Annie Jacobsen, "First Platoon"

one good afternoon and welcome to pnp live i'm brad graham the co-owner of politics and prose along with my wife lisa muscatine we have a great program for you today featuring annie jacobson and her revealing new book first platoon for those of you not familiar with how this virtual format works although you're not visible to us you'll still be able to ask a question if you'd like to do so just click on the q a icon at the bottom of the screen the chat function also will be active and in that column you'll find a link for purchasing a copy of first platoon this is annie's sixth book in just a decade and like her others it shines a light on an aspect of u.s national security operations worthy of close examination in her first book area 51 annie delved into the history of the famous and mysterious nevada military base which commonly goes by that name in operation paperclip she recounted a secret u.s operation during world war ii to bring nazi scientists to america in the pentagon's brain which was a finalist for the pulitzer prize she provided a history of the pentagon's research agency darpa that work was followed by phenomena about a secret us government effort to investigate extrasensory perception then surprise kill vanish about the cia's clandestine military activities first platoon tells two stories the narrower one is about a group of soldiers a unit of the 82nd airport airborne division deployed to afghanistan and had a catastrophic time there the broader story in the book is about a new war fighting strategy involving a massive pentagon effort to gather biometric data on virtually all of afghanistan's military age men biometric data means electronic fingerprints iris scans spatial images and cell swaps of dna and this strategy as annie argues has profound implications for potentially an even wider use of surveillance technology by government authorities in the united states and elsewhere what happens andy asks when a government can tag track and follow all its citizens that question animates her gripping a detailed book and is central to what strategists are now calling identity dominance just how far biometric and surveillance technologies developed for afghanistan will end up being used by us law enforcement remains to be seen but as a review of first platoon in today's washington post says annie is right to sound the alarm about the dangers associated with the modern surveillance state any will be in conversation this afternoon with james laporta an investigative journalist for the associated press and a former u.s marine whose military service included multiple deployments to afghanistan so annie and james screen is yours thanks for having us annie i enjoyed your book it it really took me back to sort of my time as an infantryman and also working for a brief period in the intelligence community i want to start out with asking about how you open the book you start out with a quote from a polish renaissance poet and i wanted to take your t and the quote is laws are as fair as a spider's webs a sparrow will fly through them but a fly will die and i want to know why that quote and what does that say about what your book is about well first of all thank you politics and prose for having us and james thank you for bringing your expertise to the table as an infantryman and also as a investigative reporter covering the military with the associated press and everyone involved in this book and particularly those who allowed me to interview them the the that quote i think in a tragic way sums up the very heart and soul of the story of first platoon and that is this idea of rule of law what does it mean um how will this how does how does rule of law function in a civil society and how does it function in the war zone i was surprised in so many ways as i was investigating and reporting and writing this story how many misconceptions there were how many secret you know complex uh sort of systems working for and against one another all having to do with rule of law you know civil order and essentially asymmetric warfare and so it begins with that quote and i think by the time you get to the end of the book you have to really ask that question yourself yeah you know i was sort of shocked uh what sort of took me back about your book is how the ideas seem very innocent in the in the initial stages these individuals want to do something good especially particularly from the fbi standpoint and from the military standpoint you know the fbi it's a look we want to stop crimes and we want to catch the murderers and so you naturally you would go into fingerprints and that seems very noble and on the military side it's sort of the same idea which is there are these improvised explosive devices in a different country and our men and women are either being killed or maimed by them and so the idea is what if we could stop that by sort of the same tactics that the fbi uses the fbi you know goes after serial killers and stuff like that and puts them in jail and the the crimes stop why couldn't we do that as a defense department but the ideas from all these individuals in your book seem very just you know what about this but as you illustrate your book i was wondering if you could expand on this idea where there is a clash between these individuals really trying to do something good and then it meets the institutional sort of bureaucracy and then it sort of seems to spiral into something that is not even you know what wasn't even even the original idea from the individual who sort of thought about it if that makes sense yeah so you know to just sort of orient the audience keep in mind the military's interest in biometrics biometrics as you say fingerprints facial images iris scans and ultimately dna biometrics for the military begins kind of the moment after 9 11. and i write about an fbi agent named paul shannon having interviewed him who's trying to identify fingerprintable