up in the low to show where you'll get the real headlines with none of the mercy if you live in washington d.c. now is the u.s. getting involved in libya or not as lawmakers in libyan rebels asked for response from the u.s. the reports show that they could be looking to saudi arabia to play the middleman so we'll have details on what that would mean and who said anything about being transparent even though then president elect obama promised to run a transparent and open government his latest battle to bring down leakers seems to

be promoting another message so should those leakers fear what the government might do to them and a new update on the hacker who is taking on sony after a court ruling anybody who obtained information on how to hack the playstation three is now going to have their ip addresses sent directly to sony so we're going to bring you all the latest on this attack on your privacy and it's a new face to the american dream thought of the days of owning a home with a white picket fence it's now replaced by people forced to pay rent on the after month year after year so we'll take a closer look at the new housing market and the dying roles of fannie mae and freddie mac. and some states are pushing for new regulations on voters details on what some voters are now going to have to show in the upcoming elections and i will ask if this is a sign of a republican war on voters in america we'll get to the bottom of that issue and a lot more in tonight's show but first let's move on to our top story. libya's future remains up in the air as violence and unrest persist and as pressure for

some kind of u.s. reaction is ratcheted up rebel leaders continue to ask for assistance in the form of weapons or a no fly zone and just yesterday three u.s. senators voiced their support for a more aggressive action by obama as well but save the independent reported the washington has made a highly classified request to saudi arabia to supply weapons to the rebels in benghazi so the u.s. doesn't have to get directly involved so we have repeated calls. military intervention american weapons to potentially be sold by saudis who are facing their own shia protests and no clear sign that copy can actually be defeated welcome possibly here to discuss with me is michael breen vice president of the truman national security project michael thanks so much for being here and so much for having me it's hard to figure out where to begin here there are so many variables but i want to start with this report came out from the independent they were they said that supposedly there's a seeker request from inside washington to have saudi arabia supply weapons to the

libyans what do you think about it and there's truth to it i'm not really a position to know whether there's truth but personally i'd be surprised to learn that there is i would be surprised if we asked and also be surprised if the saudis said yes but as you say the saudis are in pelican position of their own and becoming involved in a world in the situation in libya may not be directly in their interest i also wonder whether it's in our interest to be using you to review my persona as an interlocutor in something like this but i usually we're kind of comfortable with using the third eye because for everything that doesn't really stop this in the past i mean i think that the idea here would be that well if it happens then we don't have to intervene let's say that these arms do get into the hands of the rebels and they do bring down coffee then that everyone's happy and no one can say you know we hate america at the end of it but i mean of course the world is a little bit more complicated and all that and so you know as i said in the show he said i think he's on their own side that they've got to deal with. we have on our side we have a serial use the saudis for everything i don't think that's

a fair characterization of how we do it and i don't think everything is going to say we're pretty comfortable in dealing with them i think sure. what i want to ask you know of course there's all this talk. of what could happen or perhaps a no fly zone some other type of intervention and at this point it doesn't really seem like even though you know we felt like we were watching the situation unfold in a matter of days and weeks and it looks like really the living forces were encroaching upon khadafy he's still hanging on so one. happens if they don't get ready for what happens of could off he stays in power and now we have barack obama who's already come out and said you must step down right and i think one would think that really important number here is that it's not just barack obama is set up for him to step down i think the international community has been very clear it often has to stand down and that means that this is an issue in large part for the international community of course the united states mislead but any military response that we might even imagine including a no fly zone in libya involves you know becoming embroiled in

a conflict that may lead to an end to a long civil war may be over very quickly i hope it is. but that's in some ways the easy part if gadhafi leaves by force of arms or voluntarily hopefully he still managed to leave his country in a state where it has no civil society he spent the last several decades eliminating i'll concede it was position and it will take some time for libya to stand up on its own feet and it will need help from the international community so if we're going to become involved on the front end of this thing i think we need to be very clear that it has to be an international effort we have to have commitments up front and that you know if the europeans if you know some international force commits to entering libya they're going to be there for some time in a capacity building way and it's going to be expensive it's going to be a protracted commitment the last thing we need to do is go in recklessly and then find ourselves stuck not having for seamless in advance of not having made the kind of commitments that we need to make i get we have ip i think the obama

