the site leaked classified or highly sensitive information. in what appears to be a broader administration effort from prosecuting whistle blowers to protecting patriotic leakers the line between a political power play and downright treason is more blurry than ever before coming up was a former whistle blower why some leakers considered heroes while others condemned as villains it is an outrage in a country that professes to hate and john respects for the freedom of press to be you know throwing throwing reporters in jail looks like press badges might be as useless as the paper they're printed on us my pride itself on freedom of the press

that's not necessarily the case anymore but if you two good examples to prove this point. and a drone is a very very powerful way of snooping on behavior and i don't want them monitoring every every bit of my behavior just days after a drone crashed on maryland's eastern shore rand paul is rattling against domestic drone use this quickly as he makes the point the kentucky senator started backpedaling why is the drone conversation in the u.s. so taboo. wednesday june thirteenth four pm in washington d.c. i'm adding martin you're watching r t. so like tiffany leaking facts to foster a myth that obama is a no no holds barred super bowl hero taking out terrorists to save the world anonymous government sources have been leaking stories to the press that bolster the president's image of being tough on terror despite the compromise of national

security. this administration has been blatantly political on all nations security issues that i've been driving up and so. i think it's very clear that these leaks came from the white house people within the white house itself i don't think it's ever good to expose your allies to. their programs and their systems being offered to the united states in the new york times i think this is the most devastating for our national security dianne feinstein to great credit to said it lives and it put at risk at the same time as administration has come down harder on whistleblowers who leak inconvenient truths than any other previous administration combined so where is the line between political power plays and treason let's talk more about this i'm joined by peter van buren author of we meant well how i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people peter which of these

leaks thanks for joining me today which of these leaks do you think are used for political pull here. i think the answer is c. all of the above the obama white house has been almost unprecedented in leaking information that makes itself look good of course politicians do like to do that and leaking information that favors you is not unique to obama i think what's unique you are two things first the secrecy of these infor of this information the stuxnet worm the things that are going on in iran this raid that killed bin ladin information came out in those instances that was beyond top secret and was known to very few people that's something new coupled with obama's aggressive persecution of whistleblowers his use of the espionage act that's the other side of this story and that's the other thing that's unique in this case even george bush understood an accommodation between the needs of a free press and the needs of government secrecy obama has taken it a step further here it is interesting that he repays to try to bolster his image or

it just seems like stuxnet that the leak of stocks not knowing that it was the u.s. working in concert with israel and pretty much created a blueprint for cyber terrorism around the world i think that cover a talent retaliation absolutely in may of two thousand and eleven the pentagon announced that it would consider a cyber attack against the united states an act of war the same as if a bomb destroyed a building a cyber attack that took out an electrical grid or did damage would be considered an act of war the president then a year later turns around and in the pages of the new york times frankly admits that the united states has committed an act of war against iran practically challenging them to come out and fight it's almost the same as george bush back in the early days of the iraq war saying you know you come get us and that didn't work out very well so so the stock's not and admittance and also this kill list and the drone warfare the extent of this expansive drone telling machine world why do you

think that that's just the administration saying. you know we're really strong and we're we're fighting terror in a good way i mean look at what we're doing i i just to me it looks bad i don't know this is this is the sad part about all this is that in fact this does appeal to the majority of american voters obama's ratings go up he watches the polls very carefully they put out this information that he practically does these things himself with his bloody hands and its popularity goes up what's gotten on now is something that's almost impossible for us to find historical precedent in the united states has been hiding information not from the people overseas who might threaten us or use that information against us but from the american people there's certainly no secrecy about a drone war in yemen or pakistan the people there are subjected to the pointy end of the missiles all the time the iranians certainly knew they were under attack

from a very sophisticated anime that almost exclusively would point to the united states and or israel so this information was being kept secret from who from us the american people and is being released now who incidentally in the run up to a contested election to make obama look like superman superman with blood on his hands and somehow that now appeals to american voters well said peter i wanted to get your opinion on just why why is there such an uproar about these leaks now and where obama's been already prosecuting low level whistleblowers for the last three plus years why is this why is everyone up in arms about this now and kind of something we've known about. i think there's two things first it is the good thing slash bad thing that this is reaching a certain critical mass what started out a year or so ago with what seemed like a bit of wrangling over the murder and of osama bin laden has grown over the course

of this year in into almost as i said unprecedented levels of highly classified leaking that's brought it out the other of course is that sadly like so many things in america this is quickly devolved into partisan politics the republicans rather than talking lucidly about the damage to the united states that this information being leaked might be doing instead of choosing to make it into another political football one of the themes that i've written about in my latest column on tom dispatch is in fact how we should not be mistaken this is not a political football this is about a president who believes that he alone determines right from wrong he alone can decide what information may damage the united states and what information he needs to brag about for his own purposes just as he alone apparently decides who lives and who dies under america's drones pittard the cia has come out and said that these leaks threaten national security do you agree with that yes i do what happens

