>> on this edition for sunday, iraqi tribesmen try to oust fighters from ramadi. in our signature segment, enlissing college students in the fight against hackers. that's actually a coursery quirement. >> and allegations over chris christie's handling of sandy relief funds. next on newshour weekend. >> newshour weekend is made possible by --

additional support is provided by -- and by contributions to your local pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> good evening. thanks for joining us. local tribesmen launched a major offensive today against al qaeda militants who recently captured parts of two major cities near baghdad. al qae had recently captured the two almost ten year ace go.

in baghdad this weekend, at least 14 people were killed and another 55 wounded in a series of car bomb explosions and during an attack on a juvenile prison. we will have more from iraq in the broadcast. 20 government troops were killed and 20 wounded. the bomb went off as the troops were boarding a transport vehicle. >> and today, the president said he has no intention of giving up power. asad said if we wanted to give up, we would have done so in the beginning. in ukraine today, there were new clashes between thousands of anti-government protesters and riot police who used water cannons and tear gas against the demonstrators. the protests erupted following

the approval of legislation restricting pro tests and limiting critical press reports. >> two days after major changes are announced, senate intelligence chair warned today that the nation remains under threat. >> i think a lot of the privacy people perhaps don't understand that we still occupy the the nation. >> russian security agents were behind edward snowden that ultimately led to the decision. >> there is a reason that he ended up in the lafing arms of an fsb agent in moscow. i don't think it was a gee whiz

luck event that he ended up in moscow. >> the wild fire that has been burning in southern california since thursday is now largely contained and the last of those evacuated have returned home. the fire started in the angeles national forest and quickly spread. the fire is expected to be fully contained by midweek but extremely dry conditions in the state persist. and on friday, governor jerry brown formally declared a drought emergency. union workers are funding a plan to put postal retail enters inside staples stores. it is being protested because they say it threatens good paying jobs. the post office is running a multibillion dollar annual deficit. and attorneys in south carolina are seeking a new trial for a black teenager who was the

youngest person executed in the united states in the last century. 14-year-old george sinny jr. was elect cuted in 1944. his family's attorney says no witnesses were called on his behalf during a day-long trial and the all-white jury deliberated only ten minutes before convicting him. he reportedly told a cell mate that police coerced his confession. >> chris christie will be inaugurated for a second term tuesday but questions persist about his staff's involvement in the so-called bridgegate scandal. there are new allegations that members of his team threatened to with hold relief funds unless

they supported a plan developed by christie aides. we are joined by the chief political correspondent. explain these new allegations? >> this is like a second front in the war being opened against you. the mayor says that two high level members of the christie administration basically strong armed her into approving a development project. they said you're not getting your full sandy relief money unless you approve the development plan for a three block area of your city. the rockefeller group was represented by david sampson, one of christie's closest confidants -- this has nothing to do with the bridge other than it looks like another strong arm

tactic. >> to put this in perspective, how badly was the city hit? >> 80% of the city was underwater. they are right on the hudson river across from manhattan. 50,000 people in that one mile. very densely populated. it was really badly flooded. she claimed yesterday on television that she asked for $100 million and got $342,000. the christie office is disputing everything she says and says that they are in line to get $70 million. some reporting i have seen says that's money from insurance companies to homeowners, not the federal money that chris christie fought so hard to get a

year ago. >> he is such a national figure. he has been on the short list for a possible presidential candidacy. he is even in florida this weekend raising money for fellow republicans. how does this play? how do his supporters think about another alleged scandal after another? >> they're worried. his brother was on facebook this morning echoing what his press secretary said yesterday. this is democratic partisan game play i playing and the media is playing into it. they are really concerned. and i think the second front as much as it's just politics as usual we're not going to give you this unless you do that, it doesn't look good because it plays into this notion that.

