we want to present. something real. tonight on r t a twelve years after mexico's p.r.i. party was booted from power and recap the one mexico's election over the weekend and the yo soy see those movements pleas for change or ignore or give you a round of of the results and tell you why students are so upset. and it's no secret that wiki leaks founder julian assange has made more than one enemy in the u.s. but now an unlikely senator is demanding for a staunch to face the u.s. justice system will tell you who she is and how she's targeting the press freedom in the process. plus the u.s. drone program has become the backbone to american wars of broad and surveillance

back at home but this military pillar might not be as stable as you think we'll speak to the u.t. austin professor who actually cracked the drone code to prove how easy it is to hijack. is monday july second eight pm in washington d.c. my name is christine frizz hour and you are watching our t.v. . let's begin this hour with a closer look at the elections in mexico yesterday the country went to the polls and although the results are not totally official yet and wreak a penny on the at though is believed to be the winner the next president of mexico he has thirty eight percent of the vote despite being in the party that ruled in mexico with an iron fist for more than seven decades up until the year two thousand now the party accused of being corrupt will be back in power after twelve years of what many say may have been a government with less corruption but much more danger in terms of violence with

tens of thousands of people killed still critics of the next president say his party has not cleaned up their act at all in a column in the l.a. times a few months ago the editor in chief of the mexican law review john ackerman says this pena nieto is a wolf in sheep's clothing he hides behind a telegenic smile and sharp attire but he represents mexico's old corrupt political class. and john ackerman is here now he's also by the way a professor of the national autonomy's university of mexico and a columnist for proceso magazine hey there john strong words there why do you think the at though is not only says he is. well i think that there's not much evidence to indicate if anything different or new he's talking about you know being a moderate different member of the previous party the rebel it's revolution but the

evidence demonstrates just not the case even if it is one of the leading governors of the free the free historically has been divided into two different sectors one that technocrats the more sort of sophisticated election will branch of the pre and then the side which are basically represented by the governors which is more of sort of the local bosses who are control politics big machine politics and tend to be quite corrupt and not very transparent so when you met bosses they're sort of reminded me of the way we might talk about them on here in the united states are exactly that i think that's a correct analogy. the worst states for this are other areas of the country there are those mexican states which have still not gone under undergone democratic transitions so for instance ten out of the thirty two states and mexico have always

been governed by the pre the same party for the last even years now. the federal level in the year two thousand there was a change in power from the pretty to the fan in ten of the thirty two states that never happened and those ten states are the most violent the most corrupt and the most the last at least that least transparent state in the country. gross is a terrible situation today we've had nine journalists killed in last year and a half they're done only five well we left and one of those states in the state of mexico where precisely if they can pick up the had just finished a six year stint as governor that is one of those states which is no. democratically developed and all of a sudden he's going to lead to a national level as president. and we're going to see how well he's going to just not really do optimistic. it's really interesting as i've been sort of following in the reporting about this and by the way there hasn't been that much reporting out

of the u.s. but a lot of people who kind of have changed their tune have changed their vote have reverted back to this party that ruled for so long have said that they're doing so because under you know the new guard the new power it hasn't been better in fact it's been worse people saying you know it's been so extremely violent on the streets of mexico fifty thousand people killed a lot of them are police officers people who are supposed to keep the country safe they're the ones who are sort of targets now what do you think about this is that some of the people are saying you know what at least under the old corrupt government corrupt government. they felt safer. so we're look at a very cycles. i think that's true there is definitely a generalized social good content in mexico's democracy functioning actually if you look at the numbers in latin america mexico is the

country which gets the lowest numbers in terms of satisfaction with the box it's only seven seventy three percent of the population is this satisfied democracy is only about twenty seven percent are actually happy with that so people are upset both because of violence and also because a lack of economic development there of a crisis of two thousand and eight thousand nine hundred mexican very hard it was the country that was most but in all the entire region because of that crisis and so the population doesn't looking for something new something different. the ironic thing the pilot obstacle thing is the new thing they're reading it as something but bringing back the all over we have to be careful because the numbers are actually. but that's huge in terms of the support for. he is going to be looks like next president based on a vote of thirty percent of the population thirty eight percent of those who voted with only a cell sixty two sixty four percent of the population has the court actually

