well. it's technology innovation all the latest developments from around russia. welcome to the lower show where we get the real headlines with none of the mercy to be live in washington d.c. now tonight we take a look at figures that show us that we're spending more on our nuclear arsenal today than we did at the height of the cold war also take a look at the arms sales in the works as part of the effort heated up effort to surround a run out of weinstein is going to join us for that one then yesterday there were two deaths at different occupy camps one suicide one violence shooting which had nothing to do with occupiers but police in oakland are already using the tragedy to signal they'll be kicking the protesters out so will the occupy movement be lost

under the shadow of violence and a federal judge ruled yesterday that twitter will have to hand over personal account information on three people associated with wiki leaks we're going to talk about what that means for wiki leaks but even more importantly what it means for everyone's privacy on the web and more if you tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. well today is veterans day they remember and honor those that have served this country and so today the mainstream media did just that in between of course stories about herman cain and joe paterno. as we celebrate those are concrete veterans day president obama is expected to arrive at the two of you for veterans day many americans are focused on remembering the troops who've lost their lives in war but one woman is spending her energy helping the widows get past their grief

a gold star mother are vowing it never to forget honoring the son she lost in two thousand and two while he was serving in the u.s. navy hundreds of thousands of veterans are out of work and you look at the unemployment rate for veterans who left the military after two thousand and one that rate is at twelve point one percent that's more than. i know let me start with saying that i think it's wonderful it's about damn time that the mainstream media remember the people who are losing their lives every day fighting in wars waged by our politicians and paid for by our tax dollars and their families and friends as suffer along side those that have made the greatest sacrifices and also thrilled that they remember the veterans returning from wars abroad have a higher unemployment rate than the general population is of course aside from the fact that many are injured or psychologically traumatized but it really just kills me how the mainstream media plays this game on this one day it matters not the rest of the time and yeah you've heard me rail about this before the fact that last year only four percent of coverage was devoted to the war in afghanistan and if you

think that's bad you know that better unemployment better in suicides p.t.s.d. drug addictions cancers lung conditions those probably don't even make a blip on the graph but worst of all as the mainstream media has given up one of its primary responsibilities and in my mind that's asking why we're at war asking why we have a hundred thousand troops in afghanistan why we have an uncountably out of military bases around the world and why are divided congress can always come together when it comes to approving more war spending what happens to our veterans are consequences of actions actions decided on by the government and the media is supposed to be the government watchdog is supposed to analyze ask questions bring to light lies in consistencies and hypocrisy there's a lot of got to be found in our foreign policy so good for them for talking to mothers and wives of fallen soldiers for posting figures on the consequences the unemployment rate the casualties but you're right brain injuries on this one veteran's day but shame on them for missing it all on any day but this.

and since the i.a.e.a. released its report on iran's nuclear ambitions this week the rhetoric for a response in the form of sanctions or even a military attack has heated up now sources are saying that as part of the u.s. plan to expand its military operations in the persian gulf being kicked out post being kicked out of iraq the government may soon announce plans for a large scale large sale of precision guided bombs can the united arab emirates so i was seeing a real wake and arms race form let's not forget the earlier this week we brought you a report from mother jones exposing that the u.s. currently spends more on its nuclear arsenal than it did at the height of the cold war or as during the cold war the u.s. spends on average thirty five billion a year that number today is estimated to be at fifty five billion a year so why on earth do we still need to spend so much money on nukes at a time of economic uncertainty and during a global push for nonproliferation and what are the iran war hawks have to do with

it joining me to discuss it and weinstein national security reporter for mother jones adam thanks so much for joining us tonight and as i mentioned earlier this week we highlighted your report on the show we had a lot of questions from viewers when it came to the finding the fact that we used to spend thirty five billion now it's fifty five billion is that inflation adjusted . yes that is inflation adjusted alone and that's the question that we got as well and those are actually i believe ninety ninety six dollars there but it's going to arms control association reports. just being able to track down these budgets is so difficult because it's spread out across a number of agencies and also a lot of really good information is classified so there's a lot of guesswork it's a goal in some of these are estimates but this is our best guess just based on what we can find it's transparent an open source. right to tell me this we just signed a new start treaty with russia agreed to bring new their arsenal down to fifteen

