486 FBF: NSA & Cyber War with Bill Blunden

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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@holisticsurvival.com 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@holisticsurvival.com 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? I'm good.

Thanks for having me on, Jason.

I appreciate it. Well, it's good to have you. And we're going to talk about some really interesting stuff in our show, 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. Is that the name of it?

Yes. 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 not tell their loyal subjects slaves, serfs, useful idiots, whatever they want to call us. But what do you make of that?

Well, heartbleed was a programming flaw. The software developer there was actually open SSL is a stack that uses cryptography for securing websites and online transactions.

What's a stack?

It's a series of protocols that are developed. So there are a bunch of rules that you use. If you want to use cryptography and you want to use it to implement public key encryption, there's a whole series of protocols, basically related rules that govern how an interaction occurs. But anyway, so there was a developer who was working on that project who unintentionally. Well, at least that's what we've been told, unintentionally introduced a flaw into the open SSL suite of protocols. And as a result, there's this hole, and if you can find it, you can sidestep stuff. I'm not surprised at all that the NSA didn't say anything because obviously 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. It's an interesting dichotomy. They claim that this is intended to help secure us. The NSA is here to protect us and secure us, when what they're actually doing is undermining our collective security with the programs that they have and the campaigns that they run.

Well, Bill, Bill, at least now we no longer have to back up our computers because we know the NSA is doing it for us, right?

Yes, correct.

I mean, isn't this just disgusting? This is unbelievable that our government is. Is doing this and they're not making any apologies either.

No, I think 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. 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 as not necessarily being a vehicle of change, but being an impediment to change. And I think that what's happened so far illustrates that he really is opting for Band Aid solutions, and he's going to try to appease people without actually affecting the NSA's ability and the private sector's ability to gather intelligence. So I don't see significant changes happening under the Obama administration.

It is unbelievable. And he chastised George Bush for the Patriot Act. I mean, this is just hilarious that the Patriot act is child's play. Well, this may be actually part of the Patriot act, you know, can't say. But the stuff Bush was doing was child's play 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, who shined the light on. On this? What should we talk about?

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.

Yeah. One thing I hear a lot is people say, well, why should I be concerned? You know, I don't have anything to hide.

Yeah. 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 should we mind? I mean, are you kidding me? That's insane logic.

Yes. You have to understand that Eric Schmidt has every reason to kind of adopt that standpoint. He basically said, if you're doing something you shouldn't, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.

Yeah, well, he's part of the spy complex.

Absolutely. I think that people should be concerned. Even if you feel you've got nothing to hide, you're yielding your civil liberties. And these are basically safeguards. I think that anyone who maybe grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong 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.

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 5, 10, 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.

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 now 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 with nothing more than secret policies which are secretly interpreted by secret courts, and to assume that these keep us safe and eventually protect us from this police state, from the surveillance state to devolve into a police state, I think is 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, I think it's really dangerous.

Yeah, 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 bug all of Russia.

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 their military in total. I think maybe China might spend more than that. But so 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. It kind of protects things because if one of them is uncovered and there's still several others that we don't know about. For example, the NSA has something called the Office of Tailored Access Operations. There was a lot of detail about this in an article by Foreign Policy that came out months ago. And over a 12 year period, the Office of Tailored Access Operations, TAO I guess is the acronym, they compromised something like 50,000 networks in foreign countries. So I don't think it's a matter of saying which networks that they've compromised. I think it's probably easier to say which networks they haven't compromised. What they tend to do is they target routers and switches, 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 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 favor these devices, Internet devices, these routers and switches. I think in this day and age, most people are using what's called multi layer switches, which are basically a combination of a router and a switch. But that's technical detail anyways. So they basically target these hubs of information which give them access to large, broad streams of data. 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 tailing someone. There's a joint program that the NSA runs with the CIA called the Special Collection Service, which is 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? Shouldn't we call it conspiracy?

