in charge of the southeast asian command, which is scac because we understood eventually why they were so concerned. and you mentioned iran as well. i think american relations with iran when you look at once they started from the second world war so much optimism on both sides with both of the american advisers and the iranians what a tragedy over the course of 75 years the we have gotten to this point considering the inception we do see ourselves as a feared force. we aren't going to be like the soviets and the british and seamlessly exploit iran. we wanted to have a relationship that in some ways not only the oil revenues have been invested in the society but we make a significant stake in their development as well. thank you. [applause]

a panel on a civil liberties and security is next on book tv. robert higgs author of dilutions of power and anthony gregory author of the power of habeas corpus in america talked about the protection of civil liberties in the u.s. since 9/11. it's about an hour and 40 minutes. good morning everybody.

welcome. it is a tremendous honor to share the stage with bob and anthony who are two of my favorite people and i admire their work enormously. this is a huge topic we have to cover tonight. there are a lot of aspect and it's going to be a challenge to be able to cover some of those. i have warned both bob and anthony that i will be holding them to tight schedules so we can get through it and we will have plenty of time for your questions and we want to have a good discussion following. in your association goes back many years and it's been fruitful starting with the production of this book crisis and the episodes in the growth of american government pity it was first published by oxford university press in 1987 and remained in print ever since.

we were very honored to be able to issue the 21st anniversary edition last year and your work has certainly informed a lot of the independence of the program not least of which was you're 16 years as the founding editor of the independent review. one of the examples in the way that your work has influenced us is i suppose that we were the only web site on the afternoon of september 11, 2001, posted a statement condemning the terrorist attacks at that morning but also issuing a warning that the tax wouldn't be about to form the basis for the and president of government powers which we learned of course from your book crisis and leviathan. in a few minutes, could you outlined the thesis and help us to understand the events of the last 11 years in light of the history that you lay out here? >> the topic of the crisis is

the growth of government in the united states from the late 19th century to the late 20th century that growth has many causes and i start of the book that i am not making a new favorite cause explanation for that context development. it can be related and traced back to a great many changes and the changes and ideology and political changes in the various sorts and so forth but that book focused on the fact the growth of government over that century was not slow and steady. it was instead am at a sonically

interrupted by lurches in the size and scope and power of the government. at the time i began my work and the late 1970's, most of the economists were basically ignoring that profile. they were attempting to explain the long term growth of government without worrying about the exact path that followed in the list of its growth. it seems to me after some years of reading and studying and teaching economic history in connection with this experience ignoring of the profile of the way the government had grown was missing a great deal of an understanding about why it had grown. it seemed to meet increasingly as i continue my research their

episodes of abrupt and growth that were focused on the national emergency such as the world war and the great depression those three more than any other those episodes didn't behave the way that many people at the time felt they ought to be a or haul historians imagined them to behave. they expanded the power in one of these emergencies there were sometimes explicit the government would exercise extraordinary power in order to deal with the crisis at hand but once the crisis had passed and had been dealt with adequately, then the government would relinquish those powers and revert to.

they would never have a problem and let me to formulate a new version of an old idea which i call the ratchet phenomenon or the ratchet effect. the emergencies and the government would grow abruptly. after the emergency clearly passed it with indy 500 to relinquish some of the new powers, but not all. it never would relinquish all. so instead of growing among the steady path it would grow along a smooth path abruptly increased partially retrenched and then resume growth along a higher trajectory to get sick each one of these crisis periods would shift the size and scope and power of government to the high level that created a high baseline from which it would

grow on the occasion of the next crisis. as i attempted to sort of research of facts and history to find out how they related to this pattern i became more and more convinced there was the logic behind their back to the fact and it involved not simply the kind of changes other economists identified such as fiscal changes, changes in state government spending or tax revenue or barring during these national emergencies but perhaps more important involved changes in institutions which were in during. the government would create more bureaus and pass new walls and what -- and with a change the conditions that allow us to have coercion over the society and would retain some of those powers after the crisis.

another crisis is in the course of passing through these episodes, people's thinking would be changed. they have a habit of getting used to things they must endure for some time particularly for years on end. and having gotten used to them even if they objected to these conditions before. each crisis softens them up as it were to tolerate a larger government and more public and government. that is the logic i found of pouring out. when the attacks of 9/11 happened i began to receive calls from the reporters who had some familiarity with the historical work. with the fact of 9/11 will be it will probably be one of the same

as it had been before. in the wake of these attacks people are being more fearful and uncertain about what was going on and how they should deal with it would turn to the state. the state would take advantage of this concession as edward of the citizens normal resistance to the growth of government and the upshot would be another ratchet on the side scope and power of government. i'm absolutely convinced that that is exactly what has happened during the 12 years since the 9/11 attacks. the current history, the recent history fits the pattern very well. each one has unique specifics of course. a unique personality and many

differences but what is driving this growth through the process remains the same. >> - certainly observed this on steroids and as you have cited. anthony, you are hot off the presses new book from cambridge university press the port of habeas corpus in america from the king's prada it to the war on terror youths in the past several years becoming an expert on habeas corpus and your book reflects that. it's been endorsed by scholars and civil liberties leaders across-the-board and is earning high praise and rightfully so. but what about habeas corpus made you think that it was an important thing to spend the last few things of your life on

and what about it can help us in our fight for liberty in the midst of the war on tear her? >> the first years on terror i was like many americans horrified by a number of practices in the administration and guantanamo and other policies to the i have long taken the traditional view of the most fundamental of the liberties and the anglo-american tradition is the right of habeas corpus because if the government can jail somebody without even saying why then all of these other freedoms seem moot. i believe that the legal history of habeas corpus was simply on

our side but with the bush administration was doing was clear the outside of the bounds of the tradition and that if i just looked into it i could come up with an airtight silver bullet argument for what they were doing and why it was so wrong. as i researched more and the paper became a book, they discovered the history of habeas corpus was unfortunately a lot rockier and less clear-cut than that. starting in england which is more important than it might seem to a lot of people in the united states because even the supreme court decisions often this -- discuss history to decide how habeas corpus should apply in the united states because a was carried over in the constitution i noticed in this english history of habeas

