Out of the periphery of most online users, there’s a vast, hidden space used by people who want to remain anonymous, which filmmaker Alex Winter explores in his documentary Deep Web. The film focuses on the Silk Road, a black market hosted on the Darknet using bitcoin cryptocurrency, and the trial of Ross Ulbricht, who was given a double life sentence without the possibility of parole for creating and hosting the site.

Abby Martin and Alex Winter discuss more about the Deep Web, the Drug War, and why encryption on things like signal still matter in light of the Wikileaks’ Vault 7 release.

Privacy, Control & the Darknet

Do you think you know how the internet really works? Do you have an understanding of how to keep yourself safe in the age of mass surveillance and data mining?

The internet that most users are aware of is vast and seemingly limitless. But beyond this everyday space is an expansive dark space never seen by the ordinary world and utilized by users who wish to remain anonymous for a host of reasons. This mysterious space is not indexed by search engines and only seen by internet users who have the tools and knowledge to access it.

This often misunderstood space is referred to the Deep Web, Dark Web, and Darknet though these names have different meanings and are often misused. Think of the World Wide Web as the tip of the internet iceberg. Below that is the Deep Web–  the vast space hidden beneath the surface that is largely meaningless to most people. Within the Deep Web is where private networks not accessible to search engines and users without permission are located and where things such as banking data and administrative code are found. Conversely, the Darknet is much smaller– it is an encrypted network requiring specific tools to access it. This is where the Tor network is and thus where the Silk Road was found.

Not everything happening on the Darknet is illegal. Tor allows users to browse the internet anonymously as well as access hidden places that are unique to the Darknet. While it’s true that the Silk Road was accessed via the Tor browser, not all of the content in the Darknet is illegal and not every Tor user has criminal intent. Within the Darknet is where many political dissidents, journalists and others who value their anonymity can be found.

In fact, Tor was funded by the U.S. government and created for the U.S. Navy as a means for the intelligence community to have a specific place for encrypted communication. In order for that encrypted communication network to be practical, the network needed additional users and more traffic, so it was introduced to the public. Only a small percentage of the activities taking places on the Darknet are actually nefarious.

Filmmaker Alex Winter’s documentary, Deep Web, explores the history of the Silk Road. Ross Ulbricht created the Silk Road, garnering the name from the ancient trade route across Asia. Eventually Ulbricht was given a double life sentence without the possibility of parole for his involvement in the Silk Road, the anonymous community that facilitated the sale of numerous illegal items and services, namely illicit drugs. Winter’s previous documentaries also focus on government persecution of web pioneers.

In Deep Web, Winter highlights what the Silk Road was– including the unique and unusual anonymous community that it fostered and the obvious bias against the activities taking place on, as well as the users of, the Darknet. Despite having been created by the U.S. government, the empire pushes a negative narrative of the space, perceiving the existence of a drug community in direct opposition to their Drug War and the use of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, as direct threats.

In this illuminating interview, Abby Martin and Winter also discuss the need to remain safe in the digital age by keep data and communications private in an ever increasingly surveilled world. As Winter explains, anyone saying that privacy is not necessary and that encryption is only for criminals is doing a major disservice. Winter adds that privacy is a must in the digital space just like it is needed in the physical space.

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Abby Martin: It’s hard to imagine life without the internet. But for a technology so pervasive in our lives, we know surprisingly little about how it works, or more importantly how to protect ourselves in the digital space, in the age of mass surveillance and data mining. Out of the periphery or most online users, there’s a vast hidden space in the ether used by hacktivists, drug dealers and anyone else who wants to remain anonymous. It’s called the Dark Web, a sub-sect of which filmmaker Alex Winter explores in his new documentary, Deep Web.The film focuses on the philosophy and trial of the Silk Road, a black market using bitcoin crypto-currency hosted on the Dark Net. Adopted from the famous drug route across Asia, the Silk Road was created by young computer prodigy Ross Ulbricht, who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts. Ross started the Darknet project with the intention to radically confront the power establishment by circumventing the drug war, but ended up being made a public example of. Given a double life sentence without the possibility of parole.With such an unprecedented punishment, obviously there was more to the story. Alex Winter, also an actor and privacy advocate attended Ross Ulbricht’s trial. Winter’s a longtime internet activist who has documented government persecution of web pioneers in multiple films included Downloaded about Napster, Relatively Free about Barrett Brown and now Deep Web, exploring the many precedents set by the Silk Road case.I sat down with Alex Winter to discuss more about the Deep Web, the Silk Road and why encryption on things like signal still matter in light of the Wikileaks vault seven release. So your film Deep Web obviously covers so much ground in telling the story of Silk Road. It was also narrated by Keanu Reeves, which was really cool. Your counterpart in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Alex Winter: Yeah.

AM: Let’s start with the basics, because this is a really hard topic for someone to delve into who doesn’t know anything about the Deep Web. What is the Deep Web? What’s on it? How big is it?