Well, it depends on which side of the fence you're standing on. They have another program called the Signal Intelligence Enabling Project, which is even more kind of devious because it allows them to put back doors. Basically, if you have a product, they'll find ways of putting back doors into it. So this mass subversion campaign, it's so extensive that they actually have one program that 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 think I saw something about that in a movie or something. But that's, you know, I had John McAfee, the security software expert on the show and he, he talked about his time in Belize, which was just unbelievably oppressive and corrupt. And 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 nutjob. But, you know, he seemed pretty rational to me when I talked to him. I mean, he was just bringing up legitimate issues. And yeah, he doesn't buy a computer worth a credit card anymore.

If you had discussed these, if you had mentioned these programs. In fact, when I started writing this book about four years ago, and this is before the Snowden stuff 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 this known revelations. It's like all the things that I could infer or kind of hint at, I now have concrete proof. And it's, in a sense it's a relief, but in the other sense it's very unsettling. The ultimate, I mean, a program. One of the documents that came out from Snowden, they talked about a system called Turbine, 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 targeted 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. They want to industrialize the process so that they can do it en masse and have these massive operations where they're hacking all at one time, millions of machines, as you mentioned earlier. And this document was dated 2009, 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, we need the haystack.

Yeah. Unbelievable. You know, the whole, the whole concept of being secure in our possessions and effects, it's just totally gone out the window. I mean, it's gone out the window with a cop on the street. It's certainly gone out the window at the NSA level. I mean, is there anything we can do? Is there any privacy left, you know, from this monster, which is our own government that we find ourselves living in fear of?

Well, I think that this is stated official policy. The idea of undermining privacy and undermining security for everyone. It's actual policy. The private sector, they see security flaws as a negative externality. If they have sloppy engineering, as far as they're concerned, they don't pay the cost. They don't bear the cost of an incident. If it happens for them, they make much more money just adding features and pumping out product and then maybe doing security as a marketing gimmick or some way to basically pacify consumers who are yelling, this is insecure. They say, well, we're doing something. We have an assurance program. But anyways, they don't necessarily have a reason to really audit things and to carefully identify flaws that exist because they don't bear the cost. And as far as NSA subversion goes again, our intelligence services want to be able to spy and the private sector cooperates with him.

I mean, is this outrage that we hear from Silicon Valley execs? Is it just fake? It seems, it strikes me as just being a fake wrestling match. Mark Zuckerberg has come out. 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 NSA to get a hold of Facebook data. And, you know, Apple execs have said stuff like this and Google execs 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?

Well, this is definitely a narrative that has come out that, you know, they claim, well, we were coerced, that they threatened us, we had to cooperate. But I think that in the end there are plenty of reasons that companies will cooperate. They made the decision in their minds the benefits of cooperating outweighed the costs, and they did. In reality, the dividing line between the government and the private sector is pretty much nil. 70%, according to Tim Shorrock, 70% of the intelligence work is actually done by the private sector. There are financial incentives for them cooperate. Amazon just signed a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide them with cloud services. And the other companies like Google, that sells millions of dollars worth of services to the government, ditto that for Lockheed.

So 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 passed or something, you know, yes, it's, there's just all sorts of cronyism going on here.

Well, 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 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 the government. And this isn't necessarily anything new. You 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.

Oh, yeah, they tried to frame him and throw mysterious women at him thinking, you know, he would do something. Yeah, I know. It's unbelievable.

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.

When it comes down to a lot of these, these, these data brokers, this, the data broker industry is huge. It's something like a $200 billion a year industry. It dwarfs anything that the NSA does. And furthermore, they don't have necessarily the legal constrictions that the NSA does. 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 part of the public record that Yahoo had been known to cooperate with the Chinese government in identifying people who say things critical of the party leadership. And these people will end up being imprisoned and tortured. Microsoft, it's part of the. 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 it comes down to it, if they have to make a choice, they'll usually choose profits over privacy.

Oh, yeah, no surprise there. No surprise there. Well, okay, so the nsa, I mean, gosh, 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. What was the Prime Minister of Brazil? The NSA was bugging that cell phone. And I mean, maybe some of these other countries, Bill, Will become really our advocates with their outrage.

