if you're trying to do here it is our president's doing or in this country seriously hurting this country or pulling the rug out from under the top one percent i guess and mitt romney's world cash is king and the truth is negotiable. and mitt romney's finances aren't the only ones in question these days the future of the euro zone is also on shaky ground so which countries will bridge the gap and which ones will fall through the cracks. it is friday january twentieth five pm in washington d.c. i'm liz wall and you're watching our t.v. . well the online community is not going down without a fight the f.b.i. has taken down megaupload dot com one of the biggest file sharing sites on the web and hacktivist group anonymous didn't waste any time in firing back shortly after

word got out of the government shutdown anonymous launched their attack hacking into and taking down some of the biggest sites in the federal government and entertainment industry first down the u.s. department of justice that's justice done gov the f.b.i. the u.s. copyright office also from the entertainment industry universal music group and the recording industry association now this came just one day after the biggest names on the answer net took part in a blackout it was all in protest to the stop online piracy act or sopa as it's known a controversial bill before congress more than seven thousand sites went black in protest including a pedia reddit ross story that's just to name a few even google put up a banner to show their opposition to what critics call government censorship. so the timing of the government shutdown is interesting despite the outrage and protests again so but the feds went ahead and shut down a major site even without sopa being passed so what does this all mean for the

future of internet freedom in america well josh harkin's then a reporter for mother jones magazine who was following this story closely joining me just moments ago today and i asked him to give me the inside scoop on how this all went down. it was just fascinating to watch it unfold in real time i mean you know there are dollars and people all over the world who participate in the chat rooms when i was there i was in this chat room for this anonymous splinter group known and it's and on ops where i think any given time there were between a thousand and two thousand people who were logged in and coordinating with each other to launch these denial of service attacks or g.t.o. us to talks on various websites around the country and they were giving each other updates particularly about the f.b.i. website which i think was their main target and you know people were were messaging

that it was down in hungary or it was done in belgium or it was young malaysia and the goal is to shut it down worldwide and i think it was successful for quite a while it went up and down and you know there was a lot of resistance kind of triumph but there was also a sense of paranoia because people knew that the f.b.i. it was monitoring them it was probably there in this very chat room kind of shout outs to the f.b.i. like high f.b.i. . and there was also paranoia because in the past the f.b.i. has actually arrested members of anonymous for launching similar denial of service attacks on web sites like pay pal now we see this is in response to taking down that web site i got blown dot com and so the government was able to take the sound of that without a. pass so i mean what could happen if this law weren't a word to pass. well i think if the law were to possibly give content

companies you know the motion picture and music companies the ability to sort of call the shots more than they do right now they could essentially request the different sides be taken down and you know i think some of the concern is that there is not a lot. due process there you know. it might i think the fear in the internet community is that it gives them just too much power to sort of determine what sites can and cannot be on the internet so i do think it would. be corporations and the government to take action but clearly you know what the takedown of bag of blood illustrates is that even without this law you know the government feels that it has a lot of authority to take these sites down when it when it feels like they are complying with copyright so i mean what do you think the feds i mean is there a message that is being said here you know that they don't even need to be enacted

into law in order to go ahead and takes sites down if they want to. well the f.b.i. says that the raid on the site was not a response to sopa and in fact you know it had been planned in advance and you know i don't know whether that's true i mean the timing certainly is pretty curious given you know the sort of intensity of debate around you know just the day before all these blackouts on sites like wikipedia and you know even google crossed out its name on that site with a block down or to protest so so you know it's it's hard to say but i do think you know it definitely enraged a lot of people on the net and made them feel like you know this was a retaliatory and speaking of people being enraged the response that we've gotten here at our t. has been astounding we're gonna fire storm at the back people outraged at this government takedown i want to show you

a couple of the comments that we've got dark wolf says it's good that they've done this it shows that there are people that are willing to defend the free internet with everything they've got mark my words there will be a world war three and it's going to be cybernetic and another comment says anonymous shutting down side. it's is the same thing as censorship fighting with fire on you get his ashes and socially uncensored dadi use says i am an american and i am fully ashamed of the actions of my government we go around the world telling everyone how much freedom of information and speech we have yet just as here is for sale to the highest bidder and we're taking actions to censor the world but just like any other nation our leaders can be bought rented sold and lease i'm thankful that more nations do not try to be like us. so josh why such a fiery response when it comes to freedom of the answer that people seem to be so

