we mentioned earlier in the program it's not sustainable because you're not going to have you need a lot more user is that you know a multiple of or have a much more and generation when it comes to revenue is is facebook and i have to find another breakthrough in social networking to really match the expectations people have for this i.p.o. and further down the line i think that they will i mean right now eighty five percent of their revenue comes from advertisements and like you said you know there right now there's four hundred million people who are using facebook through their mobile phones and there's you know there's no ads being shown there and when they eventually you know they're working on it right now but you know people don't want to click on ads on their phones and you can't assume that the revenue stream from mobile phones is going to at all equal what's going on with the desktop computers in the past and at the same time you know most of the growth like you said earlier is coming from these developing nations where there's a lot less revenue coming in even from the ads they display jay what do you think about the business model that facebook has i mean to what do you i think everyone

would agree it's successful to this point but is when we look at public investors by i mean private investors in this company right now how much is it going to change i mean how much is the management going to change and investors obviously want to return on their in their in their own investment i mean how much pressure is likely to put on the management of facebook because they haven't had to face it before. i think google is the appropriate analogy there both companies have dual class share structures where management basically controls the votes and the public market shareholders have relatively limited control now with facebook. just like with google. founders the controlling shareholders. and paper are wealthy. in google's situation there hasn't been a mass exodus of top management even though they don't have to work for

a living. based upon that precedent i don't think there's going to be a dramatic difference with facebook. they certainly want the company to generate a lot of profits too so that when they sell the stock they can sell it at a high price but they don't have to worry all that much. pressure to meet this quarter's earnings tired get basically management is entrenched whether the public markets shareholders like it or not ok peter would you think that's going to change because we have facebook made comments made compromises in the past be in favor of the user instead of profit be very open about that do you think that's going to change you think it's going to have to change. i think from this point forward when they do the i.p.o. in may everything changes i think the corporate culture changes you know all the key players are going to be multi-millionaires do they show up to work at the same

time do they work as hard nobody knows you know and they're also going to use a lot of this money that they raise to bring in more people you bring in fresh blood you know that can be good but it's also going to change the corporate culture of what they were working for him up to this point is going to change and we'll see how that plays a going forward but i'm not very optimistic gary what do you think about that i mean if you become a you know a multimillionaire overnight what kind of initiative is it going to be for you to go to work every day or maybe go out on your own and start your own company your own ideas i mean how much of is this a threat to the core corporate culture of facebook after the i.p.o. . well there's no doubt that the incentives for employees will have reduced one of the great attractions to the startup culture is the possibility in the person perspective of one day going i.p.o. and cashing out this point in time those employees are in a position whereby they've effectively generated the returns they once hoped when

they join the company and at this point in time it becomes very difficult for the management to keep that talent in place however if we look at the s one we see zuckerberg talk very extensively about the nation of the company and the reason i believe he's promoting that so heavily is he's trying to take attention away from profitability of the company itself and to meet quarterly earnings targets and in the fourth year of these i'm not going to be very popular with investors really he won't be popular with investors that he's going to behave that way i mean that it's ridiculous ok i mean how can you justify that when other people own the company. well i think that's the challenge in fact corporate governance is a very big issue we saw one of the pension funds come out just this morning and state that they have grave concerns over the fact that he has such an iron fisted

control over this company he's got very very substantial control over the direction in the future and indeed the earnings and the financials one thing to note however is he did send a signal to the market that he has very strong control over the financials he sent a statement by looking at the s. one the net income was one point zero zero zero billion it wasn't you know one million above or below that and i believe that was him sending a signal to the markets that he knows exactly how to grow the financials here both top and bottom line jay if i can go to you it seems to me it cuts both ways because i mean we have a very successful c.e.o. already i mean when he's twenty seven years old i mean i think a lot of you'd best years on the other on the other hand would say leave him alone let him do what he wants look what he's created i mean it cuts both ways in looking at how management will change. i think that's true however the

corporate culture in the u.s. . is true magically different than in russia. partly the laws are different partly the enforcement of the laws are different but also the corporate culture is a lot different to in terms of executives who loot the company who don't grow shareholder value lose a lot of social prestige. and unfortunately that's not true in every country and i think that. is going to be very. loath to not. live up to expectations and best players are saying hey you know we're counting on you to grow profits to keep this as a financially successful company i don't think he's going to use his voting control

