yes with the review of watch the second poorest country leading to the reasons we're filing for more than a directive. more stories coming up top of the next hour first up though or is the low to show taking a look at how the u.s. feds could be shutting down web sites around the world stay with us. bucking the law to show we'll get the real headlines with none of them or see me live out of washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take another look at the f.b.i.'s takedown of mega upload doesn't mean for users of the site and for international law even without

sopa and pipa the feds are taking down sites around the world caters julian sanchez is going to join us to break it all down then at last night's debate we saw the g.o.p. candidates rail against the president for cutting defense on the backs of our veterans let's be honest defense cuts don't have to equal benefit cuts for the vets so how do we stop this myth and what areas should be on the chopping block instead and the supreme court citizens united decision has now turned into years all sort of look at how it's changed our political system in that time and talk about the protests that took place on the steps of the supreme court this afternoon we'll have all that and more peter night including a dose of happy hour but first take a look with the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so last night c.n.n. hosted gets a nother g.o.p. debate it was the second debate this week so we're really heading into the overkill

zone here but last night it was down in the final four mitt romney newt gingrich rick santorum and ron paul and john king who moderated decided to start off this debate with a question to newt gingrich about his ex-wife saying that he asked for an open marriage and i guess let's just say that it backfired in typical new fashion he turned it into an attack on the media and the media well they basically took the bait and then this morning only talked about this first minute of the debate and almost nothing else that was said. newt gingrich lashing out at the mainstream media last night during the republican debate attacking a moderator for starting the event with a personal question about his failed second marriage instead of focusing on issues that he says are important to america newt gingrich turned up the heat on the newsmedia in last night's debate started when our john king asked about an accusation by gingrich's ex-wife of one candidate facing tough questions about his taxes accusations that another candidate wanted an open marriage who would have thought we'd be where we are today with newt gingrich and all of his righteous

indignation possibly on the verge of winning south carolina i love gingrich's response because best the same crap that the pool. and that's what's wrong with politics this is was turning the american people off as for his ex-wife's claim that he asked for an open marriage he says the story is false. i mean listen i've got my own thoughts on what happened last night i think it was stupid of junking to start out the debate with that as the top question i also think that how he wanted to he could have called out newt gingrich for his firm stance on family values and marriage and thrown that in his face and said that's also why these questions matter because when you parade around telling other people how do they play live who refused to hear about any critique of your own but just doesn't make any sense not to mention of course the utter hypocrisy of newt gingrich acting like it's absurd that anybody would focus on his infidelity rather than the issues that really matter when he was the man that led the charge against bill clinton back in the day but whatever i've said my piece on that and it took me all of

thirty seconds and now let's move on to see what else happened it was a two hour debate after all so tonight specifically i'd like to focus on something that ron paul set because not only was it forgotten about the moment this debate was over but it did issue that the mainstream media does a really embarrassing and shameful job of addressing. we're the better and really deserve help oh there's a position in this a congressman is the people who come back and aren't doing well elsewise they need or want more help we have an epidemic suicide of our military coming back so they need a lot of medical help and i think they cannot shortchange they came up short changed after vietnam war persian gulf war and even now they don't get care. you see yesterday army officials held a press conference to talk about this growing and continuing problem within our military starting in two thousand and four suicide rates in the armed services began skyrocketing and hitting records eight years later after

a decade of total war as well the problem has not subsided the army reported that amongst active duty army national guard and reserves suicides are leveling off the active duty army specifically they reached a new record in two thousand and eleven so it's more as the army also reported a sharp increase by nearly thirty percent in violent sex crimes that's also not forget the veterans face staggering unemployment numbers that p.t.s.d. is still a problem of the military is struggling to counter and understand. so that's what happens after a country wages war for ten years wars where men and women go on multiple multiple tours of duty and where it's hard to even describe what exactly it is that they're fighting for ron paul is right when he says that this is an epidemic but we need to do more to counter this problem i know not a single other candidate up on that stage last night i go to sentiments funny considering of those of the candidates of the most hawkish that say that we need the strongest and biggest military imaginable that we can leave afghanistan and the we should probably start