a relatively small group about seventeen million people out of a country of one hundred fifteen million people who are going with the as a crosley actually. not too surprising or so the leftist who is running who ran for the second time also did quite well he got over fifteen million votes and came within six percent of those so. the third place finish was the bios of a lot of who was probably part of the present party so that was a clear sort of punishing of that party. mexicans have desired their vote almost half way between the left as opposition. pretty old guard opposition and so the good news i guess is going to be a lot of plurality. that is not going to go to rule on his own because that's because he's going to have a divided congress when the supreme court is going to have the students who are on

the streets demanding him to do things like opening up the media the media in mexico is very costly to companies control ninety five percent of the television channels in mexico yes certainly interesting and for those viewers who don't know yet there was actually married to a very famous former soap opera star on television a lot of the corruption charges do come from televisa not covering the election fairly but i want to talk to you about sort of the political process in mexico i noticed there were probably a lot of debates with me at the end as you mention the man believed to be in second place on one on andres manuel obrador why and why is that i mean here in the u.s. we have to me. we debate i think at least we did leading up to the republican nominating process but you know why shouldn't the people of mexico see how these candidates measure up against one another oh i think you're right about that that's one of the one of the several problems with campaigns was the lack of more open

long between the candidates or their society or community groups in general taking it though in particular was because who was very resistant to debating with his other competitors he's very much a sort of a created a major t.v. telegenic image who doesn't do quite well in this kind of more spontaneous debates or exchanges with society and so these two debates that are in the law requires debates and basically he was protected by the major television and radio networks and they just did not. write or organize any of this motivated so there was a third debate organized by the student movement itself that was actually quite interesting debate all the candidates except for bringing it though attended to that third debate but once again the television networks refused to cover it so this was exclusively transmitted through broadcasts through the internet and it got

lots of watchers and followers but it was not as much of the impact they could have if they were actually covered by the television networks and so there's really been an effort by the powers that be and you have to understand that mexico is a very unequal country ten pin families control ten percent of g.d.p. a country really how he's very powerful robber barrons who really chose people who goes there care and they were willing to do everything that was possible to make sure that he he got it looks like they were successful according to their sort of are difficult to john when less than twenty five percent of the population there even has internet access at all the majority of the mexican population from what i understand does have access to t.v. so if that is who is indeed controlling the message of course that's the message people are going to sort of digest i appreciate you're weighing in on this from mexico city john ackerman professor at the national autonomous university of mexico a pleasure. well despite the denials by the u.s.

department of justice it's appearing more and more likely that wiki leaks founder julian assange is indeed the target of an investigation by the u.s. government currently isn't just waiting to hear if you will be granted asylum in ecuador while the u.s. justice department has kept quiet on the matter for a while there's more and more evidence both from the justice department itself and also in a recent letter written by the u.s. army's criminal division which says as much but there's something new the latest is that democratic senator dianne feinstein has just issued a statement to australia's largest newspaper demanding that a songe be prosecuted she says mr is on should be prosecuted under the espionage act and she says she believes the songes knowingly obtained and disseminated classified information which could cause injury to the united states he has caused serious harm to u.s. national security and he should be prosecuted accordingly senator feinstein says there are a lot of questions these claims bring about and earlier i was joined by trevor tim activist with the electronic frontier foundation i asked him about the similarities

between what wiki leaks did in publishing these classified documents and what the new york times did because they did publish the publish the same information as well. absolutely that's the real problem with this statement is that when she says that isn't just guilty of espionage because he knowingly disseminated classified information that's the exact same thing new york times that with all the wiki leaks cables and with a host of other classified information they post that they publish every week or the new york times or the wall street journal the washington post does the same thing for forty or fifty years it's been well established fact that publishing classified information if you're a private citizen or a journalist is protected by the first amendment now the government has argued that they can go after government leakers but never have they been able to prosecute a private citizen for publishing this information in the public interest and the real problem with feinstein statement is that if it if it actually came to fruition

