Surveillance State Goes Airborne: Drones, ICE Spying, and Abandoned Troops | 08-24-26

[00:00:04] Broadcasting live from atop the Rocky Mountains, the crossroads of the West, you are listening to the Liberty Roundtable Radio Talk Show. Happy to have you along my fellow Americans, Sam Bushman, Lowell Nelson, CampaignForLiberty.org on your radio today. I hope you had a fantastic weekend ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, everybody wants your email folks. We'll get into that. We got to support the troops folks.

[00:00:34] The only way to get that done is to bring them home, but I don't see any evidence of that being a reality anytime soon. Yeah, we're also talking about, hey, the surveillance state going airborne and the digital world becoming a nightmare. Happy to have you along. Lowell Nelson, CampaignForLiberty.org. Welcome back, sir. Good to be with you, Sam. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure. The series of four topics today are so closely related it's not even funny.

[00:01:03] Well, they seem to fall together that way, Sam. The first one might be thought of as a little unrelated to the others, but still I thought it was important to talk about bringing the troops home because some of the troops are not being treated very well, Sam. But aboard the USS Lincoln, which is a big boat, big ship, you know, over there deployed near Iran.

[00:01:28] Sailors and Marines aboard that ship, they've been deployed eight months now without a port of call. Their food is bad. Living conditions are deplorable. We're talking here broken toilets, filth and mold, and even a number of attempts at suicide, Sam. So, I mean, people are not liking life aboard the USS Lincoln.

[00:01:50] And yet when pressed about it by family, you know, our leaders here on dry land, they say they just pretty much are dismissive of the familial concerns for their men and women. You know, they just don't show any interest in even investigating the allegations. They simply stand up and claim those reports are fake news. So you have to ask yourself, why the bad conditions on the ship? You know, why the bad food?

[00:02:20] Well, according to the New York Times, Sam, on the first day of the U.S. attack on Iran, Iran has responded by nearly destroying the U.S. naval base in Bahrain. And that base, the former home of the U.S. 5th Fleet, had been a major logistics hub for the U.S. in the region and was a critical place for resupply of fresh fruits for the service members on board. With Bahrain no longer capable of functioning as a major U.S. base,

[00:02:48] the fallback was a U.S. facility on the tiny island of Diego Garcia, more than 2,000 miles away." End of quote. Well, that is a much bigger lesson here that we must not ignore. And that is the fact that our Constitution, the supreme law of the land, requires a congressional declaration of war before the U.S. goes to war.

[00:03:13] And this is where, in my opinion, the legalese and the lawfare and the straining at Nats comes into play. You know, they claim this is a legal sparring match and there's people on all sides of the deal. And look, man, the founding fathers wanted this to be average language for the average farmer, for the average American. And it was very clear. Congress must declare war, you know, define what the goals would be, properly fund it. They've done none of the above, sir. It's clearly unconstitutional.

[00:03:41] But again, lawfare wants to strain at Nats over this one, Lowell. Yeah. And that's why, Sam, I'm strongly in favor of the idea that states should forbid the use of National Guard troops in foreign combat areas until and unless Congress passes a formal declaration of war. It's called Defend the Guard Act.

[00:04:05] And there's West Virginia has led out with this Defend the Guard Act in previous years, about the past 10 years, in fact. And we need state legislatures all over the country to pass this act. Basically, it forbids the governor from committing troops to combat zones without a declaration of war. So I think that type of pressure would help convince, you know, the president that, well, number one,

[00:04:34] it would keep our men and women safe that are currently serving in the National Guard in our own state, you know, safe from harm's way. And then it would also put pressure on the chief executive office, you know, the president of the United States, not to commit, you know, the country to war without a formal declaration. So anyway, just wrapping up Ron Paul's column here, he says, quote, under, I'm sorry,

[00:05:00] unless under direct attack, the use of the military must be subject to a thorough public debate. It was never meant to ride on the whim of a president. And given the opportunity, the executive is much more likely to take the country to war for reasons not related to defending our country. That is the chief reason we broke with King George in the first place. End of quote.

[00:05:25] Well, so Dr. Paul ends his column just as he said on the campaign trail so many times before. Sam, the best way to support our troops is to bring them home. And never has that message been clearer than it is today. Sam? I would just say this about Ron Paul. I think he's spot on on this. I think he always has been steady and reliable on this. And it really kind of makes me wonder, you know, what are we the people going to do in midterms?