administration is taking their time is thinking about it clearly we see the military and secretary defense robert gates saying the same things like you guys hold up you know this is a military operation but then at the same time we have john kerry who was on t.v. yesterday saying no it's not a military operation it's just a no fly zone and even senator john mccain went on the airwaves yesterday and he keeps calling for this to even have a clip of him. right. i want to focus just for a second i could on the no fly zone what that means is we want to prevent khadafi from using his helicopters and airplanes from killing the dns and i think we can do it and i think we should do it. now people like john mccain are saying that the obama administration isn't being aggressive enough but when it comes to john mccain pacifically i mean is he still just better that he lost the election alliance to criticize everything obama does or does this actually think that bombing everyone

all over the world is a good idea and the last thing i want to do is question john mccain's motivations on this point i mean certainly entitled to his view and as you know he's a highly decorated eve year himself. but on the point of the no fly zone i think unfortunately it's just not that simple secretary gates is quite right that instituting a no fly zone means taking out libya's air defense capabilities in order to do it safely in order to fly aircraft around over libya you have to make sure that the libyans are in a position to shoot those aircraft down that involves an attack on libyan air defense system so it is a north korea action the other more important question in some ways is what we do then the primary. problem of the opposition has from a military standpoint is not opposing air power the libyan air force is not something that it's not a serious threat and granted the bomb is bad but the opposition is up against infantry heavy ground force their biggest problem is regime loyalists with a k forty seven pts. so now if we do this no fly zone situation we find ourselves in

a position where neither we are craft international community or craft american aircraft or we're going to go over the battle scene and what happens if it goes badly for the rebels i also want to you know it's a counter to go on top of that point also very quickly we've heard from cannot be which of course there is no proof to it al qaeda is in the middle of this and they're feeding hallucinatory pills to the young people and that's making them protest but at the same time hillary clinton did express concern there i'm sure al qaeda would love to jump on top of this situation if gadhafi does get taken out you know we look at west point study and they say that when it comes to the militants the majority of them came from libya only second to saudi arabia especially if we look at iraq so how big of a threat is that it's hard to assess what's going on on the ground without good intelligence but i do think there's a legitimate concern there. opposing. serial human rights abuse or like could offer you is a wonderful thing to do but there are a lot of motivations going on i mean it often is clearly nuts when he says that al qaeda is sleeping pills into their nescafe at night or whatever it was and so i let

you nescafe and of course i mean it's good stuff but the drugs and the mask affair don't think it's at the root of this thing but there are real questions asked about who exactly are the opposition and look we know that i am i can i thank you very much for joining us tonight thank you. ok so it's time for show and tell on tonight's program now last time we wanted to know if you thought that a no fly zone should be implemented in libya and we got quite a few responses from our audience so here's what some of you had to say sharon gomes thinks that it should be implemented saying it should have already been done gavin irvine reply and off he will do what he wants with weapons that we sold him and thinks of the no fly zone wouldn't work he's saying he says i think a no fly zone would only aid the opposition and the people would suffer further i

don't want any intervention over there the people know what's good for them on twitter we heard from miles lacey he said a no fly zone will not stop gadhafi when he can slaughter his people with machine guns and artillery no fly zone equals that claim tolls least we did robert gates has pointed out that a no fly zone means declaring war we can't continue to interfere like we own the world and lastly we heard from it's a wrap on the no fly zone and he said not by us a nato and not without u.n. that can't but a crack more of regime forces with nonviolent means like an information campaign etc now as always we thank you for your responses and here's our next question for you at home in front secretary robert gates made a surprise visit to afghanistan where not only met with president hamid karzai and address the issue us a vision civilian casualties in recent weeks but he also addressed the troop withdrawal saying that some troops are going to stay in the country after the original twenty fourteen deadline so with all of these issues the u.s.