>> this is supposed to be a victory lap heading into his inauguration but instead he has to defend himself about this. is his popularity in new jersey suffering? >> not according to the polls. but i think everything about chris christie is hanging in the balance here. depending on when this plays out. there are some who think he's toast already as a presidential candidate. i don't. i think he can explain -- awareness of the bridge lane closures does not rise too far above where it is right now, i think he can ride this out and there are some who think he's looking strong and firm and tough in dealing with a crisis. if that rises further or if other mayors start coming out of the wood work saying he punished me in this fashion and me in

this fashion, this could all be the end of chris christie's national ambition. >> tonight fighting back against malicious hackers. it's a topic in the news because of attacks against target. attacks that might have been more extensive than we currently know. some believe the best way to fight back is to use the same techniques the bad guys use against them. these officials are now enlisting a talented group of students to help in the fight. news hour correspondent reports from pittsburgh. it first aired last october. >> the bad guys stole more than 3 million social security numbers from the state of south carolina, as many as 70 million

credit card numbers from sony play station. they got access to all of the personal details of some customers of a nationwide lending firm but cyber thiefs are not just looking to steal credit card numbers. they are looking for other valuable information. >> everything about your business is accessible to an attacker. >> stewart is a former general council of the nsa who is now a computer security consultant. >> they can steal your designs, steal your know-how. they can steal your customer list and your internal analysis of what the biggest problems are in your product. it is pretty scary. >> the bad guys are mostly working for china and former soviet states. they are well trained. some of them are protected by or working for their governments so they don't care about getting caught and they might be able to do even more than steal information from businesses. security experts worry that they

could cripple the banking system or shut down parts of the electric grid. they say american businesses need a new mind set. >> i'm a big believer that the best defense is an offense. if we're going to have an offense, we have got to have people who are really talented drawn to that field. >> people like these undergraduates who just might be able to save america's corporations and governments from the bad guy hackers. they are students at one of the nation's top computer science schools and they're learning to fight off the bad guys by thinking the same way they do. they're learning to be the good guy hackers. >> you have to understand and be able to anticipate how attackers are going to come at you. if you don't look at offense at all and you're always reacting, you're always one step behind. >> is that a change in the way that they have approached this? >> traditionally, yeah.

there has not been a lot of expertise and it has not been taught at the university level. >> what an attacker wants to do is run a show. >> it's tough stuff to teach because the brand new cutting edge cyber attack of today will be available to anyone with a web brouser by next week. >> we don't have text books. everything is so new we have to go out and look at websites and the latest things from conferences and teach from that. every year it's a significant update. >> is it ever the case that you actually have a student discover something that nobody knew about in the middle of the semester? >> that's actually a course requirement. one of the things we ask for is go out and find a vulnerability, find out if it's exploitable and report it ethically. >> they are seeing if they can break into someone's computer and tell the programmer here is a flaw. fix it. >> all of the flaws that they

find don't necessarily mean that the software on your pc is badly written. almost every machine, every piece of software has vulnerabilities that can be exploited from outside. when a machine is connected to the internet, it's almost impossible to make it perfectly secure. what's more compared to 10 or 20 years ago, there are just so many more computers and tablets and smart phones. all of them connected and all of them vulnerable, which means we're vulnerable, too. >> students are so good that the nsa enlisted them to create a game to teach anti-hacking skills to high school students. this is home to the top ranked competitive hacking team in the world, the plaid parliament of poning. that is hacker speak for own.

for the third straight year the team won top honors at international contests that pit teams against one another and demolished the competition in las vegas. >> it's like a cyber war that is going on. >> how stiff is the competition here? who is -- who is on your heels in terms of the top ten rankings? >> who is not? there is all sorts of government contractors that have teams that we compete with. they do this professionally. >> it was originally meant as praise. the students say -- >> we don't think of it as a bad thing. we think of it as getting a deeper understanding for how

something works in order to make it do something that maybe it was not intended to do but is capable of. >> as young high school students they started goofing around with electronics or computers and figuring out how to do simple attacks and how to get inside of a machine. >> andrew is a investigative reporter who has written dozens of articles about hackers and cyber security. >> they make the decision am i going to be a good or bad hacker and there's not that much difference between them in terms of their abilities but huge difference in motivations. >> that raises the question of how wise it is to teach these abilities to students barely out of their teens with unknown motivations. a graduate student says not to worry. >> if you're figuring out how to attack things, is it possible that somebody who comes out of here isn't going to do it for the right reasons? >> if that person is motivated

