thank you so much for watching "state of the union." i'm candy crowley in washington. "fareed zakaria gps" starts next. this is "gps," the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. we'll take you around the world to begin the show from russia's recession to the extension of nuclear talks with iran to strikes in syria and iraq and more. an all-star gps panel. also, inside north korea, the fascinating story of subterfuge and spying inside the borders of one of the world's most secretive and closed off nations.

and an experiment in how to fix american education. the laboratory was the nation's largest school system. the investigator, a man with a stellar resume but a rank outsider. joe klein on what he learned as chancellor of new york city schools. finally, you can e read and e rather than, e trade, and get rid of your e waste, but e residency? yeah, that's a thing now, too, in estonia. i will explain. but first here is my take. ashton carter, the president's nominee to be the next defense secretary, is a brilliant man, but by far the best quality he has going for him is that he seems to understand the need to rein in a pentagon now so out of control that it is difficult to fully comprehend or even explain. the largest government bureaucracy in the world, the department of defense, even after billions of dollars in

cuts, now spends about $600 billion a year when everything is added in. that's more than the entire gdp of poland. it employs 1.4 million men and women in uniform, 700,000 civilians, and another 700,000 full-time contractors. the pentagon's accounts are so vast and byzantine, it is probably impossible to do a thorough and honest audit of them. still, a recent government accountability office report made a valiant effort and concluded that the total budget overruns for current weapons systems stand at nearly $500 billion. the f-35 joint strike fighter program alone is now around $150 billion over budget. in other words, the cost overruns on one weapons system are more than the total defense budget of britain and france put together. in 1961 dwight eisenhower warned

against the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex. 50 years later on december 15th, 2011, to mark the anniversary of eisenhower's address a renowned defense expert argued that things had gotten much worse and far more corrupt. congress had itself been captured by the system, he said, which should now be called the military industrial congressional complex. the experts spoke of the rampant use of earmarks, congressional pet projects unwanted by the administration but amounting to billions of dollars annually that waste taxpayer resources for years and sometimes decades. over the last decade or so, the expert concluded what i have described here has resulted in a massive windfall for industry but for the taxpayer and the war fighter, it has been an absolute recipe for disaster. this radical critique of the pentagon came from the republican senator john mccain. he is joined in many of his

views by the former defense secretary robert gates, who in his recent memoir describes the pentagon as a gargantuan labyrinth of democracy on which you had to declare war to gets results. 40% of pentagon spending goes to overhead, gates points out in his book. and as many as 30 layers of staff sit between the secretary of defense and an action officer. the pentagon resembles nothing so much as a gigantic socialist enterprise run according to its own principles, shielded from market discipline, and accountable to virtually no one. how does it continue to function and actually perform? the way socialist bureaucracies usually do. if you throw enough money and talented, energetic, and determined people at it, things can work until the money runs out. the united states still spends more on defense than the next eight nations put together including china and russia. the good news is that ash carter

has already been a reformer and as deputy defense secretary attempted to untangled the procurement process. mccain will soon be the chairman of the armed services committee and mac thornberry, who will lead the house equivalent, also appears to have a reformist bent. the problem is so immense, however, that it is probably too much to hope for more than small victories. secretaries of defense will come and go, but the military industrial congressional complex lives on. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my "washington post" column this week. and let's get started. israel's prime minister netanyahu called for new elections this week. sear why's president, bashar al assad, told a french magazine that american air strikes were having no impact on isis, and on thursday russia's president putin delivered his annual state

of the nation address. in it he boasted about crimea's historical reunification with russia and went on to blame the west for most of the problems that his strong and confident, his word, nation faces. one word that was absent from the speech was recession. his government predicted the russian economy would contract. joining me to discuss all of this, richard haass is the president of the council on foreign relations. he was the drebter of policy planning at the state department from 2001 to 2003. robin wright is a distinguished scholar at the wilson center. after many years of reporting from the world's hotspots. chrystia freeland is a member of canada's parliament. she was formerly a top editor at thompson reuters and the ft and david rothkopf is ceo and editor of the fb. group, the publisher of foreign policy magazine. his new book is "national insecurity: american leadership in an age of fear." chrystia, i have to start with you because you know russia and