a war with iran they want to wage war all over the world and yet they don't want to think of the consequences on their own people on those who they want to send to fight those wars and you know what the mainstream media is just as guilty because when it comes to iraq and afghanistan but it comes to the veterans of those two wars and what their lives are like afterwards they rarely ever cover it they go all out on veterans day and think that that means that their job is done for the rest of the time they choose to miss. yesterday we first reported to you that the f.b.i. had seized the file sharing website mega upload as well as arresting seven people connected to this site i clued kinship it's a kim dot com the founder of megaupload who's a dutch citizen and lives in both hong kong and new zealand and the d.o.j. unsealed a federal indictment yesterday charging those arrested with racketeering money laundering and copyright infringement and the indictment alleges that mega upload

and a shell company associated with it cost an estimated five hundred million dollars in copyright losses all of this of course happening just one day after the biggest online protest in history in opposition to sopa and protect ip so what does this entire episode tell us about how the feds plan to apply international criminal procedures to internet policy and what happens to all those people that shared files on this site that weren't copyrighted or illegal let's not forget megaupload gets about fifteen million hits. today claims four percent of all internet traffic and has an estimated one hundred fifty million users who pay for that service so here to discuss it with me sanchez a research fellow at the cato institute. thanks so much for being here tonight was a pleasure what do you think about this and this was a major operation it was the f.b.i. but working with authorities in new zealand working with authorities in canada in hong kong in the netherlands it really was an international operation all around you know i mean the first thing to say i think is that if you know the facts laid out in the indictment here or are accurate the people behind this are in fact get

screwed i mean it does sound like they were not just hosting a platform where people committed popular infringement by encouraging you know with full knowledge and as part of their business model if that's the case you know too bad for them the question is you know given that evidently we have perfectly you know ample capability to find people overseas charge them in u.s. court indict them and get them brought here when we need to why is it necessary to have things like soap and to you know to carry that out we're also learning of course that even without. under the pro ip act of two thousand and eight the government thinks it already has the ability to seize before trial domains that are registered to us dot com dot org and so on and that's a little disturbing because even if it sounds like these people are guilty it is up to the trial to determine that beyond

a reasonable doubt and you would think that it's after that conviction that you would go to the you know go to the lengths of taking down an entire site which as we know again hosts yeah sure copyright infringement ariel just like you tube does but also lots of legitimate stuff the journalist adam penenberg he's famous for breaking the stephen glass plagiarism you know fabrication story this morning he actually used to use meg upload to get his stories to transcribe as you would record an interview and then. for someone to transcribe well there are a lot of people out there i mean that's the whole thing is that there are a lot of people that are users that make up that weren't necessarily using it for i guess you could say malicious purposes or to share copyrighted or pirated material out there so what happens to that now this site has been taken down although actually before we go there i mean some people are saying that there's a bit of a lack of thing going on where supporters of the site are trying to keep it alive you know there's some servers in the netherlands that have popped up is there any way for megaupload to stay alive at this point well i mean i think the real

obstacle at this point is that most of their executives are now in custody which makes it difficult for them to do anything also i mean you have to unlike the pirate bay for example which is a tracker but doesn't post all that content that's all you know hosted peer to peer they just has to do the try tracking files we are talking about a case where they had a virginia based servers with something like twenty four petabytes which is a good million gigabyte. just ratcheted up there it's a lot it's a lot lot a lot of data and a lot of bandwidth it's hard to quickly shift that so it's clear that someone of the company now is trying to create new servers a different ip address different domain name and they've got to survive be addressed it's still working but there's nothing there it seems pretty clear that they'll be back up in a matter of days probably and in the meantime you know rapid share and file and orion and all these other lockers are just happy for the extra traffic going to get a lot of traffic but then what happens to all these other people that decided to

sign up for make up late in paying you know whatever the fee is first of course i think somebody was saying yesterday that they just signed up and it was three hundred dollars you know for this massive subscription what happened to their son they're the ones who are out of luck you know i mean if you want to find a copy of shrek two there are a lot of places other than megaupload on the internet where you can find that if you're using megaupload and you know video from your wedding to your cousins you couldn't make it when you're screwed because that's probably the. only place that was on the internet well that i mean i think that's you know unfortunate and i think it deserves an outrage from a lot of the users but you know how often do we really see something like this happen like let's say that the author already is in new zealand didn't want to comply if there was just a federal indictment granted from a court here within the u.s. you are authorities there are fed still think that they can go wherever they want all over the world to track down these sites and arrest people well obviously you can't against the will of another country i mean who knows if it's asked but it makes you wonder makes you wonder how far they might go. i suppose you know i mean

