Closed Network Privacy Podcast
Jul 14, 2026 · 1 hr 33 min · 10 segments
Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-59-collect-first-justify-later/199 Website / Donations / Support…
So I'm gonna hop into, um, into our first story.
And I will have a link to Naomi Brockwell's YouTube video, uh, where she, um, interviewed, hm, um, this individual, Spike Bowman.
And I was actually listening to it in the car on my way home, uh, it was a couple days ago, and I was like, "Wow, this is really good, and also kind of scary at the same time." And so I'm not gonna kind of cover the whole thing.
I just...
This is kind of my take and just my summary of, of what it is.
And I encourage you to go listen to it, but I did clip a few things that I also wanna play.
So in the, in the 1970s, this country caught its own intelligence agencies red-handed.
Watch lists of journalists, surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., right, a spy agency banned from operating on home soil, running operations against American protesters.
So what Congress did w- after that scandal is it passed a reform, and that reform is called FISA.
And the man who built its safeguards inside the FBI just went on the record to say the quiet part out loud, that it got badly corrupted.
And so here's a clip actually that I clipped from, um, [clicks tongue] uh, from the episode [clears throat] that I listened to.
I think it is my failure to anticipate the, the problem that would come.
I've tried to think of ways that I-
So, so that's kind of just a clip of him just talking about it.
So here's the thing nobody tells you about FISA, right? It didn't stop the surveillance.
It licensed it.
So before 1978, when agencies spied on Americans, they were doing it with no statute and no court, so [laughs] outside the law, essentially.
It built a legal pathway and a special court to bless it, so to speak.
So surveillance that used to be illegal became surveillance that was simply kind of regulated, and the agencies got, like, some legitimacy, and the public got the appearance of oversight.
That's kind of how things work in the United States.
So, and this court, it's not like traditional courts that you know of.
It hears one side, the government side.
So there's no advocate for the target, okay? Nobody's in the room arguing back.
So I'm gonna hop into, um, into our first story.
And I will have a link to Naomi Brockwell's YouTube video, uh, where she, um, interviewed, hm, um, this individual, Spike Bowman.
And I was actually listening to it in the car on my way home, uh, it was a couple days ago, and I was like, "Wow, this is really good, and also kind of scary at the same time." And so I'm not gonna kind of cover the whole thing.
I just...
This is kind of my take and just my summary of, of what it is.
And I encourage you to go listen to it, but I did clip a few things that I also wanna play.
So in the, in the 1970s, this country caught its own intelligence agencies red-handed.
Watch lists of journalists, surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., right, a spy agency banned from operating on home soil, running operations against American protesters.
So what Congress did w- after that scandal is it passed a reform, and that reform is called FISA.
And the man who built its safeguards inside the FBI just went on the record to say the quiet part out loud, that it got badly corrupted.
And so here's a clip actually that I clipped from, um, [clicks tongue] uh, from the episode [clears throat] that I listened to.
I think it is my failure to anticipate the, the problem that would come.
I've tried to think of ways that I-
So, so that's kind of just a clip of him just talking about it.
So here's the thing nobody tells you about FISA, right? It didn't stop the surveillance.
It licensed it.
So before 1978, when agencies spied on Americans, they were doing it with no statute and no court, so [laughs] outside the law, essentially.
It built a legal pathway and a special court to bless it, so to speak.
So surveillance that used to be illegal became surveillance that was simply kind of regulated, and the agencies got, like, some legitimacy, and the public got the appearance of oversight.
That's kind of how things work in the United States.
So, and this court, it's not like traditional courts that you know of.
It hears one side, the government side.
So there's no advocate for the target, okay? Nobody's in the room arguing back.
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