in the in the cloak and dagger world. let's just pretend for now that it's all for it's all for the benefit it's all for the good of the united states oftentimes has to be kept secret an awful lot of espionage type things work because people don't know they're happening what goes on when we're bragging about them is oftentimes exposing people to danger who willingly help the united states and that awful sets off a lot of wannabes out there who say well america can say they can do this and maybe we'll do this lastly as we talked earlier it's a challenge it's a taunt it's a it's standing up and saying to everyone out there ha you want to get us here we are you come get us. that doesn't work very well and it doesn't make for good politics and it certainly doesn't portray the image of america that's been home bill shows a bit of humility the kind of things that are really necessary for america to regain its status in the world and on the discussion of national security here we have bradley manning you know the d.o.j.

is currently withholding two hundred fifty thousand documents to his defense and really there has been no charge of him actually compromising national security but i want to play this this clip from the quick of obama talking about bradley manning . we don't even do it. so there's obama saying you know he broke the law he's guilty without the trial without really any proof that he did compromise national security when you have these three me says from from anonymous officials that do compromise national security what do you think about that absolutely and that's what makes this whole smell so bad is the hypocrisy that that's inherent in it bradley manning's if he was the one that released all those cables there's the government is still not shown what damage if any has actually taken place the state department fought tooth

and nail that its internal study of the so-called damage from we can expect not be released to manning's attorneys luckily the judge last week did say that the state department had to hand that over to manning's attorneys and we all look forward to the possibility that some of that information will be shared with us in the public but when you expose sources when you expose methods when you declare that you've committed an act of war against iran i think it's difficult to say those things don't harm america and don't put america and americans at risk. i very interesting point peter and as someone who's been working and you know reporting on the administration for a long time i know that you yourself have been the target of a lot of things and i wanted to just ask your opinion how you think reporting has changed over the last two administrations it seems like during the clinton ministration there were a lot a lot of leaks in the bush administration how things are more tightly managed but now it just seems like there is no investigation it's just the reprinting of press

releases given to reporters from the government we know that the l.a. times sat on the photos on the new york times sat on wiretapping for so long i mean we just your opinion on how things have changed really in the investigative journalism world will two things have happened one is that an awful lot of people have just given up and that's the point you made quite eloquently just there they simply wait for the government to hand them something whether it's a leak or a press release or a statement in they reprint it and it makes things very easy it's kind of cut and paste journalism the other thing that's happened however is for the people who are still working very very hard out there to do investigative journalism to create jefferson's informed citizenry their jobs are becoming increasingly criminalised if everything about national security is classified now as it has as it is becoming under the obama administration then any reporting about national security has to by

definition cross the line to classify territory and thus become essentially illegal and it will be obama administration with its aggressive whistle blowing prosecutions and it's over classifications is actually seeking in my mind. to get rid of investigative journalism to punish journalists to scare away the ones that are scare of all and to prosecute the ones that need to be prosecuted at the same time stamping on sources to the point where it's only going to be the government telling us what it wants us to know and keeping hold of what it doesn't want us to know and that is not a very good place for democracy to be and you have a personal experience with this sceptically if you could just elaborate on what happened to you and also the linking to just that already declassified document on on wiki leaks and what happened there absolutely i have become a whistleblower in the process of telling americans through my book we meant well how the united states failed in the reconstruction of iraq my book unlike some of

these other things contains no classified material and in fact recounts many of the things that i saw witnessed and participated in while i was interact all in one classified format that doesn't make it any less damaging and it doesn't make it any less clear to america that the state department lied to them about iraq and has participated in waste fraud and mismanagement there in return for my providing this information to the american public the department of state is in the final stages of separating me firing me terminating me kicking me out making the retire i don't know which one it will end up being but forcing me out because speaking the truth now in washington is a very very dangerous thing they can't really come up with enough excuses to fire me so they've made a few up one of them is claiming that a link on my blog not only a link on my blog to a document elsewhere on the internet that the state department privately says is classified publically won't confirm constitutes me mishandling information such

that i'm no longer entitled to a security clearance here i'm i with are running out of time but basically now you're just linked to an already declassified document i'm trying to use that to live down and thanks so much for coming on and for sharing your opinion i was paired with an aaron author of we meant well i helped lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the iraqi people. whistleblowers are not the only ones being targeted for trying to expose injustices credentialed journalists in new york are also prevented from doing their job if you don't have a specific city issued press pass you could be arrested simply for reporting and put through a legal quandary as a result let's use occupy wall street as an example dozens of reporters were arrested while attempting to cover the protests others claimed to have been roughed up and yet the n.y.p.d. says that only there were only one person officially arrested or to correspond on the stasi a church reports on how not even a press badge protects journalists first amendment rights.

