Robert Scheer: Cyberwarfare Is ‘Where the Real Money Is’ (Part 1 of 3)
Posted on Jun 9, 2015
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| The Real News Network |
Just how and when did the military-industrial complex become the military-intelligence complex? And what’s the link between Amazon and the Pentagon?
Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer traces the complicated connections between Silicon Valley and Washington with Real News Network Senior Editor Paul Jay in this episode of TRNN’s show “Reality Asserts Itself.”
Scheer knows a thing or two on the subject, as it’s the focus of his latest book, “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.”
Also included in this first segment is a bit of backstory about Scheer’s own formative years, what compelled him to become a journalist and that his mother thought he went too easy on Richard Nixon. (Transcript follows the video below.)
—Posted by Kasia Anderson
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.
In the book by Robert Scheer They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy, Robert Scheer writes, the main price paid by turning the war on terror into a war on the public’s right to know—a bipartisan crusade—is that it destroys the foundation of democracy—an informed public. The George W. Bush administration initiated this dangerous trend, and Barack Obama has expanded on that horrid legacy by cracking down on the press and prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act more than all previous U.S. presidents combined. The result is that our privacy, and hence our freedom, has been plundered with abandon. Our most private moments are now captured in exquisite detail by a newly emboldened surveillance state, resulting in a shutdown of democracy. But the game’s not over yet.
That was written by Robert Scheer. Robert is a veteran U.S. journalist, currently the editor-in-chief of the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. He’s also a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, cohost of Left, Right & Center, a weekly, syndicated radio show broadcast from NPR’s West Coast affiliate KCRW. In the 1960s, he was the Vietnam correspondent and editor of the Ramparts magazine. He also ran for office as an antiwar candidate in congressional races. For decades, Bob was the national correspondent, and then columnist, for the Los Angeles Times. He’s the author of nine books, including the one I mentioned, as well as The Great American Stickup and The Pornography of Power.
And Robert now joins us in the studio.
Thanks for joining us.
PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: How are you doing, Paul?
JAY: So, for those of you that watch Reality Asserts Itself, before we kind of get into what our guest thinks, we usually talk about why our guest thinks what they think—in other words, what helped form the way they look at the world. And this segment, and also a little more of this series with Bob, is going to be quite biographical, ‘cause he’s lived somewhat of a legendary life. He’s one of the most important figures that came out of the left and out of progressive journalism.
And we’re kind of honored to have you here today. Thank you.
SCHEER: Yeah.
JAY: That being said, I will try to give you a hard time at times if I can.
SCHEER: Well, you know, the question you just posed, what forms your interest, it’s interesting. My motto as a journalist—and I take the journalism seriously. So when I’m in your seat and I’m interviewing—you know, I’ve interviewed Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev, lots of people all over the world. And were I beginning this interview, I would psyche myself up to assume that you know things I don’t know and, as you tell kids, have your listening years on and prepare to be surprised, prepare to learn something. And rather than follow some script, I’d want to know, you know, okay, what’s going on here? What do you really think? What can I learn? And maybe I’m full of it. Maybe I’ve been wrong.
JAY: Right.
SCHEER: And it’s a hard thing to work yourself in. You know, I traveled with Jerry Falwell, you know, on the religious right, and there wouldn’t be any point to spending the weeks I did to do a profile of Falwell when he was head of the Moral Majority and everything if I couldn’t get myself psyched up to think he may be right and I may be wrong. And so that’s always been a challenge.
At the same time, going to your question, I follow a motto of the great beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for whom I worked for for three years at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco when I lost my fellowship money at UC Berkeley ‘cause I dared to publish—[at perish (?)] publishing I dared to publish a book about U.S.-Cuban relations that my department didn’t like. So I lost my money, and I went to work and sold books for a buck and a quarter an hour for three years and did a lot of reading, got a lot of my real education. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
JAY: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Now, you do understand that in this interview, you have already started interviewing yourself, ‘cause I haven’t asked the first question yet.
SCHEER: You did. You asked, what drove you, how—.
JAY: Yeah, no, I didn’t get to ask it to you.
SCHEER: Oh. Oh.
JAY: I told the audience that’s what we were going to do.
SCHEER: Okay. Well, put that question to me and I’ll answer it.
JAY: Alright. Well, let’s start from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your parents, but particularly about the politics of the household you grew up in.
SCHEER: Well, there’s two formative experiences I had growing up that have very much influenced, if not dominated, my journalism. I have never escaped it.
One is I was born by an accident. My mother had had three abortions before me. She was an unmarried, single woman who had been very active politically in czarist Russia, and then, when the revolution happened in Russia, she was in a group called the Jewish Socialist Bund. And then Lenin and the Bolsheviks moved against her group. And so, in 1921, my mother fled Russia and came to the United States.
Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer traces the complicated connections between Silicon Valley and Washington with Real News Network Senior Editor Paul Jay in this episode of TRNN’s show “Reality Asserts Itself.”
Scheer knows a thing or two on the subject, as it’s the focus of his latest book, “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.”
Also included in this first segment is a bit of backstory about Scheer’s own formative years, what compelled him to become a journalist and that his mother thought he went too easy on Richard Nixon. (Transcript follows the video below.)
—Posted by Kasia Anderson
In the book by Robert Scheer They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy, Robert Scheer writes, the main price paid by turning the war on terror into a war on the public’s right to know—a bipartisan crusade—is that it destroys the foundation of democracy—an informed public. The George W. Bush administration initiated this dangerous trend, and Barack Obama has expanded on that horrid legacy by cracking down on the press and prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act more than all previous U.S. presidents combined. The result is that our privacy, and hence our freedom, has been plundered with abandon. Our most private moments are now captured in exquisite detail by a newly emboldened surveillance state, resulting in a shutdown of democracy. But the game’s not over yet.
That was written by Robert Scheer. Robert is a veteran U.S. journalist, currently the editor-in-chief of the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. He’s also a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, cohost of Left, Right & Center, a weekly, syndicated radio show broadcast from NPR’s West Coast affiliate KCRW. In the 1960s, he was the Vietnam correspondent and editor of the Ramparts magazine. He also ran for office as an antiwar candidate in congressional races. For decades, Bob was the national correspondent, and then columnist, for the Los Angeles Times. He’s the author of nine books, including the one I mentioned, as well as The Great American Stickup and The Pornography of Power.
And Robert now joins us in the studio.
Thanks for joining us.
PROF. ROBERT SCHEER, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: How are you doing, Paul?
JAY: So, for those of you that watch Reality Asserts Itself, before we kind of get into what our guest thinks, we usually talk about why our guest thinks what they think—in other words, what helped form the way they look at the world. And this segment, and also a little more of this series with Bob, is going to be quite biographical, ‘cause he’s lived somewhat of a legendary life. He’s one of the most important figures that came out of the left and out of progressive journalism.
And we’re kind of honored to have you here today. Thank you.
SCHEER: Yeah.
JAY: That being said, I will try to give you a hard time at times if I can.
SCHEER: Well, you know, the question you just posed, what forms your interest, it’s interesting. My motto as a journalist—and I take the journalism seriously. So when I’m in your seat and I’m interviewing—you know, I’ve interviewed Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev, lots of people all over the world. And were I beginning this interview, I would psyche myself up to assume that you know things I don’t know and, as you tell kids, have your listening years on and prepare to be surprised, prepare to learn something. And rather than follow some script, I’d want to know, you know, okay, what’s going on here? What do you really think? What can I learn? And maybe I’m full of it. Maybe I’ve been wrong.
JAY: Right.
SCHEER: And it’s a hard thing to work yourself in. You know, I traveled with Jerry Falwell, you know, on the religious right, and there wouldn’t be any point to spending the weeks I did to do a profile of Falwell when he was head of the Moral Majority and everything if I couldn’t get myself psyched up to think he may be right and I may be wrong. And so that’s always been a challenge.
At the same time, going to your question, I follow a motto of the great beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for whom I worked for for three years at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco when I lost my fellowship money at UC Berkeley ‘cause I dared to publish—[at perish (?)] publishing I dared to publish a book about U.S.-Cuban relations that my department didn’t like. So I lost my money, and I went to work and sold books for a buck and a quarter an hour for three years and did a lot of reading, got a lot of my real education. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
JAY: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Now, you do understand that in this interview, you have already started interviewing yourself, ‘cause I haven’t asked the first question yet.
SCHEER: You did. You asked, what drove you, how—.
JAY: Yeah, no, I didn’t get to ask it to you.
SCHEER: Oh. Oh.
JAY: I told the audience that’s what we were going to do.
SCHEER: Okay. Well, put that question to me and I’ll answer it.
JAY: Alright. Well, let’s start from the beginning. Tell us a little bit about your parents, but particularly about the politics of the household you grew up in.
SCHEER: Well, there’s two formative experiences I had growing up that have very much influenced, if not dominated, my journalism. I have never escaped it.
One is I was born by an accident. My mother had had three abortions before me. She was an unmarried, single woman who had been very active politically in czarist Russia, and then, when the revolution happened in Russia, she was in a group called the Jewish Socialist Bund. And then Lenin and the Bolsheviks moved against her group. And so, in 1921, my mother fled Russia and came to the United States.
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