Jason Hartman plays a Flash Back Friday episode where he hosts author Bill Blunden. The discussion centers around the NSA and the advanced software they are using to spy on individuals. Blunden gives us some of his background as the founder of Below Gotham Labs. He explains the importance of protecting our privacy and liberties.
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Welcome to this week’s edition of flashback Friday, your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present, and propel you into the future. Enjoy.
Announcer 0:14
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Jason Hartman 1:03
Welcome to the holistic survival show. This is your host, Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the holistic survival show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at holistic survival calm, you can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free has loads of great information. And there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site. So make sure you take advantage of that at holistic survival calm. We’ll be right back. Hey, it’s my pleasure to welcome bill Blunden to the show. He’s coming to us today from San Francisco, California. And his latest book is Behold a Pale farce cyber war, threat inflation and get this the malware industrial complex. I love that bill. How are you?
Bill Blunden 1:57
I’m good. Thanks for having me on. Jason, I appreciate it.
Jason Hartman 2:00
Well, it’s it’s good to have you. And we’re gonna talk about some really interesting stuff in our short time together here. Of course, the NSA is actively taking advantage of all of us. And I just read yesterday that that computer, I guess it’s a virus. I don’t know malware not sure. But Heartbleed Heartbleed. Is that the name of this? Yes. Apparently, the NSA knew about that just over two years ago, and could have probably saved us a lot of hassle and headache. But instead they decided to exploit it for their own purposes and, and not tell their their loyal subjects, slaves, serfs, useful idiots, whatever they want to call us about? What? What do you make of that?
Bill Blunden 2:46
Well, Heartbleed was a programming flawed that its software developer, there was actually an open SSL as a stack that uses cryptography for securing websites and online transactions.
Jason Hartman 2:58
And that no
Bill Blunden 3:00
stack just it’s a series of protocols that are developed. So there there are a bunch of rules that you use if you want to use cryptography, and you want to use it to to implement public key encryption. There’s a whole series of protocols basically as related rules that govern how an interaction occurs. But anyway, so there’s a there was a developer who’s working on that project, who unintentionally Well, at least that’s what we’ve been told, unintentionally introduced a flaw into the open SSL, a suite of protocols. And as a result, you know, there’s this, there’s this hole, and if you can find it, you can sidestep stuff. And I’m not surprised at all that the NSA didn’t say anything, because obviously, that their goal is to gather intelligence and spy on people. So it’s in their best interest to keep this quiet, because then they can use it to spy on people. So it’s, it’s an interesting dichotomy. You know, they they claim that, you know, this is intended to help secure us, you know, that the NSA is here to protect us and secure us, when what they’re actually doing is undermining our collective security with what with the programs that they have. And the the campaigns that they run. So well,
Jason Hartman 4:13
they’ll bill, at least at least now, we no longer have to backup our computers, because we know the NSA is doing it for us, right? Yes. Correct. I mean, isn’t this isn’t this just disgusting? This is unbelievable, that our government is doing this. And they’re not making any apologies, either.
Bill Blunden 4:34
No, they’re, I think there there have been kind of these tentative moves to kind of give voice to dissent in order to kind of hijack it and then to kind of squelch it. And this is something that Glenn Greenwald mentioned yesterday, when during the Polk awards, he was talking afterwards. He mentioned during the press conference that he sees Obama is not necessarily being a vehicle of change, but being impediment to change. And I think that what’s happened so far as kind of as kind of illustrates that that he really is, is opting for Band Aid solutions. And he’s going to try to appease people without actually affecting the NSA stability and the in the private sector, his ability to gather intelligence. So I don’t I don’t see significant changes happening under the Obama administration
Jason Hartman 5:26
is unbelievable. And he chastise george bush for the Patriot Act. I mean, this is just hilarious that the Patriot Act is child’s play. While this may be actually part of the Patriot Act, you know, can’t say but the stuff bush was doing was childsplay compared to the stuff Obama is doing. So, I mean, what are some of the issues we should get into? Should we talk about the NSA more? Should we talk about China? Should we talk about Edward Snowden? shine the light on this? What should we talk about? Let’s Let’s start with the NSA. Okay, where would you like to start? I mean, it’s such a giant beast, it’s a monster.