corpus was kind of elusive in terms of its silver bullet potential to vindicate liberty. it was first established by the royal courts to exercise control over other courts and to bring detainee's to their jurisdiction it didn't have this verde unambiguous pro freedom that we attach to today. they guarantee that no man should spend two days in jail without cause but that was wishful thinking. that isn't what it always did or what it always guaranteed. i soon found out also that when the parliament took over after the english civil war they were just as bad as the king if not

worse of violating the detained. this might be kind of a downer but i.c.e. soon came to the conclusion the golden age might have been in the colonial era and the british colony's in north america where habeas corpus seemed to have more fan idealistic application and where dhaka oneness instead of establishing it as an authoritarian measures established purely for the good reasons. but then once of the constitution was ratified and it had the power to suspend habeas corpus which we look at the sustention calls that restrict but thomas jefferson said why should they ever be allowed to suspend that? it was in some ways a centralization of authority. jefferson turned out himself to try to suspend it when he was president. like the parliamentarians he was

something of a hypocrite. he wasn't the first or the last. you see the habeas corpus being used to retrieve slaves in some cases as a rocky history you might think in the mid-19th century the supreme court on did one of the revolutionary aspects of the habeas court because in america the state would be able to issue to question the federal and imprisonment which is a really radical kind of states right but an number of decisions overturned that and soon enough it was the central government using habeas corpus to question state governments which was more like a lot developed in england. we saw how well the federal government protected the rights in the civil war and the world for especially when the supreme court did eventually get around

to determining that a loyal citizen of the government to declare of oil in the japanese internment shouldn't be detained but by then the war was basically over and the program was basically over. now in the 20th century most of the discussion of habeas corpus has concerned criminal law and the scope of the federal review of the state convictions. so whereas back in the day it was usually brought to bear before someone went to trial it caught changed in another way where it was mostly used after the trial but a continued to be relevant in the classical pieces of executive detention power and we see this ever since 9/11 with some incredible claims of executive authority under bush despite what the courts have done and certainly under obama despite what the courts have done. we have seen these glorious

court decisions that seemed to vindicate the rights of the detained but the executive branch has found a way to circumvent the spirit of that. and obama is no exception. in guantanamo there are quite a few prisoners the governor admits it has no evidence against and they are not a flat but it can't release for one reason or another. they've been there for over 11 years and the treatment there is outrageous and we have gone a long way from this idea of today's to 11 years and so now just this week the circuit court sided with the obama administration in the indefinite detention people to keep people without due process. i know a lot of people are outraged and think this is entirely unprecedented. unfortunately it's not unprecedented.

where i do see hopeless throughout this entire history there were people, there were idealists who saw the on the legal jargon and all of the technicalities of all that what was important was the principles of liberty and the principle that it's wrong. it's a wrong thing to do to put someone in detention without giving a reason to put the innocent behind bars, to be shoddy with your procedures in doing so and so i think that what ever the courts are doing and whatever congress does and what ever the presidents to -- and i have no reason to believe the president will be much better in this respect. but i've come away with is the belief that we really need a revolution in thinking and the american people need to become more focused on the ideals that underlined because these are not just legal decisions or statutes

or court decisions, they are flesh and blood people that are being mistreated and stripped of their human rights and it's an outrage and it has to stop. >> the country was founded by people who helped those ideals, such ideals as you are talking about very deeply. they fought the revolution and established a public they felt would ensure. the principles of from the tenants all men are created equal and we are endowed inalienable with rights to liberty and property. as you say it has been upheld in perfectly throughout our history but we have been blown away with all completely they've been abandoned in the aftermath of 9/11. it's a shock to see how many

have readily abandoned the principles and replaced them with the utilitarian view that somehow it is okay that those unfortunate to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time should be subjected to retribution for the defense that they had no culpability or response nobody -- responsibility. they are being ruled with people that didn't have to do with any terrorist attacks etc.. since then of course as we talked about earlier we've seen the growth of power and duty to help it further in your most recent book from the institute new explorations of the state, war and the economy. many people argue the ideals are ear relevant and those were non-intervention and peace finally had these great oceans

that formed our borders and we could be idealistic but in the new modern age, we have to be realistic about it. so both of you, all of us can jump in on this but what would a policy look like that is consistent with those ideals and the natural tenants and the deal well with modern reality? >> that is a big question. i hope we have a few years. i'm quite sure the u.s. foreign policy would have to be changed root and branch from what it has become to some extent over the past century or more ever since the spanish-american war particularly since world war ii

should it become involved in other people's quarrels and attempt to rectify the ills and the evils of the whole world it would only result in making americans themselves worse off, less free, less prosperous and more at prescott of the

reactions from abroad to the actions it might initiate towards the war outside of our borders. and yet, through a series of occasions that the government has again and again and again abandoned that classical stance towards foreign policy that was most memorably enunciated by george washington and thomas jefferson and launched into precisely the kind foreign involvement and alliances and entanglements of other people's quarrels that have marked its whole history since the late 19th century. although one can't say that this has been 100% failure it has

verged on that. a part of the message i tried to get across in the crisis is the effect on liberties and the american people has been at first. it's been highly negative. every time the united states set out to involve itself on necessarily and it was almost always unnecessarily and these foreign affairs that it could have refrained from involving itself in the, the ultimate result was a loss of liberty of some kind because the government that attempts to effect the world must use power to make those changes. in order to exert more power, the government must get the resources for that assertion. we are the reservoir of those resources. the ordinary people, the working people, the creative people, the

entrepreneurs who create adel welford that make this country as affluent as it is. we are the ones that must provide the wherewithal for the government to act as a crusader, as a savior, as a power of first resort whenever any quarrel breaks out anywhere in the world no matter how manifestly unrelated to the interest of the american people in general. i would think very few americans can tell me reason why the united states should involve itself in the civil war and syria for a sample. i could go to one case after another and make the same commentary about it. yet this has become not an extraordinary activity but they said -- basic operating procedure for the government involves not simply the state

department, but to an ever increasing degree the pentagon, which is very much a foreign policy that we are and now and all of the pentagon's foreign installations. it's hundreds and hundreds of pieces, major bases located all over the world from which it attempts to intimidate foreigners to create fear and to prop up a straw man that it chooses to support today. although it may turn on them tomorrow of course. all of this meddling and chronic interventionism has not made the american people better off. i didn't say never. there may be instances in which one can make a positive case for it. but it's the exception to the general rule. so the main thing that would have to happen is an alteration of what you might call the deep