then not only would wiki leaks and joined us on to be in jail for doing what essentially every other newspaper does but in the future other newspapers who want to publish stories in the public interest like for example obama's kill a story the new york times recently published or the story on cyber attacks against iran the administration would be able to threaten these newspapers the prosecution to scuttle the stories or after they were published you know bring them to trial and not only would it stifle free speech in the sense that it could put journalists in jail but it could also bankrupt many media organizations would have to spend millions of dollars defending themselves against what is traditionally a protected. protected by the first amendment attorney thought be there because you thought a whole lot of things right now you differentiated what the government has traditionally gone after which is government leakers with the blowers people working for the government of course the prime example here in this case is private first class

bradley manning he's an army sergeant our army on private accused of you know actually giving this information to wiki leaks as we know he has been gone after in the highest degree i guess you could say he. kept in solitary confinement for nearly a year his preliminary hearings have already started and it's very clear that the government seems to have no sympathy for somebody in his shoes but you're right this is treading on some very different first amendment waters here when we talk about a private citizen when we talk about wiki leaks what do you think you know the grounds that they could even stand on in this case i mean what should the american people be concerned about in terms of first amendment freedoms. well like you said in the opening it's clear that the u.s. is still investigating a songe you know feinstein didn't reveal that the investigation is going on she just said that she thought it should but actually the justice department confirmed

just last friday that the wiki leaks investigation is still active and their essential argument according to the a.f.p. is that a songe communicated with manning and manning gave him because materials because of a post on wiki leaks website called the most wanted leaks or that he you know a songe asked for it now this is completely the same type of behavior that journalists in gage and all the time with government sources you know it doesn't land magic classified information doesn't land magically on their desk in an unmarked envelope you know they poke and they prod and they ask their sources for information and then go try to find more and then eventually a story emerges and they publish it on the front pages of the nation's newspapers and if wiki leaks is punished for this same type of behavior that was just done over you know the internet then any newspaper can and any journalist can and it would be it would just completely overturn you know decades and decades of first

amendment law yeah i mean i think it's a really good point because it's not only i mean when we look at i'm just using the new york times because the wiki leaks information was published you know assigned himself worked with a few different newspapers but the new york times is the main one here in the u.s. . they worked in concert until you know several weeks or months later when the new york times the sighted to back off we've heard editors that work there say join us on this too difficult to work with you know blaming that sort of thing but in reality the new york times did exactly the same thing that wiki leaks did in publishing some of this information we leaks of course published more. but don't you think that lawyers eventually if this case does come to fruition they going to have a really awful hard time making the case that there was anything different between the two entities. oh yes actually what the new york times does is actually considered worse than what wiki leaks did because the new york times routinely publishes what is called top secret classified information which is actually the

highest classification that u.s. government uses and the only thing wiki leaks has published although they've published hundreds of thousands of documents has been secret and below which is a lower classification so essentially the new york times is publishing material that the government considers more sensitive and more damaging to national security if it got out now granted you know feinstein said in her statement that this information has severely damaged national security which there's actually no evidence that that's happened you know these disclosures have been out for more than a year the government can't point to a single person who's been killed we know of no real disruptions in foreign policy and national security and in fact it's actually made the american people more knowledgeable about what our government is doing considering that they literally classify anything involving foreign policy or national security these days so it's number one a credit to the public this information is out and number two the new york times isn't just in much trouble or if or more so if this was actually

a crime which again it's not yes certainly as we've been paying close attention to some of these pretrial hearings for bradley manning that seems to be one thing that prosecutors either are having a hard time come up coming up with or unwilling to release even though a judge now that they have to which is some of that information on exactly what kind of security threats have been have happened as a result of these wiki leaks cables let me switch gears for a second term i mean the u.s. and australia of course close friends and allies but there seems to be a whole lot of disagreement in you know some of the messages getting out there i want to play something senator bob carr australian foreign minister said just a few weeks ago. if the americans want to do extradite him why haven't died of him from the united kingdom they have an extradition treaty with the united with the united kingdom and according to one one lawyer it would be easier for them to do it from the u.k. then from sweden all right so this is

