nearly seven weeks after we leave founder julian assange sought refuge in an ecuadorian embassy his fate is still uncertain and the international community community is getting impatient now sweden is adding even more pressure to a high profile pursuit report from london coming up. and if you thought the kurds were close on the u.s. cyber legislation get ready for act two and the u.s. side where we lay our scene i mean should piers come new cyber legislation will tell you about the latest assault on your privacy and also take a deeper look at the seedy dealings of the n.s.a. . armed with signs

and signatures on a petition hundreds of people square off with law enforcement to rally against police brutality the tensions in anaheim are now stretching into overtime for day the latest on this tense situation ahead. k.-street meet your match and the age of the internet even the way in which people lobby congress is getting a high tech facelift their mission find political solutions to protect a free and open internet find out how they're planning to do that coming up. it's tuesday july thirty first four pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl and you're watching our. all starting off this hour with an update on julian assad the swedish government has rejected a request by edward. in officials to interview a songe in the u.k.

that's according to the wiki leaks twitter feed the whistleblower has been held up in an embassy for the past six weeks seeking asylum in ecuador he's trying to avoid being extradited to sweden over sex crimes but his ultimate fear is being sounds of the u.s. are to correspondent laura smith has more from london. according to this twisted feeds they have rejected the invitation without any kind of meaningful explanation and i mean this is doesn't really come as a particular surprise ever since this case began almost two years ago now. julian assange has been has been offering for this week to come to london and question him here and they've never done that so this is an ongoing thing i guess maybe what his legal team and indeed the ecuadorian diplomats felt could be different this time is that the invitation isn't coming from just us on himself it's coming from a novice state so he's got another state operating on his behalf so it's almost like it's on equal terms it really begs the question does the swedish prosecutor

really want to get to the bottom of this case it certainly looks as if she doesn't and if not then of course. meanwhile diplomats have been working on julian assange as his behalf and seeking assurances from the u.k. sweden and the u.s. that he won't be extradited to america or if he does go to sweden they've received no response on that they've also been trying to get the u.s. to either confirm or deny that there are legal proceedings are a grand jury having been been subpoenaed in the u.s. again no response from america. has been holed up now in the in the ecuadorian embassy here in london for weeks he fled citing human rights violations to avoid extradition to sweden on these allegations but no charges of sexual offenses and he's under quite trying circumstances it's very cramped in there it's only a small embassy there's no outside space at all and of course if he does step

outside the embassy he's liable to be arrested by the british police his mother has been quick all this week to plead her case and she says that she's extremely worried about the state of his health she says he's under extreme stress in the ecuadorian embassy and he's been under long term extreme stress for the last two years while these this case has been going on and he's. really living in conditions similar to detention those are the correspondent laura smith with an update from london now r.t. has been covering this story since the release of the collateral merkle murder video which put wiki leaks in the public eye as never before and we will continue this story as it develops julian assange and his mother arrived in ecuador on monday and as we speak an r.t. crew is in ecuador following the developments from inside the country and there's much more information coming out so stay tuned. well now there are cyber security bill up for debate today in congress this time it's the cyber security act of two

thousand and twelve the bills aimed at regulating the internet has stirred a lot of controversy recently but this one has the white house standing behind it and this bill appears to have some very positive provisions let's take a look at a few of of. ensuring that only civilian agency is not the national security agency are in charge of our nation's cyber security systems another one they're ensuring data isn't shared with law enforcement except in very specific limited circumstances and ensuring that data collected through cyber security programs can't be used to prosecute other unrelated crimes and the last one there carve outs for free speech and terms of service violations. so that all sounds great but privacy advocates are still skeptical to talk more about the cybersecurity bill aaron swartz founder of demand progress joins us now aaron welcome so on the surface this seems like a step in the right direction in protecting answering that freedoms what do you

think well i mean it's certainly good that they've made these improvements to the bill and like you said it has a lot of protections for privacy that weren't there before but there's still the fundamental question of why we need a bill like this at all i mean obviously if we are going to have a bill it's better than it has privacy protections than the previous bill which you know actually trampled on privacy in all sorts of ways but the government still hasn't explained why we need this and you know even of a civilian agency to monitor all our cyber communications against some sort of nonexistent threat i mean how would you compare this bell to other some of the more controversial pieces of legislation so. the latest to pass the house so it's closest to suspend that it's the same basic idea it's about letting people share cybersecurity information more easily but it doesn't have some of the most egregious provisions in that bill like you mention it has safeguards in place in response to the popular uprising about the bill but what it doesn't do is it