fault stance of american foreign policy which is the idea that america ought to be involved in everybody's troubles all over the world. that is a basic mistake on the desire to act or the capacity to act. it mistakes the idea that one knows enough to act intelligently with the reality of the ignorance and even the people in the state department and the pentagon have about what is going on in other parts of the world and apply to the it gets us in quicksand again and again and again which is difficult to extract ourselves and we sometimes end up with what is represented as a surgical action of some kind, and which there we are decades or even more time leader. somebody might want to tell the

state department and the pentagon that world war two ended in 1945. there isn't a good reason to still have u.s. troops occupying a japanese and german territory. it's over. they are not our enemies now. we can worry about other things. yet there they are. i can explain to you why they are still there but those explanations usually boil down to things that have nothing to do with our well-being, nothing to do with the preservation of our liberties. they have everything to do with the ordinary politics of special-interest, rent seeking, all the things that make politics different from the idealistic politics. >> rac to basic sense of rationales the we get for going to the war or for intervening. one is the safety, security, the

well-being and the freedom of the american people. the other is the freedom and well-being of the foreigners. you will often see this calculus coming into play where they will say we will make these sacrifices for the sake of these foreigners or in some cases it might hurt a lot of foreigners but we are doing it because we have to for us. and in every case, the calculations are made by government and politicians who in this area no less than any other area are acting out of self-interest and who prevaricate and who are not always acting out of the motives of as they say as bob suggested to the i think it's clear if you look at most of these wars the rationales given for american

security don't pass the test. this was true with the iraq war map which was one reason that they like to shift to the other rationale. i did get was to liberate the iraqi people. and some people were better off after saddam, but not all of them. perhaps may be likely not most of them. not to the christian groups or the sunni groups or the women or many others who've been displaced. millions have lost their homes and have had to move to say nothing of the hundreds and thousands who have died as a result of the war. on a smaller scale b.c. libby yell war that president obama participated in that was sold almost entirely on the basis of liberating the people from gaddafi was a dictator and they never should have supported him neither. yet what happens is there is a

lack of a tension span where americans are very excited about the war and what it has supposedly done for these people and then they stopped paying attention. so they don't realize that it's unleashed this horror against blacks and immigrants being put into detention camps. they don't really look into the circumstantial allies of the u.s. and libyan which were al qaeda affiliate's. and this happens over and over. so americans seem to toggle between the two rationales and it's a very convenient and very useful recipe for constant intervention because a lot of americans don't believe so watching the national security threats as they are presented but they really do want to help foreigners and a lot of other americans are less concerned about that.

even if they feel threatened as this fall or miniscule as the terrorist threat they are willing to sacrifice unbelievable amounts of their liberty and they are willing to go on with major wars. i think the solution is an ideological one and philosophical one. one problem is the american people have come to live in the seat of what is currently the world's entire and americans in many ways don't make particularly no good imperialists. they know nothing about the cultures and they are interested in the war but most people think the fighting in iraq ended and the fighting in afghanistan is more muted than it is or they

don't have any idea of the extent to which obama has continued on some cases built upon the bush policies and just as important the war and intervention which would have been the main impetus behind a government growth. these should be these issues as collected together should be regarded as the number-one issue at least at out there and at least in the moments of hysteria and in the moments of great patriotic pride, the american people kind of tune out and they no longer think of war is important. it is a minor issue so you have people voting on the basis of everything else imaginable to the you have a lot of people who

dislike the foreign policy intellectually but they don't regard it as a high priority. they regard the talking points of the week. they regard whenever the obama war romani campaigns are hurtling at each other as important and some of this stuff is very important but much of it frankly is very trivial compared to the life or death matters wrapped up in intervention and war and buy life or death i mean life or death of thousands or hundreds of thousands of flesh and blood people as well as life or death of american liberty. >> thank you. >> let's shift the focus back home now. the recent revelations by edward snowden have underscored the issues others have had for years and it's now very well documented that the federal government is capturing and storing every american's phone call, e-mail, the outside going

through the u.s. and all of the internet activity library usage of every commercial transaction, the cars are reporting. if you have it turn off in your pocket and eavesdropping and reported to be to record every conversation going on in the vicinity. in short every activity in every aspect of our lives every day is being captured and is being stored in gigantic databases where it can be mined any time they like to build a dossier against anybody. despite this extraordinary violation of the privacy as the recent boston calling this showed that's not securing assignee safety. as your book liberty or safety your ideology and the growth of government also illustrates this is a false trade-off between

freedom and security. and you show how the u.s. government is increasing economic and military interventions reduce our civil and economic liberties as well as you mentioned our prosperity in our genuine security. one of our friends and directors who grew up in germany during world war ii was remarking that today is the 69th anniversary of the attempt to kill hitler in his bunker and despite the near total state that would occur in germany at a time they didn't know of the plot in advance. so it was pointless. yet the poles unfortunately still show that a majority of americans, i think it is still a majority think it's okay for the u.s. government to be spying on americans. the general attitude seems to be i don't have anything to hide, so it's okay. so, what's wrong with the

government having all of this information? and if they don't need it, how would we stay safe in the absence of such when there are all these threats about us. hal dewey safeguard against domestic threats while also retaining our essentials freedoms? and anthony, why don't we start with you on that one? >> i think it is a mistake to look at this as a balancing issue because we know how the state always wants to tip the scale. every state has its own tendency towards totalitarianism because it is a monopoly on legal force and a free state in the world is constrained mostly by just a lack of resources and by what the people will put up with. so, looking at it as a balance is dangerous. i think it's also important to have a perspective about the threat.