is facing in afghanistan we want to know what you think is the time for the u.s. to leave or should we stick it out and rebuild you can respond to us on facebook twitter and you to. just ahead targeting a leakers and i will take a look at the obama administration's record on filing criminal charges against those suspected of leaking national secrets politico's josh gerstein joins us in just a moment and so he versus a p s three hacker the drama over the case takes another twist and for one that could set a dangerous precedent for the discuss it has been is a return to. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through. who can you trust no one who is your view with the global machinery see where are we heading state controlled capitalism is called session so when nobody dares to ask we do our t.

question morning.

hey guys welcome to show in tell me alone a show we've heard our guests not to say on the topic now i want to hear our audience just go on to you tube the video response or the twitter for part of the question that we've posted on you tube every monday and on thursday to show your responses. later your voice be heard. now we've spoken in depth on this program about the effort to ban sharia law here in the u.s. despite the fact that serialize already not recognized in the u.s. it's a problem that doesn't exist and that hasn't stopped conservative lawmakers around the country from introducing bills to ban sharia law and the latest state to jump on this bandwagon as alabama the bill's sponsor says the ban is designated you are designed to protect future generations from the erosion of the constitution despite

the fact that there's no record of any muslims trying to have islamic law recognized in alabama courts but who cares about the facts right certainly not state senator gerald allen who isn't buying it he's the solo sponsor of as the sixty two a bill that would ban alabama courts from using sharia law or international law making legal decisions but there's something very fishy about his bill and tonight we want to show you what doesn't seem to fit the in the bill it defines therea as a form of religious law derived from two primary sources of islamic law the divine revelation set forth in the koran and the example set by the islamic prophet muhammad and when reporters now begin looking at this bill they did a little bit of digging and what they found was pretty interesting if you google shari'a law you'll find nearly the exact same definition on one very popular website so here's their definition most muslims believe shari'a is derived from two primary sources of islamic law the divine revelation set forth in the koran and the

example set by the islamic prophet muhammad in the sooner i'll guess which popular website you can find this definition here's. clue the words that we highlighted also have a web page on this same site we get pedia site where anybody can post just about anything so that states. really copy the definition of his bill legal language off of wikipedia and he says that the wording was drafted by legislative staff but a source on his staff told the ennis and start of the definition was in fact pulled from wikipedia and when asked to define shari'a law senator gerald allen couldn't because he said he didn't have his notes in front of him talk about incompetent sounds like senator gerald allen and his staff are really doing a bang up job for the people of alabama working on fighting threats that don't exist and basing legal language off of wiki pedia just what the taxpayers need. now do you remember when the obama administration pledged to be the most

transparent in american history and what a promise unfortunately if you look at the situation from a legal perspective the administration's actions couldn't be more opposite from their stated promises at least when it comes to whistleblowers and will in the little more than two years that obama has been in office prosecutors have filed criminal charges in five separate cases involving unauthorized distribution of classified national security information to the media compare that to the fact that in the last forty years that only happened three times so three in forty years versus five into years that's quite a difference and i doesn't include the criminal case of the u.s. government is so desperately trying to build against wiki leaks founder julian assange launch so what's behind this hard line approach well joining me to discuss it is politico's josh gerstein josh thanks so much for joining us now not only did obama promised the most transparent administration but how much of a factor would you say that these bush era offenses that were uncovered thanks to

whistleblowers you know how much should have a role that they played in getting obama elected in the first place well the. significant push in that direction in the biggest leak of the last decade or so was probably the new york times report on the warrantless wiretapping program here in the united states which really contributed to a perception in some quarters that president bush was acting outside the law or was willing to go around the law in pursuing what he saw as the fight against terrorism and you know those kinds of perceptions and that sort of approach to that issue i think did help put some momentum behind president obama's presidential campaign now how much of this is the obama administration being perhaps overly zealous in the situation or you know how much of it is the fact that leaking has increased i guess you know with the. with websites like weekly leaks it's perhaps a little easier to get information out there right i mean it's hard to put your

finger on exactly what's causing this when you speak to experts about it they'll talk about several different reasons why there might be so many cases one is that the bush administration was really exercised as well about the issue of leaks but it takes a long time to build and prosecute these cases so some of the cases the obama administration is pursuing are actually left over from the bush era were actually indicted under president obama but stem from events that took place under president bush but you're also right that there are increasing concerns in the intelligence community about leaks going not just through the traditional media but through the new media and directly onto the internet you know it's much harder for officials to argue with somebody who's a random blogger or someone they don't even know or someone in another country than it is to argue with say a major newspaper like the new york times or the washington post so it's the kind of thing that really instills quite a bit of fear into the intelligence community is there a clear devil standard here because we see leaks coming from top level officials all the time that they might feed directly to the newspapers they might feed it to

