we brought you for your media project c.e.o. don carty dot com. welcome to the ilona show we'll get the real headlines with none of the mersey coming live out of washington d.c. now tonight we're going to speak with trevor tim from the electronic frontier foundation is going to fill us in on today's hearing on the pfizer amendments act is congress really going to reauthorize this even though we don't know how many americans communications the government is monitoring and despite the fact that americans get it when fighting in court to find out it seems crazy but it looks like the war on terror just might win out against your privacy then we'll speak with joe weisenthal from the business insider when he gets the predictions for tomorrow's jobs numbers we'll talk about one woman who took on citi group and won

in court and the story that joe has been trying to get everyone to pay attention to all week long ten year treasury bond yields are at record lows not all of them are here tonight including a dose of happy hour but first take a look with the mainstream media decided to miss. well where shall we start today to be honest i wasn't even going to pick on the mainstream media for this one because the story was surprisingly absent from their morning coverage considering how obsessed they've been with it lately but then that we got a verdict and predictably they went nuts. who would have been president snow now he is biting his nails wondering if he could just stay out of prison breaking news this off to noon out of greensboro north carolina some confusing legal developments in the john edwards trial we were heard undock on the door from the jury which means that either have a note or they've reached a. verdict or they've come to some sort of conclusion we have one verdict on one

count the jury in the john edwards case in case you are just joining us has reached a verdict on one count her you have reached a verdict and the six counts the jury with a verdict on just one count now sent back to decide on the other five facing john edwards a jury of the john edwards case is now back at work. now the fact that this means that this whole thing isn't even over well it makes me fear for the future the continuous coverage then the kind of coverage of the fallout and the perpetual never ending nature of this kind of a story honestly i just don't get it but anyway there was something else that was going on in a courtroom this week that surprising we didn't really get any attention they were not so surprisingly it's because it was for the most part pretty uneventful you see dozens of people who've been arrested occupy wall street protests showed up at a new york criminal court judge most of these people were arrested way back in last september so it's taken this long for them to even get to try to fight the charges

have their day in court but guess what happened when most of them got there according to reports and the majority of cases defendants got to court and they had their lawyers with them and then once they got there they found out the prosecution wasn't ready to try the case and that for the most part was because the police officers didn't even show up now it doesn't necessarily mean just one thing but what some of the protesters speculated was that the cops didn't want to show up because there's a lot of photographic video evidence out there thanks to this new day and age of protesting right we're everybody has a camera on hand in their cell phone at least and see what's happened in two cases that did go to trial already was that police testimony and that photographic video evidence well they just didn't add up and like i said it doesn't necessarily mean that that's what's going on here but it could be a possibility could be that a lot of the police officers didn't show up because they were brought in from other jurisdictions we've seen how far cities will go to have an overboard police

presence to counter the protesters but the other interesting thing here is they have to counter this kind of new is with what you saw the mainstream media focusing on over the last eight or nine months of occupy right when they got over ignoring the movement and then mocking the movement then we mostly just saw it this. rallies against wall street getting more intense and going national in new york city this weekend police arrested over seven hundred people hundreds of protesters from the occupy wall street movement were here and we're told by the new york city police department that they made seventy three arrests they swarm streets stopped traffic and tangled with officers on the two month anniversary of the anti greed movement more than two hundred people were arrested in new york police. through some type of object and police officers prompting them to come in and arrest him police arrested more than seven hundred protesters on saturday when they marched on the brooklyn bridge some pretty serious charges including attempted robbery sex

abuse assault trespassing disorderly conduct obstructing governmental administration a large crowd shut down one side of the brooklyn bridge protesting what they call corporate greed seven hundred were arrested about one hundred cops when the park handcuffing dozens of protesters escorting that out two dozen people were arrested as protesters ventured from their wall street area encampment into the heart of times square. now i get it what t.v. news channel doesn't love arrest footage police clashes the exciting stuff right only difference is when we cover the arrest we noticed an expanding police state excessive force is being used in many cases not all there were definitely some rowdy and violent protesters out there but a lot of police excessive force but in the mainstream media as case it was the exact opposite they gave law enforcement and their tear gas the rubber bullets their baton the benefit of the doubt and yet when protesters show up in court to