the boston bombing was terrific. it was an act of mass murder. a serial murder and mass maiming and condemn to the but if there were ten such bombings everyday in the united states, you would still be more likely to die or be injured in a car crash. so it's important to keep in mind what liberties you think are negotiable to try to deal with this threat even in the year of 9/11 you were far more likely to be killed in a normal street murder or normal pedestrian homicide. and there were at least a degree of things that americans wouldn't have put up with to deal even with murderers. so we need to access of the threat a lot more responsibly. during the cold war, the soviet union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

it had a dangerous ideology that in europe and asia and elsewhere began to take over the globe and still there were limits. still americans look back at things the fbi did at the height of the cold war and found them intolerable and that led to some of the reforms in the late 70's that were completely thrown out by the last two administrations and still, there was a lie. i grew up -- i was very young at the end of the cold war but i remember torch annette and the tension and mass surveillance. these were the things the soviets did. now it's true the u.s. didn't always adhere to the ideals that it claimed to. but these were seen as aberrations. they were in their assessments. they were not the policy that was just simply increased. the surveillance truly is

unprecedented in line very careful about that because very few things in politics are. but this is -- this goes far beyond as evil and to tear -- totalitarian rulers of the past as technological capacity of the infrastructure. it's the first thing hitler or stalin or any of those people could have dreamt of and they didn't because it goes way beyond. you have to keep in mind as he has eloquently shown the state rarely cuts that and when it does it does it all away. with conflict on terrorism like with the germans and the japanese and the communists doesn't seem to have any end point there is no point saying enough is enough. bin laden is dead. there will always be terrorists

especially if the u.s. is meddling of the world making people angry. so what ever you might think of this particular administration, you should be horrified. and in fact, the fact that this administration is overseeing this policy regardless of any of the other policies should probably change your mind about this administration if you look upon it favorably. >> do you have anything to add about our wonderful nsa state? >> i would second anthony's judgment that i believe what's then revealed recently truly is unprecedented. the power of the government with the current technology to know where we are into a very high degree what we were doing every

single minute of the day it would have been ridiculous for any novelist to embrace. >> it's not simply a reality but it is one that grows steadily worse. there is now a huge industry valued at something in the neighborhood of 80 to $100 billion annually. we don't really know. the people in the industry which involves hundreds of thousands of perhaps even millions of employees and i.t. companies are working full-time to intensify

all of the techniques developed to know even more about everyone of us and everyone else on the are at that they can know about. and with the modern technology most people are in line to be watched with a degree of scrutiny that no one dreamed of until quite recently. so what you might say. many americans are saying so what. i don't care. that i would say is an extraordinarily stupid attitude to take. the fact that you don't think that you have done anything wrong is quite irrelevant to the a anytime that serves the purposes of the people who control the power to use it

against whether you have done anything wrong or not, count on them to use it. the fact that we can't point to anyone in the position of the political power to say that individual was worse than someone or that individual is worse than paul is irrelevant. the people we have in those positions today are plenty bad enough to put this capacity to extreme the evil use and i don't think they will stop when a serve their purpose is the will use eight and they will accompany it with their usual excuses, explanations, disinformation and attempt to discredit anyone who opposes them which they are doing now full-time with edward snowden. ..

about what they are doing to us. there was a time, i am quite sure, not that this country ever had a golden age of freedom, it always had severe deviation from its ideal for delivery but there never was a time in the past when americans would have tolerated this kind of treatment and the fact that we are doing it today does not speak well of

us at all. >> it is hopeful for some of us that there is beginning to be growing protest and backlash against this. there are new revelations almost daily, came out a couple days ago about the cards being captured, in testimony before congress it was revealed they are in fact capturing everybody's information, not just terrorists, he essentially everybody in any network whatsoever, so the revelations are unfolding, building to critical mass preceding the backlash that will do something about this. 9 independence don independencet

organized itself in 80 cities including a facility in utah, it will hold 5 had a bite of data and the context, the entire world wide web is half of a data bite. an incredible amount of data has to shatter that. there are the nation munich they were rallying under a banner called restore the force and called for the abolition of the nfl in north reform not scaling back, restorations of the fourth amendment. last year on our 20 fifth anniversary, one of the recipients together -- do you see parallels in reasons for hope between the protest that he

built that led to the eventual fall of the berlin wall, breaking up the soviet union that we can use the playbook today. >> we can hope to move in that direction. one of the advantages the east germans and soviets had was the fact that the ideological support for their system has almost totally evaporated in the course of time. there were very few true believers left. there were many people who went along to get a long as there are everywhere at all times. they could build a movement to oppose the system which had plenty of evil to justify opposition because people weren't easily taken in by the official excuses for what was being done to the people. the difficulty, the greatest

difficulty we face today in my judgment was a great many americans are easily taken in. i could imagine for example that many more protests might be mounted against this and i hope they will be very much and they are held not in 80 cities or 800 cities but in every city in america, people would come out and say no, we won't tolerate this for anybody who supports it in office. we will oppose you with every ounce of our strength if you support this totalitarian measure. they would take that seriously and what they would do would be say you are right, we need our reforms and they would have committees hold hearings and dragged their feet for a few years and introduce bills which would be amended out of recognition along the way and in

the course of time, if the sun hadn't burned out by that time, they would come forward with their reforms. that is the nature of power system. that is how it responds to great popular pressure. i really hope people understand the what we need in this case is not reform. we need to carry these things apart brick by brick and let everybody who put those bricks in place know that they are on our list and we will never trust them again in positions of power. if we tolerate people who would treat us that way we will get treated that way and we have tolerated it this long. we tolerated it with faulty excuses about scare's blown out of proportion, which lies, with allies and with lies coming forth from our rulers and we forgive them somehow because in some other dimension they are

doing something we all like. that is very dangerous. i don't think this is an issue that is negotiable because it portends other totalitarianism. if they know everything about you they can blackmail you. very few people can't be blackmailed. even if you are not black mailable by virtue of your own conduct, they will threaten family members. they will threaten friends. the communists made a science out of working this way. they know how to get you to fall in line and when they know so much about everybody, they will have power in their hands to make everybody fall in line and the only way to stop it is to tear the power apart, to say we won't tolerate you maintaining this use of facility.