people like bob woodward who writes an entire book based on a lot of classified material a lot of classified conversations and yet those people never seem to get honest. right there been very very few cases of that sort the only one that even comes close to that is probably president bush is a lewis libby who was not charged with leaking but with lying in the investigation into the revelation of the cia officer valerie plame the identity but generally speaking that's a very very very unusual i can't even name another case other than that one that came close to the white house generally speaking you're talking about information that is disclosed by lower level maybe up to mid ranking employees and as you say in books like woodward's book you see hundreds and hundreds upon thousands of classified details that he got from somewhere and apparently the way he does his work is largely from speaking to senior level officials we never hear about prosecution for things like that now some have said and you mentioned this in your

piece to use in the professor's there are other ways that the obama administration can go about that they don't necessarily have to bring it to to court to bring criminal charges against whistleblowers but what are the other options well as the primary options would be to fire the person involved these people are government employees and so if you tell them that they're fired or they've been stripped of their security clearances that can be a pretty significant sanction in and of itself sometimes it's enough to just tell the officials that investigators are on to them and figured out that they're leaking information that will generally shut things down as well but in the cases they've been brought in the last two years the administration has felt in the justice department itself that it was critical to send a message that leaking classified information a top national security secrets even if you do it to the media is on it will potentially by prison well they're definitely sending a strong message if you look at the case of bradley manning someone who's been held

its want to go for ten months has been held in solitary confinement who's now being forced to strip naked every single day and yet you know not that he has been convicted of any crime yet so how do you think that the general. really looks at this scenario do they do they you know look at the obama administration or realize that they went back on their word when it comes to an open and transparent administration or has the obama administration really painted whistleblowers as this evil that puts our national security at risk. well you know the obama administration would argue there's no inconsistency with pursuing people who illegally release classified information that if you know of some wrongdoing inside the government there are plenty of things you can do other than release the information publicly you can go to congress you can report through inspectors general the various agencies so there are plenty of avenues open to you so they would argue that it's not inconsistent with their transparency but not every case of leaking is whistle blowing sometimes people are pursuing a personal agenda or trying to advance some sort of

a national security issue that they may consider important that perhaps the administration doesn't consider as a war so there are definitely two sets of perspectives here the administrations and those that advocate on behalf of. our josh want to thank you very much for joining us and that's definitely a topic that we'll keep on watching we'll see how many more of these criminal charges the obama administration might file in their next two years and beyond thanks thank you. now a few weeks back we interviewed george hotz on this program he's the now famous hacker who is in world in a legal battle with sony for jailbreaking the playstation three and then publishing a b. in christian key and software tools on his website for anyone out there to access now whatever you think of hans and his hacking this next update on the case you should pay attention to a federal magistrate has granted sony the right to acquire the ip addresses of anybody who's visited hogs his website from january two thousand and nine to the present that you get i mean anybody out there who access this site whether they

used his encryption key or not are now going to have their ip addresses other personal information given over to sony i'd say that that's a privacy issue you're discussing with me an associate director of technology studies at the competitive enterprise institute thanks so much for joining us tonight what do you say do you think this is a troubling ruling i mean you know i was a journalist for a while and look at this in a very troubling way because that means that if i was doing research if i was out there looking at george hans's website before i wanted to interview him my ip address is now going to be handed over and what about anyone who is just generally carious now that's been criminalized as well. it looks based on the decision issued by the judge that there is a risk that anonymity which is a very important value the courts of long recognize to be played by the first amendment made the butt heads increasingly in the digital age in the case of lawsuits such as in this case a copyright from the lawsuit so i think it's a danger to our privacy it is