body parts from the carnage at the world trade center and he this idea hits him that wait a minute we're about to go into afghanistan we being the military there are going to be all these foreign fighters fleeing the battlefield we the royal we need fingerprints on those bad guys and paul shannon is given the director of the fbi's gulfstream to go do just that with the blessings from the defense department and like you say this began as such a noble effort the idea was we need to find out who the bombers are we need to be able to identify the sort of criminals long term but things go awry i think partially because you have that age-old you know sort of uh sort of desire for different organizations to control things and after a certain point in time the military no longer wanted help from the fbi they wanted to have their own program and they wanted to do it their way and that gets very complex as we learn in afghanistan because you have the military with its big wheel of bureaucracy trying to go after individual bombers and in essence it sends out young soldiers like those in first platoon to act like cops on a beat gathering biometrics and when i began interviewing soldiers from first platoon one of the things that a lot of them said to me was biometrics annie this is this was unimportant because in essence it was you had one member of the platoon the coist the company intelligence support team member tasked with capturing the biometrics capturing the electronic fingerprints iris scans facial images and dna of civilians and terror suspect alike and you had a whole platoon that was kind of down on one knee you know making sure that they weren't um dealing with you know incoming threats and it created a lot of confusion and mis-ideas about what this program really was and i hope to have been able to lay that out in the book so that then you can really begin begin to see the real story of what these soldiers were doing what they went through in afghanistan and and what that means for us today yeah it was really interesting to see you talk about rule of law because there's this part of the book where you talk about how you know uh the united states military quickly realized in afghanistan that afghanistan didn't have any sort of governmental structure in place they you know um particularly in terms of you know how do we punish you know uh people who violate laws and and so the idea became that we're going to install sort of the western approach to the rule of law in afghanistan but what's interesting about the biometric sys database and system and and and what you describe as uh or what the pentagon described as uh identity dominance is that they're trying to install a western rule of law in a way of you know establishing you know laws and how do we punish people who violate those laws but the biometrics program in itself seems to run counter to that because in one part of the book you say that these a program like that was in afghanistan where your bio uh where you're enrolling all these afghans into this biometric system that would not be allowed in u.s law so they're trying to install a western rule of law in afghanistan but while also having this program that is in direct conflict with that western law and i was wondering if you could talk about that i mean you know i think that's the heart and soul of one of this this real confusion about all of this look for decades the pentagon was focused on surveillance and watching the movement of enemy armies that was the idea what's the what's the foreign country's army going to do 9 11 turned that upside down suddenly it was all about the individual person we need as you say identity dominance these efforts were tried out in iraq and then midpoint through the war in afghanistan right around 2010 this idea spawns at the pentagon called rule of law in afghanistan and so you're absolutely right the the government says we're going to set up a western style system of law it's going to be based on the three the pillars of criminal justice in america law enforcement courts and corrections so law enforcement cops on a beat courts the judicial system and then corrections it would be prisons in the united states in afghanistan it was you know detainees but right out of the ban as i report in the book you have all kinds of advisers saying we are really getting ahead of ourselves here to think that afghanistan a country that is sort of ruled by abject terror and anarchy is going to be able to do anything like set up a western-style criminal justice system and yet the pentagon sort of believed their way forward and by the time the soldiers of first platoon arrived and you yourself later you know this idea was i think a little too far down the river to pull back on and so the pentagon was moving forward with this idea of we're going to capture biometrics on 80 of the population of afghanistan we need a catalog of people in our system and as you say well what about the right to privacy certainly in america that would be a big issue fourth amendment you can't just you know capture biometrics on people who haven't done anything wrong in afghanistan you could and we did and that speaks to the bigger question of you know why were we doing this program and my takeaway is that it looks an awful like law like it was a pilot program for what could now be instilled here in the united states with these big data surveillance systems tagging tracking and locating criminal suspects in military parlance that's find fix finish yeah you you write about a a very particular point sort of jumping back in time to right after 9 11. you know you have the site you know this paul shanahan goes over to afghanistan as you say to sort of start to collect fingerprints and iris scans and things like that and it started off as a good idea and then they come to the realization we sort of we have a problem on our hands which is well the fbi's databases are governed by laws which are