Welcome to Cato Audio for July 2023. I'm Caleb Brown. In this month's offering, author Anthony Sanders describes so-called 89th Amendments and describes the importance of protecting unenumerated rights. Environmentalist Todd Myers discusses why the future of environmental stewardship lies in bottom-up technology. And I speak with Cato's Patrick Eddington about what's changed in unwarranted domestic surveillance 10 years since the Edward Snowden bombshell revelations.
What do libertarians have to say about what's termed family policy? Should we be all that concerned about declining birth rates and related demographic shifts? Cato's Alex Narasta and Vanessa Brown-Falder discussed family policy from a libertarian perspective at the Institute's Benefactor Summit held in May. So it's exciting, Vanessa. You know, it's been a little over a year since you rejoined us as Cato's Director of Opportunity and Family Policy Studies. It's been a real pleasure welcoming you back after your time on the Hill with the Joint Economic Committee.
What are you working on in your new role? Well, thank you. Well, I'm thrilled to be back, first of all. Obviously, opportunity and family policy, you mentioned both of those things. And those things, that is a broad umbrella of topics that fit underneath opportunity and family policy. As a few examples to make it a little more concrete, recently I've been working on homelessness, published a study on that. I worked with you on a study on Au Pair, the child care program, the Au Pair child care program, and reforms to that.
And I have also been working on a fertility and family policy paper, which should be published imminently. But issues like child care, paid leave, you know, flexible work, housing affordability, these are all things that fit underneath the opportunity and family policy umbrella. So the opportunity part, I mean, that makes perfect, complete sense from a libertarian perspective. Really no questions about that. It's obvious how it fits in. You know, reducing or eliminating rules and regulations that reduce opportunity is a no-brainer from our perspective.
The family portion, though, may sound a little odd, I think, maybe, to some people in the audience. It's not usually what libertarians write about or talk about. Why should libertarians care about family policy? Well, I think from a principled perspective, individuals should be able to form the families that they want to. From a practical perspective, libertarians have families, too. We care about our families. If you ask Americans broadly what gives them meaning, what gives them value in their life, they say family or spending time with family. So if we don't have a voice on these issues, then we're going to be missing and ignoring issues that we care about.
Americans across the country care about, too. I also think it's worth saying that the government is already involved in family policy, whether we like that or not. And it's trying to get more involved by creating programs like federal paid leave programs or subsidizing child care at a high level or universal pre-K or expanding existing spending or existing programs as well. So there are a variety of these bad ideas are coming out on both the left and the right, although many of the ones that I just mentioned are Democratic proposals. And we need to have a voice on these issues. So what convinced you of the need, though, for libertarians to be more involved in pushing back against?
these government family policies that exist? Well, it started on the Hill. I was on the Joint Economic Committee for a few years, and my experience there helped to crystallize my view that we need more libertarian voices in this space. I really enjoyed working with my colleagues on JEC. It was a real pleasure to work with Senator Lee as well, but there was this current of thought that was bubbling up while I was on the Hill on the right that the U.S. required more heavy-handed government involvement in some of the problems that, you know, that we face.
So I must admit, I'm one of these folks who when I hear people talk about how the end of the world is coming and some big disaster, I'm usually skeptical. It started when I was in school and people were telling us that the rainforest is going to go away. We're all going to suffocate. And that didn't seem to make any sense at the time. But I do. I do also must admit that declining fertility in the U.S. and globally is something that I do worry about a bit. I remember reading the work of Julian Simon about the benefits of humans, how great we are, how we're the ultimate resource to work by our own Marion Toopey on this, about how great people are. So fewer people in the future.
It does kind of worry me. What's the current state of fertility in the U.S.? And should I worry? Good question. I guess I'll start by saying that I also think that humans are good. People are good. That's a starting point. U.S. fertility is on the decline. It is declining in a way similar to other developed nations. In fact, the U.S. was an outlier for many years, sort of a positive outlier in that it had relatively stable fertility rates, but it is converging towards other industrialized countries' fertility rates now. And it is below replacement level fertility. And the reason why that worries people is that if you have sub-replacement level fertility and...
you either have continued decline or it's sustained at sub-replacement level, and it's not compensated by things like immigration, for instance, then you will have population aging and population decline over time. So that being said, I think it's worth keeping a few things in mind. One is that fertility doesn't always decline for nefarious, scary reasons. Sometimes it even declines for, dare I say, positive reasons, like greater freedom for women or increased opportunity for women, maybe less discrimination in the workforce. Lower child mortality allows parents to have fewer births and still have the same family size. Now, I think almost everyone would say that that is a good thing. And even things like reduced teen fertility or reduced teen pregnancy, which is something that I think that we'll circle back to maybe later on. One other caveat is just that fertility is very difficult to project.
In the past, demographers have gotten it wrong. So, you know, people look at fertility trends and they say, well, what happens if we just extend this trend out? And sometimes that looks very scary. But, you know, as one example of where folks have gotten it wrong in the 1930s, we had sub-replacement level fertility and no one was predicting the 1950s baby boom. In fact, quite the opposite. So that caught everybody by surprise.
