i am. welcomed the loner show where i get the real headlines with none of the mercy or can live out of washington d.c. now is it ever going to host our monday hangover panel i'll take a look at a number of foreign policy developments from afghanistan's new special ally status to mitt romney's foreign policy and obama's lethal presidency then a new report shows that wireless carriers had to comply with one point three million or received one point three million requests for information from law enforcement just last year but how much more is out there that we're not being told about and last week south korea announced that they want to lift their moratorium

on whaling which has drawn outcry from the international community including the u.s. but our guest tonight from a show called whale wars you might know it's the shepherd captain paul watson he says the obama administration has no room to speak on the issues so we'll have all of that and more clued in it as of happy hour but first take a look at the mainstream media decided to miss. so after months of warning coming from the f.b.i. and the mainstream media at the end of last week the day of the f.b.i. shutdown of servers has finally arrived tens of thousands of americans will find their morning routine interrupted when they try to log onto the internet and they won't be able to you may be one of thousands of americans find yourself offline this morning having trouble getting online this morning but you might be one of the sounds of computer users who potentially got impacted by what is being called malware are you having trouble to smore ning checking out c.n.n. dot com or any other dot com for that matter although it may be infected with

malware that targets laptops and computers around the world the software forced unsuspecting users to fraudulent websites fraudulent and. some are calling this or have called it an internet doomsday and it's bad thousands of americans may not be able to get online this morning on their computers because of a computer virus infecting more than half a million p.c.'s the f.b.i. began shutting down servers at midnight that were a temporary safety net to keep the infected computers online the f.b.i. set up a server is to keep the and connected computers on line but the agency is shutting them down. now the reason i want to bring this up is because it's a perfect example of the hypocrisy of the mainstream media today we found out that rather than an internet doomsday or massive shutdown where millions of people would be without internet connection it really only affected three hundred thousand people worldwide now it's no small number but it's certainly no doomsday and i

think the for once that the i actually did a pretty good job of notifying people ahead of time at this day was coming at they should check their computers to see if they were infected with this malware and the other thing is that if you did get shut down you just call your internet service provider and they help you sort out so once again it's not necessarily a story that should be dismissed people should be informed about it but i find it hilarious that this is something that the mainstream media decides to go big on while ignoring other much bigger threats to the internet you guys remember how online mobilisation against sopa and pipa had been going on for months how we had been covering these potentially damaging and very poorly thought out bills for months before the mainstream media caught on that was legislation that could have spelled and internet doomsday that we never saw the same attention paid to it not to mention the mainstream media's been silent reports coming out in recent weeks from google and from twitter their so-called transparency reports that show how many times law enforcement asked them to hand over user data that is your

information that is online now that's not interesting to them but apparently when the f.b.i. wants to drum up a threat the mainstream media is more than happy to comply the more than happy to talk about the grave dangers there i think it's pretty laughable it's very in your face actually but just know that when the real legislative threats are out there to take your internet away the groups are spending millions of dollars lobbying for behind closed doors that's where the mainstream media will choose to miss. all right so it's only monday but there's plenty to talk about because the news doesn't stop over the weekend so it's a night we'll have more foreign policy oriented hangover panel the us has granted afghanistan a special ally status so what exactly does that mean as squire is taking a look at what they're calling obama's lethal presidency pressure comparisons are being made between libya and syria and mitt romney is planning for a foreign policy trip so grab your pain pills because you're definitely going to

need them or drive or all of this out and get ready for our monday hangover. if you want to go. home. joining me tonight is joel rubin the director of policy and government affairs for the ploughshares fund and shining in remotely is jack rice former cia officer and criminal defense attorney general i want to thank you both for joining us tonight and joe i want to start with you just tell me more about this is special status as a major non nato ally that we've granted to afghanistan what does that really mean it's a status it essentially means that the united states will be able to share military equipment so military equipment to afghanistan that a more rapid rate giving afghans essentially a leg up on other countries around the world giving first in line what it does however in addition to getting materials to the afghans is it gives them a political signal that the united states is not really leaving after twenty

