now, as TikTok is. There's sort of this assumption that the same things may not be going on there and there's definitely a China boogeyman that's being waved in front of us as if they're the only ones that are going to be interfering with free discourse around elections and other things like that. The entire electronic landscape that's out there has these same sort of conditions impacting it. I am concerned when people start talking about the ability to remove VPNs and any sort of digital anonymity that's out there, and...I think this is a very real threat that people need to be aware of."

42:50 Yeah. And I was listening to Adam Curry, just another podcaster talking about his take on a lot of this and he made an interesting point because a lot of times you follow the money and you find out that it's really about something else entirely. He suggests that this is really about advertising dollars at the American traditional social media companies, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. They are getting crushed by TikTok when it comes to advertising all the dollars are flowing over there and they're just eating the lunch of Silicon Valley and so you have this cozy relationship between the big tech companies in the state where they say look hey we've done some things for you guys it's time you do something for us and all this framing is a way to say you guys need to ban TikTok

43:39 because we cannot compete with them. And I think that's an interesting take, it might not be the primary thing but it certainly seems to be in the mix and the concern to me what makes it different is when you see these trends like destroy your school challenge and slap your teacher challenge, An adversarial nation would have a huge interest in getting American youth to just start going full Joker in their school system and just causing complete chaos because it's not just dancing. A lot of these challenges eat Tide Pods, I mean, it gets pretty gnarly with what these challenges are asking kids to do and that's probably a component as well but these two things together seems like a big catalyst for action

44:29 Yeah, yeah. Man and I actually did want to just kind of fold in some more details on the restrict act for the sake of the audience Dr. Lynn Flynn Derilla did a great breakdown of this. I'm not really too familiar with her other work, but she had screenshots of the bill's text and just to go a bit deeper and highlight some of these things and then maybe get your thoughts on them. She says if this bill gets passed we lose almost all privacy we have the attached screenshots highlight only a few of my concerns with this bill it states that any software hardware or other product or service integral to telecommunications products and services will

45:11 with over a million users, which is basically any software of significance would now be at the government's disposal to review prosecute and take possession of. They can review any and all of your personal information without even notifying you they are doing so they can ban any game application or thing they deem fit if it quote poses a risk. The restrict act would allow the government to access all of the data on your video devices if it's a service that uses over 1,000,000 people. This includes services like ring doorbells in home security cameras and so much more of VPN won't help you around this because if caught using a privacy device such as a VPN the act states you will face up to 20 years in prison and or $1 million dollars in fines we need to bring our attention to this until our elected officials that we do not support the restrict Act

46:06 So there's just a few more details. They try to draw circle around any service with 1,000,000 users that's pretty much any one of these things that would be a household name Alexa ring and yeah it's pretty concerning but I guess i would say that its not about this bill because this bill might pass or fail but it's about the thought process and the desire to do this kind of thing. I remember when people were talking about net neutrality and SIPA and PIPA, whatever they were at the time. It just seems like a relentless attempt to gain this ground whether it's this act or another one but what do you see happening outside of what i just read maybe in the next decade or so in terms of the incrementalism in going down this road?

46:57 Yeah, it's an interesting question because this year we've seen before the Supreme Court arguments being made about the very roots of net neutrality. And if something like that were to change it would change the landscape of the entire internet when you add to that this sort of digital patriot act, the fears about this sort of legislation. Whether this passes or not it'll be back in some other form if it doesn't pass there's definitely a push to go in this sort of centralized direction and you know one of the things I try and do in looking at surveillance is to look at it as an anthropologist and look at how all states every state that has ever existed and including

47:47 Ancient Egypt and all sorts of long empires that are long gone, are always interested in monitoring and controlling the populations. And whether it involves crude sort of surveillance like these cladestral surveys where census are done and keeping track of people or the sort of high-tech surveillance we have now if you think back 20 years ago 30 years ago, when internet first started coming to places like Iran and it worked in a very centralized sort of way. Russia has a system like this where someone at the top can essentially hit a switch and regulate China has a system in crude ways very much like this

48:40 And what I see in this sort of desire, in this sort of legislation is the same sort of state desires. Of being able to have control and to regulate and of course fear is the thing you'll have some sort of crisis during that crisis it's like well we need to put these sorts of controls in place. That's the direction I see this sort of legislation working but of course its happening in a capitalist economy where there are all sorts varied interests about doing that and that may slow things down if the companies are involved in Internet technology start really freaking out about this will their voice will be very different than our voice so it remains unknown what happens with it but it certainly does seem to be going and that sort of direction. Right I agree, and it seems like

