and welcome back to the big picture i'm sam sacks in for tom hartman coming up in this half hour where you weeks released another bombshell recently a series of e-mails as seem to suggest that every american is being watched by the government what exactly did the emails reveal and if true what does this latest revelation say about our freedoms or lack thereof then believe it or not in some countries when corporations screw up their executives are held accountable but not in america why do we always like corporations get off scot free no matter how much damage they do to our lives and our society we'll explain in tonight's daily take. with you leaks founder julian assange has been holed up in the ecuadorian embassy

in london since june nineteenth trying to avoid extradition to sweden and possibly even the united states where he could face espionage charges but this week he may finally learn his fate ecuadorian president rafael correa announced monday night that he hopes to have a decision this week on whether or not his nation will grant political asylum and put an end to his songes exile in london and begin a songes exile in ecuador meanwhile the songes creation wiki leaks is dealing with problems of its own for the last several weeks wiki leaks has been under assault from what's called a d.d. o. s. attack it's basically an online weapon that floods the site with traffic shutting it down and wiki leaks is no stranger to online assaults but this latest one comes after the site released e-mails last week belonging to the security and intelligence firm stratfor which were hacked by the group anonymous the d.d. o. s. attacks on wiki leaks suggest that someone somewhere doesn't want to. able to know

what's in these e-mails that's because these e-mails reveal a massive top secret surveillance network in operation in major cities across america and elsewhere around the world including cities like new york washington d.c. and los angeles it's called trap wire it was developed by former intelligence officials and frankly we don't really know too much about it yet but we do know is that it works by collecting enormous amounts of data from close circuit cameras facial recognition software license plate readers and other surveillance tools to look for patterns in unusual behavior in hopes of detecting possible threats before they occur software within trap wires program to parse through all the data and raise red flags for example it's believed by law enforcement that before a terrorist or someone blows something up here she will often visit the same location several times before hand so through trap wire trap wire authorities can uncover someone visiting a location several times monitor through cameras how that person is acting around

that location and then draw conclusions on whether or not that person is going to blow something up it's pretty crime it's basically what the pretty coggs were up to in the movie minority report only this isn't hollywood and we're not dealing with clairvoyance where dealing with the security state that has an interest in not just averting terrorist attacks but also keeping tabs on average americans through constant surveillance and data mining trip wire is billed as an anti-terrorism tool but the opportunities for abuse seem limitless as one hacked stratfor e-mail read proving there are other uses beyond counterterrorism quote regarding san francisco and marks of interest they need something like trap wire more for threats from activists than from terror threats both are useful but the activists are ever present around here. you get that that's trip wire being used against activists not terrorists activists so should we all be concerned that just by visiting the

washington monument several times and if you weeks because i don't know we like a ballistics or by protesting outside capitol hill because i don't know we don't like paul ryan they were being flagged as a potential terrorist threat. and so is my next guest let me step out of it she joins me now she's the associate litigation counsel with the electronic privacy information center also known as epic amy welcome mr oh thanks for having me so since this story broke last week there is not much coverage of it in the mainstream media but the coverage there has been has been saying this is kind of blown out of proportion this isn't all that big of a deal in fact if you just went on the internet and looked on track where you'd see what was going on is that true is this is this just blown out of proportion well you can go on trump wire and see quite a bit however when you're talking about these massive amounts of data. i'm not sure if you can blow things out of proportion now this is something the government's been interested in doing quite some time is bringing large pools together to data

mining and to try to figure out what people are doing wrong however they're monitoring people who aren't doing anything wrong they're collecting all of this public data from the c.c.t.v. from the license plate readers and then just data publicly available data databases where you are what your high school records are maybe if you posted something on twitter that you decided you can make public and you don't have to make private all of that comes in and it's just being kind of monitored to see if they can possibly determine if somebody is doing something wrong but the evidence shows that they can't determine if somebody is doing something illegal versus if somebody is about to blow up a building i mean this sounds like a blatant violation of the constitution of the fourth amendment oh well it's a private company which i think is the first thing how do you know that's good but they are contracting with the government fact we know that d.h. has spent almost one million. dollars to use this service only in seattle and washington d.c. that's a lot of money and the information is being funneled into fusion centers on these