he really riled up over this. you know list the internet is still very young i mean it's only really like twenty years old in terms of shots on incarnation and i think you know there's a there's a fear that the kind of freedom and openness of the internet it's kind of for better or for worse it's a wild west quality will eventually come to an end and it will become sort of more like you know what you see on cable t.v. or something where you know it's entirely owned by different corporations and controlled by them and so i think that there's a sort of hyper sensitivity almost anything that might affect that might make it go down that road but at the same time you know i think that there's there's a significant concern on the other side you know it's not just big content companies that are seeing their information being pirated it's also small documentary filmmakers or or writers you know people publish books which are increasingly going online now and i think they do have legitimate concerns about

you know what their labor being essentially stolen from them so there's no easy answer to this so the people that support the sopa bill say hey something needs to be done as you just said to stop this from happening to stop online piracy what that is the answer critics of sopa say that it's going too far that it's stripping people of freedom of the speech on the internet. i mean what can be done. to i guess find a happy medium where where their problem can be addressed yet there isn't so that this language that allows for. for what critics say is certain people though their freedom of speech on the internet. yeah i really don't know what the solution is i mean there are some compromise bills the. they're circulating in congress and you know i think there are pros and cons to the. i mean the bills essentially you know

require kind of more of a legal process that one goes through to take down pirated content you know to actually kind of pursue people turn the arm of the law and i think that you know those barriers could be on or is first of all individuals who don't have the legal resources to go to court and stuff like that. but you know bigger content companies probably would have those resources. you know beyond i mean you know right now a lot of sites do actually take down pirated material when they're requested to do so so you know i think just you know in foreseeing at sites that are brazenly refusing to take things down it's probably the the best thing that can be done under the current system and you know maybe duck can be done more robustly now that we saw this protests and we saw. these sites go down we saw anonymous fire back.

in that so i mean is this just the beginning are we going to see. that this cyber war kind of break out between the government and hackers. well it's hard to say i mean you need to dial up service attacks are fairly easy to do you know there's sort of a point in click technology that allows you to essentially kind of fire this candidate web sites and shut them down the thing is that it's also fairly easy to trace people who do that unless you kind of mask yourself using other technologies then the anonymous is getting more savvy about how to do that. but as far as kind of cyber war it goes i mean there's a big difference between these kind of web site shutdowns and what you might consider classically to be hacking where you're actually breaking into websites and stealing information and i think that is something that anonymous is it's not quite as good you know a lot of people who are in fall. the group has grown are kind of more like regular people who might not have you know really deep computer skills but you know there

still is just sort of broader hock to this community that you know organizes itself under other organizations in addition to anonymous and i think that you know there are people who who are very skilled you know multiple levels of website infiltration and this is certainly not the last we're going to see of this and especially not from anonymous which has really grown by leaps and bounds in the last year and become much more political much more willing to engage around issues like income inequality and corporate control politics which you salter in the occupy wall street movement anonymous is a huge part of the. you know dating gauged in you know they broaden their focus from kind of the narrow kind of internet freedom issues to a host of other things and i think that selling going to cause them to grow. just want to ask a very quick rate on how successful do you think these activists groups will be like anonymous or stopping legislation. for moving forward and from seeing other

bills like this. go to congress. well you know i don't think that they're i think their primary role that they play is sort of raising publicity raising awareness about these issues getting press coverage and they are certainly not the only force out there doing that i mean i think you know the dean fault of big companies like google. and you know also competing and others in this internet blackout protest you know a couple days ago was arguably a bigger deal but i think anonymous is really good at kind of mobilizing the grassroots internet community to you know support you know the needs that kind of bigger companies and so it's kind of this you know the googles of the world are working if you can is from kind of the lobbying angle and anonymous is kind of the ground. i mean it's a pretty powerful coalition it's much more powerful than what hollywood and

conscience and she was able to muster such an extent on issues i think. they're really going to wind well so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out josh thanks for coming on the show that was a reporter for mother jones magazine and josh harkin said thanks for having me let's. all three years ago today the world watched president obama get inaugurated into office many saw it as a possible turning point and namor by his promises of hope and change sear the country in a new direction but here we are today and some are wondering what happened to that change they were promised and as election season is underway are americans now ready for some radical change larry harshness takes that question to the streets of the big apple. this year the u.s. has the opportunity to elect a new president are they ready for radical change this week let's talk about that i

think they need to give a chance to to go along with what he's doing i think. i think a lot of americans are a little bit impatient. do you think change is happening just very slowly and i think this also because of the economic crisis going on so you have to give it some time to changing that much i just don't think it's realistic at all we don't move that quickly it's not the way our system works i think we'll move in different directions over time but i don't think it's going to happen do you think that's a detriment to us that everything takes so long. maybe but is the way the system works and i think that those checks and balances in the way that it was. in the long run well they thought they were four years ago for radical change do you think they had radical change so far i feel like they had a radical change in the wrong direction so what direction do you think it should go in the way of the people. which is what which is when the government actually works for us not for themselves do you think the rest of the world would appreciate it if