[00:05:53] You know, I don't want to be against the Republicans and hand the Democrats a victory, because I would say I, for the most part, agree with the Republicans a lot more than the Democrats. But in these kind of scenarios, I agree with neither of them. I think we just need to fire everybody who's going along with this war, fire everybody who's funding it and not standing up directly against it. If we want to really bring the troops home, let's get it done. And if we really want to say there's a few troops aren't being treated well on that ship, that's true. But nobody's treated well when we're in a war that's we don't have objectives. It's unconstitutional.

[00:06:24] None of the troops are being treated well in that scenario. No, that's a lose lose proposition. I mean, war hurts everybody. Well, maybe except the armament manufacturers, right, the people who are making and selling the bombs and munitions. Maybe they're winners, but that's a super small fraction of the population. Everybody else gets hurt in war. You break out families. You know, husbands are gone and wives are gone for long periods of time. Look at this eight-month deployment.

[00:06:53] I mean, that's incredible to be separated from your family that long. And so it hurts families. It hurts the people that you're committing the war against, the aggressive action. And it hurts them, too. I mean, the people we go to war against, it hurts them. It kills them. It hurts their families. It causes them to flee. It's just bad all the way around. And we just need to stop it.

[00:07:20] Well, you better not speak up too loudly in your email about that there, Lowell. You might be under a different kind of pressure if you do, my friend. Yeah, that's because ICE wants your emails, folks. Turning again to the subject of privacy, which is the right to be left alone. We begin with another great column from Judge Andrew Napolitano, who's very, very good at explaining the appropriate use of investigative authority.

[00:07:46] And his column is too long to cover all of it, so I've just hit a few highlights. But basically, ICE recently has expanded its monitoring to the social media platforms and has issued administrative subpoenas for people who are critical of ICE. But is this legal? Well, Judge Knapp says no. Quote, an administrative subpoena is not a judicial search warrant or a grand jury subpoena.

[00:08:14] It can be issued by one government official to another for investigative authorization or to an entity legally subject to the issuing agency, such as from bank regulators to a banking institution. End of quote. End of quote. And so you look at those conditions, and they're very narrow, Sam. I mean, right? I mean, banks are subject to regulators.

[00:08:37] And so if they get an administrative subpoena, right, they have to answer it because they're answerable to the issuing agency. Or if you're one government official and you get the subpoena from another government official, then you need to answer it. But what about the private businessmen, right? So if an Internet service provider gets an administrative subpoena for all of the email messages it has processed,

[00:09:05] it, meaning the email service provider, should simply ignore the subpoena. Judge Knapp says, quote, the federal government does not possess a general police power to investigate people because of what they think, believe, say, read, write, or post.

[00:09:22] The feds only possess powers delegated to them by the Constitution, and those powers do not include the authority to create a political surveillance apparatus designed to discover who dislikes them. Now, of course, the government can investigate crimes. The proper law enforcement sequence is crime first, suspect second, investigation third.

[00:09:46] The government cannot constitutionally begin with protected expression and then work backward in search of a crime, end of quote. But, you know, even then, Sam, I believe the states vested in the general government only the authority to punish three specific crimes, counterfeiting, treason, and piracy on the high seas.

[00:10:08] So do you see on that list those three things, the crime of criticizing a government agency or a government policy? And that's the quintessential point in my mind, Lowell, is that, look, there's only three things we've delegated to the general government. All other items are left to the states and to we, the people, respectively. Look at your ninth and tenth amendments to make the point. And then look at the state constitutions to further the argument. Can you go ahead and skip the break? Thank you.

[00:10:38] That furthers the arguments by looking at the state constitutions, Lowell. And that's another reason why we need to rely more on state constitutional arguments than the federal constitutional arguments when it comes to police power, because the real power does reside in the states. They have plenary power for, you know, the police powers. And so that's where we should be relying. Now, Judge Knapp reminds us, quote,

[00:11:05] The First Amendment exists because government officials cannot be trusted to decide which opinions are acceptable. And this applies, excuse me, with particular force to political speech, which is at the heart of the First Amendment. The government may not investigate people simply because they condemn its policies, despise its officials, advocate abolition of an agency, or use coarse and inflammatory language in expressing their political views.

[00:11:33] And that means hate speech. End of quote. Well, Sam, I agree that, you know, hate speech is probably bad. We should condemn that speech. You know, we should be lovers, not haters, right? That's what we ought to be. But we must not allow government to punish hate speech. And why is that? Well, because government can define hate speech any way they want. And then they can go after you.