AW: Okay, that’s a really good question, because there’s a lot of misinformation around it like there is around anything involving cryptography and people who want privacy and anonymity in the digital space. So the Deep Web only refers to essentially technical gack. It’s just what’s under the hood of the internet. It’s un-indexed content. So it’s stuff that people aren’t interested in indexing, which mostly means banking data, the flotsam that flies around the internet that needs to exist there, but does not need to be indexed for any reason, code, that type of thing. And that’s gigantic. It’s just noise.What happened was, there was an area called the Darknet. The Deep Web is very, very big, right? There’s an area called the Darknet that’s very, very small. And that’s where people actually commune. And so what cryptographers did over the years, is they drilled their way into this little space and they created tools like a browser called Tor, which has its own hidden service within the Darknet. And you can use Tor, that’s where the Silk Road black market showed up. And you can use it to communicate with other people. And it has an onion suffix instead of a .com suffix. And that’s essentially hidden away from public viewing.That was initially created, even Tor itself was funded initially by the US government, the navy. But it was initially created mostly for intelligence communication that they wanted to be encrypted. But the way encryption works, if you’re the only one on the wire, then everyone knows you’re on the wire. Right? So the intelligence community didn’t want to be the only ones in the Darknet, the only people talking. If two guys with a styrofoam cup and a string, and there’s no one else there, they’re like, “Oh, that’s where the two guys from the NSA are, because there’s no one else there.”They let that technology go out into the public. They wanted to populate that space, because then they can live amongst the noise. So it’s the simplest way I can put it. It’s a little complicated. But Deep Web is big and vast and meaningless for the average person. Darknet is teeny weeny and has things going on in it like intelligence people, people who just want to have privacy online. And people selling drugs and contraband and things like the Silk Road.

AM: Dissidents, journalists use it for these reasons too, so it’s not this nefarious criminal enterprise.

AW: Oh, not at all.

AM: A lot of good things happening-

AW: Not only is it not just nefarious, but it’s like looking at Manhattan and saying that Manhattan is a haven for drugs because there’s an alleyway where someone’s selling drugs. The large percentile of what’s going on on the Darknet isn’t crime related. It’s journalism, intelligence community communications. It doesn’t get publicized, because those people want privacy. So there was a very loud, and still to some degree is, noisy bias against the Darknet saying, “Oh, it’s all bad. It’s all drugs. It’s all guns.” But it ignores the fact that the people that are not doing those things don’t want to advertise. So they’re not making noise about being there.

AM: What was different about Silk Road when it first came into fruition, because it certainly wasn’t the first online marketplace for drugs and et cetera.

AW: No. I mean the internet has been driven by porn and drugs since there was an internet. And so there were drugs online at the very beginning of the internet, pre-web. The Silk Road was watershed. This was why I wanted to make a movie about it, because as far as the public or the DOJ or the government waking up to it was concerned, it was watershed because when it was created, it was combining Tor, which was this way to get into Tor hidden services with bitcoin, which was viewed as anonymous form of currency. By combining those two things, it attracted an enormous user base. So people started using it like crazy. And that’s why it scaled in a technical terms. That’s why it caught the eye of the DEA and places like that. And it also started to get press.I think Adrian Chen in Gawker did a big article on it. It grew because it got press. And people started saying, “Oh, there’s this crazy community where people are exchanging drugs and all kinds of stuff.” So that made the government take notice. There are many reasons why the government took notice that are not obvious, which is what I wanted to get into in my film. And there are also many things about the Silk Road that are not obvious, which is what I wanted to get into in the film. So, to the public, the Silk Road was watershed, because, oh my god. You could buy heroin online, which you always could, but now it’s much easier, click of a button, whatever. To me what was watershed about the Silk Road was it was the first time in history that you had a large scale anonymous online community. And that matters. And that changed a lot permanently.I had made a movie before Deep Web called downloaded about Napster. And my perspective on Napster was similar, which was that Napster was the first time in history that you had the first large scale online community period. It was the first time that you had 50-100 million simultaneous users moving through one central database, which again, it changed the world.So I was very interested in the Silk Road when I learned about it, because when I got on the Silk Road before it got shut down. I didn’t care about drugs. I was there seeing that there were tens of thousands of people with anonymous user names in an anonymous community communicating about politics, philosophy, literature, drugs, whatever. There had never been anything really quite like that before and an anonymous environment. And that was, to me very striking.

AM: Your movie really, really does depict that other side of it that you obviously don’t hear in the press. It’s painted as this crazy, criminal conspiracy with Ross was a murderous scumbag who deserves to be locked away for life. But really your movie paints it as this beautiful organic thing that, especially in today’s day and age, good god. I mean nothing’s anonymous. So I could see the attraction of course. I wanted to talk more about these founding principles that Dread Pirate Roberts had and the site had, because I really do think that is the underpinning threat to the empire.

AW: Yeah, it’s threatening on a number of levels. The thing for me is that I first got interested in the internet in the late ’80s. And I got interested because A, I knew my way around technology. And I found this community there. And the community was very fascinating. It was what was called the BBS era, so you had all these different, all newsgroups. And you had what was called the alt section, which was like alt rec book, alt rec philosophy, alt rec art, alt rec drugs, alt rec sex. Everything you could possibly imagine, everyone was using anonymous user names and communicating and sharing data and media and all kinds of stuff. It was an amazing community. It was small. It was tens of thousands of people, but it was not millions of people.And I found that really striking then. And it seemed like the beginning of something. There was a movement. For me, Napster was this huge boulder in the water, because now it was like, “Okay, now this is the democratization of culture. And what I noticed about Napster, which is why I sought out Shawn Fanning and wanted to make a movie about him then, which I did. I actually sought him out in 2000. The pushback against Napster was mythologized and I could tell that then, because I was a Napster user. So every time someone went on TV and said, Napster bad, you’re just pirates. Whatever. And I was thinking, “Well, I’m not a pirate. And most people that I know on Napster aren’t pirates. That doesn’t mean there aren’t pirates there.” Right? But the majority of the people I knew in the community were not there to pirate.I started scratching my head going, “What is this pushback about?” And then you started investigating the RIA, the Record Industry Association and their relationships in DC and the threat. And it’s a funny thing, because like you said about the Silk Road. Yes, you have drugs, and you have bitcoin. You have all this stuff. And libertarians and anarchists and they’re openly talking about dismantling the system. That’s an obvious threat, but Napster was a huge threat to the power structure. And you weren’t getting that kind of blatant discourse. But they were terrified of it. And they were going to exterminate these guys to the fullest extent that they could and brand them in the public as evil, pirate people, an image I think they still have not really been able to shake.When I saw the Silk Road, I realized it was the same thing, that whatever Ross’ motives were, and this is not to exonerate him. But whatever his motives were, clearly in his political views, in his own personal history, he was looking to create a massive safe haven online anonymous community where all of these ideas could be discussed. Whether people’s motives got corrupted, whatever, the reality of it is is the Silk Road was, at it’s heart a community mostly of pretty radical political thinkers and not of one stripe. Ross has libertarian leanings. Other people had hard core anarchist leanings. It was a genuinely democratized community. And it was an amazing place to wade around in. The conversations, these were really bright people.