created by congress and we now have all these these uh you know fingerprints and biometrics from afghans how do we put that into a database that is governed by laws created by congress and so they go to uh you know john john ashcroft for legal review and he signs off on it is that the catalyst is that the sort of the first thing that you sort of honed in on that was this is where it starts to shift from a good idea to going down a um a very um sort of shoddy road it's the slippery slope the sort of boiling frog um metaphor that's often overused but a lot of times makes sense because at that point at that juncture the defense department says we now need our own database and they create what's called abus and i write about abus at length and through foias and looking at the colossal system that is abis the automated biometrics identification system and it sort of stoved pipe over on one side and it is not governed by laws enacted by congress whatsoever and so there's a sense that that information system is the wild west when you look at the fbi's database as so many of the special agents that i interviewed explained to me this is you know all fbi agents work under the presumption that the information that they gather the biometrics that they gather are going to go into the criminal justice system and have to face the courts and the corrections process not so with the defense department and so there's a sense of um that this giant colossal system is controlled by a very few select people and understood by even fewer and the the sort of canary in the coal mine tale of it all comes in this great tragedy that's the sort of third act of first platoon where one where the rogue army lieutenant clint lawrence you know becomes involved and biometrics are warped to get a presidential pardon for him and no one questions this data as i report in the book why because the system is understood by such a tiny proportion of people that not even the secretary of defense or the secretary of the army questioned the legitimacy of the president's pardon who is clint lawrence well you know it it's such an interesting and sort of tragic part of all this because when i began reporting the stories and i'm very interested in the stories of these paratroopers in first platoon who fought so honorably who were deployed to afghanistan having joined the army straight out of high school in essence so many of them were 18 and 19 years old and as they said to me annie i thought i was going there to you know kill taliban i mean this idea the ancient idea of what warfare is was turned upside down for them when they realized that they arrived in afghanistan and were in essence acting like cops on a beat deployed to these incredibly dangerous areas and they had to do these twice daily presence patrols kind of keeping the peace and cataloguing the people but still as i show in the book they fought honorably and you know despite extraordinary terrible things happening to them as a platoon as as happened to so many platoons there and when their platoon leader is injured by an ied they get a young officer named clint lowrance who had up until that point spent his entire deployment in an air-conditioned talk a tactical operation center and he was only on the ground with them for three days total and he went rogue and i think the you know the a lot of what i write about in in the events that actually happened when he ordered the platoon to fire on three innocent civilians on a motorcycle killing two of them i pull from the more than 1 000 pages of trial transcripts that led to this rogue army officer's conviction on murder and he went to leavenworth why and how he got pardoned by the president is such a tangled web um and i reported in the story but it it's it's kind of the cautionary tale of it all of bad situations doubling down on bad situations and winding up completely out of control and rife with disinformation so you talk about and just to um stay on this point so clint morantz orders the killing of uh what was originally three men who were suspected of being taliban members right to him by no means were suspected of being taliban members no i'm saying to him he they he was he suspected them to be taliban members correct i think it's i think you can we'll let readers decide what they think going through clint lorenz's mind because it's impossible to know it's impossible but he had only been on the ground for at that point 48 hours um when he ordered the platoon to to shoot the civilians right go ahead and what you found was that that uh when you run their names into the database that that his lawyers you know he's already been convicted you know um the the you know uh a military appeals court you know found that you know even if they were taliban regardless if they were taliban or if they were you know innocent civilians that didn't matter the point was is you engaged people who didn't have any weapons on them and so they run the names through the database and his lawyers run you know the lawyers are making the arguments that well these are known taliban members you know and what you find what do you find uh specifically what did your your reporting find so back up for a second here okay the way i got into the story was on my previous book which was about uh cia military operators who do not run opera are are not behaving according to the army rules of engagement they have a very different set of uh operational rules that adhere to title 50 of the cia and one of those operators told me the story of clint lowrance and interestingly a family member of his was involved in the headquarters element of the 82nd airborne and sort of involved in the clint lourand story and father and son differed on their opinion about what happened and i found that important because i believe that we as individuals and as good americans if you follow the eisenhower principle about staying informed it's important to be able to have healthy arguments