Bill Blunden 6:04
Yeah. What? Yeah, one thing I hear a lot is people say, Well, why should I? Why should I be concerned? You know, I don’t have anything to hide.
Jason Hartman 6:12
Yeah, that’s, that’s what that’s what the CEO of Google said, years ago, when, you know, they were, of course, blamed for keeping track of all our searches and our traffic. Well, why why should we mind? I mean, are you kidding me?
Bill Blunden 6:26
That’s insane. Logic yesterday, you, you have to understand that Eric Schmidt has every every reason to kind of adopt that standpoint. He basically said if you’ve if you’ve got if you’ve got if you’re doing something you shouldn’t, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.
Jason Hartman 6:39
Yeah. Well, he’s part of the spy complex. Yes,
Bill Blunden 6:42
absolutely. I think that, you know, people should be concerned, even if you know, you feel you’ve got nothing to hide your, your yielding your civil liberties. And these are basically safeguards. I think that anyone who, who maybe grew up during the Cultural Revolution when outside tongue was in power in China, or maybe in Russia, during the days of Stalin, would be able to tell you why these safeguards are important. We need them. And,
Jason Hartman 7:09
you know, you know, one thing, I’m sure we’ve all fallen victim to this. And that is the concept of you say something. And then later, it’s repeated back to you, but it’s out of context. And the context in which society is governed could change dramatically in 510 20 years. And something we say now that may be considered Okay, may not be considered Okay, then, and they are going to keep this data forever.
Bill Blunden 7:40
Yes, as things stand now, as things are currently as they are, I can say fairly unequivocally that we exist in a surveillance state, the United States is no a surveillance state where they have the technology and the tools to monitor everything and collect everything and basically make lists. And to assume that you know, and, you know, with nothing more than an in secret policies, which are secretly interpreted by secret courts, and to assume that these these these keep us safe, and eventually protect us from this police state from the surveillance state to devolve into a police state, I think it’s pretty reckless, because eventually, there will be some sort of catastrophe or some excuse that will be used. And we’ll make that transition from a surveillance state to a police state. And to think that these secret policies are going to protect us. It’s think it’s really dangerous.
Jason Hartman 8:31
Now, I couldn’t agree with you more, I couldn’t agree with you more. Well, tell us anything that we maybe don’t know already, that the NSA is doing, that we should know about? You know, I mean, we’re all familiar with the data center in Utah, you know, we’re all we’ve heard that they basically Listen, in essence, to every phone conversation, every text message, every email, I read recently, that they can literally now bug an entire country all at once. So, you know, if we want to bug all of Russia, we can we can bug all of Russia.
Bill Blunden 9:13
What you have to keep in mind is the scale of resources that we push into our intelligence services. According to the Federation of American Scientists, it’s something like $70 billion a year. So if you can, that’s often I think it’s more than almost anyone else spends on the military in total. I think maybe China might spend more than that. But so in in terms of the sheer resources we give our intelligence services, it’s not surprising that we have programs like that, and they’re all split up into different divisions and sections, they’re all compartmentalized, and it makes them harder. That kind of protects things because if one of them is uncovered, then there’s still several others that we don’t know about. For example, the NSA has something called the the Office of tailored access operations. This was a, there was a lot of detail about this in a article by foreign policy that came out months ago, in over a 12 year period, the Office of tailored access operations towel, I guess is is is the acronym, they compromised something like 50,000 networks in foreign countries. So I don’t, I don’t think it’s a matter of saying which networks that they’ve compromised, I think is probably easier to say which networks they haven’t compromised, what they tend to do is they target routers and switches, these these Basically, these hubs of information where these basically exchanges where they can kind of hit a router and get all the traffic that’s going through this network and siphon that off. That way, they don’t have to, they don’t necessarily have to hack each machine, they can get all the traffic from an entire network by maybe getting one router on the edge on the perimeter of the network. So they tend to they tend to favor these, these devices in the internet devices, these routers and switches. I think in these in this day and age people, most people are using what’s called multi layer switches, which are basically combination of a router and a switch. But that’s that’s technical detail anyways. So they basically target these hubs of information, which give them access to large broad streams of data. And so mostly, the Office of tailored access operations will operate remotely. If they need to get in close and get hands on to a machine, maybe they can’t hack something remotely or they need to get in close, maybe do some breaking and entering or telling someone. There’s a joint program that the NSA runs with the CIA called the special collection service, which has existed since 1995. So this is something these programs all happen in concert with other members of the intelligence community. And these programs are enabled by an industry wide campaign of subversion. So the NSA, again, various programs, they have a program called Bull Run, which is what they use to undermine the cryptographic primitives and protocols that are used by products, any product that uses encryption that’s commercial, it’s most likely they’ve gotten their hands on it. If it’s an American company like Cisco, it’s almost guaranteed that there’s been some collaboration between the NSA and that company. collaboration.
