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Andrew Bustamante
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- 2022-08-08
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- 2022-08-08
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“Yeah, so intelligence organizations have different strategies here. In the United States, we never create. We don't have a budget cycle that allows us to create. I mean, the maximum budget cycle in the United States is five years. So even if we were to try to invest in some C operation or create some character of influence, essentially every year you have to justify why you're spending budget. And that becomes very difficult in a democracy like ours. However, Russia and China are extremely adept at seed operations, long-term operations. They are willing to invest and develop and create An agent that serves their purposes now to create someone from scratch like Jeffrey Epstein,”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only thing that interests them is power. Money is not a challenge anymore. Prestige, notoriety, none of those things are a challenge. The rest of us, we're busy trying to make money. We're busy trying to build a reputation. We're busy trying to build a career, keep a family afloat. At the highest levels, they're bored. They don't need any of that. The only thing that they care about is being able to wield power. So a character like Jeffrey Epstein is exactly the kind of character that the Chinese would want, the Russians would want, Mossad would want, the French would want. It's too easy because the man had access to a wide range of American influential people for corporate espionage uses, for economic espionage uses, for national security espionage uses. It doesn't make any sense that a person like that wouldn't be targeted. It doesn't.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you have these agents of influence. An agent of influence is job is to be part of your effort to influence the outcomes in some way that benefits your intelligence requirements, right? Of these three types of people, the least scrupulous and the most shady is your agent of influence. Because your agent of influence understands exactly what they're doing. They know they're working with one guy and they know they're giving, they're using the influence to manipulate some other guy. When it comes to powerful people, especially wealthy, powerful people,”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like we were talking earlier, there's foreign intelligence reporting assets. There's access agents. And then there's agents of influence. Three different categories of intelligence, right? One is when you talk about foreign intelligence reporters, these are people who have access to secrets and their job is to give you their secrets in exchange for gold or money or alcohol or prostitution or whatever else, right? Their job is to give you secrets and then you pay them for the secrets. Access agents, their job is to give you physical access or digital access to something of interest to you. So maybe they're the ones that open a door that should have been locked and let you come in and stick your thumb drive in the computer. Or maybe they're the ones that share a phone number with somebody and then they're just like, just don't tell them you got the phone number for me. Their job is to give you access.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some way, shape, or form with the character of Epstein, it's 100% guaranteed. That some intelligence organization was involved. But let's talk about why. Let's talk about why, okay? There's multiple types of intelligence assets”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're taking steps to cover anything up, it's just their own, it's a painful reminder of their lack of competency at the time. Now, I understand that conspiracy theorists want to take inklings of information and put them together in a way that is the most damning, but that goes back to our point about overvaluing losses and undervaluing gains. It's just predictable human behavior.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you seeing even right now? We miss the US intelligence infrastructure, misjudged Afghanistan, misjudged Hong Kong, misjudged Ukraine, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Those were three massive misjudgments in a few years.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are more incompetent of executing a conspiracy. Than they are of competently executing a conspiracy. That's really what it means is that it's so difficult to carry out a complex lie that most people don't have the competency to do it. So it doesn't make any sense to lead thinking of conspiracy. It makes more sense to lead, assuming incompetence. When you look at all of the outcomes, all the findings from 9-11, it speaks to incompetence. It speaks rashly and openly to incompetence and nobody likes talking about it. FBI and CIA to this day hate hearing about it. The 9-11 Commission is going to go down in history as this painful example of the incompetence of the American intelligence community. And it's going to come back again and again every time there's an Intel flap. It's going to come back again and again.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know Occam's razor, so the harem's razor is that you can never prescribe to conspiracy what could be explained through incompetence. Right? That is one of those are two fundamental guidelines that we follow all the time. The simplest answer is oftentimes the best and never prescribe to conspiracy what can be explained through incompetence.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I say yes, my exception is I don't think they did that for Americans inside the United States. If the CIA can basically set it up so that two different drug cartels shoot each other by assisting in the transaction of a sale to a third country and then leaking that that sale happened to a competing cartel, that's just letting cartels do what they do. That's them doing the dirty work for us. So especially at the beginning of the drug war, I think there was tons of space, lots of room for CIA to get involved in the economics of drugs and then let the inevitable happen. And that was way more efficient, way more productive than us trying to send our own troops in to kill a bunch of cartel warlords. So that makes a ton of sense to me. It just seems efficient. It seems very practical. I do not believe that CIA would like, I don't think all the accusations out there about how they would buy drugs and sell drugs and somehow make money on the side.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the beginning of the drug war, I would imagine the answer is yes. CIA has its own counter-narcotics division, a division that's dedicated to fighting and preventing narcotics from coming into the United States. So when you paint a picture for me, like, do you think the CIA was complicit in helping drug trafficking or drug use?”