you need to use your mobile device more and he tore. the waiting game wiki leaks founder julian a song remains held up inside the ecuadorian embassy in london awaiting on an asylum decision but some worry if you will be extradited to sweden an update on the case and why some of us are just supporters are questioning his leadership. five years ago today a bridge collapse in minnesota sent thirteen people to their death this should have been a wake up call to lawmakers that infrastructure here in the u.s. is literally crumbling but since then little has changed are if you take a look at the state of infrastructure across america. and we live in a social media society but should sites like twitter be forced to reveal the names of people who set up parody or fake accounts will dive into the topic of internet

freedom versus user privacy. it's wednesday august first four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine you're watching r t. well today marks the eight hundredth day of private first class bradley manning sitting in jail manning is accused of leaking classified information to the whistle blowing web site wiki leaks now we've been saying on top of his trial but want to spend part of today also looking at the man behind wiki leaks julian assange sancia spent the last seven weeks inside the ecuadorian embassy in london awaiting word on whether he might be able to gain asylum in ecuador since first unveiling wiki leaks julian assange has been somewhat of a controversial figure but now it's clear he's even making some waves within his own circle last night a battle erupted on twitter when a few of the people who were actually one of the people who was met both with

a saw and bradley manning started criticizing him the comments are in reference to a fake new york times op ed and former new york times executive director bill keller wiki leaks took credit for the hoax that for many across the internet so this tweet from david house said as long as we can leaks is controlled by a songe the shortcoming of a songes leadership will continue to put wiki leaks supporters at risk jake about balaam another man associated with wiki leaks then tweeted in response david house attacking wiki leaks i think and i felt for a long time that he is probably a confidential informant snitch or worse i've also wrote people often ask me how i feel about david and now it's a matter of public record i wish him luck with his legal cases and nothing more meanwhile julian assange has mother recently told the associated press she's worried about her son's health she says her son has essentially been in prison like prison like circumstances for the last two years ago doreen officials have said they will not announce a decision on the asylum request until later in the month after the olympic games

in london have wrapped up. keeping state secrets it's a big business here in the u.s. in fact the federal government spends billions each year trying to prevent the public from knowing what it's up to our reports. keeping government secrets is expensive business according to america's information security office last year the us spent around thirteen billion dollars on classifications that's twice as much as it spends ten years ago and more than the entire budget of the country's environmental protection agency for instance the us government keeps way too many secrets even even government entities responsible for evaluating these things like the office for government information oversight. these officers have may have done studies and said well you know a lot of this material doesn't need to be protected so it's in many ways it's a huge waste of money u.s.

security agencies regularly fight in courts to keep volumes of decades old documents classified like the files on the cia's bay of pigs operation in cuba when the u.s. tried to overthrow fidel castro in one thousand nine hundred sixty one but the sharp increase in secrecy over the last decade is due to america's expanding counterterrorism programs rather than on classified historical files the power that the national security state has acquired under president obama is greater than any time history. during the cold war period the government indicted only three people for disclosing classified information however the obama administration alone has prosecuted six government officials for leaking information to the press more than all other past administrations combined and thomas drake was one of them he was a senior executive of america's largest intelligence agency during the bush administration he blew the whistle on fraud and abuse with regards to the agency's

secret surveillance program mr drake was charged under the espionage act watch it was happening now particular my case it set it extraordinarily chilling message that anybody has a senior executive the government had a very high position to say. it sends an extraordinarily chilling message that if you speak out if you speak up we're going to hammer you and we're going to hammer you hard because look what we did to mr drake but after a public outcry last year the government dropped charges against thomas drake in exchange for him pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of misuse of a government computer speaking truth to power is very dangerous and his world the power elites. those in charge they don't like dirty linen being aired. they don't like the skeletons in the closet being seen. and they not only do they object to it they decide to turn it into criminal activity national security

journalists say the government always has and always will leak information deliberately to advance their own interests and it's not at all the curves that they're after the primary. looking at here is that the national security state is striking back is becoming much war repressive in regard to its response to whistleblowing you know individuals who. oppose oh sees that are big carried out or who oppose simply abuses of power the obama administration is spending record amounts to keep its secrets coming down hard on the kurds and yet thousands of classified documents are making their way onto the web the internet has taken leaks to whole new level but it seems the more the internet reveals the more upset the government becomes about secrecy i'm going to check on in washington our to. talk now about