Jason Hartman 12:17
Yeah, shouldn’t we call it conspiracy?
Bill Blunden 12:20
Well, it depends on which side of the which side of the fence you’re standing on. Yes, yeah, they have another program called the signal intelligence enabling project, which is, which is even more kind of devious, because it allows them to put backdoors basically, if you have a product, they will find ways of putting backdoors into it. So this this mass subversion campaign, it’s so extensive that they actually have one program. That is, let’s say, you’re a target, there’s someone there, the NSA is targeting you. And you order a computer online, they actually have a program where they will intercept that computer while it’s in transit, and compromise it and then send it back to you. Unbelievable, I saw something about that on in a movie or something. But but that’s, uh, you know, I had I had john McAfee, the security software expert on the show. And he talked about his time and Billy’s, which was just unbelievably oppressive, and corrupt. And, and he, he said that he only buys computers, he has friends buy his computers with cash. And they’ve Of course, tried to make him out to be some kind of paranoid paranoid nutjob. But, you know, he seemed pretty rational to me when I talked to him. Yeah. I mean, you know, he was just bringing up legitimate issues. And
Jason Hartman 13:39
yeah, he doesn’t buy a computer with a credit card anymore.
Bill Blunden 13:42
If you if you had discussed these, if you had mentioned these programs, in fact, when I when I started writing this book about four years ago, and this is before the Snowden stuff, you know, was was even heard of, and at the time, I’m sure a lot of people read my stuff and thought I was some sort of tinfoil hat, you know, tinfoil hat wearing nut, and here we are, it’s reality. Here we go. I really feel vindicated by the Snowden revelations. It’s like all the things that I could infer or kind of hint at, I now have concrete proof. And it’s it’s it’s it’s, it’s in a sense, it’s a relief. But you know, in a sense, it’s very unsettling. The the ultimate, I mean, program, one of the documents that came out from Snowden, they talked about a system called turban, which was intended to take millions of machines and compromise them and manage them and access them all at once. So rather than having these target operations where you’re maybe going after one or two networks, and maybe get a couple hundred machines, and you might have to have a special team dedicated just for that, there. They want to industrialize the process so that they can do it in mass and have these massive operations where they’re, they’re hacking all at one time millions of machines, as you mentioned earlier, and this document was dated 2000 Nine. So it’s been several years since then. And I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a working prototype of that in operation. So that’s another thing to kind of to kind of keep in mind is that you’re right that they do you know, they want the haystack. They want all the information, and they think that’s how they’re going to get to find the needle in order to find the needle in the haystack.
Jason Hartman 15:20
Yeah, unbelievable, you know, the whole, the whole concept of being secure in our possessions and effects. So it’s just totally gone out the window. I mean, it’s gone out the window with a with a cop on the street, it’s certainly gone out the window at the NSA level. I mean, is there any anything we can do? Is there any privacy left? You know, from this, this monster, which is our own government that we find ourselves living in fear of?