AM: Yeah.

Alex Winter: And then you just had people there that would just buy weed or whatever. I mean that existed too obviously.

AM: No, I mean it’s incredible because like the documentary mentions, even though you had all these people, different radical political bents, everyone galvanized around the idea that the drug war is horribly detrimental to the society and that drugs should be obviously decriminalized at the very least.

AW: In the Silk Road case, the Silk Road was immediately built up as this much bigger thing, right? It immediately struck me that something was rotten in Denmark when it was like, billions of dollars in sales. Well that’s not true. This amount of users. That’s totally not true. I mean it had made an impact, but it was, in the scheme of things, a little weeny website and this very tiny section of the internet that nobody goes to and most people couldn’t figure out how to use even if they wanted to go there. And all the numbers were getting super inflated. But then you look at the drug war and you look at the existential existence of the DEA and the FBI and the amount of money, the prison system. And you’re dealing with a massive amount of power that is threatened by, not just the idea of what the Silk Road represents, which is the democratization, as you said, of people who want to talk against the drug war.But what’s worse, I think what was scarier for them, which is what happened with Napster, was they saw the future. Obviously, the internet is going to be where drugs were sold. Obviously, the drug war is all about criminalization and not about medical help and treatment. Obviously, these people’s budgets are funded on the basis of this continuing and they would lose their funding if it stopped continuing. So the threat level was on so many different levels. Then you get Ross, moved from San Francisco to the southern district of New York. And when that happened, we all knew he was screwed, because then you add on to that the financial regulation concerns around bitcoin, which is all centered around the southern district, that’s Wall Street. That’s their beat.So Ross just found himself jammed in the middle of surveillance operatives. He was breaking the cryptography rules and bitcoin, people were terrified on Wall Street about where bitcoin was going, especially in those days, they thought it was going to upend Wall Street, which is absurd. But they were going after him, you had the drug war people. They are going after him. And so it was just a perfect storm.

AM: The media floated around murder for hire theories that convicted Ross in the court of public opinion before the trial even happened. Yet, as Alex notes, he was never charged for them. Thoroughly demonized in the public, he was swiftly convicted of every crime committed by everyone on the site. The judge handed down a double life sentence without the possibility of parole. The FBI sting agents themselves were using the Silk Road to steal money during the operation. Shawn Bridges stole $800,000 in bitcoin, while informant Carl Forest siphoned $50,000. They also broke the law by hacking Ross’ computer without a warrant and using that evidence to arrest him.

AW: The idea that they just gave him that sentence because they were thinking of the children, which is how it was presented, the children, the children, is absurd. The Silk Road was a honey pot almost from the beginning. The feds were all up inside it. An enormous amount of the hard drugs that were being sold were being sold by federal law enforcement, both corrupt and straight up law enforcement. So a lot of the deaths that they were attributing to Ross were really directly attributable to different people of law enforcement agencies. So the hypocrisy was just staggering.And for me, what was cut and dried was very simple which was, and this is the way I looked at it for the film, even if Ross was guilty of every single thing they claimed he had done, including the murders for hire scam. None of those charges merit a double life sentence without the possibility of parole. They just don’t. So it was somewhat of what I watched happen with Napster. It was a successful spin job in the sense that enough stuff got waved around and the children and all of that stuff that they always pull out, that the general public sentiment was like, “Screw them.” Basically, just whatever. And to me, that was a very strong indication of the politics of the case, of what they had at stake, what they felt an example they needed to make of him, how threatened they are by cryptography and anonymity and privacy and bitcoin and whatever. The over severity of the sentence to me was a tipping of their hand.Honestly, when I went to the sentencing, even though I wouldn’t have agreed with it, had they given him 8-10 years based on drug kingpin charges, which is what the heaviest charge was, which was …Silk Road didn’t have drug kingpins. It was tiny. But it’s a little hard to argue with that given the potentiality of what the crimes were even though I may not have agreed with it.But the double life sentence was just a tipping of the hand. It was so absurd and so completely unfair, that it makes you have to ask why they felt the need to hang him in that way.

AM: And also circumvent the law several times doing so.

AW: Completely.

AM: Amazingly, like you said, there’s other Silk Roads resurrected. You can’t kill the idea. Aaron Swartz is another computer genius who posed a serious threat to corporate and government control. As a passionate activist for net freedom, Swartz believed that information should be free, especially when it’s paid for by the taxpayer. His so called crime was simply downloading academic journals out of reach to most people who don’t pay hundreds of dollars in fees to universities they fund with their taxes. The empire tried to crush him for it. He faced $1 million dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison, essentially a life sentence. Exasperated and depressed, Aaron took his own life. According to Swartz’s dad, Aaron was killed by the US government. Let’s move on to Aaron Swartz, because this is another prodigy who helped create open source technology. I wanted you to comment on that, because this is another person that the hammer came down so hard. Of course, we know what happened to him, the tragic suicide. Why was he such a threat? Why is open source technology such a threat?

