The Deep State is Real, Here's Why it Matters

Summary

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Outlines

00:00

🔍 Unveiling the Deep State: The Quest for Truth

This paragraph delves into the concept of the 'deep state,' a term that has been heavily politicized and is often associated with conspiracy theories. The discussion revolves around whether the deep state is real and what it entails. The conversation takes a historical turn, highlighting the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s as a pivotal moment that exposed the workings of power. It underscores the influence of unelected individuals in Washington D.C., particularly during the Kennedy era, who held significant sway over government decisions. The narrative suggests that these individuals, part of the intelligence community, operated outside the democratic process and wielded immense, secretive power, effectively constituting a 'deep state' that could undermine the President and manipulate Congress.

05:02

🤔 Challenging the Narrative: The Deep State and Its Critics

The paragraph explores the skepticism around the notion of a deep state, particularly in the context of its association with former President Trump's rhetoric. It acknowledges the existence of a group of unelected officials who continue their work across different administrations, potentially going rogue. The conversation touches on the controversial practices of the intelligence community, including domestic surveillance and foreign policy missteps. The segment also features a discussion on the role of NordVPN as a tool for internet security, emphasizing its benefits in protecting users from online threats and maintaining privacy.

10:03

🌍 The Birth of Modern Intelligence: OSS and the CIA

This section delves into the origins of the modern intelligence community in the United States, starting with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. It discusses the transformation of the spy agency from a wartime necessity to a permanent fixture in peacetime, despite initial reservations about concentrating too much power in unelected hands. The narrative follows the evolution of the OSS into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), highlighting key figures like Wild Bill Donovan and the influence of Georgetown's high society in the formation of the CIA. The paragraph also touches on the CIA's early operations, including Operation Paperclip, its involvement in foreign elections, and the controversial actions taken to protect American interests abroad.

15:04

💥 The CIA's Global Reach: Interventions and Covert Actions

This paragraph outlines the extensive global interventions and covert actions undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War era. It covers the agency's involvement in various coups, such as those in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, as well as its support for American corporations in international affairs. The discussion also highlights the CIA's controversial domestic activities, including MKUltra mind control experiments, Operation Phoenix, and COINTELPRO. The paragraph paints a picture of the CIA as a powerful entity with a broad mandate for intelligence and national security, leading to a period described as a 'CIA crime spree' and raising concerns about the unchecked power wielded by unelected officials.

20:06

🌟 The Church Committee and the Quest for Accountability

The focus of this paragraph is the Church Committee hearings, which brought the excesses of the intelligence community into the public eye. It discusses the revelations of illegal, unethical activities by the CIA and FBI, including assassination plots, spying on American citizens, and attempts to control the media through Operation Mockingbird. The narrative highlights the pushback from intelligence agencies against oversight and the efforts of Senator Frank Church to hold them accountable. The paragraph underscores the tension between national security and democratic values, and the struggle to maintain transparency and accountability in the face of powerful, secretive institutions.

25:07

🚨 Post-9/11: The Resurgence of the Deep State and the Erosion of Democracy

This paragraph examines the aftermath of 9/11 and the resurgence of the deep state, as the intelligence community was given expanded powers in the name of national security. It discusses the implementation of controversial programs like warrantless wiretapping and torture, as well as the establishment of new agencies and the construction of new secret facilities. The narrative explores the challenges faced by President Obama in reining in these excesses and the realization that the deep state operates outside the traditional checks and balances of the democratic system. The paragraph concludes with a reflection on the trade-off between freedom and security, and the ongoing struggle to preserve democracy in the face of the seductive pull of secrecy and power.

30:10

🛡️ The Moral Dilemma of National Security: Ends vs. Means

The final paragraph emphasizes the importance of upholding democratic principles and moral standards in the pursuit of national security. It cautions against adopting the tactics of the enemy and stresses that means are as important as ends. The narrative suggests that while crises may tempt leaders to ignore restraints, it is crucial to maintain the values that ensure freedom. The paragraph ends with a somber reminder of the ongoing challenge to resist the allure of unaccountable power and the need for vigilance in safeguarding democratic processes.