doesn't change the fundamental approach of the bill it still says what we need is another government agency whose job is to collect information about americans in order to stop some sort of terrorist threat from the internet and it doesn't attack the real problem of cyber security threats which is that the government with groups like the n.s.a. been funding the creation of vulnerabilities in our computer systems and exploiting them for their own purposes until we stop that until the government stops funding cyber security holes it seems a bit ridiculous to say that the solution the cyber security is more spying and collecting more data about americans but what are the implications of transferring that power away from the national security agency to a civilian agency. well that's certainly a huge improvement i mean if you look at the track record of the n.s.a. it's infamously been one of the most ferocious groups spying on americans collecting data about americans building huge databases and dragnets that try and

collect all sorts of material you know from tweets story e-mail records putting more material in the hands is really frightening and taking it away from the n.s.a. is a huge positive step but it doesn't i mean you know at the end of the day it's one government agency or another government agency it doesn't solve the underlying problem now there are these ramped up fears erin you know cyber attacks cyber terrorism. would you say that there shouldn't be any oversight whatsoever to you know put safeguards in to prevent against potential attacks not like i said i think it's really important you stop cyber attacks and the way to do that is to make our cyber systems more secure to close the bomb or abilities that allow attackers to get it but the problem is the government is doing the opposite they are funding the creation of vulnerabilities they are offering rewards for people to find and build moeller abilities in the misses them and give it to the u.s. government so the u.s. government can launch cyber attacks in other countries as long as the u.s.

government is paying people to create all the abilities we're not going to get rid of the problem and so instead of actually addressing the underlying problem which is that there are these holes there are these vulnerabilities in our computers the government's trying to work around it most and while yes we're going we will hold open but we're just going to watch them carefully to make sure only the u.s. government uses that's a strategy but bound to fail i don't want to badge you know senator ron wyden he has kind of been at the forefront of all of this and trying to advocate legislation that would protect internet freedoms and he plans to introduce an amendment to this bill that would prevent warrantless g.p.s. tracking so aaron i mean it looks like there is still a lot of concerns areas of concerns within this legislation. yeah i mean it's great to see senator one doing that and he's brought a lot of attention to this issue which basically is that the government claims they can spy on all of our location without a war because it's just our location and it's not and you think. it's an absolutely

ridiculous argument it's an argument that's so ridiculous they refuse to make it publicly and instead we've only been able to hear about it because senator wyden has access to classified information and he continues to push the legislation to fix the loophole that the government has simply invented out of the net now and as we had mentioned earlier what this bill does it transfers power out of the national security agency to a civilian agency and a lot of controversy surrounding what exactly the n.s.a. has done in the past and if they did compromise people's privacy and constitutional rights want to bring up a general keith alexander he came out recently and said that the n.s.a. did not maintain files on americans he says if that happened that it wasn't intentional this was this was recently at a hacking conference over the weekend but many aren't buying it i mean what do you think is this is this an outright lie what i think we have in this a whistleblower saying he was playing word games with the truth you know i think if

you really pin him down on it and say oh yes they're not files we just have a database with information about all sorts of americans but you know that's that's a distinction without a difference the fact is as whistleblowers again and again have alleged the n.s.a. is collecting enormous amounts of information about americans the putting it all huge databases where it can be searched and information about any one of those can be pulled out the fact that ok today the n.s.a. isn't pulling all of the individual files with their names on it no one millions of innocent bureaucrats taking notes on all of our conversations doesn't change the fact that there were courting them there keeping copies of them in there searching through. so you know we saw we saw. this now we have this cyber security bill that they're debating today i know you're still you still not happy still not satisfied what would it take for advocates of internet privacy like yourself to be to be satisfied. well what i'd like to see is some movement in

a positive direction we've spent so much time in trying to get rid of the worst aspects of these bills get rid of the moves to use the winds that we've seen in and there have been improvements made on those phones but what we are starting to see in this bill is small positive improvements so like you mentioned one of the changes in this bill is that it will change the definition of terms of service right now the government's position is that if you you violate the sort of click through agreement you get when you sign up for facebook that long multi-page thing that i don't think anyone ever reads if you violate that the government's position is that's a crime well there's all sorts of silly things in that agreement like you have to use your real name on this book so the government's position is if you if you use a fake name on facebook that's a crime that they can throw you in jail for search draft of the bill would change that that's a positive step but we need to see more steps like that like senator wyden and so on but instead you know what we're seeing is not positive bills but small positive excuse attached to overall it's a bad bill right erin appreciate you coming on the show that was eric schwartz the