AW: The words open source are terrifying to controlling interests whether it’s business or government. And there are some bad actors in those communities that will do anything to maintain control in a world where it’s very difficult to maintain control. There’s always this need to try to hang a label on something and then hammer it into the ground publicly. And Swartz, that’s what happened to him was he was not just an open source guy. He was one of the heads of a big activism organizations. He was a very charismatic leader. He was very well spoken. He was very articulate. He was very effective. He was a trifecta of threat. He was technologically adept. He was aggressively effective in his activism. And he was forward thinking in terms of politics and the machinery of, he was big into campaign fraud and voter/election fraud and the corruption. And what became the post-citizens united world.So he would have been on many lists for those reasons. Then eventually, you’re looking at these lists going, “Wow, he’s on this list, and he’s on this list.” So he’s like, this is a bad person. This is someone that is a threat to us. It would be helpful for us to, if not put him in jail for a little bit of time, at least scare the shit out of him by coming at him with an enormous charge of prison time. And that’s a very common DOJ tactic.

AM: The Wikileaks recent Vault 7 release. I’m sure that you have been following it closely. The CIA has its own NSA style apparatus, totally unaccountable to everyone that it can do direct hacking into peoples devices, turn on microphones and turn into listening devices. What do you think this means? And also what will it do to the cryptography movement?

Alex Winter: If you’re using signal for instance. If you’re not a CIA target or whatever government target, because it’s obviously not just the US. That intelligence community have not hacked your phone. And it takes a lot to be a target on that level. Bt if they’ve hacked your phone, the way encryption works, if they own your box, as they say, it doesn’t matter what technology you’re using, because they’re sucking down your data before you encrypt it. And they’re reading the stuff that you get after you encrypt it, because they’re sitting on your shoulder watching what you’re doing through your technology.That’s different than encryption. Encryption, if you’re not owned, which is a far greater of population of people who want to remain anonymous, journalists, dissidents, whoever, my kids for instance. I try to tell them to use this stuff. And you’re not owned, then that encryption is absolutely working and there is no evidence today that that has been broken. There is no evidence that suggests that they can read my signal communications or even some of my iMessage communications if they don’t own the box itself, either my phone or my laptop.However, that being said, Snowden warned about this years ago now. I think many of us who deal with encryption or who are dealing sometimes with sensitive material have always taken it at face value that if somebody really wanted to get our material, they could. It’s negligent to assume, whether US state, actors or other intelligence operatives from other countries. I think it’s naïve to assume that if you are really a hard target that they’re not going to be getting into your system somehow. And you look at like what happened to Podesta whether you’re a tinfoil hat wearer or not, there’s a basic phishing scam. Operational security is really hard. And there’s no easy fix for it. There’s no app that just suddenly makes you secure. It’s a mindset.

AM: Well, it’s a fascinating schism right now. And it’s kind of like, where do we go from here, because you have the government that created these technologies. Of course, they’ve gotten so out of control out of their hands. And they don’t understand them anymore, like you said. It’s basically like hackers are on the forefront and on the edge of the technology and one step ahead of the government, whether it be Snowden or Barrett Brown or Aaron Swartz. Where do you see it going from here especially in light of the Russia hacking hysteria? Because on one hand, you can have just a claim based on nothing and we don’t have to prove it because it’s all in the ether. On the other hand, it’s almost like the faith of the world is put into the hacking community to try to save us from ourselves.

Alex Winter: Thankfully, the large percentage of the hacking community functions from a basic, there’s a reason you drive down the highway and people aren’t just constantly shooting each other and smashing into each other and driving into the median. We have to take it at face value that the large part of people who are brilliant enough to be very, very good at hacking have some form of moral compass. And if they don’t, that they’re going to get outmatched by those that do. Cryptography keeps getting better. I think that the Snowden revelations were such an important and necessary thing for the public to start to wrap its head around, because it’s not, as you said earlier, it’s exactly right. If you don’t allow people to go dark, if you penetrate the citizens’ ability to protect themselves, you are making them vulnerable and yourself vulnerable to bad actors. You are weakening the security of the internet. So it was vitally important that the average person has some understanding that they’re being surveilled and that they need some form of privacy.There’s no doubt, we’re going to have to move into the world that includes the ability to go dark. That’s very scary to law enforcement. I understand why. If I’m in law enforcement, yes. I want to be able to open anyone’s door. And I don’t want anyone to have blinds on their windows, because they could be committing a crime. My job’s a lot easier if I can watch them do everything.Unfortunately, it falls on the average citizen to know a little bit more about how their technology works than they may want to. Or a little bit more about what this stuff means. I think that for me, it’s a philosophical mindset. I think that if your government or your corporation or your mom or your kid or whoever is telling you that privacy is unnecessary and encryption is for people who are criminals are doing you a disservice. I think it’s more, really a shift of mindset. I think it’s understanding that you must have privacy in the digital space just like you demand it in the physical space. And I would say moreso.I would say, we’re not all Emma Watson or people who literally have all their naked pictures hacked. It’s funny, but the reality of it is, is it’s just as easy to get your stuff as it is to get their stuff. And you don’t know whose hands that stuff’s going to end up in. You don’t know who’s going to end up with pictures of your kids. You don’t know what they’re going to do with those pictures of your kids. There are very bad people out there. Your banking information, your entire medical history. We just got this, I think most of us can agree, a fairly wonky political administration at the moment, right? A few years ago, people were like, “Well, why do I care about my government?” And now a lot of those people are going, “Oh, holy … I don’t want this administration coming after me because they have anti-Islamic tendencies or whatever crazy prejudices they have. Now suddenly, I’m a target.” It’s like all the people who voted for Trump now whose husbands and wives are being deported. We didn’t think we were the ones that were going to get … Right?

AM: Right. That’s the bad guys.

Alex Winter: Yeah. Exactly. The digital space is the same where you can suddenly, if your information is all freely there, you don’t know what someone is going to do with it. And what administration is going to do with it. So people, it’s a mindset, have to think a bit more prudently about how they protect themselves online.

FOLLOW // @AbbyMartin & @AlxWinter

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With all the discussion of the contentious 2016 election, the most shocking fact is often ignored: that millions of people had their votes stolen through malicious means. The Republican Party is currently working to purge millions more voters leading up to the 2018 election.

To explain this major attack on our supposed democratic process, Abby Martin interviews investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has done the most extensive work uncovering this massive disenfranchisement campaign.

 The Hidden Purging of Millions of Voters

In a jaw dropping article published in Rolling Stone in August of 2016, investigative journalist Greg Palast gave us fair warning about the massive voter purge set to take place during the 2016 presidential election. The system, dubbed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, often called Interstate Crosscheck or simply Crosscheck, promised to toss out the votes of any registered voter who places a vote in two different states.

With all the talk of voter fraud during the primary and general elections, a system to weed out potential fraudulent votes was a welcome idea to many. But the good news stopped there. Never mind that the claims of massive voter fraud were not based in any fact whatsoever, the entire Crosscheck program was a front- an integral part of a massive Republican-led campaign to disenfranchise millions of voters, robbing them, without their knowledge, of their constitutional right to vote.

Not only did Crosscheck strip registered and legal voters of their right to vote, but it did so in a way that tipped the scales in favor of the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald Trump. Crosscheck works by finding matches between registered voters in states participating in the program, disproportionately affecting voters based on their race. Eighty-five out of one hundred of the most common names are held by minorities and minority voters tend to cast their votes for democratic candidates. But Crosscheck does not simply look for 100% matches for names and other identifying information as one would expect- the program considers first and last name matches as the same voter even when middle names and social security numbers differ.

For an example of how Crosscheck influenced the 2016 election outcome, consider what took place in the state of Michigan during the general election. Donald Trump won Michigan by approximately 10,000 votes. Michigan’s Crosscheck list included half a million people with Palast estimating that 50-60,000 votes were deemed fraudulent, the majority of which were cast by people of color. It is easy to see how different an outcome there may have been had all of the votes cast been fairly counted.

Not only are votes discounted using Crosscheck in the United States, but there is a major campaign of voter suppression occurring across the country that undeniably targets voters of color, poor voters, and young voters alike. These attacks, and the reach of the Crosscheck program, are only increasing under Republican leadership with a full blown campaign underway working to purge millions more voters leading up to the 2018 election.

As Greg Palast explains in this eye opening and informative episode, American voters must join together to fight for fair elections and to fight against modern day Jim Crow tactics, all without the help of the Democratic Party.

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Abby Martin: In one of the most contentious presidential elections ever, a hidden fact is that millions of Americans lost their vote through various methods employed in a coordinated multi-million dollar operation. Stunning in a country that claims to be the greatest democracy on earth.We don’t hear about it. What we do hear about is, claims from Trump and Republicans that they system is rigged. Because, millions of people are voting illegally.

Donald Trump: It’s rigged like you’ve never seen before.

Stephen Miller: This issue, of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone working in New Hampshire politics…

Kellyanne Conway: Is there dead people registered? Are there illegal people registered?

Donald Trump: Dead, illegal, and two states, and some cases maybe, three states? But we’re going to stop it. We’re not going to back down.

Abby Martin: Not only are these hysterical claims provably false, but they are in fact used by the same people committing actual vote rigging. None the less, these myths are perpetrated by right-wing politicians and media to justify wide spread voter crackdowns.In the latest purge, nearly half a million people have been kicked off Indiana’s voter registration list. Just since the 2016 Presidential Election. That’s a whopping 10% of total voters in the entire state.Alongside an arsenal of voter suppression tactics, a program called Interstate Cross-check institutionalized vote theft nationwide. Investigative journalist, Greg Palast uncovered exactly how the cynical billionaire back scam works in his recent film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Where he travels the world exposing how the GOP is robbing millions of votes from minorities and poor people while the democratic party shrouds itself in silence.I caught up with Greg, to talk more about the 2016 Election and the myth of American Democracy. So, your film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, amazing film, that everyone needs to watch. It dealt with the interstate voter registration cross-check program. First talk about what exactly that is and it’s impact on the most recent election?

Greg Palast: Interstate cross-check, was Donald Trumps’ secret weapon. That handed him the election more than anything. It’s a way that you can eliminate voters of color. Just wipe them off the voter rolls, in my investigation for Rolling Stone, which is in the film, you’re watching me do it. Our experts estimate that 1.1 million people lost their votes in especially concentrated in those key swing states. Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, that’s where cross-check was operating. And that also, by the way, we talk about Trump, but let’s not forget that was also wiping out voters of color which meant that, that’s one of the reasons we have a republican congress. So that’s what interstate cross-check does. What interstate cross-check is, is go back to Donald Trumps’ line, “The election is rigged, there are millions of people voting many, many times. Millions of people voting twice.”That’s the second part of his statement that no one was picking up. And so, what that is, is his claim that there are people for example, a guy named James Brown in Atlanta is voting a second time in Detroit. That’s the accusation. Everyone says, “Oh, that’s nuts.” Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s nuts. The accusation was devastating because it was backed up by his political operatives, actually removing voters from the voter rolls on the accusation that they were voting twice. Over a million people.This is one of the grave hidden purges of 2016. And yet, they didn’t arrest. They didn’t arrest anyone for voting twice in the last election. Not one person was arrested for it, yet they’re removing people. And so here’s how it worked. And by the way, here’s how we knew it was going to be Trump.Because the guy who created interstate cross-check is a character named Chris Kobach. Who’s like this right-wing, Fox news darling who’s a secretary state of Kansas voting official, and he’s the guy who basically perfected and spread this system to hunt down these so called double voters and remove them from the voter rolls.He was backing Trump, so we knew that locks Trump for the nomination, and that locks Trump for the White House. And it doesn’t matter how you vote, because they’ve already eliminated the margin in those really close states.

