the u.n. security council meets on syria seeming to see consensus that rather than any on direct action russia says a firm no to military intervention on sanctions against the country calling for dialogue between the opposition and the assad regime. and then see a raid south clashes between government forces and rebel fighters continue only allan's counts of the capital the opposition has rejected a transfer tweeks would be country's president instead threatening the assad family would have brutal and bloody end. to the number of million people are out of work in the eurozone out of the unemployment rate that he had a record ten point four percent to be wanted since the birth of the single currency the figures were released just a day off the e.u. leaders pledged over eighteen billion euros to create more jobs at the summit of twenty two. as the headlines in his guest discussed syria and line store

crosstalk. welcome to the lawn a show at the real headlines with none of the mercy or can live in washington d.c. tonight we're going to take a look at a new assessment by u.s. intelligence agencies they say that the number one threat to this country is no longer all qaeda and its affiliates but iran and the president finally publicly

addresses the u.s. drone program but are his answers disingenuous christopher swift is going to join us to break it all down then while the recent new york times of war concluded that corporations like apple are shipping jobs overseas because this country is failing to produce enough skilled workers david sirota claims of that's just perpetuating an education crisis myth so he's going to join us to give us his take on the reading community isn't stopping after stopping sopa and pipa but there's a new suggestion to create a piece of legislation of their own called the free internet act so read it co-founder alexis ohanian is going to give us all of the details or have all that morphy tonight putting it does have happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. all right so voting is taking place in the florida primary today and the mainstream media is just going crazy over the polls in the numbers and of course newt gingrich's upcoming demise. there have been three republican contests and three

different winners and today the line is drawn in the florida sand voting is under. away in florida as republicans compete in the biggest primary of the campaign so far the winner takes all in the biggest contest today and the nastiest battle in this early primary season the last polls remain open nearly ten more hours state officials there predict it will be a big turnout more than two million voters expected to vote in florida today the stakes are huge fifty delegates are up for grabs the largest haul yet the winner takes all of them and seizes momentum as the clear front runner and it looks like mitt romney's new strategy worked poll after poll shows he's going to win today by what margin does mitt romney win florida. are now we all know that they live and breathe the political horse race and they are never going to get enough but i personally have a suggestion for the mainstream media today is if you're going to spend so much

time looking at various numbers then why not take a look at the numbers that are actually shocking there's a new study out today from the wesley in media project that compares political campaigns spending thus far to the same point in the two thousand and eight elections and while we all know that money makes the world and the political cycle go round what staggering in this study is the impact that we can already see from the citizens united decision you see this study found that while spending on ads by candidates has decreased by about forty percent spending on political ads by outside groups is up sixteen hundred percent did you hear me there sixteen hundred percent and this is just for these early primaries who knows what these figures are going to look like by the time that we reach november to give you a few more numbers there thus far in the campaigning for two thousand and twelve super pacs have spent forty four million dollars out of the two hundred seventy seven active super pacs the pro romney group restore our future has spent seventeen million dollars alone the pro gingrich group winning our future i know these names

are eerily similar aren't they well they have spent nine million dollars and of course there are always those super pacs out there the do. i don't support a specific candidate so the two biggest conservative ones american crossroads and americans for prosperity they've spent eight point eight million on ads around the country so far that a lot of money that's being thrown around you guys it just reminds you that even in times of recession the battle to get your interest represented is still going very strong problem of course with this kind of spending is that we don't always know where it's coming from and other cases where we do know we see the insane amount of influence a just one person can have let's not forget gingrich's super daddy sheldon adelson who single handedly has given it to donations of five million dollars apiece and today we also found out who was for the most part bankrolling jon huntsman supporting super pac it was his daddy that's right his billionaire father donated one point nine million of our destiny that's the name of the super pac of the total two point six million the face spent so that seventy percent of the money and there

were only ten other donors that is insane this is democracy no longer belonging to all of us to we the people but instead just a very few of the very rich people these are the numbers that we're going to see increase and that really should be worrying us it's something that we should be discussing is something that we should be questioning and that the mainstream media and all with their obsession of the numbers in the polls they still choose to miss . what do you guys know the threat from al qaeda was old news testifying before congress or an annual overview of what our sixteen intelligence agencies think are the biggest threats to the united states director of intelligence and national intelligence james clapper referred to a report from his office that concluded that al qaeda has been decentralized and the number one top threat to the u.s. is now iran referring to the alleged plot last year to assassinate the saudi