kind of black hole databases that all law enforcement information gets funneled into they're not audited we really don't know what they're doing with that information once it goes and that's the problem that's a good point that you said it's a private company that's doing this if the government was doing this we'd have a lot more resources trying to figure out what exactly it is and try and rein it in a little bit but now that it's a private company we don't have those tools doing exactly of private government is subject to certain amounts of federal laws the privacy act they can exempt themselves whatever laws boy requests however when they exempt themselves from those laws that information is we publicly available we know when a database is being collected when data is being collected and put into a database nobody would have known about trap wire really unless they had either happened upon the websites or the fact that these emails got released and people were made aware of it now this sort of data mining seems to be happening pretty regularly in the digital world on the internet people what sites they go to their

track their large sold to advertising companies and next time you go on google you're targeted with certain ads. is that an element of trap wire yet do we know if i mean it seems like this is more physical con you know watching people on camera seeing where they're physically going everything like that has there been this bridge or do we know of yet and isn't it seem inevitable that there would be this bridge between the physical what people are doing physically and what they're doing on the internet there is increasingly a bridge between our physical world and and what we do on the internet. right now the only thing we know other than the the a p l r's in the c.c.t.v. is that they're collecting publicly available information which would include necessarily your online tracking history however we aren't sure if that is in there as well we only have the information that's in the e-mails right now and what's on track wires on the website and as you've said we're having trouble even reading the e-mails because of these attacks on wiki leaks yes so we're trying to get more

information we're trying to figure out what this is doing but it's just unclear at this time what information is going into the system well this is something that's being sold as a counterterror tool but what ways can it with thirty seconds left what are some other ways that can be abused and you know in that i mean we kind of hinted at activists in san francisco exactly it can be act it can be used against all sorts of protected first amendment activity not only activists but demonstrators and the problem is you're a tourist and you're going to an area you get flagged as a possible terrorist it's almost impossible to get yourself out of that database because chances are you're not going to be alerted that you've been flagged you're never going to know and that will affect you for the rest of your life yeah absolutely scary stuff i mean thanks a lot for taking out you know if you step on a bridge recently tom had a discussion with n.s.a. whistleblowers thomas drake and kirk we beat on just how far the surveillance state is willing to go and how little little regard there is for the fourth amendment nowadays here's a clip. i want to happen to with regard to the fourth amendment

was there was there it was there a general sense within the n.s.a. that we have to operate within the. of the constitution or did nine eleven did do it cause people to say you know the ends justify the means we need to be safe yes that better sense we happened. and it was totally unnecessary. it was well within technology's capability at the time to encrypt or safeguard the identities of american citizens then as it is right now and yet we have no fourth amendment protections built into any of the recent legislation granting the u.s. government unbridled capability to grab people's data whether it be for intelligence purposes or for cyber security now on the one hand there are those who say well you know if you're not doing anything wrong why do you

care if somebody's snooping on the other hand you have some of the founders of this country talking about the need for anonymity in fact they publish things under the names like rustic us in order to be able to operate in a way that was consistent with small democracy in a small. is that debate even being held anymore thomas is that within the n.s.a. where this is an artificial cannard but really it is and it's also a false dichotomy somehow we have to trade off our liberty for the sake of security right we're going to go back to franklin this is so is it possible to unring that bell well you know frank church him self warned the country as a result of what he found out about the massive abuse during the sixty's and seventy's that if the technology advanced to a stage where essentially you could surveil everybody or have they kept kept passage he just several everybody would you be able to pull it back and so the open

question really is. why should we trust n.s.a. in the twenty first century any more than we. ended up finding out how much you have. distrust n.s.a. during the sixty's and seventy's. there's there's very few people who have not in some way at some time in their lives committed some crime and one of the ways the really genuinely tyrannical regimes operate the north korean regime for example is they will make all kinds of things illegal you know it's illegal to travel outside of your town without permission and then they don't provide any means to get the permission so basically everybody in the country is a criminal and the government knows about it and then they selectively pull that out of the hat when somebody pops up and they want to slap them down is are we moving in that direction. in my estimation we are we're headed towards a police state how many times have tom and i and bill talking about this it sounds like a stop although it sounds like. the of these german. operation we

are moving in that direction people are trashing the constitution they've lost their respect for expediency the call of the day let's make everyone happy i wrote my congressman congressman roscoe bartlett about this issue of privacy and legislation and what was the thing that gave him confidence that this power would not be abused he said it's based on good faith. well. coming up news is breaking another oil company misbehaving why do well and companies and corporations as a whole in america have such privileged positions in our economy isn't it time they were punished for their wrongdoings. wealthy british style.