AM: When did cross-track come into existence?

GP: Its been around for quite some time. Before this guy Kobach took it national, a couple of states were sharing voter rolls to see if people were voting twice. There was no big damage. Because they didn’t find anyone voting twice so there’s no one to remove. Had no effect.This guy Kobach comes in a changes the whole thing and was basically after the Supreme Court, took the guts out of the voting rights act back in 2013. As soon as that happened, cross-check spread like virus. To 30 republican states where the republicans controlled the office of secretary of state, or the chief voting official, and these guys were sharing voter rolls.Now just so you know, Donald Trump said that there were three million illegal voters. Now that’s an important number to remember. Now people think, oh he just pulled that out of his wig, out of his comb over. No. That number comes from Kobach, because the list of suspects is seven million people. Seven million names. They said that’s three and a half million people voting twice. They use the list, they tag people as voting twice, and they removed not the whole seven million but they removed about 1.1 million voters in the 2016 Election.That’s just … We put it in the Rolling Stone, I put it on Al Jazeera, I put it in The Guardian. It’s all over the world, but not in the United States.

AM: Talk really quickly about how the voting rights act was guided and how it made cross-check easier to implement?

GP: What happened was, I contacted all these voting officials. Every single one and said, “Give us these lists that you’ve got from this guy Chris Kobach, accusing people of voting twice.” So we were turned down. They said, “You know, if you vote twice, it’s a crime.” Yeah, you vote twice, you go to prison for five years. So who would do this thing? So who are these people? But they wouldn’t give us the list because it’s a criminal investigation. Well you see the hat, I’m an investigative reporter, right? Took us about six months, five months to begin getting some of these lists we weren’t supposed to have. So we have these confidential lists of the voters, we have two million of their names. And we start going through the list. And this is where the rubber meets the road. Who is on the list of voting twice? Guys like 288 guys named, James Brown in Georgia voted in another state in the same election.How do they know that? Because they found a guy named James Brown in atlanta, and believe it or not, they found a guy name James Brown in Detroit, and said, “Obviously, James Brown, this is the same voter, voting twice.” Now here’s the thing about the list, and you’ve got to take a look at these lists. Name after name after name, James Thomas Brown’s supposed to be the same guy as James Edward Brown. Christina Isabel Hernandez is supposed to be the same person as Christina Maria Hernandez. By the way, these aren’t made up examples. These are real, real, real. James Brown Jr, and James Brown Sr are supposed to be the same- father and son are supposed to be the same voter.Now here’s the trick, you’ve heard Maria Hernandez, you’ve heard James Brown, David Kim is another one. When you’re looking at common names you’re looking at black people, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.85 of the 100 most common names in America are held by minorities like Rodriguez, Chung, Nguyen, Hernandez, and how do they vote? It’s not the color of their skin, they vote democratic. So if you want to knock out democratic voters, you knock out voters of color. Here’s where the Supreme Court comes in. In most of these states, you cannot put in a new system of removing voters like cross-check unless you get it first approved by the justice department and make a claim that it is in no way prejudicial against voters of color. Of course, when you’re knocking out James Brown and Jose Garcia, it’s a game that’s pulling out voters of color. So they could never get away with this if the voting rights act were still in place. The voting rights act also gave the justice department all kinds of powers to stop this game before it happens. You don’t remove everyone, ’cause this adds to the racial bias, they send post cards to people.They don’t even say, “You’re accused of voting twice.” They just say, are you registered to vote in another place? If you don’t send back the card, and most people don’t- the poor people, who move a lot don’t get the cards etc. You lose your vote. So that happened in mass. In Michigan, I was there after the election, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,700 votes. The secretary of state of Michigan himself told me, he’s a republican, “We move aggressively against people on the cross-check list.” Half a million people on that list in Michigan, we estimate they removed 50-60,000 voters. Mostly voters of color. Several times, Donald Trump’s supposed margin. March down the list of states like Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio. Cross-check made the difference.

AM: According to your research, 1/4th the names in this cross-check list you obtained didn’t have a middle name match. And the cross-check instruction manual even notes that the social security numbers may or may not match? That is astounding.

GP: Well, yeah. They use this con, this guy Chris Kobach who’s working for the Trump Campaign and is also a state official. When he’s asked about the cross-check list, when a reporter asks something, sniffs something, he says, “Oh well we check their middle name, we check the last four digits of their social security number. We checked their birthdate. It sounds totally kosher, how could you miss? “Well, in the instructions itself it says to ignore the mismatches. Ignore the mismatches? So the trick is, they have the information if anyone asks them, well what- you have all this information, but they ignore the mismatches deliberately. And let me tell you something, this whole business requires millions and millions of dollars of government money to effectuate this.Yet we have systems, these huge database operations, in fact for example, one owned by the Koch Brothers called I360. One owned by Trumps cronies called Cambridge Analytica. Those operators can with 99.9% certainty name every single real double voter in America, but then they would get all three. They wouldn’t be able to get a million people off the voter rolls.

AM: And you know people like to pain Trump as this anti-establishment figure who’s standing up to the empire. Greg, talk about his ties with Chris Kobach and how- who else is behind this.