ambassador in washington d.c. clapper for the first time signaled that they think this may have come from the top saying that it shows that some are. and officials probably including supreme leader ali khamenei have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct conduct an attack in the united states in response to real or perceived u.s. actions that threaten the regime so i guess if anybody wanted to claim the war drums were beating between the u.s. and iran now or before there is no denying it now here to discuss this with me is christopher swift fellow at the university of virginia law school's center for national security law christopher thanks so much for joining us tonight great to be back. obviously we've heard a lot you and i have been discussing you know so much of what's been happening between the u.s. and iran between the heating up of the rhetoric that we've seen but to say that iran is now the number one terror threat to the united states what happened well the first thing is that al qaeda decentralized has been massively degraded in pakistan and afghanistan the local insurgencies are still doing pretty well see the

taliban has basically decided to shift from that theater to yemen to the horn of africa and to other places and at the same time the united states and iran have been engaged in sort of a cycle of mutual provocation with sanctions on one side and with you know threats inside the united states on the other with everyone using their proxies and other forms of influence in order to send messages that one another and there hasn't been a lot of shall we say by a lot of communication there hasn't been a lot of negotiation between the two sides and in that kind of environment with the shifting from one thing to the next with this cycle or antagonism and provocation in the absence of diplomacy it shouldn't surprise us that the iranians are pretty wound up and we're pretty wound up about the rain yes but do you think we should call them the number one threat that the u.s. faces i mean i feel like it's a little bit of a game of conveniences and here that's getting played right as a threat is touted when the administration or when the pentagon needs to specially when they need to you know push certain projects or there is or push why we need to

have drone strikes in certain countries and special operations forces there well i mean you can you can make that argument and there's certainly no shortage of. of opportunism of that sort in the pundit talk or see i don't know if it exists in the government where they have sort of different activities on world smoothly they have to answer to congress and sort of the public so i think their analysis tends to be slow as it is in this case with respect to al qaeda rather than fundamentally twisted or wrong in the case of iran however you know. the question as to whether they're threatening iran really depends on our timeframe if we're looking at the next two weeks the next two months maybe the next six months then yeah i'd say iran is probably a major problem but if we look at a year or two years three years ten years twenty years you change the time horizon iran starts to become less and less important why because iran is facing an internal crisis political crisis because iran is facing an internal economic crisis and because iran is facing an internal demographic crisis and all of those things are going to restrain iran's ability to make life difficult for the united states

specifically and for the west in general over the long term so in the short term probably threat number one but over the long term iran's internal collapse is probably going to put them out of business one of the things that i find particularly interesting too is that if you look at this report today if you look at what james clapper said it's they weren't focusing on the nuclear threat coming from iran in fact inside this report they basically said to us from everything we've seen the evidence shows they haven't decided yet whether they want to pursue that avenue clear weapon or not and so they're focusing more on iran perhaps launching small scale attacks they use this alleged plot before to get the saudi ambassador here in washington d.c. or maybe something more dealing with cyber security so is that going to change some of the dialogue because you know you and i always talk about this plan to talk or see like you said which is that if iran gets a nuclear weapon the entire world is going to change for example former presidential candidate just said it last week well we're always hearing from presidential candidates how if you don't do what they say or believe what they believe how the entire world is going to change i was astonished that some forum

said something to the effect of if president obama wins reelection in america as we know what i am. this kind of rhetoric is irresponsible and it actually gets us away from the kind of analysis that allows americans to decide whether there is a threat and whether their government is managing it properly in the case of iran i think it is likely that we're going to see a move towards the pattern of assassinations and kidnappings that iran has used in the past when it wants to send a message to the outside world there's an interesting report that came out of west point the u.s. military academy a few years ago that contrasted the approach that shia groups and the iranian government used towards terrorism versus groups like al qaida and other sunni militant groups and the sunni groups tend to go for sort of large massive theatrical large scale events mass casualty the shia groups are very targeted they want to spend of the use force and violence to send a very particular message and i think what we saw with the saudi ambassador here in the united states is part of that signaling that they're doing of course the real