Now, all that being said, I think, you know, if fertility continues to decline or it stabilizes at a low level, there are likely to be some economic and fiscal tradeoffs. From an economic growth and fiscal sustainability perspective, we can expect that the U.S. working age population will begin declining in the next decade. It has been stable. A declining workforce is not a good thing for workers or, you know, it's not a good thing because declining GDP is not good for workers. It's not great for businesses. And with fewer workers and fewer young people, you mentioned Julian Simon, you know, that can lead to less innovation, less productivity.
Another thing that people talk about a lot is federal programs and solvency gaps, and people are worried about how those might be exacerbated by fertility decline. Now, I think as libertarians, we've been worried about federal solvency gaps for a long time. So that's not really something that pushes me over the edge because I think it's something we need to deal with anyway. And I think you're going to talk probably a little bit more about that in a later panel. But all of those concerns, considering all those things that I just mentioned, I think we do have to be careful here to balance those concerns against our commitment to preserving individual decision-making and choice in a very sensitive area.
of people's lives. And also, I think that we have to admit that both having more children or having fewer children, both of these things are compatible with freedom. I hear all these different complex explanations for declines in fertility, and you mentioned a few of them. Some people blame culture as if that's a thing. Culture is everything, and it affects everything. I rarely hear the specifics about what they mean. Others blame simple economics. You mentioned women are now in the workforce to an incredible degree that our great-grandparents wouldn't have imagined, are productive workers and educated.
Could it just be that confronted with this choice of, you know, productive economic work outside of the home and then work raising children in the home, which is a lot of work, despite what Harrison said, quoting me, you know, many women are choosing just to have fewer kids and instead working more. Well, I think that is a good explanation for fertility decline in past periods. So if you look in the 1930s kind of onwards, well, fertility decline has been happening for a long time. So I think that that's also something we get really wrapped around the axle on the most recent decline where we've gone back to below some replacement level fertility. But it's been happening since, let's say, at least the early 1800s. In the 1930s, labor force participation for women and fertility were inversely correlated. And there's an argument that, you know, women did have fewer children because now they were able to be part of the labor force in a way that they hadn't in the past.
But that said, labor force participation has actually declined recently for women from its highs in the 90s. And average hours worked have been about stable over the last couple of decades. And gender norms and division of labor and these type of things have been pretty stable since the 80s. So I don't think that it's a good match for the current decline, which, you know, makes us wonder, well, what is it that actually is causing this current decline? And I think that there's a few things that we can say confidently.
One is that we know that the number of children that women prefer to have has been declining from one generation to the next. Now, that might sound like it's sidestepping the question a little bit, but I think it's important because it's not that women are having a harder time achieving their desired fertility than they were in previous generations, which is what some researchers have argued. It's that actually they want to have fewer children and they're having about as good of a time achieving that as they were in the past. Another cause of current decline, teenage fertility has fallen substantially, actually, since the 90s and explains a good portion of the current decline, most recent decline. Economist Gary Becker also suggested that...
the quantity-quality trade-off was an important cause of fertility decline. And this is basically the idea that parents, they both derive value from having an additional child, but also from investing in the existing children that they have. And for a variety of reasons, parents are deciding to do the latter, basically invest more in the children that they already have. That could be maybe because of societal expectations. Maybe it's because we're all living longer. And so human capital development is more important than it once was. But we have a lot of evidence of that. Now, what role does government play in this? There are attempts to subsidize.
children. There's also regulatory issues. What are those? Yeah, well, I think, you know, the government is involved in a variety of ways, as I mentioned at sort of the outset. On the one hand, government subsidizes children and families in various ways. One way is through K through 12 spending. That's, you know, upwards of $15,000 annually on average per child. The child tax credit is another example. On the other hand, the government also penalizes having children in various ways, makes it harder and more expensive.
As a few examples, daycare restrictions reduce the supply of daycares, and they push up the cost. We just had that situation in D.C. Yes. With that crazy rule. What is it? The daycare worker had to have a college degree?
A bachelor's degree or an associate's degree, depending. But yes, a college degree. Yes, that's correct. Yeah, so there's some kind of extreme examples of daycare restrictions now that have been adopted recently. Of course, zoning regulations push up the cost of housing, which is a big part of a family's budget. And that's sort of the problem with government policies in general is that often they counteract one another. They waste a lot of money and everybody's time in the meantime. So it's hard to say really whether the government is pro-child or pro-family or not. So I think it's fair looking at the policy landscape. We've got liberals and conservatives.
who have different notions of family policy, but they all seem to involve spending a lot of taxpayer money on different things. What is a libertarian approach then to family policy? Well, I'm hoping that the audience is starting to get an impression of what that looks like. I think it requires neutrality regarding diverse preferences for how to raise children, how parents should work, how to care for and educate children, and a respect for diverse types of families. And it requires protecting people's personal individual freedoms as well. I think there are a lot of common sense libertarian policy reforms that can be made in order to make family life more affordable, easier, less stressful, more enjoyable.
