today on our t.v. if a picture is worth a thousand words and how many pictures of it take to tell the story of the whole of a decade of war takes on a soldier with the answer maybe one picture that embodies the reality of how these sensitize us troops have become we'll explain. plus they're teaming up to take down the cyber spying hacktivists click to say and privacy advocates are all participating in a week of protest so there's a scary bill with the acronym of stand a chance or is it the end of your internet freedom. or you would see what we see more and more machines raindrop conserve natural resources caring for the environment. sounds pretty good to me i don't know about you but maybe the question

shouldn't be what g.m.o. companies are trying to do but how they're trying to do it and if that's their business and their business practices have an agriculture industry as a whole as well as your health. if anything it's wednesday april eighteenth four pm here in washington d.c. and we see coughing up and watching our team. well first there was act them sopa pipa and now cispa and i'm not speaking jibberish here if you're having a hard time keeping tabs on the latest cyber acronyms let me simplify the issue at hand for you these are essentially legislative efforts in the name of cyber security or copyright infringement whatever many may be the case that happy potential to do one very frightening thing to destroy freedom and privacy as you know it now the latest iteration of your worst privacy nightmare is a cyber intelligence sharing and protection act of twenty eleven for short now the

bill would effectively allow u.s. companies troops spy on your e-mail social networking posts and essentially all of online activities and to pass that information along voluntarily to the u.s. government now that is if something you write google or post is deemed to be quote a cyber security threat information so what is correct i mean is it an online plot to take down the pentagon and the downloading we on his latest album from hire date what about encrypting your emails or using a service that lets you browse anonymously or what about posting your political views on facebook sending an e-mail to a friend the answer is and the problem is that we don't know the legislation is written so broadly that almost any online activity can be deemed a threat and that has a potential to hurt whistleblowers destroy journalism silence free speech not to mention erode the basic premises of democracy and the legislation is coming up for a vote in the house next monday but should you care let's turn to someone who's

been covering this issue very closely journalist dave seaman is with me from miami welcome back to the program dave now to be fair there are countless scary sounding bills that frequently flowed around congress that partly stand a chance of becoming law why should we care about this one. well for one reason you should care because it stands a very good chance of becoming law has more than one hundred co-sponsors in congress and on light sopo which had a huge online outrage from the public and tech companies a like this one actually has the support of key tech companies with sopo which failed there was a petition that was linked from the home page of google and major web properties including read it and we can p.t.o. went dark to protest it they're probably not going to do that this time around this poses a very real threat and at this point it very well could become law within a matter of it was a very short period of time and the white house has expressed concerns but don't

let that reassure you too much because they also expressed concerns about and yeah and then obama signed it into law on new year's eve and expressed concerns about other bills that have been become law you know i'm glad you mentioned the the white house issue because you know there's been a lot of articles sort of thing all the white house has come out against this but i mean if and if they flack is there a problem to have the big guns to oppose legislation i don't really think we can sleep soundly but. you know what let's not sung on this issue of sort of activists gathering behind or against our in favor of why is it that facebook for example google why have these companies not come out against us what's in it for them in this legislation. well i think whenever you're gathering data that's a potential business model i think it's a sleazy business model but you can sell i mean you can sell that to the government and make money off of it so it's a revenue stream and furthermore i think these big tech companies love the litigation immunity that the government or other agencies or even companies you

know private security company can seize your information under cispa and we're talking about very private information the websites you visit his searches you make if you're doing research on a personal medical condition if you're sending private e-mails to your spouse your girlfriend or anybody else these are e-mails that can be seen by a number of people and that litigation immunity protects these companies from being sued so i think they like that aspect also i think internet users individuals hate this for the same reason there is really no recourse if your information is abused i mean i don't argue that this is a bill that is designed for abuse that litigation immunity is completely absurd so congress you're saying that congress is intentionally trying to screw over american freedoms of speech privacy and from asian. it's been a legislative twilight zone really sense it was signs that was signed into law we saw that and then we saw

a bill that literally criminalizes certain forms of peaceful protests that was signed into law and then we saw sopel which was breathtaking in its scope and in its audacity and in the extent that it goes against everything america stands for and that only feel not really because of public opposition i think it failed because big tech companies were against it this time around we the tech companies don't have our backs so it's up to the american people to speak out and for people that i've spoken to online it really sounds like when you contact your member of congress and you say you know i don't want to split this is not something we asked for this is not something that's good for the internet it's not good for the economy it's not good for our privacy obviously when you contact these numbers of congress their response to something that approaches a detached amusement they don't really care what you think at this point so it's definitely i mean it freaks a lot of people well and with good reason oh you know they might not care what the average joe thinks they get money talks than we do also have the addition of this