markets. what's really happening to the global economy with. the global financial headlines. a report.

mission. couldn't take three months for chargers three arrangement three. three. three. three brought us closer to zero for your media projects. done to our dot com. now a quick update out of fukushima thanks to nuclear power japan is now home to mutant butterflies two months after the fukushima disaster scientists collected more than one hundred butterflies around the site and said is now show that twelve percent of

them had abnormalities or mutations when those butterflies mated the mutation rate of their offspring rose to eighteen percent and when the offspring mated with healthy butterflies the abnormal abnormality rate rose to thirty four percent six months after the disaster researchers collected more butterflies showing an abnormality rate of fifty two percent of that group's offspring you can insert a joke here but seriously more troubling is that butterflies weren't the only species hanging around fukushima when it went into crisis humans were too and in the coming years and decades we could witness the human toll that this nuclear crisis has taken in the nation of japan we need to begin building a new world a world free from nuclear power no nukes.

and now it's time for tonight's the good the bad and the very very lucrative lucrative ugly for good governor pat quinn while conservatives like paul ryan are working hard to tear apart unions and screw over the working class. illinois governor quinn is doing all he can to help them last week when visited striking workers at a caterpillar plant in joliet illinois where he personally gave them a ten thousand dollars check to help pay for food during the strike members of the international association of machinists local eight fifty one have been on strike for over three months over reductions in pensions and frozen wages despite caterpillar making billions in profits in fact caterpillar c.e.o. made seventeen million dollars last year alone it's clear governor quinn understands now more than ever we need to be protecting the american worker not be abandoning them like paul ryan and his colleagues are doing well done governor the bad congressman joe walsh over the weekend someone fired pellet gun rounds at

a mosque in the chicago suburb of morton grove fortunately no one was injured however the shooting came just days after congressman walsh had given a speech nearby where he said that america faces quote a real threat from radical muslims and that these radical muslims are quote trying to kill americans every week and quote walsh went on to argue that so-called radical muslims have taken over chicago and the city's suburbs and then right after his comments someone fired shots at a mosque outside chicago you know there's a term for someone who uses mass communication to convince a lone wolves to commit violence it's called stochastic terrorism and congressman joe walsh is guilty of it. and the very very ugly samuel wurzelbacher more commonly known as joe the plumber even though his name isn't joe and he's not a plumber well joe is at a fundraiser for a republican arizona state senate candidate this weekend during his speech we're

told the crowd that the best way to solve america's immigration problem is to quote start shooting take a look. this. is a. very very. you are they right joe the plumber's idea for solving illegal immigration is just to start killing people. joe we should forget about the humanity in the value of life and just start murdering whoever tries to cross the border. maybe joe should stick to his day job he's got a lot of crap clogged up in his brain and that is very very ugly.

so oil giant chevron which i might add only pays a corporate tax rate of four percent is responsible for poisoning nearly an entire american city where the nine hundred residents of richmond california have now been treated in local hospitals after inhaling toxic smoke from a nearby chevron oil refinery that exploded into flames last week. the fire started last monday but a delayed response by the oil corporation allowed it to burn for more than four hours with enormous flames reaching dozens of feet in the sky a chevron is getting ready to lawyer up as more than one thousand people have stopped by a local law face to file legal claims against the oil giant last week richmond's mayor gale mclaughlin called the fire unacceptable well that's a fairly mild reaction to a city getting poisoned by an oil corporation but he might soon be changing his

tune now that there's evidence that this explosion could have been prevented he was caused by a pipe failure in the san francisco chronicle is reporting that chevron officials knew that the pipe had problems last year chevron officials noticed unsafe levels of corrosion within the pipe and scheduled it for replacement but that never happened at some point after discovery of pipe corrosion and before was replaced a decision was made by chevron to forgo the repairs and instead the pipes say for service for another five years and then last week that pipe failed triggering yet another environmental disaster and sickening nearly a thousand residents in richmond california so if what the san francisco chronicle alleges is right and chevron knew of the pipe failure and did nothing about it once again proving that we can't trust the oil industry to police itself what happens next do some executives go to jail. chevron lose their corporate charter to operate

in the state well probably not. after all there's pretty clear evidence that corners were cut in safety tests ignored aboard the deepwater horizon oil rig belonging to b.p. when it exploded in the gulf of mexico back in two thousand and ten and yet not one b.p. executive was hit with a criminal charge and b.p. to this day continues its drilling operation in the gulf you see corporations especially oil corporations have a privileged place in our economy and justice system but in other nations that's not the case in fact in some nations when corporations commit negligence fraud or any other crimes they don't get a slap on the response they get put to death the corporation that is and their executives well they go to jail and it's about time we started doing the same thing in the united states and that is the subject of tonight's daily take the night we