[00:11:58] Criticizing Israel's genocide in Gaza is currently defined as hate speech, for example. And so if you criticize Israel's policy, which has resulted in the genocide in Gaza, you will be, you could be prosecuted for hate speech. Did you know that, Sam?

[00:12:19] You know, they just gave the definition of hate speech to some private group which defined it as anybody who's critical of Israel's policy. That's hate speech. If you criticize their policy, that's hate speech. So the big danger there, and the lesson for us folks, is that we must not allow government to prosecute hate speech. That's simply, it's not a crime.

[00:12:45] And the First Amendment was intended to prevent the prosecution of, you know, those who criticize government. Moreover, says Judge Napolitano, quote, government cannot expand its powers merely because technology makes expansion possible. Police departments cannot purchase surveillance technology and then announce that its availability means that they are entitled to use it. End of quote.

[00:13:15] So let's remember that all... And when they spend that money on that, though, too, it demonstrates, in my opinion, illegal, immoral, unconstitutional intent. And that's something that we really need to kind of understand a little. Just because they buy it, we kind of act like, well, they can buy it. The question is when they use it. And my response is, if you do something as a prerequisite to something else that's illegal, at some point you back into the reality that that whole effort, that premeditated reality becomes part of the legal problem, right?

[00:13:44] We've got to be honest about this. Exactly right. And that brings us to the column from Veronica Kirilenko. Veronica Kirilenko of the New American magazine, headline there, Where Police AI Drones Take the Surveillance State Airborne. Now, I didn't realize this had progressed so far, Sam. Oh, yeah. It's out of control, buddy. Yeah. Quote,

[00:14:37] Now, of course, you know, federal funding is accelerating this effort. To blanket the country with flock cameras and drones. And AI is helping police departments process the abundance of information that is being captured by these cameras and these drones because AI works at machine speed, which is much, much faster than physical human speed. And I'm saying to you, Sam, and everybody out there, we need to learn a new acronym. The acronym is DFR.

[00:15:07] It's in David, Frank, Robert. DFR. It means drone as first responder. DFR. Drone as first responder. Because over 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies have received permission from the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of their DFR programs. Quote,

[00:15:36] AI increasingly handles tasks once performed by a human pilot. It can navigate the aircraft, avoid obstacles, follow targets, and move from a docking station to an incident with less human control. End of quote. Now, Sam, this reminds me of something I saw while I was in Alaska a couple of weeks ago with my wife and some of our family. You know, we had rented a car in Juneau.

[00:16:02] We were driving around Douglas Island there next to Juneau or part of Juneau there. And someone in the car spotted a lawnmower and said, hey, look at that lawnmower. It's mowing the lawn all by itself. And sure enough, you know, we went all the way to Juneau, Alaska to see our first autonomous lawnmower. It was powered by electricity, so it wasn't even noisy at all. It didn't sound like a lawnmower. It just sounded like a whirr, just a really quiet whirr. Sounds almost like a drone.

[00:16:32] Yeah, yeah. It wasn't even as noisy as one of these helicopter drones that kids play with nowadays. In fact, you had to listen really closely to even detect the fact that it was mowing the lawn. It resembled one of those autonomous vacuum cleaners that some people have in their homes nowadays. They just come out when the room is empty and they sweep everything up. So here we watched this autonomous lawnmower. I even have pictures of it, Sam. This autonomous lawnmower just going back and forth really slowly,

[00:17:00] but just progressing back and forth between the boundaries and the sidewalks basically surrounded this patch of grass. It was outside of a big agency, some big building up there in Juneau. And it just quietly progressed back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, you know. And, you know, if you had stood in front of it, it would have stopped. It had gone around you just like the vacuums do at home, you know. I mean, I don't have any of those vacuums in my home, but I've seen them in other people's homes,

[00:17:29] and they're really quite fascinating. So anyway, that's what lawnmowers are becoming nowadays. I told my son-in-law, who runs a lawn maintenance business, you ought to get some autonomous lawnmowers. Well, it's kind of interesting. There's a lot of pushback on a lot of this technology, too. There's a headline that basically says digital delays.

[00:17:53] The rising popularity of what they call slow messaging and slow messaging apps are coming back. I know this is a little bit of a side note, but people are assessed with speed and stuff like that. So they're saying, look, let's go back to the carrier pigeons idea. There's an app called Carrier Pidge and another one called Roost, and what they do is they kind of behave like a pigeon. Once in a while, your message gets lost, and the message goes really slow like a pigeon, and you can track it as it goes,

[00:18:22] and you can wait on the response, and people are starting to write love letters to each other with these slow messaging going, you know, what is she going to say next? And so people are making kind of fun and out of this kind of stuff as they push back against just overcommunication. And when government does this, it makes it even worse, right? Well, yeah, and government is not going slower, that's for sure. They're going faster. You know, Flock Safety.