i guess you know they're willing to sort of parachute into countries like italy and seize people accused of terrorism i mean if you listen to the rhetoric coming out of the n.p.a. you know these guys are worse than terrorists so maybe we need to go in and round these folks up i don't think we're you know we're near there yet but you do you do wonder given the number of hundreds of sites we've already seen seized of this authority you know when they've gotten what the industry calls the worst of the worst and it turns out that a surprise surprise it hasn't stopped ira see do they go to forums where people are posting links even if the form isn't just a copyright infringing forum do they go at these other file lockers that unlike megaupload you know doesn't it's not clear that they are deliberately planning to facilitate copyright infringement but just providing cloud storage all right so let's say that sopa and pipa which are now looks like this massive online protest

and work they've been shelved let's say that those actually were to become law and how much worse would a problem like this become we see you know so many more instances like this you know i think there are a lot of sites that they may not be going after now because they understand you know if you take down megaupload got com they'll show up again it may go upload t.v. or some other non us registered site i'm so you would imagine that they would be more aggressive in doing kind of simultaneous takedown. across the domain space if they knew that they could do it everywhere you also i just think we just have a lot more aggressive action against companies that not only are based overseas but unlike kim dotcom and company may not speak english or be familiar with us law so i think that imposes a much greater burden it's one thing to say you know business is hosted in the us are expected to understand american copyright law and be able to defend themselves in court if you're talking about you know

a small startup in bullies or something you know they may not have a lot of us lawyers and a deep understanding of the digital money millennium copyright act you know of course for him dot com he doesn't really doesn't come out to be a character that's entirely sympathetic why they arrested him with as many lamborghinis and fans because there is matching on matching of c.d.'s bens would license plates good and evil and i also have one. and one that said guilty which he may come to regret ouch ok it's just you know last question to you and you have been coming on the show for months we've been talking about protect ip and we've been talking about so and then we had this massive day of protests blackout day on wednesday do you think it was a success well i mean the bills are shelved now so i think it's hard to call it anything but it's excess on the other hand you know industry lobby groups don't like to spend millions of dollars and you know just write it off as a waste so i wouldn't be surprised if we saw these coming back under a different acronym. might happen but i guess in the meantime we have

a little bit of celebrating to do and so we're going to go into that in our next story but thanks so much for joining us tonight and you know we'll see how this story unfolds to. people that might have lost their. now the government's efforts to continue their war on piracy is obviously far from over but there was a noble victory against it today senate majority leader harry reid has changed his mind on voting on the protect i.p.x. after one hundred twelve congressman spoke out against the bill and a very successful online protest and that was ation earlier this week and it twee earlier today reid said in light of recent events i've decided to postpone it tuesday's vote on the protect ip apt they're both listed now as the late meaning that they could be that brought back or left to die but for now there are no plans in either house or the senate to vote or further debate on either bill so that's basically a tally in the will win column after all harry reid was just on meet the press last

sunday extolling the virtues of pippa as a job creating bill and he's not the only one to thinking as we see senator chuck schumer pick a sponsor also took to twitter to tell opponents that congress is in fact paying attention to its constituents he tweeted you've been heard him has been pulled so we can find a better solution and we should note that paper sisters bill sr bill sopa has also been tabled by congressman lamar smith now all i can say is holy cow congress is actually listened to with constituents for once after months of growing public outcry opposition group almost every company and embarrassing house judiciary committee hearing and the white house coming out against it harry reid was still dead set on voting on this bill so this is just proof of the protests by thousands of websites on january eighteenth successfully made their point the protect ip and sopa are not the answers to concerns about music and movie piracy but it's not just really that surprised us in fact last night in the debates all four of the republican presidential candidates also expressed opposition to the bill's. oh i

favor freedom. and i think that if you you know i think the patent office we have copyright law if a company finds that it is genuinely been infringed upon it has the right to sue for but the idea that we're going to preemptively have the government start censoring the internet on behalf of giant corporations that are economic interests strikes me is exactly the wrong thing to do. the truth of the matter is that that that the law as written is far too intrusive far too expansive far too threatening the freedom of speech and movement of information across the internet he would have a potentially depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in america i was the first republican to sign on with a host of democrats to oppose this law i mean i'm done for free but i'm not for people abusing the law and that's what's happening right now and i think something proper should be done i agree this goes too far. so it seems that everyone is