49:36 Digital everything is the name of the game because digital implies people don't care that much about their privacy. There is a record of things and you can track whatever you want, and there's uh, you know, an infinite memory because this stuff doesn't really get deleted so you can always comb through everything And one of the big takeaways from reading two-year books is just that it seems like the CIA and these guys, they just collect everything. Nothing is too boring for them to collect because it might become useful in the future and so to me that's just the whole name of the digital game It seems like there's a lot of people sounding the alarm about moving our finances online as much as possible, more than they already are. And you can totally see why and if we were going to back up and talk about just the story of American surveillance it often starts with Hoover and his meticulous and obsessive

50:34 dossiers. You brought up capitalism just a moment ago, and that's an interesting point you make a couple of times in the book is that yes, Hoover was the architect of the FBI surveillance system but regardless of the man himself such a system was an inevitable development of 20th century capitalism. And I think that's something we always need to keep in mind, we've heard phrases like never let a good crisis go to waste or follow the money but literally everything that happens in the country is going to be an opportunity for someone somewhere to capitalize or benefit financially and society at large seems to be really bad at keeping that in mind or maintaining a healthy skepticism

51:18 or asking the who benefits question. But you are right that if you look at kind of the stack of society, capitalism is at the top and everything's under that umbrella and it is going to affect behaviors and events and situations. And that's a smart thing to relay in the book but elaborate a little bit on your thoughts there. Sure, there's this great quote I'll paraphrase that Philip Agee. Philip Agee was a CIA officer in the 1960s up until the early 70s when he very famously resigned and then wrote a tell-all book which named names and very significant. Towards the end of this book, CIA Diary that he writes about this,

52:07 this line that goes basically, the CIA is the corporate America's secret police plugging up the dams of capitalism around the world. He makes this argument that this is really what the CIA is doing, it's doing things for American industry and very much you can do the same with the FBI perhaps even more so. I look at a whole series of American activists who were fighting for things like racial equality or equal pay for equal work. gender equality issues, and they were very much targeted by the FBI in the 60s, 70s, 80s now to if you want to do the Occupy Movement and things like this. People who are fighting on campaigns that they see as equality campaigns are targeted by the FBI especially in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and labeled as communists because

53:06 They're engaging into these activities that would alter the way that capitalism works or threaten capitalism in some way. And you really see this in the racial equality campaigns, in the 50s where anybody who is engaged in activism that's trying to change the racist layering in American society gets labeled a communist, they have total surveillance. They're harassed in their workplace all of these sort of things happen and some of them were Marxists or socialists are communists many of them weren't they were just people working on these equality campaigns and my way of looking at this is to look at well

53:53 Who's benefiting from this system of racism if we look in the 1950s where a black American, a black man could get 1 third of the same wage that white men would get for doing the exact same work and there were no laws against it. It was simply the way that things were And so this is the system that Hoover would be protecting in terms of doing it. There were economic interests that Hoover was interested in protecting and the quote that you read about essentially even if Hoover had never existed, someone like him would have come along I mean he was don't get me wrong He was incredible in terms of his job. I think he's an incredible monster but he had the gifts that it took

54:43 to put together this incredibly horrible agency that would conduct surveillance and harass people and do all of these sorts of things. And even though he was very good at being horrible, if he hadn't existed somebody else would have come along and done these sorts of things. There are a lot of biographies of Hoover that like to really play up that these horrible things that the FBI did, they want to lay it all on the feet of him being this awful person. And I wanna put it on the agency too, that they were there doing a job that I completely believe other people would have come along and done is just he had the gifts that it took to do those sorts of awful things

55:29 Mm-hmm. Fair points, and now that surveillance is an industry and data is a commodity will we ever unravel it? Do you think we have to wait for the end of the empire before it all comes out? Oh one good electromagnetic pulse... And it's all gone! I don't know You know It's hard to see this trajectory stopping without some sort of large failure that's there. It's not that people don't have the power, it's not that there aren't democratic actions that can be taken where the people come together and they decide they're going to limit this sort of stuff and you see different countries just even Europe's treatment of the internet and permissions that are needed for this sort of trackings that are there it can happen, it can certainly happen

56:23 But I think there has to be something big that gets people to come to realize it doesn't have to be this way. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the name of the game today is an anthropological perspective but it requires the collective mind to care and right now it just doesn't! And I don't know how bad can it get before it does? I do not know One of the things I've learned... To have an upbeat point on this This comes from my friend Laura Nader who's a fantastic anthropologist She's in her 90s now at Berkeley