to go off and flights of fancy and say thank you shareholders public market shareholders you gave me some money. and i'm taking it and doing what i want with it you know you've got lots of employees as well that own shares and they care about the stock price they're not going to be happy if the company doesn't achieve financial goals that make public market investors willing to pay a high price you know peter it's very interesting in looking at the. background here he's not motivated by money at all i mean again it kind of cuts both ways doesn't it i mean he's more focused on the idea and money fortunately for him the idea has created a lot of money do you think is this going to continue we should just continue the way. well peter that's a great point he is proven time and time again that he's never been about making

money ironically that put him as the seventeenth richest person in the earth and you know but he's made it quite clear he's not about making money and i think that people are putting that concept on to him assuming that because now they're you know getting a part of facebook and as a public company that he's going to be trying to do what's in their best interest and he's never said that he would do that he's got about twenty percent of the voting control of the company but with that he's got the you know this preferred a preferred being common stock he's got the ability to put the board members in the ability to basically do whatever he wants now you've got to ask yourself this age with this much money and the success he's had is he about making a bunch of people on wall street more money or is keeping this facebook concept as pristine as he has up until this point and i think it's going to be the latter what do you think what is going to be make while wall street even more richer is it going to be about innovation in going to web three point.

i think there's no doubt that innovation is his primary motivator here but with that said he also does have substantial pressures on him that were not there in the past as a private company now with the public company he will be scrutinized to a much greater extent and looking to the future what he's really got to figure out is how to monetize beyond the facebook platform looking to add revenues like google does on multiple other sites and historically they haven't done so well at that but there's no doubt that he's motivated to make facebook success beyond its own platform that's one of the reasons it's really the internet idea it's a user authentication platform right you're going with. discussion here we'll see if the market says it likes the i.p.o. or not many thanks to my guests in philadelphia gainesville and in toronto and thanks for viewers for watching us here are seeing next time and remember.

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

me eves if. he feels. it to be a. success.

welcome to the show where we get the real headlines with none of the mersey coming live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look at a new poll that shows that americans overwhelmingly approve of the obama administration's use of drones in targeted killings even in cases where it's an american citizen so what does that say about our society then the state department is reportedly going to have to slash its personnel in iraq to do what some described as a rocky obstructionism but whoever thought it was a good idea to keep sixteen thousand employees there anyway and we knew it was

coming a bill that would require the f.a.a. to open up airspace for the domestic use of surveillance drones is now headed to the president's desk to sign so what are the pros and cons including the effects on your civil liberties and your privacy we'll have all that morphy tonight including into us of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media has decided to miss. the years since nine eleven we've seen drastic changes in this country many of them justified by lawmakers pundits defense and intelligence officials and analysts all peddling constant fear and one specific area that we've been warned about incessantly over the last few years is a threat of homegrown terrorism and it's not just a line that was repeated by officials or put into reports you know we saw the government act on it we've now seen extensive documentation of local police departments specifically the n.y.p.d. spying on muslim communities we've seen one sting operation after another and how

could we forget there are those hearings on muslim radicalization held right here on capitol hill and you know the mainstream media well they've played along with this hysteria all along compared to other heinous crimes every time that there's been an arrest and what could have been a terrorist plot especially with a muslim group a traitor staged by the f.b.i. or not that mug shot was splashed across the screen for hours days even weeks on end. don't know if this teenager authorities say wanted to cause so much mayhem in portland the new chairman of the house homeland security committee is going to hold congressional hearings on the radicalization of muslim americans later this week new york congressman peter king says the hearings are to help him learn how certain u.s. citizens are recruited or drawn into terrorism according to court records mohammed said he had been interested in just since he was an early teen even writing for just how this website under an assumed name all of them were actually the intended

targets of a would be terrorist here to wage war right in his own backyard. according to the undercover f.b.i. agents who spent time with him nineteen year old will home with us manuel hubbard was a teen anxious to go quote operational and to learn about explosives are you targeting muslims. absolutely not what i'm talking about is violent terrorist in the stream of. so considering our media's obsession with the threat of homegrown radicalization or five you can call it concern if you want although i don't buy it you would think that a certain report released today what caught their eye the triangle center on terrorism and homeland security has just released a report that shows that the feared wave of homegrown terrorists terrorism by radicalized muslim americans well they show that it has not materialized the report's author actually called it a minuscule threat to public safety and the report also includes these details plots an arrest have dropped sharply over the last two years since the peak in two thousand and nine of about fourteen thousand murders in the united states in the