don't put it there. don't tolerate congressional hearings. we want this thing stopped and we want it stopped now. we want the president to issue some kind of executive order terminating all work on it tonight and not until we make that kind of demand are they going to do a damn thing. they will shut the way they always do. we tolerate it. we have tolerated it for decades and decades and decades which brought us to this point. we didn't get here by accident. we made it possible. it is true that not many of us keep pushing the levers but we made it possible because we never said no, no more. don't do this again. i think this time if we don't do it, we are lost. >> we go to a lot of conferences

and gatherings of scholars and activists and one of the most exciting things is seeing the great numbers of young people because x years ago when i was that age group there were not that many of us and now there are a lot of young people involved and they are very principled and very active and organizing in unique ways using the power of social media and other things and very interested in pursuing these ideas and seeing them put into action on a principled way. that to me goes tremendous hope and optimism. what do you think? >> even when i was a student, the movement that was interested in these ideas, of what was considerably smaller than it is

now. that it -- one reason the youth are often attracted to ideals, they have a long-term outlook. ac that in many cases, the short-term is not where the greatest hope is, they don't buy as much into the fleeing political controversies of the day, and they are thinking in the long term for the rest of their lifetimes and they are hopeful in that sense and that is the way i am hopeful. i think eventually something has to give. i think there are too many internal contradictions in the american political system to maintain the support that it has maintained for so long and human

nature, the laws of economics are something that the state aids to deal with, always has to, will show that many of the promises they made. the americans about what is possible in the future. are a tissue of lies or distortions and in the long term, also, i am enthusiastic about what do you see in terms of freedom being an international idea. as an american i certainly want freedom to be, we could say restored. i would like to see it flourish in america at in a way it never has but i would like that for the entire world. and to be honest i think the fixation with liberty as this american ideal, though there's a lot of truth to that fixation

historically has kind of jumped the shark. i think in the long term, i have more hope that there will be people elsewhere in the world that will take up the banner. it is the u.s. that is doing this to joan people and the rest of the world and there are people all over the world outraged by it. i have no doubt that most of these people if they were living under the most powerful expensive state on earth if there one had bases everywhere and claimed the authority to capture and kill anybody on earth on the fate of the president alone which is what our president claims the authority to do, i think that would be possible but circumstances are that is not the way and we saw with the collapse of communism, we have seen in china certainly has a far way to go, a move toward

liberty, away from the depths of knowledge that is inspiring in the long term. this might sound pessimistic in the short term. i think that it is important in the short term that we have a sense of urgency where it matters and i agree with bob that this is an issue, if there ever was one, that we should approach with the utmost urgency. there is no time to squabble about whatever the last political gaffe was. i keep up with and am interested in whatever the most controversial court cases are like anyone else. i'm interested in the news, i am interested in pop culture and i have a lot of interest of that nature just like all people and all americans but when it comes to a political priority, americans need to wake up because this isn't a matter of whether we are going to live in

a totally free country or not. it was never a totally free country. that is what i want but i don't think we're going to get that any time soon. but what we have some shot at doing is converting this accelerating stampede for the total state and it has accelerated since 9/11. i am hoping eventually americans will understand that even if we had a 9/11 every year it does not justify what is going on abroad or at home but i also can hope that least that eventually the lack of attention span that some americans seem to have regarding these things might work in our favor, they will stop believing in everything they have been told about how the u.s. government is keeping faith by waging wars or by

spying on everyone or claiming despotic authority in detention policy and elsewhere. i'd like to see the whole national security state as we know is abolished, i would like to see people saying things like i am saying and it sounds to many people to be a little out there but what is out there is what we have now and what is even more out there is the direction we are going. this is unambiguous because the trajectory couldn't be more clear and that is what is really outrageous and just like the abolitionist during slavery made a point that you have to be urgent about this, garrison, the great abolitionist said that gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice. if you talk about reform, if you hope the next candidate will

tweak things a little bit, if you are hoping that maybe our congressional leaders will somehow become enlightened and make things just a little bit more protected in terms of civil liberties, if that is your stand, the state is going the direction it ones which is total control, that is not a compromise, that is a guarantee we are going to keep going the same direction. it is time for people to be as urgent about this, as emphatic about this, as outraged about this as they are about anything imaginable because honestly, i have a big imagination and i have thought of all this stuff for years and even i was a little shocked, not so much by the revelation by by the american response which could be worse than it could be a helluva lot better. >> we are here to the degree that it is ideological battles that have been won and that is

what we work on producing daily and honored to work on people like bob and anthony in fueling the ideas and providing the information that is rooted in principle that then go out and feed the activists that affect change. try working on creating the virtuous circle between the ideas and action that will lead to change, shift the culture to no longer accepting this, again standing on principle saying it is not ok, it is not a a little bandit is not ok a lot. and we must live in these principles regardless of if it seems like we might be in danger because we are far safer with them as we know and we are far under great danger with this going on so very much appreciate

in forming this. and as well as the audience who is participating by live stream, we will take questions now if you could wait until the microphone comes to you so we could capture ended is helpful if you hold the microphone horizontal the and those who are live streaming, if you put forth a question it will get conveyed to us and we will answer ridge to the extent we have time available. >> if you could elaborate on the point of the media that the media is private and constantly -- in terms of schering house or manipulating our opinions in support of interventions, i watch cnn a lot and before became the 24-hour george zimmerman network every night they would have a piece on syria and how horrible that was and how terrible we were for not

intervening. why is that? >> crises attract viewers. they attract readers. dangers and attract interest, whatever form of the media. so the media are constantly hiding potential dangers. i should say not dangers but potential dangers. at least 89% of the great threats that cnn brings up are scarcely even real much less things that a going to turn into major threats. so the modus operandi of news and entertainment disseminate ears, or movies attract viewers, visions of future real horror attract viewers too so the media

are entertaining us and horror movie producer entertains us and at the same time, if they are maintaining their liaison with the state and they need that very much, and if you ever noticed the great bulk of material they use and report on, and from time government officials and government states, the mainstream media are simply amplifier's, megaphones, a big noise of the same government it began by making. everyone will know about it especially to be frightened about it. and the current ideological conditions, most americans when friend will turn to the state.

