2023 SAB Program: National Security in the Age of Surveillance

foreign [Music] hello and welcome to the Dole Institute of politics my name is Tyler Liggett and I'm a member of the adult Institute student Advisory Board the official group of The Institute as well as the student assistant of the intelligence Community Center of academic Excellence the student Advisory Board is a bi-partisan group whose members can access many great opportunities through their involvement with the Institute including volunteering at programs and networking with our special guests if you are a student and would like to join please contact us by emailing Dole Sab ku.edu or talking to a student worker a video of today's program will be available on our YouTube shortly you can also access videos of our past programming by going to the YouTube a loop hearing system is available to use if you have a t-coil hearing aid we also have a limited number of these hearing aids if you have a question about the loose system at any time or experience difficulty please alert one of our staff members after the program we will have some time for the audience to ask questions if you have a question please raise your hand and a student worker with a microphone will come to you please stand if you are able to and ask just one brief question if you are a part of the virtual audience you may submit your questions at dolequestions at ku.edu the Doles institute's mission is to Foster civil and respectful discussions around important and often difficult topics please phrase your questions with this in mind before we begin I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cell phones now please join me in welcoming welcoming director of the programs in student affairs Sarah Stacy thank you [Applause] so thank you so much Tyler good evening and welcome to the Dole Institute of politics I'm pleased to welcome you to the 2023 Sab program so this year's topic National Security was chosen by the Dole Institute student Advisory Board and the research questions and guest selection was done by this evening's moderator Sab student coordinator Catherine magana so Catherine is a senior majoring in political science and has done a stellar job in her role as Sab coordinator for the past two years we are going to miss her a lot but we're new we know she's going to do really good for us outside these walls as well so this program is presented in partnership with ku's intelligence Community Center of academic Excellence so please talk to Tyler after this program if you have any questions about the center there's also some brochures on the back table so have a few announcements I want all KU students to be aware that we have three awards that all have application deadlines for April 2nd so if you have an internship and it's related to public service or politics or journalism please check out our website this award helps offset some of the costs associated with The Internship or other awards are open to only Sab members so we have our Robert J Dole service the country award and Elizabeth Dole public service award information can be found on our website doleinstitute.org finally I invite you to join us on Wednesday April 12th and April 19th at 4 pm for the continuation of our discussion group series building democracy in the 21st century so on April 12th we'll have a conversation with the two co-chairs of the canvas future caucus it will be moderated by Katie Bernard of the Kansas City Star who is also a former Sab member and this is in partnership with the millennial Action project on April 19th so fan favorite are formal for more fellow Jerry's side will return to moderate a conversation with Georgia's Secretary of State Brad raffensberger and New Mexico's Secretary of State Maggie talise Oliver so this is in partnership with the Carter Center so there's more information on your program handouts in the website and you really won't want to miss these programs so enough announcements now I have the pleasure of handing things off to our modern moderator Catherine magana who will then introduce tonight's guest Tom Crawford and Michael German please give them all a round of applause thank you thank you so much Sarah for that warm introduction and thank you all for attending tonight's 2023 sap program and National Security and they're serving in the age of surveillance I'm really happy that you all can make it tonight and we're joined by two amazing guests for this conversation on domestic terrorism counterterrorism surveillance and privacy tonight we are joined by our special guests first we have Tom Crawford on the far right Tom is a retired special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation he served 23 years in the FBI's Kansas City Division and then worked on the joint terrorism task force on International terrorism investigations he later worked for the FBI's counter counterintelligence program and now teaches in the KU law school as well as at the iccae Mike German is a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security program which seeks to ensure that the U.S government respects human rights and fundamental freedoms in conducting the fight against terrorism a former special agent with the FBI as well his work focuses on law enforcement and intelligence oversight and reform he joined the Brennan Center in 2014. thank you gentlemen for joining us thanks all right so with that I'll go ahead and get started with the interview so as Tyler mentioned earlier I will be I will there will be time for questions at the end I'll ask questions for about 40 minutes and then let you know when you should start thinking of your questions but should be able to ask these two please just keep your questions short and keep it civil think of where you are and it should be a great program all right gentlemen so I'll go ahead and start off so as I said previously you're both former FPS special agents and have had careers in National Security so if you want why don't you go ahead and tell me how you came into these positions what those roles with the FBI were like and what you did to get into those positions oh boy you're you're the traveler okay thank you um so I wanted to be an FBI agent from the time I was a little kid my dad was an army officer we didn't know any FBI agents I don't know whether I got the idea from TV or whatever but once I said I was gonna be an FBI agent they said well how do you become an FBI agent and I did some research and I couldn't add so I couldn't be an accountant I didn't understand science so I knew that wasn't going to work I couldn't speak a foreign language so law school was going to be the easiest route for me to get in so when my mother Heard Law School and my father heard FBI they were both on board and I never had to think about it again and was fortunate enough to get into law school at Northwestern Chicago and two weeks after I graduated from law school I started at the FBI Academy and spent 16 years I joined in 1988 which then there was the Savings and Loan crisis which some of you might be old enough to remember and back then the justice department and FBI actually put Elite fraud or artists in prison so I worked on that case for four years at one savings loan case Lincoln Savings and Loan in California and was looking for something very different and a colleague said well you have blonde hair and blue eyes you could be a Nazi and asked me to work undercover in a case he had targeting neo-nazis who had committed violence in and around Los Angeles California and I spent the rest of my career working undercover in some form or fashion for the next 12 years and then um you know having done terrorism cases I was uh aware as anybody in the FBI that there were some serious management problems with the way terrorism was being handled so was not terribly shocked by 9 11 except the scale of it obviously was horrific um but became concerned with the way that the FBI started talking about reform because they weren't talking about reforming the mismanagement of information they were talking about collecting more information and what I knew and most agents are curious people and right after the attacks happened we started calling our friends who knows how this happened who knows what mistakes were made so everything that was in the 911 