when they were asked about u.s. citizens they they did drop i mean i think those of us that are really kind of trying to shout in the dark about this and say look if we don't stop these policies it's going to make us less safe it's going to result in a boomerang effect of terrorism you know i think we're fighting a very uphill battle here you know and part of it and you know it's people don't like to talk about this in any real way when it comes to the war issue congress has bought that are bought by the war industry democrats are afraid they want to be able to seem tough drones are a good way of saying we're just killing the bad guys and obama's drawing down in iraq and afghanistan you know it has everything to do with the economic crisis in this country as well and what we've seen with members of congress being purchased by the pharmaceutical lobby by by the mortgage industry by huge banks by hedge funds by wall street it's all connected the same thing is true of the war industry and the sort of counterterrorism industrial complex out there so i don't have any illusions that the things that i'm saying tonight are going to somehow be adopted

by the white house but i will say that very serious people within the intelligence community behind closed doors know very well that what i'm saying is of great concern to these operations and someday there will be whistleblowers and they'll probably be prosecuted by this administration that are going to come out and say the whole thing was a disaster i don't doubt that at all let me just ask you one last question to you because today happens to be a year since we saw protests die in libya we know how that ended up with a get off i mean take it out and it's still a mess and now we have republican lawmakers that are calling on the obama administration to directly intervene in syria to help fund the armed opposition what's your take on that well you know i think in the case of libya we have to remember that there was a you know there was a revolt in libya that you know was somewhere between a popular uprising and a civil war but the fact is that moammar gadhafi who of course was just. as

ruthless of a tyrant a dictator when he was hanging out with john mccain in his tent when relations were being normalized by the bush administration with him as he was when you know that this uprising happened against him his his regime was overthrown by nato this was this was not a mubarak situation where the people brought him down moammar gadhafi was brought down in a in a nato affected or implemented regime change in syria i think you have a situation where there is a much wider rebellion going on i do think that it has its if there is a civil war happening there i think that the free syrian army is becoming more and more mobilized i think the united states would be playing a very dangerous game by getting involved with arming or funding anyone within syria at the same time i think that you know bashar al assad is is a ruthless murderous dictator and i would love to see him go but i don't believe in regime change at the at the barrel of of an american or

a nato gun and so you know it's a challenge to all of us i want the slaughter to end in syria i have syrian friends i do believe that asada is a vicious brutal murder but i don't think that that means the united states has the right to run around the world and overthrow governments because if it becomes you know popular to do so i may thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you. well time for a break when we get back to government agencies in violating a two thousand and seven law regarding a great deal of information act request so our next guest will be arguing in a law suit that he filed against the f.b.i. cia d.o.j. and other government agencies they could take only of of out of the break. any match once lived is bound. to burn for ever more eternal sark is one single would suppose to.

do we all want to see this on forever. wealthy british soil the sun goes down to the tires on. money. market why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on our.

culture is that so much different and there's a huge music history of the current financial crisis and the market for syria and the spiral of violence why does the west refuse to describe events being played out in syria as a civil war why is there such meat. we often talk about the importance of freedom of information act requests on the show its journalists average citizens non-profits advocacy organizations just to name a few to look into the dealings of the government but it can sometimes take years for a four requests to be processed and for a response to come when two thousand and seven provision was put in place by congress mandating that each government agency give an estimated date to those who follow the request of when they will respond and take action over looks like not all government agencies are following the rules so now a lawsuit has been filed against the f.b.i. the cia the defense department and other agencies for failing to comply with that law joining me from our studio in los angeles is jason leopold lead investigator reporter at truthout and the one that's suing these agencies so jason thanks so

much for joining us tonight and i guess tell me more about why you decided to sue here right did you just have one bad experience with one agency or is there a pattern or trend that you discovered. well clearly as the lawsuit states it's it's a pattern and it's a pattern with the cia with the department of justice with the f.b.i. which i have been dealing with over the past couple of months i file dozens of freedom of information act requests and you know one of the problems with filing freedom of information act request is that we already know that these agencies are backlog that's the reality however for reporters it's it's crucial to try and obtain as much information as possible from the agency so we can plan our reporting one the little known provision in the foil law that is that was amended back in two thousand and seven actually says that you know these government