hundred warheads there is a global push global zero right for nonproliferation around the world why on earth i was still spending so much money on this arsenal. well the interesting thing alone is that it doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with strategy and it's got to do a lot with stakeholders domestically in the united states people who have a lot to gain from keeping the nuclear weapons program large we have several national laboratories that are kind of the beneficiaries of us large jess and they have political benefactors on capitol hill there's a couple of mostly conservative senators and congressmen who are going to make this a pet project of theirs and nuclear weapons bases the. submarines the silos the armor planes they're all over the united states and there are great court projects that have so you're saying much in the same way that we see defense contractors try to play from our weapons systems there are also people that are profiting off of keeping our nuclear arsenal large. it does seem like there's

there's a lot of financial tail wagging the dog involved in this situation absolutely alone the interesting thing is there's also been a give and take care part of the reason the administration could move forward with new start and with its goals towards disarmament was by basically giving congressman some agreements to modernize quote unquote the arsenal that does exist and of course a lot of modernization measures that they're looking at changing the rangers of these weapons changing the nuclear explosive force of these weapons could fundamentally alter the weapons and the technology that we need in order to do that stuff have been used to build more weapons i suspect look at this from a from a war hawks first package right they say that we need to modernize our nuclear arsenal because you never know what might happen in the future but is this i mean is it iran that comes into play here in the meantime they're still dorking on of they don't have one or is it more of a cold war type of way to look at it in terms of russia's arsenal or perhaps even

you know now looking ahead over to china. oh well yes little world i think a lot of it isn't even sort of stirred she jake i think a lot of the interest that you see that actually make the nuclear weapons complex run are very monday in and at the local level they're very financially oriented now having said that you will hear a lot of rhetoric emanating from the house and from the senate again mostly from conservative hawks senator jon kyl's one of the coming here and the chairman of the house armed services committee is another who are sort of courting thing to the pacific rim going to china as a major threat you know the interesting thing i do want to mention is just last week a british american security information council released another report that most of these nuclear powers china russia even france are kind of digging in their heels and slowing down their own disarmament efforts largely out of concern about u.s. nuclear weapons complex and what we're doing so if you're really concerned about china you might want to ask why are we kind of reconstituting these these abilities

to build more bombs now you know just like you said it's really hard to even go out and find the figures as to how much is being spent every single year so this is something that in my mind goes pretty much under the radar how do you think that americans would feel right now when they're being told that their costs are just going to have to come to certain social programs that they depend on if they were to hear that we're still spending so much money on our nuclear weapons. well you know i think the american people generally are feeling very confused about a lot of these issues right now it's just there are so many numbers flying back and forth a lot of congressmen are trying to obviously and throw different numbers back and say well nuclear weapons can cost this much they cost that much they're also trying to sort of protect the defense budget in general from cars and making a hawkish argument for that and i think the american people just sort of rough feeling bro you've told us for so long something needs to be cut and we're actually pulling out of iraq we're drawing down in afghanistan why is there

a military buildup how do you justify that and i think that is a dialogue it's just really starting in the united states you can see it sort of and i'm curious to hear what your take is on the post and rock military buildup for military expansion when everyone a college attention we're being kicked out of iraq and i've been reported that we're going to continue to try to spread our wings when it comes to other nations not an area that we can send more troops to kuwait now there is this talk of perhaps another weapon sales to the united arab emirates but what's your take on that. well there's a lot going on there alone on many different things at once the first thing full disclosure i used to be a contractor in iraq sort of turned away from that business after seeing some of the things that i saw over there and you can our presence in iraq is decreasing and militarily but a lot of that military presence is being replaced by contractors was just recently reported by the washington post now the arms transfers the u.s. need to suit something that we've always sort of done in the region to sort of yourself are a proxy partners there saudi arabia was one for the longest time you