and people and grow tired of this, constant wolf crying. and to tune out to some extent, all one has to do is change the nature of the threat and laid -- raise the level of volume and a come again and they never learn before. and to purchase their subservience, and willingness to part with their own resources and particularly power with their own liberties, and the title of an article that i wrote a few years ago. i may not be a good judge of my own work but it is one of the best articles i ever wrote in my life because it seems to me the fear is the very foundation of

how all states operate and can be involved in a variety of ways fact of the matter is if you want people to take leave of their senses, to not use good judgment call you have to do is scare them and it will work particularly if they are predisposed to look to the state for their salvation. >> regarding the media i am cognizant of the instance of the nixon administration, a couple of cub reporters who nobody believed that dog of the presumed the watergate story, the vast majority of americans were completely apathetic about it, could care less, but they kept pushing it, kept digging it and they were entrepreneurial media types who eventually brought down the most powerful man in the country and we have a reverse ratchet of fact where americans in general said we

don't want to trust government anymore and wants to roll back and today we have many more opportunities, we don't have just three networks anymore that control all of the news. there are a lot of entrepreneur is in the media, there's a lot of new media, a lot of entrepreneurial newsmen all over the world and it is a different picture and we can get that sort of phenomenon again and i am hopeful that we can have an even better outcome if we get a few, even just one really great person digging and making a career out of making sure we are not apathetic, that we pay attention, that we get the story and understand why it is important and as a result of this and hopefully set by principal arguments really shift the culture and seek change. do you want to say anything

about the media? >> there are specific reasons that the mainstream media are so in bed with the state. a lot of conservatives talk about the liberal media and there's a lot of truth to that and a lot of liberals talk about the corporate media and there's truth to that. is the state media. it is nominally private, it is private in a fascist cents. there is this relationship and a tight relationship. if you want access to the white house, if you want access to the war, you better play nice, goes along way to explaining all of this. and all of these independent media, one thing that gives me some hope is is breaking down this nonsensical left/right spectrum that i think the state just loves. which means divide and conquer,

has been the resort, the strategy of imperialists rulers and other villains throughout history. people need to stop getting in this whole red team. team mentality and lining up behind the talking points of the weekend realize fundamentally although other people have different views about all sorts of issues and people are very different culturally and in any given political issue you might see them as your adversary, if people keep thinking that their enemies are their next-door neighbor and obama is there savior or their enemies are somewhere in a different country or coming from mexico and their savior is the republican politician, instead of seeing the near identical nature of all these politicians, we are going to have a lot of trouble. people need to snap out of it and stop spending all their time

arguing over relative trivialities at least for now because this is really an urgent matter. >> questions? over here? >> you briefly alluded to it but one of the things reading another unprecedented change has been the government, particularly the central law system is more and more complex and intricate, intervening in more and more areas of activity, the government could find to make any of as a criminal in the sense that they could find some violation of some law and they are starting to do that to combine that with the surveillance ability to know what everybody is up to. it seems to me fat there is an impending ability to be able to

blackmail, just taking them out of the way and we see that in intellectual politics where we revised the question of disadvantaging certain groups fr from participating and releasing information. -- how would you put that into your equation in terms of if you tilt the playing field so that the institutional -- becomes incapacitated by disqualifying a candidate? >> there has been a tendency for over a century for the

government to multiplied details of statutory restrictions and requirements and that the same time to build an immense regulatory state. we now have a legal system in which laws are made without real consideration by legislators at all, simply regulations made by members of regulatory commissions and boards and what have you and there is the due process procedure and there is supposed to be some underlying statutory basis for them but they're very inventive and persistent and work on this everyday of the week end every bureau wants to have more regulations to enforce, gives it more power and ability to bring about the state of the world it wants to bring about for whenever reason, and also puts

every person with a confined we are in violation in most cases of some felony restrictions. it doesn't take much at all, it can be done by accident. dino this standing in the los angeles airport big sign standing there, reminding me of something i already knew but i was struck by it once again which is the u.s. law forbids anyone to enter or leave the united states with more than $10,000 in currency or equivalent in foreign-currency without reporting, not one form to be filled out but three and failure to make those reports, failure to make those reports and to make some accurately and

may result in the forfeiture in currency and imprisonment. how easy might it be to be off by $1 when you report the amount of money you are carrying, any number of ways in which people could totally innocently and this is not just conjecture, in regard to this, role in the past, people have all their money stolen because they couldn't correctly report the amount, that is just one instance. multiplied that by 400,000 and you have the world we live in. any time prosecutors want to show that we are criminals. historically there is a natural

law, obvious things like murder, robbery, burglary, kellogg the maun your fingers, the number of real crimes that could be committed. that hasn't changed. that is still the case but what we have now is this jumble of criminal requirements created by the state precisely so it can put the fear of god in everybody, bring them into full compliance with whatever it tells them to do or how ridiculous it is. what business is of the state how much money have? none of their business. what is their care of somebody bringing in the country $12,000 in some currency? it is none of their damn

business. why are they worried about this? because they want to enforce absurd rules on people who have harmed no one but who give them the opportunity to push their weight around and steal money from people who often innocently put themselves in violation of these ridiculous laws. as you say, here we are now and the only way we can get out of this is by beginning to hack away at these laws and repeals them, one after another. repeal, not a man, not reform, repeal! makes them go away, disappear! >> maybe just repeal the mall and start all over. then of course the really neat thing about having these databases with all your phone calls and correspondence and

everything else is the famous cardinal of richelieu in the two musketeers' that if you give me six lines written by the hand of the most on this of men i will find something in them which will hang him. >> if i could real quick make a point about this regulatory state. very short point. it seems to me i was talking about dividing and conquering. there are a lot of americans with skepticism of the criminal justice system, but they love regulation. they think any new regulation has to overall be good. if they don't think that these well-intentioned, think generally regulations are the path toward more stability. there are other americans were skeptical of the regulatory state. they're kind of blind to the lures of the criminal justice

system, the inequity, inhumanity that we see in it. and pure cognitive dissonance where people just don't get together realize the regulatory state and criminal justice system are the same people and the regulatory state is enforced to the criminal justice system. that is all. >> in the back? >> thank you. i want to thank the panel for an excellent discussion. it was reported in tonight's new york times that earlier in the day deputy secretary of state ashton carter in the aspen institute, the pentagon is ready to deploy advanced cyberdefense and offense troops, 4,000 of the month of the command of general

alexander also run the national security agency and u.s. cybercommand. i'm interested in either of the panelists's comments with the implications of that huckabee, particularly how the whole cyberdefense thing is punitively being constructed to defend us against threats from china but what the implications would be for everything you are talking about. >> in terms of small businesses or any businesses that depend on the internet which practically all of them do they should pay for their own defense against cyberattacks, this is one more pretext for more power, and even if it has the best of intentions behind it there is simply no reason to think that they are

going to do a good job on this any more than any other. the boston bombing happened despite the surveillance state and even if they multiplied the power of the surveillance states or reformed in or tweak the nor did any such thing it still happened. the threat, there will always be people who can outsmart the system to do bad, specifically with terrorism which of course is simply an act of violence that is available to any able-bodied human being and always has been, there is no way to stop this stuff altogether. people need to get some perspective. i don't know all the details about that, but there's no reason to believe it would be the one exception to the rule. >> i would wonder if it is really cyberdefense or more cyberoffense they are developing

to aim at other countries. in general all the defense programs have that kind of symmetry built into them, and we do know long-term national defense posture, that armed forces require total spectrum dominance so that they control the land, the air, the sea, and space, and this fits into that vision of universal domination. almost this stuff of bad movies at this point but nonetheless it doesn't mean not sending scores of billions of dollars every year paying i t companies to dream up and the ploy this kind of stuff.