and beliefs about a situation going into it but what really interested me is when i spoke to the son who was there he said no that's not what happened and he told me a different story and that caused me to to want to investigate this and find out what really happened on the ground and one of the first set of interviews i did was with clint lowrance's attorneys that you mentioned because they presented this idea that no no no the men killed were not civilians they were taliban bomb makers and to my mind that created an interesting conundrum on the access of rules of engagement versus killing the enemy and so i went into this actually thinking that clint lorenz's lawyers had a point that the biometrics indicated after the fact the men killed were were taliban bomb makers and so why i make that why i think that's an important point is just understanding the neutrality with which i went into and a lot of the of the soldiers in first platoon can attest to that my position was that when i began and so imagine my surprise when i because by the way the the attorneys who represented clint lorenz on his appeal after he'd been convicted of murder were experts in biometrics his lead attorney john maher worked at the justice center in parwan afghanistan which is i mentioned earlier the the important three pillars of criminal justice law enforcement courts and correction john maher their attorney worked at the courts element teaching afghan lawyers how to prosecute taliban bomb makers if there wasn't a person who could have been more quote unquote educated about all this it was that it was john maher and his team and so when i learned from my freedom of information acts from the department of defense that in essence mar and his team had created a completely fabricated house of cards presenting to the president of the united states different identities of different individuals and saying these are the men involved in the clint lowrance murder case that is where i became incensed about this concept of rule of law because how could it be that no one caught that how could it be that these lawyers were able to present bogus information to the commander-in-chief and no one not the army not the secretary of defense stepped in and said this is this mustn't happen this is a disgrace to every soldier who served honorably in the armed forces to give a pardon to a convicted war criminal on the premise that the people he killed were taliban bomb makers when that is not true you know one of the questions i wondered about this particular moment in your book is do you think that even with your information that you found that these names were not the names that they didn't have the right guys right even if that information had made it to the white house and made it to the commander-in-chief do you think president trump would steal a pardon do you mean if i if well that would be a different situation i think i understand your question you're saying let's say if biometrics had been left out of the story and the president was just told which a lot of americans apparently believe like a veteran should never be in leavenworth well i would disagree with is that your question well that's part of it but the other part is even with your information that you found that the names were not the names that the biometrics were not the correct ones even with that information do you think he still would have gotten a pardon because the because the whole bunch of the and the reason i asked that is a lot of the debate about lowrance was you know we can't question guys on the ground they have to make split second decisions you know when they when they uh decide to use lethal force if we take that you know split second decision making from them that's going to be a slippery slope that's sort of the military's argument in terms of the you know rules of engagement and so i wonder even with the biometrics being wrong which is what you found i wonder if it would still have the impact or you know would the president still have gone forward you're asking a great question and it speaks to that original quote your original question about how fair are laws because i think separate to this and why i believe this story is so interesting and complex and important and tragic is is exactly what you're talking about read read the book and decide for yourself whether you think it's fair or just that a first lieutenant knew to the ground would be given 19 years in leavenworth for making a split-second decision based on you know the facts as we know them that's that is an important separate question right to override the rule of law and the the sentencing structure of the army based on bogus information that's dangerous what's particularly dangerous about that is the secretive and secret nature of biometrics as a whole that that our civil society today i mean i spent the last part of the book writing about how these systems born of war have come home to the united states be it the pages balloons the persistent ground surveillance systems the biometrics themselves looking at americans and ultimately down the road you know tagging tracking and ultimately locating people to prosecute them in the courts and so the big picture here is shouldn't people know more about these systems their origin stories the information contained therein so that we're not just taking our word for it um you know for the so-called expert who says here are the facts and this is my summation that's what i find dangerous there's two other uh questions i really have for you uh before we sort of open up to the audience for them to ask questions one is you write about robert bales and the reason i want to ask you about who robert bells is is because president trump still has about three days in office and they're just like lowrance there has been talk recently that robert bells might receive a pardon from the president and i was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about