tonight on our team a last ditch effort to avoid extradition ricky leaks founder julian assange is in a standoff with british authorities i could as embassy is now the only thing standing in the way of his departure to sweden i'll bring you an update from london straight ahead. plus two senators are demanding answers from the n.s.a. they want to know how many americans are being monitored over the fire as a law the n.s.a. is response on your business to tell you more about this privacy catch twenty two. some consider a deserved punishment others say it's torture now the u.s. senate is holding a hearing on the use of solitary confinement in american prisons over your piece of emotional testimony and ask our guest if prison reform is in america's future.

that's one day june twentieth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm having martin and you're watching our t.v. to avoid being extradited to sweden in nine days we can expect or joining a song is now seeking political asylum in the ecuador embassy in britain has remained inside the embassy for two days which 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 hungry communist regime roman catholic cardinal you'll have been sent the 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 in 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 yoga 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 from inside the ecuadorian embassy and why given safe passage to ecuador more on the coverage wrong the ground are to correspond laura smith joining 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 is in there somewhere to be fooled by the 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 said one today not phones 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 until out to go in and get him the british police can only enter the territory of an embassy with specific permission from the ambassador. 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 says that 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 or 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 if safe 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 by doing this he has breached the terms of his bail and he's 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 should 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 of being 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 our t.v. he may have office president correia 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 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 there been kind of contradictory groups of

people rallying tell us a little bit about the. at there 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 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 always be dropping everything to tennis and support him but you can see behind me i hope the remnants of today's supporters that have been a few people here today with black odds and ban 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 closer to correspondent laura smith. well two

u.s. senators about the n.s.a. just how many people it's spied on but the agency is keeping their lips sealed and you'll never guess why they say dishing the information would have violate your privacy now senators ron wyden will and mark udall are asking what's really behind the big secret behind the fire as a report forms a foreign intelligence surveillance act a 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 of the senators and the inspector general of the intelligence committee after they sent a request to the n.s.a. for an estimate of just how many americans are really having their communications surveilled the letter says i defer to his conclusion that obtained such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicated sufficient additional resources would likely impede the n.s.a.'s mission he further stated that the office and the same leadership agree that an i.g. review of the sort suggested itself violate the privacy of u.s. persons. so what is the big secret and what does this law mean for your privacy and

your mccall director of ethics open government program joining me earlier i asked for the reason behind the pfizer log spanton back in two thousand and eight take a look so the 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 the 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 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 real first amendment and the violate before them and 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.'s 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 their survey. and what the results of that surveillance

are is is preposterous do you think that everyone everyone would be too specific to tell them. that might be the right answer actually. again in 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 what do you think. just broad mandate of spying and surveillance does without any or bursitis i mean here where you have two senators trying to gain oversight trying to gain some sort of transparency and there is none of 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 might go to the supreme court do you think that this will eventually close these backdoor loopholes of kind of 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 place 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 there's a detachment there are a lot of 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 and 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 i was ginger mccall director with ethics open government program. you imagine being forced into a small cell with absolutely no human contact for days weeks and even years i can't so what does solitary confinement actually do to the human spirit in a landmark congressional hearing yesterday the senate subcommittee on the constitution civil rights and human rights the liberty of the use of isolation in prisons and the consequences of solitary confinement for the first time to talk more about the stork we're hearing and what this means for human rights kevin

stolen from the center blogs of firedoglake dot com i asked him why it took so long to get this hearing going here's his response. that's a good question and 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 the scheduled hearing where many groups got together and and showed support i mean here 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 that hearing two years very powerful and profound testimony from a big boy if you have worked with inmates you are subjected to solitary confinement and then to also get testimony problem in iraq bureau of prisons you're in you've been writing about it kevin and the testimony is really heart wrenching to hear

these people's account of what happened and 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 the convening continued to exist on such inhumane conditions. so to go find it breaks me as we'll believe it he did 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 a personality disorder and the extreme is that they can and they didn't commit some people and harder themselves and that was a very pivotal house shared 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 or the woods they inflict on themselves are just removed and then there they go back into solitary confinement come in 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 the horrible conditions i was wondering if you could a law breaker on just what he went through. well to tie it to that hearing also the 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.n. official to calm down 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 calm 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. not going to do this anymore but as we've heard from these testimonies i mean solitary confinement is pretty tantamount to torture. i think

it's just you know the stated policy that was there in the legal authorizations 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 the sort of i'll say oppression that has as the near accountability at 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 the word is that ron and 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

any more it happens. thanks so much kevin i really appreciate your time having a stall a civil liberties blogger for firedoglake dot com. hackers got to hack and now companies are taking preemptive measures to fight back it's called strike back technology purposes to either distract or delay hacking attempts instead of trying to prevent them companies around the office to lure cyber criminals into their systems and in some cases they're hiring contractors to hack to find their security breaches kevin mitnick known once as america's most wanted a hacker spent five years in federal prison and now he's working for the other side he's the author of ghost in the wires and information security consultant earlier i asked him about the methods companies are using to bore potential hackers take a listen there's a technology called honeypots and it's been around for quite some time and this is where companies either acquire or they build systems that appear to be to hold