ewe krin wall. the russian economy it feels like is in more serious trouble than even many people in the obama administration were predicting when the sanctions were put in place. >> that's absolutely right. there is a real economic crisis in russia and it's going to get worse. it's partly the sanctions. it's compounded by the fact that the oil price has fallen so sharply, and then the other thing is there's tremendous capital flight and a tremendous brain drain outside of russia. the russian businessmen i talk to, some of whom are close to putin, are incredibly unhappy. they can't believe that what they thought were real businesses, real fortunes, are just dissolving. >> david, russia -- i think the russian government gets more than half of its revenue from oil. people often say economic sanctions don't really force governments to change because at the end of the day the pain is felt by ordinary people, but this is a case where the government needs revenues and it needs oil to be at, i don't know, $85 a barrel i think i saw

for russia to balance its books. it's well below that now. >> and putin was in denial when he gave his speech. he talked about the budget. what he didn't say is that the budget anticipates the price of oil being $100. right now the price of oil is in the 60s. he didn't talk about the $85 billion in capital flight in the past year that the russians have had, and, therefore, he's ignoring the reality of his economy. i think the real question is, what does this drive him to? does this make him more docile and in need of the west and the rest of the world or does drive him to some kind of wag the dog strategy me says look over here, look at the crisis i am in the midst of creating in ukraine or some place else as a way of stirring up nationalism? that's been the playbook. >> what's your gut? which wail will he turn. will the economic pressure make him more conciliatory, bush, the president you worned for, said when he made that statement

about looking into putin's eyes and seeing his soul or whatever it was, that oil was at $25 a barrel and putin was trying to make nice. that was why he was so nice to bush that time. >> well, you know, the fact is that it isn't necessarily a choice. mr. putin can continue to do the kinds of things he's doing in ukraine or other places that won't bring about greater sanctions and let's be honest, the real sanction against russia is nothing that the united states and the europeans have done. the real sanction is oil at 60 odd dollars a barrel. there's a joke going around russia. what does the number 63 have in common? mr. putin is turning 63 in a couple weeks, the oil is getting close to $63 a barrel and the ruble has fallen 63%. russia has enormous reserves. if you're asking me my guess, he tactically cools it a little bit but strategically he doesn't necessarily give up on his 2k3w0egoals of a restoration project. >> iran negotiations.

you have never been particularly optimistic. >> i think actually the most interesting space to watch, fareed, is what happens when the new congress gets in. will a republican congress, also democrats by the way, be willing to let this play out through the end of june or will they decide that the time has come to introduce new sanctions? i actually think washington might be even more important than the negotiating table for the next couple months. >> yeah. look, you can look at the glass half full. the fact is that in a year we have achieved a level of dialogue and exchange with tehran that is unprecedented since the 1979 revolution, that the iranian and american foreign ministers called each other by their first name. they call each other on their cell phones. there actually is serious dialogue and both sides want to deal. the question, of course, has always been can the iranians bite the bullet on the toughest issues and make the kind of concessions that the russians, the americans, the british, the french, and the chinese all

agree on. there's the danger that diplomacy is taken over by events on the ground. ironically in the last couple weeks iran is now bombing isis just as the united states is bombing isis in iraq and ironically using american war planes, old american war planes, to do it. >> it's not even just an irony. there's kind of a far as surrounding the irony. we're saying we're not coordinating with the iranians because the way we do it is we to an iraqi and say our planes are going to be here and the iraqi speaks to the iranian and the iranian says our plains are going to be here and he's the air-traffic controller. if that's not coordination, i don't know what is. we have this that sit alliance with the iranians in going against the iranians. we're also saying this has nothing to do with the negotiations. that the fact we're partnering with them against isis on the ground has nothing to do with these negotiations and that, of course, isn't true. that denies human nature, denies the national interests and all of history. >> when we come back, robin