57:01 And she really teaches that history is nothing but change. And even though it seems like we're locked into this surveillance state and that these things keep growing, and they do from an anthropological perspective of time, We don't know what happens next. We don't really know none of this really lasts forever So there will be different times and we don't know that it will be this sort of surveillance Yeah, good points. Good points and I wanted to fold in one more thing here that I heard you mention in a previous interview kind of in passing that I ended up digging into a bit you mentioned

57:40 which is an awkward thing to say, but it stands for the Pat Robertson Intelligence Scholars Program. And even the Wikipedia page is quite revealing but it says the Pat Robertson Intelligence Scholars program is a program which funds selected US students entering university in return for commitment to join an intelligence agency for at least 18 months on graduation. The program was established by the U S Congress in 2004 and 2010 It became a permanent authorized funded IC, intelligence community program. It was the brainchild of University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos and in June 2009 it was reported that Barack Obama's administration was planning to make PRISP a permanent program. Students are required not to reveal their funding and must attend summer military intelligence camps

58:35 Wow, that is pretty revealing. Are there other creepy programs like this we should know about? And what would you say are the most concerning implications of such programs before we start wrapping it up?" You know I started writing about PRISP just when it first came into being and two years later there was something else that came up very much like it. Intelligence Community Scholars Program I think is what it was called ICSP And both of these programs are very similar. You can't tell anyone you're receiving the money, you do these well-paid summer internships and it's a lot of money you get from this like I don't know 60, $70,000 a year type money at this point

59:23 You go through it, they'll pay for your education. You can't tell anyone in the program what you're doing and so you might be in math or you might be an anthropology studying what's thought of as a strategic language right some language that may have military or intelligence significance. You could be engineer any field they have these things they're well paid and what I always think about with these is Let's say you're a bright, gifted mathematician and you need math for encryption and all sorts of things. You start your education process—you otherwise couldn't go to college—and get all this. What if along the way you start taking American history classes? And you learn about American empire and the CIA and what it really does and all of this sort of stuff. By the time you get to the end of your education

1:00:15 you learn something you don't wanna engage and be part of this machine. Well, you have the choice not doing it but you have to pay the money back and you have to pay it back legislation says I can remember what the multiplier is but it's a multiplier of the highest legal interest rate which i don't know what the highest legal interest rate if you put payday loans in there it's like 800 percent or something but yeah, it is crazy thing so you could easily have two hundred thousand fifty thousand dollar debt to get to then you want to do this of course you're gonna hold your nose and go work for the machine.

1:00:54 It's really problematic because I've read so many FBI files and when you do your clearance to go work for these agencies, whether it's done through FBI or CIA or someone else. There are often parts where they sit you down and they say tell us about other people around did you ever hear anyone express views like this? And so on and I've read so many files where they'll go the name will be redacted They'll go yeah i was once in a seminar and this guy kept saying this crazy thing about everybody should have free healthcare and that was socialism. There's just all of these issues with doing it. One story on PrISP though, long time ago must've been 15 more like 20 years ago I don't know when it was now I'd be more like a dozen years ago. I gave a talk to a class at American University and it was a graduate class in the evening

1:01:46 Somebody asked a question about what do I think about students who take PRISP funding, Pat Robertson Intelligent Scholar Funding for the program. You know how you can say anything and sometimes you say stupid things and this and that? Story of my life. I don't know but I said something smarter than I usually do and I paused and I said well here's what I think I don't even think bad of the people, I think about the society. I grew up in this world where you could go to college without debt because it was being subsidized by the public and now we've made it impossible for students to go and not have this debt

1:02:23 And it's understandable for me, who someone has a passion for discipline that they would take these things. I want to have a society where we don't do this." So later on the bus—I was staying with friends—and I'm sitting in the back of the bus and I see these two students from class up towards the front so I go up and sit by them one of them says hey, you know when we that person asked you about what do you think about people who take this? There was a student in the class that we just figured out is getting this. And I mean it's not that I'm a fan of people who take it and certainly not a fan. I've been a critic to the program as long as we've known its existed but it really is the truth that it's a systemic issue why do we create these programs like you know a schooling system where the only way for somebody to get through

1:03:19 is to sign away their financial life in order to do this thing for something I don't think they really understand what they're getting into. Great points. And I agree with you broadly speaking, you got to condemn it but on an individual basis, you can't blame anyone for a little compromising when it comes to incentives the world is run by incentives and if you have organizations with infinite black budgets guess what they can create incentives for any individual to comply and get what they want out of them? And there's also in a little bit of a perception maybe