juicy information to attract the to attract the attackers and that that way they could monitor and kind of profile how they're getting into the system and try to identify where they're coming from and this is been around for for quite some time kevin how did you go from being the one you know once known as the most wanted hacker in the country to working for the other side well after i was arrested and i was in prison for quite some time is that in pretrial detention for about four and a half years and i finally finally settled the case with the government i made up doing five years in federal custody for hacking it wasn't for profit it was mostly for intellectual challenge and about three months after i was released senator fred thompson called me to testify for congress on how the federal government could better protect their systems and at that point i was kind of my transition into now helping government private sector companies and universities protect themselves

against the threats out there. so you were released early in order to help companies and the government you were and you served your term and then afterward kind of got recruited. yeah they're pretty a pretty much my case is you know very unusual i mean i was i sat in solitary confinement in the federal detention center for about a year because a federal prosecutor told the judge that i could simply pick up the phone dial up to norad and whistle into the phone communicate with their modem that's connected to their computer and launch a nuclear missile so there was a lot of hyperbole around my case and i sat in pretrial detention for a long time but what's great today is i still do the same thing i'm still going to systems but i do it with the company's permission to help them find the vulnerabilities before the attackers do so it's very enjoyable it's kind of like how blow escobar becoming a pharmacist and. kevin. said that you were in solitary confinement based on

an absurd notion that you could call and want a nuclear bomb why was that even warranted i mean and what was your experience in solitary confinement like what about do you. well back then this was you know quite some time ago computers were still mystical happy years were still mystical and and so a lot of events in motion pictures like war games in sneakers what happened is unfortunately government or government prosecutors took events out of fictional movies and attributed them for me in real life and sitting in solitary confinement and matching going into your bathroom at home and being a lead being able to leave one hour a day for five days a week it's a pretty horrific experience especially when you're in there for some mythology. but i mean look at that all behind me and i really enjoy way still you know i enjoy being able to hack but being able to help companies really protect themselves and

that's kind of my mission today is really to help in one of the meth that you know and as we mentioned as you mentioned on the show earlier this whole notion of companies being upset and you know obviously you know because they are continuing to be victimized by attackers that there's trying to set up systems that lou are the bad guy. to us but he's sometimes you know lou or two hundred we're pretty we're able to quickly figure out what's going on but this whole honeypot it's you know it's kind of like you know attracting the bad guys to this system to really. keep them busy you know there's state files in there that look look look like valuable information it could be credit card think it counts it could be are indeed information or whatever the company sets up if you keep the attackers there you profile them you see where they're coming from and then you use that information that intelligence to protect your your core systems

the real the real systems that you don't do not want anyone. now is kevin mitnick author of the book ghost in the wires by now you've probably heard of the controversy over new york city where mayor michael bloomberg proposed an all out ban on sort of products that are bigger than sixteen ounces this proposal stirred up a lot of anger among the public and attention within the media and the fight certainly isn't fizzling out this week the american medical association is considering a proposal that supports soda taxes to fight obesity sensation estimates the tax on sweetened drinks with lead to a five percent decrease in the amount of critically overweight americans and save the country seventeen billion dollars in health care costs over the next ten years so here our team we've come up with a possible scenario for what the future holds if more cities fall on the steps of mayor bloomberg i want to from graphics department created this rendition of what could happen one day we could be marking our sodas like some places mark their

cigarettes with an i saw warning label ours reads surgeon general's warning drinking soda can greatly increase your risk of obesity diabetes heart disease and cavities. so there you have it possible solution to cure america's soda addiction and argue about the reasons for this upswing in obesity all you want could be related to poverty or genetically modified foods or it could come down to something like soda that's not the point government regulation has taken a new and very scary turn this is the latest example of government overreach we're turning into a nanny state and if they can limit our sodas what can't the government limit or regulate well mayor bloomberg and others are working so hard to ban big gulps there are so many other things that new yorkers can buy that are worse than a thirty two ounce can of soda for instance you can buy multiple cartons of cigarettes which have been linked to certain forms of cancer or handles of alcohol which contributes drunk driving accidents or even twenty five grams of marijuana in new york but soda is crossing the line and banning certain sweet drinks is just

a slippery slope just wait until the government finds out how much sugar is in juice containers and soon enough this can turn into an orwellian nightmare where the voice on the wall tell you to get up and exercise but that's just a little ways out for now us americans with a sweet tooth an unquenchable thirst for freedom will have to buy or big gulps off the black market and enjoy them in the privacy of our own homes. and that is it for now for more of the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website or to dot com slash usa and also follow me on twitter at abby martin have a great night and we'll see you tomorrow.