Mindmap

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Transcripts

- [Vivek] If you want to seal the border, vote Trump.

If you wanna restore law and order

in this country, vote Trump.

If you want to defeat the deep state, vote Trump.

(suspenseful music) (keys rattling)

- Hey, Johnny. - Hey, Paji.

- I'm having a really hard time

wrapping my head around this story, I must admit.

- Yeah, and this concept of deep state has been so,

I think poisoned by politics and Trump sort of using it

for everything that he doesn't like.

And it kind of makes it hard to approach it earnestly,

but I think we have to keep digging,

like I think there's something here.

- Is the deep state real? - Is the deep state real?

(ominous music)

(ominous music continues) (glasses clinking)

There's this moment in the '60s

(ominous music continues) (rocket exploding)

where you really like see how this actually works,

like where power really is

to the height of this moment where the US

and the Soviet Union

are in this like massive staring contest.

There's nuclear weapons involved.

Everyone thinks the entire globe could be wiped out

in this conflict.

And Cuba is centered right in the middle of it all,

right off the coast of the US,

but they're on the Soviet side of the conflict.

The US at this point wants nothing more than

to snatch Cuba, to make it their own.

And they've been trying

to kill Fidel Castro a million different ways.

They're looking for an excuse to invade

and to push back on all of this,

the Soviets actually start shipping nuclear weapons

to the island.

(suspenseful music) The US has no idea

until one day a spy plane is flying over the island

and they snap this wild photo.

(suspenseful music continues) (camera snapping)

I mean, it doesn't look like a wild photo,

it just looks like a random field in Cuba.

But you zoom in and you see canvas tents, trailers,

missile launch equipment.

I mean, the US government immediately knows

what they're looking at here.

The world's most destructive weapons

are actually hiding under these tents, ready to launch,

sitting right in the United States' backyard,

right off their coast, nuclear war 103 miles away.

- Within the past week,

unmistakable evidence has established the fact

that a series of offensive missile sites

is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

- It's a crisis, a Cuban missile crisis.

(suspenseful music)

And one man in Washington DC suddenly

has a really difficult decision to make.

(suspenseful music continues)

Everyone around him wants him to invade Cuba,

but he's not sure.

Okay, but here's the kicker of the whole thing.

Instead of stay at work that night

and like figure out this crisis with his advisors,

Kennedy gets in a car

and travels across town to like a cocktail party.

He came here to a house in Georgetown,

the home of Joe Alsop,

one of the nation's most influential newspaper columnists.

It was the eve of nuclear war

and the President of the United States

kept his dinner date in Georgetown.

And the reason why is because at that party

were the people he trusted,

the people who really had power in Washington

during that time.

Most of them lived here in this neighborhood,

many of them side by side, all within a few blocks.

William Colby, the far east chief of the CIA,

he would later become the director of the agency,

Chip Bohlen, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union,

Allen Dulles, who (exhales),

boy, Allen Dulles, where do you even start?

He's the CIA's longest running director

and he lived right here in Georgetown.

Frank Wisner, one of the founding officers of the CIA,

he lived just six blocks away.

Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court Justice,

just a couple minutes walk away.

And Kennedy himself had a house in this neighborhood.

(suspenseful music)

The reason JFK kept his date in Georgetown that night

was because this is where power in Washington was,

on the other side of town from the Capitol building,

the seat of American democracy,

the decisions were being made here by unelected men

who had an immense amount of secret power.

(suspenseful music continues) (pictures clicking)

These were powerful men who were not elected or accountable

and at this point they'd become drunk on the worst kind

of power, the secret sort of power that corrupts,

the kind of power that our founders sought to check

and balance with all of their founding documents.

But here in Georgetown,

it had moved beyond anything the designers

of the country could have predicted,

into a shadowy separate part of our government, a deep state

that was actively blackmailing the Congress

and working to undermine the President of the United States

and being horrifyingly successful at it.

- Unelected deep state operatives who divide the voters

to push their own secret agendas.