a topic most people and even most lawmakers here in washington agree on infrastructure and the need to make sure it's strong and safe but it was on this day five years ago that the interstate thirty five west mississippi river bridge in minneapolis correct collapsed the buckling of the bridge over the mississippi river happened during the evening rush hour and resulted in the deaths of thirteen people and the injuries of nearly one hundred fifty people it caused a closer look at the infrastructure around the country and of course we already knew at that point after all that it was the levees breaking in new orleans and not hurricane katrina itself that caused excessive death and restart destruction there back in two thousand and five but since that time what has specifically been done what's changed the american society of civil engineers ranks this country's infrastructure every five years. and in the most recent report card two thousand and nine want to show you some of the grades that they gave them you can look and you can see a couple see there but mostly d's and f.'s and just not good grades when

these are the roads and the bridges that we are driving over i want to talk more about the issues with infrastructure with rachel mccleary vice president of the urban land institute infrastructure an issue to and i know rachel one of the biggest arguments against investing in infrastructure now is when you're already in debt and you owe money you can't be making investments i guess i want to get first of all your response to people who say that right at the urban land institute we firmly believe that infrastructure provides the foundation for metropolitan prosperity and national prosperity you see this across the country and across the globe as. countries and governments recognize the vital importance of investing in infrastructure and building the pillars of a modern economy and you know and examples like the very talented things that are happening right now in india with the collapse of the electricity grid and you see

the perils of not making those investments in a timely way and not not spending the money that we need to spend on infrastructure but what do you say to people who say you know maybe in a few years we'll be able to to really invest in those projects but we should focus now on climbing out of debt. well i mean i think investing in infrastructure is both a short term solution and a long term solution. but the urban land institute we focus on the longer term view a lot of places like the american society of civil engineers and others are really looking at the short term job benefits and helping to put people back to work which is of course an immediate concern so pumping money into infrastructure investments not only does it give you benefits today but it also you know provides those long term benefits that you need so you know it's not it's not an either or question and we have this report card that we put up on screen just

a few moments ago this is by the american society of civil engineers this is not a partisan group looking for political gain these are grades given by people who understand the engineering aspect of things that are built in the last lack of safety standards have been implemented i mean i know that if i brought a report card that looked home looked like this home to my parents there would be some immediate changes that would happen i guess i'm wondering why. you know letter grades and information like this has largely been ignored you know i mean i think across the u.s. at the national level it's been harder to get traction on the infrastructure investment issue i think we do see some strides happening at the regional and local level as local governments across the country are really trying to figure out how to move forward with their infrastructure priorities and in some cases that means you know figuring out a place to find the money locally so in two thousand and eight in los angeles the

county voted for a one cent penny sales tax increase that will go to forty billion dollars worth of transportation and transit road investments. so you do see pockets of progress at the national level we've had some. improvements there was the federal aviation bill that passed just last month the federal transportation bill was a bipartisan compromise bill was put through congress that will provide some programs to billet and funding stability for the transportation surface transportation program for the next couple of years so you know it's still an uphill climb but i think that you do see more emphasis being put on infrastructure investment and in particular more and more local and regional sort of innovations around how do you tackle this problem it's really tough to because where do our all

of our lawmakers meet will they meet here in washington i live here in washington and if you look around it's hard to imagine that there's any issues with infrastructure you look around the roads are being repaired things are being built there's cranes everywhere around the city you know working on buildings but but in fact as a country overall you know just since that report card came out in two thousand and nine reports show that public construction spending including state federal and local projects has actually been on a staggered decline any idea why that might be well you see i mean you know local governments across the board are strapped so federal investment in infrastructure at least in transportation infrastructure accounts for about a quarter of total spending and the rest of that money is spent by state governments and local governments and you know it's just been tough times for local economy is trying to figure out in the national economy where's the money come from what priorities should there be. and you know i think

infrastructure as you said when you look around and you and you see the state of roads and bridges it's not always apparent what the scale of the needs are you know don't you don't see it and you know by and large engineers are quite good at you know when you turn. tap the water comes out when you drive on the road it's pretty good quality and so they they've been making do yeah i think that's a really good point a lot of it is not apparent i know just across the pond here from here in baltimore a few weeks ago some glaring examples of underground infrastructure i know when i worked as well as a local news reporter it seems like almost every week in southern california we were having water main breaks and this happened a one hundred twenty year old water main burst and it shut down a lot of the city i know a few days later some more issues a sinkhole actually made the road caved in but when i read about this i know one of the things that i saw first was what are we doing with one hundred twenty year old

pipes under under our road then i mean i think you made a good point when you said we might not have the money now but investing could bring jobs i guess my final question is just you know who can we point the finger at to you know for the problem and also for the solution. well i think it's going to have to be you know all hands on deck to build the infrastructure for the future but i i just want to emphasize that it's not just enough to think about you know how much money we spend we also have to think about the return on that investment and the connections between that investment and land use and development and how we're investing in how we're building the places that we want to become you know art is conservation part of the equation are we really thinking about managing and maintaining the infrastructure that we have appropriately and finally about pricing in terms of sending the right signals about you so it's not you know i think you

