Where this was said
NDAA 2016, Government Propaganda, and America as World Policeman
At 1:36:20 · chapter starts 1:34:40
Kiriakou expands on the 2016 NDAA to include its domestic propaganda provision: previously it was illegal for the U.S. government to broadcast its own propaganda to American audiences, a prohibition broken by the Obama administration when the Dish Network signal of TV Martí became receivable in Florida. Rather than fix the technical issue, the administration changed the law. Kiriakou describes his 2011 Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip to Yemen, where a defense attaché proudly described funding a jazz radio station as a psyop to make Yemenis pro-American — a program nobody listened to and that was shut down after a year. Both men wrestle with whether America can return to being a force for peace, with Kiriakou concluding he still believes it's possible but it will take a very long time and requires abandoning the role of world's policeman.
Pre-9/11, the government needed a federal judge's signature to access your data. Now they send 'national security letters' directly to your provider and take everything without a warrant. And the NSA's Utah compound can store every American's calls, emails, and texts for 500 years. To protect yourself, Kiriakou says you'd have to go full Unabomber and own zero technology.
According to Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, the NSA's Utah data compound has enough memory storage for every American's phone calls, emails, and texts for the next 500 years.
At his federal minimum-security prison, Kiriakou found Black inmates split between Crips and Bloods, Hispanic inmates in a massive coalition called Pisces (with sub-factions including MS-13 and the Mexican Mafia), and Italian organized crime figures — the smallest group — commanding the highest respect from everyone. He eventually left the Aryan Brotherhood's lunch table to sit with the Bonanno family.