they can find it out on their own. this is not hidden information. a person can take normal courses and add the how am i going to ruin the world mind set to it. it's the same way a lock smith who knows how to fix locks can break into them. >> sometimes it makes sense for a company that has been the target to engage in a little digital breaking and entering of its own. to hack back. he thinks it could be an important weapon in the cyber security arsenal. it is not always so clear cut because it can violate federal security laws. >> i have been making it very public argument that we should allow this. >> what if this is outside the u.s.? is that still a violation in the act? >> good guy hackers who have hacked back have learned that

cyber criminals are not always as clever as they seem to be. take the example of a hacker who broke into law enforcement computers, copied personal information about officers and posted it online. he also left a provocative picture of his girlfriend as a calling card, which turned out to be a mistake. >> they took the picture with an iphone. and that meant that somebody had hopefully included the geographic coordinates where the picture was taken. so the fbi finds the girlfriend of the hacker and went and bu busted the guy. >> the hacker pleaded guilty. received a sentence of 27 months in prison. stewart baker says that's the kind of outcome he would like to see from good guy hackers like the students here.

>> here are the student hackers who make up the plaid parliament of poning. >> we want to return now to the battle being waged against al qaeda forces. for more we are joined now via skype. i know it's about 60 miles away. what's the scene in those areas now? >> well, in talking to people on the ground today, what we are hearing this morning is ramadi, the provincial capital was put on lock down. people were told not to leave their homes. and a large assault was launched to retake pockets of the city that are still under control of rebel groups. and fighters affiliated wi ed we

local al qaeda affiliate. most of ramadi already was under control of pro government tribesmen, so some pockets were out of their control. so this is a large offensive backed by helicopters trying to regain their city. >> these are mostly sunni tribesmen? >> reporter: yes. it is a largely sunni province. iraq is largely shia, but this province is largely sunni. not naturally pro government. the tribesmen have been leading protests against the government for the past year or so. and, but, when al qaeda came into the city and took control, i see the government as possibly the lesser of two evils.

so they have been almost forced to side with the government to rid their towns of these militants. >> so you said helicopters. are we talking full guns? machine guns on the ground working with the tribesmen as well? >> the army is very much staying out of it. the army is seen by a lot of the tribe as being as sectarian force, quite inflam tory for the army to go in and try to take these towns. the tribesmen are the ones doing the fighting but they are backed up by air power with the military. the iraqi military took delivery of some russian helicopters. >> is maliki ruling out an all out assault? >> ramadi is looking very much under control and the tribesmen

i talked to said that the offensive has been quite successful and they are claiming that the city is now entirely back in their control. fallujah is another completely different question. there we really haven't seen any real engagement to the center of fallujah being militant. there has been pockets of fighting on the outside. but there, maliki, yes, has ruled out the army going in. at the moment, he is saying he is leading up the tribes to rid the town of these militants, but, at the moment, they're not actually engaging. militarily it's very much negotiations. >> uh-huh. >> all right. thank you for joining us via

skype from baghdad. >> this is pbs newshouse weekend sunday. tuesday at 9:00 p.m., the 28th season of american masters premiers with a never before seen directors cut. here is an excerpt of the author's experience during world war 2. >> part of the counter intelligence core whose job it was to interview enemy prisoners. >> >> young guys in squads being asked to attack a village. they wanted to know every single thing they could possibly know. where the ally ways were, where the avenues of fire were. men, their job was to provide information that would have kept more of those guys alive.

>> he had a lot of latitude to move behind and near the enemy lines to understand the culture and the people and to understand what war did to the local people. it was a more intellectual probing war for him than the average grunt. >> my dad was actually 21 when he met mr. salinger. >> the four gentlemen you see here, they refer to each other as the four muskateers. there is really a bond. my dad used to comment that they would say there is no time for us to do anything because we had to stop to sit by the roadside working on short stories or his fofl. my father took the only photo

that anybody has ever seen of the writing of "catcher in the rye." >> joining us on air and online, we will report on the discovery of a speech the late civil right s.

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>> buddhism is one of the most ancient belief systems in the world. >> buddhism is both a religion and a philosophy. only your own understanding saves you from suffering. >> it is practiced by over 350 million people today. >> there are many people who feel attracted to a religion which empowers the human individual. >> i'm going to travel to 7 wonders of the buddhist world, 7 wonders that give an insight to the long and rich history of buddhism. at each location, i'll meet buddhists who will help me to understand a different concept that forms