wright is just back from the middle east where she reported a great story on the war against isis. her piece says the war is the most complicated one in the modern history of the middle east. we'll be back. daughter: do you and mom still have money with that broker? dad: yeah, 20 something years now. thinking about what you want to do with your money? daughter: looking at options. what do you guys pay in fees? dad: i don't know exactly. daughter: if you're not happy do they have to pay you back? dad: it doesn't really work that way. daughter: you sure? vo: are you asking enough questions about the way your wealth is managed? wealth management at charles schwab. i hait's tough, but severi've managed.ease. but managing my symptoms was all i was doing. so when i finally told my doctor, he said humira is for adults like me who have tried other medications but still experience the symptoms of moderate to severe crohn's disease. and that in clinical studies, the majority of patients on humira

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and we are back with richard haass, rob been wright, chrystia freeland, and david rothkopf. robin, you're just back from a trip to the middle east and a big piece in the new yorker. what is the picture of syria -- what do we need to understand about it today? >> well, i went along the war front and i think the thing that struck me the most is the fact that this is in many ways the most complicated war that's been fought in the middle east in a century. really since the middle east was established in its modern borders after world war i.

that there are more than 1,000 different militias now fighting there. but we're also so focused on kobani, this little town on the border between turkey and syria, that we're kind of losing sight of what's happening elsewhere. and aleppo, which is the biggest city, the commercial city, the new york of syria, is on the verge of being lost. assad's troops have taken advantage of the international focus on isis and kobani to make headway into aleppo dropping hundreds of barrel bombs against civilians, and he holds about half the city now and the danger is that he'll surround it and basically besiege it and then isolate up to a million people which would make life, you know, very tough for not only those people but it would also make it very tough for the rebels to hold any territory in the north. we've really reached a moment of truth in terms of what are our priorities in syria, and there are two different wars that are being fought here.

there's the one between the rebels who came out of the uprising in 2011 and took on the assad regime and the other war between the same rebels who are fighting extremists isis. the irony is in all this isis and the assad government are not really fighting very much against each other, and that the rebels are the weakest of the three forces, and these are the guys we want to build up over time. the prospect of doing that, there's a lot of disillusionment. they're having trouble recruiting members. this is a tremendously hard moment. >> you know, whenever you hear -- at least whenever i hear we're having trouble recruiting locals to fight, and if only, you know, they want america to help. that's a very bad situation to be in. if they don't really want to fight unless you support them, it means they're not going to fight. >> you can't want to make peace more than negotiators want to make peace. you can't want to make war more than locals want to make war. that's one of the lessons we

ought to have learned from the middle east. i think the idea we're going to get a wonderful moderate syrian opposition to make a political and military difference is a pipe dream. either we have to work with the forces that exist, kurds, sunni tribes, or we have got to get serious about working with turkey, working with the iran governments, working with nato and cobbling together an expeditionary force. here is the political end game we want to bring about. we, the united states, are prepared to be involved. i think the turks could conceivably be involved in that situation. the jordanians, the saudis and others. nobody wants to do it but you can't just have an air campaign. you have got to have someone to take and control any ground. right now we're in the ridiculous position where we bomb and who benefits? even if we push back isis, so what, bashar al assad can fill the vacuum. that can't be our strategy but that's what it's turned into. we need a ground partner.

>> you write in your book about the process of decision making and the way in which in the obama administration it's all about very centralized. my sense is obama fultly views the middle east as kind of a hell hole that's going to suck america dry. he wants to contain it and cordon it off, give it to asia, do some of the bigger, more strategic things he wants to do. so he's never going to embrace a kind of very ambitious strategy there because he doesn't think it's worth it. >> it's easy to understand how barack obama wants to avoid another war like iraq. he was elected to get out of that. and to understand why he wants to avoid isis getting much stronger. but at a certain point you have to make a choice. ambivalence can't be your central operating principal of the military campaign. the syria war may be the most complicated in the last 100 years but the iraq/syria war which is what this really is is even more complicated than that. >> and a what's also complicated is the domestic politics.

you know, one of the things that robin's piece which i recommend to everybody, you should read it, it was great. one of the things that you bring out, robin, is this sort of descent into warlordism and the way it's not only syria as a country being torn apart but the opposition which started with this idea of fighting for a new, different post-authoritarian syria is descending into warlordism. i think we need to worry about something similar happening in iraq, the collapse of the state and the collapse of an idea of do you belong to a state. who are you really with? what are your people? richard has written really brilliantly about this new 30 years' war in the middle east and robin is saying this about it's more complicated than it's been for a century. i think part of the problem for western leaders is we've forgotten how to deal with complexity and how to deal with really long-term situations, how to deal with situations where there are no good guys.