a danger to our privacy when judges are issuing these subpoenas that involve identifiable user information we're talking about things like your ip address or even your user name both of which can be fairly easily tied back to many cases the frustration here is that the judge didn't take seriously the are you advance by the electronic frontier foundation which filed a brief in the case they argued that because the only real reason for the court to need the ip addresses was to establish jurisdiction that the subpoena of the core here was just too broad that a narrower subpoena focusing on non-identical have the information would be more appropriate and i think that's what the court should have done and how there were there other subpoenas issued also in this case and charge hans it wasn't just anybody who visited its website but also his twitter information you tube google also were given subpoenas correct you to google twitter and a couple of other services all receive court orders looking for information and

we're talking about this guy's information being handed over by for example twitter i think it's fair for there to be a court order george hotz while i think what he did probably should be illegal may well have violated the one thousand nine hundred eighty two digital millennium copyright act he may be liable to a sony so i understand why they are seeking these records the fear here is when you start to go beyond just what he said and what people said to him but also who was looking at his videos who was commenting on his blog that's where the troubling aspect of privacy and free speech come into play now to saudi saying here as to why they need the information of anybody who looked at his blog are saying that it's a matter of jurisdiction that's one of two reasons there are going. jurisdiction is that the case should be heard by a court a federal court in northern california whereas george hotz wants it to be heard in new jersey but the reason why so many things northern california is better is because back or has long been friendlier and copyright infringement cases like this one where as george hotz is based in new jersey that's where he lives so he wanted

to be heard there the reason why you want these ip addresses is so we can demonstrate to a judge that folks who are accessing this allegedly illegal content were physically located but california the second reason they want it is because they don't figure out if george hotz violated a temporary restraining order that a court issued back in january of this year they're trying to find out whether even after he was ordered to stop distributing the. the how to video on g.p.s. your job breaking whether or not he would still do it but to figure that out you don't need identifying information you could do that you could get access that information with a far less revealing subpoena that sounds like this is about your child it's not every single person that visited his site but you know you mentioned whether we're not sure whether what he did is really wrong or not in charge hans has now become famous because he was the first person to successfully jailbreak i phone and that now by the courts has been proven to be legal so what makes it so different when you're jailbreaking a video game console. under the law that i mentioned in ninety eight generally

speaking unless there's a split decision otherwise by the copyright office any device designed to circumvent copy protection is a waffle the thing with george hotz in his case is that he wasn't trying to facilitate piracy he wasn't trying to make it easy for people to run pirate software he just wanted to run whole groups software things like the linux operating system on a sony has three that you lawfully purchased but i don't think that should be a crime if he's infringing on their rights if he's somehow stopping publishers from making money that's one thing but so far to my knowledge sony hasn't brought any evidence that he was doing something with you and of violating their copyrights which is why i think he shouldn't be. charges it's also why i think calder should revisit this and ensure that folks who are just trying to reverse engineer their own devices i'm going to be liable under these copyright suits for potentially huge damages now here is that you know we interviewed him a couple weeks ago here on the program and he was telling me that he is in

christian code and this is where you're going to help me out because he goes about my had also didn't allow for people to use pirated games or whatever on their p s three because that's not something that he believes and so does sony actually having proof that someone did go ahead and do that but we do know that people are using. the information the few choir and the tools that he discovered to pirate games now others have been involved in this in general when piracy on a device is discovered it's the process of work by a lot of different folks so it wasn't just george hotz he built a work of others o's built on his work there's no doubt that what he did was very instrumental in this process but if people party games that's not his fault unless he's selling this software to people with the intent of making it so they can pirate which is as far as i know he's up on breaking the law so he wants to go after the people who are using this for pirated games that's one thing if you want to go after the people who are uploading pirated games to bittorrent but it's also i think a legitimate case for going after these hackers were just trying to run their own

devices is something that should not be illegal and shouldn't be the basis for civil action i want to sound like he started quite a chain of events and sony here i mean they've also made statements like they want to take from being christian code off the internet entirely and wipe it clean which as you just can't do that is not how to get a network so i think they're being a little overreaching hair thank you so much for joining us thank you now still to come tonight a grumpy old senator makes a return to our jewel time segments are not a moment and most americans dream of owning their own home and can dream dying for the middle class and the last last question as soon as we reach. let's make sure that we work hard work. i think. either.