robert bales i mean the robert barrels case is just a straight-up war crime he murdered 16 afghan civilians in cold blood with premeditation um i was first really on a human level brought that story came to my attention when i was interviewing samuel wally who's really one of the heroes of the platoon all of them are all of the guys are in my opinion and he told me that early on just literally a first few days into their deployment in afghanistan they were sent to an outpost that was just a few clicks kilometers away from where bales had just massacred 16 civilians in cold blood i mean the thought of this platoon of young soldiers 18 and 19 year old boys tasked you know and of course their the officers were older but tasked to keep the peace in an area where this war crime had just occurred blew my mind that this is these were sort of the first few days of their deployment consider what they were up against how furious villagers must have been with the american military in general how anyone wearing a military uniform could have been perceived as a killer and yet the young paratroopers of first platoon did their job honorably keeping the peace around that village under those circumstances just to interrupt you real quick you know it really to me that moment especially just how you wrote it in the book it reminded me of of uh tim o'brien and and and the things that i'm hearing an echo is that okay so uh it reminded me of tim o'brien uh you know people uh forget tim o'brien during the vietnam war was in the marical division and had arrived in vietnam right after milai and milai had not broken yet and he said he remembers going into the villages and they were furious with their unit and they had no idea why until she more uh you know seymour hirsch breaks the story about the milan massacre and and it would just it you know vietnam and afghanistan are not completely comparable on paper but there's a lot of similarities and just the way you wrote that and the way you just described it it really it was almost like an echo from uh the you know the me line and what tim o'brien experienced going into the vietnam war and so right yeah robert mills uh as you said he's uh convicted uh murderer and uh but right now um uh they're pushing for a pardon for him you know you brought up a great point and i'd like to say this i interviewed 24 of the approximately 30 soldiers of first platoon all of whom did their job honorably not once in any of my interviews did i ever hear an iota of of you know hatred for any afghan civilian despite the hardships that they endured and the the death and the loss and the dismemberment and the paralysis and the the horrible things that happened to them on their deployment i heard nothing but sort of we we went there we wanted to do our job we tried we tried to support these civilians that's what i heard and so when i read you know i wrote to clint lourance when he was in leavenworth and i emailed with him but when you read the transcript and when you read the s the the criminal investigation report of him interviewing with other soldiers you hear nothing but vitriol for afghans in general and i think that speaks to your question that you're asking about about massacre and i think that it's an important distinction to realize that the heart of the american soldier overseas is is always you know at at issue and when you interview guys who go abroad fight america's wars and and come home with no ill will that's just a form of reverence that i have as a journalist that i take with me into my reporting and when i see the reverse of that um i i consider that an equal measure my last question um i wanted to ask you about is a particular individual you write about and it's the one i sort of identified it was this one line that he said that i identified with and uh uh i have felt very much the same in my own experience um i want to ask you about james twist and uh so 2009 um it's cute excuse me not supposed to get emotional anyways um 2009 had i had the very same feeling about going in and um wanting to build schools and wanting to do something good uh for the afghan people and i i love them i i really fell in love with their their kids who loved i mean who love soccer they're just like any kids that you would experience anywhere and so i going in 2009 and you know uh we do we do provide some security in our area but then i go back in 2013 and i learned that the area that we had gone into in southern helmand province had fallen back into the taliban hands and not only that it was worse than when we went in and you know at the time that i was there in 2009 you know we lost 14 guys in a very small period of time and that it says nothing about how many afghans we lost afghan soldiers who fought bravely and wanted to do the right thing for their country and also the civilians who got caught up in the middle of the american force and the taliban force you know and so and what's interesting is shifting from uh my military service into being a journalist who i still i still cover afghanistan i'm now starting to cover more and more things that i thought was a good thing and i and you know there's a there's that one quote uh that tom bush said about biometrics i used to collect biometrics on afghans thinking yeah this will stop ied cells and then tom bush says something that never occurred to me i mean he said you know why do we take iris scans of people you know we don't people don't leave iris with their iris stands at a crime scene and it never occurred to me and so it what was interesting is i really identified with james twist who who said uh you know everything good we did we ended up getting destroyed and as i get further and further away from my you know my uh my experiences in afghanistan i just learned more and more about try it gets harder and harder to find the thing that we did good and so i wanted to ask you about james twist who he is and what and and what your take is on him