1:03:56 Maybe a defeatist attitude that like the machine is bigger than any one person. So I guess I'll just take my check and do what they want me to do, but Hey, the lesson of the day is the agents are everywhere, but man it's been a real pleasure talking with you David and I appreciate you putting so much of your life's work into this subject. Any links or information about getting more of your work to give people before I cut you loose? Oh, it's all out there somewhere. Google away David Price Anthropology you'll find a counter punch is one place if you want to go in a lot of the issues including Pat Roberts intelligence scholar programs I really broke that story on counterpunch so counterpunch org is a great place to find some my writing right on well I appreciate it greatly this has been eye-opening and a lotta ways take care out there thank you Greg joy talking with you

1:04:53 And boom goes the dynamite my friends. Appropriate and synchronistic timing that the restrict act is such a big part of conspiracy news this week It was pretty fresh when we talked about it in this interview I think it was something I had just heard that morning But since that time, I've had a lot of things I brought up double and triple confirmed at this point But it's a bold and over-the-top power grab, and it fits very appropriately in this long history of surveillance and government overreach. It's not something I think we're surprised by—maybe just how aggressive it actually is? Certainly a bit of an eye widener! —but we shall see if the people demand better. It feels like they have enough stupid distractions in the news cycle that the Restrict Act just can't get covered

1:05:42 Everyone's focused on the dumb Trump arrest circus. Enough already, right? But if there is no pushback I'm sure this thing will go through Either way, I appreciate David's work a lot. I think Schwab is right when he says that if you read David's books The biggest takeaway is just the scope of these operations and they've only gotten worse The plus stuff was interesting. In the second hour, we got a lot deeper into how these structures have refined the art of public consensus and mononarrative control why it's dangerous to talk peace in times of war what Orwell missed in the portrayal of his dystopian future The Matrix Of Orthodoxy which surveilled and suppressed figure could have been most impactful on society

1:06:33 And we talked about non-US intelligence networks and Stasi. I think it was, I hadn't heard the East German secret police called that before or I guess I've forgotten but all good stuff clearly he knows a lot about this intersection of anthropology and intelligence agencies as well as their long history of surveillance and monitoring and probably most interestingly how they've altered or overcome the public opinion of their activities. Nobody cares much anymore, and few take any measures to even guard themselves and their data in the smallest and simplest of ways It is what it is I guess but I have a pretty full plate this week so I'm gonna keep it moving by hopping over to the THC meetup calendar and seeing what's what

1:07:23 I don't see anything that's been added, but for the rest of April we have April 8th in Sedona Arizona. A meetup at the Sundowner Bar and Grill. April 15th the Ticknall Walk in Ticknall Derby United Kingdom and April 20th The LA Truth Meet Up at Flame International Very cool! We got a couple on the calendar for May and even one for June... two for June But either way, don't be shy. Hop on over to the calendar and RSVP if any of those are in your area and if not throw a local event on a calendar at a place that you think would be good to meet other THC fans at I'll sound off on it they will come no risk all reward And that is gonna be it thanks to David for his dedication and time

1:08:13 I definitely learned about a few details i was unaware of and hope you can say the same but ive done my part your move prisp program participants surveillance state soldiers and three letter agency eavesdroppers your fucking move You know the plan has always been to hack your brain MKUltra's trying to drive you insane They'll explode your heart if they think that's what it takes You think I'm answering the phone, well I am. You gotta keep the curtains drawn cause you don't want anyone thinking your at home Well your not! You should tape the mail slot and baby if i seem withdrawn let me say it's cause I just dont wanna go and get whacked maybe you should know that The trauma affects you like it does everyone

1:09:12 It's just a game plan, it's what the world has become They want a pat down and a swap Don't you see what is going on? Well now you know You're better keeping on your own Cause' you can see Masters lie too much Oh baby! You can only trust yourself And if you think the system's out of touch It is and you can only trust yourself I hope you know the elite aren't your friends They'll suck out everything from you in the end If for some reason, you think I might be wrong I wonder where you got that opinion from

1:10:05 You gotta keep the curtains drawn, cause you don't want anyone thinking you're at home. Well you're not! You should tape the mail slot and baby if I seem withdrawn let me say it's cause i just dont wanna go and get whacked maybe you should know that The trauma affects you like it does everyone It's just a game plan its what the world has become They want a pat down and a swap Don't you see what's going on? Well now you know You're better keeping on your own Cause' you can see, that's just like too much Oh baby you can only trust yourself And if you think the system is out of touch It isn't. You can only trust yourself

1:11:05 You might think that these problems are small Maybe they aren't registering at all Now they know you're naive and vulnerable You won't believe all of the stunts that they'll pull Cause you can see the masters lie too much Oh baby, you can only trust yourself And if you think the system's out of touch It isn't. You can only trust yourself Cause you can see the masters lie too much Oh baby, you can only trust yourself

1:12:10 And if you think the system's out of touch It is and you can only trust yourself