- You take on the intelligence community,

they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.

So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman,

he's being really dumb to do this.

- As far as I know, we don't engage in assassinations

and kidnappings and things of that kind.

- I do think there has to be serious questions raised

about some of the foreign policy blunders

that this country has had over the last 20 to 25 years.

- There's some truth in the idea

that there is an ongoing group of people

who continue the work of government

as administrations come and go.

And is it possible for these entities to go rogue?

Absolutely. - Was the agency involved

in the kind of domestic surveillance

that has been portrayed in the news reports?

- My feeling is that it has not.

- (sighs) Okay, I am doing this.

The deep state, is the deep state real?

And if so, what is it?

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(suspenseful music)

So we ready, Nick?

- [Nick] We're good. - [Johnny] Okay, sweet.

Paji, are you on the board over there?

- [Paji] Right here, we're here at the same.

- [Johnny] Okay, if you can hear us.

- I really want this. - Could you start

by introducing yourself, who you are, and what you do

and what your relationship to this topic

of the history of the CIA is?

- Yeah, so my name's Jefferson Morley.

I'm a journalist in Washington.

I've been a journalist in Washington for the last 40 years.

- In the old days, spy agencies were a war thing.

When the US was at war,

it would set up an international spy operation

to best wage that war.

And then when the war was over, they would pare down

or totally get rid of the spy agency.

The thinking here was that a spy agency

took up a lot of resources and threatened civil liberties,

a lot of power concentrated

into a bunch of unelected people.

Worth it during war, not worth it during peace.

But then the biggest war of them all came

to America's Pacific doorstep and it changed everything.

- [Announcer 1] And in today, the bombing of Pearl Harbor

by enemy units. (bombs exploding)

- And so Roosevelt now has a license,

more of a license to do what he wants.

And one of the first things he does

is consult with a man named Bill Donovan.

- [Johnny] Wild Bill, a corporate Wall Street lawyer

who was obsessed with the power of intelligence.

- Donovan had very strong opinions

and he said, "You need a wartime intelligence service.

"You're going to war."

- Wild Bill Donovan would be in charge

of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS,

a centralized intelligence agency

that would be given immense power to do whatever it took

to keep our people safe and to keep our team on top.

This was the birth of modern intelligence,

a euphemism for spying, and lying, and cheating,

and deceiving, and sneaking, and breaking,

coercing, dividing and conquering.

No idea was too crazy for the OSS during this time.

Like one OSS psychologist had this idea

that Hitler could be demoralized

if they just showed him a vast quantity of porn.

- [Jefferson] Paramilitary operation.

- [Johnny] Strapping explosives to a bunch of baths

and letting them loose over Tokyo.

- [Jefferson] A guy skiing into Nazi occupied Norway.

- [Johnny] Making fake companies,

recruiting off Wall Street from all of his old colleagues,

bringing in bankers and movie directors,

fake radio stations, anything to demoralize,

divide or confuse the enemy.

- The OSS is the first intelligence agency

that the United States ever has.

- Oh, and one of Wild Bill's favorite things to do

was to have parties at his house.

- Hi, are we the first ones here?

- [Announcer 2] It's the big night.

- [Johnny] To plan and plot his operations

with his friends in Georgetown,

a neighborhood in Washington DC

that is strikingly beautiful.

Here is Bill Donovan's house.

It's now worth $17 million, it's beautiful.

And this is where he would have a drink

and chat with other Washington power brokers.

He would recruit new agents from American high society,

earning the agency the nickname Oh So Social, pretty clever.

Okay, but remember that spy agencies like this

were a war thing only, and the war ended in 1945

and the OSS got dissolved.

- The forces of Germany have surrendered

to the United Nations.

- What do we do with the OSS now that we're at peace?

And Truman says, "We don't want

"to risk having an American Gestapo."

- A political police. - His meaning, especially

in the context of having just defeated the Nazis,

was, you know, that's what led our enemy astray.

They had a secret intelligence agency, the Gestapo,

which wound up enforcing political norms

and enforcing tyranny, and we don't wanna risk that.

