Latest / Brooks Benson TOC-Theory of Change / Ninety Years of Listening In
Transcript
- Brooks Benson Pilot Episode: From Utah, this is Brooks Benson, TOC Theory of Change. Your privacy, your rights, your state. And the question nobody in government wants you asking: who's watching? Welcome to the very first episode: 90 Years of Listening In. Here's your host, Brooks Benson. I'm Brooks Benson, and this is Brooks Benson T O C, the podcast. I'm running for Senate District 11 in the state of Utah. That covers Eagle Mountain. That covers Cedar Fort, Fairfield, Stockton, Rush Valley, Fernan, Erda, half of Magda, half of Kearns, Copperton, West Jordan, West Valley, and Harriman. Covers a lot of different areas in the state. I'm running as a Republican. I'm running as a constitutional conservative. I care about the Constitution. And one of the most important things in my campaign that I'm running on right now is to make sure that government mass surveillance doesn't happen and that we're protecting and fortifying our Fourth Amendment rights. Those are the most important things that I think are that are facing the nation right now. And I want to make sure that that gets handled in a responsible way. And I have the background to do that. I have worked on AI technology and I've worked on software development management and building software development teams and building all kinds of software. Worked in insurance, in the insure tech space, where we saw a way for data to be transcribed in a way and analyzed in a way to help reduce car insurance prices. That is gonna be a huge help for me in crafting legislation that helps the Fourth Amendment specifically transcend any innovative technologies going forward. And that's something that we gotta work on. So this podcast that I've created right now, and that I'll make many episodes to come, I wanna make sure the constituents know not only what I'm doing, but what I believe and how I'm gonna act and what I'm doing to accomplish the problems that I'm seeing. I wanna make sure that I'm listening to people. And this can give me a good grounding on if I'm listening or not, because people I hope are going to listen and they're going to say, Hey, you You forgot to mention this. You forgot to mention this problem or that problem or I'm dealing with this. And I want you to bring that up on the show. And I'll think about those things. I'll talk about those things and want to make sure that I'm really grounded in what's going on in our district to make sure that that communication continues to happen. There's a lot that goes on in Capitol Hill. And it's gonna be hard to send a mailer out to you every single time something happens. That can be pretty costly. But I felt like this was a much easier way to facilitate. Communication of all the bills that I'm going to be running, of what my opinions are on those bills, and to make sure that I am catching up with everything that our district needs going forward. TOC stands for theory of change. The reason why I'm calling it that is because I believe that there is a true theory to how things change. Natural behavior is something that I want to zero in on any time a decision's made or any time we're changing something up or adding legislation that needs to be done. I don't want to create change that isn't lasting. Lasting change happens through a methodology that I believe is based on natural behavior and how we can go the path of least resistance as we create solutions. And so that's what you're gonna Here mostly on my podcast are things about the theory of change and how we change things for the better and how we create lasting change. Something that we don't realize often happens with the constitution is that as time goes on, certain technologies, certain aspects of life, certain aspects of society end up eroding away at some of our constitutional rights. And one of those that I want to talk about today. has to do with our Fourth Amendment rights. Something that I didn't know was that when the phone was invented back in the eighteen hundreds, we had a situation where the law hadn't caught up with a technology, and in this case the phone call, we saw a situation where the phone had allowed law enforcement to be able to track us and invade some of our privacy for a long, long time. Now, the phone, while it was invented in the eighteen hundreds, we didn't actually have a law on the book until nineteen sixty-eight that was enforceable that prevented the government, federal, state, and local law enforcement to get a warrant based on probable cause before intercepting any wire or oral communications. Back in nineteen thirty-four, there was a federal communications act that was passed. But the Justice Department basically ruled that it only banned sharing of the information and not the act of the wiretapping itself. This left the government to basically wiretap any phone call without any warrant, without any probable cause. Basically, anybody that was on a phone call once the phone was invented up until nineteen sixty-eight, every phone call that anyone ever had could have been monitored and listened into. No problems. The telephone was invented in eighteen seventy six. Now if you can imagine we have a crazy invention by Alexander Graham Bell that he invented a way for us to talk without having to be in our homes privately. We could actually talk with someone else in another home. And typically started out in the city and then it went on to the state and then it went on to the country and now we can talk worldwide. But what we didn't realize at that time was that allowed the government to invade Some of our privacy. There was no law on the books. We have the Fourth Amendment, but there was actually no law on the books that prevented government from actually getting into our lives and invading on that privacy. So, how long do you think that it actually took for them to get a law on the books that prevented and required a warrant for us to actually maintain our privacy? Require a warrant for the government to be able to wiretap and listen to our phone calls. Think about it. 1876, it was 1968 before there was an actual enforceable law on the books that required from federal, state, and local law enforcement to have probable cause to then get a warrant to then listen onto your phone call. Okay. Now there's a lot of technical things that go along with this. I want to explain each one. But the first part is they did try in 1934. I I should say citizens actually tried in 1928. Where it went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court actually ruled that police wiretaps did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Now I want you to think about that because we would never consider that in today's world. We think that wiretapping a phone call clearly is an infringement on our rights. That's a reasonable suspicion of privacy that we hold. So when you think about it, back in 1928, what that tells me is the Supreme Court didn't realize the technology that existed at that time. And they didn't realize how important that was and how it chipped away at the Fourth Amendment rights. It wasn't considered that. So you gotta get back into their shoes in that time period and understand technology is very new. There's not a lot of it at that time. We're seeing in the past 50 years there has been a tremendous amount of technology. But in 1928, the Supreme Court didn't quite have a handle on that and didn't understand how that was eroding at our Fourth Amendment rights. So then we go to 1934, they created the Federal Communications Act. Where it was starting to try and get a handle on this new technology called