welcome to the ilona show where you'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey working to live out of washington d.c. now tonight we'll be speaking with barlow john perry barlow the co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation about the dangers of cispa was passed in the house last night then clive stafford smith joins us to talk about the first ever international drone summit that's going to be held right here in washington d.c. this weekend and capital account host lauren lyster is going to join us for our weekly financial check ups will have all of that and more for you tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look what the mainstream media has decided to miss. it is one of those days when you see the twenty four hour news cycle in full effect

and by that i mean that aside from the usual election coverage the partisan tit for tat the mainstream media made sure to fit in some of those other really important stories. college football fans have been screaming for a true playoff system for years even the president of the united states well now it looks like it's finally going to happen former president george w. bush picking off his second annual warrior one hundred k. by friday in texas joining us now former s n l cast member rachel dratch author of the new book girl walks into a bar this is cactus jack and yes he got the name after he got caught in a cactus in arizona and got to see this a bear falling out of a tree after being shot with a tranquilizer gun at the university of colorado if you've been invited to the white house correspondents dinner this weekend live was easy recipes for a happy and healthy life we are joined by a living john kerry to how do you know the passer by actually saw this eight year

eight week old yorkie terror by the way and the dozens of cactus needles they got stuck right there in issue no eyes were pulled out one by one the bear was roaming around campus all day before going to take a nap in a tree. now don't get me wrong we all like to do a little silly story every now and then right we have an entire segment on the show called happy hour but the problem is when you choose to spend a lot of time covering these silly stories while also completely ignoring perhaps one of the most important stories that's out there right now and by that i mean during our show last night the house and it up rushing a vote on the damaging piece of legislation and it passed now of course it still has to go to the senate the white house has already issued a veto threat but that doesn't really mean that that won't change this this is the white house that it first issued a veto threat to the n.b.a. and then look what happened so your privacy your civil liberties clearly are not that big of a priority for them so here you have an incredibly crazy piece of legislation one

it allows private companies on the blanket term of cyber security threats to hand over your private information to the government and by that i mean any and all parts of the government right including the n.s.a. including the military this is just one more gigantic step to solidify the surveillance state that we live in the big brother if you choose to call it that and yet the mainstream media seems either blissfully unaware or just completely apathetic and it's not like this is out of the ordinary for them either don't forget the while the debate over sopa and pipa was raging on the internet while we were covering those bills for months the mainstream media did the exact same thing they completely ignored it i think it was chris hayes on m.s.n. b c that was the first one to actually tackle it then everybody else only caught on on blackout day when suddenly some of the most popular web sites on the internet like craigslist wikipedia were blacked out but it was that media attention that i believe helped to put some of the pressure on congress and got sopa and pipa to be

dropped so it's really unfortunate that they're choosing to look the other way system makes its way through congress but again am i shocked not at all these are the kinds of issues that the mainstream media chooses to miss. so the vote on sis that was rushed to the house last night and during our show it actually happened in the past the vote of two hundred forty eight to one sixty eight now it's at least comforting to know that this was not merely a unanimous decision that some lawmakers out there did choose to speak up for your privacy. but this bill had a privacy policy it would read you have no privacy the reality is the cisco represents a massive government overreach in the name of security i know it's twenty twelve but it sure feels like nineteen eighty-four in this house today if you value liberty privacy and the constitution then you will vote no on cispa could

the government use personal information to spy on americans yes. at the end of the day however it did still pass and some are pointing out that before the vote it actually got way worse so what we do now well here to discuss this with me is john perry barlow the co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation thanks so much for joining us tonight. happy to be here thank you what happened yesterday were you expecting this it seemed like mightily there was a momentum wasn't a huge surprise i mean first of all. just because a lot more complex. and and ambiguous then soper and you have large technological institutions like facebook that have been kind of signing up to be part of it. there is nothing that requires any private company to turn over data insist on the other hand there is