- Here's Harry Truman doing the right thing

and signing a piece of paper

that says that the OSS can no longer exist.

I mean, Truman was freaked out.

He's like, this was really great to help us win the war,

but this is way too much power in the hands

of unelected officials holding secret information.

But it was kind of too late.

Putting the genie back in the bottle

would prove to be an impossible task.

(ominous music)

Is it significant that all these guys live four blocks

from each other in Georgetown?

- [Jefferson] Yeah, it's very significant

because they're the product of this wartime culture.

- This is one party that just has to turn out right.

- Here is target number one for the Reds.

And who's in the bullseye?

You are. - So there was a brief moment

after World War II when the Cold War didn't exist.

We were at peace.

But then almost immediately tension started to rise

between these two great empires that had been allies

to defeat the Nazis, but were now skeptical of each other.

And senators were suddenly declaring that it was impossible

to know where war begins and where it ends.

- The Soviet Union and its agents

have destroyed the independence

and democratic character of a whole series

of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.

- And this is when all the intel people

that had run the OSS, many of them

who lived in Georgetown by the way, start calling

for the resurrection of the OSS,

a centralized intelligence agency that we can use

to fight this new global war with the Soviet Union.

But no, say a bunch of other lawmakers,

the Constitution wasn't designed for us

to put so much power in the hands of men

who are doing secret things.

Doing this will result in, "A police state run

"by power grabbing bureaucrats."

(ominous music continues)

Too much power to, "Military leaders,"

and their, "Insatiable appetite for more money,

"for more men and more power,

"whatever the cost to democracy."

- Truman's mind changed.

And what changed Truman's mind was the growing confrontation

with the Soviet Union.

- And soon the papers were signed

and a new agency was formed,

the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.

- When Truman signs the National Security Act, he says,

"We have to be careful

"that we don't have an American Gestapo."

So that thought is still on his mind.

- The CIA was the big shiny new weapon

of the United States in the Cold War

and their mission was to, quote,

"Gain and distribute intelligence,"

and to perform, quote, "Other functions and duties

"related to intelligence affecting national security."

What does that mean?

- Everybody knew what that language meant.

Everybody knew that that was,

and we just weren't gonna talk about it

because we didn't wanna write it down on paper.

- Like what do they do with this vague mandate

of national security?

- Oh boy, they go to town. - Who's that?

(crowd chattering)

- [Announcer 3] You must stir the ingredients

in your chocolate cake.

- [Announcer 4] "The Tonight Show."

(screen screeching) - So clean

but so soft and smooth. (ominous music continues)

- Operation Paperclip, 1945 to 1959,

the Americans wanted to get those Nazi rocket scientists

on their side

so that they could develop their own rocket capacity.

James Angleton, for example,

protects a general under Hitler.

- CIA, gets involved in the Italian elections.

- Italian elections, 1948,

puts its thumb on the Italian democracy

and make sure that US allies win.

- [Johnny] Operation Ajax, coup in Iran, 1953.

- [Jefferson] The CIA and the MI6 organized a coup

to overthrow the democratically elected government.

- Now that we encouraged the Shah

to take that action I will not deny.

- [Johnny] CIA coup, Guatemala, 1954, bananas,

for of course, bananas. - [Jefferson] Again,

democratically elected government reformists wanted

to engage in land reform

and the CIA overthrows it really at the behest

of the United Fruit Company.

- The CIA is now helping American corporations?

- [Jefferson] The influence of American corporations

on the CIA actions is unmistakable.

Allen Dulles was on the board of directors,

Howard Hunt, Birch O'Neal, David Phillips,

CIA coup in Congo. - Congo.

- [Jefferson] Early 1960s, CIA coup in Chile, 1973.

(suspenseful music) - Las Vegas.

- The assassination operation against General Schneider

in 1970 is coordinated with Kissinger's office.

- Thank you, nice to see you all.

- [Johnny] Mind control experiments, MKUltra.

- In 1950, the CIA launches a massive program

to develop means of controlling people's minds.