Bill Blunden 15:49
Well, I think that this is stated official policy, the idea of undermining privacy and undermining security for everyone. It’s, it’s it’s actual policy, the private, you know, the private sector, they see, you know, they see security flaws as a negative externality, if they have sloppy engineering. You know, as far as they’re concerned, they don’t pay the cost, they don’t bear the cost of an incident if it happens. So for them, they make much more money, just adding features and pumping out product and then maybe doing security as some kind of a marketing gimmick or to some some way to basically pacify consumers who are yelling, you know, this is insecure. They said, well, we’re doing something we’d have, we have an assurance program. But anyways, it’s so they don’t necessarily have a reason to, to really audit things and and to carefully identify flaws that exist, because they don’t they don’t bear the cost. And as far as as it sees NSA, subversion goes, again, our intelligence services want to be able to spy and the private sector cooperates with him. I mean, is this
Jason Hartman 16:56
is this is this outrage that we hear from Silicon Valley execs? Is it just fake? It seems it strikes me as just being a a fake wrestling match, Mark Zuckerberg has come out that the biggest privacy invader of all outside of Google is Facebook, of course. And he’s come out saying that, you know, he’s doing things to make it harder for the the NSA to, to get it get a hold of Facebook data. And you know, Apple execs have said stuff like this and Google exacts. And, you know, this seems like window dressing to me. I never really believed it. But I don’t know. Maybe I should, am I being too pessimistic?
Bill Blunden 17:37
Well, this is definitely a narrative that has come out that you know, that they claim Well, we were we were coerced, that they threatened us, we had to cooperate. But I think that in the end, there, there are plenty of reasons that companies will cooperate. And when they made the decision, they in their minds, the the benefits of cooperating outweighed the costs. And they did, you know, in reality, the dividing line between the government and the private sector is pretty much nil. 70%, according to Tim shorrock, 270 percent of the intelligence work is actually done by the private sector. So there are financial incentives for them to cooperate. You know, Amazon just signed a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide them with cloud services. And the other, you know, companies like Google that sells millions of dollars worth of services to the government do that for Lockheed. And, you know, so
Jason Hartman 18:32
so if you, if you help us out here, by letting us in to skim the data, that’s going through your servers, we’ll buy something from you with this other government department, or we’ll let you know, we’ll let your lobbyist in here to talk to us about this law you want past or something? You know, yes, it’s a, there’s just all sorts of cronyism going on here.
Bill Blunden 18:53
These companies definitely have legislative needs. I mean, especially the social media companies, they monetize the data that they collect. So the more data they can collect, the more money they get. So they have every reason to want to dilute privacy legislation. And and to do that they need the cooperation of the government, not to mention that a lot of these companies have their own in house Intel, and security sections that proactively cooperate with with the government. You know, and this isn’t this isn’t necessarily anything new, meaning that we look at the fossil fuel industry. They have a long history of watching environmentalists and then sharing that information or even Ralph Nader in the 1960s when he was looking at
Jason Hartman 19:33
Oh, yeah, they tried to restrain him and yeah, throw mysterious women at him. You know, he would do something. Yeah, I know. It’s not.
Bill Blunden 19:43
So they have all these reasons to cooperate, right? They have these financial incentives, they have legislative needs, they have common interests. They’re both ultimate when it comes down to a lot of these, these these data brokers this the Data Broker industry is huge. It’s like a $200 billion a year industry. It dwarfs anything that the NSA does. And furthermore, they don’t have necessarily illegal constrictions that the NSA does. So this cooperation is dangerous because of scale, because this industry is massive. It’s also dangerous because these companies often value profits over privacy. It’s it’s part of the public record that Yahoo has, you know, had been known to cooperate with the Chinese government in identifying people who say things critical of the party leadership, and these people, you know, will end up being imprisoned and tortured. Microsoft, it’s, it’s, it’s part of that, you know, it’s been publicized, that they have altered Skype, so that governments, like the Russian government can turn off the encryption and monitor Skype conversations in their country. So these companies, they pay lip service to civil liberties, when in when it comes down to it, if they have to make a choice. They’ll usually choose profits over privacy, and oh, yeah,
Jason Hartman 20:56
no surprise there. No surprise there. Well, okay. So the the NSA, I mean, it’s just so upsetting. Talk about anything else in terms of their capabilities, or just anything else we should know about the NSA? I mean, it’s just, you know, I would think that maybe some of these other countries could become our best advocates here. In terms of the the what was the Prime Minister of Brazil, the NSA was bugging that cell phone? And, and, you know, I mean, maybe some of these other countries bill will become really our advocates with their outrage?