no. dramatic scenes unfolding in the u.s. a must cover band for journals that the idea i showed them and apparently that wasn't enough for the new york police his press pass feeling to pass the test this reporter got arrested while covering the occupy wall street protest no muss no fuss officer just books. and i just. tried to tell him that i'm a journalist. people out my state department. whether i have or new york police one unfortunate death one expired can you writes for daily russian newspaper and has worked in the us for the last three years i don't prove you have they don't really care that just you just business and you credentials can't really protect you sent through a whirlpool like legal system the seasoned journalist was treated as a protest participant under arrest twenty four hours behind bars

a quickie trial six hundred dollars in fines for his punishment for doing his job covering the news of the day and then there were the two days of community service the universe and bring right over here this invasion station give you brooms trash cans and child and you're basically walking around sweeping the streets because of the debris paper cigarette about whatever keep you is now on probation for six months it is an outrage and i treat that professes to have a and i respect for the free press to be you know throwing throwing reporters in jail i. suppose but this case is not unique rather it's part of a dangerous trend in the u.s. when you let the state control who is a journalist that's just propaganda team pool is an independent journalist who has witnessed police reject press passes on a state by state basis throughout occupy wall street protests in new york they

don't care. even if you have a press pass i've watched i've watched a cop grab a journalist with his press pass on the ground i've seen supervisors call out to grab a journalist press pass and take it from him i have d.c.b. processes running in oakland they require a local oakland press ups in new york they've been rejecting trespassers from other jurisdictions tripper first amendment which guarantees the freedom of the press i mean there is no nothing in the law which must police agencies to determine which press and are legitimate press and which are not requiring a press pass has also been sending journalists through a vicious circle not of just people work with guessing games of which state might be next to cover story near impossibility in a fast paced world obviously you have to prove that you've covered breaking news but it's hard to cover breaking news in the police won't let you so creates this catch twenty two take several months finally if they like the news you're making

they'll let you get a pass. arbitrary or unattainable press passes demanded journalists arrested for covering the news the constitutional concept of media freedom under siege i think we're slowly coming into a state of affairs where. sitting a video camera is a lot more dangerous to the stablish myth and shooting a gun choosing to view his arrest as an invaluable cultural experience he treats it with humor i got two articles out of my experience so it's pretty good outcome for me freedom of the press in america a first hand account is the situation our fourteen new york. robot drones to stop at future of america just days after a forty four foot unmanned surveillance drone crashed on the shores of maryland senator rand paul is proposing legislation that would curb the use for drones for domestic use it's called the preserving freedom from unwarranted surveillance act

of two thousand and twelve great well the someone is trying to stop the surveillance state from expanding into the sky but wait does this bill really do anything to halt their use to explore the issue and more i'm joined by marcy wheeler author and blogger for m.t.v. real dot net hey marcy thanks for joining me i wanted to play a clip really quickly of what rand had to say about this legislation. and the drone is a very very powerful way of snooping on behavior and i don't want them monitoring every every bit of my behavior and i'm not joking about the recyclables i mean we've had different states in cities trying to punish people criminally for not separating out the recyclables we don't want to nanny state that watches every minute of our day it's not that they'll be no drones it's that drones will only be used when a judge says that it's proper so not only when a judge says that it's proper to use marci but he also put up some pretty interesting exceptions for drone use if we can show that really quickly on the screen he says the exceptions are patrolling the borders when law enforcement deems

them necessary or a high terror alert or no evidence obtained could be used as evidence in a criminal civil action what do you think about this this legislation as a whole marci. i think it's a good start there's a couple of things you don't and which are really important surveillance legislation and such as that one is you can't use the evidence in a criminal trial the other one is there are penalties so if they violate this law then you can go back and sue them. the problem is that these drones are already everywhere else and the air force not long ago i mean i went it's a start it's a well crafted bill i think it stands a small chance of attracting some attention but the air force a couple weeks back already announced that they are going to that they can keep certain once they've collected incidentally and we know from some of the other

surveillance that's going on in the country already particularly telecom surveillance done under the patriot act that they can keep this and go back and search it and then use it in whatever intelligence way they want to the what this bill would prohibit which is a real example is last year that we want to know where a where a border military drone was used to go surveil a ranch basically and capture six sovereign citizens there are a couple of sovereign citizens who had cattle ruffled six cows six cattle and the way they use the drone was to go fly over this ranch and wait until the people on the ranch were not armed so that the police could go in there and arrest them and that's currently being litigated right now and out of that we're going to get some basis of whether drones counted just more overhead surveillance or whether accounts of enhanced overhead surveillance. but. and there are still