>> and you in this foreign affairs essay, you talk about this age of disorder almost where -- and you're quite nonpartisan about it. this is happening for big structural reasons. we're going to have to live with the messiness of these old structures of stability just coming unglued. >> absolutely. you have these powerful trends this in the world. you have a defusion of power to many types of actors. you have decentralization of decision making in part because american reliability isn't what it was for any number of reasons, because of globalization. this is a difficult time at the best. you have got a middle east that's truly unraveling. the post-world war i order is humpty-dumpty. it's not going to be put back together. you have russia in a very different place. the uncertainty of asia. the only thing i would say if i'm allowed to introduce a piece of good news is asia. in the last couple weeks what have we seen? the japanese national security

adviser meet with the chinese foreign minister, and they agreed to basically park some of their differences and to begin a process of limited normalization. you have she jinping, the chinese leader give a speech which seemed to echo a little bit of let's calm the ring down. why? because china has a lot of internal challenges it needs to meet. the part of the world that's most worrisome is not the middle east, it's asia and there at least we can see a linl bit of progress. >> we're going to use that one bit of good news though i would add latin america is also doing pretty well and we're going to thank all of you for a fascinating conversation. coming up, ferguson, missouri, staten island, new york. two locations, two weeks, two grand juries who decided not to indict white police officers in the death of black men. is this just the tip of the iceberg? we'll dig in when we come back. financial noise

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now for our "what in the world" segment p.m. michael brown killed by a police gun in ferguson, missouri. eric beggarner killed at the ha of the police in staten island, new york. these two cases of the deaths of

black men by white law enforcement officers have stood up segments of america resulting in riots and protests clear across the nation and raising questions about the practices and procedures of the american criminal justice system. >> black lives matter. >> those angry americans who took to the streets aren't the only ones concerned. the united nations weighed in recently as well in the form of a new report from that world body's torture watch dog group. the u.n. high commissioner for human rights who oversaw the committee said essentially that it was too early to weigh in on ferguson specifically, but the report notes its deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings of fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals and deeper digging reveals calls for more than the u.n.'s diplomatic deep concern. according to a new investigation from "the wall street journal," police killings are significantly underreported in federal statistics. the journal analyzed data from

105 of the nation's biggest police departments and found that between 2007 and 2012 more than 550 killings by police were missing from national records. in all, the journal turned up about 45% more police killings than the official fbi statistics. given that the vast majority of the nation's 18,000 law enforcement agencies hadn't reported any killings by cops, the journal reporters acknowledge that it's impossible to actually get a full picture of the under reporting. but when there is transparency in the system, it's clear that minorities are disproportionately affected. young black men were 21 times more likely than white men to be shot dead by cops between 2010 and 2012 according to a propublica analysis. with regard to drugs, many studies, including by the justice department itself, showed that blacks are about three times as likely to be arrested than whites. that's true even though

government data shows that they do not use drugs at any like three times the rate as whites. the nonprofit sentencing project concludes starkly, racial minorities are more likely than white americans to be arrested. once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted, and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences. african-american males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males and 2.5 times more likely than hispanic males. if current trends continue, one of every three black american males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime as can one out of every six latino males compared to one out of every 17 white males. the project does not throw around the charge of racism. in fact, it makes the point that the american system of justice is not racist by design. the real problem, it contends, is that america has two systems of justice, one for the rich and one for the poor.

for a variety of reasons, race, class, economics, minorities mostly have access only to the second class system of justice. these are tough words, but facts are facts. perhaps the events in ferguson and new york will make americans ask some more questions about a criminal justice system that does not seem to work equally for all its citizens. when we come back, we'll take you deep inside north korea. >> they just basically have the most abusive nation in the world. >> you will meet an american woman born in south korea who got a job teaching up north. what she smuggled out could be very dangerous to those she left behind. she will tell us all about it when we come back. >> it's the most horrific place to be in the world. through youre suddenly, you're a mouth breather. a mouth breather! well, put on a breathe right strip and shut your mouth. cold medicines open your nose over time, but add a breathe right strip and pow, it opens your nose up to 38% more.

