US Military Expands Mass Surveillance Program

The US military recently purchased a massive new surveillance program that could give them access to EVERYTHING that’s done online. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The US military recently purchased a massive new surveillance program that could give them access to everything that's online. Well, you know what, I, let me tell you about when I saw this story. I, I had been doing some reading that it really is troubling to me and it's troubling because there's, the millennials don't seem to give a whether they're being monitored or not. They, they, I mean, if you take a division in age groups, baby boomer, boomers, yes, they don't like it. Older baby boomers, yes, they don't like it even more. Millennials, maybe Xers and millennials, they think about it differently. They think it's just a cost of doing business so they can have access to the stuff they want.

Right. A lot of them have the mentality, well, I'm not doing anything wrong, so what does it matter? You know, forget civil liberties, forget all of that. You know, let's just, you can have my data. It doesn't matter. It's not important.

It's just, it's amazing, man.

And we should be terrified that the United States military has bought this program, Augury is what it's called.

Yes. Yeah.

And they can use this, they can just pay and the company will hand them over data, email activity, website activity, cookie data that is on their computers. It lets them know every single thing an individual has done. And Augury was basically started for corporations.

Yeah. Have you ever even heard of Motherboard?

A little bit, a little bit.

Okay. I had not really heard. I, I knew that they had organizations, but Motherboard apparently is the king of this process scrape and sell, right?

Yeah. And, and so again, this was started for corporations so they can get your data and target you with ads and sell you stuff. And the military saw the application of that, they said, well, wait a minute. If you know what websites this person's going to, you know who they're emailing and what they're saying in the email, maybe we should have that. Maybe we need to know that. You know, so, so we can, we can track the hackers, they say. We, we gotta make sure we're cutting down on cyber crimes. So NCIS is actually the big military organization that is buying this left and right. And the scariest part.

With, with no warrants.

Exactly.

It's completely warrantless searches. Now, again, let me come back to the basic concept that just should startle everybody, including millennials, if you're a millennial. And that is that they're willing to trade off this right to privacy because they, because the internet has functions that they want.

Yeah.

In other words, I want this and I want it so bad, I'm willing to let you into every little secret of my life, my home, whatever, my job, whatever I do, you can have it, no problem, because I'm not worried about it. And then the second thing is they, they've always assumed, they've come up, it's a generation that's come up and has always assumed that this just goes on. Yeah. When I, when I go into that world, this is gonna go on. So what do I have to complain about, right?

Well, and another scary part of this too is that this is the government's way of getting around the whole, I need to have a warrant, which means I have to have probable cause.

Right.

Now it's the same data where five years ago you would have to have a warrant.

Yeah.

But now they go to Augury and they say, hey, I got a thousand dollars here. Gimme some data.

What, what, what gen, are you an Xer?

No, I'm, I'm on the upper end of the millennials.

Okay. Did you, did, did you have to take civics in school? Did they, did they teach civics, did you take it?

We, we did a little bit.

Okay. Did they.

Mostly economics.

Did, did they teach history about what happens when this goes bad? I'm, I'm really, I'm curious about it because when I was coming up, that was a big deal.