Best of The Program | Guests: Ken Paxton & Ross Anderson | 8/10/21

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It was a great show today, and you don't want to miss the podcast.

We have Ross Anderson on from Cambridge University.

He's an expert in security.

We talked a little bit about technology and what is coming our way and the plan for iPhones here in the U.S.

that Apple is going to scan everything for child abuse imagery.

Ross, who again,

his whole thing is technical security, he says this is a nightmare that is about to happen.

Also,

on today's podcast, we had Ken Paxton, our attorney general here from the great state of Texas.

We were talking about the border, what the governor is doing, also COVID, and to rein in these little teeny dictators all around the state.

Also, we did an hour today

of,

I think, empowerment.

It was

opening up the phones and asking people if you came from a really bad situation as a child and you had no reason to believe you could make it, but you did.

Tell me your story.

It's great.

It's on today's podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Blandbeck program.

Welcome to the program, Attorney General from the great state of Texas, Ken Paxton.

Ken, how are you, sir?

Well, you know, days are pretty interesting these states, Glenn.

Today's going to be interesting?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, they're all interesting.

As you can see, just what's going on in Texas,

every day is a new challenge.

Yeah, it is.

Texas is under fire today

because of the hospital situation here.

It is not an emergency, but we have hospitals that are firing people if they don't want to take the vaccine, and we could use a few extra nurses, I understand.

And so run-of-the-mill request from the governor is now being distorted as

that there's a massive problem with the hospital system here in Texas, which is not true.

Well, you're right about that.

And the problems that we are having as it relates to COVID,

oddly enough, as you watch the border being pushed by thousands and thousands of people, potentially with COVID.

I think we lost him.

Yeah, it is.

Texas is overrun at the border.

And I mean, small, little teeny towns are having to put COVID tents up.

These people are just dumped into their city by the federal government, and

they're just putting up little tents because they don't know what else to do.

It's absolutely out of control.

It's not just, you know, what's amazing is that they are busing people around the country and just dropping them off.

I know for a fact, I was talking to some police officers in Dallas, and they said that these buses showed up in Dallas and just dumped a couple hundred people out of buses, and they just wandered around the streets, and that was it.

They were let go.

That's how it's being done.

Okay, there's a couple of things.

First of all, I had a county commissioner on last week,

and he was talking about a

commissioner's court and a judge in a commissioner's court.

It's weird when you hear court everywhere else but Texas, you think of an actual court, but that's not what this is, right?

That's correct.

This is like a city council for a county.

So it's not, there are a few counties in Texas that don't have enough court, so they act as a judge, but for the most part, in these large counties, a county commissioner's court or a county judge is not really a judicial judicial position.

It's more of a management or a city council type position.

Okay.

And this quote-unquote judge made a ruling against a commissioner and forced him to leave even though he was vaccinated because he wasn't wearing a mask.

That is exactly what happened.

And of course we have an executive order from the governor who's acting under his power called the Disaster Relief Act, where he said, hey, you can't require a mask.

And that is completely in violation of state law, what that commissioner did.

So what are you doing about it today?

So in the next, I think, hour or so, we're going to file to intervene in his case because he's already got litigation going.

And we're going to try to stop what we would consider illegal by this county judge.

And I doubt he's going to take it well.

He has been on Twitter just saying, you know, you got to mask up.

We got to get ahead of this.

We have to stop all this madness, yada, yada.

But

the county commissioner he kicked out, he was already vaccinated.

So well, and here.

Go ahead.

Here's the deal, Glenn.

You know,

these guys are supposed to act under law, and he doesn't like the current law.

He needs to, like, lobby the legislature to change it, not decide for himself, hey, I run this county.

I do what I want.

I don't follow anybody's other laws because I'm the county judge.

That's effectively what this guy is doing.

Look, if he's right, he's right.

He can go lobby and try to get the changes.

But he can't unilaterally just make up his own law.

And that's sort of the attitude of a lot of

these elected officials.

They can do whatever they want.

Do you expect him to do you expect this to go through here, or is he going to fold?

No, I think he likes the media coverage.

He's not going to win.