the phone. Well, still with the Federal Communications Act, the Justice Department ruled that it only banned sharing of the information, not the act of wiretapping itself. So here we're in a situation where they made a very clear clarification that it was just about sharing information and you could still listen on a phone call. So Now we get all the way till it was finally the wiretapping act of nineteen sixty-eight law that required a warrant for federal, state, and local law enforcement to get a court order based on probable cause to intercept any wire or oral communications. Okay. So it wasn't until nineteen sixty-eight. Now that's a long time after the phone got created. And that's crazy when you think about how long that took. That's almost 90 years that a technology was in place that was chipping away at your Fourth Amendment rights on a private communication between two people from a distance. They might have been in their home, they might not have been, and the government was allowed to listen in on that. Okay. So the way the legislation works too, though, this law in nineteen sixty eight didn't quite encapsulate everything that we had hoped that it would. We want to keep the Fourth Amendment intact. And the nineteen sixty-eight law was trying to do that. But then what ended up happening was like any piece of legislation that might have some cracks in it, they had to add to that to fortify it a little bit more. So we get to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. They called it the ECPA of nineteen eighty six. That expanded the nineteen sixty eight Wiretap Act. The reason why was new technologies were coming into play. Email was starting to come into play. Cellular phones were starting to come into play. Under the 1968 Wiretap law, if you think about it, there we're talking about a wire here. That didn't include wireless phone calls, cellular phones. So they had to reform that law to make sure that your Fourth Amendment rights, again, were still protected as technology progressed. We are starting to see in this day and age. A lot of different technologies that are starting to affect how the Fourth Amendment is used. A lot of these things right now, all these new technologies, they're finding ways around. And as technology is innovated and increases its scope, we're not seeing the laws. We're playing catch up every time with legislation. And it's been a long time since this has been updated. And what we've got to do is we've got to look at how voices are recorded out in public. How phone calls are recorded based on cameras, where cameras can be put up. There's a lot of things that that change that. So we've got to look at a lot of different technologies today. Obviously, a big topic here that's come out in the recent year is a as a big deal, but we didn't really see it take wave and and go viral until this past year with flock cameras. Okay. Now I don't want to really talk about the company flock itself because that's not what we're worried about. What we're worried about here is technology in general. In how it expands. So we would think that, clearly, clearly a cell phone would be the same case as a regular phone, right? We would think that, but the way they wrote the law at the time was based on a wire, a wire connecting two phones together. It didn't consider the fact that one day phones might not have wires. It might be completely wireless, and you could be in a public place with that. You could be in your car, you could be somewhere else. But at the time, phone calls when they had wires only took place in private places, phone booths, or maybe a bar, or maybe, maybe somewhere in a business. But you didn't have a lot of public places where you could be standing on a phone call. Phone booths later got a reasonable expectation of privacy if you're in a phone booth in public. Once you're in the booth, that's a reasonable expectation of privacy. But that law didn't. quite take it far enough, in my opinion, where we're now going with cell phones, that takes it to a whole new level. You can be in public, but we understand it still to be wiretapping. And thank goodness for the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 that made it to where all electronic transmission communication was protected through a phone call. And they expanded that. So now we're getting into cameras though. We're getting into voice recordings, and they're claiming that because you are in public, those rights all of a sudden don't matter. So let's say that two people are at a public park and they're across the park, but they're on the phone and a cop pulls up. Are they allowed to wiretap or listen in on that phone call without a warrant just because those two people are in public? Well, no, they're not. They're not allowed to. Go into that phone call. They have to get a warrant to do that. They have some type of probable cause to actually listen on that phone call. But what if there's flock cameras out and about or just cameras in general that are recording your your movement? They're recording your voice. What does that change? Well, now they can listen to one phone call over here. That's only one part of it. And then the other part of the phone call on the other side, if they have another camera over there, and they can take that technology, piece that technology together. And then all of a sudden they're in public. They got all that information in public. Well, now they can piece together a phone call without the definition of wiretapping that is protected under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. And now we're in a situation where we have the whole phone call and we got around that, right? We're now getting away and chipping away at our Fourth Amendment rights again. So what we've got to do is we've got to figure out a way and bundle up and expand these communication privacy laws so that we can foundationally secure the Fourth Amendment the way that it was created by the founding fathers. It's that important to maintain that. And we've got to look at all of these different technologies and make sure that we are keeping up. The only difference between the phone technology and today's technology is that technology is innovated faster than ever these days. We have to figure out now how to predict what technologies are going to happen in the future so that we can keep up with this. Why is this such an important issue now? You never hear people talking about the Fourth Amendment, but we are getting to an age where technology and AI is starting to chip away at those Fourth Amendment rights. And what we're trying to do is prevent a situation where the government has gone too far and we can't reel it back. If we can't get it right now, pretty soon, if there was ever a Anne Frank to hide in your basement, you're never going to be able to do it. They're gonna track everything so much and so hard that you're not gonna be able to resist your government because they're gonna know what you're gonna do before you know you're gonna do it. That's how AI works. That's how it is preventative in action. And they can only do that if they're collecting data that they're not allowed to collect. Next time on Brooks Benson, TOC, Roads, Schools, a Natural Gas Pipeline in North Dakota, and why a software guy from Eagle Mountain decided to run for the state Senate. That's Brooks Benson, TOC. If this one made you think, send it to someone who'll argue with you about it. That's how change starts. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and find Brooks at BrooksBenson4Utah.com and on Facebook at Brooks Benson for Utah State Senate. Brooks Benson, TOC Theory of Change.