horrid essentially of defense contractor a lobbyist on the hill pushing for this legislation talk a little bit about that. that's exactly right this is not a bill that the american people asked or they didn't say hey government we need more regulation over the internet the internet works pretty well this is something that was pushed by for profit spying companies and it was pushed by a handful of tech companies and it's totally counter to what would be in the best interests of the american people in nearly every possible way and we've seen this time and time again where congress are supposedly elected officials are no longer representing our needs they could be focusing on a number of issues that would help the average person far more what about increasing you know transparency and liquidity in financial markets what about bringing people back to work any of these things would be a better use of their time than these crazy spine bills that make us look like a joke on the world stage other words hacking the internet one of the areas where

america excels and innovate so why are we trying to destroy this it makes zero sense it's actually shooting ourselves in a foot i think that's a good point to make there but really briefly for those who aren't necessarily tech savvy you know the average american would say well you know i'm not going to send out terrorist sounding e-mails i'm not going to google for you know terror threat information i'm not planning cyber attacks could average americans who don't do bad things care about the spell. are you really have to ask yourself even if you're not a terrorist or whatever and by the way sopa they used you know we're stopping online piracy is the red herring this time around they've pretty much doubled down they're saying now we're using this to stop cyber terrorists whatever the hell that is. so for the average person you have to ask yourself do you want strangers that you know nothing about people in local police departments people privately run security companies do you want them to be poring through years of your emails every single google search you make late at night and that is going to go there if you

want to all these private things being in the hands of strangers and then having absolutely no accountability you know if they turn around and use that information in the worst way possible you can then you can even get a lawyer and sue them because they have litigation immunity it is certainly scary and if you do want to figure out a way to get in touch with your congressmen and the electronic freedom foundation a.c.l.u. do you have a ways to go and do that thank you so much for clarifying us on the issue david seaman journalist and the host of the d.l. show thank you. now moving on to get another military scandal out of afghanistan this time involving u.s. soldiers photos afghan corpses yes again now today's revelations come from the los angeles times which published grisly images of troops from the eighty second airborne division posing sometimes grinning next to the remains of afghan insurgents now the photos are from twenty ten but it does seem like almost every month some sort of new scandal emerges that involves u.s.

soldiers committing one atrocity or another in the field of war there's marines urinating on corpses the groanings of the qur'an shooting sprees torture the list goes on now the military response in this case seems to blame placed the blame on the press the pentagon made the usual noises about how this doesn't represent the conduct of the military as a whole and then issued the usual of warnings about how the release of such images jeopardizes u.s. lives by leaving a bad impression in the quote minds of the local afghans you know because local afghans have such a favorable view of this country after a decade of war and night raids torture and civilian killings these acts are despicable yes but the discussion in the media and within the pentagon seems to miss the point america is a war and for more than a decade soldiers have been sent over and over again to foreign lands to do what they're essentially trained to do to fight and to kill and that means a generation of american men and women have fought and died lost limbs and watched

friends die all in the name of war and those who come back come home with scars both seen and seen and let me run through some of the statistics for the american soldier dies every single day and a half on average in iraq and of course ghana stan u.s. veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every eighty minutes and more than six thousand five hundred u.s. veteran suicides are logged every year now that is more than the total number of soldiers killed in afghanistan and iraq combined since those wars began now we can debate about the role of the media. the effect these photos have on local afghans sort of blue in the face but we need to stop treating them as isolated incidents and admit that this is what war does for a lot and that this row is a former army sergeant and a fantasy and veteran and a resistor of the war in iraq he joins me now from new york. thank you so much for your time as someone who's really experienced war firsthand what is your reaction to this going on. well i was in afghanistan in two thousand and five not

for really doubt long but long enough to get a clear idea of the fact that this war is being fought in urban environments it's being thought by young men who are being trained with with cameras in hand and they deployed with cameras in hand and what we're seeing now is the result of that and furthermore it's only a small small piece as you said prior of a much much greater picture of a phenomenon that that collectively i think most prominently known in the military is working on. and i just want to ask your intro was incredible i have never heard another anchor i'm not sure if you're just reading your own opinions or what but you guys just nailed it right on the head when you said it this is this conversation can be used to change and it needs to stop revolving

around a few bad apples or whatever it needs to start being be getting real about the fact that these aren't isolated incidents and furthermore it's only a matter of time until they all find out. sorry to interrupt again to be fair i was just really outraged when i read this i mean i'm not excusing the behavior of these soldiers the says despicable behavior i'm sure it doesn't help necessarily our war effort by any means whatsoever but it seems to me that the special never looks at the fact of a decade of war and soldiers and their mentality that we use the word soldiers i in my personal life lost somebody to a suicide and that has really really personally affected me for forty years i can't imagine fighting side by side by my friends and colleagues and a lot of people that i couldn't amount of the psychological effect about how me and these guys are coming home after fighting these wars i mean it seems like this is