Well, I think that if you looked at this from the standpoint, our own leadership says, well, you know what? In order to find the needle, we need the haystack. And they say, don't worry, especially General Alexander. He's been famous for. He says, 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 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 end up with despotism. 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 see in 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? I think we'd be going. This country would be going crazy. What we saw after nine, 11 would be nothing compared to if we found out something like that.

Yep. Yeah, you're right. You're right. That's something else. Well, talk to us a little bit about Ed Snowden, if you would, a little more about that. 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, has he?

I think that if there's been any damage, again, it's been to the credibility of our intelligence services. Whenever there's attack 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 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 monitored Chinese banks. 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 accuse other countries, you know, we've always accused China of doing stuff like this. We actually do it. And I think 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 en masse. And, you know, there's a word for it. The State Department has a term, it's called schizoplomacy. The fact that you go around and you complain. You know, you complain that 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 generals hypocromacy. 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 highlights something that is that we have right now, a crisis of trust. If you look back at the 2008 collapse, the financial collapse, we had a bunch of executives tell us and regulators tell us, don't worry, deregulation is going to be fine and these AAA mortgage securities are safe. And it turns out that they were lying right through their teeth. So we have the same kind of situation, I think today even President Obama coming out and saying, you know what, we don't engage in warrantless wiretaps. We always get a warrant. I think he was on Charlie Rose when he said that and he says we don't do economic spying and that this is all directed towards counterterrorism. And as these Snowden documents have come out, it turns out none of this is true. It's all lies. And I think 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 it's a lie.

Well, 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 as completely outrageous. Oh, that's never going to happen. And here we are.

They're big lies. I'd say it's plural. Like I said, the first big lie being that this is directed at counterterrorism. They need a threat to justify this. So terrorism and preventing it is their big backstop. And on top of that they say, well, we don't do an economic spy, not like China or anyone else. 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 kind of talking points have been repeated over and over again by our high level officials. And it reminds me of the Pike Commission. Otis pike 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 Otis pike figured out was that the whole barrel of apples was bad and that they were doing stuff outside the law that definitely would not for the faint of heart to hear about the programs they were running. And you realize, you start to realize who's actually in charge and why things are done.

It's really nothing short of unbelievable. It really is. I just, you know, it's hard to even comment. It's hard to just know what to say other than to just listen to you. It's just ridiculous. What's going on with China and this whole cyber security issue. Cybergeddon, I guess, is what you're calling it, right?

I think that there's this perception, you know, that there's this massive campaign from China that's hitting the US and the notion that this is all the work of the Chinese government is what psychologists would call out group homogeneity bias.

Out group homogeneity bias. Okay, I like this one. This is sad mouthful.

Yes, it's from psychology. And basically, 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 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 Bo Xilai, 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. 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't offer basic services. You look at the pollution in Beijing, you can cut that air with a 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 a doubt benefits the government, and they can't even do that. To give you an example of the breadth of the corruption, the former security chief, Zhao Yongkang, the Chinese government recently seized something like $14.5 billion from his family and associates during a corruption investigation. They're investigating them, 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 with these attacks coming from China, the Chinese government can't control its Internet. You can't attribute all these attacks to China, to the Chinese government. There's too many people doing too many things.

Right, right, of course there are. But 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 is very low. So I remember a couple examples. And you know, maybe These were just PR stunts, 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 struck midnight, during the. Right after the malamine and the dog food thing. I think they caught one of the corrupt people and you know, the next day they shot him in the head. I mean, they don't mess around there. Talk about a speedy trial. You're entitled to a speedy trial. Yeah, it's probably a day and you're dying the next day.

The fact that they have those policies shows you how desperate they are to try to control things. The fact that they have such harsh measures is they're trying to discourage it. Look at Bo Xilai. I mean the leadership in China, they basically feel like they're above the law. They feel like until someone in the leadership or there's a faction in the leadership that turns against them. And that's what happened to Bo Xilai. There's, you know, members of the. They turned against him, 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.

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. Sudd 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.

Yeah, I would agree. I think it's a very dangerous situation to be in and to think that our president might very well be good intentioned. I'm not a mind reader, I doubt.