question is what's the state of commanding control inside the iranian government who's in charge of the mullahs in charge of the reds lover illusionary guard who are in charge is the government in the parliament in charge my guess is some of those folks are in charge of different things on different days of the week depending on who they happen to be meeting with what do you think there is a report in foreign affairs today that essentially started looking back at some of the history claiming that you know since two thousand and one there are members of al qaeda that were in iran were being held there but now they kind of paint this picture as if it iran and al qaeda are working together and this is become the new safe haven and it just isn't it because of some of the things that you mentioned just now between cities in between shias it just doesn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense let's distinguish what we know from what certain people think what we know is that there were in fact some al qaeda operatives including the some of bin laden's family members that took shelter in iran and were allowed to shelter and built in iran after the u.s. operations in afghanistan in late two thousand and one early two thousand and two

we also know that iran allowed carly and some other chaps to move from afghanistan through iranian terror. into iraq so we know these things have been happening and it wouldn't surprise me if there are in fact a handful of al qaeda operatives or some affiliated active individuals currently in iran right now but the question of whether that's true or not is not so important the question is how much does it matter and at the end of the day if al qaeda is no longer the threat then ha well it is no longer the other question is you know at the end of the day if this is in fact happening and you know to be honest with you with some some of what i've seen i think it's probably likely at the end of the day this is shamelessly opportunistic on the part of the iranian government and al qaeda let's not forget that the particular brand of sunni islam that al qaeda hears itself to is militantly anti shia and let's not forget that the last time the iranian government accommodated chaps of this particular elke they went to iraq and what did they do they started massacring the shia as quickly as they could including pilgrims including women and children including all the rest so if iran

thinks of itself as defending the interests of shia muslims all around the world and they're sort of tacitly letting out a few guys running around in their territory that's a major problem for them not only domestically in terms of their own politics but in terms of their legitimacy of the the worldwide who supposedly of the worldwide shia community who the other problem is since september eleventh in the united states and europe and other places the right russia china everywhere there's been this tendency to conflate groups that are not related to one another who may actually be competitors with one another because they look the same they sound the same and they chant death to america the fact of the matter is some of these groups hate each other more than they hate us or at least as much as they hate us and the divisions between them and the distinctions between them can often be just as important if not more important than the things that superficiality super superficial similarities that they're going to buy into their mass something that often gets lost i think you can see in a lot of the discussions i want to switch gears really quickly just one last

question is that the president hosted this google plus event yesterday where he was taking questions from viewers and he finally decided to. pressing question about u.s. drone use but there he said don't worry about it the way that we use our drones is on an incredibly tight leash and he said that there are not as many civilian casualties as people claim that there are so here we have at least a public acknowledgement from the president talking more about drones when it's not necessarily about a specific drone strike that went right and may have killed the militant or not but i feel like that answer seems a little disingenuous it depends on how you look at the answer if you look at the i'm not a i'm not an air force pilot so i can't tell you about the use of drones and what the collateral damage is and all the rest but from a legal perspective the laws of conventions some of the laws of war require you to be as focused as possible and how you target and go after a potential adversary so the extent that drones allow you to take out an individual or two or three individuals as opposed to a building or a village or an entire region there's

a legal argument there that drones are not only more moral not only more effective but also somewhat legal the political side of drones is what's not getting enough attention and that is whenever you get into a fight whenever you get make the decision to move from negotiation or from threats and coercion to actual violence there's a whole bunch of so from a little processes that go on drones or a new weapon we haven't figured out how they factor into that but even you know from a legal perspective at least the way i see it too is that we just don't see a lot of information right when it comes to civilian casualties that's right at the cia it isn't public they want to acknowledge it's trying to program or that it even exists and then claim that there have been zero casualties and they tell us a little about it then we don't know if it's really so precise or if the casualties are you know over over rated or over rated but you know even if they try to over that if the drones are under article town of three hundred the part of the u.s. law that allows covert operations activities you're not going to have that kind of oversight but if they're under article fifty if they're under the department of

defense clearly then the laws of war attach the geneva conventions attach and suddenly there's more transparency yeah but at this point we just have to. take their word for it right so that makes me a little bit skeptical always chris rock got to wrap it up unfortunately i want to thank you for joining us tonight pleasure to see you thanks. are there still much more to come tonight we're going to ask if the education system here in america is to blame for outsourcing after the break we're going to speak with david sirota about what he calls the education crisis and where we should be focusing our attention instead. of. the old. technology innovations all the lives developments around russia we've got the future covered.