agencies must provide requesters with estimated dates of completion and some agencies do follow those or do the follow the law the department of homeland security as i cited in the story i wrote up today about this lawsuit just last week i've sent in the foyer analyst a an email requesting an estimated date of completion for four requests i filed late last year for occupy wall street talking is to find out what role the department of homeland security played if any in the crackdown on occupy wall street the analysts responded said that they expect to have documents to me on or around march fifteenth the f.b.i. however will not provide me with with an estimated date of completion and even after citing the law numerous times the agency just simply refused to do so so i

mean the lawsuit and i joined with public interest law firm national security counselors based in arlington virginia which has in him an amazing track record in terms of bringing these types of foiled. receiving positive results so what if it isn't a.j. so let me let me break in here to you every day thin let me interrupt you for a minute or so if you file this lawsuit and then maybe it'll make them comply and actually have to follow some of the rules but i also want to talk about some of the other shady practices that right even if they give you a it will be given to you and on or around this date you know you recently wrote about something else that the f.b.i. does where they just blackball the information and call that and don't even have to give it to you when you file these for requests or pretend that they don't have it . exactly these are little known practices that the f.b.i. and other of our government agencies to some practices that they.

employ this issue of blackballing is just amazing and i found out about that as i indicated in another report late last year after filing a freedom of information act requests for occupy wall street documents again with the f.b.i. the f.b.i. responded by stating that it had absolutely no documents could not find any documents i found out about this blackballing practice by an individual who has filed a freedom of information act requests and learned that when the agency told him that it could not find any documents responsive to his request that in fact what they actually found was a file but they blackballed it and they did not even tell him that they found such a file while this may sound like using a technical it's it's really important to understand how the government is ordering

the law and jason just one last thing i know the national security archives do this every year they give out an award to an agency that they think was the worst of the worst record of transparency and this year they gave it to the d.o.j. the department of justice do you think they make the right choice but they go too easy on obama is that imply. you know he said well. i think that it's certainly the right choice and given the department of justice is track record over the past couple of years it makes sense we saw that the department of justice just last year had wanted to implement this new rule this new law which they had already been practicing basically stating that they would respond to for requesters in certain instances by stating that they don't have any documents even when they did have documents also the fact that the justice department has cracked down on whistleblowers and has prosecuted

whistleblowers under the espionage act it's certainly the right choice and you know the the two thousand and nine guidelines that attorney general eric holder put into place after obama signed this executive order promising new era of open government and transparency they're just not living up to it now we definitely have and i want to thank you so much tonight for joining us tonight thank you. are going to another star break when we can back dissolve a joke that's rick santorum in response to his financial backers saying that women should keep their legs shut in thanks to all time when i. assume the digital advertisers stocking your every move we're going to see if there's anything you can do about it. i. will. technology innovation all the developments from around russia we've got the future

covered. to. play. the fire. again. 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 harvey welcome to the big picture. above. our guys it's time for tonight's tool time award and tonight we're giving it to g.o.p. presidential candidate rick santorum yeah that's right once again rick santorum has said or done something that i just can't let fly so yesterday foster frights the

billionaire backer of santorum made a comment on m s n b c that spread like wildfire on the internet and all across the media. this contraceptive thing my gosh it's such an expensive you know back in my days they used bare aspirin for contraceptives the gals put it between their knees and it was not costly. now we aired that clip last night as part of a larger discussion about the jihad as we've chosen to call it being waged by the g.o.p. but this morning santorum rose to defend his supporter and himself to charlie rose . this is someone who's a supporter of mine and i'm not i responsible for every comment that a supporter of mine makes i mean there are lots of folks who they say it was a it's a bad joke it was a stupid joke it's not reflective of bayer or my record on on this issue you know it's funny that so santorum is trying to write off reese's comments as a bad joke but i've seen the clip too i found the fact that brees was chuckling at the said what he did nothing short of disturbing now that your idea of

a joke it was a bad one and let's not forget that there is truth in every so-called joke since that's what you call it want to call it now i'm glad that everything get a good laugh out of saying the birth control is too expensive and women should just close their legs like the good old days but i don't find all that funny not only that the disgustingly sexist thing to say but if birth control is too expensive that's an issue we should deal with not just tell women to shut their legs but go back to the clip right santorum points out that he is not responsible for every comment one of his supporters makes on that point santorum is right candidates are not responsible for every statement made by every supporter but in this instance we are just talking about your average everyday supporter praises one of the key backers of rick santorum super pac he's already donated more than most americans make it here to santorum campaign and even hinted at a million dollar donation to come but that jorma didn't just play with the state and was a joke and he can't be held accountable for his statements he also mentioned that