founder of demands progress well tensions remain high in anaheim the police shooting a man while diaz who was apparently an arms fire protests and riots that are now into their tenth day the city which has a significant hispanic population is up in arms over a string of police shootings the protest at times turning violent with police unleashing dogs and using pepper spray on the crowds of protesters firing back the ring brock's and other items at authorities there's also been reports of vandalism to local businesses to talk more about the turmoil in what was once considered the happiest place on earth are to correspondent for a moment ago and joins us now live from on high what is the latest over there. yeah hi liz well next week city leaders are going to try to use ease some of the tensions which we've been seeing over the last several days here and i'm there's

going to be an open public meeting where members of the community will be able to voice their concerns about what's happening inside of the city and most people expect that the most common theme will be the recent rash of officer involved shootings now the mayor has called for a federal investigation because he can see that there is definitely a high level of trust which has been lost between the community and the police force here and historically the residents of the lower income neighborhoods there in anaheim have felt like they don't have anyone to turn to when there is trouble in their neighborhood so today community leaders are going to city hall again to bring up this issue of latino representation on the council and even the a.c.l.u. is filing a lawsuit in hope of changing the format of the elections trying to get more like you know representation in a city which over the last couple decades has seen a huge huge demographic shift but nonetheless despite all these efforts there still seems to be a high level of trust lost when we were in the neighborhood just

a few days ago where manuel the we talked to people who say they witness what happened but they just didn't want to talk they don't want to talk to cameras they don't want to talk to police and it's because there's this attitude of fear in the community that if they speak up about any sort of crime that they see in their community that they're going to face richard boucher an arrest and even deportation by the authorities so what we expect to see are more protests here one is scheduled for tomorrow which will go from the shooting scene to city hall and we do expect also the protests to continue in front of disneyland demanding that the police chief in anaheim resign. and rebound throughout all of this it's now in its tenth day i am we've seen the protests get quite violent would you say that that violence is ask leading. well if the if you talk to the demonstrators they would tell you that the violence on behalf of the police is definitely increased scene we saw

about nine arrests on sunday now the city of anaheim says that most of those protesters were from out of town causing trouble from video that has surfaced today and from eyewitness accounts those protesters say that they were being peaceful and in the less they are being charged with resisting arrest and blocking the streets and even in previous protests where we did see some vandalism and we did see people throwing rocks and bottles we've seen members of the community people who are related to some of the sheen victims asked for peace but even though they don't condone the violence they definitely say that they understand the fact that the community is completely and rage right now and what exactly are protesters demanding. well we talked to people in the

community and we also talked to some of the families which are related to the young men who were shot and killed when it comes to the families they definitely want to see more transparency in the investigations they feel that their concerns over how their loved ones were killed were not address and that police just swept their case under the rug and this is kind of what led to the anger so they're definitely looking for a complete change in the system as far as how police address police shootings and as was how they deal with the community when it comes to the community activists other people who have been victims of crimes they definitely want to see these police be prosecuted in the case of manual vs who was unarmed when he was shot and killed by police his family has filed a fifty million dollars wrongful death lawsuit against the city so there are those things in progress we'll see if any of these efforts or how the city will respond

to these protests and these lawsuits and everyone i know you had mentioned that that community meeting that's in the works and would you say does it seem like there is a resolution and site is that is that does it seem like that's attainable at this point. well the police will tell you that they have responded appropriately to the uprisings and seen that they have reached out to the community and they have had several neighborhood means and that is true that residents have been able to speak at past council meetings as neighborhood meetings but they feel that it's pretty much just police and the city paying them lip service while they have been able to speak out not much action has been taken and they say that these lives that were taken by police officer shootings in the past few weeks could have been avoided had the police department and the city address the concerns that they've

been raising for years now thanks for keeping us updated on this very tense situation over there that was our to correspondent from uncle and now. well the biggest names on the internet are teaming up in hopes of influencing congress meet the same it's made up of facebook google amazon and e bay and they're forming a new trade organization and they say they'll advocate policy and legislation that's in the best interest of their users the internet association as it's called is set to launch and september according to their president their mission is to lobby for quote a political solution that will push for protecting a free and open end turned out so what's this new even lobby really all about discuss this and more i'm joined now by todd r. weiss he's the technology journalist at tech man walking hi todd so you're doing well they say we have those fat our full cyberforce is a bad thing together what do you make of this new lobby well

a lot of people i spoke to for this story i wrote we talked about how this is something that was really overdue that the internet has been around now since one thousand nine hundred four and there hasn't really been a lobbying group created just for internet large businesses so i think that's really one of the most important things. now could we expect that the decisions in the interests of these gigantic companies are going to align with those of their users. well i'm not sure what's going to happen here we haven't actually confirmed that these are the companies in the there's been country confirmation but it hasn't officially been announced it won't be till september but it all sources you know indicated google and yahoo and amazon in need for the major members but what kind of reaction there's going to be i don't know if that can be really decided. ok i guess i guess it's something we're going to have to wait and see but you know these days it seems like most business says they depend on the internet whether it's for communication for promotion for sales everybody is connected in one way or another