a catastrophe that's going to be growing and worsening. yeah i guess you could ask me that's unfolding right now and like i said the evidence of this catastrophe exists and this work form which i believe is all over the place i know i've seen a lot of it definitely than the euro game that i've seen is not through the media it's been from other soldiers showing you photos and things like that and they collected well downrange and while i don't die i didn't personally take any of these photos and i was focused on taking happy pictures when i was in afghanistan because we were trying to make it look like a happy occupation. you know there's an enormous amount of this material that exists and i actually i'm i'm i'm writing a piece right now for the huffington post in which i'm calling for us that are ns and us soldiers to go ahead and release their word porn because in fact there are

probably thousands of terabytes in existence and soldiers and veterans are to actually look at this and understand how much power they have i possess in this documentation they can release these things to the media and seriously impact the national discussion right now at a moment when it's needed so critically well and based on our previous discussion be careful that our presence for the process perhaps be the in the fair interests put and it's a classic of course but i do want to ask you i mean you know who would who would you place the grain and that's the whole scandal i mean is it just about these individual soldiers or is about creating a system where we train people to fight and kill but don't necessarily train them how to adjust to normal life and thinking and being as human beings. right certainly i understand what you're asking this is symptomatic of. a long history of war and the types of wars that the u.s.

tends to write. ins to this this kind of you know aggravated behavior on behalf of the soldiers and so you know in vietnam we saw a lot more of my physical work trophies being taken like fingers and ears and tongues and things like that. in this war it's photographs instead of taking perhaps things with and they still do i know of examples and so does the media but you know more so than taking body parts they're taking pictures and and you know these pictures when released and eventually they will be released either by soldiers and veterans now or at some point i'm sure they'll be hacked free or anything to try and talk about it when these guys come home if they've you know they've seen so much war they they've you know there has been fundamentally altered by years and years of war when these guys come home. should we be afraid

sweden nervous about what could potentially happen if they're not getting the support from the pentagon. i understand i understand i would personally never be afraid of another soldier or a veteran but that's just a personal thing i don't think anybody's beyond being reached but part of what i've seen a shelter have been part of what for us what understanding what's actually happened and the kinds of trauma that it's carrying these guys and gals carry with them is contained within this war porn and it continues to go under the surface and when this stuff starts coming out maybe then we can talk seriously i don't national level about funding in a way that's not deficient you know maybe when this stuff starts coming out we can start the conversation about better and suicides and our actually going to things. like i stuffed out people are going to continue assuming that it's you know g.i.

joe and it's not that's the point words and i really want to thank you for your time it's not an isolated incident as you point out that was not this roll up at us and veteran and a contributor to the huffington post but still ahead here on our team what is in your food well it turns out as a happen a lot more than you think how do you know companies are working hard to keep you in the dark plus all the dirty side of this business up next.

i'm laurie mr king. right well in many european countries the idea of genetically modified food is as important as save euthanasia now in the us however a company named on one song show and corporate agribusiness have exercised near dictatorial control over u.s. agriculture aided and abetted by indentured politicians and regulatory agencies supermarket chains food giant processors and the so-called natural products industry now this november in a food fight that will largely determine the future of what we eat and what we grow and santo is going to face one of its greatest challenges to date a state white citizens ballot initiative that will give californians the opportunity to vote for their right to know whether the food they buy is contaminated with g.m. most now the issue with g.m. owes isn't just about the effect of the consuming these products products has on people i want to focus a little bit on the company and santo which if you're not familiar with which part of course on a frequent here in our t. has

a practice of for example issuing farmers who just use its products special seeds that will not necessarily be reusable harvest after harvest this hoax these farmers on the company one song joe there's also a special fertilizer that only monsanto sells that kills altered weeds as supposed but also again profit wise horses farmers to rely on the company monsanto it's almost kind of like a drug addicts are a drug dealer before we get into the effects in the u.s. i want to bring in how this issue is playing out in the hall and artie's career streeter explores like many have to pile promptly relies on agriculture to survive and life is tough. we have to get. through. to the markets are going to have a market price for a vegetable and we have to sell them much more to try to eat. think of crows maybe

it's one of nepal's biggest crops but only about half of what it needs is being produced and forty percent of the population is malnourished. the united states agency for international development or us wants to lend a helping hand we have been trying to cope with the. increase in production production of the food crops. and also increased production to fifty and on by making him a little bit more competitive. by bringing his costs down so that health could come in the form of month on top of an agricultural giant which shows as much controversy as it does feed usa id has announced it wants to create a partnership with monsanto and the name government to boost maize production here almost agree that nepal needs to address its food insecurity problems critics say that maybe the solution to nepal's agricultural issues should come from within the country and not abroad hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the u.s.