Commission report we basically knew within two weeks and yet what the FBI and the justice department and the Bush Administration were putting out was this was a failure of intelligence this was because our intelligence authorities have been narrowed after the church committee investigation we have to expand those authorities and gather more intelligence well if if the problem was actually the management of information right we had agents in New York agents in Minneapolis agents in Phoenix agents in San Diego agents all across the country who had done their jobs and collected evidence and and reported it up the chain of command where it was being mismanaged and the assets that could have addressed these problems were being mismanaged so now all they were doing was opening the spigots to more collection that was going to have a a a harsher effect on Americans who who weren't doing anything wrong and uh that information was all going to go into the same mismanaged system that was only going to lead to not just abuses of civil rights and civil liberties But continuing security failures and I was just a special agent I decided the best I could do is just do my job the best of my ability and volunteered to do another undercover assignment that involved uh the United States supporters of a middle eastern terrorist group who had reached out to a white supremacist group seeking their assistance based on their shared hatred of Jews and it was a really good opportunity for the FBI to look good after having failed so miserably after 9 11 but the case was just terribly mismanaged to the point that the opportunity was being lost so I decided to report that you might remember around this time Colleen Rowley FBI agent in Minneapolis who was aware of one of the failed investigations that they had tried to get started before 9 11 wrote a letter to Mueller explaining that I think it and getting to know her later she was trying to because what Mueller was saying publicly wasn't accurate and she was trying to warn him that I was in Minneapolis when we were trying to get this case going and you're saying inaccurate things about the case that might harm an ultimate prosecution so you know here's the true information and after that controversy then director Robert Mueller said if anybody who wants to uh or if any agent knows of a mismanaged terrorism investigation I want you to report it he didn't he didn't watch you report it I did report it and that was pretty much the end of my FBI career I was taken off of that case told I would never work undercover again and kind of put in a penalty box and I tried for two years to get the issues resolved but uh but ultimately they wouldn't do it so I decided to report to Congress and leave leave the FBI and ended up going to work for the ACLU like all good agents do right and worked at the ACLU for seven years on on national security policy questions and their impact on civil rights and after seven years there got hired at the Brennan Center so how did I become an FBI agent um I had wanted to serve I did not go into the military because I was very correctly advised by my father that I would not follow orders well I never lost that desire though I was in law school those were Dark Times back in the early 90s when lawyers were getting laid off and so thinking of what to do and so I applied to the FBI I applied to the CIA I applied to several music agencies with that thought in mind of wanting to serve my country somehow they were not hiring at that point either it was not a good time to be looking for a job in the 90s or 91. but I did graduate law school and I began practicing law now I didn't start off doing this but I think I hold the distinction of being the only FBI agent who was a legal aid attorney before he became an agent and I was a legal aid attorney in Kansas City Kansas for three years prior to becoming an agent and so I'd I'd practice now the blue and I was talking about this with one of the students at dinner I was called by the FBI asked if I still wanted to go and this is five years after I'd put my initial application in five years I was doing well I was actually getting ready to move up with a different practice my wife was a prosecutor locally we were talking about starting a family all that kind of thing talked to my wife about it she asked me do you really still want to do this and I thought about it hard and I said yes I do still want to do it and she agreed to go along with it and I went through that process it still took a year after that you go through a lot of tests to become a special agent at that point in time there was I think four different one of them was like taking an ace an ACT test and I'm not exaggerating I mean it was like math and same like you're taking this thing like what in the heck has this got to do with being an FBI remember interviews things like that and after I got through the process I didn't hear anything thought okay we're moving on and I got a phone call say you get a class to go to Quantico on Monday they called me on Thursday the week before so the other attorneys in my office weren't very happy I dumped 288 cases on those lawyers packed up on that Sunday and went to Quantico with my wife being four months pregnant so it was a sea change for me um to to go in the bureau but I mean having said that I you know I went through at an interesting time I went through in 1995. is when I went to Quantico and so we had the first government shutdowns when Bill Clinton was President there was a lot of turmoil that was a lot of the initial turmoil from the government started it was an interesting time to be back there the key thing for me was is that they had told me going in that there was no question I would be sent somewhere else in the United States there is no way I would be sent back home I mean that was just you understood that and that was one of the big considerations for my wife who was a prosecutor and wanted to continue working you know so where would we go and Quantico they have you list you know there's 56 field divisions all the United States and as a in your new agents class you get to list one through 56 where would you prefer to go not that they care where you want to go but they at least give you the Mirage of so you know I put Washington DC number one they were sending 10 people every new age's class leading up to mine and the day comes to get the orders and I open up my orders Kansas City they sent me home one of the funniest memories of that day is all the instructors for your class there's like 30 or 40 of them stand in the back and I was being last name of the C I was the one of the early ones in my group to open mind and they're like I didn't know what to say I and I looked I actually showed it to the assistant director like is that right he goes yeah screaming at where are you going I said I'm going home and 40 voices in unison said that a bunch of bad curse words it's really pretty funny and as I've always said I was smart enough once I got sent to Kansas City to never leave um when I started I was working I started I did Healthcare fraud for a little bit but the majority of my time prior to 9 11 was spent working violent crime and if you lived here back then in the late 90s up through 2000 the metro area was setting records every year for kidnappings bank robberies homicide drugs now there was one cartel drug groups really started moving into the Midwest and particularly Kansas City at that point in time so it was Kansas City Missouri Kansas City Kansas were incredibly violent places back then and I was on the squad which at that time it was called the violent crime squad or in the bureau term was called the reactive Squad because what that meant we were always reacting to something that had taken place we were reacting to a bank robbery we were reacting to a drug deal gone down we were reacting to a kidnapping that had taken place okay and so that was the squad I was on and you know when you're a young agent I mean you're you know used to call it you're out there you're literally chasing the bad guys and it's high high speed high stress and you do understand what it means to carry a gun for living at that point in time as an FBI agent now 911 everything changed for me so I was working like you know drugs and gags at that point and