the work at the bases here in the u.s. fire from a far and then go home to their families each night so what's the emotional and moral toll on those warriors that aren't on the battlefield and the e.p.a. is now issuing new warnings for the water in new york thanks to fracking so as more negative data and proof comes out against this method we have to ask why it hasn't been stopped or you have all that morphia tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. it so there were quite a few things that happened this weekend and i want to get into what i think is perhaps one of the most important developments in just a minute but for those of you that were tuning into the mainstream media this morning to try and get caught up in the news there was one thing and one thing only that was developing. only minutes until that republican field gets a bit less crowded at one less for this big debate before the south carolina primary john holmes who will withdraw from the race in the next hour huntsman says

it's time for republicans to unite around the candidate who can best be obama jon huntsman will officially drop out of the race and put his support behind mitt romney jon huntsman says the g.o.p. race has degenerated to personal attacks not worthy of the american people calling for a campaign of old ideas to unite the american people and calling on the g.o.p. candidates to end the negative attacks against their fellow republicans. are now i can't say that i'm surprised that the media is just a side themselves yet another ten of it has dropped out of the race and of course not we all know this is their bread and butter this is their obsession this is their sunday night football except for they obsess over it every day of the week and every hour of the day but the funny thing is i mean let's just admit it right this is not in the least bit shocking huntsman has been doing well in the polls even despite placing third in new hampshire it's been obvious all along that sorry this guy is most definitely not going to be chosen by the republican field he's

missing like fifty more ounces of required craziness by the mainstream media they play along the x. shocked that he's dropping out and they savor every moment of their useless and nonstop mind numbing election coverage. let me fill you in on something else that happened over the week at something that really is a big deal see at this point you our viewers are well aware of sopa the stop online piracy act making its way through the house the protect ip act it's making its way through the senate to bills that are being sold as copyright protecting legislation which in fact don't actually combat piracy and instead allow the government to blacklist websites and as many have described it break the internet as we know it with their d.n.a. as filtering provisions to bills for which the opposition continues to grow by the day it's a building for months and we have documented it every step of the way for you last week we saw breakthroughs in that even members of congress the authors of these bills seemingly realizing that they might be becoming political liabilities and

then this weekend the white house released a statement saying that they would not support the legislation as it is saying that their analysis of the d.m.'s filtering provisions suggest that they pose a real risk to cyber security and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online now there is of course some nuance in the white house position which we'll get into in our first interview but the bottom line here is that even the white house seems to understand at least slightly that this threatens internet freedom and internet security and all the while does not address what the sponsors of the bill want to fix which is piracy. and then where has the mainstream media been all this while they definitely didn't decide to make a deal big deal the white house a statement on this monday morning and fact over the last couple of months sopa and pipa have been conspicuously absent from their coverage almost entirely the only place that i finally saw a real debate about these bills in the mainstream media was on chris hayes program with an s n b c this weekend but nowhere else you know that really shows us is how

incredibly far removed the mainstream media is from what young people actually care about if you've been monitoring the internet blogs online publications you would know what's happening with these two bills you would see how the reddit community has engaged in online activism pressuring businesses and members of congress to drop their support but the mainstream media is just completely oblivious why do you think you're losing young viewers and then it takes one of the youngest hosts on m.s.n. we see to finally bring this up and there is one more issue here that we have to address by now you know that all of the major tech companies like google yahoo e-bay they all oppose sopa and protect ip but do you want to know a few more companies that actually support the bills aside from just the motion picture association and the recording industry all those companies would be comcast and n.b.c. universal viacom news corp time warner and this new publishing world why basically the parent companies of every single corporate media outlet and then you wonder why

they've been so oddly silent well the truth is the fact of the mainstream media has for the most part ignored this debate is just of bears not to mention damaging for their attempts to keep young people watching but the more of the incredibly relevant issues that they choose to ignore the more they're going to continue to miss and eventually they're going to see the consequences. now it's getting to a few more details as to what exactly is happening on the sober and protect ip front the white house is. against these pieces of legislation but are they going to all of it or is it just the t.n.s. filtering rupert murdoch has decided to join the fight by taking to twitter and attacking both obama and google but is this one battle of the old man is destined to lose sopa and pipa supporters like harry reid and the top lawyer for n.b.c. universal have been peddling a few myths about the legislation which we need to break down and wikipedia has