Some 40 US academic institutions

were involved in this kind of research.

- [Johnny] Feeding LSD to people without their permission.

- [Jefferson] Can we develop a truth serum,

dosing somebody with LSD 60 times in a week?

NSA's Operation Shamrock.

- [Johnny] Operation Shamrock.

- [Jefferson] Electronic surveillance, 1945 to 1975,

the first warrantless wire tap.

- Oh God, Bay of Pigs nightmare.

- [Jefferson] There were hundreds

of CIA assassination plots. - Operation Phoenix.

- [Jefferson] Eventually Bill Colby, who was later director,

admitted that they had killed 20,000 people.

- Operation Mockingbird.

- [Jefferson] COINTELPRO. - [Johnny] COINTELPRO,

Operation Chaos, Watergate, Jim Critchfield,

Frank Wisner, James Angleton, Roosevelt, John Foster, McCoy.

- [Jefferson] The CIA coup in Indonesia, CIA coup in Greece,

CIA involvement in the Guatemalan Civil War.

It was a CIA crime spree for 20 years.

There's no other way to describe it.

(suspenseful music)

- So by the 1970s, the CIA is this powerful,

well-funded machine of intelligence

that is doing a lot of secret things all around the world.

They start blackmailing lawmakers

to scare them away from investigating them

and reigning them in.

- These agencies had harmful personal information

on lots of people.

When I was doing my Angleton book,

a guy told me one day when he went to meet Angleton,

Angleton quoted back to him what he had said to his wife

in bed the night before. - Jesus.

- And so, they had this capacity

and people knew that they had this capacity.

You know, the Kennedys knew

that J. Edgar Hoover had information about his affairs

with various women.

♪ Happy birthday, Mr. President ♪

- This kind of knowledge that they had,

Angleton and Hoover were masters at using

those kind of secrets as leverage.

Kennedy had this thing hanging over his head

and he knew Hoover, you know, had that on him.

And so, you know, he couldn't fire Hoover.

- And so much of this power is concentrated

among just a few people, many of them not elected,

and many of them living right here along these streets

in this neighborhood of Georgetown, living in fancy homes,

having fancy cocktail parties

and kind of running the Western world.

It's exactly the nightmare of the founders of the country

and the nightmare of President Truman.

- And one month after the assassination

of President Kennedy, Harry Truman publishes an article

in the "Washington Post" and says,

"The CIA should be abolished."

- Wow. - And he says,

"It has cast a shadow on the historical reputation

"of the United States."

- The man who signed the piece of paper

that created the CIA comes out and says he regrets it.

Eventually Americans start to get savvy to the fact

that their government is sort of going off the rails.

(suspenseful music) (bell ringing)

As this war in Vietnam drags on,

more and more Americans stand up and say enough,

demanding accountability for a national security apparatus

that had gotten out of control.

And what does the government do in response?

They start spying on the protestors.

- Operation Chaos was the CIA spying

on the anti-war movement.

Johnson calls in Dick Helms and says, "What's going on?"

They said, "Communists have to be behind this."

And so they start infiltrating the anti-war movement

and they come back in about a year

and they say, "Well, you know, Moscow

"and the North Vietnamese,

"they really like this anti-war movement,

"but it's not controlled by them, it's not funded by them.

"It's pretty much an American thing, you know,

"but that doesn't change anything."

And Chaos continues to grow and eventually by 1970,

there's 30 officers working on it, hundreds of agents.

And you know, the ostensible purpose of Chaos,

to detect a foreign hand,

I mean, Chaos was in existence for seven years,

every time they were asked to report on it, they came back

and said, it's not foreign controlled

and it's not foreign funded, which was obvious

to anybody who was involved in the anti-war movement.

There were a lot of people inside the CIA saying,

"You know, we're spying on our wives and kids basically,

"you know, they're going to the demonstrations

"and we're reading the reports at night.

"We shouldn't be doing this."

- Are we trying to exterminate an entire people?

What have we become as a nation?

- Americans were waking up to the fact

that these unelected men were wielding way too much power

and spying not only on the entire world,

but on Americans themselves.

