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Much as the world benefit from a new dance craze, it would behoove us to ensure that China doesn’t use our moves against us. Our first guest Geoffrey Cain is all too familiar with what the CCP can do with surveillance technology. He sits down with Rob, James and Charles to touch on the protesters, the extraordinary police state they’re up against, and he tries to convince a skeptical Rob and James that TikTok is more than just really annoying.
Next we’ve got Andy McCarthy back on the show. He explains how the record has been straightened somewhat by the Oath Keepers’ verdicts that came down on Tuesday. They get into the charges brought and the reasons the DOJ whiffed on 3 out of 5. There’s also some talk on the crime wave and the prospects of a return to law and order in our cities.
Plus, the guys make fun of Charles for liking soccer!
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Mr. McCarthy seems to be under the impression that the Democrats “bungled” Trump’s second impeachment. I submit that the Democrats played the Senate Republicans like a fine violin. They, in no way, wanted or want Trump disqualified from the top of the Republican Totem pole.
it is the Republicans that blew it by not finding Trump guilty in the SECOND impeachment trial.
The R senators who voted to impeach Trump were fools.
meanwhile, nothing happened to the permanent bureaucracy who pushed Russia Collusion
There’s a possible guest out there to explain why we are in a post Constitutional Republic and instead we get someone to say the Constitution worked, it’s fine. No acknowledgement that the DoJ is corrupt and the FBI is a rogue agency. Please invite Mr. Ellmers to be on. He’d be a wonderful guest.
The thought had just crossed my mind that “Oh, Charles C.W. Cooke is there. This is probably not worth listening to.”
When Cooke comes out with: “Elise Stefanik is a Trump creation.”
Stefanik was elected to Congress in 2014.
Here’s another. He’s running for senate in Virginia.
https://emord.com/jonathan-w-emord-esq/
https://emord.com
@Jonathan_Emord
Where she was a backbencher with no constituency beyond her congressional district. She was a stalwart behind the scenes person without a national profile. She’s #3 in the Republican caucus primarily because of Liz Cheney’s political implosion and her support of Donald Trump.
That is, like a loyal Republican, Stefanik defended the Republican President of the United States — against what the vast majority of Republicans considered bogus charges.
As a result, Stefanik was blacklisted and canceled by Harvard, her alma mater. Which should make her even dearer to true conservatives.
Say, maybe she can be one of the two pro-Trump guests the Ricochet Podcast allows itself every year!
I remember at the time people saying it was an odd switch. Stefanik’s voting record was more moderate than Cheney’s. She did support the party, which is the main duty for that position.
On the TikTok discussion, I perked up when it was mentioned that the Biden Administration is proposing Oracle as the U.S. company that could purchase TikTok.
Geoffrey Cain rightfully pointed out Oracle’s ties to China. It’s been awhile, but I worked pretty close with their database software for awhile, and I even attended a couple of their conferences, Oracle World, which is (was?) really a big event in San Francisco.
It was in the 2000’s when I attended, and it included a Q&A with Larry Ellison who heads Oracle. There was always a group of Chinese who would ask him a question or two, and I looked at it as a way for Ellison to show a measured obeisance.
But when Cain said that Oracle was directly selling software to China’s state security system I thought that was particularly ironic.
Oracle’s very first customer was…
the CIA.
I disagree on the methods of impeachment that Andy was advocating. In my scenario, the House would have sat for articles of impeachment the next day, and sent them to the Senate. The charges would have been simple, and would not have required a long investigation.
It would have been dereliction of duty, which isn’t specifically spelled out in the Consitution, but could have been made to fit. It’s obvious that Trump was derelict, with his closest advisers and family begging him to do something as the riots got worse.
The Senate would probably not have convicted, falling short of a 2/3’s majority, but I bet that it would have garnered more Republican votes than the trial that was actualy held months later. But if they had made that 2/3’s majority, Trump would have been removed from office within days.
And conviction or not, Congress showing that kind of ability to move fast on something like this, would also have sent a message to future presidents.
The Chinese government is not interested in people like Rob. They are interested in young people, especially young people in the US Armed Forces. During the conflict in Afghanistan, the military found out that soldiers and airmen walking around Kandahar AFB were literally creating a base blueprint for the enemy. A security hole in the system allowed outside parties to track the users’ movements. Overlaying them one on top of the other created a visual representation of the base.
With that in mind the DOD has banned TikTok on government issued phones given to the brass. But they do not – and cannot – ban it from the privately owned phones of the enlisted.
Listened to this podcast, as I always do, on Saturday morning. I’m a big fan of it and of Rob Long in particular. So, what I say comes from a place of like. Let’s not get carried away and say “love”; Rob and I are both WASPs, and that would be awkward.
Rob mentioned tiktok and the ongoing controversy regarding its security implications. “So, what?” or words to that effect were mentioned. Since I’m a security professional, I thought I’d try to answer the question.
The basic problem of computer security arises from sharing of resources. Say that resource is your iPhone. Having the tiktok app running on your iPhone introduces the potential of leaking sensitive data from other apps into tiktok. What does “sensitive” mean? Location data could be transmitted back to tiktok hq, for example, thereby giving a profile of your movements. What else do you do on your iPhone that you would not want to share? Banking? Email?
I can hear a natural objection: I used subjunctive a lot in the previous paragraph. Surely the good folks at apple can guarantee that using the tiktok app on an iPhone isn’t a security Pandora’s box? (Excuse me while I finish giggling.)
It isn’t a matter of stupid dance videos. It’s sharing a platform with software designed by people that mean you harm.
Bill
Of course they can. Or they can at least ban possession of a phone on base if the app is installed.
I worked for a defense contractor in 2008. Phones with cameras had to be left in your car when you entered the building.
“So what?” has been Rob’s mantra from the beginning of this podcast, especially about media malfeasance.
It’s impractical to ban TikTok on a service member’s phone in the United States. But when they’re deployed to a combat zone or near combat zone (e.g. naval exercises), the military can and should regulate the use of personal cell phones, with severe penalties if caught breaking those regulations, with jail time a definite possibility.
Nothing happened to at least one Arizona lawyer, either.
That’s nothing. My benighted mother believes that Trump somehow falsified the Obama inauguration in 2009.
This seems to ignore the fact that Trump wasn’t responsible for security etc. in DC. That’s the responsibility of Congress, and especially of Nancy Pelosi who were negligent at best.
It’s hard for me to imagine Genghis Khan’s stances towards the homeless.
I can neither read nor listen to Andrew McCartney anymore. I think he struggles with realizing the DOJ he nobly worked for is so incredibly corrupt. He can’t accept that he wasted his career with such dishonest people.
Charles Cooke I find intersting, but incredibly naive. He doesn’t seem to understand how deeply evil and dirty the left is. He seems to think they follow the same rules he does, but have reached different conclusions.
To put it mildly, in both cases.
Why “impractical”?
It’s basically a Chinese espionage app. Very easy to issue orders against having Chinese espionage apps installed own your phone.
Yup. If you’re going to impeach Trump for “dereliction of duty”, you’ve got to do the same to Pelosi, who turned down requested security.
I could imagine the Democrat donor class supporting Liz Cheney through the Republican primaries. And then, in the extremely unlikely event that she became the Republican nominee, suddenly discovering her conservative record. This happened to John McCain, more or less.
Unless she pulls a Charlie Crist, and transitions from Republican conservative to liberal Democrat. If she did that, she would gratify my low opinion of her.
He would probably courtmartial his commanders for lack of alacrity and “failure to slaughter”.
Famously, the Secret Service refused to allow Trump to go address the rioters, due to concern over his safety (and their own).
Setting aside the tens of thousands of armed Federal officers in Washington, DC, even by itself the Capitol Police had at least twice as many armed officers as the total size of the unarmed crowd trying to “antifa” the Capitol.
Never use conspiracy to explain what can be accounted for by incompetence; but this is a level of incompetence that is hard to believe.
Not really. Overall security in D.C. is an executive branch function, though the Mayor of the District of Columbia has that responsibility by federal statute.
As for the Speaker of the House being resonsible for security within the capital complex, I think that that is shared with the Senate, so she’s not wholly responsible for it. I didn’t take a deep dive, but doing a quick check of the Captial Police’s oversight, it doesn’t look like the Speaker has any formal direct authority over it.
But that’s not the real point. All U.S. Presidents take an oath of office that includes the duty to protect and defend the constitution. Given that as Commander in Chief he has considerable flexibility on how he deploys troops, and further that the District of Columbia is a federal enclave and not a state, he clearly has the constitutional power to take direct action to protect Congress when exercising their own constitutional duties.
So implying he wasn’t responsible for protecting Congress when it’s under literal attack is simply wrong.
Direct responsibility for capital security rests with the Capital Police, and the Speaker doesn’t have direct authority over the Capital Police.
But that’s not the point. The J6 riots were so unprecedented, that turning down additional security doesn’t seem like all that big of a mistake, except in retrospect.
At worst, you can call Pelosi’s decision to be incompetence over a perceived threat, given the decision was made before the riots.
What makes Trump’s inaction an obvious dereliction is it was willful. He was watching the riots on television while aides and family members were begging him to do something. The riots were in progress. This is not about decisions made in how to deploy security before the event, but what actions should be taken after the riots have started. Given the president’s oath of office, I have a hard time imagining any of his predecessors sitting on his hands the way he did. They all would have seen a duty to act.
Trump should somehow have known that the armed Capitol Police, in spite of facing merely half their number of unarmed protesters, would be unable to handle the situation? It still boggles my mind that they couldn’t.
Moral: Don’t jump to conclusions after hearing only the prosecution.