the us told its troops out of everywhere do you think that would have bad implications shows weakness they think. it would be good because well cares if we look weak that we're broke with iran and everything else happening in the moment you don't want to you know would be. the change i would like to see would be probably they would be complimentary because there are some libertarian ideas that are great but you just can't pull the social fabric out from the folks that need it you can't do it i'm a really hard time with the bad and i think we should be out of all countries you know we should be occupying anything but we need to take care of our own i think you need somebody who is prepared to stick his head out and do big changes like to say do you think the us people would get behind a leader that did that if they get desperate enough because of the split that's

happening with people who are employed not employed to have money and no money they desperate enough you'll get it whether or not the us needs radical change the bottom line is it remains to be seed whether or not vote for it. while it's mitt romney against occupy wall street one protester asked the g.o.p. presidential candidate a question that he apparently didn't like take a listen are you. going to. retire. is a great nation because we're united nation and those are trying to find the nation as you try to do here as our presence during our in this country seriously the right course for america is not to divide america trying to fight is between one another there's a nation that if you've got a better model. there's a russian writer for the future for north korea's writer right here on mars.

so while bashing occupy the occupy wall street movement for being anti american he's also attacking russia implying that the country is some kind of doomed economic model but if we took the time to look at what the model looks like today he may find that he likes it because he may be surprised to see that russia has a uniform income tax rate of thirteen percent individuals and companies pay nine percent dividend income in the sale of certain russia shares are exempt from taxes and the minimum rate of russia's corporate profit tax is twenty per cent much lower than what it is here in the u.s. so does romney have his facts straight to help me answer that he spoke to independent journalist jay meyerson is america right and occupy wall street wrong i asked him to give me his take on romney's rants. i have

a three fold response the first part is that we should just say from the outset that russia and north korea don't have similar economy it's so but that's what we can sort of expect from romney because he's not an expert in international political economy right so we're already not in the realm of really sophisticated analysis and we know that going forward this second response is that another area in which romney has no expertise is what sort of economy the occupy movement wants right and the reasons for this are obvious romney has never been to an occupation he's never spoken probably with anyone who's been to an occupation. so we were not obliged to take his proclamations about what occupy wall street is about to seriously and then of course the third response and the most important one is that we know what kind of economy occupy wall street wants because they set one up right it's a place where if you're not feeling well someone takes care of you if you're hungry you can have some of the eat if you're sleepy you have

a place to sleep you know to be like that that's what occupy wall street wants because that's what they set up and he has no idea what he's talking about and he seems to think that that is not at all what occupy because he seems to imply that the movement as a as a threat to america it's not the first time that he said something like that's his call the movement class warfare before. well it's interesting i mean what he said there was don't divide the country but you'll notice the groups into which the protester was trying to divide the country were the ninety nine percent and the one percent that's a really inclusive sort of division that includes percent of the country so i think that you're right in the lead and it's important to note that romney and all of this sort of neo liberal capitalist class that came up and got rich at the same time he did in the one nine hundred ninety s. under clintonian globalization was cheering on liberal policies being put in place in russia you know a few years after the end of perestroika you. yeltsin dissolving the congress

because people were upset about neo liberal policies being put in place romney would absolutely love it in russia exactly i mean i don't know if he still thinks that russia is still as communist. as you imagine those statistics that statistics of what the tax system really is today in russia i mean they're relatively low relatively low flat tax rates you would think that that's something that romney would advocate i mean when we hear things like this coming from the possibly he could be president he is considered the front runner right now so when he says things like this where would then if he were to become president where would this mentality and this approach take the u.s. . well more of the same right i mean the way that romney accumulated his two hundred fifty million dollars when you cumulated it was at bain capital which bought off companies and fired tons of workers and turn them profitable and sometimes turned them into companies like staples which is part of this this move

towards corporatism that consolidates was at the very top in the hands of the people who own this small number of incredibly successful corporations international corporations and demolishes the rest of you know the world as opposed to just the us economy which it also demolish is and romney's economic philosophy is part and parcel with this drive it's the thing that has driven up you know heavily speculated on food prices in the middle east to make revolution inevitable there it's wrecked the european middle class all over the place and threatens the euro it's completely demolished the american workforce and that is more of what you can expect from romney and if we're being quite frank with also with president obama what do you think this has to say you touched on it earlier about romney's concept of foreign policy comparing countries like russia like china like like north korea very very different countries in terms of what's going on.