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but the comfort it provides is it's justimmeasurable.ece the america red cross brings hope and help to people in need every 8 minutes, every day. so this season give something that means something. very few americans are allowed inside north korea even for just a visit let alone allowed to stay for months and work there. but that is just the opportunity

my next guest had. suki kim spent months in the secretive hermit kingdom as a teacher at a private university in pyongyang, the capital, in 2011. miss kim used subterfuge to get into the country, subterfuge to get her notes on her experiences out of the country. and with those notes she wrote a highly acclaimed and very controversial new book "without you there is no us quoti." suki kim joins us. how did you get in? >> i have been following north korea. i went there first in 2002 as a journalist. i did a piece, and then i went back for harper's magazine during the philharmonic concert in pyongyang in 2008 and i realized there was no way of covering this country because you would end up just being north korean propaganda. then i found out about this private school that was being built in pyongyang and staffed with foreigners. so i applied for a job and i got in. it was all male boarding school

in a suburb of pyongyang. 270 young men were there in 2011, which happened to be the last six months of kim jong-il's life, and these young men, 19 and 20, were all completely sons of elite. >> what kind of things did they talk about? what kind of things did they ask you about? >> well, there was -- first of all, they didn't know anything about the rest of the world. if any of them did, they were fearful to admit that because every conversation that we had, even at meals in the cafeteria, there was -- somebody was reporting on it. they were all watching each other, and if they were curious -- there were little slips here and there where they would be curious about democracy and how it functioned in the rest of the world. at the same time people really thought people spoke korean in

the rest of the world. the utter lack of information was astounding. >> was there knowledge about the outside world all wrong in terms of propaganda or did they just learn nothing? >> it was all like a mismatch. you know, they didn't know the existence of the internet in 2011, and this was a pyongyang university of science and technology. their major was computer a lot of them, but they thought internet, it's just north korea's -- it's like predownloaded information system. they thought that was the internet. >> how did you get the notes out? that itself is a story. >> i wrote morning and night and i had a laptop with me since i was a teacher, or posing as a teacher. but then i would write all this information and then put them on the us b stick, a couple of them and erase them all from the laptop because i knew they could search my things. >> when you got it out, did you

think about what it would mean to write the book in terms of the affect it would have on those students because it was a kind of total violation of the deal you had made. >> well, i mean, i'm not sure if it's a violation of a deal. first, i went in undercover. when i say undercover, i went in there with my full name. all the school had to do was google who i was. i told them i was a writer. studentwise i did everything i could do to protect their identity. i changed all their names and blurred all the identities and characteristics. most of all in the book they come through mostly being obedient to the regime. so i don't see how it could possibly affect -- when they can't even single out the students and also they basically love their great leader. >> the sense one gets from the outside looking at north korea is honestly, it's the weirdest country in the world. it is the most strange social experiment, and the puzzle is

how does it survive? how does it -- how is it that people just docilely accept this incredibly authoritarian regime that's not just authoritarian but totalitarian, really kind of tries to shape how you think, feel, breathe. what's your answer to that? >> well, i think it's a combination of many things. sort of this perfect storm of, you know, you have, first of all, this cult. serious personality cult. it's religious really. absolute belief in the great leader where, you know, this -- three generations of these men who -- these hugely narcissistic men wiped everything out of their culture accept themselves. the only holidays are the great leader holidays. every book, every article, every televisi television, every song, you name it, there's not a single thing -- every building has a great leader slogan. i think when you have that kind of a personality cull, that's an