Bill Blunden 21:33
Well, I think that, you know, if you looked at if you looked at this from the standpoint, our own leadership says, Well, you know, what, you know, in order to find the needle, we need the haystack. And they say, Don’t worry, you know, especially General Alexander has been famous racist, don’t be concerned about fourth, I read the constitution also. And you can trust me, I’m trustworthy, and I have the best intentions. And the problem is that that flies in the face of history, if you look at it like that the Chinese dynasties for thousands of years, dynasty after dynasty fell, because of that mindset, you give the Emperor complete authority, and eventually, that absolute authority corrupts absolutely. And you you end up you end up with despotism. And, and so I think that if we actually did step back, and we looked at this from the standpoint of another country, I think we’d seen a different light, because what if Americans, we were here in this country, and there was another country that could watch everything we did and monitor everything we do with no accountability, and no limits. We I think we’d be going this country would be going crazy. What we saw after 911 would be nothing compared to what we found out something like that.
Jason Hartman 22:39
Yeah, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. That’s, that’s something else. Well, talk to us a little bit about Ed Snowden. If you would a little more about that. What I’m really having trouble understanding bill is, were we actually compromised in some way? I mean, you know, maybe on one of his laptops, he has got some damning secret, like the launch codes to our nuclear missiles or something, you know, which, of course he doesn’t, I’m joking. But, you know, maybe he has something that really would be valuable to another potential enemy of ours, maybe. But he hasn’t released anything else. He,
Bill Blunden 23:23
I think that if there’s been any damage, again, it’s it’s been to the credibility of our intelligence services. You know, that whenever foreign is attacking it from a foreign country, on the New York Times, or on a company like Google, there will be several weeks of coverage in the media where, you know, officials will erupt in fits of righteous indignation, and they’ll point their fingers at another government. And you know, sometimes even some of the security companies involved will get some airtime to publicize their services. Never mind that the Department of Justice has monitored the Associated Press, or that the NSA has monitored Google or that the NSA has broken into the networks of Chinese telecom provider, Huawei and stolen their blueprints, or the Chinese trade ministry and monitor Chinese banks. And I think what it comes down to is that the NSA, the damage that’s done is the fact that it’s now exposed that not only do we do what we accused, other countries, you know, we we’ve always accused China of doing stuff like this, we actually do it. And I think what we what we’re doing is actually even worse, because we’re undermining the collective security of the internet with these subversion programs. And this mass interception program, we’re robbing people of security and liberty and mass and you know, there’s a word for it. The State Department has a term it’s called schizo diplomacy. The fact that you go around and you you complain, you know, you you’ve complained in another country is doing something then you turn around and you do it yourself. I have a word for it too. I call it hypocrisy. Yeah, and I think that if
Jason Hartman 25:02
hypocrisy diplomacy.
Bill Blunden 25:05
So I think that generals and officials are going to go around lecturing other countries on how they should behave, I think you should at least have the common decency to practice what they preach. And I think this is kind of this, this highlights something that is that we have right now a crisis of trust. You look back at the 2008 collapse, the financial collapse, we had a bunch of executives tell us and regulators says, Don’t worry, deregulation is going to be fine. And these triple a mortgage securities are safe. And it turns out that they were they were lying right through their teeth. So we have the same kind of situation. I think today, you know, even President Obama coming out and saying, you know, what, we don’t engage in warrantless wiretaps, you know, we always get a warrant. I think he was on Charlie Rose when he said that, and he says, we don’t we don’t do economic spying, and that this, this is all directed towards counterterrorism. And as the Snowden documents have come out, it turns out, none of this is true. It’s all lies. And I think what’s what’s coming into play here is a propaganda technique called the big lie, which is where you tell a lie that’s so big and so so audacious that the average person couldn’t possibly believe that that’s a lie.