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be a priority for that. But to say that the organization of CIA was somehow in cahoots to independently assassinate their own executive, that's a significant stretch. I've seen no evidence to support that. And it goes contrary to everything I learned from my time at CIA.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Yeah, absolutely, it's possible to infiltrate CIA. There's a long history of foreign intelligence services infiltrating CIA from Aldrich Ames to Jerry Lee recently with China. So we know CIA can be infiltrated, even if they are infiltrated and even if that's interlocutor executes on their own agenda or the agenda as directed by their foreign adversary, their foreign handler, that's different than organizational support for an event. So I do think it's possible they could have been infiltrated at the time, especially it was a massive majority for the Cubans and the Russians to infiltrate some aspect of U.S. intelligence multiple moles were caught in the years following. So it's not surprising that there would”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I cannot imagine. in any reasonable point of view that the organization of CIA had anything to do with the assassination of JFK.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five ideas, and it was one of the ideas. Still happens to this day. The president will still come in, but he'll basically send out a notice to his covert action arm, and he will say, I need this. And I need it on Wednesday. And people have to come back with options for the thing he asked for, a finding. He will issue a presidential finding. And then his covert action arms have to come back and say, here's how we would do this and hide the hands of the Americans.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was like, no, because the best ideas oftentimes come from bad ideas. So again, Cuban Missile Crisis, mass hysteria in the United States about nuclear war from Cuba, missiles blowing up American cities faster than we could even see them coming. It makes sense to me that a president would go to especially the part of CIA, which is the Special Activities Division. It makes perfect sense to me that the president would go to a division called Special Activities whose job it is to create crazy ideas that have presidential approval, but nobody knows they exist. So it makes sense that he would challenge a group like that to come up with any wacky idea, right? Come up with anything. Just let's start with something because we can't have, we can't bring nothing to the table. We have to do something about this Cuban issue. And then that's how an operation like that could reasonably be born. Not because anybody wants to do it, but because they were tasked by the president to come up with”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. First, I'm glad that JFK rejected it. That's a good sign. So we have to understand that good ideas are oftentimes born from bad ideas. I had a really good friend of mine who actually went on to become a pastor. He used to say all the time that he wanted all the bad ideas on the table. Like, give me all your bad ideas every time we had any kind of conversation. And I was always one of those people who's like, isn't it a bad idea just a waste of time”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's evidence, I haven't seen it. Speaking from a science based point of view only, if energy and matter can always be exchanged, then a person who can understand and become sensitive to energy is a person who could become sensitive to what does become matter”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were supposed to do, we still know that to this day, there's still a demand in the US government and in CIA for people who have sensitivities to ethereal energies.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, you've got to look through the lens of time. You've got to look at where we were historically at that time. There was the peak of the Cold War. Our enemies were doing the same kind of experimentation. It was essentially another space race. What if they broke through a new weapon technology faster than we did? What would that mean for the safety and security of the American people? So right decision or wrong decision, it was guided by and informed by a national security priorities. So from this program that was designed to use drugs to drive interrogation and torture people was born something very productive, Operation Stargate, which was a chance to use remote viewing and metaphysics to try to collect intelligence. Now, even though in the end, the outcome of MKUltra and the outcome of Stargate were mixed, nobody really knows if they did or didn't do it.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes those conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but most times they don't. That's just part of the risk of being a myth”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a very good question. The folks I left behind when I left CIA who continue to serve as faceless, nameless heroes every day I am grateful to them The truth is that if they were motivated by something else, they wouldn't be as good as they are at doing what they do. And I see your point about shouldn't we be celebrating our victories? But when celebrating our victories runs the risk of informing our Enemies, how we operate, giving away our And running the risk of shaping a narrative intentionally among our own American people, now all of a sudden we're turning into exactly the thing that the American people trust us not to become.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more professional to be a silent sentinel, a silent servant humbly carrying the burden of public service in the United States where we are a fair and open democracy.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Public service is a sacrifice. It's a grind. For all of the soldiers, the submariners, the missiliers, the police officers, intelligence specialists, they all know what it's like to give things up, to serve a public that can turn its opinion at any given time. And history is what defines it. The more important thing is to understand that if you want a true, open and fair democracy, you cannot control a narrative. And starting to share all of your victories or starting to share your biggest victories with the intent of shaping public opinion to be supportive of the police force or supportive of CIA or supportive of, you name it, is shaping a narrative that is intentional operational use of influence to drive public opinion. That is something nobody wants to get into.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Soldiers weren't seen as heroes in the Vietnam War. You've got to remember that when you, so first of all, public service is a sacrifice. We oftentimes forget that. We start to think, oh, government jobs are cushy and they're easy and it must be so easy to be the president because then you're basically a celebrity overnight.