I was told one afternoon that I was going to be transferred onto the joint terrorism task force specifically to take over to open a criminal case on what had been a historic intelligence case involving links to Al Qaeda in this case had been worked as an intelligence case and it involved a charity out in Columbia Missouri uh it became my life's work in the FBI I worked that case for 10 years total it didn't it existed as an open investigation for 21 years it was the third Islamic charity designated by the US government as a specially designated Global terrorist organization following 9 11. that occurred in 2004. um it was a you know got a lot of publicity at the time for me what it meant was is that I traveled all over the world I learned everything I would ever want to know about Al Qaeda who made up Al Qaeda how Al Qaeda operated where they operated I became fluent in how money was moved throughout the world on behalf of terrorist organizations I was given this title I didn't again didn't raise my hand for this one of the things the FBI did after 9 11 is they created what was called the terrorism Finance operations section as part of the international terrorism Division and that the specific purpose of tfos as it was called was to follow the money specifically to Al Qaeda and transition into Isis because you cannot have a successful operation unless it's funded right you can't build a bomb unless you have money to buy the parts so I became responsible for supervising every open International terrorist investigation in the Kansas City division because every investigation was mandated have a financial component so I got to be very fluent in Banks and money distribution businesses whether you're talking about Western Union or anything similar to that and as a result of that that led me into doing a lot of teaching within the FBI you get tagged with being an SM a subject matter expert and stuff and so off you go and so it it led me to getting involved in a lot of other terrorist investigations around the country going in to give you know our experience in Kansas City how we'd work certain things and that kind of you know wedded my appetite to you know one day I'm going to retire and I would like to teach and we started a program at the commander general staff college at Fort Leavenworth that I was a part of for roughly 10 years where we were going and teaching soldiers getting ready to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan on International terrorism issues and specifically money issues evidence collection one of the things I'm proudest of we helped train Special Forces who are deploying into Iraq and at the initial stages of the invasion in O3 on how to seize evidence properly in order that if we if we could tie it back to an investigation that we'd actually use that evidence seized in Iraq in the U.S federal court at the time people thought we were nuts that had never been done before it was unheard of the military had no mechanism to do this but myself and another person we would go down to MacDill Air Force Base regularly train these guys well it turned out for us and this one specific case I referenced before out of Columbia we ended up having evidence that was seized in Iraq that was sent back to us as part of that initial effort and so it it actually paid direct dividends specific to our investigation which was enormously surprising so you know had a lot to do with that I I had a unique career in Kansas City in that because of the cases that I was assigned to I worked with the entire U.S intelligence community and when I say I worked with them I did it operationally it wasn't some theoretical exercise I was working investigations with them and I worked with many many foreign intelligence services and law enforcement agencies as well I had a lot of stamps in my official government passport my time in the jttf traveling around and that gave me a lot of exposure to how other countries go about doing their business and you know more importantly how unique other countries viewed the United States and our legal system I think it's interesting in listening to Mr German everybody has their own experience to draw from I had a lot of encounters with foreign intelligence service law enforcement people where they would look at me and say why don't you guys just kill this person why are you why are you trying to build a case to go to court didn't even it wasn't even a thought depending what country you're in especially at that point in time in the Middle East it was I would say frisky okay um and I had a lot of conversations about why and or or how important uh the United States system of justice is and specifically what due process is had a lot of conversations with folks and they would just look at me because they didn't understand it they don't have due process in those countries and even some of our allies in Europe don't go about this the same way and so I had a lot of conversations about that type of inquiry and and it you know over time it made me realize that you know what our system of laws and regulations actually it makes our it makes the job of not just FBI but anybody who's working in the U.S intelligence Community trying to work a terrorism case or a counterintelligence case for that matter makes it very difficult a lot of hurdles you have to overcome in order to effectively investigate something and so having that experience and having those conversations and seeing how different corners of the world operated made me really have an appreciation for our system and how we go about doing things and I say that too as somebody who had practice law for over four years before I became an agent used to going into court you know I litigated every day I did stuff in state and federal courts things of that nature so what that wasn't new to me in the sense that I knew how our system worked obviously but when you put it in the context of chasing terrorists around the world and how their countries are approaching that it gave it a different perspective and so I did that you know we had one of the crazy things about Kansas City we had some extraordinarily high profile and relevant Al-Qaeda cases one after the other after the other and I worked on almost all of them very proud of the work that we did as a group that joint terrorism task force we had was extraordinary and we did a lot of we did a lot of good um but after about 11 years of doing that I I was you know kind of hit the wall and asked to move over to counterintelligence so counterintelligence of course everybody thinks that that is oh my God that's James Bond and You Know Jack Ryan and all that stuff and I am sitting here to tell you that that is the farthest thing from the truth is humanly possible one of my favorite sayings that I learned as a young agent from an older agent we were complaining about our you know 15th generation computers and this older agent looked at me and goes you gotta remember this saying the FBI we call it yesterday's technology tomorrow and it's true I don't think the general American public understands that ESP and I say this with a special of reference to the FBI because we are always the last music Agency on the low bid Spectrum uh agents and analysts in the bureau are asked to do more with less than any other USIC agency particularly when it comes to technology okay the notion that agents can spin a dial and surveil somebody is pure utter nonsense fiction okay the processes that you go through in order to instigate something like that are extraordinary to say the least and very difficult to fulfill all right so when you move over to Counter Intelligence what happens well you're no longer worried about terrorism you're worried about State actors at least in the time I moved over the emphasis was turning into China of course the big three or China Russia and Iran there are other ancillary countries I mean North Korea obviously is a problem there are some countries that we all consider to be allies who like to try and get our secrets too okay and what counterintelligence really is is protect it protecting secrets and it is there is a lot of Darkness to that world there's a lot of clandestine activity there's a lot of covert activity that goes on in CI because that is the realm of spies okay the U.S spies on people