Jason Hartman 26:11
I mean, what would the big lie be? Is it what we have already heard, like people, maybe people are so numb, that they don’t even believe this stuff about the NSA? I mean, this seems like a big enough lie. You know, if you said this 20 years ago, people would be they’d be it would have been thought of is completely outrageous, oh, that’s never gonna happen. And here we are,
Bill Blunden 26:34
their big lies, I’d say there is plural. Like I said, the first big light Being that this is this is directed at counterterrorism, they need a threat to justify this. So terrorism and in preventing it is their big backstop. And on top of that, they say well, we we don’t do an economic spine, not like China or anyone else. And, and we don’t listen to anyone in the US without a warrant, we always follow the law, we always have a warrant. And so these, these, these kind of talking points have been repeated over and over again by by our high level officials. And it harkens It reminds me of the pike commission, Otis Pike, who was a representative who was in charge of a commission, I think it was after the Church Committee. And he looked into the CIA. And what he found was that it wasn’t just one bad apple in the barrel, or one or two bad apples, what what Otis pike figured out was that the whole barrel of apples was bad, and that they were doing stuff outside the law. And that definitely, you know, would put would not for the faint of heart to hear about the programs they were running. And it just you realize, you know, it’s you start to realize who’s actually in charge and why things are done.
Jason Hartman 27:54
It’s it’s, it’s really nothing short of unbelievable. It really is. I just I you know, it’s it’s hard to it’s hard to even comment, it’s hard to just know what to say other than to just listen to you. It’s it’s just ridiculous. What’s going on with with China, and this whole cyber security issue, cyber, cyber Gedan, I guess is what you’re calling it. Right?
Bill Blunden 28:17
I think that there’s this perception, you know, that there’s this massive campaign from China that’s hitting the US and the the notion that this is all the work of the Chinese government is what psychologists would call out group homogeneity bias
Jason Hartman 28:33
out group homogeneity bias. Okay, I like this one. This is a mouthful.
Bill Blunden 28:38
Yes. It’s It’s from psychology. And basically, if you it’s basically when you look at another country, and you fail, or another group, you look at another group outside yours, and you fail to recognize the diversity that exists inside that group. And you attribute stuff to the whole group as a whole. And it turns out that there are a lot of actors in China. There’s organized crime, there’s foreign spies, there’s rogue bureaucrats like boshi lie, there’s corporate spies, there’s all sorts of people doing stuff. And it’s not the result of some thousand year plan on behalf of the Chinese government. It’s more a function of their waning control. And back when Deng Xiaoping was in charge of things in China, he implemented some he started, he launched some economic and political reforms, which basically backfired. And what we have today as a result of those in China is rampant corruption, which is really just debilitating, to the point where China can offer basic services. They you look at the pollution in Beijing, you can cut that air with the knife. You don’t want to go outside without a mask on. And the fact that China can’t even collect taxes, I mean, this is something that without doubt benefits the government and they can’t even do that. To give you an example of the breadth of the corruption of former security chief Xiao Yong Kang. The Chinese government recently seized something like $14.5 billion from his Family and Associates. In during a corruption investigation, they’re investigating and they started seizing assets and $14.5 billion in assets they seized to give you an idea of the scope of the corruption and how debilitating it is. And so what’s happened in China is that rule of law is broken down. And when that happens, all sorts of things happen. And so you with these attacks coming from China, you the Chinese government can’t control its internet, you can attribute all these attacks in China to the Chinese government. There’s just because there’s too many people doing too many things.
Jason Hartman 30:32
Right, right. Yeah, no, of course there are. But you know, it’s kind of interesting what you say about how the government can’t control the corruption because in China, their tolerance for corruption, if you get caught the operative words, of course, he is very low. So I remember a couple of examples. And you know, maybe these were just PR stones, but during the y2k scare, they made a bunch of high level Chinese government officials, they had to be flying in planes in the air during, you know, when the clock starts at night, during the right after the melamine and the dog food thing. I think they caught one of the corrupt people. And you know, the next day they shot them in the head. I mean, they don’t mess around, they’re talking about a speedy trial, you’re entitled to a speedy trial. Yeah, it’s probably a day and you’re dying the next day.