I'm pretty sure he knows he's not going to win.

If the law matters, he has no chance.

We've won these battles before.

This is deja vu all over again for us.

So we're pretty, we're very confident we're going to win.

I think he's doing it for media coverage.

But you just said, you know, if the law matters.

I have to tell you, and I can't speak for Texas because Texas is, you know, there's a few states that are bucking this system.

But it doesn't seem like the law matters anymore.

To many Americans, the law doesn't matter anymore.

Well, I think Obama set this up, you know, when he was president.

He ignored federal law, didn't work through Congress, made up his own executive orders, had agencies make up the law, and just thumbed his nose at laws.

And we had to sue him.

We were very successful doing that.

But I think he set sort of the mindset for a lot of Democrat, particularly Democratic elected officials.

I don't have to follow a law either.

If President Obama doesn't do it,

I might adopt the same approach.

So that's kind of the approach that you're seeing by mayors, by county judges, by elected officials all over the country who just say, why should I have to follow the law?

Consume me.

What does it cost me?

They have no personal risk.

Well, but you have more than that now.

Firing somebody for their health conditions against the law.

It's not being enforced.

Questioning somebody about their medical information is against the law, not being enforced.

The CDC eviction moratorium, unconstitutional.

Everybody admits that,

but nobody's going to stop it.

Using any method to coerce someone into taking an experimental drug against the Nuremberg Code.

But it doesn't matter.

I mean,

when does this end?

Well, I mean, this is why we're in the fight.

I mean, we can't take on every battle around the country, but we can certainly fight the fights that we have in Texas.

And this is, this is, today, this is a fight we have.

But we have, you know, we've got thousands of fights going on, and these occur almost every day in my office.

Where we have to pick among a number of choices of which battle can we go fight.

And how are are we fighting at the border, Ken?

What is the latest on that?

So that's another long battle for us because we've got six lawsuits as it relates to the border.

The governor issued his executive order where he said, hey, if there are people being transported that are illegal, they need to be sent back to the border, which is, in my mind, perfectly normal.

And you'd expect a governor to try to protect his state from the spread of COVID from the border and the crime that's associated with that.

And yet, we were sued by the federal government for trying to protect our state in a way that the federal government.

Wait, you're breaking up.

You said you've been accused of

breaking the law, I guess, the federal law?

Yeah, yeah.

So there's this idea under this U.S.

Supreme Court case, U.S.

v.

Arizona, that because the federal government

has statutes providing them authority over immigration that the state still can't protect themselves that the federal government doesn't.

I just don't think that's the correct understanding of what the law is.

How can it possibly be that a state has to sit by while the federal government ignores the law and allows great harm to the citizens of that state?

I can't believe that the governor has to sit by and let that happen.

This is the old Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Right.

It's just not, that cannot be the right interpretation of the law or the Constitution.

And we're fighting that.

Oh, absolutely.

We'll fight that to probably the U.S.

Supreme Court.

Good.

Good.

Ken, thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

God bless.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Let me go to David in Missouri.

We're talking to people today that had no reason to expect that

they were going to be able to make it.

We just talked to a guy a minute ago who is,

you know, who is told every step of the way, you're going to go to prison you're never going to make it even in my house i mean it was it they helped me on my career my folks would take me to the radio station and everything else but they didn't really believe i mean i was told

you know you really should have a backup career and it was a good idea but because maybe because i didn't have one this had to work.

But anyway, David is with us now in Missouri.

David,

why did you have no expectation of making it in other people's eyes growing up?

Well, thank you for having my call, Glenn.

It's an honor speaking with you.

Longtime listener, first-time caller.

Thank you.

You know, I grew up in a single-parent home.

My biological father left my mother when she was pregnant.

I have no idea who he is or where he is, and that chapter is long gone.

But, you know, my mom's first husband was former military and a prison guard.

He was a very harsh man and mentally and physically abused me for years and years and years.

And it caused damage that still to this day, I still find traces of in my life that I have to overcome.

But along the way, I found alcohol, which consumed my life.

I could tell you, you know, six to eight months of time that I don't recall at all of my life because I had so much alcohol consumption.

