today on our team a last ditch effort to avoid extradition wiki leaks founder julian assange is in a standoff with british authorities embassy is now the only thing standing in the way of his departure to sweden bring you an update from london straight ahead. plus two u.s. senators are demanding answers from the n.s.a. they want to know how many americans are being monitored under the pfizer law the n.s.a. is response none of your business will tell you about this privacy catch twenty two . and some consider deserved punishment others say it's torture now the u.s. senate is holding a hearing but the use of solitary confinement in american prisons for you with a piece of the emotional testimony and ask our guest if prison reform is in america's future.

one day june twentieth five pm in washington d.c. . you're watching our t.v. to avoid being extradited to sweden in nine days within weeks founder julian assange is now seeking political asylum in the ecuador embassy in britain as you might remain inside the embassy for two days this is a relatively short amount of time considering some of the other asylum cases we've seen worldwide over the years. here's a look at some top asylum cases from around the world the longest asylum case took place during hungary's communist regime roman catholic cardinal you'll have been senti lived inside the u.s. embassy in budapest from one thousand nine hundred fifty six until one thousand nine hundred seventy one he was eventually allowed to leave budapest for vienna fast forward to nine hundred eighty an economic crisis sent tens of thousands of cubans attempting to flee the country but being stopped before they could leave six

cubans including group leader and use these took matters into their own hands and crashed a bus through the peruvian embassy gates and ivana seeking asylum as a result fidel castro then opened the port of money and one hundred twenty five thousand cubans left the country in a chaotic exodus by boats then in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine to yangon then military governor of panama sought refuge at the apostol like none could hear the vatican's embassy after being overthrown by the u.s. noriega remained held up for ten days he surrendered after being assured he would not face the death penalty but that wasn't the case for former afghanistan president analogy boola a case of defacto asylum he sought help from the un after resigning power in one thousand nine hundred ninety two and actually lived in its headquarters in kabul until one thousand nine hundred six however the story ends tragically for najibullah in one thousand nine hundred six he was castrated by the taliban and was

dragged behind a truck in the streets of kabul and then publicly hanged on a light post most recently there was the case of the blind chinese dissident chen guangcheng he escaped house arrest in his village and sought refuge at the u.s. embassy in beijing he left after six days and was later allowed to go to new york with his wife and two children. so how long will join a song remain in the ecuador embassy and will he be given safe passage to ecuador for coverage on the ground in london our two correspondent laura joined us earlier to give us an update on the situation take a look. well in the building behind me which is the ecuadorian embassy here in london julian assange which is in there somewhere to be fooled by this luxury nature of the building i'm sure it's very nice inside but the ecuadorian embassy itself is very small so the ecuadorian ambassador's unlikely to deny sons to stay for any length of time having said that we haven't seen any decision made today he

is in a tricky situation really as long as he remains inside the ecuadorian and to see the police on to allowed to go in and get him the british police can only enter the territory open embassy with specific permission from the ambassador can say so that he remains inside decay but the moment he steps outside the door actually regardless of whether he's been a grant a granted asylum in ecuador the police could arrest him so that is a bit of a tricky situation really so it's quite cramped in that what's been going on today is a series of meetings and discussions we had towards the end of the day a statement a bit of a noncommittal statement really by the ecuadorian ambassador who talked about the ecuadorian tradition of supporting human rights on the one hand but she also said that they had no intention of interfering with the legal processes of sweden or the u.k. and she said that she was looking for a just and fair solution so that's where it stands at the moment more what do you think is going to happen if ecuador decides to grant him asylum.