people spy on the United States and so there's offense and defense and I'm getting into this because I teach two classes this semester on counterintelligence so I'm going to start riffing on this but you know it's offense and defense and you're trying to protect what we have and you're also trying to acquire what we need every country on the planet almost that's I can't say that universally many many many countries on the planet are engaged in this activity okay FBI's responsibility is defense okay when it comes to counterintelligence cia's responsibility is offense other other USIC agencies fit into that Spectrum at different points in different places some may have responsibilities for one or both but in the black and white scheme of things on CI it's FBI defense CIA offense and I say is you know helping too military different in the sense that when we're talking about the defense intelligence agency or the combatant commands their intelligence is geared toward the battlefield and predictive modeling of battlefields they're trying to figure out what the enemy is going to do whether that be Iraq or Afghanistan right now what is the military doing they're doing predictive modeling on what happens if the United States have to get gets involved in the ground in Ukraine or what happens if we get into a shooting where we China over Taiwan that's their Intel Focus okay it's just to try and paint that picture so I did that for eight years one of the things that we did that was kind of different hadn't been done before in Kansas city is we actually took some CI cases and went Criminal and indicted people in one of those cases the last trial I had as an agent it was a theft of Trade Secrets case on a private business not in Junction City Kansas and at that time we got the second long longest sentence for those two defendants in U.S history for a theft Trade Secrets case and what I can tell you sitting here five years removed retired five years ago what I can tell you sitting here having worked this when you hear these things about threats going on these days China Russia what's going on trying to obtain Secrets technology or otherwise it's very true and it's an all-day everyday exercise and one thing I ask you to keep in mind before I before you move forward is when it comes to terrorism or or specifically counterintelligence in the FBI we might have a couple thousand agents work in those issues across the world now we've got 330 million people in the United States you think about how much actual ground that we have to cover just covering the United States a couple thousand people if China decides they want to Target this is say they want to Target Boeing because Boeing's got a sexy airplane coming out they'll put 20 000 people on that one point of acquisition I'm not exaggerating so it's a huge difference FBI is relatively small when it comes to organizational size and I marry that up with what I said prior about our technological adversity that we are constantly faced with so it's not you know I think I'll finish my initial with this people because of the environment we've lived in in the last five six seven eight years FBI and the rest of the usick for that matter has been very politicized it's been painted with a certain brush these are not monolithic organizations okay FBI agents and FBI analysts support staff their husbands and wives Sons and Daughters brothers and sisters they take care of their grandparents when they get old they take care of their parents when they get old I didn't leave Kansas City because my parents were older and needed you know I had to stay they'd take care of them I could have taken a promotion and moved on they coach little league teams they're Scout Masters they're going to parent-teacher conferences in other words they're human beings like everybody else there's this effort that has been made to view the organization is this all-encompassing menacing monolithic type deal and I just I it's so wrong because in reality it's people trying to do a very difficult job every day and it is a very difficult job I would say it's one of the hardest jobs anybody could do anywhere because of the responsibility you're given as an individual what our mission is to protect this country and the citizens of this country from attacks espionage setting aside the white collar crime the drugs and gags and everything else try and keep that in mind it's people it's not some scary thing that has been painted with this politicization that we've seen the last several years and I'll end with that uh you know as briefly as you can do you think you could explain just for the audience the differences in agencies like the CIA NSA and FBI and how they handle privacy and National Security differently well what I tell my students is is that the big the big difference between FBI and CIA is this in simplest terms FBI enforces the laws of the United States the CIA breaks the laws of foreign countries that's when the Espionage agency does and it's really that black and white the rest of the USIC agencies have roles on both the as I say both offense and defense now CIA operates 180 degrees different than the FBI or any other Agency for that matter because they are engaged in in foreign intelligence gathering um one of one of the points I make to my students is they you know they because I have a lot of students come to me and they're like they want to be a FBI agent or a CI agent you know what does that mean and I always make a point of you know what is a non-official cover agent for the CIA and you've seen movies you know with the mission Impossibles and they talk about the knock list or you know all that kind of stuff but what is a nonofficial cover agent it is someone who has agreed to give up their entire identity in life to serve their country if you're a knock you cut ties with your family friends everyone you have a new identity you're sent somewhere you've probably never been before and if you are captured caught and captured doing what you're doing chances are it's not going to end well for you so CIA for all the times in my career that I wanted to throttle them for getting you know not being as user friendly as I needed them to be I will always have amazing tremendous respect for those folks because I can sit here and say again I'm not this isn't me trying to Pat myself on the back but you know yeah was I In Harm's Way a lot yeah I was never In Harm's Way like those kind of people all right and so that's another thing I was when I taught when I used to I used to do a ton of public speaking for the bureau I was always trying to make this point remember that there are your fellow citizens out there putting their life at risk for you and I you know that's what it comes down to and so that fbicia that's kind of the black and white for me thank you would you mind uh Michael you're talking to me a little bit about this earlier uh go over how government surveillance related or in the name of counterterrorism has kind of changed in the last two decades from 9 11 to January 6th uh so considerably and almost immediately after 9 11 the USA Patriot Act was passed within a month of 9 11 long before the 911 Commission or congress could analyze what had gone wrong at the FBI and the CIA and the NSA they basically took every request that they had made in previous years that had been refused by Congress and put them all in one package called it the Patriot Act and put it forward and essentially what it did was amend a lot of different laws including the foreign intelligence surveillance act which allows the FBI to obtain warrants from a prior to 9 11 to obtain warrants from a secret Court to do foreign intelligence electronic monitoring and searches the bank secrecy act which I'm sure Tom had a lot of experience working with to basically expand these authorities to lower the threshold of evidence necessary to obtain it so rather than needing probable cause for a search warrant the FBI only needed what they call the relevant standard to obtain someone's cell phone records the metadata that they collected so that was passed right away but almost immediately as well there were some extra legal things that the Bush Administration put in place that later became known as the president's surveillance program this was a program that was in violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act which under its own wording said this is the exclusive method for conducting foreign intelligence collection in the United States and this secret president surveillance program allowed the government to obtain all of our telephone metadata with no finding that any of us had done anything wrong it allowed the collection of content that was going overseas so phone calls that somebody was having with somebody overseas or business transactions again uh tracing the money became a big part of what they were trying to do so we had the way I've explained it in in my writing is a change in Attitude along with a change in architecture the architecture allowed for more aggressive collection against people that were not suspected of doing anything wrong and the attitude that counterterrorism was the top priority and we needed to get the information and and figure out what to do with it later allowed this massive collection and at the same time right about the same time the FBI's internal rules changed the Attorney General guidelines that govern FBI investigations again to lower the threshold to where a person could be investigated so your Good Conduct no longer protects you from being investigated the FBI has much more authority to Target people with much less evidence to believe they're doing anything wrong um those rules does the secret programs were were first acknowledged in 20 in 2005 through through uh New York Times article that exposed it uh that started a lot of conversations about whether to renew certain sections of the Patriot Act I testified in some of those hearings and had members of Congress wag their finger at me and say you can't point to any serious abuses of this law and I would try to explain gently that it's a secret law that allows secret collection and you know it I I agree with Tom you know my colleagues in the FBI for the most part were people that I I would trust with anything but that's not how our democracy works and giving an agency that has failed significantly in the past and has harmed civil liberties that kind of secret Authority without aggressive oversight and public accountability is inevitably going to lead to abuse in 2013 Edward Snowden released the scope of what was going on it was fascinating because in the twice that I testified of uh regarding Patriot Act reauthorizations that were always reauthorized uh most of the focus was on national security letters because there had been some abuse of those letters that that had become public so most of the discussion was about that and there was this other program section 215 that allowed the FBI to collect any tangible thing uh based on Rel the FBI's interpretation of relevance to an investigation very low standard they had used it I think the one year I testified they had used it nine times the next time I testified three years later they had used it 13 times it didn't seem like this was something that that was open to abuse because they were using it so seldom but when Edward Snowden released a lot of documents what we found was it only took four of those to collect all the cell phone metadata from Every American across the United States every day to put in in a big intelligence database so you can't know what you don't know and that's again not the way democracy Works we're supposed to have oversight in Congress oversight in the foreign intelligence surveillance courts and it was you know one of the congressmen who wagged his finger at me and said I can't point to abuse called himself the father of the Patriot Act he said he claimed authorship of it and he claimed after Edward snowden's leaks revealed the scope of how section 215 was being used that he had never imagined that that section could be used that way so here's here's the person who's supposed to be conducting aggressive oversight of it who doesn't even understand how it's being used that that it's that secret it how these uh efforts are are put in place so because of the the the 2005 leak and the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks there were efforts to try to get some control over this and the foreign intelligence Court this for this secret court that sits in Washington DC started creating minimization requirements they called it basically a rule book for the FBI to follow in secret uh but over and over again what they would find is that the FBI and the other intelligence agencies were not following these rules when nobody was watching and they kept having to modify them and modify them and modify them uh finally section 215 was was first turned over to the private sector they asked the phone companies to keep these records rather than having the gov government to it but ultimately it was allowed to expire a few years ago but there's another section the foreign intelligence surveillance act section 702 which is coming up for Renewal and is part of the debate because just recently the office of the Director of National Intelligence has acknowledged that there are further abuses even past the ones that the foreign intelligence surveillance Court found interestingly the FBI's rules were expanded once more in 2008 and that created the authority to conduct what they call assessments and they're they don't call them threat assessments because no threat is necessary agents are allowed to open these assessments based on their own initiative so long as their intention is to be fighting crime preventing terrorism or threats to National Security so this assessment is is basically an unpredicated investigation there's no evidence to believe that the person has done anything wrong but it allows a lot of Fairly aggressive uh tools including the the Recruitment and tasking of informants so the FBI can send an informant into a group to collect information about what that group is doing without any evidentiary basis to believe they've broken any law or done anything wrong so these are really broad authorities that are very easy to abuse and unfortunately we've seen over the course of the research I've been doing on on these things since I left the FBI that that just like back in the battle days under J Edgar Hoover that who agents tend to focus on are people who they have some bias against some political bias religious bias you know obviously after after 9 11 there was a lot of anti-muslim animists in the United States and as Tom said these are people they're people who live in our country and the biases that exist in our country exist in in the FBI as well and you know at the ACLU when I was there in 2011 we used the Freedom of Information Act to get counterterrorism training materials that sure enough were included some really awful biased information if actually erroneous which is you know it again riffing off at something Tom said because he's right the FBI is an incredibly small organization it's only 30 35 000 employees varies over the years only 12 000 agents across the whole country and around the world right it's a very small agency but has a very big impact because of all the power that it's given and what we have to do you know part there's always this idea that you balance privacy against security you balance civil rights against security but that's that's not accurate right the the that we were talking over dinner that you know Saddam Hussein had a lot of surveillance in his country uh and you know I I don't think people felt safe right uh you know nor were they safe obviously uh so you know and this actually it was it was really well explained by the uh President Obama set up a committee to understand the the Edward Snowden program leaks so section 215 and section 702 and they explained in their in their Preamble that privacy is a type of security that you can't balance security against security right we don't lock our door just because we don't want somebody to read our papers that keeps us safe that keeps us secure and if our papers which of course now are kept in the cloud at your internet service provider at the social media programs you listen to if that isn't safe then you aren't safe and unfortunately the the way that the the Paradigm has moved is to where if it exists in data the government believes they can get it and you know it's it's fascinating that recent debate over Tick Tock right and