I ended up getting married.

My wife had two kids and I took them as my own and raised them, but it was very difficult because I had obviously the tendencies from my mom's first husband that still left traces of my parenting so I was a harsh person for a long time and then you add the fuel of the alcohol to it it was a hard time holy cow yeah over time

over time my wife and I actually got divorced after we had jointly had our our child together and alcohol still considered to you know could still consume me and I remember there was a day this was actually August 1st of 2010 I was away from my wife and my family and I had my youngest daughter with me.

And we were just sitting there together, and I was hung over more than I could imagine.

And I looked at her, and I thought, this is God's gift to me, and I'm treating it like this.

And that day, I set the bottle down, never touched it again.

August 1st, this year was actually my 11th year of sobriety.

So let's get past the alcohol part.

After that, what, I mean, I had nothing.

I had no skill.

I had no future.

I had no hope.

And so I just worked dead-end job after dead-end job until finally, you know, I landed in a service industry that I was very successful in and my skills were great.

And after working for many people with a lot of prayer and counsel from church leaders, I started my own business.

And I actually started my own business probably similar to the way that you did a lot of things in your life where I didn't have a lot of money or support.

It was whatever I had.

At the time, I think I might have had $1,100 to start a company with.

And fast forward five years later, the Lord has blessed me to the point where I know the Bible says if you bring the tithe of the storehouse of the Lord, he will pour out blessings upon you more than you can ever contain.

And sometimes I'm praying, Lord, I appreciate the blessings, but can I just have just a little bit less right now?

Because this is a lot.

And

God is just so good.

And, you know, I have more hope and joy than I have ever had in my life.

And success to me is not the business.

Success to me is not the possessions that I have.

The success that I feel in my heart is my relationship with Jesus Christ and my love for people.

Just the stories that I can tell them,

the testimony that I have.

And if you were to even look at the business profile that I have on Google or talk to the customers that I have,

they tell me day after day.

They say, we love doing business with you because you care about me, not the money.

You come into my place of business or my home to help me with my service issue, and you genuinely care about me.

And my customers are my friends.

The people around me are my friends.

And I just have a joy of life that's contagious.

And that was never, who would have ever thought that was in the cards of my life?

I was a raging alcoholic from an abusive, you know, at the hands of an abusive prison guard.

How's your relationship with your kids?

How's your relationship with your kids?

So I would tell you that my two oldest kids, we have a fantastic relationship, but they're still,

I mean, I repent to them

often,

and I tell them

regularly how sorry I am for the things that I did or said.

But I will say this.

I love them more than I ever have in my life.

They're very successful children.

Actually, they're not, I say they're always going to be my children, but they're 18 and 19 now.

So they're older and very successful themselves.

One of my crowning achievements is that day on August 10th, when I shut set the bottle down for the last time, my youngest daughter was actually not old enough to ever have recollection of me ever drinking.

Still to this day, someone 14 years old, 13 years old,

still has no clue that I ever drank alcohol and never will, ever, ever, ever will know that I ever did, only through stories that I tell her as cautionary tales of things to look out for from the evils of the world and the vices that can grab a hold of you so tightly and easily.

Wow.

David, I am so glad that you called in.

Thank you.

Congratulations.

I'm so happy for you.

So happy for you.

Well, thank you.

You bet.

God bless.

It's by the grace of God.

God bless.

Thank you, Blanche.

I will tell you, you notice the theme here.

I think everyone has mentioned God in some way or another.

Every single person.

I think even the first guy who lives in Wisconsin, which I don't understand, the horse racing is fine, or the horse raising horses is fine.

Just Wisconsin, really?

Wisconsin.

They're places that aren't that cold or progressive.

I just want to point that out to you.

And that's the birthplace of progressivism.

Yeah, it is.

Anyway, but

you notice the mark here.

There's no reason for hope.

You know,

I know that God lives.

I know that God lives.

I know

the

healing power of the atonement because I, just like our last caller, had lots to atone for.

And I know it.

I know those things.

But let me just say this.