i mean not that's not clear i mean what i what i suspect would happen is that the ecuadorian embassy would try to get him from head to the airport they can issue a warrant to face passage for him but as i say as far as i know the police on bound to states about to the moment he leaves the embassy he is liable for arrest because of course he by doing this he has breached the terms of his bail and he is supposed to stay the night at the address where he's registered and of course the ecuadorian embassy is not the address where he's registered say that he has broken these conditions which puts him in another awkward situation because a lot of his friends and celebrities including the socialite she my mccollum the journalist john pilger they posted a large amount of bail for him because he's breaking those conditions that now looks like they might use that money to this point to be an easy decision for julian assange is to have made. why do you think you chose a door or an embassy laura. well i'm sure he thought very

carefully about which country he might go to we know heroin on t.v. that he has developed over the last few months a good relationship with the president of ecuador president rafael correia and in fact we his sources saying that it's possible that while he was recording his interview with president career for his interview program which is running at the moment on r.t. he may have us president korea off whether he might consider giving him asylum so what we're seeing now could be the sort of end game in a process that's been going on for some months president correia is a very socialist leaning man he's he's displayed a certain amount of sympathy for julian i saw it in the past and one might assume that he has had some kind of signal from ecuador that they might be prepared to consider it. what is the scene been like since since he took asylum in the

ecuadorian embassy have there been a lot of supporters out on the streets have there been kind of contradictory groups of people rallying tell us a little bit about the. at that have been supporters i mean it has to be said that since this place to start to eighteen months ago the number of supposes that songs has on the street in the u.k. has dwindled right at the beginning of this process we regularly saw one hundred one hundred fifty people turn out to support him and his cool herring's but through the months and i'm not sure why that is i don't think it's because sympathy for him has to build i think it's just because people knew that this was going to be a very long process and people have jolts and they have to go to them so they can't always be dropping everything to ten asses to pull him but you can see behind me. the remnants of today's supporters that have seen a few people here today with black cards and that is reaching enough you can see them behind me to shoot the messenger kind of thing so these are the whole it's cool and i can see that they have equipment that suggests they might even be

staying the night say they're not going anywhere that was our to correspondent laura smith well two u.s. senators have asked the n.s.a. just how many people it's spied on but the agencies keeping their lips sealed and you'll never guess why they say dishing that information would violate your privacy now senators ron wyden and mark udall are asking what's really behind the big secret behind the foreign intelligence surveillance act the law was expanded back in two thousand and eight and allows the n.s.a. to spy on americans without a warrant here's the response the senators received from the inspector general of the intelligence committee after they sent a request to n.s.a. for an estimate of how many americans are having their communications surveilled a letter says i defer to his conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicated to fission additional resources would likely end p. to the n.s.a.'s mission he further stated that his office and n.s.a. leadership agrees that an i.g. review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of u.s.

persons so what's the big secret and what does this law mean for your privacy joining me now is jim mccoll director with epix open government program. thanks for joining me ginger let's take it back to two thousand and eight while i was the fires a law expanded like this so the fires amendments in two thousand and eight made it possible for the government to listen in on conversations without a warrant provided that one of the people in the conversation was abroad and their justification was national security but it created this problem where again there's a lack of transparency and oversight and the law says that there's a reasonable belief that someone is operating abroad what is that reasonable belief your guess is as good as mine. and you know what why does this matter to people who say you know i have nothing to hide why is privacy so important that your privacy is important in order to be able to have

a real robust first amendment you can't have a robust first amendment while you have the government looking over your shoulder while you have them chilling dissent listening taking notes to what you're saying there is no possibility for a real first amendment and doesn't the violate the fourth amendment i mean i thought that there was a reasonable probable cause to wiretap someone or listen in and serve a whole was just kind of overlooked for terrorism well yes and actually that fourth amendment that is part of the challenge that's going to be going up to the supreme court in a case that's coming up in the next year so we'll see what the supreme court says but it certainly looks as though there's a fourth amendment problem here and let's talk a little bit about the n.s.a. his response to the senator's request they said it would violate the rights of privacy of americans to know how many people were spying on what do you think about the kind of double speak it's ridiculous it's ridiculous that there inspector general can't issue a report can't do an investigation to find out what the n.s.a.