Congress and you know I I'm not a technologist I don't know a lot about how the technology works but I am entirely convinced that Tick Tock collects way too much information about us if you have that app on your phone but so do all the others and all those others sell that data so while I am concerned like Tom said about Chinese government agents who are coming into our country to do harm I'm also concerned about companies that are selling this data about us and I'm concerned about the law enforcement infrastructure we've built I mean one of the uh other layers of intelligence collection in the United States or state and local intelligence fusion centers how many of you have heard of state and local intelligence fusion centers see that I've done a terrible job as an advocate I started writing about these things in 2007 and published my last report on it just last December these are ostensibly state and local entities mostly law enforcement LED Sometimes some of them are actually housed within the FBI they include state and local law enforcement federal law enforcement Department of Homeland Security National Guard private sector participants poorly defined so private companies contractors all collecting information about us and sharing that information broadly across the information sharing platforms with very little oversight about what they're doing and in 2020 they got hacked and some three 200 gigabytes of information was released there was information our tax dollars were used to collect information about us that it was then taken from these entities so it's it's not improving our security it's a security vulnerability that we've created with this impression that collecting this data is somehow going to keep us safer when actually it puts us more at risk well I have a million more questions for the two of you but I think it's time to turn it to a q a for the audience so if you have a question please raise your hand and will or Angela with the mics will come to you and hold the microphone free to ask your question I think we have one over here and one over here so two of the values that I've always seen in every member of the intelligence community that have had the privilege of meeting including YouTube our community service and patriotism I was reading the recent Wall Street Journal article that was showing how much those have plummeted as core values of our country recently I was just curious if you have any thoughts on the direction that that could take the intelligence agencies in the near future if you start to draw from a pool of unpatriotic or non-service-minded individuals you're not going to staff the usick if you don't have people who want to do service you're certainly not going to staff them effectively um there is something to be said that to work we had a usick agency is a calling just like if you want to join if you're desire to join the military it's a calling I've heard it a million times you don't join the FBI to get rich I mean I could have made a lot more money practicing law in my career okay um you do it because you do want to serve and that that mindset I think is essential you have to want to sacrifice I mean look I spent six years out of ten away from my family I was going away from home for six years out of a 10-year span and there's a cost to that okay you have to be willing to serve I gotta I gotta take one second though because I I don't want to turn this into Point Counterpoint but I got to take issue with a couple of things you said one I don't think it's fair to try and conflate the Snowden surveillance issue that had nothing to do with the FBI that was an NSA program okay well it's the FBI you're using section 702 FBI did not was not part of that program FBI does the back door searches nope fisa applications Mike what year did you retire the office of Director of National Intelligence just put out a report acknowledging the effort you can't speak in Generations there are four fisa Court opinions criticizing the FBI abuse of this Authority what you said paints a picture that is inaccurate point out a couple of other things 911 was a sea change for the usick the policy that governed the United States intelligence Community was put into effect in 1947. the National Security Act of 47. it was not updated or amended until 2004. okay Congress didn't think it was necessary one of the failures leading up to 911 was the fact that there was not information exchanged particularly between CIA and FBI it's called stove piping it was a huge problem so what happens after 9 11. there was a mass panic what you don't remember after 9 11 was is there was also Anthrax attacks that happened across the country there was one that happened down in Wichita Kansas that I had to go respond to FBI was told in the span of less than 24 hours after 9 11 that you had to stop being a reactive agency and start being an agency that prevents crime specifically terrorist incidences from occurring not just in the United States but against U.S persons anywhere there was no infrastructure that existed to accommodate that mandate that we were given from not just the White House but from Congress it was invented on the Fly now were there mistakes made absolutely and I will be the last person who is an FBI agent who served as long as I did who will ever sit here and defend FBI management you won't hear that from me it's not a meritocracy okay but you can't generalize and try and put all of that the way you're stating it makes it they one agency wasn't responsible for all of it it's not it's not accurate Bureau had you bring up the bank secrecy act the bank secrecy Act was passed in 1907 under the next Administration why because they had to address organized crime and drug activity BSA was not updated or changed in any way until the Patriot Act after 9 11. Banks were not reporting as they were required under the bank secrecy act properly on customer activity one of the things we discovered was it was easy as could be to open accounts anonymously in exchange and send money wire money anywhere in the world it's a huge problem Banks weren't reporting they used to go to Anna moneyliner and conferences all over to help train these people and what they were supposed to look for and how to properly issue the reports they were supposed to it was a sea change 9 11 was for banking Financial houses and the people who ran them you had to have resources devoted that didn't exist prior to okay national security letters where they used before 9 11. absolutely they were National Security level letters used to have to be approved by the director of the FBI the deputy director of the FBI the Patriot Act changed that to where the special agent in charge of a field office had the authority to issue a national security letter what's an NSL it's an administrative subpoena I issued I can't even tell you how many I issued never once were those issued out of anything other than what was called a full investigation okay the levels of review that were in place before those were issued no agent just sent that out in the mail it went through a supervisor it went through the general counsel of the FBI field office reviewed by the assistant special agent in charge and the special agent in charge a fisa application in other words the secret wiretap at least 10 levels of review before that thing went to the judge if you had a prosecution involved even a potential one down the road that fisa application was also reviewed by the assistant United States line attorney on the side of the case likely the U.S attorney of that office and Department of Justice no fisa application makes it before the fisa court judge unless that thing's been signed off on by extraordinarily multiple layers of review and approval and it's always been that way no individual agent can get a fisa approved no individual agent in my experience and I'll narrow it to my experience no individual agent can submit an application on their own I don't want to cut you off Tom but I do want to make sure that we get to everyone's questions who has and do we have a question over here you've you've done a good job I think of letting us know that the agents the field agents are doing the best they can with what they have to work with is the problem I think the answer is going to be yes but I