the joke wasn't representative of him or his record on this issue so let's just take it as i can see what rick santorum personally believes about contraception i don't think it works i think it's harmful to women i think it's harmful to our society. well that's you know. it's not. it's a license to. do things. that is counter to what you just. is that comforting he thinks the birth control is harmful to women and society and a license to be doing things counter to how they're supposed to be i guess he means it makes an interest to us or i don't know i would really just love to see it written down somewhere just how things are supposed to be in this world but to be fair rick it's pointed out time and time again that his political and personal stances on contraception differ so let's hear where he stands on the issue as a politician women should have access to contraception i have no problem with that

at all i've said repeatedly that i would not vote for any contraception. that is an individual decision. and should be made available i don't care what it was about contraception or anything else it was just created a right that didn't exist now that last clip santorum is talking about how he has an issue with a supreme court ruling on griz bald vs connecticut you know the ruling that said that americans have the right to contraception santorum thinks that it should be up to the states and the state has the right to decide if a woman has the right to birth control when it's convenient because santorum says that he would never personally vote to ban birth control but he doesn't believe it's a right and he thinks the other people should be able to ban it well rick i have to think that the right to make their own decisions when it comes to their health care is very much a right that women should have whether or not a group of crusty old male legislators on the state or federal level agree so for his personal and political beliefs and for trying to downplay an absurdly offensive comment made by one of his biggest financial backers rick santorum is tonight's two

all time winner. now tonight we have yet another example of your privacy being invaded so it turns out that smartphones are keeping more of your data than you know and the past we spoke about companies like carrier i.q. is software allow telecoms to keep tabs of all of your texts phone history and web searches what if i told you that you may have apps on your phone that actually collect your entire list of contacts and then upload that to servers now android users might be somewhat familiar with this google has a policy that requires its apps that display a message asking permission to access personal information or that request doesn't explain what the app maker will actually do with the information once they have it but hey as long as it looks like google has your best interests in mind right well that might be scary but it's not nearly as scary as what's happening with i phones see apple has always taken the high the mighty approach to privacy saying that they personally approve all apps that appear in their store and any app that transmits personal data without permission gets the boot but it looks like apple hasn't been

hearing to its own policies because eleven percent of the free applications for the i phone and the i pad are taking user contacts and sending them to their parent companies without ever telling you about it and what's worse a few of them are even encrypted the data that they're pulling from your contacts before sending them over their own servers leaving that sensitive information open floating around in cyberspace for hackers to find so you want to know which apps are the worst offenders well we've got yelp koala and hipster to name a few so for every out there is says i don't use those you should keep listening because facebook foursquare instagram even twitter also snooping through your phone . when you use the application in order to match you with other people who might be using it your address book goes up to the server besides your contacts names phone numbers and e-mail addresses twitter records browsing history and search terms what twitter wasn't telling people was that they were keeping that address book for eighteen months which is

a long time to keep all your personal data in an e-mail to the. yeah i think eighteen months is it way too long however months twitter now after tech sites like venture beat discover the apps are uploading users address books sometimes without encrypted that information companies have slowly start to come forward saying that they're going to change their current techniques with the apps next great and now the government is getting involved and they want to tell them why they're unaware of what they're approved for doing in cyberspace and a letter to apple congressman butterfield and waxman stated this incident raises questions about whether apple's i.o.'s app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of i phone users and their contacts so my devotes advice to smartphone users be sure to read the permission requests and privacy policies for the app before you just click accept otherwise you might be giving away your phone book. now and speaking of your privacy can't get the feeling the advertisers just know everything about you no matter where you

look online in my come up on your smartphone the ads are all following you and somehow they're often tailored to everything the recently browser bought so it can be a normalized part of our digitized world but what happens when your shopping or web browsing habits give away your secrets and surprises there's still a way to retain your privacy before it goes too far joining me to discuss it is trevor tim activists at the electronic frontier foundation trevor thanks for joining us tonight and i guess the reason i brought up this story today is because there's a specific story out there about target they've got this whole system to monitor what you shop for you have a user id or a shopper id and so ended up giving away to one father that his daughter was pregnant because she bought some vitamins and some lotion can you tell us a little bit more about that or the specific process that target uses. so target would take in all the information about their regular shoppers. and match it up to their credit card information in their milieu address and what they would do with

this information is. into a database track. what people buy and what this will end up saying about them so they would look at patterns and in the extreme case they could they ended up figuring out. if women were pregnant and they could do this by tracking well whether a couple of examples they used were lotion that they were by or vitamins that they were buying and in one case target even knew a girl was pregnant before her father did and they were sending her advertisements for pregnancy materials and her dad called up and could play the shoot and they said well why were you trying to get my daughter pregnant and it turned out that she called back a few years later and said i apologize because she was due in august so this information is very valuable to companies because they can then use it to sell products quicker and we can see the same thing happen happening online where websites install cookies on your computer that then trash your web behavior and

then they can tailor further tailor ads to you to try to sell you more products and i notice that all the time i mean it creeps me out i might buy something online one day next a thing on my facebook and there is an ad for that exact website that i went to i was shopping on and so i mean at this point should we just assume if you're a consumer should you just assume that everything you're doing is being tracked by some major retailer even if you're doing it in the store or if you are shopping on line too or does it depend on the on the company i guess you know do the majority of them still do it. oh yeah i would the wall street journal did a study about six months ago and they looked at the top fifty websites and forty nine out of the fifty were using this tracking this. these tracking cookies and wikipedia was actually the only one that did install cookies on your computer when you went to their web site now you should obviously assume that this is happening to you but there are measures you can take there are do not track add ons to

a lot of browsers that you can add that will block a lot of these cookies but even when you think you may be blocking them that may not be the case and we can see that in today over a controversy that involves google and apple actually apple browser so far you and your i phone actually blocks these third party cookies from from entering in on to your device so that they can track you while you're on your phone but google tried to work around this mechanism so that they could track when people hit the plus one button the web sites but unfortunately what this ended up doing was disabling the whole system so that if if google got around the system just for the plus ones then all cookies could get on the system and it could end up really turned into a really big privacy violation for people who thought that they were using the browser and they were being tracked because google even said in its privacy policy that they were that they respect respect and so far he's. own privacy policy would

be tracked in that way so it's not really shock or they weren't right i mean thought at that point what are we supposed to do do we just assume that every time we think we're signing up for some kind of privacy policy that that the law that they're going to be breaking the rules we have to hope that somebody find that and pointed out in the wall street journal or someone else reports on it and the company has to take it back. well that's a good question i mean these companies obviously zero a duty to their users to be more transparent about their practices and again we've seen that with the past story like you just like you just mentioned in the previous segment a lot of users didn't know their contact lists were being downloaded and this has a lot a lot bigger implications beyond you know advertisers and a breach of privacy that way like you said there are security problems a lot of these contactless were being sent out over unkrich to streams and they were vulnerable to hackers but more importantly you still have to look at privacy via the government because as you said twitter also downloads these contactless and

we have seen from the wiki leaks case in the past year that the government can go after information from twitter such as your contact list on twitter or your ip address as well when twitter has your contact information your phone they can get that too and it creates a really tough situation for people who are having their information subpoenaed for twitter and they end up getting their phone information as well and obviously that's going to have a really big chilling effect on journalists as well as just ordinary people well it's it's a scary world i guess and you know on one hand you can say that there are certain things that make life more convenient if you go online and what you're looking for it happens to be there staring you in the face but definitely a lot of privacy and security concerns to the servers now to figure out how to navigate our way through traffic thanks so much for joining us tonight thanks for having me. hard time for a last break the night away from back time for fireside friday and on happy hour should vegetarian restaurant think forced to serve meat winning a freedom and saggy pants could get in trouble with the law and alabama at the all

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welcome to tonight's fireside fridays beef your host of the many cops. yesterday federal court in detroit sentenced to more for a bill mccollum known as the underwear bomber to life in prison and he received not just one life sentence but four consecutive life sentences let's not forget this was for an attempted plot not a successful one nobody was hurt no one was killed no one was hurt except for maybe a little matal of himself now the reason i bring this up is just to remind everybody when it comes to prosecutions based on charges of terrorism our civilian court system hands down tough punishment if anything what cases like this often are very.