you may be one of the hundred forty million mobile phone users that have the software carrier i.q. installed on your phone by your carrier or by your phone manufacturer tracking your every mobile move and all without notification or permission you won't even be able to see that it's running on your phone and nobody even knew about this software until security researcher trevor eckhart first posted these explosive findings this is a video of him finding the carrier i.q. hidden deep inside of his android. traditions that it has are below. and you can see a pretty extensive list of permissions here everything from calling phone numbers stuff that costs us money sending text messages reading text messages getting our location recording model yo changing our audio settings playing with bluetooth changing network connectivity all sorts that this has. now carrier i.q.

collects all the information and gives it back to your cell phone provider but that isn't even the scariest part not only does a software track literally everything the you do but you can't even find that it's running on your phone or turn it off. what's really important here is to look under system tools you see it is said to automatically said have you seen that this application will always run one hundred years running and then i'm going to show you strange christof or stuff and see if you are offered with a forced out which means this application must be running even though we didn't see it in the running applications was for let's go ahead and try to stop it. and see it actually does nothing you are unable to stop that you are. now of course carrier i.q. argues that all that night after all what's the big deal with tracking your location application deployment and tax they also deny cards allegation that they can track

individual keystrokes supposedly it's all to keep cell phone providers in the know about their customers every move so they can make business decisions and improve products that for some reason they were compatible weren't all that high quite happy or buying that explanation i guess they didn't like the idea of their every move and potentially even their keystrokes being monitored without their knowledge or their permission they were pissed and so in the wake of the controversy the service providers actually responded sprint announced last week that it would be dropping a carrier i q apple has made a similar announcement to mobile and have yet to make such an announcement and verizon well they don't use the software now congress is also deciding to get in the mix democratic representative edward markey has released draft legislation called the mobile device privacy act which would require companies to disclose when they've installed monitoring software what that software is and who can read it he said in a statement to the hilt consumers have the right to know and to say no to the presence of software of their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their

personal and sensitive information now all of that seems pretty obvious the fact that spy software is being installed on over one hundred forty million americans phones without their knowledge or permission should make congress just as angry as it makes me which is very now of course that doesn't mean that the government is innocent congress seems to find out. to excuse me seems to find the time to be outraged about almost everything except for your privacy they make time to hold committee hearings on occupy d.c. vote on every single post office name in the country but when it comes to people's privacy the outrage is pretty muted in fact they normally push legislation that does the exact opposite and are all for the government monitoring your communications but don't worry when it's the government doing it it's just to keep you safe anyway i hate to be such a cynic here but i think that we have to look at this carrier i.q. situation in a positive light with their acting but take it with a grain of salt i wish congress would legislate this way on all issues that do concern your privacy. now on january eighteenth we saw a day of online protests that at least for now killed so and protect ip two pieces

of legislation they were working their way through the house and the senate they were sold as anti-piracy measures but in fact threaten the freedom of the internet as we know it now aside from google wikipedia and other big websites taking part we also saw the reddit community play a huge role and pressuring not only businesses like go daddy to change their stance but also members of congress like paul ryan well guess what they're not stopping there the community has now come up with a proposed plan to create a piece of legislation called the free internet act and ideas are already flowing so is this just a fun experiment or might we see a piece of legislation coming up from lawmakers but from the people well joining me to discuss it is alexis ohanian co-founder of reddit alexis nice to have you back on the show tonight if you can you know let's start give us a little bit of explanation with how this all happened somebody decided to just come up with an idea said hey let's talk about a free internet we can come up with that on our own and then the conversation just started flowing yeah yeah that's pretty much it in fact we're seeing

a lot of the same self mobilization that we saw during the. protests planning the magic of reddit is that anyone can come up with a melody and have it turn into something much much bigger and so someone had this idea reddit or you know with a username that is probably it's just some silly characters and entire community now is gone behind it at f a that is for united act dot reddit dot com and so you can create a separate about anything you want and it just so happens now that there's one discussing everything imaginable about legislation that the community would like to see put forward to protect our rights online just like we have to protect it offline right now we see the community come up with a lot of ideas on reddit but do you think we've ever seen anything like this before specifically where they want to create their own piece of legislation no no this is definitely a first but i'll tell you we are in uncharted territory this is a community that few years ago decided. was going to be a good idea to have the world's largest secret santa exchange and did it and entire