fourteen it's going to maintain a relationship with the afghans which has been point of concern in the region so well troops may be going the relationship will continue ok so is that is that kind of all that is jack you know as a political signal because if you ask me we've been fighting a war in afghanistan for the past ten years there's a lot of money going in right there's a lot of weapons that are going in i mean sure the pentagon did actually just what was it. in dollars from funding for the afghan security forces and so is it just just that just a little a little sign to get to that of course i mean we could try this up what we want yes it's true we'll provide them with additional training we're trying to provide that was some special ops stuff to provide them with equipment but in the end it's a bit of a payoff i guess because we've been spending billions and billions of dollars we simply want to convince everybody in the room oh we haven't disappeared completely of course we can take you back to the eighty's and we disappear over time because you know we move on to let next latest and greatest what we do but is that

a normal thing side of this far as i understand there are fourteen other countries that have this kind of status is it normal for the secretary of state just make this kind of announcement i mean it is congress of us to get involved are they supposed to approve the funding for all this money that we're going to keep giving well this is an executive authority and so the president the secretary of state they have this ability to make these as of nations interesting really this is the first one that president obama has made during his time in office so we haven't seen this used for a number of years it's oftentimes made when there are countries who are engaged in tense situations we gave one in status in one thousand nine hundred ninety egypt and israel simultaneously so it's a political lever it's intended to show that we can begin to have a different relationship with these countries but interestingly hasn't been used by this administration and i agree i should add that one point i mean we look at what happened with the israelis and the egyptians but you could take a look back further and what it is the americans have tried to accomplish with the likes of those in central and south america too so the idea of fighting but one of the war on drugs was a part of the ability to come in and provide

a lots of training lots of support all lot of weaponry to say that if we're not willing to go in ourselves we'll provide a bunch of cash and hopefully that will be good enough and i think that's really what they're trying to do in this case but you know what we don't necessarily have to use the boots on the ground all the time because we love using drones and we're we're big in that now so we'll continue to do that well drones are definitely something that we see an increase. in reliance on and just today or maybe just over the weekend right we found out there was another drone strike in pakistan where fifteen more people were killed the pakistan thing so finally last week they decided to open up the nato supply routes again for which there are also great protests happening in pakistan today because hillary clinton finally apologized really that was all that it took as you just knew this apology i mean we were at this standstill for months and so i just can't understand why i would take so long to make that decision especially if we were in the wrong where it was you know when it came to pakistani soldiers losing their lives it is a remarkable turn to see seven months. before an apology is issued and it was done

in a way where we could get enough support from the pakistanis so that they could open up the routes but also minimize political blowback here in washington and that's really what it's all about the bigger picture right now in washington is that there's a horse or is going on the presidential campaign and so the administration will get attacked for anything it does even an apology when the u.s. forces made a mistake that could be politically toxic for the administration they were very careful in how they did this. and i think we have to look at the other side of this though when you look at what's going on in pakistan right now and just how difficult the situation is there there's an estimate that they have trouble in the neighborhood of one hundred ten maybe more nuclear weapons it's one of the most unstable regions in the world in many many ways and there's a huge fight going on between the prime minister the military the pakistani i.s.i. and even parliament the supreme court all of those are fighting amongst themselves and the americans are trying to find a way to balance that power struggle to sort of come out on top because if you look

at the military and what we have tried to do with the pakistani government over the last really ten plus years it has not played well and if we lose that power struggle and up on the wrong side of this this could be a massive disaster i mean think big picture you can go back to ten years ago when the leading a nuclear figure in pakistan was a.q. khan and then you look at their ability to spread that nuclear development and nuclear technology to the north koreans to the iranians and others in many ways pakistan is a bigger problem for the united states than afghanistan iraq or yemen combined has been over the last decade what do you say to all well i think the jack is on to something here pakistan is the central node for multiple areas of proliferation of nuclear weapons and the terrorist networks that do exist in pakistan have been very difficult to root out and the pakistani government as well has been in many ways

betting that and supporting those activities so we have a very complicated relationship with pakistan only think it was out for an apology basic a holiday the heck i think i'm having that we settled that one so i want to go i think this is a topic that we talk about constantly on this program which is the obama administration's drone policy right when it comes to when it comes to killing u.s. citizens abroad which we have done and so esquire did a great lengthy feature piece about this today which i think it's about time i think of the more people that want to. we go in-depth and talk about this the better but to me it probably the most poignant part is when they were talking about . on the right this was on his sixteen year old son and they bring up the point that this administration has never ever spoken about it they've never acknowledged the fact that we killed this sixteen year old boy and so you know what kind of what kind of justice is that is the question what the drone policy is one that is certainly an evolution and it has made an impact on the fight against terrorist