want you guys to confirm it is the problem with the FBI CIA the agency management or the clowns that we send to Washington every two years and every six years well you're setting me up we're being recorded So using clowns that'll get me in trouble no look look there there is there the one of the big changes that happened in the FBI after 9 11 is is that director Mueller inflated the size of FBI headquarters exponentially I don't even I don't even know what the percentage is but the numbers of agents that were assigned to headquarters grew by the thousands that meant there was less agents in the field available to work not just terrorism but anything they created positions that there weren't people to staff and Mueller demanded that those positions get staffed and so what that meant is is they dropped the requirements it took for you to go into the management program as a field agent the highest GSA pay level you can get to 13. so a supervisor is a 14 in a sax of 15 and then there's there's executive service levels within that they created all these 14 and 15 positions they couldn't staff so then all of a sudden we had people with three years in the FBI who were going back to 14 on a substantive desk in terrorism didn't work then and it's not working now okay and they have yet to figure out how to fix that problem and that's nothing new it's not secret it's been written about plenty of times before it's why I say I'm not an apologist for that system at all it frustrated me quite a bit in my career I can't speak to how the other agencies are constructed what I can tell you is for the folks who I worked with I had friends at all these different agencies that I knew over the years there has been a cycle in felt you know roughly since 2016 of mass retirements and people quitting it used to be unheard of that you would hear of an FBI agent with 15 years in quitting it was unheard of that analysts at CIA who had 20 years in resigned that has happened quite a bit in the last five to ten years and so there's there's you know and frankly morale has also been hit horribly so that's a combination of factors that that doesn't help getting the job done effectively you know what I would say too and Michael jump in here but when it comes to the protection of the American people's civil rights the first line of defense is the individual agent um it is the individual agent that is going to initiate nine times out of ten nine and a half times out of ten is going to initiate the opening of a case and my ex again I will speak only to my experience I never saw my 23 years anyone attempt to initiate an investigation based on Prejudice of political view race sex preference anything the case was open because that individual or individuals and that in by individual I could also meet a corporate business entity had done something to put them on the radar and that something had to look like something illegal that needed to be investigated to determine whether it was illegal and I had plenty of cases that I started that I closed because you couldn't get it there but you had to go through the process you had to at least make the effort to determine whether or not there was actually illegality involved there was a congressional investigation into the wider Whitey Bulger Fiasco at the FBI don't know an informant that the FBI mishandled FBI agent was actually convicted I believe of murder related to that the handling of that informant hearing was hearings were held in Congress and a Report was generated which I I bring off just because of its title its title was everything secret degenerates and I think that can be applied to any of these programs and any of these agencies right you know we all have a room in our house that when guests come over we just shut the door there right we we clean up the rest of the house but that room is to closing the door doesn't make it cleaner you know I had a friend of mine when I moved to New York City who had had lived through 911 and of course was traumatized by it he said you know what I don't know why you bother about this oversight stuff you know I I'd let them do whatever they think is necessary to do and I said well what did you know about how the FBI was handling intelligence before 9 11. and he said nothing and I said and what you know now and he said nothing I said so what makes you think you're any safer and you know I think the January 6th event sort of book ends this problem that here was an attack planned in in plain sight anybody with a newspaper subscription could have read what was going to happen and somehow the the intelligence apparatus we built was not ringing the alarms to send the people there to do this yeah there there's evidence and you know one of the problems that was pointed out is is the failure you you can't fix a problem you won't acknowledge and uh if you look at the Inspector General reports that examine the national security letters and found widespread abuses throughout the FBI if you look at at the Inspector General reports that examine the foreign intelligence surveillance act warrant process and found widespread problems that all these hoops that that need to be jumped through aren't actually jumped through all the time and in fact erroneous information gets into those warrants and that is a systemic problem and I would argue it's a systemic problem because it's Secret right that that the one advantage I had mostly work in criminal cases in my career is that I went through they call it a trial right you know I'm up there putting the evidence that I collected everything that I've I've done over the past year working undercover against Nazis is now available to their defense attorneys to cross-examine me with and if I made mistakes they get to beat me up about it and the judge gets to say if I broke the law and the jury gets to say whether the evidence uh Justified the government's activities and put these people in jail and that kind of cleansing process I think is a little more effective than what we have in this intelligence system that we've created that doesn't actually perform as well as it needs to and has to far too great an impact on the privacy and civil rights of ordinary people who aren't doing anything wrong there's no reason the government should have your cell phone records right it had a friend of mine said well you know I don't care if that government has my phone records I'm not doing anything wrong and I said well what is the the government learning about terrorism from your phone records she said nothing I said then why does the government want your phone records that's the question that you need to ask yourself why is this information being collected if from people who who aren't doing anything wrong and I would argue that because there are only 12 000 FBI agents and because this is uh an organization that doesn't necessarily get all the resources we might imagine that it would they need to be more careful in how they use those resources to make sure they're focused on people they actually have evidence or doing something wrong think we have time for one more question I think we have one up here oh sorry about one right there yeah I wanted to ask that there is why like a somewhat widespread opinion that 20 years ago 10 years ago the main threat to the United States was foreign terrorism and now the main thread is domestic terrorism and it especially was raised after January 6th and for example the attacks targeting electrical grid which happened several times in last in late years so my question is first whether you agree with this and if you do then what adjustments should be done in the work of these agencies to adequately respond to this change I personally take issue with the notion that domestic terrorism is more of a threat than International terrorism Al Qaeda first and foremost has never gone away despite all the political pronouncements that Al Qaeda is dead and buried that's simply not accurate and matter of fact there's still members of the original gang of six that founded Al Qaeda that are still out there Alive and Kicking and up to no good so they will never give up wanting to attack the United States same applies to those who belong to Isis Coruscant I can list off all these because it's their ideology the United States is the enemy we assumed