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The human nature is not to assign competence. So empirically, humans overvalue losses and undervalue gains. That's something that we've seen from finance to betting and beyond. If the Austin Police Department starts telling you about all these heinous crimes that were avoided because of their hard work, The way that your brain is actually going to process that information is you are going to say, if this is all the stuff that they've stopped, How bad must this place be? Much more haven't they stopped?”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. If the Austin PD started telling you every day about these crazy crimes that they prevented, would that make you feel more safe? It would make you feel like they're doing their job”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, take advantage of the shelf life. You get space, so you got to keep it a secret. There is no tactical advantage from sharing a secret unless you are specifically trying to achieve a certain tactical advantage from sharing that secret, which is what we've seen so much of with US Intel sharing with Ukraine. There's a tactical advantage from sharing a secret about Russian military movements or weaknesses in tanks or, you know, supply chain challenges, whatever it might be.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The danger comes from letting your enemy know that you claimed the victory, because they can reverse engineer and they can start to change how they did things. If a terrorist act, if a terrorist cell tries to execute an operation, the operation fails, from their point of view, they don't know why it failed. They just know that it failed. But then if the US or if the American government comes in and says, we took apart this amazing attack, now they have more information, right? The whole power of secrets, like we talked about before, the power of secrets is in knowing that not everybody has them. There's only a shelf life.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does for two reasons. It has to be secret. First, the mythos, the same thing we were talking about with General Petraeus. You can't brag about your victories if you want to let the myth shape itself. You can't do that. The second thing is once something is claimed,”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is what's difficult because any proof that they collected that actually prevented an attack from happening is proof we'll never know about. This is the really unfortunate side of intelligence operations. And I've been at the front end of this. You work your ass off. You take personal risk. You make personal sacrifice to make sure that something terrible doesn't happen. Nobody knows that that ever happens.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If what's nice about this is that we can agree to disagree, and history will be the one that decides. But once. There's a reason that Edward Snowden needs to do something new every 16 or 18 months to remain relevant. Because if he didn't, he would just be forgotten because he was not a maverick who changed history for the better. He was a man who broke a law, and now he's on the run. And to some people, he is a hero. To other people, he is a criminal, but to the vast majority, he's just a blip on a radar of their everyday life that really makes no difference to them at all.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That how you act in the face of accusation is, in essence, part of the case that you build for yourself. So running away to China, Russia, Cuba, there was a Latin Ecuador, I think. That just paints a very negative picture that does not suggest that you were doing anything that was ethical and upright and in favor of the American people if you're going to run to American enemies to support yourself. So for sure, in the eyes of the law, he's a criminal. In the eyes of a group of people who are largely ignorant to what they lost, to them, he's a hero. To me, he's just kind of a sad case. I personally look at Snowden as a sad. Unfortunate case. His life is ruined. His family name is tarnished. He's forever going to be a desperate pawn. And that's all because of the decisions that he made and the order that he made them.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms in the eyes of the law, he's a criminal. He broke the law. He broke the confidence. He was under security obligation. And then when he ran away, he ran away to all of the worst villains in the world from the U.S. perspective to basically seek protection.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Security and convenience are on two opposite sides of another spectrum. The more convenient something is, the less secure. And the more secure something is, the less convenient. And that's a battle that we're always working with as individuals, and then we're trying to outsource that battle to our politicians and our politicians are frankly just more interested in being politicians”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For everybody to have Housed in a server that you have no idea where it's at that could be hacked at any time by a third party.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was so much evidence collected because of the surveillance nature of their state. Now, why do they have a surveillance state? It's not for people like me. It's because they're constantly afraid of extremist terrorist activity happening inside Abu Dhabi or inside the UAE because they're under constant threat from Islam and from extremists and they're under constant threat from Iran. So that's what drives the people to want a police state, to want a surveillance state for them, their survival is paramount and they need the surveillance to have that survival. For us, we haven't tasted that level of desperation and fear yet, or hopefully never. But that's what makes us feel like there's something wrong with surveillance. Surveillance is all about the purpose. It's all about the intent.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was caught on camera. His idea was registered. My idea was registered. Everything was tied back to our IDs. The proof and the evidence was crystal clear. Even still, he was Emirati, I was not, so when I went to the police station to file the complaints, it was something that nobody was comfortable with, because generally speaking, Emiratis don't accept legal claims against their own from foreigners. But the difference was that I was an American and I was there on a contract supporting the Emirati government. So I had these different variances, right? Long story short, in the end, the surveillance state is what made sure that justice was played because the proof was incontrovertible.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you're breaking the speed limit, it just immediately charges your credit card because it's tied, it's all tied together. Totally surveillance. That technology was invented by the Israelis who use it in Israel. I was in Abu Dhabi and I was rear ended at high speed by what turned out to be an Emirati official, a senior ranking official of one of the Emirates.