[00:18:50] They're going slower when it comes to protecting my rights, my friend. Yeah, that's true. Flock Safety is the name of the company that makes these Flock cameras. They're best known for their automated license plate readers. They're ALPRs, basically. But they are jumping into this drone as first responder market niche very aggressively. You know, they – and this is what they say about their own product.

[00:19:19] Quote, Flock DFR is a fully remote drone as first responder system that launches automatically in response to 911 calls. It provides real-time video of the scene within an average of 86 seconds, giving officers situational awareness before they arrive. The system integrates with your existing tech stack like CAD and LPR, enabling fast automated aerial response, all without requiring rooftop staff. End of quote. And this really is pretty impressive, Sam.

[00:19:49] I mean, from a technological viewpoint. It's super impressive. They can fly – they're Alpha Drone. Flock says they're Alpha Drone. They can fly 60 miles per hour. They can operate within a four-mile radius, which covers roughly 50 square miles. It can read license plates from a mile away. It carries thermal imaging capability, zoom optics capability, you know, allowing you to zero in on a certain thing.

[00:20:17] Well, so not only does a drone arrive on the average in 86 seconds, but it also arrives three-fourths of the time before a human being arrives. And so far, they say, they claim, about one in five calls, you know, one in five 911 calls is cleared without ever having to dispatch a human being, a human officer. And again, to me, it all depends on whose hands this technology is in and what their intent is.

[00:20:46] If it's in good people's hands with honorable intent, I think it's incredibly awesome. If it's in the wrong hands, I think it's incredibly dangerous. Yeah, just like any other tool, just like the Internet when it came along. It was incredibly helpful, but also incredibly dangerous. And, you know, that's what's happening with AI, with the advent of AI. It, too, is incredibly awesome. It certainly helps me in my work be more productive, but it can also be very dangerous.

[00:21:13] And we just have to learn to work with the tools that we have, use them in the right way, and stop people, bad people, you know, with evil intent from using them in the wrong way. I mean, you can, for example, it has helped to find a kidnapped child, for example. I mean, and that was a wise and good use of the technology.

[00:21:38] But in other cases, it's bad because it's used to, you know, I mean, one drone followed two men until they parked and began playing basketball. Another hovered over a young person sitting alone on a rooftop. Another allowed cops to find out where a good-looking chick is. Yeah, exactly. Just to stalk their, you know, estranged wife or whatever. So there are numerous abuses of this technology.

[00:22:05] And that's why we members of the public, we've got to encourage our legislators to specify the appropriate guardrails around the use of drones. I just happened to mention to my own state representative last week, Sam, a Substack article that said Utah had strong guardrails in place. Apparently they'd done a survey of all 50 states, and they decided that Utah had strong guardrails, and the state of Washington had very strong guardrails.

[00:22:33] Well, my state representative just laughed at that and replied, if the author of the article thought Utah's laws were strong, he was sadly mistaken, because they are not strong, she said. And that puts the rest of the states in the country in sorely lacking the necessary guardrails. So, you know, you need to be active out there. I know this is a national show, Sam. We have people all over the country listening to this show.

[00:22:58] You need to work with your state legislators and ensure and insist that they provide strong and wise guardrails in place around this technology, or it's going to be abused, you know, so badly you're going to be sorry that you didn't act and get them in place first. That's the word of warning. That's the whole reason for this focus on this topic this morning, Sam, is that our digital world is becoming a nightmare, as Paul Craig Roberts says,

[00:23:28] and we need to stop the abuse of this power. Let's go ahead and use it wisely, but let's stop the abuse of the power. And I think if we demand as people and get educated and up on the topic and demand our legislative bodies deal with this stuff, I think we can get ahead of it. I think the biggest problem that we face a lot of times is when we let the technology get ahead of the laws and governance of it, and then without governance, things go sideways. Yeah, exactly right, Sam.

[00:23:58] So I appreciate the chance to talk about this very important topic on Liberty Roundtable this morning, Sam, and encourage people to be involved and to get the guardrails in place in your state. Sam? God bless you. Lowell Nelson, everybody. CampaignforLiberty.org. We'll chat soon, my friend. I will do. Thank you, Sam. Bye-bye now. Liberty Roundtable Live. Let's save our constitutional republic, shall we? With God, all things are possible. Let's save our constitutional republic.