incredibly powerful thing to be doing it for three generations. you also have a very brutal military dictatorship that's been in place for a long time, and also to wipe out every communication method, you know, there's no internet. the phone calls are tapped. it's a small country. you can't travel within the country without permission. you take away education tools, you take away any way of critical thinking, and you literally take away the tools where people can communicate with each other. then i think you have a nation where they just basically have the most abusive nation in the world. these men just own their people. it's the most horrific place to me in the world. >> and it doesn't seem like it's changing. >> i don't know how they're going to rise up. they can't even get to the next town without a permission. they don't have the internet. they have no way of going there. transportation system, there's just nothing that connects people. so i think it is up to us in the

rest of the world to do something where this system is not going to be maintained the same way. >> fascinating account. thank you so much. next on "gps," imagine being thrust into a job where you have more than 100,000 employees, and millions of clients. imagine taking that job when you have little experience in the field. that's what happened to my next guest and he will share his lessons with you when we come back. turn the trips you have to take,

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for more people every day. comcast nbcuniversal. bringing media and technology together for you. how do you even begin to try to fix america's largest school system? a huge bureaucracy with passionate competing interests ranging from teachers to unions to concerned parents. how do you get your arms around the problem when you're a complete outsider. that's the problem joe klein faced in two when mior bloomberg

appointed him the chancellor of the new york city public school system. he's written an interesting book about his ten-year tenure. joe klein, thanks for joining me. >> great to be with you, fareed. >> before we get to the public schools, i have to ask you a question. before you were doing this in another life incarnation, you were one of america's great litigators and the justice department, you took bill gates and microsoft to trial and very famous antitrust case, and so you know the law, and what i'm going to ask you about is the law where its meeting higher education. asian americans are suing a group -- a group of asian americans are suing harvard university on the grounds they believe that harvard and presumably other ivy league institutions are maintaining a quota, not allowing more than about 16 or 17% of asians to apply. have you looked at that case? how strong is that case in your view? >> it depends ultimately on the

facts. these are allegations but the allegations are powerful. if i think if universities put a quota on any racial group, i think that's going to end up in trouble in terms of where the court is right now and its thinking. constitutional litigation and affirmative action. people say it may have been based on test scores and other facts but i think that's a troubling set of fact. >> the basic fact is even though applications of asian americans have almost tripled i think in the last 20 years, the percentage admitted has been strikingly the same. >> there's where i want to be cautious. allegations are always different from facts. like you said, i did a lot of litigation in my life and i found people often allege things that aren't true. i'm not saying that's what happened here, but that -- >> you want to check it. >> i would want to see the facts. >> all right. high school. how bad is the problem to begin with? when you look at america's high school education or education in

general. >> it's really bad, and i don't want to sound hyperbolic but let me give you one number. today in america by any fair assessment, somewhere around 35% of our kids are exiting high school ready for college. still about 20% don't even get out of high school. in a world in which increasingly skills that are being demanded of our kids are much, much more than they used to be. so we have what i would call a crisis, and i don't like to be hyperbolic but we are massively under educating our kids in america and it's going to exacerbate the problem that's bedevilling us right now which is this massive inequality. >> what is the solution? is it longer school days? is it higher standards? is there a kind of set of obvious best practices that should be followed? >> absolutely. and longer school days, starting kids way before the age we're starting them now, not just pre-k but particularly for minority kids who come to school with such limited vocabulary

pre-k but the most important things it seems to me are wrapped in three core ideas. proflallized teaching. half the teachers quit in the first haf fierce. that's not a winning model. albert shanker in 1985 wrote a piece called the making of a profession. let's follow that. let's have more demanding requirements who gets into the profession. let's have our ed schools do a much better job educating people. >> can i stop you on that. one of the things i noticed is that the countries that do very well in northern europe and in south korea and singapore draw their teachers from the top third of the graduating college class. we draw our teachers, sad to say, from the bottom third. >> bingo. right. right they think and there that's a problem. second, those countries educate those teachers much, much more in content knowledge and classroom practice than we do. and they have a much more professional view of their role. second thing to do is give everybody choices. one of the things we did, we talk a lot about in new york, we