last year not a single one resulted from islamic extremism so there you go folks this incredible threat hasn't materialized yet one of the sacrifices that we've all been forced to make in order to be ready to counter it one of the grave offenses that have been committed against our civil liberties the power grabs that lawmakers have been able to make while selling us fear of a homegrown threat as usual glenn greenwald. did another great job today of recounting it for us at his blog on salon dot com that includes miranda rights being curtailed for domestic terror suspects we now have an indefinite military detention provision codified into law through the n.d.a. that was signed by the president on december thirty first of last year there's a bill that's been pushed by members of congress to strip americans of their citizenship if they're accused of being associated with terrorism and as i already mentioned we've seen our local law enforcement spy on muslim communities spy on and infiltrate communities based on their religion even work with the cia in order to

do it i guess though that's technically against the law right and you know all along where has our mainstream media been when it comes to reporting on these changes the truth is that for the most part they have been part of the crowd that's actually been peddling the fear they've allowed the fear mongers to grace the television screens often unchecked by any facts or statistics they spent countless hours holding up the threat and the fear by flashing mug shots of scary looking muslim men and yet one report comes out showing that this threat has been inflated so the facts do not back up the claims now they just completely ignore it and it's not a good thing was hard to find either people was written about in the new york times but it's something that the fear pushing accomplices in the mainstream cable network media have completely chosen to miss. well here's a poll that should make us all ask questions of ourselves and of what kind of

a country become to the other day joint washington post a.b.c. survey was released showing improving numbers for president obama on everything from the economy or against other candidates the g.o.p. candidates specifically and on matters of national security and if you look even closer at these results though you'll find the following the pertains to specific issues that this president campaigned on things like closing guantanamo bay and respecting the rule of law the results from those surveys show that seventy. of respondents approve of obama's decision to keep him open that includes fifty three percent of self identified liberal democrats and sixty seven percent of moderate conservatives and when it comes to the administration's use of unmanned drone aircraft against terrorist suspects overseas eighty three percent of americans said that they approve and here's where it gets scary of those who approve of drone use seventy nine percent think of the use of targeted killing against american citizens abroad who are suspected of terrorism is justified so is this tragic or should we

have seen it coming join me to discuss it as have gusto list civil liberties blogger for firedoglake kevin thanks so much for joining us tonight and i guess my first question to you is what your immediate reaction was when you saw these specific poll results because i was i was pretty shocked but you know maybe i'm just being naive i think the revolting whole numbers but i don't think that they're entirely surprising given the fact that back in july of two thousand and ten we had the a.c.l.u. warning that the obama administration was in danger of establishing a new normal and i would say that the way that americans view national security policies or counterterrorism policies certainly indicates that. this is so we have established in your normal country i want to get into some of the specifics to for example this question about keeping guantanamo bay open and asks if you approve of the president's decision to keep guantanamo bay open which is kind of interesting right because he'll claim that this is something he's been trying to do the

opposite of clothes they all along and yet his hands of been tied by congress. it's interesting because it's almost as if this could become a political question in the twenty twelve election which anyone who has been following the election closely knows that neither mitt romney nor brock obama nor rick santorum or anybody else save for maybe ron paul is going to make an issue out of guantanamo bay prison and so that's one aspect that i've thought of when i saw this result but also you know it's awful fifty three percent of liberals would be ok with letting the prison remain open and you really have to put it like that because and well i think they might be thinking that because they believe that obama's hands are tied it's really all because i would expect liberals who are passionate about supporting obama to lead the way and have the courage of their conviction to say if they think it's wrong then they would be urging obama to close . on that sense to have to talk about

a good point that brought up on his blog today when he talked about the hypocrisy of so many liberals or progressives or whatever you want to call them that were incredibly critical of the bush administration because of guantanamo bay because of the erosion of our civil liberties and yet i mean you and i spoke about this many times before if you look at the obama administration's policies not only is he kept open by you know he is far and away really exceeded what bush has done in other respects so why do you think that for this progressive crowd you know by the way let me just mention one more statistic here on killing the u.s. citizens with drone strikes democrats approved by fifty eight to thirty three and liberals approved by fifty five to thirty five so when we talk about this specific group why is it ok now. i think it has to do with priorities largely things that most liberals are thinking about economic issues when they go into the voting booths and i i think that it's really a question here of what kind of country are liberals willing to live in. where are