(suspenseful music)

- We have been victimized by excessive secrecy,

not only with respect to the failure of the Congress

in the past to exercise proper surveillance

over intelligence activities,

but also excessive secrecy has created this kind

of mischief within the executive branch.

- [Johnny] Senator Frank Church helps lead the charge

of taking all of these secrets and excesses

and thrusting them onto the national stage

and shining a light on them.

- There has never been a full public accounting

of FBI domestic intelligence operations.

- The American people are learning

for the first time just how bad this was.

800 witnesses, 10,000 documents.

Their secrets were shared.

CIA, FBI, NSA, assassination plots.

- Does this pistol fire the dart?

- [William] Yes, it does, Mr. Chairman.

- [Frank] When it fires, it fires silently?

- [William] Almost silently, yes.

- Spying on Americans.

- A wholly comprehensive listing

of everything those people fought

or did on any subject you can imagine,

they're having a concern with.

- [Johnny] Targeting people like Martin Luther King Jr.

and other civil rights or feminist activists.

- Bureau agents were told to attack the new left

by disinformation and misinformation.

- [Johnny] Anti-war protestors were spied on, intimidated.

- COINTELPRO is the name for the effort by the bureau

to destroy people and to destroy organizations,

or as they used the words, disrupt and neutralize.

The bureau went so far as to mail anonymous letters

to Dr. King and his wife.

"King, there is only one thing left for you to do.

"You know what it is.

"You have just 34 days in which to do it, you are done."

- That was taken by Dr. King to mean a suggestion

for suicide, was it not?

- [Frederick] That's our understanding, Senator.

- The CIA's LSD mind control experiments

were also detailed to the public.

- [Jefferson] One of the first things they come across

is the MKUltra papers.

- And so were the FBI and CIA's attempts

to infiltrate the free press, planting journalists

within our newspapers.

We would later learn in some investigative reporting

that this infiltration of the free press

was much more widespread than Church even discovered.

- He reported that up to 400 journalists had been paid

by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird.

And there's no doubt that it was a massive effort

and effective. - The Church committee

made a few things clear, number one, that indeed a group

of unelected government employees used immense power

and resources of the United States government

to pursue programs that were illegal, unethical,

and generally out of line with American values and norms.

And they did it in secret

outside of any set of accountability,

partly because the US Congress wanted to give them money

and turn a blind eye.

- I can recall members of Congress

who recoiled from responsibility

of knowing what was happening,

members of Congress who said,

"Don't tell me, I don't wanna know."

I think that is an indictment of the Congress

just as severe as any indictment

which is labeled against any of the intelligence community.

- When Dulles wanted to get approval for the CIA budget,

all he had to do was take a top line number

to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee

and he would say, "This is what we want for this year."

And the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee

would say, "Okay, that's what you've got

"and please don't tell us anything

"about what you're doing with it."

And so there was no internal challenge

to this world of CIA people.

- But here's the other thing that is so crucial here,

which is that when you listen to these hearings,

you see people who thought they were doing the right thing,

who thought that they were doing what they needed to

to protect the country during a very scary time.

- After a 30 year period, all of a sudden,

you woke up one morning and here was this creature

that had been created that no one along the line

had ever really contemplated.

Each of these steps that I think initially

were innocent, honest steps.

- Many of these agents were earnest patriots,

but they were operating in a system free

of accountability and transparency.

- Even within the deep state, there are people

who were doing things for altruistic and good reasons.

And then there are people who were doing things

for their own selfish or bad reasons.

And you know, exactly how many are in each category,

is you know, sort of impossible to delineate.

- I got sucked in when I should have known better

and where many other more intelligent,

sophisticated people got sucked in in other areas.

- So after the Church committee,

all kinds of new oversight regulations come in.

There's new committees formed, there's new regulations,

and suddenly the intelligence community now finally

has some kind of oversight.

The deep state was reigned in.

Now they did fight back.

Church was undermined and intimidated by these agencies.

- CIA people, I mean, they hated Frank Church.