Bill Blunden 31:20
The fact that they have those policies shows you how desperate they are to trade and control things. The fact that they’re there, that they’re that they have such harsh measures as they’re trying to discourage it. Look at boshi lie. I mean, the leadership in China, they basically feel like they’re above the law. They feel like until, until someone in the leadership or there’s a there’s a faction in the leadership that turns against them. And that’s what happened to boshi lie. The there’s, there’s, you know, members of the they turned against him, he he made some people angry, and they turned on him. And suddenly everything that he’s done now starts being used against him. But until that happens, you almost have a blank check.
Jason Hartman 31:58
Well, this is exactly the way it will happen to many people in the US. With all the data the NSA is storing on us, suddenly, all of these things that you thought were just harmless comments, or things can come back to haunt you later. That’s going to happen. We’re going to hear a lot of a lot of stories like that in the future.
Bill Blunden 32:19
Yeah, I would agree. I think it’s, it’s it’s a very dangerous situation to be in. And to think that, you know, our President might very well be good intentioned. I’m not a mind reader.
Jason Hartman 32:30
I doubt it. But okay, okay. Me too. But and you live in San Francisco. I’m impressed. Yes.
Bill Blunden 32:41
But anyway, anyways, I mean, ultimately, this is coming down to China, they think China’s going to launch some sort of cyber cyber attack against us.
Jason Hartman 32:49
Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about that, you know, these attacks, the fear of the attack on the power grid or the banking system? I mean, is that a legitimate concern?
Bill Blunden 32:58
Well, I’ll tell you what, I can’t say that economically, China and the United States are joined at the hip,
Jason Hartman 33:04
and why would they want to kill their best customer?
Bill Blunden 33:06
Yeah, we are there. You know, United States is probably the Mainland’s number one, import market. I mean, they export stuff, we import it, even though we pay
Jason Hartman 33:15
with fake Monopoly money, but it’s true still pay and see our
Bill Blunden 33:18
currency. Okay. And, and then there’s the fact that in terms of in terms of Treasury securities, they they hold more than any other country they hold, they hold some, like more than then some, like 20% of all US Treasury bonds. So they have this huge stake in the United States. And I think that they would be shooting themselves in the foot. If they did something like this. It doesn’t make sense that they would do something like this even I agree. Yeah, even Howard Schmidt, Obama’s former’s cybers are came flat out and said, I don’t I don’t see this happening. I don’t think it’s, you know, it’s this is ridiculous.
Jason Hartman 33:54
Yeah, of course, it is. It’s totally ridiculous. What I mean, is St. For example, they attacked our power grid, and they drove us back into the Stone Age, which would be the result of having no power. I mean, it would be an absolute disaster. And so say that happened, well, what are they gonna lose? You know, a trillion dollars a year in exports. I mean, that drives them into the Stone Age, you know, they love this urbanization that’s happening over there. And, you know, the fact that people are getting off the farms and coming into the cities, it makes, it makes it easier to control their people to
Bill Blunden 34:30
Yeah, from from, from us statistical analysis, there’s no data, there’s no there have been no cyber gains. So you really can’t use any sort of past data to predict that this is going to happen. And yet these people who who who paint these scenarios, they act as though they could predict they could they could predict it. And what they tend to do is to focus on on how awful it’s going to be when it happens. And that’s really where they they excel at, they’d say this is how bad it’s going to be. And what this shows is that this message this this message of cyber cyber Armageddon, you isn’t intended to Appeal to Reason. It’s it’s designed to appeal to emotion. It’s it’s intended to elicit a visceral response. And this is this is another propaganda technique. We talked about the big lie. This is this is threat inflation. And we saw it, you know, in the run up before the war in Iraq, we talked about, you know, we heard President Bush talk about the, the the smoking gun that comes in the form of a mushroom cloud. And so these these, these, these doomsday scenarios, this threat inflation, it Stokes anxiety, and instills a crisis mentality. And when people are in this crisis mentality, they’ll pay any amount of money to be safe again,
Jason Hartman 35:38
right? they’ll they’ll turn over all their power to their government. That’s right. Yeah, yeah, it’s, uh, I mean, the entire war on terror. Would you go so far as to say that’s just, it’s just a fantasy.