can overemphasize the total amount of infrastructure spending but we really need to think about as a country is how do we invest wisely how do we build the future that we want for ourselves in the coming decades and what does that investment in infrastructure really need to look like absolutely some really important questions there rachel mccleary vice president of the urban land institute infrastructure initiative thanks so much for being on the show i disagree here. and that's a now for you want to story that we told you about earlier this week we reported on the hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted on reconstruction efforts in iraq with relatively little progress to show as it turns out infrastructure failures in iraq are not isolated incidents when it comes to u.s. efforts abroad but more common occurrences a report released on monday shows a large amount of the u.s. government's four hundred million dollar investment in large scale infrastructure in afghanistan in just the year two thousand and eleven also went to waste the

report by the special inspector general for afghanistan john soco found that quote a decade of struggle and bloodshed and more than eighty nine billion dollars of u.s. appropriations for afghan reconstruction has not cleared the landscape of serious problems he went on to say the united states risks wasting billions of dollars if u.s. funded development programs cannot be sustained either by the afghan government or by continued donor support. it's an ominous warning to military officials looking for an exit strategy in an increasingly unpopular war audits of construction sites in afghanistan discovered weaknesses in planning coordination and execution that's a direct quote those are those are what's to blame for these wasted funds so much so that several major construction projects that were supposed to be finished by mid twenty thirteen are significantly behind schedule four of the five delayed projects were to build power lines and other to construct provincial justice centers across the country meantime in its final report to congress the commission

on wartime found as much as sixty billion dollars in u.s. funds have been lost to waste and fraud both in afghanistan and in iraq over the past decade now you might be wondering why u.s. military progress hinges on reconstruction efforts these days considering we spent the better part of the better part of the decade bombing multiple regions of these countries but it is in fact part of the effort to win the hearts and minds of the people and to establish democracy in the region from the ground up in short it's a tool at least in theory to try to curb the talor taliban insurrection now with the twenty fourteen deadline looming the question becomes who will pick up the cost of these unfinished projects the answer is looking more and more like u.s. taxpayers will be footing the bill if lawmakers approve a request from president obama for a new reconstruction funding the united states will have provided nearly one hundred billion dollars to rebuilding afghanistan since the war began. so there you

have it ten years in war and relatively little progress made at least as far as rebuilding some of these countries meanwhile back at home american infrastructure is crumbling and the economy is not doing much better i think the american people deserve a plan that lays out how much longer their taxes will go to build schools and roads and buildings in countries other than our own i think these questions are not being asked often enough of our candidates for president and for congress men and women who often sign off on the way the money in this country is appropriated. as you may know we talk a lot here on r.t. about social media and the way it's being used more and more by the government both in investigations and sometimes even for the purposes of surveillance we've told you in the past additionally all sites which is facebook actually sell users' information to companies for marketing purposes. well today we want to focus on twitter but those behind twitter have been have not done to cooperate with the government so let's look at one case there's

a user his total twitter his or her twitter or twitter handle is on steve darkland seems to be parroting steve auckland the chief executive of northcliffe media who's already set to spoof tweets are obsessive and offensive an e-mail by twitter to the account holder that was recently made public said that quote twitter is obligated to respond to a lawful process and will do do so on august first twenty twelve that's today but now guess what twitter has reneged on its promise and is refusing that order to give that information to law enforcement so i'm wondering could we be seeing a new chapter will other social media take cues and perhaps even follow suit christopher chambers as a journalism professor at georgetown university hello they're all going to see there's no this move by twitter a little bit unprecedented i'm wondering if you think it will in fact you know send a message that it is possible for these social media companies to stand up for the government or the government i don't think it's it's possible but they're not i

mean this is this is the result of social pressure this is a result of their own users turning against them and it's really an example of the tension that you see in twitter and most of these social media giants they've become the mainstream media outlets that the you know thought that they were going to supplant and and move beyond evolve beyond i mean you know with with with guy adams and b. c. you me twitter has become in b c two has become the daily mail you know which was the which was the result of the author yeah so the guy adams case for those people who have not been following this is a british journalist who works for the independent and i know he was criticizing some of the coverage of the olympics a lot of people would like you know you on twitter somebody criticizing quote the coverage and so he gave the corporate email address of an executive b.c. . which is already posted right. apparently and twitter guidelines you can't give personal information he was they thought he was violating federal they suspended his account and then re brought it back i guess i guess the point is here guys are

starting to tread in waters a murky waters. of free speech starting to be defined. in this use of social media they've become in their you know if you want to call it evolution they're trying to monetize themselves or trying to make money they're acting more like traditional media outlets well that you know they're going to have to deal with the same hobgoblins the whole all these outlets from fox to traditional newspapers and what and part of that is dealing with people who are using them as an outlet for what most would say legitimate either media criticism or parody and satire which is protected speech parody and satire in case of the daily mail you know nonsense with with auckland is protected speech but that doesn't mean you can't turn around the targets of that and go after those people with with legal process whether they'll win or not is

a different story the thing that's nothing new rich people powerful entities have always used the courts or law enforcement to quell debate and quell information they don't want out there the question is how does the the media outlet respond to that well they're supposed to respond by protecting that kind of free exercise and the free flow of ideas as long as there's no it has nothing on lawful going on i mean i know with the daily mail they thought well you know they might have been hacked but there was no proof for that but i mean twitter does have to respond to lawful subpoenas the question is are they going to roll over a fold and they were going they did that twice and got called on it by their users and that is the scary part now i think another really interesting aspect of all this to me oh you use words like protected speech we know of course the first and here in. us twitter is not just a social media website for the u.s. there's something we have lobel global it is used by people in countries with very

different rules and laws about speech and so i think it's really interesting to see the way that some of its founders have had to deal with oh yeah i mean you have this whole legal tangent now where things that might arise in pakistan or london or being fought out in a federal court in san francisco which has nothing to do with china or pakistan or london or anything like that and so that part is fascinating in of itself but it's all part of that see maturation or evolution or growth of twitter from this group global consciousness which is what the founders and i think you know we're back to versed in practical content users alike what like to think of it as and the reality which is it's maturing into this you know see the entity that didn't really want to be didn't want to be like n.b.c. or far right now it's now has to deal with that and they've opened the pandora's box and they're going to have to deal with it and protect supposedly protect the

very people that inject the information into it you know you live by the sword you die by the sword absolutely i want to talk really quickly a little bit bigger picture here to the extent you know your professor at georgetown i'm sure one hundred percent of your students have some form of social media my hundred twenty percent. as a member of the media it's the same thing a whole lot of people in this country more and more use social media rely on social media to communicate do you think the majority of those people understand the extent to which this is a tool for law enforcement yeah i think i think they're understanding it now i think what you're seeing is that the enemy in these two instances where did not become n.b.c. because people hated them already didn't become the daily mail people had them already it's twitter. it's almost like that's supposed to be your own goal who's supposed to be watching over you and he's off doing what he's doing his own thing i think people are much more attuned to this now i mean the serious content suppliers

of the serious twitter users beyond beyond the teenagers tweeting that you know they hate somebody but even they are starting to catch on but that stuff is curated it's stored and could go to people that they don't want to go to and they're not there ex-girlfriend but to the federal government or to other governments i think this opened a door that i think the casual user is now seeing i think they're starting to see about what do you think that would take for you know twitter and facebook to actually say you know under no circumstances will we give your information i mean is it going to take you know a billion people leaving facebook or threatening to leave facebook it's going to take it's going to take that kind of insurgency because they are mature businesses now with the evolving business models and they've had trouble obviously facebook as and now twitter and they are much more in tune i mean you know the whole thing with guy adams was a strategic relationship that twitter had with n.b.c.

well now users are starting to see that they're going to be much more distrustful and it would take a large scale insurgency but leaving them that would be like telling americans you know don't drive anymore i mean we might you know protest high gas prices we're not going to not drive so they don't have to worry about losing the users they have to worry about losing the users trust and that's much worse for me i think it's a really interesting point that you bring up that i hadn't thought about just sort of this relationship of twitter with n.b.c. for one picks coverage purpose but the fact that in this case there's italy they notified n.b.c. whereas most of the other cases they're notified by the federal gov't if they want information on certainly i think we're going to see some changes in the. rest of our chambers journalism professor at georgetown university always good to have you here as well the capital account is up next on our let's check in with more let's start to see what's on the agenda today hey there laura. we've made it through half the reason for us we made it there half the week which means we're about halfway through this central banking extravaganza week which is rife with expectations of

whether central bankers will put their hands into the economy and acts so the federal reserve came out today with its interest rate decision no change there so now all eyes are on the e.c.b. and there are high expectations around it because you may recall last week mario draghi made a very bold claim saying the e.c.b. is behind the euro we are vowing to support it and it will work this is at the same time when manufacturing numbers are out for the eurozone which are not good it paints a grim picture so we'll dive deep into this whole euro zone conflict and really pull out what's important only on the capital account would you hear extravaganza use with central banks but you know what i'm saying sometimes you just gotta look at a party. a party you don't want to be absolutely absolutely things lauren and save for the capital account but for us here that's going to do it but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america or our website our two dot com slash usa and you can always follow me i'm on twitter at christine will be

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news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are all day.