counter their arrests the cops don't even show up you really have to start questioning why they had to be handcuffed in the first place but the mainstream media doesn't follow up of course reporting on the legal mess that people actually have to go through now for trying to practice their constitutional rights their freedom of speech go out in the street and protest and i guess that's a little too boring for that that is what they choose to miss. well if we want to talk about other stories the mainstream media ignores because somebody somewhere out there must have given them a good sound by or there's the john edwards trial how about the massive surveillance of your communications now we know that it happened during the bush administration's warrantless wiretapping experiment then we know the congress passed the amendments act in two thousand and eight to make it illegal for the government to have broad surveillance powers over americans international

communications we also know that there were abuses and actually domestic communications were collected as well so clearly this all brings up a range of privacy and civil liberties issues and unfortunately we have to rely on congress to address it and if they go the way that the obama administration is pushing for that means reauthorizing the law that said to expire at the end of this year but today there was a hearing on capitol hill where lawmakers at least discussed some of the concerns and heard some testimony from a representative from the a.c.l.u. so do we have any hope joining me to discuss this is trevor tim activist at the electronic frontier foundation trevor thanks so much for joining us tonight and i want to get your take on what it was that people were actually saying what members of congress were saying what they were asking before we get to that let's just talk about you know in the broad scope of things what is it what does that mean if they just reauthorize this law the end of the year with no revisions no questions asked

. right so like you said the opening the fison moments act was passed in two thousand and eight and it basically gutted the privacy protections americans have when they call people overseas or e-mail them when it came out of the n.s.a.'s warrantless wiretapping program and we're after congress had all sorts of hearings after this was exposed by the new york times in two thousand and five instead of you know you know bring subpoenas and asking for charges against the administration they ended up legalizing a lot of it or at least in their mind they thought they were legalizing it it still unconstitutional and pretty much every civil liberty civil liberties groups mind including the a.c.l.u. and the. the real problem is even though it it essentially authorized what they said was you know just monitoring international people's calls the u.s. the new york times reported two thousand and nine even after the law passed that they were sucking up millions and millions of americans e-mails sometimes just domestic only even in fact capturing president clinton's e-mails so the scope of

their program is massive we've seen a report from wired a couple months ago talking about how the n.s.a. is billion new facility that's meant to essentially copy the internet and suck up every e-mail and phone call in the country and so this law basically allows allows that to happen and gives the administration and the justice department cover for going about it so now they're going to have a place to store that all right at this massive n.s.a. center that they're building we bring up a really interesting point there which is that organizations like yours lot of civil libertarians out there with look at this a law and say that this is so clearly unconstitutional but then that's one of the really interesting things about this isn't it is that we haven't had a court way and be able to actually rule on whether it's constitutional or not. roy a couple of the representatives said well you know the phys amendments act hasn't been ruled unconstitutional by any court so it must be constitutional the community

fact that it left out is the obama administration just like the bush administration before it has taken every step to resist court's ever getting into the case on the merits there's a few suits going on around the country major lawsuits one by the a.c.l.u. where a court ruled that the plaintiffs actually could sue over this and they didn't need to prove that they actually had been surveilled but but just that the fear of surveillance was enough the government actually just appealed that the supreme court saying that these plaintiffs don't have standing because they can't prove that they've been surveilled and at the same time they refuse to release any evidence that their program is actually doing what it says or that these plaintiffs aren't being surveilled at all in our case we sued over the n.s.a. warrantless wiretapping six years ago and the case is still going on the government in our case is arguing state secrets privilege with me which means even if all the allegations that we make are true because it deals with national security and it may harm national security in their mind that they that the court should have to