announced that they are going to blackout their site on january eighteenth so the opposition is proving they will not rest so let's analyze some of these developments joining me to discuss it is declan mccullagh chief political correspondent for seen at second thanks for joining us tonight and first i guess what your comments on the white house coming out this week and releasing this statement that as it is they will not support these pieces of legislation resupplies it all a little surprised because they announced their opposition it's qualified opposition it is they're not saying we hate it there's no way we'll ever support it they're saying right now it's really not the best approach and generally what happens is that there's a formal process the white house office of management and budget releases a statement very nuanced here they posted it on white house dot gov instead as opposed to issuing an official memo and it was it was longer than usual it was more nuanced and so i think this is a different way to approach it but it does come down to

a real road block that's an obstacle or hurdle for proponents of this legislation i don't have to get around it but from your reading of this statement and maybe they kept it a little too vague on purpose because they specifically addressed the d.m.s. filtering how they thought this might threaten cyber security but do you think that they really took a stance on some of the litigation that might result out of this you know the way that credit card companies and providers might then be held liable to get court orders to break ties with infringing sites. yeah i mean keep in mind that the d.n.a. us filtering sections of sopa and protect ip they're just one portion of the bill and even if you remove those you still have free speech issues you still companies targeted websites targeted just because they might just have a few copyright infringing pages and all of a sudden the websites targeted by the u.s. government are copyright holders and that's why senator wyden has said that even if you yank the d.n.a.'s filtering sections the bill is still not something you can

support and civil liberties groups have said the same thing so it doesn't make protect they feel wonderful thing and so even if they. the sponsors removed that section you're still going to a lot of controversy about the bill so let's get into some of what was said and done this week and i want to start with harry reid who was on meet the press and basically he's saying that i matter what the president's done he still wants to move forward with protect ip still wants people to vote on it but he made it into a different kind of issue take a listen. we're having a very important piece of legislation important to this network right here and that's of course having with informational move with with making sure that we have intellectual property that's protected and we need to do that and that that's also job sepulchral that's what we need to work on things create jobs and protect the american economy. since one of these was to be jobs bills can you enlighten me.

well i actually like senator reid's misunderstanding of what protect ip is i mean i pieced in this bill stands for information it isn't for informational prop no no it stands for intellectual property senator so this is going to weird misstep but this is he's actually wing of the motion picture association of america in the recording industry is talking points he's saying that the one way we can protect jobs is to protect intellectual property and if this is an american export business and so on the counterargument is that there are a lot more jobs produced by silicon valley in the industry than hollywood and we think that every business has computers and uses the web and so on this has been a major economic growth engine more so than hollywood and it's about but this is really just echoing of the talking points there and he's saying that we need to protect i intellectual property well sure but that's like saying we need to help law enforcement that but that doesn't mean we want to say ban curtains because it

would help police solve crimes by eliminating privacy i mean there's a balance and protect ip and sopa go pretty far up setting our current balance let's get them to another talking point as railing about the fact that nobody in the mainstream media is really covering this and finally we saw chris hayes there and he had an n.b.c. universal's top lawyer on and this was one of the arguments that he made. what this legislation is addressing are websites as i say wholesale devoted to illegal activities that if they were in the united states would be subject to criminal prosecution and to shut down this legislation would not affect a single site in the united states so to mention us affected by these by this legislation is wrong. all right that's another talking point that we hear constantly in addressing these bills but that's kind of a myth as well isn't it. it's the never really true he was just talking about sites are going to be taken offline by the d.n.c.

walking but in reality what the other sections that he's not talking about there are not even good knowledge exist made up by the things like search engines and information location tools i mean what's that is it c.n.n. dot com is that it goes beyond just google and that's the that's protect ip is language and so he's right in saying that only foreign sites under the current version of soap is language is subject to blocking but there are other sections of the bill that allow domestic web sites information location tools search engines ad networks all of those are going to be subject to orders and d.o.j. workers and the orders that copyright holders bring against these u.s. domestic companies under the other sections of protect ip and so yes the replications would be far reaching out a laugh they are running out of time here but i got to get to report murdoch's tweets which he decided finally to be very vocal on the internet and he went after