is up to how many people they're surveilling and what the results of that surveillance are is is preposterous do you think that everyone. everyone would be used to specific to tell them. but see that might be the right answer actually. again the real issue here isn't the privacy problem the real issue is the fact that the agency the n.s.a. in particular but the intelligence agencies in general want to operate without any transparency they want to know everything about you they want to know everything about me they want to know everything about the american public but they don't want the american public to know anything about them and what do you think those kind of just broad mandate of spying and surveillance does without any or her site i mean here where you have two senators trying to gain oversight trying to gain some sort of transparency and there isn't it wasn't as those it's very troubling especially when congress these are the people that we trust to be able to exercise oversight

over agencies we have congress and in this case we have the pfizer court and neither of those bodies are really able to access all of the information and what we've been pushing for what we asked for only testified before congress was more oversight more reporting to congress to the american public so people can look at what the agencies are doing and can judge for themselves whether or not this is really necessary or effective do you think the this new letter that the senators did and i also just the case that i go to the supreme court do you think that this will eventually close these backdoor loopholes of kind of just rampant surveillance or do you think that this will just continue to expand hopefully i have some hope for the supreme court given the case that they decided this last term u.s.b. jones where they told law enforcement that it wasn't able to warrantless li g.p.s. track people so placed a g.p.s. tracking device on the car without a warrant they said no that's not all right and it was

a unanimous decision and they had some very strong language in there about the importance of privacy and the trouble with this sort of twenty four seventh's surveillance then there's attachment there are a lot. people just because it's not a man sitting out in a van like listening into your private phone calls it's more just computers data mining searching through keywords and stuff like that can you describe a little bit about the operational methods of how they are doing this well that's the problem i have no idea what the operational methods are i mean we can't even get that information under a foot and i don't feel bad about that because apparently even congress can't get that information there's a very broad freedom of information act exemption that allows the n.s.a. to conceal pretty much everything that it does all of its operations all of its programs so we have no idea exactly what they're doing who they're monitoring or how. what do you think about you know in light of all those obama voted for this expansion in two thousand and eight what do you think about his administration saying we're going to be the most transparent administration and completely open

what do you think about just the his administration in general and the transparency issue we're very skeptical of that at this point and he said when he signed this originally that it wasn't a good law that he was going to work to create more oversight when he got into office and instead what we see is his department of justice in particular is perpetuating the problems under the bush administration they continue with the state secret structure and they continue to make very wide use of the exemptions under the freedom of information act that allow them to withhold documents they continue to operate without oversight or transparency especially on national security issues. talk a little bit about there was just a foyer request done and there was a list of words that you couldn't say or that you you say online and it subjects you to n.s.a. spying one of them was cloud another one was mexico and pork it was a request that we made to the department of homeland security for their social

media monitoring program contracts and documents associated with that and what we got back we got back a contract on eleven million dollar contract with general dynamics and we also got back some specifics about what they were monitoring and that list of words including cops including sick including cloud including exercise that list of words are the list of words that are being monitored by these these contractors paid by the department of homeland security they're also monitoring for reports that quote reflect adversely on the department of homeland security or the federal government so dissent criticism so what i mean what other kind of words wrong those listening to everyone says those words though i mean that's pretty much everyone is subject to and i say spying on these social networks well in this case is d h s but yeah that's the problem is that it's not tailored at all it's dragnet surveillance in a way that could has a very real possibility of chilling dissent of chilling first amendment freedoms if

you have to be constantly afraid that what you're saying is being listened to is being noted down by the department of homeland security whose mission by the way is to prevent terrorism and to deal with natural disasters that's what the statute statute tells them they are allowed to do instead they're operating outside of that monitoring conversations that people are having if you have to constantly fear that your conversations are being monitored and noted down it's going to change the way that you speak the chilling effect on them to really speaks very eloquently about that but i wanted to just talk about these words when we're kind of i mean. a lot of people could look at these industry like this is an insane waste of time and taxpayer money that we're paying d.h.s.s. to monitor warns that everyone would say on a daily basis just it is it's a complete waste of time and money and it's also entirely outside of the statutory bounds of what the agency is supposed to be doing so why are they doing it you know