before we open it up to questions um well thank you for that you know and um and i do believe that part of what makes you an amazing journalist is having those experiences inside of you and um you know james twist was one of my favorites and journalists aren't supposed to have favorites and he committed suicide um [Music] after we interviewed for a year in uh just a few weeks before clint lawrence was pardoned and he he was such a brave soldier and he spoke so freely with me about his experi experiences with such truthfulness and honesty and confusion about exactly that and you know why so much of that the good that he intended to do in afghanistan went to hell in a hand basket in essence and his story is such an important one and i hope i was able to capture a little bit of it in in first platoon and his his loss is felt by us by by all of his platoon mates and they've had so much loss um but i think that some things as a journalist you're never really able to explain the best you can do is try and report the story as it was told to you so i wanted to open it up for questions uh and just real quick how long did you work on this book i was just i wanted to i meant to ask you that at the beginning i'm just sort of wondering how long did you work on this is just the combination of how much work i started reporting on it in 2018. wow but of course i've written many books about about the war and so in in a way that the long tail of it has to do with you know previous reporting and your your stories build build upon them because they're all part of the of i think the american experience um in the world in the world we live in now yeah so i want to answer so we do have a couple of questions here um there's this one from john twist that i want to ask so that's about who's his father um i i figured which is which is why i wanted to make it the first um he says uh john twist asked 13 soldiers testified against the rants why was the word of an officer more powerful than the eleven enlisted men during the appeals slash pardon process i'm not sure i understand the question so uh what he's saying is during the trial um you know uh and even with the uh you know so the trial happens he's convicted the appeals process they they uphold the lower court's conviction right and then it goes to the white house right and and so even without having your biometric data there's still 11 guys of that that of his platoon that testified against the rant so even without your uh your data being a part of that decision at the white house the president still knows i believe maybe yeah i'm not sure if he was briefed but you would think that the president was least briefed that 11 other members of the platoon testified against their you know the the mattoon officer and so what he's asking is why was despite the other men why was he pardoned why why you know was um yes why was the word why didn't that mean anything i guess yes i think it's a very significant and almost rhetorical question you know the answer is almost there in the question which is and why would the commander-in-chief um take this action which i think so many military veterans feel you know it's a disgrace and a dishonor to those who served honorably to make this sweeping judgment and a pardon not listening to what what the soldiers and the courts decided and i think that will forever be a tragedy um there's this question here from an anonymous attendee uh asks how do you uh what do you feel is the long-term implication of transforming the united states armed forces into uh quote unquote cops on a beat how does it how does that contradict the purpose of nato and how does that contradict the core purpose of u.s ground troops i think it's a very dangerous idea and i think it forebodes some real problems with rule of law and and it it suggests you know the authoritarian nature of these databases and these biometric databases i i fundamentally believe that soldiers you know who sign up to uh be in the armed forces are under the impression that they are going to go to war not going to uh be a cop on a beat and i don't even think that the training is even equal um you know i had a soldier who was collecting dna in the war zone explained to me what it was like to be a coist and trying to get a blood sample off of a dead soldier while they're taking fire now that that doesn't sound like the job of a of an infantryman and yet it is and furthermore that coist officer then has to take that dna sample which is so critical you know its integrity is so important and has to try to bag and tag it while taking fire then get back to an outpost a lot of times that doesn't even have electricity and and prepare that sample to be sent to a laboratory back in the united states i mean that's a the job of a forensic scientist or or an fbi you know special agent not a 19 year old soldier and i think to give that responsibility to them the person's question is brilliant in that regard i mean that's a bad idea and yet it's happening yeah i do recall there is a there is a story that i know of um there's a couple stories actually where the the service members were not that well trained but they had to collect biometrics and they had to do the bda and they weren't going to carry you know the body of an afghan back to base to just to try to find out if they were taliban so what they ended up doing was they would cut off a a limb they would cut off a finger they would cut off a hand and bring a body part of the person back to enroll them or to test for dna because they didn't they didn't have the resources to bring the whole body back so they would literally cut someone's arm off and bring it back to base to enroll you know uh and that was just because you know lack of training yeah and things of that nature um i i agree with you entirely and i've heard stories like that it's a really bad idea on top of a bad idea um a soldier carrying a dead fighter's finger in his pocket to get the