they willing to put civil liberties on their list of priorities that need to be defended in this country i have to stop and think sometimes is it possible that some of these people would be willing to live in a country where we have all of these violations of civil liberties where it's possible for someone to be tortured where it's possible for somebody to be indefinitely detained where there's rampant surveillance where there's all these things that you and i might consider to be undermining civil liberties but at the same time if they can have a country where they have free health care where they had full workers rights where everybody was allowed to unionize where people had no rights to abortion where people had equality and anybody who ever they were there was cultural equality if they had all this were they would be ok because i think that it does seem like they did this doesn't factor at all into their decisions when they're supporting politicians do you think that civil liberties is that not being on the bottom of

the list in terms of a lot of other democratic policies. i think so and that may be largely a result of the political class itself in this country i mean quite frankly we you and i understand that barack obama and mitt romney they aren't going to go out to any podium and start talking about torture and they're not going to go out there and start talking about surveillance in this country because those are mechanisms that are needed to prosecute the war on terrorism and so it would be undermining the the whole american project to use that term if they were to preach to us about how civil liberties were being undermined but at the same time i mean civil liberties right these freedoms that we also often take for granted that's what america is supposed to be about you think of these are the things that we hold most dear and so you know i'm just wondering for example with this issue when it comes to approving the administration using targeted drone strikes to take out american

citizens suspected of terrorism abroad if it hit closer to home do you think there would be any difference and we did see a little bit of an outcry and we saw the crowd booing at some of the g.o.p. debates when the n.d.a. was signed by the president when this whole concept of indefinite military detention of american citizens came into play. i think it does depend on who the target is unfortunately most liberals and or you know well talk about americans in general probably would be willing to violate a lot of these civil liberties and how they've been trained to think since nine eleven and so they're willing to undermine civil liberties so that they can be safe so that they can supposedly the government can prevent terror attacks from happening but you know i just think that people here in this country. they they're very trusting of the government to they were willing to go along and

and say to themselves that you could never really be as bad as as you were have you or i might think that it is that even though people are being targeted without due process overseas and they are being killed without having any chance to defend themselves and and and argue whether they are in fact terrorists or are not well this really isn't something that is being abused and so they are just there's a whole lot of wishful thinking and i just don't think that it matters a whole lot to them because at the end of the day the big critical issues today have to do you know with the liberals that i follow it seems to be about economic issues soon and and i think maybe in some ways that we have to talk about these different rights like you quality and workers' rights as well these

mechanisms that are undermining civil liberties could be used to affect you as a worker and maybe you as the person who wants to have equality as a as a woman as a gay and lesbian bisexual transgender person or something like that what do you think kevin that that the media bears any responsibility in this regard to them and i harp on them all the time for not really covering the drone program for when a report came out by the bureau that's a good journalism that says that we target funerals right and we target civilians that run to help it they don't see it anywhere on your t.v. screen. yeah i mean this isn't something that's going to be making any news casts and most moms for the most part. they'd be hesitant to question because quite frankly they're going to go and they're going to ask somebody who's with the pentagon or they're going to ask somebody who's with the f.b.i. if this is in fact happening if they read about some kind of an atrocity and then they are going to deny that that atrocity has happened and then they're going to

say oh well so and so said this isn't exactly what's going on and they're going to go about their business and maybe they'll facilitate some kind of a discussion on their newscast but for the most part that is going to establish for them a boundary for how they cover the issue now and you get a whistleblower if you get somebody who becomes someone out there in the spotlight who there are allowing to go on t.v. to talk about this say well example somebody like donald vance today is getting a rehearing and he was tortured in a prison in iraq and rumsfeld was possibly responsible and yeah when i get anything that that's one of those those rare occurrences kevin i got to wrap it up and forth about thanks for joining us tonight i mean i think that it's pretty disturbing bring up some good points that made people just care more about the economy right now but it does seem like land everybody's given and when both sides just accept this that you know we're going down

a dangerous path thanks so much. our guys are taking a quick break away from back report from the times says the u.s. embassy in baghdad is facing a crisis no splenda and a less than full salad bar what seemed like a small thing is this could have a larger implications for our future of rocks will delve into the topic with michael o'brien schools with that. kind we'll be ambulance. people calling like you said for free and fair election. day and we're still reporting from the tomato plant where you can hear behind me loud explosions really. really is you know. i mean.

i get it gave a. 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 are welcome is a big issue.