obama and google first to go after google and he said piracy leader is google who streams movies free sells advertisements around them no wonder pouring millions into lobbying and then he also says so obama has thrown in his lot with silicon valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy plain thievery. as he's trying to you know join in here and i think get with the chorus and start to use twitter but it's kind of around here right now if you're going to talk about paymasters isn't the motion picture association that put a lot more money than silicon valley doesn't the lobbying. exactly right also campaign contributions through pacs and through executives who work for these entertainment industry companies about ten fold and so we're actually if you if you read down rupert murdoch's twitter feed a kind of backed away from that point later on but hollywood it's companies are very very good at the d.c. game that they through they spend ten times the amount of money that silicon valley

does and that includes ten times the amount of money from. political campaigns and obama's campaign. well it's definitely interesting to finally start seeing this debate at least get a little more play and it seems to me like those that are in opposition i help are winning declan thanks so much for joining us tonight and thank you for raising the profile of this issue thanks. all right still ahead on this martin luther king jr day i'll talk about occupying the dream i've written as remembering about the fought for economic justice as later in the cell and also look at his some drawings from a different perspective the pilot's mistake of a secret johnson a writer and director of the film a man like this in the. internet only a military mechanism to do the work to bring justice or accountability. i have every right to know what my government should do if you want to know why i pay

taxes. but i would characterize obama as a charismatic version of american exceptionalism. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm trying hard welcome to the big picture.

i'm mr. there's the the elite. what a protest nobody seems to know. but never a pepper sprayed the face but part of the argument that they're being overly dramatic. we often talk about drone warfare on this program and the legal gray area of unmanned warfare taking place in the skies over sovereign nations the lack of data

that's available when it comes to the civilian casualties let's not forget the cia won't even publicly acknowledge their drone program and they like to claim as john brennan did last june that in the year before that there had not been a single collateral death so we know exactly what that leads to and the countries where we launch drone strikes strong anti-american sentiment let's look at this from another perspective let's see what it's like for drone pilots that fly and shoot from thousands of miles away consider themselves to be on the frontlines at work and then return home to their families every evening a short film named unmanned tries to give us a glimpse of this. i'd like to thank my great english teacher mr murphy you said i'd be flipping burgers instead of flipping oh yeah i am the new crown here ok well the joystick. so what are the takeaways here wants as the man behind the film joining me from our

studio in los angeles is casey cooper johnson writer and director of the film on man casey thanks so much for joining us tonight and i guess the first obvious question that i have to ask you is why did you make this film. well i spent about a decade living overseas in a post-war country in kosovo and during that time i was primarily working on documentaries and current affairs television there and a lot of the issues that we explored in our film work had to do with with themes of war of conflict and of how society coped with. the wars both during the conflict and in the years afterwards. i just recently returned about three years ago to united states to study at the american film institute and i was shocked to realize that the way that we fight wars here at home had shifted

so radically during the time i was gone when i first started seeing and reading about. the drone pilots and the operators who are basically fighting from home. as a guy who. gets very in raptured stressed out and full of angsty about my career as a filmmaker and find it hard to come home sometimes and just learn about what my daughter did it can in. that day i felt like it must be a really incredible challenge for these operators to make that daily commute between work and family ok you know before you started the project you did you have an opinion on drone warfare you know do you think that it's right that it's wrong that it's a very big legal gray area that it might be somehow unethical or are you even support i'm just curious if it if it changed your mind at all while you tried to

create this story. well when i did begin researching the project. i obviously was going at it from much more of a journalistic approach especially with the background and documentary my opinions at that point were that i was both fascinated. and a bit worried about what this could eventually mean as it looks like. it looks clear that this is the direction that warfare is going. the ability to minimize u.s. casualties is a very strong compelling. you know justification for wanting to further use drones. but also you know it seemed like a scary thing for someone who had just moved to hollywood and realize that nobody

here talks about the wars that we're involved in on a day to day basis also did you because you didn't make a documentary this is a feature film you know that follows and managed shows the fact that he comes home every night and he spends time with his family you know at one point he takes part in a drone strike or is the one that pushing the button where a lot of civilians are killed it seems like it takes a moral tone on him but he's told by his superiors that it's ok if they got one bad guy they also talk about themselves as heroes so is this all from talking to actual drone pilots you know how did you get this information. a lot of this came out of research that i did both from reading the books that are or out and available about drones and about robotic warfare from doing a lot of research online as well as talking to some actual members of the u.s.