a voluntary expectation that they might and here's why that's. really troubling because it obviates a whole series of other privacy protections there is a single word in the bill that says not withstanding. that we're standing all other statute. private organizations may hand over. personal information to the government well you know this is a way of making illegal what has actually been going on for a while i mean the n.s.a. as if it has been trying to demonstrate i mean we've been suing the n.s.a. to stop warrantless wiretapping for several years now. it's funny they freely admit that it's both illegal and that they're doing it. you know that's one of the things here right though is if the government then says that. you hand over this information are going to have legal immunity in much the same way that i thought the telecoms get is that something that we're just supposed to get used to we're

not going to have any recourse to citizens anymore is the worst thing about it which is that the government actually we've been spared the government's. tyranny by their incompetence google facebook amazon these institutions are actually very good at what the government is very bad which is actually parsing out who's doing what what they're doing that they don't even know now it is also the case that they don't need to make very much of that metadata vailable to the people in government to greatly advantage so you governmental centers and lending it back because of you know because because at their leaf know it they know what they're doing better than the government right or no no they weren't there to link it turning you know we're doing in terms of very you know pointed examination of people's personal lives. knowing a lot about individuals and making this available in various ways and even if they

were not i mean all we have to do is to hand over a certain amount of the algorithms that they're using and the n.s.a. by virtue of the fact that it has taps all over the country that monitor all the traffic through can take everything every face every facebook post every google request and identify and in particular us and now they're going to have a gigantic hub to do it from right out there and let me ask you something though you know when i say in the introduction that some people argue that right before this vote actually happened since they got way worse i'm referring to something that might masnick wrote about over at tech dirt and he was speaking about this amendment that technically was supposed to limit that by the way they sold it what the government can do with this information you know and that includes using words like whether this is about if national security which they let in there which we've seen be used as a blanket term but they actually added other language the right other language. regarding. exact wording was cyber threat.

that if there was if there was evidence of cyber threat now i don't know that could mean a lot of different things but it can certainly mean somebody trying to get access to certain information and or certain circumstances but if they're also saying you know to protect children to protect the individual these are also the things that they added there right so yes you know it's always even a cyber security legislation where the sea doesn't stand for children it stands for china. and you know and to a certain extent russia i mean this is this is actually still about the cold war in still about this assumption that there are these great powers that are vying for world control in some way and that we must do everything we can even if it involves monitoring our own citizenry to a very finite degree to a totalitarian degree to stop the dreadful chinese or the russians or

do you think if they're that we should be trying to counter a certain cyber threat i mean is there a need for any cyber isn't regulated station at all which i mean there are hackers out there right there are there is a national don't try to go in i don't trust the government to protect my privacy as i've said before this is like you know expecting a peeping tom to install your window blinds and thinking that that's a good idea. the best way to protect your privacy is for the government to allow us to have much more secure communications to make it easier for everybody to have none of this communications and then you they encourage this in other countries that they're making it very difficult in the united states so i think that the best policies that the government can take are no policies at all to stay i mean it because of the ok what do you have in the not happening though right well let me bring in this white no no no no threat and you buy it well you know obama has threatened to veto surveillance before. and then there were you know last minute

changes that made it ok so i'm not completely comfortable about this i mean. you know i understand that when n.d.a. passed and essentially a limited a.v.'s corpus in this country made it possible for anybody with trials to be to be held indefinitely. you know. the alternative would have been not passing a bill that had it not been passed would have denied every veteran in america their benefits the next day so i mean it was a cut it was a case of congress holding the president hostage no but the but this is the thing right congress wants all these things even if they don't get where it's at reactors that the right the us is in the house but there are also a number of pieces of cybersecurity legislation working their way through the senate right now so why do they want it so bad you know what i mean if they formed certain members of congress you know this apparently innocuous. and legislation was