opened up 600 new schools of choice under mayor bloomberg. every middle class person insists on choice. why not give it to all the kids. the third thing is the intelligent use of tech nothinoo improve teaching and learning. the technological revolution seemed to miss education. to me those are the core lessons of hope, and all of those lessons were lessons we applied in new york and we saw results as a result of applying those lessons. >> are you optimistic? >> i was born optimistic. i call the book "lessons of hope" for a reason. i have also seen the results. when you see -- we started with ten years in a row over 45% graduation rate. that rate under the mayor went up to 65%. not high enough, but that's a

lot of lives being affected. when i see 70,000 or 80,000 parents applying for 20,000 slots in communities where people were really told it's one and done, that gives me real hope and real optimism. and in the end i think it was winston churchill who said america always manages to do the right thing after we try to do everything else and i think that will happen in education as well, fa fareed. >> pleasure to have you on. >> thank you. >> next on "gps" there's e-mail, e-commerce, ebooks, and now esmth residency. why your digital economy could be e stonian. like my potassium and phytosterols which may help lower cholesterol. stonian. supports your heart and body residency. why your digital economy could be estonian. eresidency. why your digital economy could be estonian. now eresidency. why your digital economy could be estonian. the bed reacts to your body. e-commerce, ebooks, and now eresidency. why your digital economy could be estonian. -residency. why your digital economy could be estonian.

visit your local retailer and feel the tempur-pedic difference for yourself.

today is the 73rd anniversary of the japanese attack on pearl harbor. the following day, december 8th, 1941 -- >> a date which will live in infamy. >> u.s. president franklin

delano roosevelt made his famous pearl harbor address to congress. that brings me to my question of the week. how many times has the u.s. congress officially declared war? a, 7. b, 1 11. c, 15, or d, 19. this week's book of the week is david rothkopf's "national insecurity." this book helps remind us that since 9/11 america has been too fearful, too reactivreactive, t tactical in its foreign policy. we saw that with isis trying to bait washington with vivid videos. he decides how the system of demission making in washington has broken down. it's an important book about the process of foreign policy. now for "the last look," actually it's the first look at

e residency. in a ceremony in estonia, one of the world's most wired countries, edward lucas was given the world's first e resident card by the president this week. >> i'd asked him ages ago if you ever make these cards available to foreigners, can i have the first one, and he said yes and he was as good as his word. >> e residency is not the same as citizenship or legal residency. it is digital residency that gives you special powers, sort of like a super hero. are you sick of passwords like i am? well, maybe then e residency is for you. it could replace p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d as the most popular way to prove your identity. >> it's allowing to you travel all over the internet to prove who you are in very secure and safe ways. >> we caught up withe ed lucas n his london office so he could show us what he could do with his new e-identity. >> i think this is absolutely revolutionary in the way in

which we interact with other people and other things on the internet. >> you can launch a company in estonia without having to be there and utilize the country's financial services. insert your e-resident card into the smart card reader attached to your computer, and you can access these services anywhere in the world, as if you were physically present replacing the need to sign things on paper. and lucas says this is just the beginning. >> just we have competition between visa and mastercard and american express. we will competition between providers of digital identities. the one that offers the best combination of security and convenience will come out on top. >> only downside? at the moment to get the card, you have to go to estonia, and winter is not the most delightful season in estonia. the correct answer to our "gps" challenge question was "b," 11. the first time that congress officially declared war was the war of 1812 with great britain. the last was 1942.

six of those 11 times were as with japan in 1941 against various countries during world war ii. thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week, and i will see you next week. good morning. i'm brian stelter and it's time for "reliable sources." ahead this hour, al sharpton, activist, political adviser, and msnbc anchoanchor. how many hats can one guy wear? plus, the president and race. what he says and what he doesn't say. obama's long-time messenger dan firefighter is he pfeifer is here taking us behind the scenes. and new information about the american reporter jail in iran. but we have to begin this morning with a journalistic sin at "rolling stone." it is now making national headlines and it's all about this bombshell article, a rape on campus which describ