organizations so this administration is caught in a very difficult place where it has not acknowledged up until very recently that even had a drone policy now it is publicly acknowledged it but the legal mechanisms for targeting and identifying which targets to hit those are very much under wraps we have not had a full debate yet in this country we deserve that rightly because one of the arguments here is that well hey for the most part we're killing bad guys and it's better because you don't get troops on the ground that are involved and they get to stay far away and they're safe but but somebody should answer questions i think about sixteen year old american teenagers that are then taken out by this goal i couldn't agree with you more that's one of the biggest problems we have seen this not just in yemen but you have to stand in afghanistan to where the obama administration using this targeted killing program what they have done is they've changed the definition of what it insurgent is so in other words if you actually kill somebody somebody who's male who could be of the particular age of an

insurgent all of a sudden they are an insurgent i mean if you look at the success rate according to this administration in terms of the targeted killing program in terms of their drone strikes well it's not at one hundred percent it's darn close and the reason it is it that number astounding number is they've changed the definition technically at this point if you blew up a school of sixteen year old boys at this point you could literally say every single one of them is an insurgent how about that for a definition. good point right i mean though it's a really disturbing factor is the that they try to hide that kind of information so when we want to our next topic i guess that we have a lot going on today and so you know so we saw kofi anon meeting with with abbas here and supposedly they came to another agreement for the violence to and i don't think that anybody at the moment really feels too hopeful about that because this is not the first time we've gotten this but then you have hillary clinton saying that assad's did i say abbas earlier that assad's days excuse me and it's odd days are numbered and so what does that mean i mean this is the point where we start

comparing it to do we start comparing it to libya at all into what happened to get off well the situation in libya was one where we heard officials say that the days were numbered but one never knew when that day would come and it came and it came very fast and the pressure right now on syria is extraordinary even the russians today announced that they would not be supplying weapons to syria any longer until the situation calms down so the pressure is tightening defections are rising and i think the secretary's remark reflects a belief that over time assad will have to get out or find a way to get out or he will be pushed out and that's that what they're betting on are his days numbered jack well i think you know i think they are numbered but again here's the distinction between what we see in syria what we saw in libya. the libyans were limited in their ability to push back particularly in terms of gadhafi but if we take a look at the syrians right now their ability to reach into the places like lebanon

and potentially from lebanon into israel is a very very real concern and has been for a very long time also the other distinction is that the libyan government their military was marginal and marginalized at best you take a look at what the syrians have right now they could devastate the region killing hundreds of thousands if they so choose to do and so with the americans sort of standing there in the europeans doing the same thing many have been unwilling to do anything at all the french were the ones who really do. grow the libyan issue the french are unwilling to drive this one and i don't see anybody really lining up to do it we all bring our hands and say how horrible this is that these people are dying by the thousands and they are but at this point i don't see anybody anybody why you like to be like the only people really lining up to do something i guess you could say from from this military perspective would be someone like john mccain who said why did the president all see as shameful and i don't think that one can say because the us military is not bombing that it's affected us policy this policy is working aggressively there are sanctions employees there's political pressure

employees these things take time but most experts agree that sending in troops or starting air raids would actually exacerbate the situation make it worse want john mccain it always gets to be an expert in election years too right when when you want to make a democratic president look like that has a weak foreign policy are john i got to wrap it up but i want to thank you both for joining me tonight thank you. are guys it's time for our first break of the evening but when we come back we'll have another edition of you said i read it and that a congressional inquiry released today on the police asked cell phone carriers for user in fell more than a million times in two thousand and eleven so joining sanchez will be on to discuss that report after this. line of american power continues. things that are. might actually be time revolution. and it turns out that

there were very good solid rock. radio. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then. some other part of it and realize that everything you. are is a big. story . book and they alone as though they'll get a real headline with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those