>> over here. >> to embrace cosmopolitanism and feel that celebrity isn't exclusively an american ideal, that it is global and the national student movement for liberty and students for liberty feel the same, i feel compelled to play devil's advocate and as an american citizen, what threat to do you think face this country and the government's legitimate threats, what legitimate threats face this country and how might the government about addressing those threats in a just way? >> terrorism efforts at threat, a missile -- it is statistically negligible but it does exist. exists for the most part because

the u.s. goes around thinking it owns the world and propping up dictators and overthrowing them, torturing people, drone bombing lake in western pakistan, terrorizing, how on earth for those people, this kind of behavior makes people mad. as long as the u.s. continues to do this, then the a threat of terrorism i am confident will be higher than it otherwise would be. i really don't see any way that the government can stop terrorism other than pulling out of these countries, declaring peace, and perhaps, although it would be disingenuous, going on a reel of apology tour. i don't think there's any way to stop people from sneaking things on planes. this is absurd. people can make volatile -- molotov cocktails if they get a liquor, there are all kinds of

-- anyone who has any imagination at all can think of how to unleash a horror that would take many lives. people of access, the government has been profiling and we see the boston bombing with white muslims, they don't fit the profile so you can widen the profile but you will just widen it until it catches everybody and the state might have everyone's information but it is not going to be able to actually stop these threads. may be on the margins possible, they will stop something, but the majority of all these failed terror plots since 9/11 have involved fbi informant where the fbi sends somebody to convince a bunch of people to make this plan and then they stop them before the plan is carried out. there are one or two exceptions but this is just, it is just,

the national security state is not protecting us. i don't think it can protect us. i think the only hope against the again rather trivial threat of terrorism, it is not trivial if it impacts you or if you lose someone in it the same as car accident of people drowning in pools or any other horrible thing. criminal, and murderous, but there is a threat of crime. there is no guarantee of safety. people need to get overage that. there is no guarantee of pure security. but we do know that the stage is attempting to move toward your control and there is no possibility of pure control either, especially directed toward any good purpose. they can make life unbearable and they can make life much less free for all of us but the time

has passed beyond which americans should be even humoring this idea of what do we do to get the government to protect us better. the time for that discussion was september, october, november of 2001. that was 12 years ago. the state blue its chance. it unleashed a great quarter, it destroyed more american lives than the terrorists ever had and it is true that terrorists hate us for our freedom, the state is conspiring with the terrorists however and that from weed. there is no way terrorists can take away our freedom. they can destroy life, they can kill people, they can destroy property but not nearly on the scale of the state and when it comes to our liberties they are no match for government. this is osama bin laden's wildest dreams that the american people would do this to

themselves. >> dianne feinstein claimed that the nsa prevented a tax but no evidence fits the case and tea s.a. claims it stopped plots but there has been no evidence and one thing we do know historically is some would-be bombers and hijackers stopped by their fellow passengers -- who can protect ourselves and we need to remember we have more power than we ever give ourselves credit for and utilize them and we will be far safer under that basis. there is one over there and that's come over here. >> i am particularly conflict on this matter because i like to evaluate both sides of an issue and when i attend events like this, i usually hear one side of it and i would really like to hear you polk holes in the other side. i would like to use this opportunity to ask you a very

specific question. what you just mentioned about we don't know how many acts of terrorism have been avoided and conclude none of them have been avoided, part of the security methodology is you find evidence and stop an act of terrorism is totally counterproductive to reveal how you did that soak it is a catch-22 situation. and i don't think we will never know behind the freedom of information act how many acts of terrorism will be stopped and power it was done. i want to pose a hypothetical to you. >> i don't think the state could resist. champion -- >> security if they did. tipped off the bad guys you're not going to find them the same way again. the hypothetical is -- >> i think you can reveal that without revealing how it was

done and they do it with murder in the newspaper every day, they talk about certain things that won't reveal all the details. >> we have a difference of opinion on that issue but a specific question i have is hypothetically, i am not naive enough to think all government workers are men and women of good faith. there are a lot of them who just want to make their job pay off but assuming there are some good people, if they were able to find out and have stopped 9/11 incidents that we don't know about how many of those incidents would have to occur before you would be willing to give up any of the individual freedoms that we are championing? >> i myself am not willing to give up any freedoms at all, period, for their claims that they have protected me in the past or their promise to protect me in the future and the reason for that is i don't consider

them credible sources. we know that they -- we can document the ways in which they have lied again and again and again. the default position i take is the government may be telling the truth but i am going to assume it is lying. whenever it tells me something i can't confirm independently like that. i would be a damn fool without independent confirmation to believe anything i am told because it clearly serve the purpose of the government to represent itself as having succeeded in these kinds of protections but when i think about what it takes to commit an act of terrorism it is so simple and so accessible to doubt an i.q. over 75 that the fact that there have been no serious terrorist incidents in this country since 9/11 tells me that damn few must be trying to carry

out terrorism. i could carry out some terrorism in the next few days, anybody can. it is not that hard to do some kind of terrorism. it could take a thousand different forms and if we don't see acts of terrorism why do we believe the bogeyman are under our beds in great numbers? it does not make sense. as incoherent as an argument. >> do you take into account the historical operations against the japanese code which we didn't find out about 440 or 50 years after the fact. i agree with you wholeheartedly that a single individual can do and act of terrorism, most restrictions are against good people and totally inconvenient, but if there's a conspiracy monitoring developed patterns i am wondering if we have enough