was proposed by the two ranking members of the intelligence committee in the house this comes from intelligence it is a desire on the part of intelligence to greatly increase their purview and their range of examination and believe me it will. to a to an extent that is truly hazardous because you know no now the government can get good at it you can get as good at it as amazon but at least we have k. we have organizations like yours right types of advocacy groups that shine a light on this and so how do you feel you know i was just trashing the mainstream media because that nobody has been covering it they don't even talk about how magnificent this but even happened is you know how do you feel about that because this is your life's work. well you know i'm encouraged because i really feel like we have a constituency. now i grant you there is still the mainstream media and they have

their constituencies you know which is a very powerful voting bloc of people who suffer from fox understands he's they're older but they vote. and they're not going to pay any attention to this but i mean twenty two percent of the american people do not have any access or desire to have access to the internet they're offline by choice. they're older and they watch television and they're the ones that vote so ok but it's likely to be silly like me right my generation really needs to get made up that just don't care i got it i'm going to be sorry was that political process still matters i hope so you know this is what we try to do here although every day it's a reminder to me to call your senators. have a good idea the campaign to stop this is still out there john kerry thanks so much for joining us tonight and. all right it is time for our first break but coming up next both parties seem to have answers of where to find money to stop the looming

student loan interest rate increase so we're going to ask why they're both avoiding a very obvious solution and then clive stafford smith is going to stop by to talk drones and the first ever international round summit. you don't see a story and it seems so. you think you understand it and then. the other part of it and realize that everything. is a big. blow

to the capital account i'm floored mr. mayor. welcome to the aloneness so we'll get the real headlines with none of them or see the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and for what act. really matters to those of us and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anyway if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like.

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. what a rare moment on capitol hill these days looks like both democrats and republicans agree the government should step in to extend the current student loan interest rates for at least one more year preventing that scheduled increase that should go in to effect on july first but you know what personally i'm not quite ready to celebrate because even though both sides want to extend the current rates they're at odds on where the government is going to find the six billion dollars to make up for it so that students can actually breathe a sigh of relief now they have quite different ideas about where that money should come from the g.o.p. well they're trying to keep those rates from doubling from three point four to six point eight percent by cutting from obama's health care plan so they're

specifically going for a section titled the prevention and public health fund that provides money to states for preventing hiv and aids preventing obesity curbing tobacco use and modernizing vaccines but even as the house voted in favor of the g.o.p. proposal earlier today the white house actually already vowed to veto it now instead they're favoring the democrat back proposal that's the white house and they would leave obamacare untouched see the democrats want to collect that six billion dollars from boosting payroll taxes from high earning owners of private firms with less than for shareholders and we all know the partisan bickering over on the hill is enough to make you want to puke so neither side is going to agree here so allow us to propose our own plan where the government can find that six billion dollars to be honest it's really really easy perhaps congress should turn their attention to the most obviously bloated part of the government discretionary budget defense for two thousand and twelve the pentagon has budgeted six hundred fifty five

billion dollars and despite the hysteria over budget cuts the d.o.d. is still going to have six hundred thirteen billion in two thousand and thirteen so let's check out a few particular areas where these hundreds of billions go now first let's talk military bases some estimates out there say that there's anywhere between one thousand and seventy seven to eleven. hundred eighty of them around the world but quite frankly there are so many that nobody really seems to be able to keep proper count and that's partially because the d.o.d. is working very very hard to keep the exact number under wraps when we talk about money and bases we don't believe the country to actually prove that the us has lots of room to cut you see even the pentagon admits that there is excess infrastructure and as the military reduces its troop numbers that gap is going to grow so just in america now there's at least one hundred seventy five bases maybe even more and the base realignment closure commission called brac will they put together the list for another second round of closings to the idea of closing and joining military bases