stories that people actually care about and transfer them back to t.v. . to the capital account i'm lauren lyster. our guys it's time for you said it i read it right take time to respond to my

brilliance and engaging they were comments from facebook twitter and you tube because when you've got something to say i listen now our first comment of the evening comes form mr easy rider he had this to say on you tube at our birthday shout out to george w. last week said it so disrespectful even if you don't. like the man let him be he's not in office anymore well mr east writer i'm sorry if you go on our piece disrespectful that was definitely not the intent honestly i think we did a pretty did it in a pretty tasteful way with a little satire thrown in but if you ask me i think that you probably just don't think that we should be going after him because he's not a novice anymore that it's not about the style in which we did it and i have a problem with that is you once you become a public servant especially as high ranking and high profile as the president of the united states well your legacy your policies those are fair game not to mention i believe that if your policies include serious war crimes you should be held accountable for them but you seem to have taken the same approach as the obama administration in letting bush is an act of torture as one example say in the past

george w. bush is a president who got us into two wars legalized spying on us citizens open detention facility in cuba at the cia tortured black sites around the world ran up the deficit and that's just to name a few things i think we should all remember that and not just leave him be now for a next comment stay that had this had this question about our interview with glenn greenwald last week he said on you tube at around thirteen fifty seven glenn greenwald mentioned a project that's trying to shield the internet from government to anybody pick that up or know about any projects to protect internet users from government data mining well what glenn greenwald was talking about there was of the tor project i won't get into all the details here but you should learn more about it there's a lot of information online but you should also make sure that you watch our interview with jacob apple bom who founded to our project from earlier this year and finally as we did this to us he asked at the ilona show hey we're doing a review of the dark knight rises like you did for promethea is that was kind of

funny in a subtle way now i will be more than happy to do more views in the future like i said before i don't go to the movies all that often these days but the dark knight rises will definitely be one of them so hopefully you'll enjoy my take on that one too so thanks for all your comments that's it my rantings tonight but i'll be back with more as usual next week. well thanks to an inquiry from congress first ever report has been published showing how often law enforcement asks cell phone carriers to hand over your info and the result is a mind boggling one point three million demands that came in for subscriber information just last year in two thousand and eleven so that includes looking for your text messages call records location data and other things but here's the really scary part the actual number of requests is probably much higher because not only is that a record keeping a factor for the underreporting but in some cases requests can affect more than just one cell phone use or police have made requests for cell tower dumps where hundreds thousands of people who may have been near a tower at the time are that reeled in now while the report from the courts have

shown us that warrants for wiretapping has actually have actually decreased this wireless carrier port tells us that it's probably just because they're finding ways around that so here to discuss all of that with me is julian sanchez research fellow at the cato institute julian thank you for joining us tonight and by the way if anybody really wants to read a good movie review is julian is the man here the this was the pro vs or if you are your friend this is my favorite personally so i expect you to have a dark knight rises review as well but let's give it to the serious business right so before we even get into how many more requests for data there might be out there just one point three million i'd say that's still a pretty big number right yes i mean it's even for folks who study surveillance and are sort of paranoid about the. sheer quantity of it going on every year that was a number that surprised me a lot of the subpoenas for i mean at least half of it probably more than weird

numbers from sprint and there are four basic subscriber information so stuff like here's a number and ip address give us the account the person that's less sensitive hold it can also reveal things like anonymous speech if you have for example some using your smartphone to write things on the internet that basically try bring from a. it can be used to connect anonymous online posting with an original person to their first amendment issues with that. but it looks like you know about half and some cases maybe more than half of that is those subpoenas and then the other half at least for the major carriers so e t. and t. sprint each say they get about a quarter million a year. and you get about a quarter going out here are the more than the rest and we're going to have a weird saying that because you know i was reading some commentary to you that they have the prepaid phones perhaps the only that has nothing to do with it and if it's a criminal investigation those are more likely so part of it is yeah i believe that i have also read that sprint has serves a lot of the companies that provide prepaid phones those are obviously