a great amount of surveillance that bill would permit particularly given that most of the drones operating in the airspace right now are military an air force has already said they're not going to throughout the day incidentally what about the you know the exception of just kind of the blanket threat of terrorism if there is a terror threat i remember you know the abuse kind of coming from the state department with the chart and just all these these threats there's a terrorist threat here one day and not the next i mean could that be misuse or abuse and just say like oh well you know we needed to use these drones to surveil because there was a threat. oh absolutely i think the bill i mean yes it absolutely could and you know one of the immediate questions is how they're going to define terrorism in that circumstance but it does in that sense model other existing legislation such as telecom wiretapping.

but it is crafted somewhat better than what telecom legislation is in place right now so in other words there's sort of this is action in the united states that you're allowed to use surveillance for intelligence but not for not for crime for criminal surveillance and there's back separation and telecom surveillance right now in wiretapping and i think what paul is trying to do is replicate that because we are so far down the pike on surveillance at this point that to suggest that you would have to have to get a warrant for for surveillance. unfortunately people would just go crazy and say there's no way same thing with her exception drones kind of and new surveillance almost always gets rolled in at the border because there's what's called this border exception which the supreme court has broadly accepted over a number of kids already marci i want to show you a map really quickly of just how many drone bases there are in the u.s.

currently already twenty state local governments and twenty four universities are already authorized to fly them so it just seems like you know are drones just an inevitability of the ever expanding surveillance state at this point is a really nothing we can do to stop these from from i mean they're saying that you know we're not going to spy on the average person and their backyard but i mean how do we really know what's going to happen with these drones. i think it's i think we're at a really important moment and paul's bill is a part of that because it's going to raise this conversation there are people on both the left and the right who are opposed to drone in the domestic sphere forever didn't one is safety that drone went down the other day and we're just lucky it didn't go down in the more populated area. the f.a.a. is having a difficult time working out how we're going to get drones flying safely in civilian airspace another problem is people keep buying these drones and find

they're finding a lot more expensive than they thought they were going to be the customs and border patrol just got. criticized by the inspector general at the a just last month because they're not that eight can't use their drones as much as congress told them to use their drones there aren't the purposes there is the maintenance there are the staff and b. there are a lot more expensive than the lobbyist are trying to sell them or making them out and the other thing people need to realize that there's a tradeoff going on is you know we're getting our local police forces because we afford them and yet the department of homeland security is giving these grants to localities they can buy these drones as if that could replace those policemen patrolling the streets that's not going to make us safer so there's all of these reasons why drones are what the the lobbyists are pressing them to be and as you said i mean we're we're not being able to afford your police yet these drones are

hundreds of millions of dollars at a time a thank you so much for joining us marcy that was marcy wheeler author and blogger for mt we'll dot net capital account is up next on our team so check in with lauren was sort of the with on today's agenda lauren you were covering the jamie dimon hearing tell us the latest i was the first abbie do you see where i'm coming to you from today changes scenery i like it not in the studio it's because i am in the house of the fortified artsy news room because again. the diamond is in town and you never know what could happen so this isn't because i'm worried about the drones you were talking about it's because i'm worried about the bankers that run these too big to fail institutions and jamie dimon descended upon capitol hill today this was the chance that we could hear some explanations over this two billion dollars trading loss to j.p. morgan law which let me tell you this isn't over ok this loss could be billions of dollars more i thought at least it would be the opportunity for some good political theater i have to tell you what it was was just as my guest said if you put it so

well a two hour press release i mean by the end of it lawmakers were saying jamie diamond tell us please what can we do to better regularly you i mean abbey i'm pretty sure this was supposed to be about the massive risks that a taxpayer backed bank is undertaking with depositors money at stake but didn't seem to be the main concern on lawmakers minds who by the way receive a lot of j.p. morgan cash so they may have their interest more aligned with making sure that that cash stacks up in an election year so it seems like it was just business as usual on the whole more than business as usual what can you expect ok this is the senate banking committee the number one guy the chairman j.p. morgan is his largest donor the number two guy the ranking member senator shelby j.p. morgan is his number two donor did i get the right number one and number two j.p. morgan is who they have to thank so absolutely you know you don't know where their interests lie but you have to wonder if it's with the taxpayers nonetheless we're

not letting jamie diamond off we have an in-depth discussion with marketplace is it out evan check it out next thanks so much for watching we'll see you guys in a half hour for more on our coverage go to our to dot com slash usa. question is that so much of coming to me is going to be made into a lot of the plane carrying up look at moscow streets thousands protested in russia's capital for a wide variety of reasons but one issue nights many of them they are against the return.

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