a i think is also seen as more politically stable and more agreeable to us at the moment as there's no doubt that who graduated in the white house today tomorrow next year five years from now a republican or democrat they have a strong interest in seeing u.s. presidents and u.s. objectives achieved in the middle east and certainly these sorts of proxy deals and maintaining a presence of business and some military is in their interest. now i have to ask you because so much of the rhetoric as i mentioned at the beginning of this interview has been heating up in regards to iran and a lot of this posturing in terms of you know spreading out post iraq is to surround iran at the same time after that i report came out we've heard a lot of people calling for a military attack even mitt romney stepping in on this and this somebody who's been in our war zones you know we even have secretary of defense leon panetta former secretary. robert gates commenting it this is dangerous this could have

a lot of consequences for somebody who's been in north highlands how does that make you feel when you hear these people talking about it. well i think i wanted to mount a clever when you look at what sort of another what secretary gates and most recently . what the are really the international community is doing with respect to iran right now this is just state craft kind of taking its course i think you're going to see sort of a concerted effort and i think what we've already seen out of the obama administration is an unwillingness to go to law no matter what happens with iran and a military strike or a person strike or some kind of forceful sanctions may be on the cards there whatever happens i think there is a general will among the u.s. public and among this administration the u.s. is not going to do this alone which also sort of explains those arms transfers that you are talking about we like to have some allies in the region but you know i think that this is a huge political football we're going into an election year or you've got a couple of republicans and let's face it mitt romney is always being criticized

for not being conservative now if he's going to make his bones somehow taking on iran as you great way to do it but it just baffles me because i do it from my perspective it seems like the best way to really honor veterans and those that are fight for this country is to try to keep them out of the war war rather than have that kind of tough talk. well it's certainly interesting now that you mention a lot of that we don't see any real veterans with a great deal of military experience kind of emerging in the republican field for president you know you don't see a whole lot of people who are speaking from experience there you see a lot of people who we might have referred to or a few years ago in st bernard's you're seeing a whole lot of people who are claiming to speak for the better and not really a whole lot of people who have a great deal of empathy or understanding with better and really it was doing now and it's definitely an important thing to bring up and i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight on this. thanks

a lot of happy veterans thank you. now sort of contact the white house to lay the decision on the keystone pipeline project but there's a lot of the time to win environmental votes and then green light the project after the election and there's violence here occupy wall street protests across the country being used to smear and of its image that will cover interest. was . the police could. test nobody seems to know. the face of the argument that they're being overly dramatic.

you know some closure see a story and it seems so. think you understand it and then something else and here's some other part of it and realize that everything is. hard work is a big issue. after

tens of thousands fled into washington d.c. over the past several months in protest the obama administration has delayed its decision regarding the construction of the keystone x.l.

pipeline and ultimately the administration's decision regarding the seven billion dollar trans canada project came down to environmental concerns about its route specifically going through parts of nebraska because one of the states that would host the seven hundred mile pipeline which would go through the sandhills treasure the region of the cornhusker state and national environmental organizations alarmed about the carbon footprint of oil from the tar sands joined with a basket from nebraska farmers who worried how possible oil spill would affect their land crops and livestock so the obama administration delayed their decision and a president released this saying he said because of this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the american people we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood now yes delaying the decision is a step in the right direction but is this actually going to kill the pipeline project altogether depends on who you ask out there something to this delay to force trance can lead to scrap the idea completely and for