So what are some of these specific ways, though, some of these specific deregulations? You mentioned a handful of them. Are these mostly state, local, federal? Where do they mostly fall? So we have actually a paper coming out on this. Chelsea Follett and I have written a paper on fertility and family policy. And there are many reforms in that paper. So you'll have to stay tuned and take a look at it for all the details. I probably won't have time to mention all of them today. But we do look at labor policy, tax policy. We look at housing policy, child care reforms, even immigration policy, and how those could improve families' lives. As one example of a specific way that we could make having children easier and less stressful for parents, there have been a variety of reasonable independence laws passed just recently.
in states around the country. And these basically, they allow children to walk home from school alone, play in their front yard alone, especially in light of the fact that families or parents are spending, investing so much time into their children these days, and that that may be limiting fertility for families. I think we want to be careful that it's not the government limiting fertility for families by requiring, you know, kind of helicopter parenting when it's not necessary, really. And in fact, when children would be better served by more independents. So sometimes we at Cato, we work with conservatives to achieve certain policy goals. Sometimes we work with liberals and progressives and Democrats to achieve these goals. How do you see this coalitional work shaking up when it comes to fertility? Who are you going to work more with, you think?
Well, I've always been of the philosophy that we should proactively look for opportunities to work with both sides. And I think that there are ways to message on these issues that appeal to both sides. We're seeing a lot of genuine interest in zoning reform right now, which I think has probably been mentioned. States around the country and cities as well have taken matters into their own hands, as they should, because they're really the cause of the housing affordability issues to begin with. And they've been looking over their zoning codes and deregulating in various ways to increase density. So places that are really blue, like California or Washington, Oregon, Seattle, Minneapolis, have been implementing these types of reforms.
On the other hand, going back to reasonable independence laws, you know, there was a reasonable independence law passed in Utah to begin with, but Colorado recently passed one last year. And Virginia actually just very recently, I think in the past month, passed a reasonable independence law that was supported both by Republicans and by Democrats as well. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity to, you know, make progress and find allies on both sides. Baby Ninth Amendment's How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters tells the unheralded story of how Americans carefully sought to protect liberty from overweening government by including in most state constitutions specific provisions, so-called Baby Ninths, that expressly protect unenumerated rights. Author Anthony Sanders explains why it's impossible to itemize every right a constitution should protect and shows that however many rights are specifically enumerated, other important rights will inevitably go unmentioned. So what is a constitutional drafter to do? He spoke at the Cato Institute in May.
My experience is that people who don't like the idea of unenumerated rights, or at least they don't like the idea of judges protecting rights that are not specifically listed in the Constitution, often have a tendency to sort of kind of poo-poo those rights or minimize them or suggest, well, you know, it's just really economic rights. And I want to meet that head on and say that, you know, this is not hypothetical. I want to make sure people understand that. So, for example. In the early part of the 20th century, we began a horrible national obsession with eugenic sterilization. And at one time, two thirds, I believe, or more than half, at least, of all states had laws requiring eugenic sterilization. That was a case that went to the US Supreme Court, the infamous Buckley Bell case. Do you have an unenumerated right not to have your reproductive organs torn out by state-sanctioned eugenicists? Pretty important question, I would say. In more modern times, of course, the question has arisen whether you have a constitutional right, an unenumerated constitutional right, to...
access potentially life-saving drugs there was a case um called abigail alliance in the dc circuit was a group of people that were terminally ill with cancer they had exhausted all possible therapies and medications but their doctors said you know what there's an unapproved drug that's going through fda approval process that might save you they challenged in court the fda's withholding of that drug and they were told by the dc circuit nope That's an unenumerated right that we are not prepared to protect in any meaningful way. So I invite you to sort of comment if you'd like to on this idea that there's not really that much at stake here in terms of protecting unenumerated rights because they're just trivial things like what time you get up or whether you can wear a hat, whether you can have a garden in your front yard. Maybe that means a lot to you, but your life doesn't really depend on any of those things. So respond to that if you would.
Sure. Yeah. Well, so starting at the beginning, do we have an unenumerated right to those things that you just identified, such as bodily saving drugs, life saving drugs? You have to ask, what does the Constitution say? So there are some libertarians who might argue, I don't care what the Bill of Rights say. These are rights that we just have are protected and our judiciary should be enforcing them. And I get that argument. And I'm not saying that argument isn't right. But I think the way that courts are comfortable adjudicating these things and the way that people usually think about these these matters when they write constitutions.
is to say, well, what does the Constitution say? And because Americans like a broad protection of rights, we have written our Constitutions to do just that. And so we don't have to worry about, you know, this is just a natural right that should be protected no matter what. It's actually there in the Constitution. Why is it there in the Constitution? Because precisely what you were just talking about, Clark, and say the right to bodily integrity or the right to try to take medicine from a doctor who's willing to provide it to you and try to save your own life. Those are just basic natural rights that are pretty obvious that we should have in some way and have some measure of protection for.