It, but okay.

Me too.

And you live in San Francisco. I'm impressed.

Yes, I do. But anyways, I mean, ultimately this is coming down to China. They think China is going to launch some sort of cyber getting attack against us.

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?

Well, well, I'll tell you what, I can say that economically, China and the United States are joined at the hip.

Why would they want to kill their best customer?

Yeah, we are. Their United States is probably the mainland's number one import market. They export stuff, we import it, even.

Though we pay with fake monopoly money, but we still pay fiat currency.

Then there's the fact that in terms of treasury securities, they hold more than any other country. They hold more than something like 20% of all U.S. treasury bonds. 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.

I agree.

Even Howard Schmidt, Obama's former cyber czar, came flat out and said, I don't see this happening. I don't think this is ridiculous.

Of course it is. It's totally ridiculous. I mean, say, 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 going to lose? You know, a trillion dollars a year in exports? I mean, that drive them into the Stone Age. They love this urbanization that's happening over there. And the fact that people are getting off the farms and coming into the cities, it makes it easier to control their people too.

Yeah. From a statistical analysis, there's no data, there have been no cyber Guddons. So you really can't use any sort of past data to predict that this is going to happen. And yet these people who paint these scenarios, they act as though they could predict it. And what they tend to do is to focus on how awful it's going to be when it happens. And that's really where they excel at this, is how bad it's going to be. And what this shows is that this message of cyber Armageddon isn't intended to appeal to reason. It's designed to appeal to emotion. It's intended to elicit a visceral response. And this is another propaganda technique. We talked about the big lie. This is threat inflation. And we saw it in the run up before the war in Iraq. We heard President Bush talk about the smoking gun that comes in the form of a mushroom cloud. And so these doomsday scenarios, this threat inflation, it stokes anxiety and it instills a crisis mentality. And when people are in this crisis mentality, they'll pay any amount of money to be safe again.

Right. They'll turn over all their power to their government. That's right, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the entire war on terror, would you go so far as to say that's just, it's just a fantasy? I mean, it's just a, it's just a. It's make believe.

There's definitely an agenda behind it. And to see this, you need to look back at World War II, 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. That 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 Aumur 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. No. 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 terror. You don't run around like a chicken with your head cut off and start suspending constitutional rights.

Well, you know, they can pass the NDAA and now they can just imprison any one of us indefinitely for no apparent reason. No lawyer, just 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, the countries we think are so ridiculously primitive. Well, under the ndaa, on an individual, case by case basis, it's a very.

Very frightening, unsettling piece of legislation.

It is very, very frightening. And Obama got like almost no criticism for that.

He snuck it in.

I just couldn't believe it.

There was a small subset of people like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky who took it on in court. But 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.

Yeah, yeah. It's a scary deal. It really is. Well, what else would you like people to know?

Well, I think that, you know, when you're in this situation where you're in 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 yielding our rights to try and secure ourselves at a very high price. What we end up doing 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 by focusing on cyber Armageddon and focusing all our resources, we make the mistake of rebuilding our world to deal with one problem and we end up ignoring genuine and existential problems.

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 a 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.

The book is published by Trine 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 my website is belowgotham.comgotham as in the city below, as in under. And I put news updates there and occasionally we'll blog stuff there and try to keep abreast of stuff.

So that's belowgotham.com your books are available on Amazon. How many books do you have now?

I must have eight or nine. This most recent one is available at Barnes and Noble. I know they decided to stock it. So that was a good decision, a good thing to happen for us. So that's another place you can get it besides Amazon.

Fantastic. And 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. What's great about the shows you'll find on jasonhartman.com is that if you want to learn how to finance your next big real estate deal, there's a show for that if you want to learn more about food storage and the best way to keep those onions from smelling up everything else, there's a show for that. If you honestly want to know more about business ethics, there's a show for that. And if you just want to get away from it all and need to know something about world travel, there's even a show for that. Yep, there's a show for just about anything only from jasonhartman.com or type in Jason Hartman in the iTunes store.

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