was successful in the past in two thousand and five a round of closures saved about four million dollars that's so chump change but it turns out the good old war hog buck mckeon head of the house armed services committee has put his foot down on the latest round proposed by the military itself and so since he is so starkly opposed to the idea we don't even know how much money could have been saved because the money originally a lot of it for brac never even made it into the final military budget this time around so so much for saving money there right but guess what does have to live with all that extra empty space then again there's another idea how about looking at our military's dysfunctional weapon systems now i could go on and on but let's just focus on the show favor right the joint strike fighter program this was supposed to be the pentagon's ace in the hole and they invested heavily in the f. twenty two an f. thirty five but what do they have to show for it well not much both sets of unreadable serious problems pilots have died the fighter jets have been grounded for months at a time but despite the seemingly chronic problems the military actually wants to buy more of them and according to wired changeroom it's going to cost about

a trillion dollars to fix maintain and buy more of the twenty two and thirty five through two thousand and fifty that's right you heard the one trillion dollars so congress needs six billion yet they refuse to look at a program it's going to cost the u.s. an estimated one trillion long run down on military bases and shoddy weapons systems. that's just skimming the surface right there are so many places the defense could be cut contractor waste and fraud no bid contracts but i think you guys get the point right and so now i'd like to go back to my original discussion on reaching bipartisan agreement because we have a lot of it going on here not only are the lawmakers in agreement over extending current student loan rates but it seems they both agree to refuse to even look at the area in our budget which is so wrought with waste that it's practically begging to be cut so moments like this make me wonder if there is any hope for any smart decisions to be made in this country at least in our fiscal practices. now this weekend the first international drone summit is going to be held here in washington

d.c. it's being hosted by reprieve code pink and the center for constitutional rights and what better time than now right to bring people together to actually have a public discussion about our government's policies of killing by remote control so just yesterday was reported the white house has signed off on expanding the cia's drone program in yemen to allow for signature strikes which the exact targets need not be known just spacious looking behavior is going to suffice now it's a practice they are to use in pakistan which far too often has led to civilian deaths and our guest tonight has spoken to those grieving families works to get their side of the story told so here to discuss this with me is clive stafford smith director of u.k. legal group reprieve the represents the drone victims thanks so much for joining us tonight nice to have you in studio let's start by just telling us what this weekend is all about what this first international drone summit is going to be like but it's about drones. but it's something actually you have to give most of the credit to code pink i was sitting having dinner one time in washington and i was just

quietly by myself and all these women in pink started going by and i knew nothing about them then but it's very impressive they put together the dia benjamin and various others put together most of the bringing a whole bunch of people here to talk about drones and the key thing is simply to have people discuss it to be public discussion right we never get that because the government makes all the decisions without us and well it is interesting i mean when you think and i guess the analogy i would draw or is how we came into the nuclear age back at the end of world war two where all of this was done secretly you or i we were probably not around then but we didn't get to say anything that have any discussion and we're entering now what i refer to as the drone age which is very similar to this much happening and people out there have no idea what's going on the hear a little bit about you know killing people in pakistan. but the drone issue goes beyond that and into these little drones that the cia already has the sort of the

size of a pizza they can hover outside your bedroom and snoop on you at any time and you know we just passed an f.a.a. bill that has opened up the skies to domestic drone use i think that people are going to want to learn a little bit about more about drones before it becomes too late but i'm curious so has there been any response from the government from the white house from the pentagon or anybody about it going on i mean we spoke with. who is the pakistani attorney that was trying to come speak and the state department wasn't granting him a visa for about fourteen months and then what do you know just a couple days ago they said ok and they gave the documents so in that sense i mean they got to be hearing something right there was a media campaign about this well there is and i think the media campaign helped get in here and i know she has been for some time there in pakistan and it's just on american not to let him into the country and i'm glad they reconsidered because bullshit shows that represented the human beings who are on the receiving end of