that's a question i would love to ask them unfortunately we can't necessarily boyett that so i don't know why don't you make a freedom of information act request i guess to the government we have no idea it seems like it's not a well tailored program it doesn't actually forward any legitimate national security goals it just seems like it's the agency protecting itself playing a public relations role instead of a role that will actually protect people it's protecting itself do you think it's almost to administer a chilling effect on dissent you know i really can't speculate but i mean certainly it seems like it's a public relations public relations tactic to see what it is that people are saying about the agency that is critical which is not what the department of homeland security in this particular component is supposed to be doing. just seems like. privacy is so devalued especially in a post nine eleven world people are getting their privacy eroded day after day it

seems like there's another element of the surveillance state that's being ratcheted up what is your opinion on the drone surveillance that's going to be unstated in a couple years it's very problematic and we're seeing more wide use of drones here domestically in the u.s. it undercuts privacy of the drones allow the government to see into spaces that they never would have been able to see into before they have very high resolution video capabilities and photographic capabilities so it's very troubling and we've seen a little privacy oversight on this and very little privacy leadership so we've been working on this a lot and you are there any privacy provisions that you think will be pushed to be put into legislation or is there anything happening so far with we hope so we hope so we haven't seen anything promising yet but it's certainly something that we hope to see there are a lot of areas of privacy that we need to see legislation on we need to see legislation on mobile privacy there are cases coming up now after that case of the supreme court about the g.p.s. tracking where the government is using locational data from phones so the question

is is that a fourth amendment violation do you have a privacy interest in the locational data on your phone visa via the government but also do you have a privacy interest because of the advertisers or third party companies so locational data we need to see legislation about that we need to see legislation about these sort of social media monitoring issues i mean there's a there's a lot of things out there a lot of privacy issues that we need to see some leadership from congress on it seems like congress is waiting for a moment when the technology is just static when we can all look around and say all right this is what we have in front of us let's make some laws never be static then the technology will always be advancing there will always be new issues and we need to deal with things now as they come up. thanks so much for coming on that was ginger mccall director with epix open government program can you imagine being forced into a small cell with absolutely no human contact for days weeks and even years i can't

so that's what solitary confinement does what does it do to the human spirit when landmark congressional hearing yesterday the senate subcommittee on the constitution civil rights and human rights deliberated the use of isolation and presence and the consequences of solitary confinement for the first time to talk more about the storable hearing and what this means for human rights. and the dissenter blogs at firedoglake dot com. kevin thanks for coming on what took so long to get this hearing going it's a good question this is an issue that is bad i think a prevalent issue in society for many people for a number of years in fact you could say decades and it appears that just yesterday there was a big grassroots breakthrough and we saw that scheduled hearing where many groups got together and and showed support i hear that there were one hundred eighty

people that were in an overflow room in addition to the eighty people that were actually in the room attending the hearing two years very powerful and profound testimony from. warriors who have worked with inmates you are subjected to solitary confinement and then to also get testimony from an iraq bureau of prisons. you've been writing about it kevin and the testimony is really heart wrenching to hear these people's account of what happened then i want to play a sound bite from anthony graves one of the men who was held for ten years in solitary i knew guys who drop the appeals not because they gave up hope on the legal claims but because the conditions were just intolerable they would rather die . continued to exist in such inhumane conditions. so take a fun it breaks with me as we believe and he deteriorates right in front you have

very heartbreaking testimony from anthony haven't i wanted you to expand more on what solitary confinement actually does to break the human spirit and why don't people really realize this well one of the doctors who testified his last name is haney was talking about the totality of control that people experience who are put in isolation which it's important for people to know that officials don't call it solitary confinement they have a different word similar to how they have a different word for torture they have a different word for this they call it an administrative segregation or they call it putting in being put in restrictive housing and then what happens to the right in these facilities is that are you start to have sort of these personality disorders and the they didn't and they didn't commit some relation and

harm them stops and there was a very vivid accounts shared of of people maiming and making them their bodies believed and doing things that you would think would lead any reasonable person in an institution to remove that individual have a psychiatric facility where they could get some sort of help help so they could get some kind of attention but they said that in most cases there is a sort of matter of factness on the part of the visuals that are facing this and in fact you're seeing that officials don't really seem to care and these individuals when they are treated for the woods they inflict on themselves are just removed and then there they go back into solitary confinement. kevin this whole song story kind of unfolding over the last two days makes me think of course of bradley manning and the fact that he was in solitary confinement for quite some time and they're horrible conditions so i was wondering if you could