the role of Imperial colonial power dating back to 1948 in the recognition of Israel I mean it stems from that forward so that threat's never going to go away um January 6th it's it you know it's interesting my first the first thing I did when I got out of Quantico is I was assigned to be Tim McVeigh as part of the trial preparation for the Oklahoma City bombing trial lead attorney was Merrick Garland for that Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols were two ex-us Army guys who'd gotten out uh kind of bummed around didn't have much going for him nickel's brother lived up in Michigan was member of an early form of the Michigan militia they the ideology going again we're talking back to 19 early 1990s okay the government over taxes us the government is not doing what we think they should be doing pick whatever issue okay there's a religious bent to this abortion was a single issue that these guys latched onto for example so fast forward to January 6th proud boys Oath Keepers 1776ers pick your group what's their ideology it hasn't changed much from Nicholas and McVeigh now is it a very serious threat absolutely it is is it a growing threat yes now you can sit here and debate what the issues are that are feeding into that Evolution our politics for example we're not here to get into that but I think the part of the problem is is that we want this country to try and prioritize stuff like this you can't really prioritize which ideology is going to strike first they both want to strike first so the question then becomes do we have the assets available to allocate to address both problems okay and that's I think where the the FBI in particular but the rest of the usick right now is trying to figure that out there was a huge move roughly five years ago within the Department of Defense to completely de-emphasize International terrorism we'd gone into Iraq and Afghanistan we've killed all these guys it's no longer an issue well and we still see soldiers getting killed in Syria we still there are other things going on involving those groups that are still a problem okay uh you know the domestic Terror side it's you know Mike went undercover back then to get into those groups it is easier said than done to do that the criminals and I say criminals people who are part of these domestic groups are way more sophisticated than the mcveighs and the Nichols they understand how their internet works they understand how the FBI and local and state law enforcement works so it's just not simple to try and infiltrate these groups so how can you do that well they're being told you've got to surveil them so how do you surveil these groups how many tools are actually in the toolbox to do that what's you know how many how many options do you actually have to surveil a group like the proud boys if you can't get a human Source into them what can you do well you're gonna have to figure out how they communicate you're going to have to ascertain the facts that substantiate a search warrant or actually the warrant to get what's called a title III wire tap on the criminal side and listen to them or to look at see what they're doing on content on the internet again through court order right it's not it's not easy I mean that's that's the part of this that you've got to understand investigating groups like this pick your side itdt it's very hard to do huge criticism came out in that 911 post you know whether you're talking about the 911 Commission report but just the after action washout we had no we being you suck had no human intelligence sources into Al Qaeda zero the only surveillance we had was listening to phone conversations and that wasn't being done by the bureau that was being done by CIA NSA and not being shared okay so you get you're trying to get him in it trying to recruit somebody's part of that group which is really probably the best strategy to do right now try and play on somebody's sense of what's right and wrong because the end of the day when you're trying to recruit somebody who's committed to be part of a criminal organization you've got to try and get to understand what you are doing is wrong I had to do that a lot in my career it's not easy to do but that's probably the straight way into one of these groups is to try and get one of their members or multiple of their members to cooperate and let you have some advanced warning of what's coming and and I I would just agree with the idea that you don't you know it's a silly exercise to try to prioritize these things the FBI has certain responsibilities they need to cover them all but you know there has been a deep prioritization of white supremacists and far-right militant violence in the United States certainly since 9 11. uh it you know I worked this stuff in the 1990s and we didn't get three sources we needed then uh but you know one one of the key things that that needs to be done you know yes surveillance and and use of informance and infiltrating with undercover agents but first we need to understand the problem you know how many people white supremacists killed last year anybody the year before that uh the FBI doesn't know either nobody keeps track no government agency keeps track of the violent actions that white supremacists and far-right militants or any other domestic terrorist group engages a bill was passed in 2020 the National Defense authorization act requiring the FBI and DHS to report incidents of domestic terrorism across the United States they've submitted two reports where they say they don't do it they do this you know again their primary activity they can tell you how many bank robberies happen they can tell you where they happen they can tell you how much money was taken in each bank robbery but they can't tell you how many people white supremacists killed that's because not because they don't have good agents they have really good agents who can go out and get that information but if they collect that information what they would find in their domestic terrorism program which would reflect what academic groups and advocacy groups collect from from media reports and police records is that white supremacists kill far more than any other group that the FBI investigates is domestic terrorism so it wouldn't justify it would no longer allow them to justify investigating these groups that don't engage in deadly violence so getting that data would be able to help you understand how the networks work that's how a brilliant case agent in my first case working Nazis in in Southern California that's what he came in with he came in with there was a racist attack by skinheads here there was a racist attack by skinheads here you know these two people were with the person who got charged in that crime but they weren't charged but they were also up here at this other event where they got charged so so you could see the network because of who was at those violent attacks but if he hadn't been collecting all the information about the violent attacks he wouldn't have been able to put together the predication necessary to do that undercover operation and know where who to Target for that that uh to gather that kind of criminal evidence so you know this is you know what what was unfortunately denigrated after 9 11 the you know shoe leather law enforcement additional techniques that have been successful in so many other episodes where we've had a crime problem rather than you know let's monitor all of social media and try to figure out who among the millions of people who are saying really awful things is actually going to do something which I would submit has not proven very effective unfortunately as we've seen this week all right well please join me in thanking our guests for tonight's program as a reminder to all students in the audience our next student Advisory board meeting will be Tuesday April 4th at 5 30 PM so we hope you can join us and remember to apply for the awards and the internship assistance program by this Sunday April 2nd so everyone have a great night and thank you for coming [Music] foreign foreign

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 259

Keywords: Dole Institute, Dole Institute of Politics, Politics, University of Kansas

Id: m9FbcmDuiBU

Length: 78min 51sec (4731 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023