snowden s newfound celebrity that i want to concentrate on here. there may be no better time to do it than right now. because saturday was the 12th birthday of the usa patriot act, signed into law by president george w. bush on october 26th, 2001, just about six week after september 11th terrorist attacks. and what has it done since? it has exploited one of the most vulnerable moments in our history to allow the nsa and the rest of washington s military industrial complex to expand federal tentacles, even deeper into our lives. all in the name of making us safer. but has it? still with me, bart gilman, chyron skinner, bob herbert from demos, and now joining me is noah shackman, executive editor of news, the foreign policy magazine, and a nonresident fellow of the brookings institution. so nice to have you all. so let s dig in a little bit about this idea of stop watching us. it s a very basic sort of claim, but how realistic is it that, in
11 years ago, with the passage of the patriot act, the bush administration secretly interpreted it to mean that because congress said, you re allowed to get business records that are relevant to a terrorism investigation. they secretly interpreted that to mean that we can get all the records of all phone calls of all americans. and instead the fbi put out don t worry, we re not abusing this. we ve only used that power two dozen times in the past year. turns out one dozen of them was enough to get 1 trillion phone records. and we have not known 11 years went by and we found out because of snowden. yeah, he did an important public service, for no other reason, generating this set of conversations, which maybe we haven t been having, in part because we were consciously the fact that i was i gave my fingerprint, right? i never would have done that if i had been thinking more carefully about it, until that moment i thought, oh, this will be fun. we get so used to that notion of te
president george w. bush and very briefly under president obama. he was on the train giving an interview by phone about the obama administration as an enormous source. he was not in the quiet car. and seemingly he was at high volume. so loud that tom matse, a clean energy entrepreneur, and liberal activist for moveon.org sitting nearby could live tweet it. on acela listening to former nsa spy chief michael hayden give offrecord interview. i feel like i m in the narkss a, except i m in public. hash tag awkward. i felt it in a little bit in the stop watching us rally yesterday, which is like, can a revolution for privacy be live tweeted? i mean, there s a way in which like our very being in the 21st century is so connected with
don t think it works. and yet, bob, i wonder. i really enjoyed every moment of the book. like, i was deeply engaged with p it. i also kept wondering, despite the hatred i felt for bush, i was raised to despise this person. i was thinking, is it too much to i was looking at this great quo from ron reagan, in which he said his father was tender hearted and sentimental in his personal dealings, but he could nevertheless have difficulty extending his sympathies to abstract classes of people. when we look at the racial inequalities that emerge during the 1980s, we see exactly that. that didn t feel like politics was working for many communities. no, politics was definitely not working for many people. and reagan s policies hurt people during the reagan administration. and subsequently, right up until today, with the folks that are following their view of who and what ronald reagan was.