disproportionately involved in drug investigations if you also the wire we know that dealers like to get prepaid phones use them briefly burn them so that might explain the disproportionate numbers coming out of sprint may also in part be that sprint because of the incredible deluge of requests has set up a special site to electronically receive and process and quickly turn around law enforcement requests so it may just be that prompts are happier to they're making it easier for us to go to this does this tell us that you know because we've had a lot of reports coming out lately that google transparency going to point twitter decided to release a report to saying how often you know it is the law enforcement seeks user data does this still tell us that cell phones are the primary method i mean that you know this number by far blows away just the twelve thousand requests you got last year well it's hard to say we don't have for example numbers from wireline broadband providers like comcast or time warner people partly get their internet wirelessly now partly through services like that so that would be counted well

another thing that wouldn't be counted here is your bulk surveillance like that involved in and i say vacuum cleaner style acquisition of you that doesn't involve individual requests it's hard to say it does look like cell phones are still a major part of it would be the. surprising because we know that electronic surveillance is mostly negative mostly overwhelmingly and we're talking about ninety percent here used in drug investigations so it's not that surprising that we're often talking about is people using cell phones either to text or call to arrange transactional not to mention of course these days a lot of people have smartphones and you have some data there and they can help you out thirty's track down exactly where it is that you are but so you're reading about this to looking at you know two different reports the first the courts are really great information on how many wiretaps they're getting and they say guess what we've actually seen a decrease from last year by fourteen percent and so i guess that's those to make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside and then you have stuff like this and then you

just think wow they just getting a warning sort of what one funny thing is that the number every year journalists report oh there were many wiretaps this year it's up it's down if you look at those sort of appendixes to that report basically every year they say there were two thousand twenty five hundred wiretaps for criminal investigations and then a year later they say ok here's the other six to seven hundred wiretaps that we didn't report last year and the number goes up by sometimes twenty five percent so those numbers are usually actually not solid until often several years later but another part of it is that we report wiretaps which is very specifically defined as pulling i don't try to communication in transit so if they get a text message or a voice call or even an e-mail while it's moving on the wire between the sender and the receiver that's a wiretap and that's actually pretty hard to get there's a very high legal standard it's a lot easier however to get communications and storage and particular to get location information that was one of the big news from sprint here is they said

well we had over five years fifty thousand wiretaps and almost two hundred thousand location information requests and you're seeing that sort of across the board and you see that is a really popular tool in part because it's a lot easier to get but also in part because it's not there's less attention to it because it's not reported. so what we have is the cons of data that are flowing change and become more varied a decreasing amount of it is caught under the legal definition of a wiretap as opposed to other kinds of ways of obtaining information it's not a wiretap when they get your motivations way that you know i think is important to you is that i think of the natural reaction that a lot of people would have when they find out that government is trying to seek a lot easier data as they think well it's a national security issue right and they're trying to catch terrorists not what it's all about you know as you mentioned like ninety percent of this is related to the drug war right and so that's that's where you should start asking a lot of questions and so finally we had a congressional inquiry at least into the you know the cell phone providers but is

this going to become a normal thing or is this is kind of like a one off hey we feel like knowing about it this year i mean it seems like it should be a no brainer that all of this information if you go to a regular basis just as wiretaps are because this is obviously where surveillance is going this is where communication in general is going so naturally that's where the law enforcement attention is also going to go i don't know how you can possibly make a sound policy to know when you need tweaks or changes to the law if you don't actually know what kind of surveillance is really happening it's actually not clear by the way that any of these numbers include foreign intelligence surveillance they don't tell you they don't tell you which agencies you know or from law enforcement or even the one flu that you may just have not counted that also strictly speaking you know foreign drug cartels could be classified as foreign powers so i wouldn't be surprised if ten years from now we found out that a lot of that national security surveillance wasn't investing you know. so much as maybe. so basically there's

a lot of spying going on all the time and your information is safe and then what we know we were out of time unfortunately but the this is your lighters it makes me feel so grave this of of writers are also they're making money off this because they're charging the government in order to you know do all the paperwork and processes down and they claim they're still losing but i don't know just sounds to me like eight million bucks out of it and they've probably don't want to complain about that all that much joy thanks so much for joining us tonight. are you guys it's time for another quick break but when we return another industry isn't bracing self regulation but are the feds going to keep oversight on man then conservatives might pine for reagan but one conservationist thinks that obama is just like him in some ways shepherd captain paul watson is even going to explain after the break. we.