politically. i mean when he kind of loves them all into one category what does that have to say about his understanding about what's going on abroad. well look the guy was the governor of massachusetts i mean he what he knows about foreign policy he's sort of picked up because he's been running for president for a long time but all he is is really rich guy who really wants to be in charge of america and this is over so there isn't much by way of foreign policy there none of the republican. presidential candidates apart from maybe huntsman has any sort of foreign policy chops at all romney is a rich dude who wants capitalism to thrive everywhere in the world no matter how much it wreaks on the environment on people polity democracy. thank you for coming on the show that was j.m. myer thin independent journalist. well it turned out so the crisis in the eurozone

leaders scrambling now to save the troubled currency a series of recent credit downgrades put the region on the brink of a continent wide recession a great default feared to have a domino effect on the neighboring countries and as germany and france come together this week to discuss what's next for the e.u. will we actually see any changes to answer that i spoke to founder of credit write downs edward harrison here is his take. because ultimately the euro zone's in a policy called is which basically means they have a failed policy in terms of how they're addressing the crisis they think the crisis is about public sector when in fact it's about private sector that a imbalance between the couper and the periphery in terms of the competitiveness of those countries because the various countries to build up current account imbalances which resulted in huge increases in the periphery so outside of greece

that's exactly what we saw in places like portugal spain ireland spain ireland for instance current account surplus or actually budget surpluses before the recession . the whole thing is going to pieces and they're thinking it's all about the budget but it's not and as you say everything is going to pieces and what's not how thing it is this serious credit downgrades what are the consequences of that and what does it mean for the crisis in the euro zone well you know i don't think the credit downgrade themselves are that significant because all of these countries their debt was trading as if they had been downgraded already in fact downgraded more than we saw what i thought was very interesting in terms of the downgrade in terms of the direct impact is that germany which is a aaa country credit what watch negative like all the other eurozone countries but it was upgraded to stable which suggests that going forward politically people will

say look to germany say you are the board you are the part we need you to do the heavy lifting so it creates a sort of a double edged sword for germany because it makes them put them in the hot seat where they have to perhaps pony up more where there are greater expectations on them to take a leadership role unless you know from friends. because france lost a aaa rating and now we saw these riots erupt in greece and now we're seeing this tension in romania and hungary why are they now in this legal clash with the e.u. well you know you have the eurozone and then you have the wider view it's not just about the eurozone in terms of their imbalances that are built up everywhere and i think that it's important that the euro area. people outside the euro area stick to the same rules as within the euro area just

from a cosmetic perspective so the germans don't want different expectations of what happens in romania hungary than they have it within the euro area and so that's really caused the same tactics to be applied in terms of austerity budget cuts etc. as a result there is lots of unemployment and the riots that you were just talking about and the fear now as this country wide recession is that likely to happen at this point it already is and if you look at the numbers in terms of the actual manufacturing sector as an example that's been negative fifty percent is the demarkation between positive and negative for the p.m.i. index which is measures activity in that sector that's been negative since all of the q four germany is an example they already released the q four numbers and it was negative for the entire quarter in terms of their g.d.p.

so the entire eurozone is in recession as we speak and while the euro zone is in a recession the u.s. is trying to recover from what's some call the great recession and there is this anticipated domino effect since these countries and they are as on are so interconnected. what's happening in europe going to affect our recovery here it's definitely an impact. margin but you know obviously the united states is a is a large part in all commie we get a very small percentage of our g.d.p. from tree as compared to a smaller country c. like germany which is much more influenced by true nevertheless there also the fun of it to linkages on top of that so really i think that the real impact would be if there were a negative credit a country like spain or italy default would be the sort of the really negative scenario or some sort of all the scenario which impacted the american consumer

interesting outward thank you for coming on the show that was ever at harrison he is the founder of credit write downs. well it does appear now but be sure to stick around for the a loaner shell coming up in just a half hour after a massive public outcry the anti-piracy bills known as. officially been put on the back burner so what is the future of u.s. internet regulation alone i will sit down with julian sanchez from the cato institute to hear his prediction. but for more on the stories that we covered got our com slash usa our fabulous internet internet team is working hard to bring you the very latest news coming out of the massive cyber attack anonymous initiated last night and of course we would love to hear what you think about these hack attacks so write us a combat who knows it may end up on the air so don't forget to check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can also follow me on

twitter liz wahl see you right back here at seven. download the official on t.m.p. cation joe on the phone no i pod touch from the i.q. stops to. watch on t.v. life on the go.