And therefore, it's no surprise that if you look at our state and federal constitutions, that those kinds of broad protections are in there. And they're in there because constitution writers have done this two step where we identify a lot of rights. We know we can't identify them all. And so then we have some language that does that. So maybe some of the listeners will be like, OK, well, what is this language that you're talking about? So the Ninth Amendment, many of you may know, which is often called the stepchild of the Constitution because it's so often been ignored by the federal courts. It says the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights.
shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. That language is put in there, was drafted in 1789 and then adopted in 1791 in the federal constitution. And there are many people who argue, well, that doesn't actually mean what it says. It doesn't actually protect these, your right to bodily integrity or what have you, because it's really about federalism or it's really about a status quo when the constitution was ratified or not infringing on the state's rights or what have you. I don't think those are correct arguments. I go with the argument made by a Cato scholar, Randy Barnett, that these actually means what it says and protects rights beyond those.
What do you do then when you have that language in a state constitution where there's no federalism, right? You don't have the same history of the interplay of the 10th Amendment and all these other arguments that we don't need to worry about today. You just have it in a state constitution. It says other rights retained by the people. The most important thing to do there is to look at the word retained. I spent a lot of time in the book worrying about what this word retained is. What retained is doing is speaking to this idea of a social contract.
Now, social contract isn't a real thing. It didn't actually happen from the state of nature going into society as social contract theorists have talked about. And some of you probably remember from philosophy class or what have you. But it's a way to think about how we share our how we balance our rights and the powers of government. So the idea is we have certain rights that are that we have as individual people. Then we come together in society. We give up some of those rights. We do give up some of those rights to government, but we retain others. Now, what's.
a right that we would retain that we don't really need to have a functioning society where we can have a government that protects our rights, provide some public goods, but otherwise we get to keep the other rights. Well, I think the ones you just identified are pretty obvious. Your right to bodily integrity. Just because it's not specifically listed elsewhere in the Bill of Rights does not mean, say, the government has a right to come and sterilize me or pick a body part or do something else horrendous to my person. That is protected as a retained right. And then we can argue about, well, where is that line? And where's the government's legitimate interest in regulating some of these rights? That's a different argument. But the fact that the right is there and that it is specifically protected by the Constitution through this open-ended language is not that hard to fathom. And one thing I really hope people take from the book, whether to read with all the minutia of what I talk about, is that this is not a weird way to think about how we would structure a Constitution.
that we would have this problem of listing some rights and then not wanting others to be implied and having rights come up in the future that we haven't even thought about, right? Who is thinking about sterilization, say, when a state structured its constitution decades before the progressive era that you were just discussing? And so we have this language that can be applied in the future when we come to new situations that are going to present new challenges and we can think about what those rights are that are retained that are nevertheless protected by the Constitution. Anthony Sanders is author of Baby Night Amendments. Does the future of environmental stewardship depend more on innovation or regulation? In Time to Think Small, Todd Myers argues that protecting the planet requires small, decentralized technologies like smartphone apps rather than sweeping top-down government programs. He spoke at the Cato Institute in May.
I've worked in environmental policy for more than two decades in Washington State, which is a fertile political environment for studying environmental policy up front. In my first book, EcoFads, talked about what I have seen in working in state government agencies and environmental policy, which is that so often the policies that we make and that politicians choose are based more on making them look good and feel good rather than actually delivering environmental outcomes. And those incentives cause us to go in the wrong direction in many cases. It's sort of like I was in Vegas and there was a guy who was sort of scruffy looking and I came out and he said, excuse me, sir, I haven't had anything. to eat? Do you have any money? And I said, if I give you money, how do I know that you're not just going to gamble it? He says, oh, well, I've got gambling money. His priorities were fun before the fundamentals. And that's what I see so often in the environment. And that's what I wrote my first book. My new book, Time to Think Small, is an effort to try to solve that, to shift power from politicians to people who are on the ground who have the right alignment of incentives. And now they have the tools to solve many of these environmental problems. And I first want to start with, before I talk about that,
A lot of times we are told that only government can solve environmental problems and only government can do things at the scale that is necessary to solve these problems. And I want to give an example of why that's not true. Government's incentives are not always aligned with people or the environment. So the best example, I think, is the Flint water crisis. You're probably familiar with what happened. The city of Flint, Michigan, in an effort to cut costs, switched the source of its water.
It turned out that that water was corrosive to the pipes in the town. Now, that's not necessarily a problem. There are chemicals and other things you can do, many cities do, to reduce the corrosion. But they didn't realize it, and what ended up happening is that the water coming out of the taps looked like the water that's in the bottle this woman is holding right here. Now, initially, both the state and federal government denied that there was any problem. One of the people at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality said, anyone concerned about lead in the drinking water can relax. Well, that, of course, turned out not to be true.