a few weeks ago but you know senator carr as recently as yesterday is still trying to make the case that joining us on jay is you know of little interest to u.s. authorities that he doubts they will pursue this what's going on here with these mixed messages well he's clearly either ignoring the evidence or lying i mean in australia actually australian journalists issued a freedom of information act request in their own country for australian diplomat diplomatic cables different in the wiki leaks cables about their conversations with the us and their investigation into a songe and base the cables ended up coming back to them saying exactly what we've been saying for eighteen months now it's of the us is involved in an expansive investigation to go after a songe among other charges with conspiracy to commit espionage and not only that if we don't want to believe the australian diplomatic cables we can just believe the justice department which said on friday that the wiki leaks matter and investigation is ongoing so the idea that this investigation is

a figment of his imagination just doesn't comport with the facts yeah certainly this is a story that is developing and changing almost on a daily basis appreciate having you come on the show to weigh in trevor temp with the electronic frontier foundation. we talk quite often here in r t about the drawbacks of drones how many of them are being used as surveillance vehicles it's something congress seems to be taking note of now as well on the house floor last week a few members of the house of representatives mentioned that their constituents are begging them to implement stricter limits on drones in general and a few have even offered amendments to legislation that is currently in the works but now there's a new set of concerns and they have to do with the way in which our own drones could be used against us the reason unmanned aerial vehicles are able to be unmanned after all is because someone is controlling them remotely so even if a drone can't be physically hijacked it turns out it can be hacked a team of researchers at the university of texas have proven this and let's take

a look at some of the video that illustrates how this is done the researchers hacked into the g.p.s. system of a small but sophisticated drone with a so-called spoofer one that mimics real g.p.s. signals that took complete control of the drone by sending it false g.p.s. signals making it go wildly off course several times the implications of this are that a terrorist group could do the same thing and use it to crash a drone into a building even another aircraft well earlier i spoke with professor todd humphreys he's part of the team from university of texas at austin their radio navigation lab which led the demonstration i first asked him about the department of homeland security's response take a look well initially. i think they were somewhat skeptical that we could pull this off but when they saw the test results the footage and so forth i believe that they were happy that happened because now that we can shed the light on the problem perhaps they can do the funnyman need to address the problem so break this down for me from what i understand it always is about

a thousand dollars in parts to assemble i think you guys call it a spoof or how does this work. well this proven device does cost about a thousand dollars in the hardware but that's a bit a little bit misleading the software is where all the magic happens and it took us about four years to develop a team of two or three ph d. students how does it work well it turns out that the civilian g.p.s. signals are completely open on authenticated so all you have to do is gin up your own signals that are indistinguishable from the civilian g.p.s. signals and then raise the power sufficiently that you commandeer the g.p.s. receiver instead of the authentic signals. i know that congress is going to open us airspace to drones by two thousand and fifteen as of now about fifty six domestic government agencies are already authorized to fly drones in the skies above the united states and i think sixty three known active drone launch sites across the country we're showing a map of some of these sites now unless i'm mistaken i mean drones are simply going

to share the air space with what we already have which is other planes what are the dangers that we're looking at here. well first of all i want to say that i'm a big proponent of bringing into the draft the drones into the national airspace they're going to come we might as well accept that the question is how can we bring them in reliably and right now the dangers of bringing them in before addressing this problem would be that somebody from the ground could hack the drones and turn them into their own to their own devices making them go into a different place or along a different path so it could cause loss of life it could cause collisions but i hope that we can address the problem long before that happens and we should mention to our viewers military drones g.p.s. systems are encrypted so that's something that would be much much more difficult to hack into but that isn't the case for similar civilian drones you said you guys are proponents the bottom line is as you say they're coming various police departments in this country have already purchased drones i think from what i understand even fedex is looking to bring in drones more cheaply and efficiently to deliver