finally in agreement that the way the sopa and pipa are written fix anything it would just place unwarranted restrictions on the internet as we know it but today so long as glenn greenwald brought up a good point he took to twitter to ask is the lesson of so because defeat a good citizens can defeat an industry back to bill or b it takes another big industry to look on valley to do that you know he's right not only to the right of the people stand up against legislation but several companies within silicon valley most notably the ones who blacked out their websites stood up against it too so perhaps that was the last piece falling into place forcing congress to change their stance on copyright protection after all silicon valley is one of the biggest industries driving our country today but this one would be isn't going to stop the n.p.a. and the fight against protecting hollywood's precious content as mike masnick attacker points out this is just the first battle and it's going to be a very lengthy worldwide war and like we just explained our last interview

government decided to take on anybody who might be pirated material without congress and hollywood lobbyist like chris dodd are still working to persuade congress to create a bill that would go after piracy and counterfeit materials or to revive sopa and pipa if they actually can let's just hope that future proposals won't be as extreme as the ones the american people managed to kill this time. so to come tonight foreign policy might not have been on the agenda during yesterday's debate as veterans' benefits are a topic of discussion so after the break we're going to find out how the government can still cut back on defense spending only for the soldiers get the benefits of a designer.

technology innovation. last night's c.n.n. debate was essentially devoid of any foreign policy now iran or afghanistan or shadow wars but on the issue of veteran unemployment came up some of the candidates did take their time to criticize president obama for upcoming defense cuts and they said he's doing it all on the backs of those who served. we have a president of states who said he is going to cut veterans benefits cut our military at a time when these four. or five six tours coming in and out of jobs sacrificing everything for this country the president of states can't cut one penny out of the social welfare system he wants to cut a trillion dollars out of our military and hit our veterans it's just because we've

got an aging navy we've got an aging air force and they're playing and cutting our number of active duty personnel they can't possibly keep up with the needs of our veterans it is absolutely wrong to balance our budget on the backs of our military we need a strong military so strong no one in the world would ever think of testing it. now just remember a few things the four hundred fifty billion dollars in cuts over the next ten years the defense was a deal reached by congress as was the condition that the super committee failed six hundred billion trigger cuts would also be coming that way now it's through the veterans benefits are one of the areas that will be hit with the chopping block and let's be honest it is not have to be that way so where else could be going down and when republicans stop using better it's their advantage pushing for continuous wars there's discussing with me is jeff a larger rector of homeless veterans initiative at a community council for the homeless. jeff thanks so much for joining us tonight so we just showed a few clips of you here rick santorum go off on his tirade and he says that it's

absolutely disgusting that the president is trying to cut a trillion dollars from defense he's doing all that that's the better and how does that make you feel as a veteran well that's let's keep in mind that president obama has probably been the best president in modern history for veterans he's increased the budget for the by far over what the bush administration did he's been a lot better especially around homeless veterans we've seen a massive decrease in homelessness among veterans at a time when we're in the deepest recession we've been since the great depression homelessness in general went down one percent because of the stimulus. package and h. p.r.p. for homeless prevention rapid to be housing that's inside of that and especially for homeless veterans because of vashti program which is a supportive housing voucher through the v.a. and through access vs grant which is homeless prevention raftery housing money we're seeing big cuts in the number of veterans who are homeless so when i hear politicians like ron paul and other libertarians who want to go out there and say

that well we can just cut get rid of hardwoods you get rid of hud that's how many thousands of veterans are going to end up homeless again because they're really being helped a lot by these programs and while i disagree with the president on some things the fact is is that when it comes to veterans he has been by far better than any administration we've seen in modern history and the thing is so these cuts that are going to be taking place in four hundred fifty billion dollars in cuts that republicans are talking about there are going to be cuts to veterans' benefits there's going to be some change to the system there but would you say that that is necessarily the president's fault or the pentagon right there are the ones that are looking at where they have to slow down their being good let's also take a different there's a difference between the veterans administration and the department defense ok so these two aren't the same thing and the cuts that are happening aren't going to be cuts to things or don't have to be things like the health care or tri care which is the health care of service members it doesn't have to be on some of the things that