GP: As an investigator, I can tell you, the oldest rule is the important rule: Follow the money. But what we’ve been doing is hunting down the money behind this steal. Now who funds Chris Kobach? The money goes back to a four letter word, Koch. K-O-C-H. We follow the trail back, boom. It’s the Kochs. And so the Kochs are behind the money to Kobach. Now, taking apart the voting rights act, 1965. It’s a really complex expensive lawsuit. And that was brought by Shelby, Alabama. Where does Shelby get the money? It’s 10’s of millions of dollars to bring cases like this. Where does little Shelby get this money? The answer is, it was supplied again by the Heritage foundation which is Koch money that they put into it, and other billionaires. And also a character that is known by his nickname the Vulture. His given name is Paul Singer but he’s a multi-billionaire who’s vital, he became the number one donor to the republican party for some time.So the money to take these things- to go after civil rights law and voting rights law, the money to run cross-check, the money to sell it to the public, is coming from people like Paul “The Vulture” Singer, the two Koch brothers who I’ve been following for years. And these are the people behind it. These are the people behind it. The Mercer family, and other billionaires putting their money in these operations. This is not new stuff. This is old accusation against black people.In the film, the big Klu Klux Klan propaganda film, Birth of A Nation which is now 101 years old. 101 years ago, they made this film and they had white actors in black face sneaking a second ballot into a ballot box. So the accusation that black people like to vote twice, that’s an old Klu Klux Klan trope and Trump just shop lifted it for this election.

AM: Yeah, and these people are just patsies like, again Trump paints himself as this anti-establishment figure, really he’s just a complete patsy for the Mercers, the Koch brothers, Banon too. You look at Breitbart, and the funneling with the Government Accountability Institute, it’s all Mercer and Koch money funneled right into these people and they’re just using them.

GP: The big backer of Trump was a guy called JP, John Paulson as he’s known, the foreclosure king as he’s best known. And JP the foreclosure king joined with Paul Singer to take Delphi Auto Parts which is GM Auto Parts and move it to China and move it to Mexico. And yet, he’s the big backer, one of the big secret backers of Donald Trump, and yet Donald Trump stood at the gates of a closed Delphi plant which his donors had moved to China, and said, and his donors had moved also, one of the plants from Warren, Ohio to Mexico. He said, held a big rally and said, “See this, see this closed plant? I’m going to build that wall higher and bigger. Every time I look to this plant I just add a few more feet to that wall.”Now I don’t know what the wall has to do with moving the plant across the border but it was his boys who were funding his campaign. And by the way, it’s very important to understand this, Donald Trump just plays a billionaire on TV, he’s no billionaire. He’s hocked up to his keister. So he had to turn to these guys quietly.

AM: You know, this has always been kind of a talking point, the voter fraud, especially on Fox News. The voter ID laws have been pushed through and through. Alec and Koch brothers and that think tank. It seems like Trump was really the one to mainstream it, just act- you know, creating that false reality and that paradigm that people just fall behind and believe it.

GP: He took it out of the Fox News, foxhole, spread it nation wide, they’re coming to take your vote way. This is the idea: If someone votes twice, they’ve taken your vote away. And of course, never just anyone, it’s always a voter with dark skin. It’s an immigrant swimming the Rio Grande, voting illegally. Find me one, I know of only two convictions. And it’s very easy to find alien voters, they show up to vote, sign their name. One was a republican in Georgia from Austria. Not in Georgia, in Florida from Austria.So what’s happened is, they create this false hysteria. And here’s a new one. By the way, as we head towards 2018. Chris Kobach, met with Donald Trump in Trump Tower just days before the inauguration. He had a memo in his hand which you could see, he didn’t hide it when he was shaking hands with Trump before they went in, there’s pictures of him holding the memo he’s about to give Trump. Well, we could blow it up about 100 times and see what it was. And it said, one of the things it said on it was, “To change and amend the national voter registration act.” That’s the Motor Voter law, which is one of the main things that registered minorities in America, when you get a drivers’ license, you get a voter form attached.He would remove that, he wants people to prove, Kobach, and now Trump want people to prove that they’re citizens to vote. And I say, well why not? Prove you’re a citizen to vote. Excuse me? How do you prove your a citizen in America? This is not Red China, we don’t carry citizenship cards. Social security cards, drivers licenses, those are issued to aliens, including my team who aren’t American citizens but have green cards.So, social security number, drivers license mean nothing, you have to have a passport? Now excuse me, who has a passport? Or there’s your original birth certificate, good luck finding that. Or naturalization papers. So what happens is, Kobach, Trumps’ guy, took this thing on a test drive in Kansas saying, you’ve got to prove your a citizen. The only thing that happened was, 36,000 students were blocked from voting because they couldn’t get these papers, they didn’t have passports, they’re too young. They had no passports, they didn’t have birth certificates. 36,000 young people.Now a federal judge knocked that out. A federal judge said, “You have 36,000 people who couldn’t register, could you tell me one, Mr. Kobach, even just 1 out of 36,000 that’s an illegal alien voter?” He couldn’t name it. So the judge said, “This is all bogus.” Threw it out. Why? Because of the National Voter Registration Act which this violated. So he’ll eliminate the act, just like eliminating the voting rights act, eliminate the national voter registration act, he’s going to eliminate the civil rights act.

AM: Greg, your movie was devastating, because it’s not only the cross-check, it’s not only the voter ID laws, you go to some of these polling places, and the disenfranchisement is stunning. Miles long lines. Thousands of people waiting in the freezing cold for hours and hours. Talk about some of the other voter suppression methods that are going on too?