packages but if the navigation systems on these drones could be hacked i mean let's go into some detail about what could actually happen here well the navigation systems of these drones have a variety of sensors some of them have altimeters and magnetometers and inertial sensors but at the very bottom is a g.p.s. unit and most of these drones that will be used in the civilian air space have a civilian g.p.s. unit which is wide open vulnerable to this kind of attack so if you can commandeer the g.p.s. unit then you can basically. spoon feed bolts navigation information to the navigation center of these drones. so you said when you sort of proposed this idea to the department of homeland security that they didn't really believe that you could do it but they wanted to check it out i'm certain that this is something you know they would have thought about ahead of time that this was a possibility i mean certainly hackers like the hacking activist group anonymous can hack into just about anything of course this is

a possibility i guess i'm wondering i mean do you think that they were as prepared to see what you show them. you know there were some there are some very sophisticated people at the v.h.s. homeland security and i know that they're well aware of these problems because they're well aware that the civil g.p.s. signals were never authenticated i think the real challenge was whether we could actually pull this off on a u.a.b. that was flying in midair with all the correct alignment and compensation for the timing delays and so forth that was a big affair and my students and i worked hard to demonstrate that it was indeed possible and perhaps within the capability of other hackers so you know you and a couple of ph d. students at university of texas i guess i got to ask you i mean what's going to be next what else are you guys working on i think you have a good point that this is important that you notify our government agencies that this is possible. what's the next project for you guys. well you had two goals

all the way along in this research first goal is to raise awareness among the general public that we shouldn't blindly trust g.p.s. signals the civilian g.p.s. signals which are under an encrypted the second goal is i think the more ambitious one let's see what we can do to fix this problem there's a grassroots approach to that where you you fix the receivers themselves but there's a top down approach to where we could actually change the satellite signals coming from the g.p.s. satellites and that's going to take time it's going to take money and political will but that's what we're hoping it will eventually happen so that the problem is solved globally. phrase you certainly have a great grasp on the technology that we're dealing with i know that in the media it's very rare that a lot of you know especially the mainstream media even talks about drones i know fox news did this report and you spoke to them recently but. it's i think a lot of people are going to be surprise and i'm wondering what you think i know last month we had a drone crash here on the eastern shore of maryland. but do you think i mean as

somebody who spends so much time sort of developing drone technology working with it understanding it do you think the vast majority of americans you know even understand what drones are. i think the vast majority of americans are fascinated by drones by the prospect by by the thought perhaps they could get takeout food delivered to their doorstep by a drone for example but there is a lack of deep understanding of the the inner workings of the technology and perhaps of the safety threats and that's what we're trying to do is highlight some of the the safety issues involved oh my gosh i've never even imagined takeout food delivered you know have the pizza you know have been dropped off the back in a drone i've never even thought about that but there are some more serious concerns out professor humphreys i mean as far as surveillance i know a lot of police departments have used drones and are planning on using them even more or surveil people in this country i mean isn't there

a level that you speak to with your sister students about some of the negative negative effects that these drugs are having in this country of course i've got some tall fences around the back of my house and i have a reasonable expectation of privacy when i'm having a barbecue there in the back of the house so of course i wouldn't like to have any drone surveilling me and my family as we're having a barbecue but i'd like to see these kinds of concerns balanced with the kind of economic benefit the drones could bring so where as we'd like to welcome them in we've got to address problems of privacy we've now got to address problems of safety before twenty fifteen when the f.a.a. opens the skies to these drones give me some perspective here i know university of texas certainly not the only university we've done stories before on various universities that are not only working on drone technology in specific matters as you and your student have but also developing entire programs i mean certainly this is a field where you know a lot of people might not like it but it is growing and developing an. entire

program you can major in some universities in drone technology talk a little bit about why this is for those who are less familiar with the growing technology here. well i think part of it goes back to the drones in never ability they're coming it's a juggernaut they're going to be here so let's develop the technological skills we need to harness this kind of technology and train a new cadre of engineers to develop even even further more ambitious project i know that there are good good research being done at georgia tech and in universities in new mexico and in other places these are just people recognizing that this is the world that's facing us and let's be on top of the of the issues when i was professor todd humphries assistant professor at the aerospace department at the university of texas at austin and that's going to do it for now but if you missed part of this or any other show today you're in luck.