So the EPA and the Department of Environmental Quality finally realized, okay, we've got a problem. We need to do something. What can we do? So the EPA identified, the regional office identified a source of funding that they could buy water filters for the people in Flint, Michigan. But then there was a debate because that source of funding wasn't really for that type of purpose. And if they used it in that way, then they might get requests in other areas to use it the same thing. And so there was an internal debate and they finally decided against it. And one of the emails said, we could probably justify this, but quote, I'm not sure if Flint is the kind of community we want to go out on a limb for.
That's the EPA. That was who was supposed to be looking out for the people of Flint, Michigan. And to add insult to injury, when the regional director was called before Congress to discuss the Flint water crisis, she said, I don't think anyone at EPA did anything wrong. So the assumption often is, one, that only government can solve these problems, and two, that government has your back when trying to address these environmental problems. And the Flint water crisis is a pretty clear example that that's not always the case. So what's going on here? Why aren't we solving these problems? And the answer is that politics repeatedly trumps environmental outcomes.
So this is a poll from Gallup from 2016 that found at that time that climate change was the most divisive issue in America. This has since been eclipsed. We're back to abortion being the most divisive issue in America, but still climate change is one of the most divisive. So if you are trying to address a long-term environmental challenge in an environment where politics is extremely divisive, it is very difficult to get policies that are sustainable in the truest sense of that word, which is that they can be sustained over a long period of time. We are not going to solve climate change or a number of environmental problems. I've been doing this for 20 years, and many of the same problems I see today were the problems that I saw when I started in environmental policy. In order to solve these problems, you have to have sustained effort in an environment where politics is so divisive, it is very difficult to get that.
And in fact, what you often see is a disconnect between what is happening on the ground and the data that are available and the reactions to it. And so this is actually a quote from Superabundance, where Julian Simon was being attacked, and people were surprised because he was pointing out, look, here are the data about abundance and the costs of resources. And one scientist said, it is quite ironic that people who think of themselves as real scientists were the ones coming up with excuses for not dealing with the data, resorting to ad hominem attacks and generally showing a disdain for scientific methods that I formerly thought would be found only among book burners. So why does this happen? It happens because the incentives for politicians and other folks are often not to find the best solution. They are to either make themselves look good, to justify their own ideology, and they're not involved in feedback. They don't get negative feedback when environmental policies fail. The primary feedback they get is from their colleagues, from the voters, from other things like that. So what they do is that they cater those policies to the people that they do get feedback from, and even when environmental policies, the one they're advocating, don't work out, they don't feel a cost for those things.
So the question is, what can we do? How do we solve this problem? And the answer is that I think it's time to democratize environmentalism, and it's time to think small rather than big government. So it's not just me who thinks that we need to do things differently than we did in the 1970s. It's actually Bill Ruckelshaus. Bill Ruckelshaus was the first director of the EPA who was responsible for many of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and the other things that people on the left so often point to as touchstones for the way that we need to address environmental problems. But a little over a decade ago, he wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that said yesterday's solutions worked well in yesterday's problems. But the solutions we devised back in the 1970s aren't likely to make much of a dent in environmental problems we face today. And the primary reason is that when you're addressing problems like
plastic in the ocean or impacts to wildlife habitat or climate change, the sources of pollution are distributed. They're not single smokestacks or big outfalls, which are much easier for the EPA and for government to address. So now if you want to address a distributed environmental problem, you need distributed solutions. And fortunately, we now have those. And I am contractually obligated, because I work for a free market think tank, to quote Nobel-winning economists. Here are two.
First, this is very much like what Eleanor Ostrom, who was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, says. She says, what we've ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule. Thanks to technology, this is now even more true. People now have more power, more ability to do these sorts of things, to collaborate with each other, to get the information that they need to solve environmental problems. And the reason is that the cost of information and the transaction costs of information and of collaboration have gone way down, which is what Ronald Coase pointed out. And this quote from him, I think, is particularly important where he says, the governmental administrative machine is not itself costless. It can, in fact, on occasion, be extremely costly.
And so we have gone from a situation in the 1970s where government was probably the best way to solve some of the big environmental problems we faced to where now the transaction costs involved in individual collaboration, collaboration among private citizens, is probably far lower than the cost of doing things through regulation. And so whereas in the 1970s, using the EPA was probably the better approach because the cost of collaboration was very high for individuals, that has now flipped on its head, and it's given us an opportunity to solve environmental problems in a very different way. And I'll give you my favorite example. So the beauty of small technology and innovation is that it is adaptable to so many parts of the world, right? We're all used to using technology in the United States and in the West, but it is now being applied across the globe. So in Africa, there is a number of places where there is difficult to get water. And in many of these places, what ends up happening is people, primarily women, hike to a local source of water. They pick up as much water as they can carry and then carry it back to the village. And then if they want to make sure that that water is clean, they have to boil it, which often means putting stress on local forests and cutting down trees for charcoal and things like that.
The other way that they can get water is that they can buy plastic bags of water. But of course, what do you do then with the plastic bags? If you don't have access to water, you probably don't have access to trash collection. So a group called eWater Services came up with a pump that is internet connected. And the reason they did this is because they wanted to see which pumps were working and which weren't. And then the other thing that they did was they charged a very small fee for water, about a penny a day. So people could fill up their account using their phone. And then they hold up what this woman is holding up here. It looks like a key fob to the pump to access the water. And the beauty of this, because there is a small fee, she's very careful about how much water she takes. She doesn't want to take more than she needs to because it costs money. But the other thing is, is that if that pump breaks...
E-water services knows immediately because it's internet connected. One of the challenges of water pumps in Africa is that pumps installed by governments or NGOs often break. E-water services says that after about 18 months, about 40% of pumps break. So then what happens, right? Where is the government? Where is the NGO? Is there somebody who knows how to fix it? They often have to wait, sometimes months, to have these pumps fixed. But with E-water services, they know immediately when that pump is broken, and they have a financial incentive to go fix it.
And here are the results. And you can actually, this is a live dashboard that eWaterServices has. And you can see that earlier this year, they just passed 1 billion liters of water served to more than 212,000 people in the three countries in which they work. But most notable is the bottom right-hand corner that shows that 98% of their smart taps are working. Because when tap breaks, they're losing money. And some of they have people in the area to go fix it and make sure it gets back online. And so now that means that the people in these villages know that they have reliable and consistent access to water. Back one. There we go.
The beauty of these technologies and of thinking small is that it turbocharges superabundance, which is obviously the focus of the work of the human progress. So Julian Simon's argument was that innovation, boosted by all of the new minds in the increase in population, that that innovation overcome resource scarcity issues. But if you assume that 20 and 30 years ago, only a small percentage of people sort of have access, have the ability to innovate these new things, then even though we are keeping up and actually exceeding resource capacity or resource limitations, that when you extend innovation to all sorts of new people by lowering the barriers and making small innovations possible.
you now take that superabundance and you turbocharge it because the percentage of those new people on the planet who have access to innovation, the ability to innovate becomes even greater. And so my hope is, is that what we will see in the near future is the superabundance that we have seen is actually increasing because more people can come up with these sorts of solutions. And so let me just finish with this. There are three things I think that are key to the power of thinking small. First, it is sustainable and durable. Like I said, in a political environment where there is so much polarization, environmental policy is very difficult to be sustainable and sustain over the long run. Technology doesn't go backwards, rarely goes backwards. It goes forwards. And so it doesn't matter whether you believe climate change is a crisis or a hoax. If you are getting a technology that is helping you conserve energy, you're going to keep it. And that makes that approach more sustainable. Second, it is adaptable.
The example I gave was in rural Africa, but there are examples of these technologies all across the globe, and they can be adapted to many small problems and localized problems. And lastly, it connects people to the problems directly. It is not people in Washington or Brussels or the United Nations who are imposing these. It is people on the ground who have the most to gain or lose from the success and respond to the incentives and the success or failure of those technologies who are making the decisions and finding out how to apply it, which is why you see the situation you do in Africa where 98% of the pumps are working and they've delivered more than a billion liters of water. That, I think, is the real exciting.
revolution that we are on the verge of, which is that these small technologies are already changing the way that we address environmental problems. And for people like me who care about personal freedom and prosperity, it aligns those two things with environmental sustainability for the future. Thank you so much. Todd Myers is author of the new book, Time to Think Small. In the 10 years since Edward Snowden made Americans aware of massive, unwarranted domestic surveillance undertaken by the US government, what's changed? Cato's Patrick Eddington assembled an entire week of programming at the Cato Institute Surveillance Week to talk about it. We discuss some of the highlights.
Pat, I'm going to go ahead and let it be known to you now for the first time. We did not discuss this in advance. You sent our events team into a tizzy when you said... I'm going to have a full week of events on surveillance. And of course, this is an issue of critical importance. If we are being surveilled, it gets that much harder to secure all the other rights that we have as Americans. If you don't mind, and people can go to cater.org and watch any of the events that you put together. But this is 10 years now since Ed Snowden told us about the unconstitutional, unconscionable, problematic.
and invasive things that our own government was doing to us. So why is it important to highlight that? I think, you know, most folks these days, because we are more than 20 years after the terrible attacks on our country on 9-11. It's basically, you know, more than a generation, essentially, you know, since those events. And there have been a lot of things that have happened, of course, you know, in that particular period of time. And I think, you know, when I began to kind of figure out what I wanted to do, you know, for this particular event,
or series of events, I should say, I wanted to make sure that we began with the past and how essentially we got to this point. So our first event, of course, was on June 5th of 2023. And we started with literally the pernicious surveillance legacy of 9-11. And so we examined how the government responded in the days and weeks and months and ultimately years after that terrible day. And within the first 48 hours, then director of the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden, ordered NSA to begin monitoring phone traffic coming out of Afghanistan. And less than two weeks later, he was telling them to monitor all traffic, essentially, between the United States and Afghanistan, which guaranteed that a lot of Americans' traffic, a lot of their telephone calls to their relatives, friends, co-workers, all the rest of that kind of stuff, was going to get swept up in this new mass surveillance program, which was subsequently named Stellar Wind.
And the Congress was not informed of this, at least as in any kind of, you know, wide scale way. Jay Rockefeller, Senator Rockefeller, and then Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, you know, were essentially told what was going on, but they weren't allowed to have staff in the room. I have said that, you know, Ms. Pelosi could have shut that process down immediately by simply asking for everybody's business card so she could get the names right for the impeachment resolutions that she would offer against them for engaging in this activity. But she did not think to do that. So we didn't learn about the Stellar Wind program until December 2005 when the New York Times exposed it. And at the same time that Stellar Wind was going on.
We, of course, had in late October of 2001, the Congress passed the above ground or above board surveillance package known as the Patriot Act, which has, if I recall correctly, roughly 150 different provisions, which included things like sneak and peek searches, whereby FBI or other agents could go into your home or your business without your knowledge, copy your hard drives, potentially implant surveillance devices, all the rest of this kind of stuff. It was just one of the many changes. that took place. So we had a two-tiered surveillance system running. We had one that had actually been officially approved and another that was completely secret and illegal. And the point that I've tried to make to people is neither one of them was needed because as the congressional joint inquiry found in 2002 as a result of their investigation, the 9-11 Commission two years later, 9-11 didn't happen because we didn't have the data.
9-11 happened because of incompetence on the part of FBI, CIA, and NSA. It's just that simple. And yet the American people have been forced to pay the price with the loss of their fundamental liberties because of these programs, which have all but become permanent law. Now you say permanent law, but we have had changes that have occurred since the revelations of Ed Snowden so many years, now a decade ago. What were those changes? And when you say permanent law...
The NSA had a facility built into a routing center for all AT&T traffic for a considerable amount of time. Yes. And when I speak of permanent law, I do that in the context of the fact that when the Patriot Act was passed in late October of 2001, there were 16 provisions that had expiration dates or were known in legislative parlance as sunset provisions. And today there are zero. There are no sunsets. Three of those particular provisions that were never really used, including the so-called lone wolf provision, were allowed to lapse in March of 2020. And I think it's worth noting that the sky did not fall when those three provisions lapsed, which is one of the points that those of us out here defending the Bill of Rights have been saying all along. But what Ed Snowden, of course, revealed in June of 2013 was this massive...
telephone metadata program, programmatic. In other words, you know, you get one warrant and you get a jillion different phone numbers, essentially, instead of one warrant targeting one person. And this, of course, caused, you know, a huge blow up. And two years later, we get some anemic reform in the form of the USA Freedom Act, which essentially, you know, made that mass surveillance officially legal, allegedly not at the same scope. But even as that was making its way through Congress and we got into the 2016 presidential cycle, Ted Cruz of Texas, Senator Ted Cruz, who was a presidential candidate at that particular time, you know, publicly stated that that law, the USA Freedom Act that they had just passed would actually allow NSA to collect more data. And he was attacked by his fellow Republican and GOP conference member, Marco Rubio, also a presidential candidate at the time, for revealing that fact. And what we finally get to, you know, just before the pandemic began in 2019 or early 2020, is the National Security Agency finally admitting that that particular program, the Section 215 telephone metadata program, the one that Ed Snowden exposed,
was useless, that it had never really accomplished anything, despite repeated statements by NSA officials to the contrary over the years. So that's why people like me are just massive, massive skeptics when we hear claims from government officials, from NSA, FBI, et cetera, that these are must-have authorities, that we will have a 24 Jack Bauer, everyone will die in the next five minutes kind of situation if these things are not maintained or extended and so on and so forth. Yeah, the claims that are made by intelligence agencies, anytime we consider shutting down a program, and I guess it's sort of telling when they don't complain about a program getting shut down. That is to say, they themselves have not found a great deal of value in that program. Whenever there are complaints about shutting down some sort of surveillance program, it is, we're going dark.
As if this particular program is the linchpin that is holding up the entire apparatus of our government's agency's secret data collection. Yes. And what's also interesting about one of these other authorities, we mentioned the fact that Stellar Wind was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005. And over the next two and a half years after that story ran, the Congress spent that period of time trying to take an inherently illegal and unconstitutional program and make it legal. And the final result was what we're living with today, which is the so-called FISA Amendments Act, and specifically Section 702 of that particular statute, which allows this kind of programmatic surveillance. Now, to be clear, the statute says that they're only supposed to be targeting foreign nationals or foreign entities. But because of the nature of the global communication system, whereby, you know, you and I can have a telephone call, you're in Kentucky, I'm in Virginia, our call could get routed through London.
you know, potentially, or somewhere else overseas. And ultimately, this is how a lot of this collection on Americans winds up getting done and ultimately stored in NSA databases. And what we've seen, you know, when the 702 program was approved by Congress in 2008, this was at the height of the American campaign against al-Qaeda and related Salafist terrorist organizations. And that was the selling point for the program. You know, that's why Stellar Wind was started. It was to try to uncover Al-Qaeda, do what we could to find out about the nature of their networks, its scope, where they were operating, what their plans were, and so on and so forth. But now, here in June of 2023, literally just this particular week, representatives of the intelligence and law enforcement community came before the Senate Judiciary Committee and offered all kinds of other reasons why this FISA Section 702 authority should be extended. And so now we've gotten into literally the fentanyl crisis.