dismiss it outright without ever hearing into the evidence so they're actually purposely blocking any court from ruling it unconstitutional how all of that's just lovely right most transparent administration ever is what they promise but so let's talk about what was actually discussed today because i know the jail jaffer was there from the a.c.l.u. you know we at least had some some testimony somebody from the civil libertarian side there trying to point some of this out but what was the prevailing argument because i know that one of the arguments here is that what we can't put more transparency into into the fight is the law and tell you who's communications they might be actually monitoring how many americans communications might be caught up in this because then if we tell you and the terrorists will know to it did the members of congress actually buy that. actually i was kind of surprised about how much pushback those kind of arguments got from the congressman and hopefully as arbiter of things the calm i mean and the proponents of this law claim that there is actually oversight when in fact we know there is virtually none first of all the

files the court got over seven hundred requests for these broad dragnet warrants last year and they didn't reject any of them so we know they're very loose with how they decide these things number two the government won't release any information about how americans are affected they won't release any of the files the court secret classified opinions even though when obama was first getting to office he promised he would declassify them and they won't even declassified their interpretation of the law so we have basically what all the secrecy set up all around their program and the way they interpret the law both in the judiciary side and the executive branch side and it's gotten to the point where senators are demanding this information from the government and they still haven't given it up so hopefully we can see so at least some dramatic reform if not just completely complete rejection of this law when it comes up for vote now that sounds lovely and

i want to believe that and i want to hope that that's going to happen but you know the one hand we've seen a complete flip flop from the president himself on this issue from back in the day when he was still center there and also we do have to take into account that it's an election year you know some of the other people have been covering this hearing today noted that nobody wants to seem like they're soft on crime and especially that they're not soft on terror during an election year. right absolutely i mean president obama when he was a senator actually vowed to filibuster the files amendments act because it gave all the telecommunications companies like eighteen c. absolute immunity for the crimes they committed by allowing the n.s.a. to suck up everybody's e-mails and phone calls after nine eleven when the after he vowed to filibuster he ended up actually voting in favor of the bill and then after he got into office he said ok well when the bill comes up for renewal i'm going to make sure that there's added civil liberties protections well when time comes around for renewal right now the attorney general eric holder says it's his top

priority to renew it without any changes and he just wants it just like it is and so you know we've seen this pattern over and over again where we've seen promises where you know more transparency is going to be added more civil liberties protections are going to be added and it never ends up happening so hopefully congress you know after this hearing after hearing the a.c.l.u. and effort privacy explain the real dangers of this bill what kind of puts put aside the fear mongering and actually either change or actually block this law ha put aside the fear mongering i don't believe that's ever going to have an i mean these are the areas where enforced that we often see bipartisan consensus if you want to talk about the patriot act and so many of those elements to the right somehow democrats and republicans always manage to come together but so just really quick before we go to i want to get your take on yet another story because we do hear a lot of fear mongering a lot of beating up about cyber warfare and so then this week we found out about

flame right about this new malware that's out there they say that resembles stuxnet except for it can actually monitor your keystrokes it can get screenshots it can record audio and people are saying this is just a completely different beast so i'm curious what to hear what your take is on it. well yeah this is a little different in stocks because in that case it actually did physical damage to the nuclear facilities in iran this one seems to copy what's on the screen copy keystrokes even turn on a microphone and once computers record what's going on or transfer files out but unfortunately even if this virus was just aimed at the worst of the worst in iran it is a computer virus so it ends up spreading so the traces of this virus can be found in europe u.a.e. and other places and it's kind of a harbinger of things to calm because we've seen this so much i mean the u.s. has accused china of being involved in cyber espionage and you know governments

even use these these types of things against their own people you know in syria right now we've seen dozens or not dozens but at least a dozen different types of malware they're targeting pro-democracy protesters so you know even in the national defense authorization act this year the u.s. actually authorizes more offensive cyber warfare covert cyber warfare so this is you know not a one off thing and we're just going to see more of this in the future all right well all the more reason then you know to talk about and try to figure it out trevor thanks so much for joining us tonight. and a lot. there's still much more to come tonight even though the jobs numbers haven't been officially relieved looks like we might be a little bit disappointed that after the break we're going to speak to business insiders joe weisenthal about the dismal predictions and will ask why everyone is rushing to buy treasuries. a lot of american power continues.

might be time. for very good. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then 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 sorry is a big issue. here is what you write a. book and they alone if ill will get the real headline with none of them are the

problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore 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 in t.v. . welcome to the capital account i'm lauren lyster.