really directly impact service members' lives what we can cut back pretty easily on our some of the g.o.g. expense expenditures on things like contractors we don't have to be giving these elaborate contractors to corporations like halliburton kellogg brown and root you don't have to cut this service to actual service members you don't have to cut those benefits you don't have to even touch those and you can cut a lot more out of the. defense department's budget without adverb really impacting any service members well i mean maybe we can kind of face is out there that we have since we have hundreds of them around the world maybe there's a few weapons systems that we could. yeah i mean if you just take a look at the jet systems that we don't even use or nuclear submarines that we don't even use it's not like we have to make cuts in things that are actually impacting day to day life for service members impacting national defense we can just get rid of systems that are irrelevant at this point in time mitt romney talked about an aging navy and air force will why are we keeping those older planes

where we keep those older submarines it's not like we're not producing new ones we just happen to be maintaining keeping planes and submarines and ships that are well outdated and so we can very much trim our military still keep it way beyond any other country every other country combined in the world we can still have a military much bigger than all of those and protect service members and cut the budget but the thing is when somebody like mitt romney starts lamenting the fact we have an aging navy he's lamenting it because he says that we need more we need more defense spending and so i mean i don't know how does it make you feel if you feel like they're using veterans almost as upon when you hear rick santorum and mitt romney who don't want defense spending to be kind of the who are really preaching for us to stay in afghanistan that are really you know drumming. beating the drums for a war with iran when they say how dare you cut defense because it's only the veterans that are going to be hurt i mean if you feel used in

a certain sense well i mean i personally don't feel used i've been out of the military for years now but i can see where i can see where that rhetoric is use atory that's what it is that's their point in bringing it up. they can't possibly actually argue facts on these issues because they're completely wrong even completely wrong as right as he was talking about the epidemic of suicide to talk about think that after world war two that there were no programs put in place we don't remember going to god about the g.i. bill and the housing programs how many housing programs were put in place post world war two there were tons of jobs programs put in place. for world war two i mean he's just cutting history out i mean if his if he was poor of a doctor is he is a historian i feel bad for the women that he served now as they are going to take but it's interesting though because it does have a very large battery and following and he gets a lot of time in service members that you're going to get them out of these countries and out of these wars that are incredibly unpopular of course he's going

to get those kinds of their missions i mean that's just that's just common sense because he's following certain policies that are very popular in the military we don't like to think about how unpopular the wars are inside the military but they are and so his foreign policy stances from that aspect are now if we start to expose some of the things that he talks about with closing down hard in how many thousands of veterans would become homeless like that if we closed down i think some of that support would probably weigh i want to bring out one of the things that mitt romney i was also talking about is that when he was asked this question as to whether or not there should be some extra help for veterans when they were trying to help them get jobs he basically said. back to the states and let the states handle it all that's kind of a radical idea right since when do the states really have the what are they in charge of military affairs in that sense what do you think of it i mean not only would it be a radical departure from anything we've ever done it just wouldn't be effective it's just plain and simply wouldn't be effective the states if they could be doing things like that they would be actually massachusetts where he was governor has ben

more successful than any other look at better and homelessness for example i had a time where we saw national veteran homelessness go down by twelve percent we saw a veteran homelessness in massachusetts go down by about twenty percent because of how well their office of veterans affairs has made some of these moves no they haven't done it of course while governor romney was governor it was years after he got done being governor there but the fact is there are things that states can do there are also things that the federal government can learn from what some of the states are doing but they think that we can just push it down to the states and that it's going to be effective it's just not smart policy. and the problem here is that they're using talking points rather than smart policy smart policy it's a lot it's going to be in depth it's going to be expensive they're not thirty second cheap little talking points that's not good policy that's part of the problem here too right that's why this needs to be discussed and interest from our office and rad and just thrown around as a talking point jeff thanks so much for joining us tonight not a problem thanks rob. i was taking

a break but we love people right now. turn thirty pm in moscow these iraqi headlines is almost without overwhelming majority of egypt's first parliamentary vote since moved barak was deposed the muslim brotherhood takes almost about. the future of the arab league mission in syria caught between those saying the observers presence will reduce violence and others so i mean the group for a lot of progress the protesters clashed with police in.