a law breaker on just what he went through will to tie it to that hearing also un special rapporteur on torture juan mendez actually tried to get a private meeting with bradley manning to get testimony about how he had been held in isolation in quantico marine breaking and he was not allowed to have this private meeting the united states wanted to monitor it wanted to actually be there and i think mendez has an interest as a u.s. official to come and talk to prisoners here in the united states about how they are being treated and how they're being violated the sort of stories that you read sound like something that you might hear coming out of guantanamo bay or sound like something that you might hear from a foreign prison in a middle eastern country that typically the united states would condemn but in the united states so far officials have not allowed us reporter to come and talk to

bradley manning and for that matter it seems have private meetings with other prisoners who have experienced some sort of abuse that was described in that hearing yesterday. thanks for the update from the hearing and kevin what do you think about obama when he was initiated as president he said you know we don't torture this is behind we're not going to do this anymore as we've heard from these testimonies i mean solitary confinement is pretty tantamount to torture i think it just. you know the stated policy that was there in the legal authorization that were made by bush administration officials that may be off the books but it certainly doesn't mean that in these institutions in the country that people are subjected to this sort of i'll say oppression that has as near accountability as think about the people who are in solitary confinement there are african-americans latinos there are people who are allegedly in gangs people who

are muslims people who want to practice their religion openly in the prison but do so in ways that. already is that ron the correctional facilities think that they have to control and suppress and so they get placed into solitary confinement and i think that's just something you know it's a reality in this country there is torture and whether it is in the stated policy anymore it happens thanks so much kind of an earlier time i was having a stall a civil liberties blogger for firedoglake dot com. more than two point five million houses in the u.s. have been repossessed by banks since the economic crisis struck but the impact isn't only financial many of those being forced out of their homes are taking drastic measures some of them choosing to take their own lives when faced with addiction artie's medina coach and coach and have reports. dozens of police and

swat teams sworn in on this small central california town not what you'd expect for what was supposed to be a routine foreclosure but at this point we believe the suspect is barricaded inside of the apartment complex we don't know anything about him we don't know what the motive is behind this shooting all we know is that we have two people dead apparently forty five year all jim richardson a rarity oh had his motives he was losing his condominium because of her fifteen thousand dollars and all manner of the loans he could no longer afford to pay the condo was sold to the option for a knock down price and ferrero was handed end of the action notice it proved to be the last straw for the former security guard who barricaded himself inside his home and refused to walk out a life without and warning the such an extreme act it hasn't been an isolated incident in this area public safety as a whole has been affected by the economy just like everybody else live there isn't

anybody in the community that hasn't been affected by this economy last year the town's foreclosure rate was the third highest in the country with a one in after a nine thousand properties reposed by the banks the entire region is ravished by unemployment and budget cuts and it's a story being repeated nation wide with equally bloody consequences in phoenix a man opened fire on police when he refused to leave his house in ohio an old married couple killed themselves when the faced with a vexation while in florida and then was gunned down by police after he said his recently for close town house on fire these doubts by foreclosure killings have been going on quietly around the country average since the financial crisis threaten to pull the rock from those only surviving on credit i think people get desperate and they don't. the light at the end of the tunnel but you know it's ok if i lose my home and i move somewhere that i can afford and i can rent and

i just think we really get attached to. and are very reluctant to give it up and i think it brings on desperation when you when you move there was no sign of any recovery in california's economy and stubborn unemployment it means the body count looks set to only grow in the months ahead x. prayed for it caused a huge surge in home foreclosures this year while the threat of a shadow inventory of soon to be foreclosed homes continues to hound housing markets there is a question how many more depressed people forced from their own homes and with nowhere else to go are pushed to the very edge determined to do anything it takes to stand by their property till the bitter end my son of course the artsy reporting from california for the for now for more of the stories we cover to go to you tube dot com slash art.