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So let me give you just a practical example. So people don't realize this, but there's multiple surveillance states that are out there. There are surveillance states that are close allies with the United States. One of those surveillance states is the United Arab Emirates, the UAE. Now, I lived in the UAE from 2019 to 2020, came back on a repatriation flight after COVID broke out. But we were there for a full year. We were residents, we had IDs, we had everything. Now, when you get your national ID in the Emirates, you get a chip. And that chip connects you to everything. It connects you to cameras. It connects you to the license plate on your car, to your passport, to your credit card, everything. Everything is intertwined. Everything is interlinked. When you drive, there are no police. There are no police on the roads. Every 50 to 100 meters, you cross a camera that reads your license plate, measures your...”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The creation of a secret intelligence service that operates outside of foreign intelligence collection, also that a handful of people who don't like the president Get what whisked away, assassinated, put in prison? Who knows what? About the resources that would be the amount of money and time and how hard would it be to keep that secret, to have all of those things in motion? The reason it worked in Russia and Soviet Germany or Russia and communist Germany was because everybody knew there was a secret police. Everybody knew that there was a threat to speaking out against the government. It's completely different here.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Freedom of speech. So the court is not going to support what the executive is asking them to do. Even before you take somebody to court, you have to involve law enforcement. Essentially, you have to send some sort of police force to go apprehend the individual who's in question. Well, guess what doesn't meet criteria for any police force anywhere in the United States. Arresting people who say negative things about the president. Now, if somebody poses a threat to the life of a public figure, the threat to life of a politician, that's a completely different case, which means the standards of evidence are much higher for them to arrest that person. So unless you create a secret police force, then your actual public police force is never going to take action. So all these people who are afraid of this exact situation that you're outlining, they need the creation of a secret police force, the creation of a secret court that operates outside the judicial system.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's just say that somebody goes to the NSA and says, hey, can you give us a readout on all the people who are tweeting terrible things about the president? Okay, cool. Here's your hundred million people, whatever it is, right? Here's all the people saying negative things about the government. So now they have a list. What do they do next? Well, let's just make it simple. They stay with NSA and they say, surveill them even more, tap their phones, tap their computers. I want to know even more. So then they get this preponderance of evidence. What do you do with evidence? You take it to a court. Well, guess what? No court is going to support. Anything that goes against”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About so let's just walk through that exact example, right? Because this is a preponderance. It's a preponderous fear. It's a ridiculous fear because you would have to tap on multiple elements of government for anything to happen. So for example,”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worked, we were safer. Now that we don't have that information and now that there's this giant looming question of whether or not NSA is there to serve people or is collecting mass surveillance against all American people, that's not really a true accurate representation of what they were ever doing. They were looking for the needle in a haystack of the series of transactions in metadata that was going to lead to American deaths. We are now less secure because they can't do that. And that bothers me.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that the court, the justice system, the civilian justice system went back and essentially overruled the ruling of the intelligence courts before them just goes to show how the general mass community really shouldn't have a say in what happens in the intelligence community. They really shouldn't. You have politicians and you have the opportunity to elect people to a position and then you trust them. That's what a representative republic is. You vote the people in, you trust them to work on your behalf. They make decisions without running them by you. They make decisions that they believe are in the best interest of their constituency. And that's how our form of democracy works.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't man, NSA can clone my phone. I will give them my children's phone. I will give them the passwords to every one of my accounts. If it means that there's a likelihood that my family will be safer from a nefarious actor whose intent on hurting us. NSA doesn't care about your affair. NSA doesn't care if you're cheating on your taxes. NSA doesn't care if you talk shit about your boss or if you hate the US president. Nobody cares about that. Your intelligence community is there to find threats to national security. That's what they're there to do. What Snowden did when he outed that whole program.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have no privacy. The cell phone that you carry in your pocket, you're giving permission to those apps constantly. You're giving commercial organizations. You and I have already said are less tied to ethical responsibility. You're giving them permission to collect enormous amounts of private data from you all the time. And do you know what happens if AT&T or Verizon sees some nefarious activity on your account? They do nothing. They might send a note to FBI because they have to according to some checklist. But when NSA was collecting intelligence on metadata from around the United States, they were very specifically looking for terrorist threats that would harm American lives.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The truth is that the American experience after 911 is nothing like the American experience now. So all the terminology, all the talk about privacy and privacy laws and mass surveillance and all this other stuff, it was a completely different time then. And that's not to say it was an excuse because to this day I will still say mass collection, bulk collection of data. That allows for an expedient identification of a threat to national security benefits all of us. But people don't understand what they want, like people don't understand what the value of their own privacy is. First of all, the fact that people think they have personal privacy is laughable.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a topic that I never get tired of talking about, but it's very rare that anyone ever really agrees with me, just so you know.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source