well tomorrow is going to be the big day for jobs numbers bureau of labor statistics this statistics is going to give us news on the month of may revise figures from previous months but we have do we do have a few bits of information that can give us some insight today a.t.p. employers services they released a private report based on payrolls that found that one hundred thirty three thousand jobs were added slower than predicted by surveyed economists then if you look at the markets the u.s. ten year bond yields reached record lows today meaning that people are actually fleeing other investments for the so-called safe haven of treasuries and that's not a good thing either so does this mean that we just have to keep waiting it out for the economy to get better or does that mean that people are simply giving up on the economy joining me from our studio in new york is joe weisenthal deputy editor of business insider joe thanks for joining us tonight and i want to start with something going so that you've been you've been writing about you've been tweeting about all week long saying that this is the big story of the week everyone needs to

pay attention to this to the ten year bond and so tell us why. yeah this is totally historic the interest groups and u.s. government are collapsing at unbelievable speeds to record low levels so basically what's happening is all around the world people are seeing growth diminishing growth looks weak in the u.s. the growth looks weak in the brics obviously europe is in a deep recession and they're worried about banking crises and sovereign debt crises in italy spain and greece and so on and the entire world is fleeing those assets for the safety of u.s. treasuries and it really turns everything on its head would people talk about the u.s. debt crisis and so on there doesn't exist the market decides basically no probability of the u.s. having a problem at least it doesn't appear to be all people who just cannot get enough of u.s. government debt now that you know you bring up a really good point there because something that we'll hear specifically probably

from republicans right is that our debt is going to bring this country down this is something that we have to deal with but if people are so worried about our debt why would they be buying up the government bonds and so does that mean that that just doesn't matter our debt and our deficit or does it just mean that well at the end of the day we still look better than europe does. well this is a big debate so i guess there are a few things one is republicans are people who worry about the debt would say well sure the interest rates look now but you know things can go bad and they'll say look people used to buy a housing mortgages at low rates and then those went bad and so on and then there is this other idea that well there's nothing fundamentally good about us it's just you know this whole like we're of the best house in a bad neighborhood the cleanest dirty shirt kind of analogy i don't really buy either one i think that the u.s. debt is not a big problem is not the u.s. debt is not a problem history and the pattern around the world shows pretty clearly that when

you're borrowing your own currency debt really isn't the issue surely the u.s. dollar could weaken as the deficit grows you could have inflation problems if you spend way more than the economy can handle but in terms of an interest rate spike due to deficit or anything resembling a sovereign debt crisis like greece it's just not going to happen the japan scenario where we don't spend enough and we don't do enough to jump start our economy and interest rates keep grinding lower over years and years is definitely more likely the path we're on and you know that's definitely something that you brought up that other people out there brought up many times and i was also interested you know you wrote about a quote that came from a strategist the work to nowhere and he basically said that this means that people have just simply given up on the economy you know what does that mean. you know basically when you're buying ok so the u.s. government holds one point five percent a year basically nothing you're almost getting you're basically just giving the

government money and you're getting it back at the end but not getting paid for it when people are that willing to go that far just to get a return get their money back it basically means they're not seeing anything in the private sector in stocks or anything like that that they're excited about and in this case the analyst who is from the japanese investment bank was saying look japan went through a period like this in the early two thousand where interest rates totally collapsed as people thought the japanese economy would never recover and now he's a drawing an analogy to europe people are throwing in the towel thing europe is toast there's no hope for hope for them to turn around there's no solution. imminently there's no there's nothing that can prevent spain from blowing up and so on they're just giving up and parking their money in what is the financial covalent of the mattress or the jar on the back of the room that yields virtually nothing. i yeah yeah i feel that there is no absolutely right nobody ever wants to hear