fingerprint later i mean my god the problems with that in terms of uh laws of war but those were go arounds that people you know did to try to do the mission so to speak very dangerous and again for people listening bda means battle damage assessment and i had many soldiers the first platoon one of my interviews with daniel williams in the book he talks about exactly that that they're they're required to stay in a villager's house under extraordinarily dangerous circumstances when normally they would be going back to the outpost mission accomplished instead they have to get the bda and so they're waiting and waiting and waiting and some of the other soldiers said you know bda you guys want fingerprints these soldiers are missing body parts and you know they're charred from uh from from ordinance and yet that's what the defense department wanted get us the fingerprints get us the iris scans for what for this big colossal database that is growing and growing and growing and now by the way sits inside the basement of the biometric technology center in west virginia inside of what's the first jointly run fbi defense department initiative on u.s soil and that's the canary in the coal mine part of this tale which is anyone who says oh annie those biometrics aren't really those systems aren't really growing might want to take a look at the fact that the biometrics technology center is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and its databases are getting more and more powerful daniel asks do you see the biometric tracking is what julian assange and edward snowden warned us about also did the researching change your opinion on their guilt under us law you know i don't i don't know enough about um snowden or assange to really to really talk about them and i think because i have such a strong opinion about pardoning um [Music] war criminals having to do with the land rants case that i'm probably not the most neutral person to ask about either of those two cases but i don't know i didn't see warnings specifically on the biometrics in the war diaries that assange put up but i do know that snowden was the first person to unveil um the what was then classified concept of uh identity intelligence i2 which is part of identity dominance which is this idea that you to gain dot to understand uh to dominate a person's identity to know who they are to later be able to go after them means pulling all kinds of information about them into the database so in the with biometrics it's body measurements but what snowden was saying with identity intelligence it was also open source information like going to facebook and finding everything out about a person there pulling that into the database going to you know automated license plate reader situations where you're pulling uh records from surveillance cameras on the street and that's where you really get into the big brother orwellian sort of fear of all of this that that's where a lot of these databases these big data databases are taking us yeah just a caveat off that i do remember um in regards to snowden stuff like that there was i believe it was snowden who you know there was a um through what he uh his disclosures revealed it was revealed i believe it was snowden that uh there was mass collection of cell phones in afghanistan you know uh afghans using cell phones and that there was a mass collection of cell phones and i remember interviewing general michael hayden uh the former c.i.a and nsa director about specifically that point you know collecting of afghan cell phones and he asked and he answered the question with the question which was you know how far does the fourth amendment extend outside the board of the united states does the fourth amendment also protect afghans in afghanistan and his answer was no but that i think also plays into what you're talking about before where the u.s government is trying to you know insert and establish a western rule of law based on our you know justice system but at the same time we're running programs in afghanistan that are that are in direct conflict with you know the rule of law that we're trying to instill so i think that also uh plays a factor as well i got some other questions um uh bo perry asks has has palantir been a large player in the biometric data gathering and does their third-party nature of this firm allow them to grow the effort more aggressively outside of the government the government's legal limitations aside from mass surveillance what are other ways can biometric tagging and tracking be weaponized well that's a great question and talent here does play a big role i mean in the book i report the story of a one of the pages operators um and talk about you know secretive things that that are not known by soldiers while first platoon was on the ground conducting their patrols they were being watched 24 7 by a surveillance camera the majority of them i'm going to say all of them except for one had no idea about this but i interviewed one of the pgs operators his name was kevin h and he would watch down or cover down on the platoon watching every moment every time they left their base and when he wasn't doing that he was watching terror suspects and he was sitting in a combat outpost in nearby sia choi with surveillance cameras on the aerostat the software that aggregated all that data that full motion video that was coming in you know by the extraordinary amounts of it all palantir was the aggregator so palantir would process and make sense of all of that data and as kevin h said to me when we were interviewing about this he said to me at one point well and i'm paraphrasing you know their moves he said palantir is awesome in the war theater don't get me wrong but there are moves afoot to use this uh these systems at home in the united states and he said that he thought that was frightening and it reminded him of big brother well just a few weeks into the global pandemic in april of 2020 the