If I wake up in the dirt, you know, trapped in a box for all eternity, and there's nothing besides endless dirt nap,

I don't care.

I mean, I'll be disappointed.

But the secret is, I won't wake up from it, so I won't know.

But it's made me better.

It gives you hope.

If you really, truly believe, that's the difference.

That's why we believed we could do it.

That's why we were founded.

Because we didn't need a king.

We already had one.

And all of our laws are based on biblical truths.

And the more we deny the biblical truth, the more we deny our own laws.

That's why everything is breaking down.

Because

we no longer believe in the law.

We're not a nation of laws.

We're a nation of men.

We were a nation of laws only because we agreed on those laws that they were pretty much eternal.

That

the things that we had in place in our Constitution and the directives of the Declaration

of Independence didn't come from man.

They came from God.

And the Constitution was just a way to protect those things.

If we lose our faith in God, you lose almost everything

because nothing, the center won't hold.

You know, people always say atheists find their, find, sure find religion in the foxhole.

I don't know if that's true.

But I know that people who are kind of indifferent, when they're in the foxhole, whenever they're in trouble, their kids get sick, they suddenly find God.

They do find God.

We are in a place right now

where the only,

the only thing that will heal us is forgiveness.

That's it.

We are in a place now where we can't forgive one another because we voted differently,

because we think differently.

We are in a place now where we can't forgive members of our own family for things they've said.

When you're in the situation these callers have been in,

you have to forgive.

Otherwise, it just turns into hate and it turns into rage and it turns into vindictiveness.

Do you notice that pattern in our everyday life as a nation?

It's because we can't forgive each other.

We need to forgive each other

and forgive ourselves

and start fresh.

So I am trying to eat healthier and I am, but the thing is, I don't like healthy food.

I don't like any of it.

You've heard of a fat suit, right?

I mean, there's got to be, when are we getting a skinny suit?

Something that will make me look skinny, because I just want...

treats all the time.

I grew up in a bakery for the love of Pete.

The bad news is no skinny suit is coming.

You actually have to do the work, blah, blah, blah.

That's why I am eating Bilt Bars.

It satisfies my sweet tooth, but it's a protein bar, but not like, you know, that's like eating stuff at the bottom of my chalkboard usually.

This is 100% real chocolate.

It's low carb, low sugar.

If I'm eating a protein bar as a treat, come on, you gotta know it's good.

And I am.

Mint brownie, cookies, and cream, the new flavors that are coming out all the time, they're fantastic.

Go to builtbar.com and use the promo code BEC15 for 15% off your order.

Your mouth is going to water just looking at them.

Trust me, Builtbar.com, promo code BEC15.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

So last week the story came out.

Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery.

And on the surface, if you're not paying attention to what's going on in the world, you think, oh, well, that's good.

I got an email from a guy who used to be very, very high up at Yahoo about 20 years ago.

And he said, we basically set up a direct line with the FBI because we frequently had websites submitted to us to be crawled or indexed that we believed may contain child pornography or other illegal things.

At first, we were just emailing links over to the FBI task force, but the process for them to check on it and get back to us was just so arduous that we just eventually set the FBI up with an E3 terminal.

in their LA area offices.

That was basically the same terminal that our editorial team members, those who were the keepers of the internet at the time, they determined which websites and search results showed up for people and which ones we would block, trying to keep harmful or illegal content out of Yahoo's search results.

So, by giving the FBI an E3 terminal, anyone from the editorial team or the sales group could submit a website directly to them for review.

It would pop up in their queue, just like a help desk ticket, and someone at the FBI could review it and let us know if the content was legal.

But they could also just flag something to be blocked, blocked and it would be blocked.

Generally, no questions asked.

And because of what we felt at the time, we felt like we were doing good, taking down child and sex trafficking criminals.

We felt great about it.

This long-winded way of saying,

yeah, I'm sure that Apple is...

and others are getting into a cozy relationship between social search tech giants and the government.

We now know that this was a mistake to open up the door in the first place.

Ross Anderson is with us.

He is a professor of security at Cambridge University and one of the louder voices speaking out and warning us about what Apple is doing.

Hi, Ross.

Hi, Glenn.

Thank you so much for being on the program with me.

I want to understand

why this is so dangerous.

Apple says it has all kinds of safety features and they're only scanning faces for those that are

in sex

rings or have been sex trafficked

and maybe those children that are missing.

Well,

you can see how this is going to develop.

But first of all,

Apple will be scanning all the photos in everybody's camera role everywhere in the USA and later everywhere in the world against a database of 200,000 abuse images

that have been supplied by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Now given the way that their neural network is organized it looks like it's going to scan for faces as you say

and so you can imagine the kind of things that will happen that there'll be some abuse image that's 10 or 20 years old

and

so the reviewers at Apple will see a photograph which isn't of child sex abuse but of a grown-up with their clothes on and the system will recognize this person and the person at Apple then has to decide whether this is a survivor or a perpetrator and what to do with it.

There's a small problem there that US law says that if you do get suspected child abuse material you should report it at once to NCMEC rather than reporting it to Apple.

Right?

So there's firstly a legal problem there.

And then secondly, there's the problem of what happens when NCMEC extends that to missing children.

right?

Because some of the children who are known, you know, who go missing, go missing for perfectly good reasons.

For example, they might be getting abused at home, they might get beaten or even sexually abused.

And so if you recognize runaways, there's all sorts of processes around that you have to think about.

Apple doesn't seem to have thought about this.

They don't seem very keen to provide help desks and helplines and places where people can report stuff.

And then the next problem is that once you've got a mechanism sitting in your iPhone that can scan your camera row for

faces, it's open to any government in the world to come along with a warrant and say, hey, Mr.

Apple, we've got a file of 20,000 faces that we'd like you to scan for in our country.

And you can guess what those faces might be.

In China, it might be the faces of the Dalai Lama and the Pope.

In Europe, if there's been some rowdy demonstration in Paris, for example, the police might feed in the faces of demonstrators.

You know, your guess is as good as mine.

But Apple is building a very, very dangerous mechanism into its iPhones, and there needs to be proper scrutiny and accountability of this.

Aaron Powell, this is actually, is it based on, or is it just very similar to something that happened in 2008 in China that kind of opened Pandora's box?

Well, yes, and this is a worrying thing, you know, because if our civilization is going to be in Cold War 2.0 with China for the next 20 years or 30 years, we should watch what the Chinese do and understand it rather than copying them.

And in China, what happened in 2008 is that they mandated everybody in the country to put software called Green Dam on their PCs.

And Green Dam was sold to the population as being a porn filter.

And it did that to some extent, but very badly.

However, the real purpose of Green Dam was to look for words like Falun Gong and Dalai Lama and so on that were of interest to the Ministry of State Security.

What Green Dam also did is it made your computer vulnerable because the government weren't very good at writing software and the software that they produced meant that everybody who used the Green Dam software was vulnerable to having their PC taken over by websites that they visited.

Now that's been fixed by now, but still it's the case that in China and in Russia we have this ecosystem of government scanning what's on people's PCs.

And no doubt the Chinese will be seeing to it that they get to scan stuff in people's phones as well.

So, you know,

we were talking about this the other day, and I said to my staff, can anybody name anything that you know is a bigger threat to your freedom and security than

social media and technology?

I mean, it's not necessarily the threat today, but we know what it can do.

And

yet, again, do you know anybody who has given it up and said, I'm just not going to be a part of this?

Very, very rarely does that happen.

We are just going down the road and they keep passing these red lines of, oh, that's a really bad sign.

That's a really bad thing to do.

And just hoping that it's not going to be turned against us when we already see social media is doing all of these things.

Well, absolutely.

You know, I used Android for many years and switched to Apple a couple of years ago when I was updating my security engineering book, and I noted how much more secure Apple was.

But the problem with Apple iPhones being tamper-resistant is that I can't easily drill into them and find out what they're doing.

I can't see the database of hashes of abuse in my phone and check that it doesn't contain hashes of dissidents instead.

With a less secure phone like an Android, you could perhaps do that and you could hold people to account.

So here is a case where security is being used against us to undermine our privacy.

And the tamper resistance of the iPhone means that the government can have an iSpy in your iPhone over which you've got no control whatsoever.

Ross, how far away are we

from

an easy police state with the wrong person taking charge?

Well, that's exactly the problem here.

You mustn't give the police too much power.

You may think that it's nice to give the police power when your lot are in charge, but it never works because you end up with the other lot in charge and you know then you've had it.

So to stay free, we have to see to it that the government can only do so much, that it can't undermine our basic freedoms.

And you're lucky in the United States having your constitution constitution.

And here in Europe, we have the European Convention on Human Rights.

And once you get to those parts of the world where we don't have guarantees for basic freedoms, well, good luck.

Well, I don't know if you've been paying attention much to America lately, Ross, but we're not following the Constitution.

I mean, we are our Constitution says, you know,

you can't quarter soldiers into a house and go through somebody's papers.

Well, I think you already have that.

If you're online and the government wants some information, they're just going to go to one of these tech companies and they'll go through all of your papers.

I mean, and they'll watch you or they'll scan your photos.

And there's no such thing as privacy anymore.

Well, indeed.

And

I'm not an expert in U.S.

law, of course, being a Brit, but I hear from American friends that the argument which Apple and the FBI are going to use goes to a case around drug sniffer dogs where somebody's in a traffic stop had a drug sniffer dog brought around and they found some

weed in his boot and he got convicted and he said that was unfair and the court said that if you've got a search that finds only contraband that's okay

now it depends on what the government defines as contraband but if you've got a government search engine that can look at all your most intimate stuff you know, your photos, your emails, your texts, and it can use artificial intelligence to find out something that the government of the day considers to be contraband,

then that means

makes a mockery of the idea that you've got to get warrants.

Because suddenly you're turning the universe around so that the government to do surveillance doesn't have to get a warrant against a suspected person, but against a suspected idea or

a suspected image or a suspected form of speech.

That's what's changing here, and it's really scary.

Is there anything the average person can do to secure themselves?

Well,

what's happening

in the long term, this is down to political action, this is down to legal action, this is down to, well, you know, my next phone isn't going to be an iPhone.

In the meantime, Apple's saying that they will only scan your photos if you back them up in iCloud.

Well, then fine.

Buy yourself a disk drive and attach it to your laptop and back your phone up on your laptop and back the laptop up on a disk drive.

Right.

I mean and by doing that that only just tells anybody who does market in child pornography, don't put it on the iCloud.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

Well, and it's also too much bother for most people.

You see, what Apple and the FBI will be relying on here is the fact that Apple nagged you really, really hard to get an iCloud account and to put more money in it and to back your phone up to iCloud and your MacBook MacBook too rather than using a disk drive.

For some years my wife refused to get an iCloud account and every time she connected her iPhone to the MacBook, it just complained and said, put in your iCloud password.

And it's this kind of commercial nagging that is now going to be exploited by law enforcement to drive a coach and horses through security.

But there is another thing here, which is that your photos in iCloud aren't properly encrypted when they're backed up anyway.

So Apple could, if it wished,

run child porn detection software over the photos, just like, for example, Facebook does over photos in Facebook Messenger and Google does over photos in Gmail.

And it could then report people who already have illegal images in iCloud to NCMAC, but it doesn't do that.

Last year, Facebook reported made over 20 million reports to NCMAC, and Apple made under 1,000.

So

there's something really weird going on here.

Apple really cared about stopping child sex abuse.

They could have done a lot of stuff a long time ago.

Any thought on why they're now taking this step?

Because it's unneeded,

apparently?

Well,

one of the things that's been suggested is that Apple is contemplating encrypting iCloud data properly, and the FBI is going to object to that unless there's some means of scanning for stuff of interest to them.

But of course,

child sex abuse material isn't the only thing of interest to the FBI.

The FBI has got much wider interest than that.

Ross, thank you very much.

Thank you for everything that you're doing and speaking the truth and letting people know

what is possible with technology and what is coming our way.

Professor of security at Cambridge University on the Apple plan to now use iPhones to scan for

child abuse imagery and possibly much more than that.