web sites have been devoted to this and now twice a year you can exchange secret santa gifts people all across the world it just kind of works and it's this decentralized magic that has has done so much for the sopa and pipa fight thus far the i i wouldn't put anything past them now they're still a long way to go from great discussions online to actual legislation but what's really exciting is that what's come out of the backlash is that there are legislators there are senators and representatives who are actually listening i wish there were more of them but there are plenty who are listening to the experts and we have we have meetings scheduled i've got one actually at the end of this week there are plenty of people who are paying attention to what writers are doing beyond just me and are actually the ones who are capable of getting these ideas turned into law now i know that a lot of us don't like the way the legislation is written because often let's face it if the lobbyist to end up writing legislation it ends up favoring a certain industry like i guess you could say the entertainment industry was one of what we saw with sopa and pipa but i mean you know how seriously can you take this

what the read of yours are putting out there they're also not legal experts i'm the majority of them i'm assuming probably have never actually written a law before so is it just to get the conversation started. yeah and you know i i am a technologist at heart i am not a lawyer i almost was a lawyer but then i went to a waffle house and had an epiphany but that's that's a whole other story i think like many americans the kind of laws that we have should be understandable to non lawyers i think you oftentimes get into a lot of trouble when you have so much legal ease that any reasonable person can't quite divine what it's trying to get at and so i like the approach of starting very simply with with people in plain english who are admittedly novices coming up with the most basic rights that we deserve to have online and then us getting them to some legislators who you know know that they're beholden to voters and not to lobbyists to craft this into real language it's exciting if you had it your way and then what would this free internet access look like what kind of rights that

protect. we need we need basic really basic free speech rights the hyperlink needs to be protected speech. we would you know we've seen discussions go so far as to talk about copyright reform because it's gone much much further than the founding fathers intended because it was supposed to encourage innovation and it's come it's become this monster that actually strangles more of it than anything else so copyright reform like i said protected speech online and things like privacy there are fundamental expectations that we as americans have about our privacy in meatspace offline that we would like to see protected. now i'm curious though there is you know also have our dad right now ron wyden had last year introduce something called the open act which at first didn't really go anywhere some people laughed it off and now it's help on paper and dead it seems more and more like it just might be a possibility and this is something that the tech giants out there that google that facebook twitter and linked in actually support so you know what do you think of it

well and i don't want to be very clear sopa and pipa if we're going to use the dead metaphor than we have to think of them is as obvious as the undead because they are not in their heads have been cut off unfortunately these these bills go they've been shelved and they've certainly the representatives behind them have certainly been sort of shamed by the public but they are not dead and we still have to be very very proactive now open you know which widen had talked about for many many months comes at fighting this much more intelligently then sopa or even came close to because it was written with some actual technologies at the table but we need to go a step further and actually really make sure that there are things safeguarding our rights online and as well as looking at legislation that more effectively targets copyright that yeah i think that you know at least what a lot of people say to you in terms of some of the reasons why maybe the big tech giants are more open to the open act is it doesn't necessarily. hold them liable if

you do take down some of this infringing activity within a certain amount of time then you're ok it also i guess isn't as they get when it comes to a site dedicated to infringing activity actually had to be dedicated to it there now i want to switch gears with you here real quick before we go which is that we've been talking about google and their new privacy policy here and how they want to streamline everything and so it just follows you all over the internet and congress has asked them about it and they ended up writing back a thirteen page letter but basically saying don't worry this is not about your privacy this is just to make your life easier what's your take well so on the one hand i can understand the. again this is a business founder this is the co-founder of it i can understand the desire to simplify language you know we are actually as a member of the board on reddit we're looking into doing a similar kind of simplification of our privacy policy and user agreement because it's just way too much legal use the issue with this i think with google is that it

is a reminder to a lot of people who aren't necessarily thinking about it that so much of our lives is tied up in google whether we use their g. mail whether we use their search google plus you know there are so many bits of data about us that it's that are being collected even in anonymised form to provide you know for instance better advertisements for us and it's important to realize that you know there is a much broader coalition of the internet than just google and i hope that that's something that congress has come away from all this discussion with and and these internet users they're american citizens and they are very very interested in things like privacy and it just so happened that google was on the side of the american people against hollywood for sopa and pipa but this doesn't mean that they will always be and so it's really really important for us as citizens to keep in mind that this stuff matters and you know i ship are waking up to elections i'm sorry we got to take a break but thanks so much for joining us tonight.