help. and the american people need to hear what's going on but it's not just america i mean this is going on around the world is one thing for people to say oh the americans are doing these things with drones and the drone a minute in cost me very much cost me three hundred bucks and i can now drown you if you misbehave yourself and you will do it and these things are just incredibly cheap and easy to get this sophisticated technology a tool and people need to be very afraid of the other girls getting them will go around the world it's not just the u.s. well that's what i wonder you know is what have we started surveillance clearly is one thing like you said you could have a draw and. i was there and you probably can actually put a missile on it and say can i go to you know yeah ok you know i don't get it but you can put a camera on it but in the sense of conducting drone strikes that actually kill people right in pakistan and that's all you know. planning in yemen you know what's going to happen next what's to stop everyone else from doing the same thing

wherever they want well there's all this sort of fear factor so there is the factor for example if someone wants to bring anthrax and drop that on that says the much more effectively done by drone than it is any other method but i think actually we want to get a bit away from the fear and also think about privacy. in britain twenty twelve olympics coming up in the one hundred days the british police are going to be flying these drones overhead you come to work to our lympics in london and we're going to drown you and we're going to kill you we're going to snoop on what you do and this is the sort of we'll be going into i don't know if you remember the sort of dystopian side five films from the eighty's it was pretty horrific thing and we didn't like that world that we were seeing in those films that's the will walking into very quickly not only with drones but even the system right the topic that i was just talking about at the top of the show but i do want to go back to yemen for a moment right because just yesterday it was reported because some administrative

officials decided it was ok to leak this kind of national security secret that they want to talk about in court right that they were going to be expanding their the cia's ability to launch drone strikes in yemen to the signature strikes where you don't even have to know who the person is they just have to be doing something that looks in some way suspicious but they were to do this in pakistan right and you know you've spoken to people that the that have seen the consequences of this right mean their funerals have been votto it's only in the. you know i mentioned to you before when i was last in pakistan and i shook the hand of the sixteen year old kid . who came to me and his mom about about drones three days later he was dead he was a sixteen year old kid who was killed with his little cousin and he was no more terrorists than my grandmother and so you know i've. seen the human beings and that actually makes it much more personal than just a theoretical issue but what really worries me is this i was in guantanamo

yesterday and i've been visiting. and the number of times that we made mistakes in that we bang people up in guantanamo who weren't terrorists who went fighting america it takes an amazingly touching faith in american intelligence the american government to think that as they said in the paper just today we don't have to know the names but we can kill them and we can be confident we're killing all the right people and you just trust us i mean that's astounding when you think of the mistakes they make in identifying the right people in guantanamo where they've had ten years to interrogate them but that's the thing right is that. kuantan of oh they're still dealing with they're still trying to figure out what to do with some of these detainees some of them they've actually declared on triable and you know i'm happy to bring that up too because there is a senate report that had been done by a commission but it took a look at the policy of torture which was employed by the bush administration and

said you know actually it didn't really achieve anything and it didn't really get us any more information that we could have gotten in another way and so that you know that's an important conversation that she was not didn't it's not that it didn't get this information to go to garbage so you know one of my two well that's why evidence obtained under torture is inadmissible in court because you have no idea if you're torturing somebody how do you know if they're telling you the truth or not but but so now we've switched to just killing right or that's the policy of this president is kill rather than capture or you know is about seven hundred years ago when the position went around killing rather than capture and they said of the albigensian in the south the friends killed them all and god will know his own review that is slightly about barack i think you know seven or eight hundred years later and yet that unfortunately is the problem you know we take no prisoners and we kill them and you know i speak as an american do it when i say you know what our country is meant to be about women to be about a little due process well you know i couldn't agree with you more in that sense and

so that's why it's so important i think that this summit is going on that people like yourself are actually out there representing these victims and reminding everybody that there there are human faces. to this issue there are people who are actually losing their lives and losing their families thanks so much for joining us tonight my pleasure. all right i'm going to go check my twitter but when we get back mississippi's efforts to abolish abortion as in the tools i'm spotlight tonight and the fabulous lauren lyster is going to be stopping by with an economic diagnosis and its financial check. let's not forget that we had in the park hard work. i think. he'd want to well.