embassy in kabul due to speak out against monsanto as it is our farmers are poor they don't have much to begin with then they'll have to completely rely on. monsanto usa id believes month antos hybrid seeds will get higher yields but it could also be a noose around farmers now you saw me doing so being true to the straight from them then you start going suits from them so you're one of my producers. to give you your two units starts going down and then it means that you have to increase in because you have years to. buy seeds from this company because seed for keeps going down the corporation's history is not exactly covered in chlorine it's been sued by hundreds of thousands of farmers around the world convicted of dumping toxic waste in british landfill sites and allegations of monopolization follow it everywhere farmers like romper saw nothing go ahead. enough to deal with. times when the

reason. and those are difficult because i didn't have another job where i could get some extra money from. but it's a tough decision whether to swallow the cost if you can nation preassure there are t. cap in june apart. from the international stage here in the u.s. so here to discuss the issue of g m o's is jeffrey smith he's the author of the book seeds of deception they actually run welcome to the program. very briefly you know some people say well these g m o's can help solve world starvation and yada yada yada what why why why not why not a lot of these companies to push their seeds wherever they want. first of all the experts agree that g m o's have nothing to offer to hew the world eradicate poverty or establish a stable agriculture that was clear and report done by over four hundred scientists over several years sponsored by several un agencies in fact when g m o's

reintroduced in india ten years ago so much hype and celebration now the government finally admits that it's responsible for a wide strip widespread suicides an estimated quarter of a million suicides among farmers and most of which have been blamed on bt cartons failure to yield and allow farmers to even pay back their high interest loans so why aren't we think this kind of outreach here in the us i mean i just want to bring up perth that demeaning europe there's almost no g.m. crops out here in the us nearly seventy five percent of our food products that why aren't americans as outraged in till recently most americans had no idea what you know most were however we're now seeing more and more awareness and education and this has resulted in a natural demand for labeling so people can reject g.m.o. since most americans say that if g.m. moves were labeled they would reject it right now fifty five u.s. congressmen have sent a letter to the f.d.a.

demanding labeling recently one million signatures were heading into the f.d.a. but we're not going to wait for the federal government it's now happening at state levels in connecticut you know why should we wait for the federal government. well unfortunately the obama administration has been walking lockstep with monsanto and basically has taken some people from monsanto and related organizations and put them into key positions like food safety czar now u.s.d.a. secretary let us keep us id director so basically for dealing with the federal government we're dealing with an arm of monsanto it almost seems to me and tell me if you think there's a far stretch that you can describe us and santo as a pseudo drug pusher i mean if a company like mcdonald's puts a crap in its brokers hawking at consumers on their food and just to throw in some fun suit anyone that went to burger king for alternative food sources would be up in arms it just surprises me that there isn't as much widespread outrage or on the

hill for example over this issue when people learn about monsanto and where was consistently thought of every year is the world's most evil company they hear not reached however monsanto stones billions of dollars in this information in fact last week one of its lawyers threatened to sue the state of vermont if they promote legislature passed a labeling law that would require people to label genetically engineered foods and you see this changing anyway i mean i know you said you sound a little little bit optimistic people are sort of catching on but i mean let's be realistic and money talks lobbyist talk us a plan doesn't necessarily change policy. well there is good labeling bills proposed in over twenty states this year which is unprecedented but i see real possibility happening in california we're in two weeks from now they're going to hand in eight hundred fifty thousand signatures to force nature to go on the ballot so it'll be voted directly by the citizens and then we'll probably see monsanto

raining down on a multi-million dollar d.c. information campaign trying to get people to vote against their best interests but i think it will pass in california and once companies have to label their products i think they'll remove those rather than admit that they used well jeffrey i do want to thank you for your time i know there if i was at the supermarket and was looking at a piece of beef and realize that it was made of some weird genetically modified frank and god knows what products i probably wouldn't choose to buy it so it's no surprise that the lack of labeling is what is perhaps keeping some of us in the dark but it certainly is an important issue and one that we will continue to talk about later on today shows that was jeffrey smith the author of the book seeds of the section now that does appear now for more of the stories that we've covered you can check out our website or you tube channel you can also follow me on twitter i want to hear about your points of view on what we've discussed today what stories you want to see artie talking about on air and to weigh in on this whole g.m.o. issue i mean this is

a big deal here and we want to hear your opinions on air. issues that so much do you choose an issue on the market can be us and it's going to put a stop to the downward diplomatic spiral with iran in seeking ways out of the current deadlock more talks are. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for life you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear 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. download the official and see how many cation your high phone on called touch from

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