information to determine whether conspiracies of this or that or the others thing have come out to prevent terrorist attacks? >> i agree it is conceivable that things are happening that we can't know about. you and i don't have access to information and that is why we complain here tonight. they shouldn't have it. we don't have all the information they have. we can never say for certain they never prevented a terrorist plot. even if they prevented one, prevented 50 of them, i don't want him to take my liberties away because it is a relatively trivial threat to me in the broad spectrum of threats to me, my life, limb, liberty and well-being, and at the same time terrorism has been utterly blown

out of all proportion by the scare tactics, there have been no genuine threats that continue to exist, the greatest threat was during the cold war when we were on a hair trigger opposition with the u.s. as are, both sides with 10,000 nuclear-weapons, thousands of them on long-range intermediate, deliverable in an hour. even a small proportion of those that have been engaged in exchange it would well have destroyed the entire world. that was a real threat. even if we were all the sweetest angels and as confident as god, there were accidents that on several occasions that could have triggered all-out nuclear war between the u.s.s.r. and the united states. the cold war is now over but not

really. russia has thousands of icbms with nuclear-weapons. operational, just a few minutes. if they should deteriorated or the technology should develop a. we could have a devastating exchange of nuclear weapons. it is not out of the realm of possibility. ten years ago there were a number of generals and admirals, in the u.s.s.r. and the united states, and bring to the public's attention, and maintaining these weapons.

it disappeared. and gave up in exasperation because no one paid attention to them. and they pose the greatest threat we can imagine to people all around the world and what's in this country. people need to get their priorities straight in doubt. terrorist planting a bomb on an airplane is not in the same universe with and exchange of big h-bomb's. >> one more question in the audience. my answer to this if they can't keep me safe without securing my liberties and i'm going to fire them and hire somebody who can. >> fourth amendment rights analysis, its own privacy or the expectation of privacy, it seems that our digital communications

starts with checking locks that say read and accept, that box indicates we have an agreement with the conduit or entity that providing a conduit of power digital communication, inevitably that agreement contains the porche privacy policy. my question is given we checked the box, and digital communications protected by the fourth amendment. if the answer is yes, what is the argument indicating that those digital communications are in fact protected by our fourth amendment right? >> my response would be the way you posed that question requires a lawyer, and experts in that area of law. i am not a lawyer. i would respond to the question

differently. i don't care how an expert lawyer would answer your question. i don't want people in government reading my e-mail,. and the people who serve me with capability to send me e-mail messages are handing it over to the government, i want them to stop. i want them to make clear they will not handed over to the government and i want all carriers to make clear they will not handed over to the government and i want all of us to make clear to the government officials that we want them to stop reading power dam e-mails. it is simply not something that has to be done or serves a legitimate defense or security purpose. if they have a good reason to read somebody's e-mail, if they have some evidence, they can show cause they can easily go to a court and get a warrant to read our e-mails or look at any

other form of evidence that we consider private by virtue of having the court authorized them to do so. they do this now, rubberstamp tens of thousands -- it is not hard. they can get it in a matter of a few hours. and instead scooped up every single human being's electronic communication tells me they are thinking along different lines. they are not concerned about going after somebody who for some plausible reason might be engaged in acts of terrorism or other criminal acts. they are just fishing in every pool and to me i can't believe they are doing this for a good purpose. >> one thing i note is in the

years between it was created, foreign intelligence act created this within the justice department or the executive branch the years between then and 2001 there ask for 14,000 words, and this was the restriction of george bush and obama couldn't put up with but i agree with everything bob said, this isn't my primary interest but if i ever going to play the legal game, in terms of privacy as some kind of thing the we have. the fourth amendment like most of the bill of rights is a prohibition on government conduct. it doesn't matter what you do or how open you are but there are things both states doesn't have the authority to do because it wasn't given that authority. second of all in many cases it

specifically prohibited from engaging in. people open themselves up, and the state has a right to even look at it. >> i will take one that came through the remote viewers, ed snowden, hero or trader, i will quote associates in the nsa that came out, three senior nsa officers who among them working for the nsa, they have all been whistle-blowers for the past seven years trying to go through the official whistle-blower channel, they cannot get any traction on it. that is good enough for me. i want to thank everybody for being here. robert higgs and anthony gregory and especially all of view, this is an incredibly important

issue. something more important, something you can share in them. bob and anthony's book foresail at the book tableland they're here to sign the feel like and we have content on our web site, independent.org. the program will be available, there are many articles that they have written, analysis and a lot of information you can use and share with your friends and hopefully empower us to shift the culture, abolish the current state of affairs and have a much brighter future. we hope to see you again soon at another independent institute event. thank you and good night. [applause] >> you are watching booktv,

nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> here is a look at some books being published this week. in emily get her gun but obama wants to take your jenna lee miller discusses a process she went through to obtain a firearm in washington d.c. and presents her thoughts on the gun debate. thomas harding recounts haunts alexander's search for rudolph hosts in hunts and rudolph:the true story of the german jew who tracked down the commandant of auschwitz. in discrimination, race, affirmative action and the law, harvard anniversary law professor randall kennedy discusses the industry of the affirmative-action law and argues it is still necessary today. kurt johnson, founder of the list project, a program to resettle iraqis recounts his experience working with the u.s. agency for international development in baghdad and volusia into the a friend is

fatal, the fight to save the iraqis america left behind. in american founding son, john bingham and the invention of the fourteenth amendment, a law professor at the university of indiana recounts the life and career of john bingham. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and booktv.org. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. here is our prime time lineup for tonight's. at 7:00 p.m. eastern, susan dunn talk about the election of 1940 at the roosevelt reading festival. at 7:45, the story of new york city police department whistle-blower adrian schoolcraft followed by michael novak, author of writing from left to right at 8:30 p.m. eastern. at 10:00 p.m. eastern, craig

steven wilder joins booktv on afterwards in an interview with joe madison, talks about his book ebony and ivy, race, slavery and a troubled history of america's universities. we wrap up tonight's prime-time programming and of:00 eastern with the biography of charles manson. visible tv.org for more of this weekend's television schedule. .. >> for making such a beautiful book, as you can