air force and drone military. basically it's a fiction is this is a fictionalized story. it's a drama that tries to incorporate a lot of the themes and issues that i wanted to touch upon. in a way that followed a very personal story of of one man and how in particular this affects his life and his relationship with his family which is something that i felt like i as a father and husband could relate to even through my own experiences never having been in the military myself and one of the things you look at too is the recruiting process and the young man in the film goes through on these army recruiting centers and i've reported on one that used to be up in philadelphia which they closed where you know he talks about and brags about how great he was at video games do you think that that's becoming a big push in the recruiting process that are in our military that if you are going with a joystick nation sign up it certainly is. i think that. the

well first of all the the story of the recruiting center in unmanned also comes from the philadelphia. army experience center. that was there a couple years ago the. and you know the the kind of video games like america's army call of duty you know i've heard you know stories from people who've worked on those that those are far more effective recruiting tools than any television advertisements or you know high school visits so. the fact that the operation of the remotely piloted aircrafts. you know having to multitask jobs on several screens is something that the skills you get in the you know to play video games prepares you well for. you

know i think it's obvious also i think with that with the new sort of kind of exciting forms of entertainment here that that that a very effective tool for getting people excited about going into the military but then do you think that they end. desensitized and removed from what they're dealing or is there an emotional toll. from what i've been able to find in the research i believe there is an emotional toll that taken. how that comes about you know i don't know. what i would say about how that toll you know. affects them but i think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that on a daily basis you are returning to your home and to your home town your family and needing to turn off the war experience every day which is something that i

think is part of what's new about this and you know why a lot of the reason why i take on this is the story of a man does that. it has implications for the warriors in a new way that we've never seen before something that we need to see more of i think it will see documentaries about it as well it's a nice film casey thanks so much for joining us tonight thank you very much. but we've spoken at length on this show about the expanding definition of terrorism being used to target americans and many of our viewers have shown an interest in learning more so let's get to a story that a lot of you asked us to dedicate some time to animal rights activists being branded as terrorists it all started with al and and animal enterprise terrorism act was passed in two thousand and six where the definition was broadened to include many parts of animal rights activism and just last month we spoke to the sparrow projects and these to pani and who was prosecuted under that law. i ended

up in one of these units because i was legislated and convicted underneath an overly broad law called the animal enterprise protection act in two thousand and six that the animal enterprise protection act was amended to be called the animal enterprise terrorism statute the animal enterprise terrorism act is a law that says that if you inflict financial damage or an economic disruption or physical disruption. and surprise that uses animals for profit you could be charged as a terrorist now after nine eleven. so the animal enterprise terrorism act passed in two thousand and six and outlawed acts that are quote done for the purpose of damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise or the cause of the loss of any real or personal property and the real kicker is that it also prohibits economic damage to an enterprise i guess that last one is absolutely as absurd and broad as it sounds to me is that if you cause an animal enterprise to lose any profit you could be committing an act of terror so tried and true methods

of protests like picketing organizing boycotts anything that could cause a company to lose their profits would not only be illegal it would be considered an act of terrorism of the law criminalizes protest and activism plain and simple and thankfully the animal rights community isn't taking this one laying down the center for constitutional rights as representing five animal rights activists who filed a lawsuit in massachusetts challenging this law as unconstitutional and a violation of the first amendment the five activists argue that they can no longer freely engage in activism for example one defended the spent years of her life documenting the process of making and posting those pictures online and elsewhere those pictures can be grotesque and yes even discourage people from maybe eating but that's the point it's also their right which she feels she no longer is free to exercise for fear that she'll be a terrorist now for all i know i could be prosecuted under the a.t.a.i. now for showing these pictures which could discourage people from buying which would hurt company profits it's really not all that far fetched now in the past the

law was used against a group of protesters who picketed the houses of researchers they were labeled by the government not as activists but they are terrorists for picketing that case was thrown out by a judge who said while true threats enjoy no first amendment protection picketing and political protest are the very core of what is protected by the first degree amendment and personally i could not agree more the broader definition of the word terrorism should be very worrisome to all americans not just the animal rights activists it's an attempt to stifle dissent scare people into silence so we're going to make sure to keep you updated on any future developments on this very important case that we know our viewers were concerned about we did get a lot of comments and messages asking us to shed light more light on it. and i have to have our mandate as you said it i read it and then the e.p.a. calls her for the regulations in the new york area when it comes to fracking so the government finally wising up or says it's still not enough and discuss it with.

people calling like you said for free and fair elections. and we're still reporting from the so. you can hear behind me loud explosions.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom hartman welcome to the big picture.