This has become a linchpin argument on the part of the FBI and NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that we're getting data about foreign fentanyl flowing into the country and all the rest of this. And of course, they're attempting to link this to China. So it's an orchestrated effort, once again, to engage in fear-mongering to move it forward, right? The fentanyl is an interesting issue because as we have broadened our definition, I say we, the federal government, has broadened its definition of terrorism. and has broadened its mandate, it seems, to deal with drugs rather than bodily harm aimed at Americans from foreign adversaries. I mean, fentanyl is a problem. It's a big problem, but it's not a national security threat. No, it's not. And that's kind of the moving the goalpost nature of what they're doing here. And we would be remiss if we did not point out that over the course of the last 15 years, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has repeatedly, virtually on a yearly basis,
lambasted the FBI and the NSA for their failure to abide by the law as a result of all these so-called backdoor searches on Americans, particularly that the FBI has been engaged in. And so essentially the way the 702 program works is they sweep up this data. It gets shoved into databases at NSA. It is what's known as raw data. So in other words, nothing is redacted. The names of individuals are all there, all the rest of that kind of stuff. And FBI agents.
over the course of the last 15 years, have repeatedly gone into this database and searched for information on Americans, in many cases with absolutely no connection to any kind of crime. And so the latest scandal has been an incident in which at least one FBI agent conducted database searches on some 19,000 supporters, potentially campaign donors, to a particular congressional candidate who has not been officially identified. Now, this is J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO. type stuff. And that's why these abuses, the only way that you're going to end them at the end of the day is not to rely on these agencies to fix the problem. They've had 15 years. They've repeatedly ignored the FISA court. So what you have to have at the end of the day is a return to a pure Fourth Amendment standard here. So in other words, no probable cause, no warrant, no exceptions. That's exactly the standard that should be applied here. There are a lot of folks in Congress, I think, in the House and Senate that want to try to make that happen. But at this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, we definitely heard from Senate hawks on a bipartisan basis, I'll have to say.
who are buying into the fentanyl line, who are buying into these other explanations for why this authority is must-have and so on and so forth. So we'll see how it plays out over the course of the balance of the rest of 2023. For the average American, for the Cato Audio listener, our wonderful Cato Audio listeners, what's the line you draw? What's the line that we should draw for ourselves? That is to say, one, yeah, we respect the right that our government needs to be able to collect information on adversaries that are foreign. Our government needs to be able to keep those things secret.
But we also have to respect the rights of individual Americans. And if we're not respecting the rights of Americans, what are we even doing here? The reason that we're collecting this information is to continue to secure freedom from threats abroad. So in terms of my own interaction with my unwitting interaction, maybe with these agencies in terms of collecting data, what's the line we draw? Is it really that simple? If I'm judging a program, what is the line that Americans should draw? I think the line that should be drawn is the line that was drawn by the founders in the Fourth Amendment.
And our problem here is the lowering of standards, right? I mean, the FISA Section 702 represents a lowering of standards. The use of these so-called administrative subpoenas called national security letters, which an FBI agent can sign off on. It's the lowering of that standard. It's the abandonment of that standard that has helped to lead to, you know, all of all these violations. And I should also point out that, you know, this is not just about, you know, protecting the rights of Americans. It's about making sure that our federal law enforcement intelligence agencies are actually focused on the right things.
And the more data that you shove into a system, essentially, the more noise that you create, you know, the more garbage. Potentially false positives. Well, that's exactly right. And just, you know, the sheer amount of data itself. So, you know, it's about being targeted in terms of what you're going after. And that's the problem. They're treating everything, including something like fentanyl, you know, as some kind of national security crisis. And what we need to make sure that they're actually focused on is first and foremost, counterintelligence, hunting spies, exposing spies, taking out spies, you know, either judicially or otherwise, and making sure that we don't have a repeat of 9-11. That was the justification for all these programs originally.
And I think that's exactly where we need to kind of get back to. I mean, sure, you know, is it nice? Is it nice to have information about chemical weapons, you know, convention compliance and all the rest of that? Sure. But that's not what these programs are supposed to be about. And these programs should not be operated at the expense of Americans' liberties. It's that simple. Patrick Eddington is a senior fellow in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties Studies at the Cato Institute. If you have an idea for what we ought to discuss in this exclusive Cato Audio feature, you can send it to us at CatoAudio at Cato.org.
The Cato Institute's pocket constitution helps citizens young and old gain a better understanding and appreciation of their own individual rights and the principles of government that are set forth in America's founding documents. With over 7 million copies in print, it has been held up by senators at press conferences and by representatives during floor debates. It's found in federal judicial chambers across the country and makes a great gift to friends or family alike. Buy yours today at Cato.org. That will do it for this edition of Cato Audio. I'm Caleb Brown. Talk to you again next month.