Bill Blunden 35:54
I mean, it’s just a it’s just a, it’s make believe I there’s definitely an agenda behind it. And to see this, you need to you need to look back at World War Two, when England was being bombed by Germany, they put up these posters that said, remain calm carry on. And that’s really the appropriate response, the terrorism is effective because of our response to it. I think that in order to see how to properly respond to terror, we need to look to see how Japan responded to the alma shinrikyo. And how they when they did the nerve gas attacks in the subways? Did they suspend their constitution? Did they torture people? Did they implement mass surveillance? No, they didn’t know what they did was they had police investigations. They investigated people, they charged them, and they tried them in civilian court. And that’s how you do it. That’s how you deal with hair. You don’t you don’t run around like a chicken with your head cut off and start suspending constitutional rights.
Jason Hartman 36:52
Well, you know, they can pass the NDA and now they can just imprison any one of us indefinitely, for no apparent reason. Yes, no lawyer, just all of that all of the rights you have in a third world piece of junk country, you know, it would be like being in North Korea or Iran. But the countries we think are so ridiculously primitive, well, under the NDA on an individual case by case basis,
Bill Blunden 37:18
it’s a very, very frightening, unsettling piece of legislation is very, very frightening. And Obama got, like, almost no criticism for that. he snuck it in, I just couldn’t see it. There was a small subset of people like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky, who took it on in court. But it kind of this is kind of one of those things that just, you know, it’s almost like the formation of the Federal Reserve. It just kind of happened, you know, when no one was looking, you
Jason Hartman 37:45
know, it’s a scary deal. It really is. Well, what else would you like people to know?
Bill Blunden 37:49
Well, I think that, you know, when you’re in this situation, where you’re, you’re in a kind of a crisis mentality, I think that you have to, when it comes down to it, a rational person won’t pay any amount of money to be safe. I think that by if we adopt that mindset, and we follow along with these solutions that they’re prescribing, we’re going to end up wasting a lot of resources, and using our rights to try and secure ourselves at a very high price. And what we end up doing is is foregoing the opportunity to actually spend resources on problems that are genuinely existential, I’m talking about problems like climate change. I’m talking about the problem of, of this growing inequality that’s hollowing out our middle class. And it’s kind of underscoring the state capture that’s happened in our government. These are existential problems. But but by focusing on cyber Armageddon, and focusing all our resources, we we make the mistake of rebuilding our world to deal with one problem and we end up ignoring genuine and existential problems.
Jason Hartman 38:54
Yeah, well, that is true, because there’s only a limited bandwidth and a limited amount of resources for dealing with problems of whatever kind they may be. And Bill when we’re dealing with fake problem. And that means we’re not dealing with the real ones. So very, very good points that you make. give out your website, tell people where they can find you and find your books.
Bill Blunden 39:19
The book is published by trying day. It’s a publishing house out of Oregon. Chris Milligan is the head guy over there. He is an ex hippie whose father was a CIA agent, OSS agent, a very interesting story, so that my website is below gotham.com. Gotham as in the city below is in under and I put news updates there and occasionally we’ll blog stuff there and try to keep abreast of stuff so
Jason Hartman 39:39
below so that’s below Gotham calm. Your books are available on Amazon. How many books do you have now?
Bill Blunden 39:45
Oh, I must have eight or nine this. this most recent one is available at Barnes and Noble. I know they decided to stock it. So that was that was a good decision a good thing to happen for us. So that’s another place you can get it besides that. Amazon. Fantastic and on
Jason Hartman 40:01
Amazon on Amazon, though your books have excellent reviews. So this is great stuff. And I just appreciate you getting the word out. And thank you so much for joining us today. That’s bill Blunden coming to us from San Francisco. Bill. Thank you. Thank you, Jason.
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