somebody say that there is absolutely no solution because you always have to hope that there is some kind of hope but you know in the hands of the ordinary member people say this all the time go on this is what a crisis is is that people come to this believe they look at the abyss of the like there's nothing we can do about this and then things turn around but this is the this is a common mentality in the worst of a crisis ok ok i hope you're right then and so that sense you have predictions for for jobs numbers maybe some some hopeful predictions. i don't know i would like to be hopeful and you know i'm inclined to be optimistic but the day of it was pretty has been pretty mediocre lately today's a.d.p. report as you said was not that good initial claims are checking back with a lot of data this morning in fact and just all of it was not a horrible disaster but. it's a pretty disappointing and so. good reason to think that tomorrow's non-farm payroll numbers will be particularly good all right so now kind of let's let's

switch gears because lately on the show we've been talking a lot about well we always talk about the fact that nobody has still been brought to account right there's been no criminal charges brought against anybody on wall street we had bill black on the show yesterday that was just trying to go to congress and you know brief a bipartisan group of members of congress about derivatives and then he got uninvited because they were afraid that he was going to too much bank bashing and so it just seems like there's no hope for trying to bring some reality into the conversation here you know for actual reform to the system but then you have this story in bloomberg about this woman who was a midwestern woman she started pretty low eventually she became a v.p. at the mortgage unit at citi group then she saw a lot of fraud going on then she decided to sue them and guess what she actually won and she got a thirty one million dollars settlement and so i'm just curious what lesson do you think that we can learn from this kind of story i mean on one hand. and this woman

one here but what does that say about our regulators. yeah i think you know the obvious point is that not a lot seems to have changed between this story and the j.p. morgan laws fundamentally that we still have huge banks and i don't even know if it's really about the regulators of the laws or whether there should be more prosecutions because i'm not even sure that there are enough laws to justify the kind of criminal prosecutions that people want to see but i think we do have these huge cumbersome institutions and they in any large organization you're going to have these like deep flaws in various pockets and that's what we're seeing and it was sort of a build up of all these flaws that helped lead to the final the two thousand and eight crisis and now we're seeing them spotted here in their city j.p. morgan and so on you might be able to add the facebook morgan stanley to that list just like you see these ungainly things happen. very large firms so i'm not really

sure about prosecutions or even about regulation but i think that the people calling for bank break ups which includes you know people like the conservative dallas fed president richard fisher just. sort of spans both sides of the aisle these are the kinds of things that really bolster their argument ok and then since we haven't had you on the show in a while you know i have to i have to ask you about this facebook i.p.o. for a minute at least to get your take and specifically because what we've seen you know mark zuckerberg how much worth has been lost you know just in the last couple of days and then at the same time you see this other effect where kayak for example decided to scrub their i.p.o. because facebook was such a fiasco and so you know a lot of people are asking if facebook really cast a complete dark shadow over this for a lot of tech firms out there is that the end of i.p.o.'s for tech companies what do you say. i think it's. probably overstating the case like with all these things

that people take of events at the extrapolate something the end of the i.p.o. window has been shut off a strong growing profitable company will be able to go public in a market there's all the you know who knows what's really happened what it was i mean the market has been very bad for the last several weeks that's another reason to think that maybe there wouldn't be demand for its i.p.o. i you know i think trying to draw a big lesson from the facebook from facebook in terms of what it means for other companies is probably not going to get you very far in the end but the facebook story is just you know it's clearly a debacle. it should have been the easiest in the world to sell everyone loved it and the series of events cause it to be such a disaster and as far as mark zuckerberg losing money i just think that's kind of a joke i mean he's so rich that i assume that when people talk about him losing two billion dollars in a day it's more just because it's humorous to think of someone that rich and losing

money but not any real skin off his back well that's the crazy thing right if he can actually lose billions of dollars within a matter and maybe he's not on the list of the richest people anymore in the world but he's still out there. he is still clearly one of the richest people in the world and beyond that you know he said from the very beginning he's not going to run facebook for the stock you know jeff bezos said he's going to focus on the company and the product and you know presumably the stock takes care of itself so i would actually be surprised if he's too worked up about you know six or seven days of trading so far. thank you for joining us tonight and giving us a nice doom and gloom. outlook on the world and the economy i don't know anything about it thanks so much. thanks. carl coming up after the break we have show and tell and that while obama is trying to find a way to nationalize student loans looks like the van.