GP: In Ohio for example, which is as we know, the vital swing state, and this happened many places, they did this in Wisconsin too, where they said, “Early voting, you can only have one single voting station for an entire county.” And they tried this is Wisconsin as well, this was key to Trumps victories in Ohio, supposed victories in Ohio and in Wisconsin. What they did, was you wait in line, on Tuesday when most white people vote in Ohio, they had for example, in Montgomery county which is Daton, they had 178 polling stations.But yet, on election on the Sunday before, which was when black people tend to vote, they call it Souls to the Polls day, there’s one polling station. The result was, and you can see it in my film. I saw literally, I’m walking, walking, there’s a half mile long line, there was one polling station, are you ready? For 80,000 voters. One polling station for 80,000 voters. You’ll see this line of black people waiting to vote. Waiting, when I was in Daton, five hours to vote. And at the end of the process, and they did this in Wisconsin, this very election, at the end of waiting all this time, they’re not given ballots, they’re given absentee ballots.Now what’s the difference? You fill out a- in Ohio and Wisconsin, you fill out the ballot, you put it in an envelope, you have to fill out the envelope perfectly. If you don’t have a driver’s license and it says, driver’s license and you leave it blank, you lose your vote. You lose your vote because you left off your driver’s license which you don’t have. You have to write “No driver’s license.” You have to sign it in several places, properly, and your signature has to match exactly your registration’s signature. So if you no longer include your middle initial but you signed your registration form 40 years ago with a middle initial, you lose your vote.All these tricks, because officially, this is an ugly thing that we don’t talk about in the United States, people who mail in their ballots, absentee ballots, or mail-in ballots, 1.7 million of those ballots never ever get counted. This is the ugly type of what I called soft apartheid in voting in America. We use fancy terms like disenfranchisement. You know what, someone steals your car, you don’t say, “Someone’s disenfranchised my car!” No, they’ve stolen your car. They steal your vote. It’s a theft.

AM: We focus on obviously the presidential elections with this because obviously its the biggest most vast disenfranchisement of the votes, but local elections, every election this is happening.

GP: Really, what’s very, very important, is that most of this vote theft is actually aimed at the state, local and congressional elections. I’ll give you an example. One of my first big investigations of vote theft was back in 2000 when I discovered that Katherine Harris and Jed Bush, of Florida had removed 10’s of thousands of black men from the voter rolls.10’s of thousands of black men from the voter rolls, what was the reason? They were all felons, criminals who aren’t allowed to vote. And Florida is one of the only states that still removes people from the voter rolls if they have a felony conviction. Okay. The problem was, I investigated and not one, absolutely zero of the people on this list who lost their vote, none of them were illegal voters. None. But yet George Bush became president by 537 votes because of what Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris did.But here’s the trick, they didn’t do it to elect George Bush. It was originally created two years before this system of purging black folk off the voter rolls to elect Jeb Bush as governor.

AM: There’s so many backups in place to secure the republican vote, to secure that this happens which brings me to the most obvious question, of course Hillary, and during the run up to the election, every time Donald Trump would bring this up she would poo-poo it and say, “Oh you’re crazy, how dare you question this sanctimonious system that we have?”

GP: This is one of the big problems that I run into. I’ll get questions like, “Well, if the republicans are stealing votes, how come the democrats aren’t saying anything?” Well, one answer to that, by the way, is democrats steal votes too, lots of them. I saw some of the most ugly Jim Crow style tactics used against Bernie Sanders voters here in California in the Sunshine State. I mean it was raw, today as you and I speak, there’s still over a million ballots that were cast, that were never tallied, never counted.Over a million, today, overwhelmingly those were Bernie Sanders votes. The victims are always the same, the victims are always voters of color, poor people, students, basically progressive votes. And because the democratic party, if they let everyone vote and help everyone vote it would be a very different party. So the establishment democrats don’t want those votes. They’d rather lose them in the general election than have those votes in the primary.That’s just the ugly awful truth.

AM: I think its hard for people to believe that the Clinton dynasty would give up power because they would rather legitimize the system that bred them.

Greg: The Clinton’s are the system. Remember, whether we like it or not, Hillary Clinton did some pretty shady things, the last thing she wants to do is talk about illegality. And misuse of the electoral system, misuse of campaign finance.

AM: Here you are, doing this giant in depth investigation, this feature film, trying to get this story out and here everyone, is just hysterically fear mongering about another country, usurping our election.

Greg: Well, heres the problem, the Russians did not tell Hillary Clinton, “Do not make a single stop in Wisconsin.” She didn’t tell those long lines in Ohio. Did Russia remove the votes of students in Georgia because they didn’t have citizenship proof papers? It wasn’t the Russians.

AM: We cannot count on the Democrats to fix this, Greg, what do we do, how do we give back a voice to the voiceless here?

GP: We have to form the organizations and participate in the organizations that exist right now that’ll expose the con that America has the world’s most perfect elections. We don’t. We still have apartheid elections, we still have Jim Crow. The only difference now is that Jim Crow has gone from wearing white sheets to using spreadsheets. We can expose it, and then we can act on it. We gotta do those two things and not ask the Democratic party to do it for us.

FOLLOW // @AbbyMartin & @Greg_Palast

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

Oregon State University Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights hosted a panel discussion with independent journalists Rania Khalek, Abby Martin (The Empire Files), and Mnar Muhawesh (MintPress News) to discuss Syria, Palestine, and Yemen in a way the mainstream media refuses to cover.

Perspectives on Palestine, Syria, and Yemen – Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh, Rania Khalek

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@AbbyMartin | @MnarMuh | @RaniaKhalek

Robbie Martin and Abby Martin break down the new mainstream media push to oust Assad with military force in Syria, Trump’s reversal on his Syria position and the general acquiescence towards war-drums beating for North Korea. They also talk about how Youtube and other private internet platforms known for alternative media and free speech are starting to censor and demonetize large swaths of independent content creators with no recourse whatsoever.

This podcast is the product of many long hours of hard work and love. If you want to encourage our voice, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio on soundcloud or subscribe on itunes.

@AbbyMartin | @FluorescentGrey