federal government the united states federal government health and human services announced that it had given the contract for coveted tracking to palantir i write about that in the book and i think it's a situation that people want to pay attention to to understand how they may be tracked tagged and tracked in the future there's a there's a question here from uh i'm going to try to run through these before our time expires um chris hedgecock asks what are the implications of wide area surveillance city tracking in domestic law enforcement are any cities currently using these systems great question and that is sort of dovetailing off the last question these wide area surveillance systems are precisely what i was talking about with the pj system and some of the cameras are stationary and they look down on a certain ain't what's called an aim point other situations as we see in baltimore for example here in the united states the the aircraft flies in a circle sucking up all this data which then goes into a database to be looked at later when a crime is committed and so this you know begs the question that you brought up in the beginning well aren't we all for rule of law don't we want the bad guys caught yes absolutely but how does that play into the fourth amendment right to privacy should we really just have a society whereby we're constantly being watched so that later on someone can figure out who committed a crime that is as one expert in the field told me very much like the science fiction story minority report stephen pugh asks is there a process where afghan citizens can remove their information from the database that is a very important question and from what i understand that answer is no and even more frightening i tell a story in the book about a young 12 year old boy who had his dna recently taken in a felony crime investigation by detectives with the new york police department and he would later not it was demonstrated that he didn't have anything to do with the crime and and he was never charged a 12 year old boy but his dna was unwittingly taken from a mcdonald's drink that he was drinking and it took his mother extraordinary effort and help from you know a civil liberties lawyer to get her her 12 year old son's genetic fingerprint removed from the nypd database and that's a metaphor for i think this question yeah to kevin off that i do know uh you know afghans that have helped uh uh american forces you know in in terms of interpreting they were promised um special visa uh uh special immigrant visas from congress and what's amazing is is these are some of the most vetted individuals in all of afghanistan because every um i believe it was every six months they had to go and get re-investigated and they had to go through another counterintelligence background and they would also get their biometrics taken right and you would have these afghan interpreters who would uh pass 12 15 16 17 18 different background investigations over the course of working with us forces and then as it came time for them to get their siv to come the united states they would all of a sudden not pass their background investigation and they would be told there's derogatory information in your record and oh by the way you can't see what that derogatory information is because it's classified and that is understood by a very select few and you know accessible to a few people as well uh so we might have uh do we have time for two more questions yeah i see two more questions here yeah uh these could be our final two i see here uh who is the first person you interviewed from the platoon oh my goodness um the first person i interviewed from the platoon was na is named jared meyer and he was in second platoon which was like the brother platoon to first platoon um and i interviewed i continued to interview him throughout the reporting of the book and i tell a bit of his story in the narrative and then uh this could be our uh final question um hey annie it's uh zatel hopefully i'm saying that right we we appreciate the final product it's been sobering response from the guys uh i'm glad the truth of inadequacy of leadership was exposed uh who surprised you the most with their ineptitude oh well thanks um thanks for that question and and for everybody's support on this book and i think that what was most distressing to me was the ineptitude by um secretary of defense mark esper you know he was right there uh whispering in the president's ear he certainly had the president's ear when president trump chose to harden clint lowrance and secretary esper had been secretary of the army before and if there was anyone who i would think should be standing up for the good order and discipline of all those who served honorably it would have been mark esper well that's our final question thank you so much uh for your time today i'm going to turn it back over to mr graham thank you james so much for your amazing questions and also for your service thank you great moderating james and i i just want to echo what andy said to you but at your own time in in afghanistan yes some of the good that you thought you were doing may not have lasted but the military experience that you had and informs the work that you're doing today as a journalist which does continue to give it value um and annie uh you've given us a lot to think about regarding biometric data collection the surveillance state and the rule of law all important issues that we as a society will continue to grapple with and that your book will help us address to everyone watching thanks again for tuning in remember you can find a link in the chat column to purchase annie's book for splatoon from all of us here at politics and pros stay well and well read thank you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 16,770

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Id: PocYkkTEZtQ

Length: 60min 12sec (3612 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021