a market for environmentalists that is the ultimate goal but then labor unions are feeling quite differently a lot of large unions showed support for this project and are upset because any delay obviously means they won't be hiring now despite arguments on both sides of the issue this delay couldn't be better news for president obama himself let's not forget the state department found himself in trouble when word got out during the department's review and it hired a contractor who was buddy buddy with trans canada so as you can imagine that prompted a conflict of interest accusations that he was also stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to keep his a wealthy environmental supporters and. pain donors on his side while still trying to appease those who want jobs and the oil industry that wants this pipeline real that so a lot of people are wondering which base he would have banned it and i guess with his delay he conveniently isn't going to have to worry about it at least until after the next presidential election so stuck in a bind this sweep it under the rug slick move obama and the environment just happen to luck out this time too. and yesterday two people were killed at or near

occupy camps in unrelated incidents the first was an occupy burlington where thirty five year old veteran shot himself a psych it happened outside of a bart station exit and frank ogawa plaza where the victim was shot in the head now and neither of these cases did the occupation have anything to do with the deaths but that is going to stop the media and even more so city officials from painting it that way the oakland police officers association and oakland mayor jean quan have already signaled they think that it's time for the occupiers to leave so what exactly needs to happen to keep the message afloat instead of in the shadows of the violence joining me to discuss it is john joshua holland editor and senior writer at alter net dot org joshua thanks for coming back on the show tonight now if you can start by just telling us a little bit more about this shooting near the occupy oakland camp yesterday as i understand everybody said that they've never seen the guy before that this wasn't related to camp at all. yeah it's

a tragic that neither one this is the one hundred first murder in oakland this year three eyewitnesses told it at the site started on the street there were multiple assailants and they chased the eventual it down through the camp. and after they got to the far side of the camp they they killed him there were a number of members of occupy oakland that reportedly gathered around and tried to administer c.p.r. but unfortunately the young man you know there were a number of people out there last night who were saying that if this were not close in proximity to the camp it would have gotten a media attention one man said that there had been another young victim of the shooting death just catty corner to this incident and he said quote there were no news vans there were no helicopters overhead so i think that you know it's unfortunate that these incidents are being used as a premise to call for the dismantling of these camps when in fact these are social

problems that exist in oakland or the incident that you mention in any burlington of course you know veterans have a very high suicide rate these are tragedies that would happen with or without the occupation. tragedies that deserve a lot more media attention and not just an instance that's right but specifically when we talk about oakland do you think having a trial for a long time now since its beginning he think it was an attempt or perhaps. a good place for the police to try to deflect some of the attention and turn it back on to the protesters because they definitely getting a lot of flak we've seen a lot of police brutality and violent incidents over the last couple weeks. well i think that it is there is that there is a lot of politics at play here in oakland of course it's a very progressive community where jeanne one of the city and the police have taken a lot of criticism. from progressives and people who are sympathetic to the movement for the violence in these police actions but they've also been getting

a lot of resistance from their community from members of the community local businesses for letting the occupiers move back and frankly go up plaza all signs are that another crackdown is imminent. yesterday four members of the city council joined with the local chamber of commerce to demand that the protesters be removed posthaste and they threatened jean with a vote of no confidence if she didn't. go ahead and do just that so i do think that that's exactly what it is it's again a very useful premise. you know for those who seek to dismantle this well you know one of the arguments that they use here is that i think i can change those so the police officers can go back to doing what they're supposed to be doing right and that's stopping crime around the community and this tragic incident from yesterday is a perfect example for them but has anyone bothered to ask why they think that they need to come out in force and tactics and really worry about the protesters rather

than continuing on with their daily duties. well it's an interesting question i spoke with a police officer yesterday over the crime scene tape and he was saying that you know i asked him is there ever a sense that some lesser amount of force can be used to achieve these goals i specifically was talking about deployment of about two hundred fifty riot police to a fig forty. eight taking over and building in the middle of the night and i said you know is there is there any thought of those those forty people could have been approached the next day in the light of day where it didn't seem to occur to him what i've seen in oakland is a sense that you know the old saying is that if all you have is a hammer every thing in the world looks like a nail we've only seen massive deployments of very heavily armored riot police or a minimal police presence last night this happened during rush hour there were no

