Was Trump Tower Wiretapped and What are the Implications

Transcript

TTWCP-DAILY-47_2017-03-07_Was-Trump-Tower-Wiretapped

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/07/2017

Was Trump Tower Wiretapped – What are the Implications

Craig Peterson: Hi, Craig Peterson here. Time for another daily TechSanity check. And today I am down in Florida so you have to excuse a couple of things here when it comes to audio and the audio quality. But there are some important things to talk about. And today, we’re gonna talk about the Trump wiretap. What happened here? Why does he think his phones were tapped?

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We’ve all heard by now that President Donald Trump tweeted about his phones being tapped, about Trump Tower, frankly, and his headquarters there for his election, his campaign being tapped by President Obama. Now that’s a really big deal when you get right down to it. Was it tapped? What does tapped mean? What does bugged mean? There’s a whole lot of questions here. His tweet was, and I quote here, “Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory.” He tweeted. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism. Now that’s a real interesting point. Because if it’s true, if we indeed had President Obama ordering that Trump’s phones for his campaign be wire-tapped, that is bigger than Watergate ever was. That is way bigger than Nixon. It’s a real question. A real problem.

Now let’s talk about wire-tap… sorry, it’s not what you see in the movies. It’s certainly not existed 20 years ago. Today, all phone conversations are digital. No question about it. If you pick up a landline phone, you know, the type of phone that has a dial on it. Yeah, you remember those, right? And has a wire that goes into the wall. That call is digital. Ok, it’s not digital necessarily from your phone to the wall. And it’s not digital necessarily from the wall to the first point it hits the equipment the phone company has installed, the slicker or some other piece of equipment. But at that point it’s digital. And it’s hauled as a digital signal all the way until it gets to the other side which is reciprocal over there, right? It’s going to be digital up until the point that it gets to the point where it has to be analog, right? And goes into the analog handset. So that’s the way it works with phones. It’s digital. If you have a cellphone, when it goes into your microphone and gets processed, there’s an analog to digital converter that’s in your phone that sits basically behind the microphone in the chain of events. And it’s digital from that point out. And it goes all the way. If you call another cellphone, it goes right to that cellphone and it’s digital right up to the point where it goes to a dock that then hooks up to your speaker, right?

So, we’re talking about digital signals. Those digital signals can be easily tapped. In the movies you see things like they’re listening. Think about the Matrix, right? Their Neo is there and there is a wiretap going on. And they hear this wiretap it goes click, click, click, click. Do you remember that? And they said ok, they found us. They’re tapping us. Well, you used to be able to hear a click, maybe as late as the 1970s. Before that point in time, they were actually clipping on to the wires a little instrument that could be used to listen in. So it’s kinda like a party line, if you remember those. I remember party lines, we used to have one at the house. But you’d pick up the phone, you’d be talking to someone. You’d hear a click, there’s someone else who’d pick up on the party line and you’d say, hang up on me. I’m here right now. In fact, my mom told us kind of an interesting story when she was a kid. Because she and a girlfriend both share the same party line. Both their houses were on the same party line. And the girlfriend was a very good friend with a guy my mom had a bit of a crush on. So she arrange to have her girlfriend call this guy about something. And then leave after my mom had picked up the phone. So I thought that was really kinda interesting, right? A little bit of scheming going on. So the girlfriend called the guy here at the appropriate time and started chatting with him and my mom picked up the phone, Oh, hi Martha, how are you doing? Oh John, how are you doing John? And started a little conversation. Then Martha says hey, I gotta leave. Talk to you guys later. And so my mom got to talk to this guy that she had wanted to talk to, right? So that was the clearest example of what was a party line. And party lines were cheaper and there were a number of reasons they had that back in the day.

So when my mom picked up that phone line, both Martha and John heard her get on coz it would kinda click, right? You knew there’s someone out there. The volume would change. Nowadays, if they want to tap your phone, all they’re doing is making a copy of the digital data. There’s no fingerprint left behind. None at all. They’re just listening in on that data and we know that AT&T as an example, was giving the NSA a complete feed of all of its data, which includes all of your voice calls, and the NSA was recording that and they were processing it and they were handing it over to whichever government agency who wanted it basically. And apparently they’re still continuing to do that and apparently, the Obama administration also has dramatically increased the amount of monitoring that’s been going on. So now we have Donald Trump come along and say Hey, Obama wiretapped our phones, right? And the question is what does that mean, right? Bottom line, what does that mean in the real world? Because wire-tapping is actually going on in every American. The United States is part of the Five Eyes. It’s one of the countries that spies on its own citizens. And that’s 5 western countries, it’s actually higher than 5 now. But it includes the United States. Records and monitors every citizen’s communications. Canada does the same. The UK does the same. Germany, Australia, and now I think most countries. I think France does it now too. It goes on and on.

So if they’re monitoring every conversation, aren’t they wire-tapping? Isn’t that the bottom-line here? They’re listening to everything. They’re recording everything. Therefore, they frankly are wire-tapping. So, on one level, Trump’s statement is absolutely correct. He was wire-tapped. And that’s true for every one of us. Every American out there. And any American who makes a phone call, or anyone in the US to someone of interest is automatically gonna have their calls monitored. It’s automatic, right? So, me and the media, and of course we’ve heard of Fox News and various other media people who were being monitored and they knew it by the FBI and others, were being monitored for a few reasons. There are automatic systems. Well, for instance, I interviewed some guy who is a CEO of a company who has an interesting technology. Well, if that guy maybe talked to someone else, who was going to do some financing, let’s say for the company, is gonna be an investor, an angel, or otherwise. And that third party now had contact with Hamaz, for instance, and so he was already under observation. That might place, in fact, it would place automatically, it would put me under observation and it would also out the guy I interviewed under observation. See how it flows downhill, right? It goes out 3, 4, even 5 degrees here. And, in fact, they covered that. I thought that was really good that Ridley Scott covered that on The Good Wife, the NSA monitoring.

So, no doubt about it. Trump’s wires were tapped. No question. So, the next question is what does that mean? Was he saying that they were tapping his phone in order to what? They had transcripts of conversations, well we know that happened. Look at what happened to one of his nominees, right? It came out, oh you talked to the Russians about yeah… and yeah… and Jeff Sessions here. More recently you talked to the Russians. So a call from the Russian Ambassador’s office, for instance, could get them in trouble. Because that call from the Russian Ambassador’s office now, we’re monitoring them. Our National Intelligence and Security’s monitoring them, the Russians, therefore you’re gonna get monitored. And now we ask, was that the reason that he was being monitored? And he kept asking, where’s the leak? How come I don’t even get out of a meeting and they’re already reporting in the press what happened in that meeting? What’s going on there? Why is that happening? Another perfectly legitimate question. And you know, if they are monitoring everything and there are people inside that are getting the information from the NSA, then yeah, they

did get it. They did have it. It would have been transcribed automatically and it probably was sent to a human transcriber as well.

So was the FBI investigating him? That we don’t know. Did Obama himself order the wiretap? That we don’t know. Did Obama’s administration, maybe the Attorney General, order the wiretap? That we don’t know. And was the wiretap, if it was in place, other than obviously the NSA and what they were already doing, if it was that wiretap put in place to help protect national security, that’s another question we don’t have. In other words, were they trying to keep an eye out for a third-party Russia, Iran, China, trying to listen in on the conversations? Trying to get information. So was Trump being monitored to see if someone else was monitoring him? A lot of questions. Wow, this is gonna go on for a whole long time. We’re really not going to know for a while. Of course, President Trump has come out and asked for an investigation, congressional investigation. Asked the FBI to look into this. It’s gonna be very, very interesting. And in a day and age where our technology is so pervasive, and you and I are just using our cell phones to call each other, that information’s being wiretapped. So, I don’t know. Is that good? Is that bad? Is it gonna be used against us? Is it gonna be manipulated to make us look bad? Can the government try and throw us in jail over information that is isn’t true? But they are able to put it together in such a way that kinda looks like it might be true? Tons of questions. And of course we’ll keep on top of this and we’ll let you know a little bit more about this as time goes on here. Kinda what I think and what the technology is really doing to us and for us.

Now tomorrow, we’re gonna talk a little bit about sanity here on Facebook. They got this new, disputed news tag. I don’t know if you saw it. This came out with it over the weekend. But tomorrow, we’ll talk about that a little bit more. Take care. Visit us online at http://CraigPeterson.com. Bye bye.

SHOW NOTES:

President Donald Trump tweeted about his phones being tapped, and now the Trump Tower. He tweets that the Trump Tower, which was also his election headquarters, was being tapped by President Obama.

So, what does tapped mean? What does it mean to be tapped? These and more questions answered today on TechSanity Check.

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