so how can this lobby really impact all businesses both big and small well i think it's important because right now there are plenty of lobbying groups for all kinds of different organizations the world of computing or groups like comp t.i.a. and other lobbying groups but there hasn't yet been really in a group just for retailers on the internet or businesses on the internet and i think that's huge there's a national retail association for brick and mortar businesses and that's a huge leap powerful because a lobbying group i think that kind of thing is really needed for things like and the amazons the yahoos the base of the world because they have uniquely different needs they don't have stores they crossed every single state line in the united states and every order around the world and that to me is really important that here in the united states where many of these companies are based they have a lobbying group that can help you know discuss their specific needs with

legislators in this country that we've seen as serious legislation aimed at regulating the internet in one way or another you know says the latest sopa pipa and a lot of critics say that these lawmakers are are trying to legislate something that they don't even fully understand do you think that it's necessary to educate lawmakers about the internet that's that's a great point liz one of the things that one of the folks that i interviewed for my story for you he said was that you know there are still legislators are still members of congress who still think the internet is a series of tubes i mean i know it sounds ridiculous but people don't understand what the internet is people don't understand the history of the internet how it happened and why we now in two thousand and twelve but when you. and it's since about one thousand nine hundred four as a consumer tool i mean i remember when this was something that all of us discovered back in ninety four ninety five it seems like it's been

a while but you know it's what twelve years is not that long a period of time to really learn about well they certainly seems like it would be in everybody's best interest for them to get up to date on what the internet really is and you know all of this see you know kind of touting the benefits of this but i mean what would you expect the biggest companies in washington to fight for i mean these are that they have a lot of power i mean facebook google have a lot of power and so i mean could that be dangerous in a way. well that's that's very true but i think one of the things that could really come out of this is that companies like these as i said before they have a lot of things that happen over from state lines amazon for one amazon is having fights around the country as far as sales taxes state by state a lobbying group like this can help perhaps explain to you know lobbyists to congress i am

a zones position you know at this point there are states across the country who are starting to collect taxes on amazon purchases right now that's a that's a huge leap hot topic across the country and we're going to see more of that i think and i mean i guess we need this is just the beginning of it so what kinds of policies exactly do you think that they are going to be advocating well i think it will be policies having to do with how these businesses can do the work they do from state to state you know this country united states because it is fifty states and then those states each have separate governments it on a federal basis some of these things may have to be decided because you know there are specific issues i mean to do with state to state interstate transit things like that shipping and all and all kinds of things like that i think that's probably the key the key issue although i also heard in my report from some of these sources that you know there are other issues as well taxes and how they can do special you know deals with governments to save build plants and in places where shipping

facilities things like that there's a lot of tax related kinds of things that there's i'm sure there's that organization will lobby for on behalf of these companies and the president of this company has pledged to help protect you know the privacy and really advocate for you know the best policies that are the interest of their users are you confident that they will in fact do that well i don't know if the lobbying organs are to me a lobbying organization is going to lobby on behalf of its members i don't know if it's going to lobby on behalf of all of a. you know consumers so consumers will want to watch what this group does just see how it effects them out if experts as they make from these companies how it affects how they deal with companies like yahoo or google or they you know it's going to be one of those things that you can consumers are going to want to see what happens and then there's the whole issue of political contributions now we're going to see political contributions formally through a new group which all of us will have to watch for because it's worrisome and in

the political. very interesting appreciate you coming on the show that was tot our white house technology journalist at tech man walking. well the capital account is up next on our t.v. we're going to check in with lauren lister to see what is on today's agenda lauren what do you working on over there hi liz well the federal reserve began meeting today which means they will begin dispelling any mists about what the federal reserve can and should do we have mike maloney audi's founder of gold silver dot com author of rich dad poor dad guide to investing in precious metals and he will tell us why the fed acting would be the worst thing for the average person in america or the u.s. i should really say and this comes on a day to where people are looking toward with the e.c. b. is doing to act because they too will meet this week liz so you won't want to miss it right that's all coming up next thanks for that update lauren but that's going to do it for now for the news for of the stories we covered you can check out our

you tube channel it's youtube dot com slash r t america will post all our interviews in fall there and you can also check out our website it's our t.v. dot com slash usa and you can also follow me on twitter as well capital account is coming up next will be right back here and a half hour. of american power continuing. things that are. might actually be time revolution. and it turns out that a particular group of starbucks is a surprising ingredient. interpol

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