police in the square they took ten minutes to respond so i don't see how the presence of occupy oakland did anything to influenced police response to this particular incident now you've been writing a lot about the police response perhaps some cover ups or at least a lack of transparency when it comes to being really honest about what goes down and you also know that these tactics they've been using are actually against what's written in their manuals. that's right you couldn't believe. it was it was as part of a settlement of a two thousand and three class action suit that arose from an incident in which oakland police used wouldn't call its and chemical weapons on peaceful iraq war protesters protesters against the iraq war they had to come up with a set of guidelines and these guidelines are very specific they don't allow the use of tear gas unless of all other means of containing a crowd exhausted it you've seen them use it you know very very readily it doesn't

allow them to fire projectiles except in certain circumstances so we have seen them i think very clearly go off the oakland police department is also resisting request a public records request by the a.c.l.u. of northern california to release police reports about these uses of force so it's it's difficult for us to evaluate just what's going on because of that lack of transparency and as unfortunately once again here we are talking about police tactics and talking about violence and i feel like this is part of the problem is that all along these things take away from the message of. what it's trying to achieve and especially the way the cities are using these tragic events to try and smear the movement so what's the movie going to have to do to you know to stop that to keep it on message yeah i mean that's one of the i think we're good aspects of this whole story is that

a lot of people who are. going to feel exactly that same way feel that there's a small note there is a small number of people out there who are you know seeking confrontation with police and they feel like those people are undermining the message oakland and indeed last week we saw a very clear illustration of this when there was a really dramatic day of peaceful protests that shut down the port and then that was the. in the evening by tear gas and a lot of had their moments on the street the next day the media coverage was all about. you know that evening. craziness and not about rather inspiring. activism so you know i've spoken with activists out there who say that they are redoubling their efforts to police their own we've already seen a lot of efforts. to keep their own in line and i believe we will see more of

i want to thank you so much for joining us tonight letting us know what's going on over there help and thanks for. i will looks like facebook's questionable privacy practices might be catching up with them according to the wall street journal the federal trade commission is nearing a settlement with the wildly popular social networking site that would protect users information and under the settlement facebook could face privacy audits for the next twenty years and i didn't keep the site for making private information public without the users knowledge and if it did want to make any data public it would require permission for its little socially require the popular web site to create widespread in practices so let's say that you want to make a photo that you posted online only available for your friends to see when i deal with banned facebook from changing their settings and your photo is protected from anonymous eyes but the sound that was a long time coming two years to be exact back in two thousand and nine facebook made changes to its privacy settings letting privately label information be available to the public and they took away users options to go back and then make

that data private again so the social media company said that they made the changes to simplify settings excuse that made a lot of viewers our users excuse me angry myself being one of them because the move was clearly deceptive now as you can imagine users and consumer groups were outraged and that's when they took their anger to the f.t.c. basically god so much negative feedback from their sneaky methods that six months later they restored the ability to opt out of specific tools on the site and limited the amount of data that users had to make public but that was a small victory in the name of privacy f.t.c. has slowly been forcing the site to develop granular privacy controls where the user can pick and choose who sees what information and facebook isn't the only company that space scrutiny for its privacy practices you know that google and twitter both have to work out a settlement with the f.t.c. as well so if the settlement is agreed upon could be a huge step in the right direction and we should point out we don't know yet how long it will take to finalize a settlement but we do know the users shouldn't have to worry about what information is made public in the online world especially when they label that data

as being private so now the f.t.c. is keeping a watchful eye on the company perhaps users will feel better about posting their information and knowing who really gets to see it. now still to come tonight if he's trying to york newspaper on occupy wall street or on a war and a judge rules that twitter must turn over account information of three people with the rates for what is not ruling say for the future of a seat back in just a. little more military mechanisms if you don't work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government's doing you want to know why i pay taxes. i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism.