today on r t we've told you a lot about these cyber legislation snaking their way through congress and what it means for your internet freedoms but what is the co-founder of apple steve was the ark have to say about it our t. has the exclusive interview with the man who helped shape technology into what it is today. and from one apple to another you watch your weight by exercising and eating healthy but who's watching the farm lobby and the legislation they're sneaking to try to sneak they're trying to sneak through congress coming up we'll tell you who's planting seeds and lawmakers heads and how the farm bill will affect you. it's friday august tenth five pm here in washington d.c.

i'm liz wahl and you're watching r t. o begin today taking a close look at cyber legislation and they aim to regulate the internet with the failure of the most recent cyber bill in the senate and a possible obama executive order it seems the government is looking for ways to beef up internet protection that of cyber command general keith alexander also head of the n.s.a. has come out asking the administration to review the rules when it comes to cyber attacks currently the pentagon is only allowed to defend against attacks inside its own boundaries but they're hoping now to expand that power to outside of their own computer networks and within foreign countries now this comes a day after caspar risky allows identified another apparent state sponsored virus with links to stuxnet at and flame so as heavy speculation swirls around the future of the internet we here at r.t. sat down with someone who had a clear hand in creating our current cyber climate she was the at co-founder of apple speaks to our abby martin about net neutrality his fear that freedom on the

internet could become a thing of the past he also weighs in on the kim dot com case against him. as co-founder of one of the largest companies in the world do you think that you have a responsibility to speak out about issues like internet regulation i don't think anyone comes with a responsibility just because their company is really big especially since i'm not the one who wanted to run a company just be a great engineer that helped start it so i don't feel that anybody has a responsibility however i do like it when well known people that are in the public eye speak out on social issues and give their opinion what do think about legislation like so and people and why you think that they are so unpopular it turns out that the the internet when it first came it was a breath of fresh air it was so free nobody own the internet space countries didn't own it they didn't control it it was worldwide it was people to people it was like we little people the world all of a sudden had this incredible resource and we didn't have to go through other people

selling it to us and delivering it to it's that has changed a lot but still those were items that were kind of against just being able to use the wires to send whatever you thought of to somebody else who's a friend or whatever sharing sharing data so a lot of people have done that sort of thing they have freely shared a song maybe a song with son or maybe they've shared another file with another good friend and they just don't want interference now sure it's illegal to share copyrighted material fine there are laws in place but these were new laws that were going to just totally try to put up roadblocks to services that had other very good purposes in our life for example i might make a promotional video for an interview like this and then i'll e-mail it to you well it's too big to email so i'll upload it to a little site maybe it's dropbox maybe it's my apple ideas maybe it's make upload all upload to a site and send you the u.r.l. and now you can download it and i do that regularly i heard you previously talking about ken dot coms case. and you know you mentioned that the charges against him or

pretty much phony and a lot more on what you meant by that yes first of all he ran. one of the largest file sharing services in the world so the most movies and all were being exchanged by people through that site it's not a site where you could link connect to it and say search for avatar there was no searching somebody could upload a file and then pass out a u.r.l. on their own and they're violating the law if it's copyright material like a movie and the person who downloads is violating a law too but the what kim dot com rant is just a service that's like a post office he was the post office it was being mailed through winding shut down the post office thinking that's where the problem is it's not so that was a phony charge they tried to charge him with a copyright violation himself for uploading sixty songs or something but they had come off of c.d.'s he had purchased so they say it was all these attempts that i call phony then they had to figure out a way to extradite him they needed a crime that would get him five years in prison to meet the law the new zealand law

for extradition so they made up phony charges of racketeering like he's some big mobster connecting you know a big financial empire and all these countries i mean apple does that but kim dotcom is just a nice soft little sweet guy when you meet him who tells the truth openly you know that you know when somebody is being truthful when you're with them personally and he doesn't hide things he doesn't share he doesn't have concocted lines to tell he's not a. racketeer there's a they charge him with mail fraud because he said i deleted some files and what he had done was delete the links to them it's like if you have a computer and you take a file and you throw in the trash. the file is still on your hard disk it didn't really get a raised the link is gone you can't find it any more by that link so that's a phony charge he really had got rid of the one part you could get rid of to make it look as though it was deleted the phony charges just indicate that they're going to they're doing everything they can to make the public think they the prosecutors are in the right you know but you don't do phony things when you're in the right

you have an open and shut case not their having their having to go be on the bounds of what's what's right to try to convict him what kind of precedent do you think this is that's for just government overstepping i've read a lot about how they confiscated his data files actually took them to the united states and they didn't have the right to do that it's it's yeah the trouble is we developed what sort of rights you have to have against accusers meaning the police and the prosecutors they are the accusers presumption of innocence means the burden of proof is on the accuser they have to prove things you have the right to be notified what you're being charged of you have a right to you know a lot of different rights that make sure you're being treated fairly and prosecutors and governments are found every way they can to get around those rights and that's what bothers me is that you know if they want to convict you of something you didn't do they have an awful lot of techniques to do it lot of ways to do it and you founded the electronic frontier foundation to protect free speech should the principle of the first amendment be protected with something like wiki

leaks free speech is not absolute in my mind it's a very important right it has to go through considerations of did you violate it in ways that might be hurt somebody else some free speech could actually trigger harmful events it could trigger even murders so it does murdering and an abortion doctor count as free speech no there are limits to free speech i don't know in the case of wiki leaks. i don't know where that's going to fall out so you think there are limitations in terms of kind of opening or protecting all free speech online and the war on whistleblowers will. all free speech online i was brought up with the belief that the first amendment was such a good thing every every one of our bill of rights in the united states was so crucial to my heart the way my dad taught me but free speech meant you could say something bad about the president even you could say something bad about your government you have that right and we were taught you don't have that right in communist russia so i believe in that right very strongly as far as as far as wiki

leaks you know i wish i knew more about the whole case for on the surface it sounds to me like something that's that's good the whistleblower blew the truth the people found out what they the people had paid for you know and the government says no no the people should not know what they paid for and growing up in a generation where you've seen the internet perforate into something is so massive and where political and social movements are birds online now what do you think just about the evolution of the internet and how you know apple has really played a role in expanding that to people you know when we started the company i would go back to that point did we have a vision of computers being prolific in everybody's hands throughout society yes did we have the idea that it would lead to you know the incredible connection that the internet would come onboard that broadband would come on board for almost everyone who wants it and that that would lead to all these you know basically the way we live life in the way we do things put everything political everything social

the way we do things with other people is all done with your computer on the internet with your i phones with your mobile devices now and it's a totally different world than it was when will we have powerful computers but they weren't a part of your life as much as now and i'm just as happy as everyone else to see it having turned out this way how do you see it going you think that it will still continue or do you think it will see kind of. curb i mean but the political and social movements now where everything's integrated everything's being homogenized in the entire world and we're seeing the arab spring the occupy wall street movement really because of social interaction yes i thought. that a lot of social interaction will be curbed i want to take that back i theory i fear it will be that the gate keepers those who can turn on and off switches allow certain things disallow other things allow who gets to send me data about a new movie rather than everyone have an equal say so of reaching me yeah i fear that very strongly that especially net neutrality issues like that internet freedom

is being interfered with in major ways and it shouldn't i think the internet should have been considered from day one a country of its own that isn't bound by any individual country's laws maybe we could have an internet government but it didn't happen just like world government doesn't happen you know space doesn't belong to anyone the moon doesn't belong to anyone these are really beautiful principles in life and then as soon as a country figures out a way to get control of them it disappears i'm an optimist and i believe we can move more and more towards net neutrality the trouble is a lot of it has to be enforced by the government and. conservative types and libertarian types say government shouldn't have any say in control over that that takes away our freedom wrong it takes away the freedom of the companies that are taking away the freedom from us every freedom we have in the united states every one of them was given to us by congressional regulation it's called the bill of rights that that is what gives us our freedom and yet it was from the government

was government regulation no there are times when government regulation says you will not impede with the internet neutrality of the users but what do you think about this whole hacktivism movement that's come out of kind of you know the war on whistleblowers and the occupy wall street and anonymous and you have you know these takedowns of government websites and then you see legislation lexis the cyber intelligence security and protection act that kind of puts a stop to these things you think that that's kind of working as a guys. and using the hacktivism and hacktivists to kind of regulate the internet even more so i really think that there are means for legitimate discourse and trying to bring attention with activist x. is wrong on the other hand i believe very strongly in legitimized marches and that sort of stuff you know with the approval of the authorities there's room in our society to go out and have a microphone and to have a say and be heard by so many others especially in this day of the internet so there are a lot of avenues it's just trying to you know grab something to get on the news and

i don't think that's the way to maybe it's a start it puts ideas in people's heads but i really. i don't i don't think that's the right way to solve things and he said before that no one really has the responsibility to speak out about anything but why why do you steve why do you speak out and why do you think so many others don't about these issues you know what the whole world is very conflict oriented we want to take a side and fight for my side my side might be my country it might be my computer platform it might be which browser i use and i take my side and everybody. this is bad and i want to fight it and i only want to look at the world one way and i'm the i try to be so wide and open and just you know accept everything and judge it that's the watercooled scientific you know approach don't take a side don't be like for one religion against others that sort of thing thank you so much for your time and that was our taze abby martin with with apple co-founder steve wozniak now let's take a look now at

a piece of legislation that should be coming up for a vote soon but one that congress seems to keep putting off it's called the farm bill and it is restructured and renewed every five years far from a simple bill to help farmers the bill is all encompassing and deals with everything from food to biofuels to food stamps as our to correspondent christine friends our reports there's a growing concern that powerful lobbying interests will have a major impact on the future of food in this country. for those facing hard times places like this do still exist in most major cities washington d.c. included and the need is growing exponentially since two thousand and eight there has been a twenty five percent increase the number of families so it's like senior citizens who need our food assistance the capital area food bank provides food organizations who distribute it to those in need many part of the supplemental nutrition assistance program or snap formerly known as food stamps it's

a program facing extreme cuts in the upcoming farm bill have snap a skirt a person literally that's giving us let's say one hundred dollars the snap could have their benefit reduced to maybe fifty to sixty dollars a month and this is a person that maybe has a family of three or four people in fifty sixty or fifty or sixty dollars that go a long way. after that they must go elsewhere but programs like this are far more complicated than they see the rules and regulations laid out in the complex and large piece of legislation so this is the current version of the farm bill that the house is debating in the summer so this is double sided. really half the pages in its newly released report cultivating influence the two thousand and eight farm bill lobbying frenzy food and water watch breaks down the forces behind the ingredients of the bill an example of too many cooks in the kitchen over the course

of the bait of the two thousand and eight farm bill over a thousand and thirteen companies trade associations groups lobbied they spend one hundred seventy three million dollars was our calculation so who has the greatest influence when it comes to setting food policy in the united states many experts say it's actually wal-mart they've got nearly four thousand stores across this country many of them super centers and in just the last fifteen years have gone from about six percent to twenty five percent of total. grocery sales that means not just more profit but much much more power other major lobbying influences include monsanto kraft foods the american sugar alliance and the national restaurant association whose money speaks louder than those who receive help from places like this. the great need by people has resulted in food banks giving more and more space are open so we'll see with forty eight thousand square feet our new

food distribution center with one hundred twenty three thousand square feet and with that greater need of facing deeper cuts it could be a recipe for hardship for more and more americans in washington christine for our team. but to talk more about how lobbyists in washington may dictate what's on your dinner plate i'm joined now by r t correspondent christine friends out christine welcome so i want to talk more about this the way that lobbying and the amount of lobbying dollars that goes into impacting the farmers bill i mean how exactly does that oh i have a lot of props here to kind of demonstrate yass how does it may add does it become more affordable to buy you know canned green beans instead of fresh green beans i want to get from here to here there's a lot going on why is it all of a sudden more affordable to get to get beans out of a carol that's the thing that's so interesting when you talk about the farm bill because there's not just

a farm lobby you have comprising you within this farm bill so many as you heard in my report a thousand different entities lobbying so on the one hand you have retailing associations and lobbying groups that represent grocers and they want of course for the food to be as cheap as possible they want to be able to you know sell this for sixty nine eighty nine cents but then you have the people growing the corn the farmers they want to be able to make some money they want their. work to pay off for them so they can make money when they sell the food so there are so many different interests and what you have is a giant game of tug of war when it comes to putting together this bill because you have so many different interests that not only don't want the same thing they want the opposite things so the short answer to your question is we don't really know exactly how they do it but they do use a whole lot of money a whole lot of resources and influences you have at least forty people in the two thousand and eight farm bill farm bill forty of the lobbyists that were working to

put it together are former members of congress or staffers of members of congress so you have a whole lot of connections a major revolving door in terms of some of the influences that go into this monster piece of legislation that as you had mentioned this piece of legislation is all encompassing and it affects all kinds of things and i guess ultimately it also affects food prices and food prices again then you get into the demographics of who can afford to get fresh produce like you know fresh fruits and vegetables and who can afford to get you know canned goods i mean how does that play into it well you know as we also mentioned in the in the report a lot of people don't know what the farm bill is where funding for food at this food stamp or snap program comes from and the next farm bill is expected to make cuts not only in terms of the amount people get but who is eligible for that so you have that aspect and one thing but the most interesting thing i mean the farm bill also in it it dictates the way nutrition programs work and what they include it

dictates investments in rural development it talks about things like biofuels ethanol regulatory oversight of things like commodity programs so it's not just you know kraft foods in tyson foods and wal-mart it's also financial services companies that talk about you know commodity trading so it's really really interesting all that is involved in this and listening to everything that is involved in this i mean. who is interest does this legislation then serve while a whole lot of people's and that's why so many people fight for it so as i mentioned the poor i'm going to give you this example of wal-mart now this is a battle they actually didn't win despite being a major powerhouse in setting food policy in this country one of the things that they wanted to do and so far haven't gotten their way but i wouldn't be surprised if we do see them getting their way in the future they want to take off country of origin labeling so as somebody shopping in a grocery store i know i would like to know where my food comes from what country

what state i was trying to buy local when i can in my local farmer's markets it's something that some people care about and some people don't so we should have the option to know you know where these green beans were made guess what wal-mart wanted to make it so the country of origin was taken off labels so you don't know if your food is made in china or india or anywhere. you know even if it does matter to you they want to make it so that information is not available so these are the types of things that you know these groups are fighting for and it's interesting because you mention the labeling in other countries g.m.o. labeling and these types of labeling is mandatory but here in the u.s. i mean is this you know just another example of the power of lobbyist was a little of course one of the most common names when we talk about g m o's is monsanto their power their influence is astounding when it comes to the type of policies that are made and it's just crazy to know how much influence they have

despite you know what is actually good for americans very interesting christine thanks so much very interesting report that is our t. correspondent christine for us out. we want to hear oh and now on a specific food ever since industrial agriculture has started producing tomatoes they began looking the say that's because consumers want the right fist reddest roundest tomatoes and big business says give them just that the question though is what producing genetically identical tomatoes does for their taste and nutritional value joining us to discuss this is barry estabrook he's the author of the book you see there it's made a land how modern industrial agriculture destroyed our most alluring fruit. very welcome so what in the world what happened to our tomatoes well. through the past thirty or forty years. immersion readers. read primarily for one

thing. we're looking. at we're going to run a window reader what a window. you christian want to know and we've been to that would be hard. and so can you talk about what that essentially does to the tomato i mean we have some tomatoes here they look they look almost exactly alike they look good but really what does it do to their nutritional value. and to the taste what what does that essentially do to these nice looking tomatoes. you know better both the priest the conductor who made the better your my my opinion is that if they don't taste like anything you're going to get some sort of all but interestingly a modern radio like the one you're holding there are far far fewer vitamins and minerals and other nutrients other important nutrients quite in the beer antioxidant been a tomato that you could pick up in the grocery store in

a bank in sixty it's got a weird well lighted being much more nice and you go right down the line well they'll have less than they did fifty years ago and how did this happen i mean is this ultimately giving is this driven by customer demand now it's driven by what the farmers are paid or one large tomato farmer in florida quite honestly told me when i brought the subject to me said barry i don't get sent to sleep i don't get paid spent your trip i get paid for. so there was no room. for readers create. a speed just tomatoes and a lot of incentive for them to frequent the disorder wanted to overdrive huge cordy's. baseless tomatoes and i know that a third of all fresh tomatoes and grown in the usa come from florida where they're bred to look this way what are the downsides to having to having them grown there.

well it's if you're familiar with border you're going it's called the sunshine state. and it seems like we're a good place to grow tomatoes. from a dream a commercial perspective you would have to be cool to try to grow tomatoes are going to play for florida the reason is is florida for all of its lore is extremely new and there's nothing that will kill radio plant quicker than you're getting everything every bargain and reducing your degree from good people commit a crime that it. is so it is possible to have a tomato that's red right and alicia's can we bring back those tomatoes that are good for you are they don't forget those are not in fact. they're coming back and researchers at the university of florida have war very close to coming out with

a tomato that actually delivers flavor. here nutritious and can withstand the indignities of industrial production little rosy widely on the market in the next decade there's no reason it can't be just the. in two recent years will people show during this debate the premium made and ultimately i mean when you have these tomatoes that i mean they look good but they're lacking in nutritional content i mean that's affecting america's diet. we particularly because we so much so many tomatoes and tomato products when you think about all the things you hold both all the ketchup all the fresh tomatoes and salad we need a huge quantity so a lot of our nutrients go native. and they absolutely i mean americans we like to catch up on everything right. i know that in your book you talk about you know the conditions in florida the field where these are grown can you talk about that. well

in the worst case scenario absolute abject lately no other word for it and it's been many could. seen from britain who already read in the order. in the fifteen or so years that we're talking about. being locked in chains shackles and chains being beaten if you don't work hard of being. killed if you try to escape and of course people being in school branded the road in florida just like it's like just what redfern like it can be not well very the sounds awful that sounds like black and human rights violation sounds exactly like you describe it like slavery how it how is it able to happen in florida. it's not like where you were it is when they prosecute you and like is this is two hundred please to. be prosecuted under the thirteenth amendment of the constitution which is the

amendment that reads where. they do it because. unscrupulous pre-board who and companies that are interested in making things it does get expensive for them so off we will look at any corner and you can score like. the burial so going back to food i also we have we have a bunch of food related offense augmented and i'm looking at these bananas here and they also look the same they and they they appear to be uniform and like meat some made of it is could there be a similar scenario playing out with bananas and other fruits and vegetables were both an image you hold like almost every other commercial romanic in the world. are things overriding cavendish and. it's wonderful to hear ear

infection where you know manipulation when patients in certain areas of the world. you know when you get things that are so genetic we are. just open season for any any year infections that will get so ultimately i mean with this the effect of you know food being becoming more commercialized and and even when we talk a lot about the power of the lobbyists and the amount of lobbying dollars that goes into agriculture and food as this some ultimately in effect of all that you. change is the cream over the supermarket business in the last thirty years giant companies like wal-mart or now the biggest grocery store. in america. and huge other grocery chains all getting by these huge buying organizations are reporting downward pressure on prices and so farmers have to take any shortcuts

they can. what will it take barry to reverse this to bring back you know the good old tomatoes and to bring back the good old fruits and vegetables that were rich in nutrients and. how do we how do we get that back. well you could. come into the sense i mean we are going use the old words that surveys show that american consumers rank tomatoes for instance at the very bottom of the dissatisfied product is the mark we still buys i think when people get educated and have a good tomato if you get one row and locally are you going to all and that the world of difference in the taste people will come along very well at a time but that is very interesting thanks so much for coming on the show appreciate it that was very asin for the author of tomato land and that's going to wrap it up for this hour you can check out our you tube channel you tube dot com slash our to america follow me on twitter.