Jim Angleton would go around and say,

"Frank Church was a KGB agent."

Dick Helms raged against him.

Kissinger, they couldn't believe

that US intelligence was being opened up.

On the other hand, Americans were like, "Oh my God,

"this is what was being done in our name?"

- But overall, this is a story of American democracy,

doing what it's supposed to do,

reign in the worst impulses of humans with power,

and in the process avoiding disaster

at least for a few decades.

- One of you is about to be elected the leader

of the single most powerful nation in the world.

Have you formed any guiding principles

for exercising this enormous power?

- When it comes to foreign policy,

that'll be my guiding question.

Is it in our nation's interests?

Peace in the Middle East is in our nation's interests.

Having a hemisphere that is free for trade.

(screen screeching) (crowd cheering)

- Have some very, very sketchy details reaching us here

at SkyCentral, important enough to bring to you though,

at this early stage.

We believe that a plane

has crashed into the World Trade Center.

(suspenseful music continues) - Gotta move back!

- [Johnny] A new threat.

(suspenseful music continues) (pedestrians yelling)

And a new call to give power to professional spies

and bureaucrats to keep us safe by doing secret things.

- And by passing the Patriot Act, we will make America safer

while safeguarding our civil liberties and privacy.

- [Johnny] And then of course, new agencies,

all with variations on the same name.

- 9/11 is kind of like a Pearl Harbor.

There's this desire, you know, we've been attacked.

Anything goes, we have to strike back.

This is an existential struggle.

And that same ethos of the Early Cold War,

anything goes, that returns big time after 9/11,

and the CIA seeks or asserts without being checked,

all sorts of powers that they hadn't asserted before.

They implement the torture program,

they massively expand the warrantless wiretapping,

the kind of things that we had seen Angleton do in Chaos.

Those exact same techniques are revived

and expanded after 9/11, you know, on a very large scale.

- Taxpayers funneling money into millions

of new top secret jobs.

22 capital buildings worth of new office space

that spring up all around this area where I live,

to house all these new secrets,

and inside them waterfalls of new programs,

so many weirdly named programs

that no one leader could ever hear about,

let alone regulate all of them.

- There's not a whole lot

of effective oversight on something

that has grown so big and so bushy.

- [Johnny] And none of which should be known to the public,

that is until someone who's worried that history

is repeating itself, decides to spill the beans.

- Our breaking news this evening is the identity of the man

who sent the Obama Administration

into defend and explain mode this week.

His name is Edward Snowden.

He's an American former CIA employee

and computer technician.

Today he came out as the leaker of classified NSA documents

that spell out a secret.

- [Johnny] And we all kind of wonder,

what if we actually need this now?

What if we need all these dark windows

and top secret PowerPoint decks where they design

how they're gonna spy on us?

What if our safety relies on what happens inside

of all these buildings?

So we keep funding them, but in doing so,

we must at least acknowledge what we're doing here.

We are trading a portion of our freedom

in exchange for a sense of security.

And in the process we're creating

and feeding kind of a new branch

of our government to power, one that operates outside

of this elegant triangle that the founders constructed,

to trip up the corrupting forces that run the risk

of always possessing men with secret power.

- Most everybody agrees that there's over classification,

there's way too much information that's classified,

but information is power, and the fewer people that have it,

the more power the people that do have it have.

- [Johnny] And the result is that when the most powerful man

in the world arrives to the most powerful House

in the world, promising to reign all of this in,

to reign in the excesses, he actually finds that he can't.

He's not able to change much of it.

Instead, he sits there and watches much of the things

that he critiqued grow under his watch,

the thing that he's supposed to control

he finds he doesn't have that much control over.

- These targeted strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorists

are indeed ethical and just.

- Secrets keep us safe,

but secrets also degrade this delicate thing

that we have called democracy and accountability,

that is until we save ourselves

from their everlasting seductive pull.

- The United States must not adopt the tactics

of the enemy, means are as important as ends,

crisis makes it tempting

to ignore the wise restraints that make men free.

(ominous music)

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