The Bottom Line

It is the age-old debate that accompanies all new advancements in technology: We love to adopt the latest tech, and we do not think too much about the consequences for our safety and privacy.

Facial recognition is great to unlock a phone, but it is also being used by security agencies to pick us out of the crowd.

The internet still holds the promise to make our lives easier and knowledge more accessible. But it comes with the price of selling ourselves to "surveillance capitalism".

The biggest companies in the world thrive on tracking our behaviour - what we are searching for, where we buy our things, and where we go. They bundle and sell that information to other companies.

And the more our lives become digitised, the greater the risk of hacking and blackmail becomes.

In this episode, Steve Clemons hosts a panel of technologists and scientists to discuss technology and how dystopian our future is becoming.

Guests:

- Ina Fried - chief technology correspondent for Axios

- Professor Hold Thorp, editor, Science magazine

- Larry Irving, inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame

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The year 2019 may be remembered as the time when people around the world felt cheated. From Hong Kong to Santiago, and from Baghdad to Algiers, people demanded better governance.

In the United States, the president was impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, although his removal is highly unlikely.

With organized disinformation campaigns all around us, it’s become harder than ever to distinguish fact from fiction. Censorship and self-censorship are more routine, and the cultural protection needed for a free press is eroding.

Join Steve Clemons and his guests as we take a look at the biggest issues, events and personalities of 2019.

Guests:

• Cherylyn Harley LeBon, a leader in the Black Leadership Network

• Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief at The Intercept

• Antoun Issa, Senior Editorial Manager at the consulting arm of The Atlantic magazine.

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The term "deep state" usually conjures a secretive illuminati that is the real power behind the curtains - made up of spies, criminals, military leaders and businessmen.

In the world of US President Donald Trump, it has come to mean the civil servants who have been working for the government for years.

They are "holdovers" from previous administrations, and they are blocking his agenda and policy reversals. At least, that's the mantra that he repeats in his campaign rallies nationwide.

But is Trump using this construct as a punching bag to paint himself as an underdog who is fighting the powers that be?

"Deep state" has become a permanent fixture of the culture wars in the United States, and Trump is using it to energise his base.

So what is the reality of the "deep state" in US politics? Join Steve Clemons as he hosts a discussion on the ramifications of the constant presidential rants against government bureaucrats and diplomats.

Guests:

Elaine Kamarck - Director, Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution

Adolfo Franco - Republican strategist and former executive, US Agency for International Development

John Neffinger - Former communications director, Democratic National Committee

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For someone who claimed he wanted to "freeze" the governmental budget of the United States and "get rid of" US debt, President Donald Trump shows no signs of reigning in his spending habits.

For 2019, Trump's budget added more than one trillion dollars of debt, pushing the total amount of debt over $20 trillion, roughly the same size as the GDP of the US.

But to most economists, these numbers are irrelevant. The US is still the economic engine of the world and still in full control over the flow of money worldwide.

The lack of concern for the national debt is on display this political season, where neither party has focused much energy on government spending during the election campaigns.

But what about the warning signs coming from other economists who see a different reality: less purchasing power for people, lower standards of living, and rising poverty around the world?

How about the rising opposition to the "Western liberal order" of the past 70 years in Western liberal countries? And if Washington continues to use sanctions against countries as a weapon, won't they try to create new financial systems to get around the restrictions?

Join Steve Clemons and his panel of experts in this conversation on the sustainability of today's US-dominated financial system.

Guests:

Edward Luce - US national editor for the Financial Times

Sandra Navidi - Author of Superhubs: How the Financial Elite and their Networks Rule Our World

Douglas Rediker - Former US representative to the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund and current member of the Geo-economic Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum

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One of the priorities of US President Donald Trump has been to undo everything done by his Democratic predecessors.

At the top of his lift is to end the North America Free Trade Agreement, which came into effect in 1994, when Bill Clinton was president. The renegotiated treaty is called the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement, and it awaits ratification by Congress.

One of the Trump administration’s key motivations with the USMCA has been to create more jobs in Mexico, to stem the tide of immigration from the south.

No one disagrees that NAFTA needs an update, but many wonder whether Trump’s “America First” trade policies will slowly kill the idea of open trade globally.

Launching tariff wars on China, the EU and others has left many businesses dependent on importing and exporting wondering how to plan their future.

Join Steve Clemons and his panel as they debate whether Trump’s trade wars are helping or hurting Americans. What is being done about how huge U.S. corporations treat their lowest-paid workers? Will Trump’s policies bring back jobs to the United States, after decades of outsourcing? And as soybean farmers in the American Midwest witness a rise in bankruptcies and suicides, is any relief in the works?

GUESTS:

Carla Hills, former US Trade Representative; member of the National Committee on US-China Relations

Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington; former leader of the AFL-CIO federation of labor unions

James Glassman, former US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy; and author of Dow 36,000

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Rodney Barnette grew up in a segregated United States. He was drafted to go to Vietnam at the age of 21 and returned a year later, wounded in the line of duty.

After his return he joined the Black Panther Party, a civil rights movement that demanded an end to police brutality and equal rights to housing and employment. But Barnette was unaware that the FBI spied on him for years.

"Despite the fact that my dad had served in Vietnam and he is taking care of his family and is just a regular citizen, this information is being collected because he's considered an enemy by his own government," says his artist daughter Sadie.

There is a long history of government surveillance of black civil rights groups in the US.

It was supposed to have ended in the 1970s, but today there is a similar threat to Black Lives Matter (BLM), a movement fighting to end systemic violence against black people.

What started spontaneously in late 2014 as a protest around the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown, bled into cities across the country where other black men and women were being killed by police. A simple hashtag became a rallying cry: #blacklivesmatter.

As the movement grew, some organisers began to feel under watch, so they filed freedom of information requests with the New York Police Department to obtain surveillance records related to BLM. But the NYPD refused.

"The greater goal ... is to cover up the extent of their political use of their police powers to oppose Black Lives Matter. Because when they undertake surveillance of Black Lives Matter, this is not law enforcement activity. Black Lives Matter is not breaking laws," says Dave Thompson, who represents some of the organisers against the NYPD.

Alex Vitale, a professor at Brooklyn College who has researched political policing for years, explains that "the history of political policing is a history of the surveillance of individuals and organisations based on their political beliefs, not on their criminal behaviour."

For organisers of BLM, the threat of surveillance is a reminder of what happened to their parents' generation. And it's just recently that people like Rodney Barnette have been able to see the extent of that monitoring.

Fault Lines reporter Femi Oke went to Oakland, California, to better understand the history of surveillance and to see how far the government can go when its powers remain unchecked.

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