have a tale of two oil spills or should i say a tale of two or oil spill responses last month an oil well belonging to the chevron corporation began leaking oil off the coast of brazil about three hundred seventy kilometers from rio de janeiro according to estimates more than three thousand barrels of crude leaked into the atlantic ocean. though most question whether or not that number is accurate and brazilian officials believe chevron has withheld more accurate information regarding the true size of the spill especially since a massive oil spill was visible for weeks after the incident also responsible for the oil leak off the coast of brazil was a drilling company called trans ocean remember those guys right if later on another oil disaster the b.p. oil spill last year that killed eleven men and spewed at least five million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico and just like the much smaller oil spill and chill

a many think b.p. kept it a secret exactly how much oil leaked into the gulf. but aside from the role that trans ocean played in aside from the corporate secrecy over just how bad the spills are the similarities between the two spills stop that's because the governments of the united states and brazil have taken drastically different courses of action to punish the corporations responsible for ruining local environments last week the federal the federal police in brazil submitted a report recommending that seventeen employees of chevron and trans ocean be charged with crimes against the environment one of those charged is chevron's president in brazil a guy named george buck as the lead investigator said is the name by the way fabio sklar he said i am utterly convinced that the company's institutional policy is reckless and irresponsible therefore the executives are responsible and we're not talking about civil penalties here there already have been and will continue to be

a lot of those but we're talking about criminal charges in other words the brazilian police want to throw some suits in jail not only that chevron has been suspended from doing any further oil drilling in brazil in the short term and prosecutors are see seeking a permanent ban on chevron preventing their corporation from ever drilling for oil again in brazil a country which by the way is this weekend became the sixth largest economy in the world so the sixth largest country in the world economically just filed an action to execute essentially the corporate death sentence all because chevron and trans ocean acted irresponsibly and in the process let a few thousand barrels of oil spill into the ocean. meanwhile here in the united states where there was no oil spill more than a thousand times larger and more eleven men were murdered as a result of a corporate crime now one criminal charges been filed against one executive or

anyone at b.p. or trans ocean. not only that b.p. and trans ocean are right back to business as usual right now as we speak the drilling for oil in the gulf of mexico so why is that why is it that in brazil police want to put suits in prison and ban oil corporations from ever doing business again in that nation ever again yet here in the united states when people die it's just a slap on the wrist and water under the bridge it's because we're bought out the corporations have seized control of our lawmakers our regulators and our justice system and now they can pretty much get away with whatever they want even murder b.p. boss tony hayward was called before congress received a thorough tongue lashing from lawmakers but then he was free to go on his private jet it was all a spectacle a show for americans to think that someone was being held responsible for murdering eleven men and for the worst ecological dance disaster in our nation's history but

it was theater and nothing more none of our politicians would take on a huge transnational corporations like that why because the company would punish them by funding their opponent in the next election with invisible money courtesy of the supreme court's citizens united decision but down south in brazil we're learning what happens when the people still control things as president grover cleveland said back in one thousand nine hundred seven corporations should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people we as americans need to demand more from the banks or is on wall street to these murderous oil barons we need to start demanding that corporations and their executives be punished for their crimes let's end the lawlessness in corporate america and bring back business in the public interest to go to move to amend to

work to see how we can take america back from the billionaires and the corporations . that's the big picture for tonight tuesday aug fourteenth two thousand and twelve if you missed any of tonight's show you can now watch it in h.d. on hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture for more information on any of the stories we covered visit our website to tom hartman dot com free speech org and our t.v. dot com also check out our two you tube channel is there a link said tom hartman dot com and also a tell marvin dot com check out all the different ways you can send us your feedback and as tom always says don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get active occupy something tag you're it we'll see tomorrow.

and they should. could you take three. or four charges three arrangement three. three. three. three blog videos for your media projects free medio done to our teeth dot com. my parents really truly honestly believe that what had happened was as a result of my father's exposure to agent orange i was born with multiple problems . i was missing my leg and my fingers and my big toe on my right foot i use my hands a lot in my artwork i find myself drawing my hands quite a bit to me for my hands you know just as if anyone would. but they do tell a story they tell a story of. oxen.